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Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Nimrod Novik - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...n-interviews-nimrod-novik.html israel klein interview transcript strategy
shared by Javier E on 27 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • for years now, a group of hundreds of former senior defense and diplomatic officials in Israel have been saying this is a catastrophe — that it is a catastrophe for Israeli security, a catastrophe for Israeli democracy, a catastrophe for Israelis’ international standing, and a catastrophe for Israel’s soul. Their warnings seem quite prescient now.
  • they’ve argued there was another way. There was a huge amount Israel could do on its own and should have been doing, that if Israel is not going to tip into a kind of single state that it did not want and could not ultimately defend, that the conditions had to be created now for something else to emerge in the future.
  • One of the people working on that project was Nimrod Novik. He’s my guest today. Novik was a top aide to Shimon Peres when Peres was prime minister and vice premier. In that role, Novik was involved in all manner of negotiations with the Palestinians, with the Arab world, with the international community. He’s on the executive committee of Commanders for Israel’s Security, which is a group I mentioned a minute ago. And he’s an Israel fellow at the Israel Policy Forum.
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  • NIMROD NOVIK: The group that worked on it, called Commanders for Israel’s Security, it’s over 500 Israeli retired generals, as well as their equivalents from the Mossad, Shin Bet Security, National Security Council, the entire Israeli security establishment. And we formed a team. We felt that Israeli policy was far too reactive and far too conservative for the good of the country, national security, short and long-term.
  • We had not anticipated the trauma of Oct. 7, but we certainly anticipated things getting from bad to worse, unless Israel changes course.
  • we came up with a plan that suggested even though a two-state solution, as you said, is not on this side of the horizon, but given that eventually, it’s the only solution that we believe serves Israel’s security and well-being long-term, as a strong Jewish democracy, we mapped out what can and should be done in the coming two, three years to reverse the slide towards the disaster of a one-state solution.
  • NIMROD NOVIK: There were primarily two governing concepts, if you will, of the Israeli policy. Again, calling it policy is giving it more credit than deserved. Israeli government have been reluctant to determine the end game of our relationship with the Palestinians. Where do we want to see ourselves and them two years, five years, 50 years from now? No decision has been made since the Oslo era.
  • As a result, what we’ve seen was a policy based on insisting on separating the Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas from the West Bank, ruled sort of by the Palestinian Authority. Separation was one principle
  • And the other one was dubbed status quo, even though it was an illusion, because nothing was static about it. As a matter of fact, creeping annexation has been accelerating under various governments.
  • The more territory was taken by settlements, the more extreme settlers were conducting violent raids into Palestinian civil populations. The more the Palestinian Authority, internally defective, becoming more and more authoritarian, more and more detached from its own constituents, less responsive, less capable of governance, losing control over large swaths of West Bank territory, forcing the I.D.F. to enter more and more
  • It was a slide into a state where the Palestinian Authority would cease to function as the promise of the nucleus of a Palestinian state.
  • If we look at it today, it’s already perhaps the municipal government of the city of Ramallah, rather than of the West Bank, and weakening the Palestinian Authority by choking it financially. By not allowing it to demonstrate to its people that it is the vehicle that will bring them one day to their aspiration of statehood, on the one hand, and making sure that Hamas controls Gaza, the two tracks spelled disaster.
  • So I must confess, we had not anticipated that the disaster will look the way it did on Oct. 7, but we certainly realized that the policy in Gaza of rounds of violence every year, every two years, every 18 months, and buying off relative tranquility by funding Hamas through the auspices of Qatar, allowing it to arm and rearm, the inherent contradictions in the policy were quite apparent
  • There’s a right-wing one-state solution. I think when you mentioned the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, I think if you read things he has written in the past, he is looking for a one-state solution. He wants to crush Palestinian dreams of statehood and repress Palestinians sufficiently that they stop believing they can ever have anything better and eventually content themselves to Israeli rule and live quietly within that in order to gain better lives.
  • NIMROD NOVIK: I’ll put it bluntly. I believe that a two-state solution is inevitable, not because we wish it and not because it’s nice, not because Palestinians deserve self-determination — which they do, but that’s not a historic imperative. I believe that the two-state solution is inevitable because these two people are not going to live happily ever after under one roof.
  • For that to happen, for the two people to stay in one state, one of two things have to happen. Either Israelis will agree to grant Palestinian equal rights in that one state and therefore become a minority, or at least, a slim majority in our own country, and that’s never going to happen. Israelis are not going to agree to be less than the overwhelming majority in our own country.
  • Or Palestinians will agree forever to forgo equal rights, which I suspect is as unreasonable expectation as the other. So we will separate.
