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Contents contributed and discussions participated by ethanshilling

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ethanshilling

Why Thousands of Republicans Are Leaving the Party - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...republicans-leaving-party.html

US Politics

shared by ethanshilling on 10 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • In the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the phone lines and websites of local election officials across the country were jumping: Tens of thousands of Republicans were calling or logging on to switch their party affiliations.
  • In California, more than 33,000 registered Republicans left the party during the three weeks after the Washington riot. In Pennsylvania, more than 12,000 voters left the G.O.P. in the past month, and more than 10,000 Republicans changed their registration in Arizona.
  • Voter rolls often change after presidential elections, when registrations sometimes shift toward the winner’s party or people update their old affiliations to correspond to their current party preferences, often at a department of motor vehicles.
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  • The biggest spikes in Republicans leaving the party came in the days after Jan. 6, especially in California, where there were 1,020 Republican changes on Jan. 5 — and then 3,243 on Jan. 7. In Arizona, there were 233 Republican changes in the first five days of January, and 3,317 in the next week
  • “It’s not a birthright and it’s not a religion,” Mr. Madden said of party affiliation. “Political parties should be more like your local condo association. If the condo association starts to act in a way that’s inconsistent with your beliefs, you move.”
  • Among Democrats, 79,000 have left the party since early January.
  • In North Carolina, the shift was immediately noticeable. The state experienced a notable surge in Republicans changing their party affiliation: 3,007 in the first week after the riot, 2,850 the next week and 2,120 the week after that.
  • It is those actions, some Republican strategists in Arizona argue, that prompted the drop in G.O.P. voter registrations in the state.
  • Mr. Nunez, the Army veteran in Pennsylvania, said his disgust with the Capitol riot was compounded when Republicans in Congress continued to push back on sending stimulus checks and staunchly opposed raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
  • In Michigan, Mayor Michael Taylor of Sterling Heights, the fourth-largest city in the state, already had one foot out the Republican Party door before the 2020 elections. Even as a lifelong Republican, he couldn’t bring himself to vote for Mr. Trump for president after backing him in 2016. He instead cast a ballot for Mr. Biden.
ethanshilling

U.S. unemployment claims jump sharply, showing the pandemic's continuing economic toll.... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-continuing-economic-toll.html

US unemployment pandemic economics

shared by ethanshilling on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • New claims for state unemployment benefits in the United States sharply increased last week as the pandemic continued to batter the economy.
  • A total of 1.15 million workers filed initial claims for state unemployment benefits during the first full week of the new year, the Labor Department said.
  • The government reported last week that the economy shed 140,000 jobs in December, the first drop in employment since last spring’s steep losses, with restaurants, bars and hotels recording steep losses.
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  • The labor market has rebounded somewhat since the initial coronavirus wave in the spring. But of the 22 million jobs that disappeared, nearly 10 million remain lost.
  • “Compared to then, we are doing better,” said AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist at the career site Indeed, referring to the spring. “But compared to the pre-Covid era, we still have so far to go.”
  • Perhaps more immediately, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has pledged to push a stimulus package through Congress that would provide relief to individuals, small businesses, students, schools and local governments.
ethanshilling

San Francisco's Tech Workers Make the Big Move - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ancisco-covid-work-moving.html

US technology eco economics

shared by ethanshilling on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Rent was astronomical. Taxes were high. Your neighbors didn’t like you. If you lived in San Francisco, you might have commuted an hour south to your job at Apple or Google or Facebook.
  • Remote work offered a chance at residing for a few months in towns where life felt easier. Tech workers and their bosses realized they might not need all the perks and after-work schmooze events.
  • That’s where the story of the Bay Area’s latest tech era is ending for a growing crowd of tech workers and their companies. They have suddenly movable jobs and money in the bank — money that will go plenty further somewhere else.
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  • The No. 1 pick for people leaving San Francisco is Austin, Texas, with other winners including Seattle, New York and Chicago, according to moveBuddha, a site that compiles data on moving.
  • The biggest tech companies aren’t going anywhere, and tech stocks are still soaring. Apple’s flying-saucer-shaped campus is not going to zoom away. Google is still absorbing ever more office space in San Jose and San Francisco. New founders are still coming to town.
  • But the migration from the Bay Area appears real. Residential rents in San Francisco are down 27 percent from a year ago, and the office vacancy rate has spiked to 16.7 percent, a number not seen in a decade.
  • Pinterest, which has one of the most iconic offices in town, paid $90 million to break a lease for a site where it planned to expand. And companies like Twitter and Facebook have announced “work from home forever” plans.
  • Now the local tech industry is rapidly expanding. Apple is opening a $1 billion, 133-acre campus. Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook have all either expanded their footprints in Austin or have plans to. Elon Musk, the Tesla founder and one of the two richest men in the world, said he had moved to Texas. Start-up investor money is arriving, too: The investors at 8VC and Breyer Capital opened Austin offices last year.
  • The San Francisco exodus means the talent and money of newly remote tech workers are up for grabs. And it’s not just the mayor of Miami trying to lure them in.
  • There are 33,000 members in the Facebook group Leaving California and 51,000 in its sister group, Life After California. People post pictures of moving trucks and links to Zillow listings in new cities.
  • If San Francisco of the 2010s proved anything, it’s the power of proximity. Entrepreneurs could find a dozen start-up pitch competitions every week within walking distance. If they left a big tech company, there were start-ups eager to hire, and if a start-up failed, there was always another.
  • No one leaving the city is arguing that a culture of innovation is going to spring up over Zoom. So some are trying to recreate it. They are getting into property development, building luxury tiny-home compounds and taking over big, funky houses in old resort towns.
ethanshilling

