Nicole Berg's stunted wheat field is so short and sparse she doesn't think the combine can even reach the wheat without, as she puts it, eating rocks.
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Farmers Are Feeling The Pain As Drought Spreads In The Northwest : NPR - 0 views
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Berg is a dryland wheat farmer in the sweeping Horse Heaven Hills of southeastern Washington state. She shows off one head of half-turned golden wheat amid a sea of them. Besides being too short, the plant's kernels didn't fill out properly.
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"See how the wheat head is curled like that?"
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"And then you break into it, you might have some berries down here, but this will be empty. There is no wheat inside the wheat head."
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Northwest farmers like Berg, and ranchers who depend on rain, are expecting what one farmer called a "somber harvest" this year.
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Earlier this year, Oregon declared drought zones for eight counties, and six more have requested it since. Now the drought is rapidly expanding into usually cooler and wetter western Oregon, according to Ryan Andrews, a hydrologist for the state's Water Resources Department. He says the thirsty ground will absorb whatever rain comes, meaning streams and rivers will get little water.
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The Berg's aren't the only ones suffering. The region is parched from near the Canadian border clear to the edge of Nevada, with triple digit temps on the way making it worse.
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On her ranch, Berg says she's also worried about 1,000 acres of native grass seeds she has to plant this year into dry soil for a government conservation program. She says with all the Western wildfires in recent years, the wild grass and forage seeds have become expensive. She hates to plant them in shallow, bone-dry soil only to lose the crop if there's not sufficient rain.
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Jeff Marti, a drought expert for Washington's Department of Ecology, says it hasn't been this dry since the 1920s.
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"It's the story of the irrigation haves and the have nots," he says. "Meaning those folks who get their water from rivers or storage, are probably going to be fine for their irrigation needs. But the dryland users and the folks that have cattle that depend on forage on the rangelands may be more challenged."
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Looking ahead, Marti says the warming climate may mean more rain for the Northwest, but also much less snowpack that melts sooner. That could stress water supplies even more.
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A bit west of Alderdale, Washington, cattle rancher Gary Hess is also having a hard time with the drought. His grass-fattened mother cows bawl at their calves, wanting them to stay close and away from the cattle dog. But he only has enough irrigated pasture for a small part of his herd, the rest are on dryland range. So Hess recently sold 70 mother cows with calves at their sides to another operator in Wyoming. They had many more good calves in them, and he hated to see them go. But he has no dryland grass to keep them.
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"When you have to sell younger cows, that's a disappointment," Hess says as he tears up a bit. "With the kind of weather we've had the last couple of years, and the drought and the lack of feed and lack of water, we just finally had to cut back."
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This spring it's also been windy here, further drying out the landscape like a blow dryer. Hess is thinking he'll have to sell more cows soon just to survive. He says it's hard to lose animals and bloodlines that he's worked so hard to build up. He figures it could take him up to a decade to build his herd back up without going into debt.
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Most ranchers say they don't have time to dwell on the trucked-off cattle or lost crops. They're busy applying for federal disaster aid. And they're also keeping an eye out for wildfires that are always top-of-mind in the dry, hot summer, but expected to be worse because of this year's terrible drought.
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Scorched, Parched and Now Uninsurable: Climate Change Hits Wine Country - The New York ... - 0 views
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Napa boasts some of the country’s most expensive farmland, selling for as much as $1 million per acre; a ton of grapes fetches two to four times as much as anywhere else in California. If there is any nook of American agriculture with both the means and incentive to outwit climate change, it is here.
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But so far, the experience of winemakers here demonstrates the limits of adapting to a warming planet.
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If the heat and drought trends worsen, “we’re probably out of business,” said Cyril Chappellet, president of Chappellet Winery, which has been operating for more than half a century. “All of us are out business.”
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What winemakers came to call “smoke taint” now menaces Napa’s wine industry.“The problem with the fires is that it doesn’t have be anywhere near us,” Mr. Smith said. Smoke from distant fires can waft long distances, and there is no way a grower can prevent it.
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The losses have been stunning. In 2019, growers in the county sold $829 million worth of red grapes. In 2020, that figure plummeted to $384 million.
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Ms. Heminway and Mr. Hannigan have been unable to find coverage from any other carrier. The California legislature is considering a bill that would allow wineries to get insurance through a state-run high-risk pool.
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After the Glass Fire, Mr. Chappellet is one of the lucky ones — he still has insurance. It just costs five times as much as it did last year.His winery now pays more than $1 million a year, up from $200,000 before the fire. At the same time, his insurers cut by half the amount of coverage they were willing to provide.
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If Napa can go another year or two without major wildfires, Mr. Davies thinks insurers will return. Harder to solve are the smoke taint and water shortages.“It’s still kind of early on to talk about the demise of our industry,” Mr. Davies said, looking out across the valley. “But it’s certainly a concern.”