  • NIMROD NOVIK: Civil separation with overall security control — continued security control until a two-state agreement ushers in alternative security arrangements, is a concept that basically suggests reversing the creeping annexation, which is no longer creeping. It’s now galloping.
  • So the idea is to start reversing the slide towards one-state reality in the opposite direction, of reducing the friction between the two populations, increasing the capacity of the P.A. to perform, while maintaining the overall security controlled by Israel until a deal is struck.
  • You often hear when you talk to people in Israel about different paths that could be taken. Well, we don’t have anybody to negotiate with. The Palestinian Authority doesn’t have credibility. Hamas wants our destruction
  • And a core premise of the report is that there are things Israel can do unilaterally, that it doesn’t need a partner to do things that will make the situation better from its perspective and create conditions maybe for deals in the future. So tell me what is in Israel’s power here. What would you actually recommend to do tangibly?
  • NIMROD NOVIK: It’s not a genetic deformation of the Palestinians that they cannot govern themselves. This is nonsense. We had a period after the second intifada, the years 2007, 2008, where the Palestinian Authority, there was a prime minister by the name of Salam Fayyad. First, he was finance minister, later on prime minister, who revitalized the Palestinian Authority in a dramatic way. The authority was on the rise. People were proud in it, its own population. They could have won elections at that point.
  • And then Netanyahu was elected in 2009. Now, obviously, we are the strongest party. We hold most of the cards by far. And when we decide that we are going to choke the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian Authority will choke
  • Now the second trend that happened was that Mahmoud Abbas, President Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, the early Abu Mazen was a very different person than the late one with whom we are dealing today. He became increasingly nondemocratic, authoritarian, autocratic, paranoid, removing from his vicinity and from position of power all the best and brightest that were working during that era
  • . Things went from bad to worse, Israel doing its share in weakening the P.A. and the P.A. leadership became more claustrophobic. All these can change.
  • At the moment, the West Bank is a Swiss cheese. It’s 169 islands of Palestinian-controlled areas surrounded each by Israeli-controlled territory. So we wanted to reduce that by half so that contiguity will have a security, law and order, and economic well-being effect.
  • We suggested a host of economic measures that enable the Palestinian Authority to deliver for the people, which is the opposite of what’s happening now, when our minister of finance is choking the Palestinian Authority by withholding funds that are theirs by the agreement Israel collects taxes for the Palestinian Authority, VAT and others. And we are supposed to automatically transfer them to the Palestinian Authority. It’s the main chunk of their budget.
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Recent heat spike unlike anything in 11,000 years - Yahoo! Weather - 0 views

weather.yahoo.com/ng-11-000-years-191131579.html global warming climate history science
shared by Javier E on 08 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • it took 4,000 years for the world to warm about 1.25 degrees from the end of the ice age to about 7,000 years ago. The same fossil-based data suggest a similar level of warming occurring in just one generation: from the 1920s to the 1940s.
  • scientists may have to go back 125,000 years to find warmer temperatures potentially rivaling today's.
  • the climate had been gently warming out of the ice age with a slow cooling that started about 6,000 years ago. Then the cooling reversed with a vengeance. The study shows the recent heat spike "has no precedent as far back as we can go with any confidence, 11,000 years arguably,"
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  • Before this study, continuous temperature record reconstruction only went back about 2,000 years. The temperature trend produces a line shaped like a "hockey stick" with a sudden spike after what had been a fairly steady line. That data came from tree rings, ice cores and lake sediments.
  • the general downward trend of temperatures that reversed 100 years ago seemed to indicate the Earth was heading either toward another ice age or little ice age from about 1550 to 1850. Or it was continuing to cool naturally until greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels changed everything.
  • "We have, through human emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, indefinitely delayed the onset of the next ice age and are now heading into an unknown future where humans control the thermostat of the planet,
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The Recount Road to Nowhere - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...another-call-for-a-recount trump politics US recount
shared by rachelramirez on 30 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • The Recount Road to Nowhere
  • This is a critical period in which the shape of Trump’s Administration will be formed, one that presents all sorts of tasks and challenges for his opponents.
  • Trump has three hundred and six, and Clinton has two hundred and thirty-two. This includes sixteen for Trump from Michigan, where his victory, by ten thousand votes, was certified this afternoon.
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  • A recount would have to reverse the results in all three states to get Clinton to two hundred and seventy. And, as fivethirtyeight.com noted, this has never happened in cases where the margins are as large as those in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania; even Michigan would be at the edge of past experience.