A Global Tour of a Record-Hot Year - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...test-year-2020-global-map.html

shared by ethanshilling on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • 2020 was effectively tied with 2016 for the hottest year on record, as global warming linked to greenhouse gas emissions showed no signs of letting up.
  • The heat was also felt in Europe, which had its warmest year ever and experienced blistering heat waves as late as September.
  • In central South America, warming and drought resulted in wildfires burning a quarter of the vast Pantanal wetland
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  • In the United States, the warming was most significant in the Northeast and Southwest.
  • With the 2020 results, the last seven years have been the warmest since the beginning of modern record-keeping nearly a century and a half ago, Dr. Schmidt said.
  • The planet has warmed more than 1 degree Celsius (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s, when the spread of industrialization led to rising emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and the pace has accelerated in recent decades.
  • Dr. Schmidt said his team and others have been studying the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on 2020 temperatures. Lockdown orders and the economic slowdown reduced greenhouse gas emissions by about 10 percent in the United States alone, according to a recent report.
  • Dr. Schmidt said efforts were underway to quantify the effect over the past year. “The numbers aren’t large,” he said, but they may have played a role in making 2020 a record-tying year.
  • ethanshilling on 14 Jan 21
     
    world climate
ethanshilling

Facing new outbreaks, China puts more than 22 million under lockdown. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...22-million-under-lockdown.html

pandemic china

shared by ethanshilling on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • They locked down two cities with more than 17 million people, Shijiazhuang and Xingtai. They ordered a testing regime of nearly every resident there, which was completed in a matter of days.
  • More than 22 million people in all have been ordered to remain inside their homes — double the number affected last January when China’s central government locked down Wuhan, the central city where the virus was first reported, in a move that was then seen as extraordinary.
  • Since Wuhan, the authorities have created a playbook that mobilizes party cadres to quickly respond to new outbreaks by sealing off neighborhoods, conducting widespread testing and quarantining large groups.
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  • China, a country of 1.4 billion people, has reported an average of 109 new cases a day over the past week, according to a New York Times database.
  • Those would be welcome numbers in countries experiencing far worse — including the United States, which is averaging more than 250,000 new cases a day — but they are the worst in China since last summer.
ethanshilling

December Jobs Report: Recovery Goes Into Reverse - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...december-2020-jobs-report.html

US pandemic economics

shared by ethanshilling on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • U.S. employers cut 140,000 jobs in December, the Labor Department said Friday. It was the first net decline in payrolls since last spring’s mass layoffs and followed five straight months in which hiring had slowed.
  • The unemployment rate was unchanged at 6.7 percent, down sharply from its high of nearly 15 percent in April but still close to double the 3.5 percent rate in the same month a year earlier.
  • “It’s a really vivid demonstration that the labor market can’t bounce back in any sustainable form until the pandemic is under control,” said Nick Bunker,
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  • “With the pandemic raging, people are losing work and losing hope,” he said.
  • At the same time, economists said the concentrated nature of the December job losses suggested that the damage from the latest wave of coronavirus cases had not spread to the rest of the economy.
  • Most forecasters expect the economy to remain weak and perhaps shed more jobs in early 2021. But they are becoming increasingly optimistic about the rest of the year.
  • “There are a lot of rich people who’ve saved a lot of money and really want to spend it,” said Tara Sinclair, an economist at George Washington University.
  • Retailers, which laid off millions of workers last spring, added more than 120,000 jobs last month, a sign that they have learned to adapt to the pandemic.
  • Robert Branca, who owns two dozen Dunkin’ locations in Massachusetts, said that business picked up steadily over the summer but that it had tailed off since then.
  • Federal aid may also be crucial in another hard-hit category: the public sector.
  • Nearly four million Americans have been unemployed for more than six months, the standard threshold for long-term unemployment.
  • If that pattern repeats, it could have long-term consequences, particularly for people with disabilities, criminal records or other characteristics that make it hard to find jobs even in the best of times.
ethanshilling