Northern California PG&E blackouts hit hardest in areas that dealt with wildfire destru... - 0 views
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National Guard Readies for Election Day Deployment - The New York Times - 0 views
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This year has brought a barrage of emergencies across the country that have required the National Guard — the coronavirus pandemic, hurricanes, wildfires and a wave of street protests.
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Communities are bracing for protest regardless of the election’s outcome. If demonstrations turn violent and overwhelm the local police, governors will almost certainly call out their states’ National Guard.
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Under federal law, it is the Guard, not active-duty military, that can enforce order on domestic soil.
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States are already on alert for violence. On Monday, Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts ordered 1,000 members of the National Guard to be on standby in case of turmoil following Tuesday’s election.
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Hundreds of National Guard troops already have been called up in non-law-enforcement roles, to assist states where the ranks of poll workers have been depleted by the coronavirus pandemic.
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But in a year that is anything but normal, with the electorate sharply polarized, the president warning supporters of a stolen election, and gun sales through the roof, states are bracing for violence that may overwhelm local law enforcement and bring uniformed military troops into the streets.
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Legal experts say the election may complicate the response because the president has broad discretion to sidestep legal restrictions by declaring an insurrection, which would allow him not only to take control of state National Guard troops, but also to deploy the Army or Marines.
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But at the same time Mr. Trump threatened to deploy active-duty troops, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argued against such a move to control the wave of protests in American cities, including Washington, at least at that time
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Mr. Esper said at a Pentagon news conference that deploying active-duty forces in a domestic law enforcement role “should only be used as a matter of last resort and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.”
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Governors have mobilized Guard forces frequently in recent months to respond to protests over violent policing, as well as hurricanes and wildfires. In June, during the height of the protests, about 86,000 Guard troops were deployed in domestic missions.
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While federal law bars using federal troops, that restriction can be lifted by the president under the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to send in armed forces if he decides local authorities are not enforcing the laws of the United States.
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The Insurrection Act could complicate the response to civil unrest, Ms. VanLandingham said, because mayors and governors have no say in what is classified as insurrection, so troops could be sent in even if local authorities do not think they are needed.
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In Visiting a Charred California, Trump Confronts a Scientific Reality He Denies - The ... - 3 views
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When President Trump flies to California on Monday to assess the state’s raging forest fires, he will come face to face with the grim consequences of a reality he has stubbornly refused to accept: the devastating effects of a warming planet.
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“It’s mind-boggling, the ignorance that he displays on this subject,” Ms. Whitman said in an interview on Sunday. “He doesn’t understand climate change. He doesn’t particularly believe in science. It’s all about him and his re-election.”
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Mr. Trump has doubled down on his anti-climate agenda as a way of appealing to his core supporters.
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voters may hold him and his administration accountable for brushing aside scientific experts and failing to effectively mobilize the government to minimize natural disasters that have claimed lives, damaged property and threatened economic prosperity.
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“Talk to a firefighter if you think that climate change isn’t real,” Mayor Eric M. Garcetti of Los Angeles, a supporter of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, said
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“As an historic figure, he is one of the most culpable men in America contributing to the suffering and death that is now occurring through climate-related tragedy,” Jerry Brown, the former California governor
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The president’s record is also more consequential, experts say, because the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere has now passed the point at which scientists say it would be possible to avert many of the worst effects of global warming — even if tough emissions policies are later enacted.
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“In both cases, there is no plan to deal with crisis,” he added.
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the president has used his time in the nation’s highest office to aggressively promote the burning of fossil fuels, chiefly by rolling back or weakening every major federal policy intended to combat dangerous emissions. At the same time, Mr. Trump and his senior environmental officials have regularly mocked, denied or minimized the established science of human-caused climate change.
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At the event in front of supporters in Jupiter, Fla., Mr. Trump declared himself “a great environmentalist.”
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The report is clear about the causes — burning fossil fuels — and the effects: It found that the increased drought, flooding, storms and worsening wildfires caused by the warming planet could shrink the American economy by up to 10 percent by the end of the century.
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he said of global warming, “I don’t know that it’s man-made,” and suggested that even as the planet warmed, “it will change back again” — an idea scientists have long debunked.
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And Mr. Trump’s first appointee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, declared early in his tenure that carbon dioxide was not a primary contributor to global warming, a statement starkly at odds with the scientific consensus.
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He said Mr. Trump had put in place “common sense policies that have kept our air, water and environment clean.”
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Taken together, those rules represented the country’s first significant step toward reducing greenhouse gases, while putting the world’s largest economy at the forefront of the global effort to fight climate change.Now they are in shambles.
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If Mr. Biden is elected, he has vowed to rejoin the Paris agreement and reinstate those rules, while pushing to enact even stronger policies, spending up to $2 trillion to promote the development of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.
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Bond Fire Erupts Outside Los Angeles, Forcing Thousands to Evacuate - The New York Times - 0 views
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Exacerbated by wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour and extremely dry conditions, a fast-moving wildfire spread to more than 6,000 acres in Southern California on Thursday, forcing the evacuation of 25,000 residents, officials said.
