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katherineharron

McConnell for the first time recognizes Biden as President-elect - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

gop

shared by katherineharron on 15 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the first time acknowledged Joe Biden's victory and referred to him as President-elect, six weeks after Election Day and amid President Donald Trump's continued refusal to accept defeat.
  • "The electoral college has spoken," McConnell said in remarks from the Senate floor in the US Capitol, adding, "Today I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden."
  • many Senate Republicans still wouldn't recognize Biden's victory on Monday evening even after the Electoral College made the win official.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • it took more than 40 days since Americans went to the polls for many GOP members of Congress to speak up.
  • "The fact that it took six weeks for my colleagues to recognize reality and stop undermining our Democratic process is sad and disappointing," said Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin in a floor speech Tuesday following McConnell's remarks.
  • Trump needs to "take his cue from Leader McConnell, that it's time to end his term," in a floor speech
  • "Our Republican colleagues, for the sake of our democracy, for the sake of the peaceful transition of power, should stop the shenanigans," Schumer said "Stop the misrepresentations and acknowledge that Joe Biden will be our next president."
  • Two other members of GOP leadership -- Senate Majority Whip John Thune of South Dakota and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas -- both said that any effort to overturn the election results on January 6, when a joint of session of Congress meets to count the electoral votes, would be fruitless.
  • McConnell said while millions wished the election would have yielded a different result, "our system of government has processes to determine who will be sworn in on January the 20th. The Electoral College has spoken."
  • Trump, even in defeat, holds enormous sway over his party, to the point where many refuse to publicly accept electoral reality or raise any concerns as the President continues to undermine the integrity of US democracy by lying that the election was rigged and stolen from him
  • "Montana cast three electoral votes for President Trump, and the Electoral College voted today," said Daines, who just won reelection in Montana. "And Congress will need to ratify in January."
  • some GOP members of Congress were signaling they were more willing to accept Biden's victory.
  • "We've now gone through the constitutional process and the electors have voted, so there's a President-elect," Blunt said. "With Vice President Biden as the President-elect, the President continues, obviously, to have all the options he has available to him, but the electoral vote today was significant."
  • "It would take far more than one speech to catalog all the major wins the Trump administration has helped deliver for the American people," he said. "The outsider who swore he would shake up Washington and lead our country to new accomplishments, both at home and abroad proceeded to do exactly that. President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence deserve our thanks and our gratitude for their tireless work and their essential roles in all these victories and in many more."
  • "I think everybody realized it yesterday that counting the voting of the electors was a pivotal moment, and I agree," Cornyn told reporters Tuesday, when asked if he recognizes Biden as President-elect.
Javier E

Green Energy's Future Rests on Red State Buy-In - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...629420

energy future state analysis

shared by Javier E on 06 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • The states that are most deeply integrated into the existing fossil-fuel economy, either as producers or as consumers, tend also to be the places that are most resistant to, and separated from, the major demographic, cultural, and economic changes remaking 21st-century American life.
  • These fossil-fuel-reliant states are nearly all among those moving most aggressively to restrict voting, abortion, and LGBTQ rights; to ban books; and to censor what teachers and college professors can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation
  • Most of them have larger populations of white voters who identify as Christian and rely heavily on blue-collar work in the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: production of energy and other natural resources, manufacturing, and agriculture. Republicans dominate their electoral landscape, both in state and federal offices.
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  • This convergence of fossil-fuel dependence, cultural conservatism, and isolation from the most dynamic modern industries captures how comprehensively the two parties are divided by their exposure to, and attitudes about, the changes reshaping America.
  • The irony is that the energy transition may represent the best chance for the states most reliant on fossil fuels to benefit from the new sources of economic growth.
  • Last year Walter co-wrote a detailed study on how a shift away from fossil fuels would affect the states. Replacing fossil fuels with lower-carbon energy sources, she said, will create “a tremendous amount of jobs in Republican states.”
  • The 19 states that top the EIA’s latest rankings—for the most carbon emitted per dollar of economic output in 2018—present a singular profile. They begin with Wyoming, West Virginia, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Alaska at the top of the list and then extend across the South (including Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas), the heartland (including Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska), and the Mountain West (Montana, New Mexico)
  • The political leadership in these states has opposed most efforts to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy sources. Fourteen of these states, for instance, have joined in a lawsuit (led by West Virginia) now before the Supreme Court that could undercut the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions.
  • The Republican senators from these states have also uniformly opposed proposals to limit carbon emissions, such as a clean-electricity standard to phase out carbon-emitting electricity.
  • The most important exception to this pattern is that many congressional Republicans have backed tax credits to encourage deployment of wind and solar power.
  • all Senate Republicans are opposing the Build Back Better Act’s more sweeping incentives, which energy analysts agree could enormously accelerate the development of those sources.
  • Almost all of the states fighting the energy transition are expressing equally intense resistance to social change. In effect, they are fighting the future on both fronts.
  • The core problem for these states, Muro notes, is that most of them tend to lack the well-educated workers who are, in essence, the crucial raw material for not only internet, computing, and communications firms but also advanced manufacturing.
  • the torrent of culturally conservative legislation across the fossil-fuel-reliant states (and GOP-controlled states more broadly) adds another barrier to tech companies pursuing significant expansions in them. “They want to decentralize somewhat, but they are very concerned about how this plays with the people they are trying to hire,” Muro says. Companies, he adds, “need to make sure the talent is not put off” by these restrictive social policies.
  • Devashree Saha, a senior associate at the World Resources Institute, told me most economic models project that, overall, the transition from a fossil-fuel to a clean-energy economy will create more jobs than it destroys in energy-related sectors.
  • The bipartisan infrastructure bill that Biden signed last year included several provisions designed to channel jobs in the clean-energy economy toward places that would be hurt by diminished reliance on fossil fuels, such as coal communities. The now-stalled Build Back Better plan contains further incentives to steer that investment, though those haven’t been sufficient to overcome the opposition from Republicans representing the fossil-fuel states, or Manchin.
  • That resistance underscores the extent to which the energy transition has been woven into the larger struggle over the country’s direction between what I’ve called the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation” and the competing Republican “coalition of restoration.”
  • The loud demands for more domestic oil and gas drilling since Russia invaded Ukraine, and the fierce opposition to any regulation of carbon emissions, show how a low-carbon future has become just another count in the indictment Republicans use to convince their voters that Democrats want to uproot America from its deepest traditions and transform it into something unrecognizable
lilyrashkind