U.S. to Declare Yemen's Houthis a Terrorist Group, Raising Fears of Fueling a Famine - ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-houthis-terrorist-group.html

Politics terrorist crisis

shared by ethanshilling on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will designate the Houthi rebels in Yemen as a foreign terrorist organization
  • It is not clear how the terrorist designation will inhibit the Houthi rebels, who have been at war with the Saudi-backed government in Yemen for nearly six years but, some analysts say, pose no direct threat to the United States.
  • Mr. Pompeo will announce the designation in his last full week as secretary of state, and more than a month after meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who began a military intervention with Arab allies against the Houthis in 2015.
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  • The Houthis’ inclusion on the department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations means that fighters within the relatively decentralized movement will be cut off from financial support and other material resources that are routed through U.S. banks or other American institutions.
  • But the Houthis’ main patron is Iran, which continues to send support despite being hobbled by severe U.S. economic sanctions
  • Experts said it would chill humanitarian efforts to donate food and medicine to Houthi-controlled areas in northern and western Yemen
  • The United Nations estimates that about 80 percent of Yemenis depend on food assistance, and nearly half of all children suffer stunted growth because of malnutrition.
  • “I urge all those with influence to act urgently on these issues to stave off catastrophe, and I also request that everyone avoids taking any action that could make the already dire situation even worse,” Mr. Guterres said then.
  • The United States accuses the Houthi rebels of being proxy fighters for Iran
  • In October, the rebels released two American hostages and the remains of a third in a prisoner swap that also allowed about 240 Houthis to return to Yemen from Oman.
  • Beyond the looming famine, the terrorist designation could also seal the fate of an immense rusting oil tanker moored off Yemen’s western coast.
  • “If we do not want to cause Yemen to lose an entire generation,” Mr. Ralby said, “we need to back off this designation.”
ethanshilling

At Least 12 Dead in 2 Landslides in Indonesia - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...landslide-rains-west-java.html

disaster world

shared by ethanshilling on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Two landslides set off by heavy rainfall and unstable soil killed at least 12 people on Java, Indonesia’s most populous island, and left rescue workers searching for survivors, disaster officials said Sunday.
  • “The first landslide was triggered by high rainfall and unstable soil conditions,” said Raditya Jati, spokesman for the National Disaster Mitigation Agency.
  • “Many people came to see the rescue team and suddenly the second landslide hit,” she said. “There were more victims from the second one because it was much bigger than the first landslide.
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  • Many people were not in their homes at the time of the landslide because it was afternoon, she said.
  • Deadly landslides are common in Indonesia, where deforestation and illegal small-scale gold mining operations often contribute to unstable soil conditions.
  • The first landslide struck the village hours after a Sriwijaya Air passenger jet crashed into the Java Sea upon takeoff from Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, in heavy rains, killing all 62 aboard.
  • Indonesia, an archipelago of 17,500 islands that straddles the Equator, was once covered by vast rain forests. But over the last half-century, many of the forests have been burned and logged to clear the way for palm plantations and other farmland.
ethanshilling

Impeachment Looms. What's Next for the G.O.P.? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...eachment-republican-party.html

US Politics trump

shared by ethanshilling on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Trump has said he won’t be at the inauguration — but Democrats are hoping that by Jan. 20, he won’t even be president anymore.
  • Speaker Nancy Pelosi laid out a specific plan last night to seek President Trump’s removal from office
  • The next 10 days will be momentous for the whole nation, but for the G.O.P. in particular. The party is in chaos; as it gropes its way forward, here are three big factors that are likely to shape its direction.
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  • Trump came to power by exploiting the flawed incentives built into social media platforms: their promotion of outrage over reasoned discussion, their emphasis on personality over substance, and their unwillingness to monitor the information being shared.
  • Trump’s rise to the presidency was heavily fueled by the support of a few wealthy donors, but it also can’t be explained without the Tea Party revolt of 2009 and 2010.
  • Over the past four years, Trump has developed a relationship with scores of megadonors, including a number of billionaires who were firmly behind his re-election campaign.
  • That said, many business leaders have expressed alarm at the lengths to which Trump was willing to go to contest the election’s result, and they have called on him to acknowledge Biden’s victory
  • If Trump manages to maintain his grip on Republican voters, even without his favorite social media outlet, then it’s unlikely that he will leave a lot of air in the room for another leader to rise.
  • By the end of the campaign, a decisive majority of Republicans said they were more loyal to the president than to his party.
ethanshilling