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Fire officials attributed the spread of the Bond fire to the winds.The blaze began as a house fire in Silverado, about 50 miles from Los Angeles, and quickly spread to the surrounding area, fire officials said. The cause was under investigation.
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Chief Fennessy said that more than 500 firefighters were battling the flames and that more than 30 agencies were involved in the effort, which included fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters.
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At the same news conference, Sheriff Don Barnes of Orange County warned residents that they should have their medications and other necessities ready to go in case they had to evacuate.“When you need to go, it’s go then,” Sheriff Barnes said.
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“They can’t walk, they cannot drive,” she said of residents. “People can’t get anything. Besides Covid-19, this adds on top of it.”Ms. Sadollahi said she had lost five days of business because of the Silverado fire in October, which had compounded the economic effects of the pandemic.
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He said he was unfazed by the latest wildfire.“For us, this is routine, every 10 years,” he said. “It’s kind of like, if you live in California, you expect earthquakes and fires. I think Covid is affecting the area more, to be honest.”
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Calamities Challenge California's Economic Foundation - The New York Times - 0 views
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The pandemic and wildfires have underscored issues of housing and growth. Will the disruptions and dislocations force the state to chart a new course?
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Now California and its $3 trillion economy are confronting a profound question: How much will go back to normal, and how much has been permanently changed?
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For decades, California has operated under a trade-off: In exchange for high taxes and a high cost of living, its companies reap the rewards of an educated populace, an inviting lifestyle and a culture of innovation.The events of 2020 have forced a closer look at the calculus.
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But between climate change and remote work, the state is facing questions that uniquely cut to the core of its economic identity.
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f workers untethered from their offices flee the state, or companies start basing more high-paid workers elsewhere, it will have huge ramifications for California’s outlook
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The median price for single-family homes and condos in the state is closing in on $600,000, according to the real estate site Zillow, more than twice the national level. The figure reflects a longstanding shortage that has also caused rising rents, crowded households and two-hour commutes used to offset the cost of living. Much more than taxes, the reason that companies move jobs out of the state is lower-priced housing and the lower labor costs that go with it.
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Economists and planners have long counseled that the best way to relieve this pressure is to build more housing near the coastal job centers, but California has continued to sprawl, a pattern that has undermined the state’s own emission-reduction goals by encouraging longer commutes, while placing more homes in fire zones. In 2010, the last year with available data, nearly a third of California housing was in the so-called wildland-urban interface, where wildfire risk is greatest, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
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This would seem like an easy enough mandate. After all, California has invested heavily in renewable energy, was the first state to mandate solar power in new homes, and is run by a governor who has spoken of a “a climate damn emergency” and recently signed an executive order banning sales of new gas-powered cars in 15 years.
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Having a prosperous and growing economy ultimately means finding new ways to add jobs and homes. So California’s looming battles over climate change promise to be another round in a debate that predates statehood, which is how many people it really wants, and how much water will be required to sustain them.
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A world that is warmer, drier and more crowded may not be the world they asked for, but they’ll still be looking for jobs, while coping with the world as it is.
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Opinion | An Iconic Landscape, Threatened by Trees - The New York Times - 0 views
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For a host of ingenious reasons, Native people had long set fire to the prairie: to rejuvenate vegetation and attract bison herds, to ward off mosquitoes and snakes, to ease travel, even to hinder their enemies in battle. Intentionally or not, they were also keeping the Eastern redcedar at bay, confining the scrappy conifer to the prairie’s deepest wrinkles.
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white settlers were slow to catch on. Confronted by fire, wild or not, they fought back, desperate to save their homes, their crops, their livestock, their culture at large. At the same time, they planted trees in a land without: for shelter, for timber, for shade, for a touch of their forested homelands back east
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“Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons,”
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The federal government encouraged this practice from the start. The Timber Culture Act passed in 1873, permitted homesteaders to claim an additional 160 acres of free land by planting trees on at least a quarter of it. Decades later, desperate to curb the Dust Bowl, President Franklin Roosevelt channeled roughly $14 million — mostly via emergency relief and the Works Progress Administration — to the Prairie States Forestry Project, resulting in nearly 19,000 miles of windbreaks throughout the Great Plains, many of them composed of Eastern redcedar.
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Still today, the Department of Agriculture subsidizes the planting of redcedar for everything from windbreaks to wildlife habitat. State programs provide similar cost-share programs, and it’s from all of these plantings (and more) the spread — or the “encroachment,” as ecologists call it — generally begins.
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In 2018, the rangeland ecologist Dirac Twidwell and his colleagues at the University of Nebraska began the Eastern Redcedar Science Literacy Project to catalog the fallout
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Eastern redcedar can transform a thriving tallgrass prairie into a closed canopy woodland in just 40 years. In the process, critical biodiversity is evicted from the landscape. The majority of grassland bird species are no longer present where Eastern redcedar cover exceeds just 10 percent of land cover. Beyond 30 percent, most small mammals vanish, too. And as too many ranchers and other land managers can now attest, both forage production and plant diversity take a nosedive in the Green Glacier’s wake.