Major winter storm to bring heavy snow, rain over MLK weekend - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...now-rain-mlk-weekend-rcna12212

winter storm crisis

shared by lilyrashkind on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • A major winter storm system is expected to wallop parts of the United States with heavy snow and rain over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, meteorologists have warned.
  • The upper and the middle Mississippi Valley could get heavy snow Friday, with potentially freezing rain set to fall over parts of the Carolinas and the southern Appalachians this weekend, according to the National Weather Service.
  • “The snow will result in reduced visibility and hazardous driving conditions,” it said. The system is already prod
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • ucing snowfall in the northern Plains and the Upper Midwest, with heavy snow in parts of Minnesota and Iowa coming down at rates of one to two inches per hour
  • In a weekend forecast, NBC’s "TODAY" weather anchor Al Roker said the storm system could bring 6 to 12 inches of snow stretching from the Dakotas down to Missouri.
  • Snow is also expected to develop over parts of the central and southern Appalachians, with pockets of rain and freezing rain potentially developing over the Carolinas and the southern Appalachians overnight Saturday into Sunday morning.
  • Roker said the system was expected to move south before making its way up the Eastern coast into Sunday and Monday, bringing heavy wind and rain if it continues along its expected track. On Sunday, a wintry mix is expected to hit parts of the Southeast, including Atlanta, as a significant ice storm unfolds across the Carolinas.
Javier E

Rift Between Wyden and Son Shows the Challenge of Taxing the Ultrarich - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...taxing-the-rich.html

tax rich billionaire politics policy lobbying

shared by Javier E on 11 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • “Many millionaires perhaps may consider themselves tomorrow’s billionaires.”
  • Dennis Kelleher, who heads Better Markets, a group that works against income inequality, said the marshaling of little guys to protect the big guys “happens all the time.” Small-business owners protest estate taxes they will never pay. Community banks protest regulations aimed at the large banks that are their biggest competitors. Minimum-wage workers are somehow framed as the targets for I.R.S. enforcement proposals aimed at the ultrarich.
  • “Not only does it distort discussion of incredibly important policy,” he said, “it ends up advancing the interest of this very small number of people and industries that have a chokehold on public policy in Washington.”
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  • The billionaire class has long leaned on farmers and ranchers to beat back efforts to tax inheritances more heavily. This year, the tactic worked to kill a proposal from Mr. Biden that would have set the value of inherited assets at their original purchase price, not their worth at the time of the original owner’s death.
  • That “step up” in the value of an inherited asset means that its unrealized gains over a lifetime are often never taxed, a boon to wealthy heirs, protected in Washington by those considered politically untouchable.
  • Two former Democratic senators from rural states, Max Baucus of Montana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, lobbied against the Biden proposal and quickly won over Senator Jon Tester, the current Democrat from Montana, who killed it in October in the name of “our family farms, ranches and small businesses.”
Javier E

Home Insurance Premiums Rise as Americans Flock to Weather-Worn States - The New York Times - 0 views