The 51st State? Washington DC Revisits an Uphill Cause With New Fervor - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...washington-dc-statehood.html

US Politics washington

shared by ethanshilling on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • On the day after a mob rampaged through the halls of Congress, the mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel E. Bowser, heaped praise on the Metropolitan Police Department officers who had rushed to restore order after the Capitol’s police force was overwhelmed.
  • “I’m upset that 706,000 residents of the District of Columbia did not have a single vote in that Congress yesterday despite the fact their officers were putting their lives on the line to defend democracy.”
  • But Wednesday’s riot, in which 56 city police officers were injured, has become Example One in a renewed and decidedly uphill effort to change the legislators’ minds.
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  • “Having a Democratic president who supports statehood will help us move the bill substantially,” said Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s sole representative in Congress.
  • There are plenty of obstacles. The District of Columbia could presumably gain statehood by winning simple majorities in the House and the Senate
  • Some experts say only a constitutional amendment could give Washington residents a voice in Congress. Just such an amendment cleared both houses in 1978, but only 16 of the 38 states needed for ratification approved it.
  • On Wednesday, statehood supporters seized on the Capitol Hill fiasco as further evidence of the case for statehood
  • The city’s relations with the Trump administration have long been poisonous
  • District of Columbia officials want to strictly enforce laws against hate crimes, he said, but discretion in prosecuting felons is reserved for the U.S. attorney for the district, a Trump administration appointee.
  • Whether statehood might follow seems a long shot at best. But as supporters say, stranger things have happened — as recently as Wednesday, in fact.
ethanshilling

Covid-19 News: Live Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-19-coronavirus

US Politics pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 11 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In earlier stages of the pandemic, the states with the most coronavirus cases often bordered one another. Major outbreaks were concentrated in geographic regions of the United States
  • Now, the five worst-hit states are scattered around the country: Arizona, California, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and South Carolina are averaging the most daily new cases per person
  • Nearly 5,000 Arizonans were hospitalized with the virus as of Sunday
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  • Rhode Island, which aggressively handled its spring surge, has the worst outbreak of any Northeastern state.
  • In Oklahoma, daily caseloads have increased 40 percent in the past two weeks.
  • Nearly one in 10 people have tested positive for the virus in Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous.
  • South Carolina has more than doubled its average cases over the past two weeks.
  • Five new coronavirus vaccination centers opened in New York, in the latest effort to accelerate the sluggish pace that has dogged the rollout in the city.
  • President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is scheduled to receive his second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine on Monday.
ethanshilling

As House Was Breached, a Fear 'We'd Have to Fight' to Get Out - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tol-breach-trump-protests.html