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Allergies. Wildfires. Tick-borne disease. All of these problems climb while stream flow and groundwater recharge rates often decline. True, a juniper woodland sequesters more carbon. But the grassland it muscled out was a more reliable carbon sink, storing more than 90 percent of its capture underground, safe from wildfires that would send that carbon into the atmosphere. From virtually every angle — environmental or economic, livestock or literature, air quality or landscape aesthetics — the Green Glacier is a problem.
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“The Great Plains biome is dying,” Dr. Twidwell said. “Losing grasslands at this scale is akin to losing tropical rainforests or coral reefs.”
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for decades now, discussion about the Green Glacier has been largely relegated to the dusty confines of trade journals and agricultural conventions. Perhaps this is because the vast majority of our remaining grasslands are privately owned. Perhaps, as our forests burn and our levees break, there is little sympathy left for the livestock industry, responsible for roughly 15 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — never mind the many effects of tree encroachment that bleed far beyond the ranch.
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If America wants to preserve what’s left of Cather’s spiritual homeland, something greater than what Dr. Twidwell calls “postage-stamp prairies,” then “the clock is ticking,”
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The good news is that prescribed fire, where done repeatedly, has proved to effectively halt the Green Glacier’s spread. In fact, the Loess Canyons Rangeland Alliance, a group of neighboring landowners in southwestern Nebraska, is one of the first documented groups to halt the encroachment on a regional scale.
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Obama's Ambitious Global Warming Action Plan - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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But if you doubt the reality of this shift, just look at the news coverage from Monday of the drop in the price of shares in coal companies ahead of the speech. This headline in Street Insider says it all: “Coal Stocks Routed as Pres. Obama Preps to Tackle Carbon Emissions.”
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What’s particularly welcome there is the language on “removing counterproductive policies that increase vulnerabilities” — which I hope will lead to some of the steps I recently described that could cut costs from future wildfires in America’s “red zones,” as well as shifts in how federal flood insurance is priced.
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the Obama Administration is putting in place tough new rules to cut carbon pollution—just like we have for other toxins like mercury and arsenic
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Sets a goal to reduce carbon pollution by at least 3 billion metric tons cumulatively by 2030 – more than half of the annual carbon pollution from the U.S. energy sector
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Directs EPA to work closely with states, industry and other stakeholder to establish carbon pollution standards for both new and existing power plants;
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Makes up to $8 billion in loan guarantee authority available for a wide array of advanced fossil energy and efficiency projects to support investments in innovative technologies;
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expanding and prioritizing forest- and rangeland-restoration efforts to make areas less vulnerable to catastrophic fire;
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Commits to expand major new and existing international initiatives, including bilateral initiatives with China, India, and other major emitting countries;
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calling for the end of U.S. government support for public financing of new coal-fired powers plants overseas, except for the most efficient coal technology available in the world’s poorest countries, or facilities deploying carbon capture and sequestration technologies;
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Living in the Ring of Fire - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Pacific Northwest is so beautiful because of the still-active tectonic forces that have shaped it. But this summer, The New Yorker published a piece that wrapped old news in new terror. And what had been buried in the recesses of Northwestern minds suddenly flared. The collective anxiety has not gone away.
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The larger question, from Seattle to Sagamore Hill, is how we fit disaster into our daily lives — a pact with the known unknown. There is no such thing as a safe place on this earth.
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More than 90 percent of Americans live in an area with at least a moderate risk of tornadoes, or wildfires, or hurricanes, or floods, or earthquakes
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You gauge the odds; that’s really the crux of choosing where to live. And you hope your political leaders have the foresight to spend money on things that may not have an immediate benefit.
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In the Northwest, these are the odds: There is a 10 to 15 percent chance of a magnitude 9 earthquake happening over the next 50 years, and a 30 percent chance of a smaller, though still enormous, collision of plates
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Armed group takes over Oregon wildlife refuge building - CNN.com - 0 views
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Armed anti-government protesters have taken over a building in a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, accusing officials of unfairly punishing ranchers who refused to sell their land.
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One of them is Ammon Bundy, the 40-year-old son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who is well-known for anti-government action.
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Asked several times what he and those with him want, he answered in vague terms, saying that they want the federal government to restore the "people's constitutional rights."
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Prosecutors said the Hammonds set a fire that burned about 130 acres in 2001 to cover up poaching. They were sentenced to five years in prison.
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The group is occupying part of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns after gathering outside for a demonstration supporting Dwight and Steven Hammond, father-and-son ranchers who were convicted of arson.
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"This refuge -- it has been destructive to the people of the county and to the people of the area," he said. Read More"People need to be aware that we've become a system where government is actually claiming and using and defending people's rights, and they are doing that against the people."