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

insurance premiums us migration climate change trends texas florida

shared by Javier E on 06 May 23 - No Cached
  • Home insurance premiums are on the rise, and a key driver for the price increase is climate change. Yet, Americans are moving fastest to Florida, Texas and other states most at risk for climate-related natural disasters, according to a new study from LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a data and analytics provider.
  • Since 2015, the average homeowner has seen the bill for their property coverage grow by roughly 21 percent. But in Florida and Texas, the two states with the highest population gains in 2022, rates have climbed significantly more — 57 percent in Florida and 40 percent in Texas.
  • “The states where climate tends to impact the world more strongly are seeing a bigger jump in population,”
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  • Many new residents cite cost of a living as a key factor behind their moves, but home insurance costs are rising faster there than the national average, meaning homeowners should brace for sticker shock.In Florida, the average home insurance premium in 2019 was $1,988. Today, it’s $2,714 — an increase of $726.
  • The risk is highest in the Sun Belt region, which is experiencing rapid growth, yet Americans are moving directly into areas of danger. Hurricane Ian alone killed more than 150 Floridians, knocked out power for 2.6 million residents and left Florida with a bill of nearly $113 billion in its wake.
  • Those states are also experiencing extreme weather: Hurricanes like Ian, Nicole and Fiona, as well as record heat, ice and snow storms, wrought billions of dollars of destruction in 2022 and killed nearly 500 Americans.
  • California bucked the trend in several ways. Despite being battered by wildfires and extreme storms in recent years, home insurance rates there grew by only 25 percent, below the increase in other coastal states. California lost 343,230 residents, accounting for a 0.3 percent dip, last year.
  • In South Dakota, 8,424 new residents moved into the sparsely populated state in 2022, while insurance costs have jumped 39 percent since 2015. In dry, sunny Arizona, where nearly 71,000 new residents flocked in 2022, costs grew 28 percent
  • Florida grew by more than 318,000 new residents in 2022, accounting for a population increase of 1.9 percent last year — the largest uptick in the nation. Texas, with more than 230,000 new residents, was right on its tails.
lilyrashkind

Sara Menker Warns About Fallout of Rising Food Insecurity | Time - 0 views

time.com/...sara-menker-food-insecurity

food US

shared by lilyrashkind on 01 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • ara Menker runs a private company, Gro Intelligence, that uses data and AI to make predictions about climate change and food security, but when she appeared before the U.N. Security Council on May 19, she sounded more like an advocate. Gro’s data has found that, because of rising food prices around the world, 400 million people have become food insecure in the last 5 months alone. (Food insecurity, as Gro defines it, means people living on $3.59 a day or less.)
  • Menker, 39, who was chosen as one of TIME’s Most Influential People in 2021, was born in Ethiopia, attended college at Mount Holyoke, worked as a commodities trader on Wall Street, and left to start Gro to use technology to tackle challenges like hunger and climate change. Today, Gro works with governments and big food companies, analyzing hundreds of trillions of data points from satellites, governments, and private sources, to forecast the supply of agricultural products globally.
  • In recent months, as the war in Ukraine raged on, Gro’s systems started flagging problems that were putting a growing number of people at risk of going hungry. Some were worsened by the war, but many others have been building for longer, caused by the actions of other governments banning exports or imposing tariffs. Menker talked to TIME shortly after briefing the U.N.
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  • All of them are driven by different things, but I break it down into five major crises happening, any one of them on their own would actually be considered large. The five combined are truly unprecedented.
  • Your second is climate. Wheat growing regions of the world are facing the worst drought they’ve ever faced combined for the last 20 years. And so climate shocks just keep getting in the way of production and productivity. Think of those two things as sort of inputs.
  • If the war ends, that is better than where we’re sitting today. But there’s also a lot of infrastructure that’s been destroyed during the war. So you have to rebuild that and it’s not like you go back to the volumes you are at right away.
  • The fourth is record low inventories of grains in general. If you look at government agency estimates, we have about 33% of annual consumption needs sitting in inventory around the world. We just need to move it around. Our data tells us that that number is closer to 20%, which is only 10 weeks of global inventory left. And that’s a really big deal.
  • Climate disruption leads to a lack of predictability and stability of our food supplies. It just throws my mind off when last year we were writing about how North Dakota was suffering from a record drought and so its corn and soybean yields were going to drop and they did— by like, 24%. This week we’re writing about how it’s too wet there and farmers can’t plant. That’s climate change, this lack of predictability, this lack of stability itself that makes our food systems very, very fragile.
  • So, we are a private company, but we work with financial institutions, we work with very big and very small companies. We also work with governments to help them think about food security. I started Gro to avoid something like this. I wish people would have paid attention to us when we were ringing alarm bells in 2017. Because it’s always about preventative medicine versus ending up in the ER.
  • Re-examining what trading in agriculture looks like is a very big part of it. There’s no version of a country that actually has any and all natural resources it needs in one place. You can’t grow everything you need in a country. You actually need the world to function in a particular way, but the world became more isolationist in the last five years—not more connected—as politics and policy came into play. And so that itself has damaged diversification of trading partnerships.
  • And if you looked at domestic prices in that country, and you look at it in all the different cities, prices weren’t going up, they were going down, which is not a signal for when you’re short of anything. So we put that together and the ban was removed.
  • You’ll see it manifests itself in many, many different ways. I keep seeing headlines of Netflix losing subscribers. Netflix is losing subscribers because the average price of a grocery basket in America is two times the price it was in April 2020. Something’s gonna give—you’re going to buy fewer shoes—and that’s why I said it will manifest itself in completely unrelated industries as well.
  • Nobody. There are countries who are net exporters who are obviously making more money. American farmers are certainly making more money as a result of it. Is America as a country benefiting? Absolutely not, because the economic shocks are global. We live in a very globally intertwined financial system, period.
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