US politics crisis

shared by ethanshilling on 07 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The mob of Trump supporters pressed through police barricades, broke windows and battered their way with metal poles through entrances to the Capitol.
  • Then, stunningly, they breached the “People’s House” itself, forcing masked police officers to draw their guns to keep the insurgents off the chamber floor.
  • “I thought we’d have to fight our way out,” said Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado and a former Army Ranger in Iraq, who found himself captive in the House chamber.
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  • An armed standoff ensued in the House chamber, with police officers drawing their weapons. A pro-Trump protester casually monkeyed around at the dais of the Senate.
  • It began around 1 p.m., when a mass of Trump supporters, some in camouflage and armed with baseball bats or knives, left the National Mall and, encouraged by President Trump, ascended on the Capitol complex.
  • “I don’t trust any of these people,” said Eric Martin, 49, a woodworker from Charleston, S.C., as he marveled at the opulence of the Capitol and helped a friend wash pepper spray from his eyes. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
  • The Capitol Police fatally shot a woman inside the building, according to Chief Robert J. Contee of the Metropolitan Police Department, and multiple officers were injured.
  • “This is what the president has caused today, this insurrection,” Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, said as he and other senators were hustled off to a secure location.
  • Soon, a nervous energy pulsed through the room. The police began to close the gallery doors, which had remained open to allow for better ventilation as lawmakers streamed in. Congressional leaders were quickly ushered out, as staff aides urged lawmakers in the gallery and on the floor to remain calm.
  • For about an hour, the Trump loyalists went in and out of at least one entrance of the Capitol with little disruption from the police.
  • The few police officers standing on the steps of the Capitol were overwhelmed. Their flash bang grenades only invigorated the protesters. Around 2:30, an entrance near the west side of the Capitol descended into chaos as a wave of Trump supporters wearing Make America Great Again apparel pressed past police barricades.
  • In the House, just after 2:30 p.m., a police officer stepped on the dais and informed lawmakers that they might need to duck under their chairs.
  • Frantic shouting filled the room as lawmakers struggled to unfold the plastic bags that they were instructed to prepare to put over their heads in case of tear gas.
  • In a surreal scene of chaos and glee, hundreds of Trump loyalists roamed the halls, taking photos and breaking into offices. No police officers were in view.
  • “We’re claiming the House, and the Senate is ours,” a sweaty man in a checked shirt shouted, stabbing his finger in the air.
  • “You guys just need to go outside,” he said to a man in a green backpack. Asked why the police were not forcing the mob out, the officer said, “We just got to let them do their thing for now.”
  • One protester came up to him and shouted in his face, “Traitor!” When another man approached to apologize to the officer, the officer replied, “You’re fine.”
  • Around 3:30 p.m., about 25 police officers had entered the Crypt and started asking people to move back. A few minutes later, dozens more, wearing riot gear and some in gas masks, ejected the roughly 150 protesters in the Crypt.
  • Protesters repeatedly exited the building bearing trophies that they had torn off walls. A few carried “Area Closed” signs that they had snatched and then stormed past.
  • By 7 p.m., the presence of police officers and federal agents had drastically increased along the National Mall. Officers pushed back against aggressive protesters as they prepared for the possibility of more unrest overnight.
  • “We want to go back,” Mr. Crow said. “And finish the business of the people to show that we are a democracy, and that the government is stronger than any mob.”
ethanshilling

Wins in Georgia give Democrats control of the Senate. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ats-control-of-the-senate.html

US politics

shared by ethanshilling on 07 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Democrats gained control of the Senate on Wednesday by winning both of Georgia’s runoff races
  • The election of the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff was a political triumph for the Democratic Party in a state that has stymied it for decades.
  • On the same day that Georgia elected Mr. Ossoff, a 33-year-old Jewish documentary filmmaker, and Mr. Warnock, a 51-year-old pastor who will become the state’s first Black senator, an almost entirely white crowd of aggrieved Trump supporters, some carrying Confederate flags, descended on Washington to defy political reality.
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  • “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that,” Mr. Warnock wrote. “Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
  • Georgia has not sent a Democrat to the Senate in two decades, and the party succeeded this year by focusing heavily on voter registration and turnout, particularly in suburban counties and in Atlanta and Savannah.
  • It was a strategy engineered in part by Stacey Abrams, the former state House leader and candidate for governor, who has focused on combating voter suppression in the state.
ethanshilling

U.S. Disaster Costs Doubled in 2020, Reflecting Costs of Climate Change - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...2020-disaster-costs.html

climate change economics world

shared by ethanshilling on 07 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters across the United States caused $95 billion in damage last year, according to new data, almost double the amount in 2019 and the third-highest losses since 2010.
  • Those losses occurred during a year that was one of the warmest on record, a trend that makes extreme rainfall, wildfires, droughts and other environmental catastrophes more frequent and intense.
  • Topping the list was Hurricane Laura, which caused $13 billion in damage when it struck Southwestern Louisiana in late August.
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  • The storms caused $43 billion in losses, almost half the total for all U.S. disasters last year.
  • The next costliest category of natural disasters was convective storms, which includes thunderstorms, tornadoes, hailstorms and derechos, and caused $40 billion in losses last year.
  • Wildfires caused another $16 billion in losses. Last year’s wildfires stood out not just because of the numbers of acres burned or houses destroyed, Munich Re said, but also because so much of that damage was outside of California
  • In California, officials have tried a series of rule changes designed to stop insurers from pulling out of fire-prone areas, leaving homeowners with few options for insurance.
  • The data also shows another worrying trend: The lack of insurance coverage in developing countries, which makes it harder for people there to recover after a disaster.
  • The single costliest disaster of 2020 was a series of floods that hit China last summer, which according to Munich Re caused $17 billion worth of damage.
  • Of the $67 billion in losses from natural disasters across Asia last year, only $3 billion, or 4.5 percent, was covered by insurance.
  • Without insurance, Mr. Rauch said, “the opportunity to recover fast after such an event is simply not there.”
ethanshilling