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The Hammonds, who are set to turn themselves in Monday afternoon, have said they set the fire to reduce the growth of invasive plants and to protect their property from wildfires
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The Hammonds have been clear in that they don't want help from the Bundy group. "Neither Ammon Bundy nor anyone within his group/organization speak for the Hammond family," the Hammonds' attorney W. Alan Schroeder wrote to Harney County Sheriff David Ward.
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He said that over the years, law enforcement has learned how to handle a situation like this; one that hasn't erupted in violence and in which a law may be broken, but there's no immediate threat to anyone's life. The best approach now, Roderick said, is to wait the group out and to figure out how to bring a peaceful end to the situation.
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The protest has prompted Harney County School District 3 to call off classes for the entire week, Superintendent Dr. Marilyn L. McBride said. "Schools will open on January 11," she said. "Ensuring staff and student safety is our greatest concern."
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After the march Saturday, the armed protesters broke into the refuge's unoccupied building and refused to leave. Officials have said there are no government employees in the building.
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"We will be here as long as it takes," Bundy said. "We have no intentions of using force upon anyone, (but) if force is used against us, we would defend ourselves."
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Ammon Bundy said that the group in Oregon was armed, but that he would not describe it as a militia. He declined to say how many people were with him, telling CNN on Sunday that giving that information might jeopardize "operational security."
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"We are not terrorists," Ammon Bundy said. "We are concerned citizens and realize we have to act if we want to pass along anything to our children."
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He wouldn't call his group a militia, but others are. "I don't like the militia's methods," local resident Monica McCannon told KTVZ. "They had their rally. Now it's time for them to go home. People are afraid of them."
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When asked what it would take for the protesters to leave, Bundy did not offer specifics. He said he and those with him are prepared to stay put for days or weeks or "as long as necessary."
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"We are using the wildlife refuge as a place for individuals across the United States to come and assist in helping the people of Harney County claim back their lands and resources," he said. "The people will need to be able to use the land and resources without fear as free men and women. We know it will take some time."
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He did not explicitly call on authorities to commute the prison sentences for the Hammonds, but he said their case illustrates officials' "abuse" of power.
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He said the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge has taken over the space of 100 ranches since the early 1900s. "They are continuing to expand the refuge at the expense of the ranchers and miners," Bundy said.
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He also said Harney County, in southeastern Oregon, went from one of the state's wealthiest counties to one of the poorest. CNN has not independently corroborated Bundy's claims.
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Obama optimism over climate pact tempered by GOP opposition - Yahoo News - 0 views
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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry hailed the newly passed international climate change agreement as a major achievement that could help turn the tide on global warming, but got a quick reminder that Republicans will fight it all the way.
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Obama said the climate agreement made Saturday night by almost 200 nations "can be a turning point for the world" and credited his administration for playing a key role. He and Kerry predicted it would prompt widespread spending on clean energy and help stem carbon pollution blamed for global warming.
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The immediate reaction of leading Republican critics was a stark reminder of the conflict that lies ahead.
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Obama said the agreement is not perfect, but sets a framework that will contain periodic reviews and assessments to ensure that countries meet their commitments to curb carbon emissions.
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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Obama is "making promises he can't keep" and should remember that the agreement "is subject to being shredded in 13 months." McConnell noted that the presidential election is next year and the agreement could be reversed if the GOP wins the White House.
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And Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma said that Americans can expect the administration to cite the agreement as an excuse for establishing emission targets for every sector of the U.S. economy.
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Kerry said from Paris: "I have news for Senator Inhofe. The United States of America has already reduced its emissions more than any other country in the world."
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In an interview taped for CBS' "Face the Nation," Kerry called the climate pact "a breakaway agreement" that will change how countries make decisions and "spur massive investment."
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He acknowledged that a Republican president could undo the agreement, but said there is already plenty of evidence that climate change is having a damaging and expensive impact with more intense
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storms, wildfires and melting glaciers.
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Several Democratic lawmakers applauded Obama's efforts.
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House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi hailed it as a "monumental moment" and praised Obama for his leadership on the issue.
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Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal Is a Winning Climate Strategy - The Atlantic - 0 views
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For the first time in more than a decade, Democrats can approach climate policy with a sense of imagination. They can also approach it with a sense of humility, because their last two strategies didn’t work particularly well. When the party last controlled Congress, in 2009, Democrats tried to pass a national cap-and-trade bill, a type of policy that allows polluters to bid on the right to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It failed to pass in the Senate. Starting in 2011, President Obama tried to use the EPA’s powers under the Clean Air Act to fight carbon-dioxide emissions. After President Trump was elected, he terminated that effort by executive order.
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Economists tend to prefer policies that work across the entire economy at once by integrating the costs of climate change into the price of gas, food, and other consumer goods. But voters—who have more quotidian concerns than optimally elegant economic policy—don’t always feel the same way. They don’t want gas prices to go up. And that means they support policies that remake one sector of the economy at a time, usually by mandating the use of technology. Economists like to disparage these policies as “kludges” or “command and control.” But Americans like them
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climate policy’s Boring as Dirt problem: the BAD problem. The BAD problem recognizes that climate change is an interesting challenge. It is scary and massive and apocalyptic, and its attendant disasters (especially hurricanes, wildfires, and floods) make for good TV. But the policies that will address climate change do not pack the same punch. They are technical and technocratic and quite often dull. At the very least, they will never be as immediate as climate change itself. Floods are powerful, but stormwater management is arcane.
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The Green New Deal, first and foremost, can be understood as trying to fix the BAD problem. In the long term, it’s an ambitious package of laws that will touch every sector of the economy. The Sunrise Movement, a youth-led activism group that has pushed for the policy, has listed seven demands that any Green New Deal must satisfy. They range from requiring the U.S. to get 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources to “decarbonizing, repairing and improving transportation and other infrastructure.” They also call for a massive investment in technology that could directly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
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The single most crucial aspect of the Green New Deal is its proposed job guarantee, a controversial policy that says that every American can have a job with the government if they want one. Data for Progress, a leftist advocacy group, claims that the Green New Deal could generate 10 million new jobs across the country over 10 years.
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This policy—a job for every American who wants one—reflects what the party learned from fighting Obamacare’s repeal. Obamacare provides a revealing view into how economists think about policy versus how people experience it
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Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal was not a tax, even if it included taxes; it’s remembered instead as the greatest of all stimulus and jobs bills. If Democrats take the White House during a recession, they will have a far easier time passing a Green New Deal than a carbon tax.
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Obamacare survived because it gave two new superpowers to voters. The first was the power never to be denied health insurance for preexisting conditions, and the second was free or cheap health insurance through Medicaid. The reason Americans jammed the Capitol Hill switchboards last year to protest the repeal—and pulled the lever for Democrats in November—wasn’t that they valued Obamacare’s elegant cost-control mechanism. They wanted to keep their superpowers.
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Fixing climate change will include lots of technocratic tweaks, lots of bills about dirt. They will be hard to defend against later repeal. So it would be nice if lawmakers could wed them to a new benefit, a superpower that people will fight for years after passage. Hence the job guarantee—a universal promise of employment meant to win over Americans in general and create more union jobs in particular.
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The policy aligns with emerging Democratic strategy, too. The Green New Deal is policy-by-slogan, like “Medicare for All” or “Free Community College” or “Abolish ICE.” Those phrases capture a worldview, a promise, and a vision of how life would be different after their passage. They mirror the pungency, if not the politics, of Trump’s promise to “Build the wall.”
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as far as policy makers are concerned, Obamacare comprises a set of clever tweaks and rules meant to change how insurance markets work and lower the cost of health care. Before the law passed, Democratic lawmakers cared deeply about getting those tweaks right.
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For her first day on Capitol Hill, and her first public act as a representative-elect, Ocasio-Cortez chose to focus on climate change
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Many Americans first heard of the Green New Deal early last month, after Ocasio-Cortez made a surprise appearance at a demonstration in Nancy Pelosi’s office
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We killed the cigarette. What we got in return is mango-flavored nicotine in 'party mod... - 0 views
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The secret to Juul's controversial success may be a twist on the age-old story of smoking as an outlet for teenage rebellion. The popularity of Juul seems to grow in tandem with the uproar: Sales of Juul are up more than 700 percent from a year ago, according to Nielsen data.
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American puffing peaked in 1970, when almost half of all adults smoked cigarettes
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“All of our smoking actual tobacco has gone way, way down,” noted Brian Maslowski, an instructor of alcohol, drug and tobacco seminars for Fairfax County Public Schools. The kids he encounters Juuling, he says, are “very much aware of the risks and consequences of smoking.
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Even the surgeon general’s landmark warning in the late 1960s that linked smoking to cancer couldn’t get Americans to quit. Instead, they gave it up at a glacial pace — by 2016 just 15.5 percent of adults smoked, according to the most recent CDC data, and it was largely thanks to a culture shift that cast the small circles of smokers who’d gather to puff outside of office buildings and bars as deeply uncool. They were addicts.
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And Juul kept the nicotine and chucked out all the rest — the thin casing of paper that always seemed to fall apart in the bottom of our purses, the flakes of tobacco, the tar, the carbon dioxide, the smell, the very form of the cigarette.
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To Allan M. Brandt, a historian and author of "The Cigarette Century," Juul is anything but new and different. "It represents the cultural norms and notions of the cigarette, which was very much youth-oriented," he said. "It was kind of forbidden; it was extremely cool."
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Could it be that with Juul, it’s just a different generation simply doing what young people have always done — testing boundaries, sneaking independence? Teen pregnancy is down, and marijuana is practically normalized. Perhaps Juul is just the new boogeyman to replace all the old ones.
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“It spread like wildfire, for two reasons,” he said. “The first reason is the flashy flavors like creme brulee. The flavors are responsible for bringing the kids in, the nicotine keeps them.”