Trump supporters also mobilized at state capitols. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bilized-at-state-capitols.html

US trump politics crisis

shared by ethanshilling on 07 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • As supporters of President Trump breached the nation’s Capitol on Wednesday, hundreds of other Trump supporters across the country gathered at state capitols, in some cases prompting evacuations and law enforcement mobilizations.
  • In Washington State, a crowd of Trump supporters, some of them armed, breached the fence surrounding the governor’s residence and approached the building before state troopers mobilized to keep them away.
  • “Those acts of intimidation will not succeed,” said Mr. Inslee, a Democrat. No arrests were made.
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  • Chris Hill, the leader of a right-wing militia, said he called some of his “troops” to the statehouse to protest, repeating the president’s false claim that the election was “rigged.”
  • In New Mexico, a lawmaker reported that the State Police were evacuating the Capitol, while Mayor Michael B. Hancock of Denver instructed city government buildings to close as about 700 people gathered outside the statehouse there.
  • More than 500 people gathered in Lansing, Mich., praying and carrying a mix of flags and guns.
  • In Sacramento, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California canceled a news briefing on the coronavirus to ensure the safety of his staff, he said in a statement.
  • The Sacramento police reported “physical altercations” between the group and counterprotesters and several arrests for possession of pepper spray before the gathering was organically dispersed by a cold afternoon rainstorm.
  • And in Portland, Ore., dozens of left-wing demonstrators gathered late Wednesday for a “Stop the fascist coup” event. Police said the group broke windows at multiple businesses in downtown.
ethanshilling

To Cut Emissions to Zero, U.S. Needs to Make Big Changes in Next 10 Years - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...erica-next-decade-climate.html

us climate politics

shared by ethanshilling on 16 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • If the United States wants to get serious about tackling climate change, the country will need to build a staggering amount of new energy infrastructure in just the next 10 years, laying down steel and concrete at a pace barely being contemplated today.
  • That’s one conclusion from a major study released Tuesday by a team of energy experts at Princeton University, who set out several exhaustively detailed scenarios for how the country could slash its greenhouse gas emissions down to zero by 2050.
  • That goal has been endorsed by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., as well as numerous states and businesses, to help avoid the worst effects of global warming.
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  • The researchers identified a common set of drastic changes that the United States would need to make over the next decade to stay on pace for zero emissions.
  • This year, energy companies will install 42 gigawatts of new wind turbines and solar panels, smashing records. But that annual pace would need to nearly double over the next decade
  • The capacity of the nation’s electric grid would have to expand roughly 60 percent by 2030 to handle vast amounts of wind and solar power
  • By 2030, at least 50 percent of new cars sold would need to be battery-powered, with that share rising thereafter.
  • Most homes today are heated by natural gas or oil. But in the next 10 years, nearly one-quarter would need to be warmed with efficient electric heat pumps, double today’s numbers.
  • Virtually all of the 200 remaining coal-burning power plants would have to shut down by 2030.
  • “The scale of what we have to build in a very short time frame surprised me,” said Christopher Greig, a senior scientist at Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.
  • To start, the United States could make enormous strides over the next decade by rapidly scaling up solutions already in use today, like wind, solar, electric cars and heat pumps. Doing so would require $2.5 trillion in additional investments by governments and industry by 2030.
  • Wind and solar power could be backed up by batteries, some existing nuclear reactors and a large fleet of natural-gas plants that run only occasionally or have been modified to burn clean hydrogen.
  • Devices that suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could help offset emissions.
  • But most of those technologies are still in early development. That would have to change quickly.
  • “We need to be building up our options now,” said Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer at Princeton.
  • The studies found that, if done right, getting to net zero appears broadly affordable, largely because technologies like wind and solar have become so much cheaper than anyone expected over the past decade.
  • “It’s not a question of whether we have enough land, because we do,” said Eric Larson, a senior research engineer at Princeton. “But with that many new projects, you have to ask if they’ll run into local opposition.”
  • Then there are jobs to consider. Net zero would mean eliminating coal and drastically reducing oil and gas use, displacing hundreds of thousands of fossil-fuel workers.
  • On the flip side, millions of new green jobs would spring up for workers retrofitting homes or building wind farms, though those jobs might not be located in the same regions.
  • Politicians would need to figure out how to gain public acceptance for the sweeping changes unfolding, while protecting vulnerable Americans from harm.
  • What both studies do illustrate is that there’s little room for delay.
  • “It may seem like 2050 is a long way off,” said Dr. Jenkins. “But if you think about the timelines for policies, business decisions and capital investments, it’s really more like the day after tomorrow.”
ethanshilling