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“I think the history of this tells me, don’t trust these industries,” said Brandt, the smoking historian. “Juul can say, ‘We’re not interested in kids; we’re going to fight the use of this in kids.’ But with flavors like mango, and cool cucumber. . . .” Cigarette makers have always said they didn’t want kids to smoke, he continued. But bad news about children lighting up on the schoolyard, he said, “was always great news for the tobacco companies.
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Senate Approves $36.5 Billion Aid Package as Hurricane Costs Mount - The New York Times - 0 views
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As the costs of this year’s hurricanes continue to rise, the Senate gave final approval on Tuesday to a $36.5 billion disaster relief package that includes a bailout of the financially troubled National Flood Insurance Program.
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In addition to providing hurricane and wildfire funding, it would help Puerto Rico’s government avoid running out of cash in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
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The measure approved on Tuesday is intended in part to prop up the National Flood Insurance Program, which is facing an influx of claims from this year’s hurricanes
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Andrew Sullivan: New Hope and New Danger on the Left - 0 views
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I can’t help drawing parallels between what we’re seeing in Democratic Party and the similar far-left wave of enthusiasm in Britain, where a new tide of youthful energy has flooded the British Labour Party and transformed its ambitions almost overnight from ameliorating capitalism to full-on socialism.
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There was an infectiousness to the excitement in 2015, in part because full-fledged socialism seemed to be answering a genuine and massive crisis of capitalism.
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It spoke to those under 40 whose futures are debt-ridden, who have little hope of property ownership, and struggle to manage with precarious, low wages. It rallied a sense of the common good against the isolation and depression of austerity. It actually took the science of climate catastrophe seriously
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It’s worth noting that the original version of the Green New Deal was devised by the left-leaning British National Economic Foundation, as a means for recovery after the 2008 economic collapse
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Once Labour’s full, staggeringly bold proposals were unveiled, support for the party soared
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Labour climbed a full 20 points in the six weeks of the 2017 campaign, robbing the Tories of a majority in the Parliament
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So it seems to me there is a massive opportunity for the left now across the Western world. Look at how popular a 70 percent top rate is … in America! The left is correct to sense a huge opportunity and they are right, I think, to be bold.
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I wrote about Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour last year in these pages, and that, under his leadership, “it turned out to be difficult to propel a new movement of left radicalism without simultaneously tapping into a vein of left extremism,” and that seems to me to be precisely the challenge in the U.S. as well
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the full package from the contemporary radicalized left in both the U.K. and U.S. brings with it far more troubling ideas
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If they insist on calling our multicultural and multiracial democracy a manifestation of “white supremacy,” they will empower real white supremacists.
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A passion for social justice curdles into attacks on free speech
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Postmodern critical gender theory denies any meaningful natural differences between men and women, and casts an entire sex as inherently problematic
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Concern about mass immigration is dismissed as nothing but racism and xenophobia.
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so Labour, after so much promise and success, has not been able to get any sustainable polling lead over the most shambolic Tory government in memory.
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If the Democrats want to fight the next election on the need for a radical rebalancing of the economy in favor of the middle and working class, for massive investment in new green technology, for higher taxes on the superrich, and for health-care security for all Americans, they can win
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If they conflate those goals with extremist rhetoric about abolishing everyone’s current health insurance, and starting from scratch, as the Green New Deal advises, not so much
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If they insist that men and women are indistinguishable, that girls can have penises and boys can have periods, as transgender ideology now demands, they’ll seem nuts to most fair-minded people.
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Hostility to the policies of the state of Israel — a perfectly legitimate position — morphs swiftly into ugly anti-Semitic tropes
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It’s not easy to find any heroes in Washington these days, so allow me to eulogize one. Walter Jones was a longtime Republican congressman from North Carolina, who died earlier this wee
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Are they really capable of fucking this up once again? The answer that is emerging in the first months of the new Democratic House is: of course they can.
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we may be underestimating what the constant drumbeat of news about the accelerating sixth great extinction has been doing to us psychologically.
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I’m haunted all the time by the knowledge of what my lifetime will have witnessed. Humans are committing countless species to death; we are destroying the life of our oceans and skies; we are changing the planet’s ecosystem more quickly than at any time since the asteroids wiped out the dinosaurs. From the perspective of life itself, we are conducting a holocaust of the natural world. How is the knowledge of this not traumatizing?
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A new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research notes, according to the BBC, that “since 1950, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold.”
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Last week, research emerged showing that the insect biomass is declining by 2.5 percent a year, which means that we may wipe out the entire insect population within a century — and lose a quarter of it in the next ten years.
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This amounts to what Jill Kieldash describes as the “actual structural and functional collapse of the natural systems which have supported life on Earth for the last 400 million years.”
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I don’t know how this paradigm affects you every day, but it is for me the gutting context for everything, a growing nausea laced with guilt and shame.
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In a century, we will have destroyed this Earth as we have known it — in absolutely full awareness of what we are doing. It’s the greatest crime humanity has ever committed
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One answer could be that they are behaving in a classic way when a catastrophe strikes: They’re traumatized by this knowledge, and they cope with this trauma by a classic form of disassociation. In fact, we are all living through this collective trauma
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Once we become aware of its true scope, depth, and accelerating pace, we then begin to view everything else through the traumatic lens of the climate crisis
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How could anyone with a reasonably realistic, educated worldview not be haunted by the perpetual specter of Climate Trauma when considering fundamental life and identity choices?
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I am not surprised by declining birth rates in the West. Having a child in today’s era means initiating another human being into the end of the world as we have known it
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I find my own witnessing of the collapse of liberal democratic values in the West inseparable from the mass extinction of life on Earth our civilization has wrought — and the double depression this creates makes me want to escape
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this collective trauma is never-ending. It’s a 9/11 all the time. Woodbury notes the similarity between our knowledge of future planetary collapse and a diagnosis of a terminal disease: “You may put it out of your mind for spells, but the grief associated with prospective loss comes at you in waves.
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The challenge is to resist disassociation — which is “the human capacity to mentally escape an insufferable reality.
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We are disassociating from America in our current dystopian politics. But we are also, more profoundly, disassociating ourselves from our deepest ecological reality: that we are killing what created us. And we cannot seem to stop.
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If they call a border wall an “immorality” and refuse to fund a way to detain and humanely house the huge surge of migrant families and children now overwhelming the southern border (up 290 percent over the same period in 2018, with a record 1,800 apprehensions on Monday of this week alone!), they will rightly be called in favor of open borders
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when it became clear that the Iraq War had been based on phony intelligence, he actually changed his mind. More than that: He took moral responsibility for his vote for the war, and rethought a great deal of his previous views. Ashamed of what he had done — and the lives lost because of the war — he went on to write 12,000 letters to family members of service members killed
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he tirelessly fought to bring back war-making powers to the Senate, where they belong. He took on his own party leadership in demanding votes before military adventures
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He was that very rare creature: a true Republican fiscal conservative
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Of course a man of this character was a dogged defender of his own constituents, especially those in the military subjected to unfairness or injustice of any kin
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This didn’t make him a liberal. It made him a conservative. And he proved that to be a conservative these days — a humane, decent, honest, principled conservative — you really have no place in the Republican Party
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In 'The Uninhabitable Earth,' Apocalypse Is Now - The New York Times - 0 views
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His new book revisits that approach, expanding his portrait of a planetary nightmare that, to judge by climatologists’ assessments, will soon take over our waking life
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Wallace-Wells is more concerned with the prospect of human suffering and even extinction.
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“It is about what warming means to the way we live on this planet.” He warns of collapsing ice sheets, water scarcity, an equatorial band too hot to be livable and — for anyone fortunate enough to reside elsewhere — extreme heat waves that will burn longer and kill more. All this could come with 2 degrees Celsius of warming — the threshold that world leaders pledged to stay below in the Paris accords of 2015.
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he obtains some consolation by peering into the abyss, entertaining the worst-case scenarios of 6 to 8 degrees Celsius of warming. Given the prospect of utter annihilation, he says, the “degraded muddle” that we might still manage to eke out should count “as an encouraging future.” It would be “merely grim, rather than apocalyptic.”
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The overarching frame for Wallace-Wells’s book is an analogous call to action: “How much will we do to stall disaster, and how quickly?”
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“The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead,”
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The harms of global warming tend to fall disproportionately on poorer people and poorer countries, but the “cascades” already set in motion will eventually grow so enormous and indiscriminate that not even the rich will be spared.
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His New York magazine article already synthesized plenty of information about perilous climate risks and scared the bejeezus out of people; what are we supposed to do with this expanded litany of horrors?
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He describes himself as a Bitcoin-buying, non-recycling city-dweller who hates camping. He was scared out of his “fatally complacent, and willfully deluded” inertia when he became immersed in the awful truth and, his book suggests, you can be too
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it’s not as if any of the hair-raising material with which he has become intimately familiar has paralyzed him with fatalism — quite the opposite. “That we know global warming is our doing should be a comfort, not a cause for despair,” he writes. What some activists have called “toxic knowledge” — all the intricate feedback loops of societal collapse — “should be empowering.”
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even while staring down the bleak decades ahead, Wallace-Wells had a child. “She will watch the world doing battle with a genuinely existential threat,” he writes. “She will be living it — quite literally the greatest story ever told. It may well bring a happy ending.
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Mobilization is impossible for people who are sleepwalking their way toward disaster; and mobilization is necessary, he says, to deploy the tools at our disposal, which include carbon taxes, carbon capture and green energy.
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There is no single way to best tell the story of climate change, no single rhetorical approach likely to work on a given audience, and none too dangerous to try,” Wallace-Wells writes. “Any story that sticks is a good one.”
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detail the possible future that awaits the planet should we continue to add carbon to the atmosphere and fail to arrest global warming. Floods, pestilence, famines, wildfires: What he calls the “elements of climate chaos” are veritably biblical in scope
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“The Uninhabitable Earth,” David Wallace-Wells