How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-climate-migration-crisis.html

russia climate economics

shared by ethanshilling on 16 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • As the planet continues to warm, vast new stretches of Russia will become suitable for agriculture.
  • A great transformation is underway in the eastern half of Russia. For centuries the vast majority of the land has been impossible to farm;
  • Twenty years ago, Dima says, the spring thaw came in May, but now the ground is bare by April; rainstorms now come stronger and wetter.
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  • Russia hopes to seize on the warming temperatures and longer growing seasons brought by climate change to refashion itself as one of the planet’s largest producers of food.
  • But for a few nations, climate change will present an unparalleled opportunity, as the planet’s coldest regions become more temperate.
  • And no country may be better positioned to capitalize on climate change than Russia. Russia has the largest land mass by far of any northern nation.
  • There is an optimum climate for human productivity — average annual temperatures between 52 and 59 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — and much of the planet’s far north is headed straight toward it.
  • And as the climate warms, Canada will move into the ecological sweet spot for civilization, benefiting from new Arctic transportation routes as well as an expanded capacity for farming.
  • This is why a group of Canadian business executives and academics have called on their government to turn the country’s immigration system into a magnet for the planet’s most talented people, hoping to nearly triple Canada’s population by 2100.
  • The race for prosperity in a climate-changed world is about achieving domestic self-reliance and also expanding geopolitical influence.
  • but Tchebakova’s research suggests that if humans continue to emit carbon dioxide at high rates, roughly half of Siberia — more than two million square miles — could become available for farming by 2080, and its capacity to support potential climate migrants could jump ninefold in some places as a result.
  • The wait may not be especially long. This season, crops of winter wheat and canola seed outside Tchebakova’s own city of Krasnoyarsk in southern Siberia produced twice the yields as the year before.
  • As Vladimir Putin himself once glibly put it, a couple of degrees of warming might not be so bad: “We could spend less on fur coats, and the grain harvest would go up.”
  • But agriculture offers the key to one of the greatest resources of the new climate era — food — and in recent years Russia has already shown a new understanding of how to leverage its increasingly strong hand in agricultural exports
  • Russia’s agricultural dominance, says Rod Schoonover, the former director of environment and natural resources at the National Intelligence Council and a former senior State Department analyst under the Obama and Trump administrations, is “an emergent national security issue” that is “underappreciated as a geopolitical threat.”
  • In 2010, in what was a rare and early official assessment of climate risk, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Quadrennial Defense Review warned that climate change “could have significant geopolitical impacts,” contributing to poverty, starvation, drought and the spread of disease
  • The current plan invites any Russians willing to relocate themselves in Siberia and the Far East, including in the Birobidzhan area of the Jewish Autonomous Region, to buy properties at 2 percent interest.
ethanshilling

Schools Will Close in Germany as Cases Surge - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lose-coronavirus-lockdown.html

Europe germany us pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 14 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • This fall, even as cases surged across Europe, Germany worked hard to keep schools open, prioritizing them over other aspects of daily life like restaurants and bars.
  • On Wednesday, German schools will close along with nonessential stores and services as part of a strict lockdown that will be in effect through Christmas.
  • “The numbers were so out of control that German leaders decided they had to lock everything down, even schools,” said Melissa Eddy, a Times correspondent in Berlin.
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  • “It sends the message that Germany lost control of the pandemic entirely,” Melissa said. “The schools got sacrificed because they failed to lock down everything else strictly enough.”
  • The coming weeks are now especially uncertain for schools. Germany, a country long committed to data privacy, has not leaned into online learning software, which makes a transition to remote learning even more difficult.
  • Similar trends are playing out across Europe and the world.
  • Coronavirus-related deaths in young people are remarkably rare. Since the pandemic began, The Times has identified only about 90 deaths involving college employees and students out of more than 397,000 infections.
  • In the Netherlands, the Dutch prime minister is expected to announce a monthlong lockdown during which schools will close
  • In London, Mayor Sadiq Khan called for schools to close early for Christmas, even as Boris Johnson, the prime minister, fought to keep them open.
  • Employees at local businesses in Ithaca, N.Y., home to Cornell University, have started a petition to shut down indoor dining, receive hazard pay and maintain clear safety protocols
  • Student athletes at Harvard University struggled through a fall semester of at-home workouts and Zoom meetings, Alex Koller and Ema Schumer reported for The Harvard Crimson, the student paper.
  • Connie Chang’s daughter started the school year in distance learning. But without constant surveillance, she could move freely through the internet with relative ease.
  • She spoke with experts and shared a few tips for other parents worried about dialing back the digital overload. Some suggestions: Normalize digital play and respect your child’s need for communication, while teaching children how to navigate the internet as a literate user.
ethanshilling

Arctic's Shift to a Warmer Climate Is 'Well Underway, Scientists Warn - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...arctic-climate-change.html

climate arctic world

shared by ethanshilling on 08 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • “There is no reason to think that in 30 years much of anything will be as it is today,” one of the editors of a new report on the Arctic climate said.
  • The Arctic continued its unwavering shift toward a new climate in 2020, as the effects of near-record warming surged across the region, shrinking ice and snow cover and fueling extreme wildfires, scientists said Tuesday in an annual assessment of the region.
  • This year the minimum extent of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, reached at the end of the melt season in September, was the second-lowest in the satellite record, the scientists reported
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  • While the whole planet is warming because of emissions of heat-trapping gases through burning of fossil fuels and other human activity, the Arctic is heating up more than twice as quickly as other regions.
  • And perhaps most stunning, snow cover across the Eurasian Arctic reached a record low in June.
  • The amount of snow that fell across the Eurasian Arctic was actually above normal this year, said Lawrence Mudryk, a researcher with Environment and Climate Change Canada and lead author of the section on snow cover in the assessment. “Despite that, it was still warm enough that it melted faster and earlier than usual,” he said.
  • The warmth was pervasive across the Arctic. The average land temperature north of 60 degrees latitude, as measured from October 2019 through September, was 1.9 degrees Celsius, or 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit, above the baseline average for 1981-2010 and the second-highest in more than a century of record-keeping.
  • In recent years Arctic researchers have increasingly come to recognize that the region is moving from a climate that is characterized less by ice and snow and more by open water and rain.
  • The increasing dominance of younger, and thus generally thinner, ice has contributed to the reduction in sea-ice extent, Dr. Perovich said, since thinner ice is less likely to last through a single season.
ethanshilling

Supreme Court Hears Holocaust Survivors' Cases Against Hungary and Germany - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...holocaust-hungary-germany.html

politics holocaust cases

shared by ethanshilling on 08 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • The justices struggled to decide whether a 1976 law that bars most suits against other nations allows Jewish victims to sue over the theft of their property.
  • The Supreme Court, wary in the past of cases concerning conduct by and against foreigners that took place abroad, heard arguments on Monday over whether American courts have a role in deciding whether Hungary and Germany must pay for property said to have been stolen from Jews before and during World War II.
  • The Trump administration took issue with the rulings, filing briefs and presenting arguments supporting efforts to limit review in American courts.
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  • The Hungarian case, Republic of Hungary v. Simon, No. 18-1447, was brought by 14 Holocaust survivors, four of them United States citizens, who said their property was stolen by Hungary and its state-owned railway, which deported hundreds of thousands of Jews to Nazi death camps in the summer of 1944.
  • Gregory Silbert, a lawyer for Hungary, said its courts should be allowed to address the matter.
  • Three-judge panels of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled against both Hungary and Germany, saying the cases could proceed
  • The German case, Federal Republic of Germany v. Philipp, No. 19-351, concerns the Guelph Treasure, a trove of medieval religious art that was once owned by a consortium of Jewish art dealers in Frankfurt and that is now estimated to be worth $250 million.
  • The basic legal question for the justices in both cases is whether the disputes should be resolved by American courts
  • Benjamin W. Snyder, a lawyer for the federal government who argued in support of Hungary, took a position that frustrated several justices.
  • “The State Department simply doesn’t feel that it has sufficient information to provide the court with a recommendation,” Mr. Snyder said.
  • Ms. Harrington responded that her case, a potential class action, was at an early stage and that “it’s pure speculation at this point” to try to calculate her clients’ damages.
  • A supporting brief from Hungarian Holocaust victims argued that trying to sue in that country was pointless. It described a case brought there by a 92-year-old plaintiff whose suit was dismissed for lack of evidence beyond her sworn testimony and who was ordered to pay the government’s legal fees.
  • “This would put courts of the United States,” Mr. Kneedler said, “in the business of making sensitive judgments about the conduct of foreign governments, including perhaps some of our closest allies
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