  • Stein’s Wisconsin application lists a number of reasons for a recount, most of which are paraphrases of a single thought: the Russians might, just might, have fixed the election
  • The only example of observable irregularities that Stein cites is an uptick in absentee voting, something that may have many causes.
  • There have also been reports pointing to a weaker performance for Clinton in counties with paperless balloting; however, as both fivethirtyeight.com and the Upshot have pointed out, any difference disappears when one controls for demographics.
  • It has been widely noted that Clinton did not visit Wisconsin in the general election. The results may have been “surprising,” but they are not mysterious.
  • Nate Silver gave Trump close to a one-in-three chance of winning. And, as the Obama Administration confirmed this weekend, there is no sign of interference in the balloting.
  • written by its attorney Marc Elias, which said that the campaign took concerns about Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania “very seriously,” especially given that “this election cycle was unique in the degree of foreign interference witnessed throughout the campaign.”
  • “lawyers and data scientists and analysts combing over the results to spot anomalies that would suggest a hacked result”; of meetings with data scientists; of researching recount and audit rules; of an attempt “to systematically catalogue and investigate every theory that has been presented to us.”
  • On Sunday morning, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, responded to the recount calls by pointing to how outraged the Clinton campaign was when Trump said, during the debates, that he couldn’t say whether he’d accept the results.
  • When it comes to combating Trump, one must take particular care not to join him in the land of conspiracies, however intellectually engaging or emotionally satisfying that may be. One has to start, instead, by holding fast to the truth.
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Trump reverses abortion-related U.S. policy, bans funding to international health group... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...to-international-health-groups
shared by izzerios on 24 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • a rule is back in effect to block U.S. international family-planning assistance to foreign organizations that use funds from other sources to perform or discuss abortions.
  • einstating a rule first instituted by President Reagan
  • Stop providing abortions, or any information about abortions, or lose valuable dollars from the United States, the biggest global funder of family-planning services.
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  • denunciations from family-planning groups and their Democratic allies and praise from pro-life officials and Republicans.
  • officially known as the “Mexico City policy” and referred to as “the global gag rule” by its critics
  • repealed and reinstated every time a different political party has assumed power in the White House.
  • Even when the rule has not been in effect, however, existing federal law has barred the use of U.S. funds to pay for abortions anywhere in the world.
  • sparked a flurry of angry responses from Democratic lawmakers and women’s health organizations.
  • “We won’t go back to coat hanger medicine.”
  • Pelosi said in a statement that Trump’s order “returns us to disgraceful era that dishonored the American values of free speech and inflicted untold suffering on millions of women around the world.”
  • the group said, it received $30 million in aid from the United States Agency for International Development
  • that implementation of the Mexico City policy was linked to increases in abortion rates in sub-Saharan African countries
  • couldn’t draw “definitive conclusions about the underlying cause of this increase.”
  • “This is a vital step in the journey to make America great again, recognizing and affirming the universal ideal that all human beings have inherent worth and dignity, regardless of their age or nationality,”said Tony Perkins
  • “Funding foreign groups that promote or participate in abortion violates the principle that there should be a ‘wall of separation’ between taxpayer money and abortion,”
  • Trump has started to “make good on his promises to the millions of pro-life Americans that helped him ascend to this office.”
  • “marked an expansion of existing legislative restrictions that already prohibited U.S. funding for abortion internationally,”
  • the foundation said, NGOs could use non-U.S. funds to engage in abortion-related activities as long as they kept separate accounts for any U.S. money received.
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Role reversal: GOP unites behind Trump, Democrats in disarray - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html role gop behind trump democrats cnn politics
shared by horowitzza on 27 May 16 - No Cached
  • Just when it seemed that the election could not get any crazier, it has. A month ago, it seemed that the Democrats were sitting pretty. Republicans were in disarray.
  • After a series of strong wins, including in New York and Pennsylvania, it looked like Hillary Clinton would finally bring her competition with Bernie Sanders to an end.
  • Sanders' attacks have intensified in recent weeks. He has raised the volume of his comments about Clinton and charged that the entire nomination process has been problematic and unfair.
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  • On the GOP side, Donald Trump has clinched the nomination by reaching the required number of 1,237 convention delegates. Republicans are uniting around him
  • The Never Trump Movement has vanished almost as quickly as it started.
  • Most ominously for Democrats, a number of recent polls are showing the gap between Clinton and Trump has been shrinking, with Trump actually taking the lead in some of them.
  • Trump's eclectic and unorthodox agenda has caused considerable consternation among many Republicans.
  • To have a bombastic television star at the head of the party ticket can make the GOP look silly, not like the party of governance.
  • If the Republicans see a winner, many are willing to line up behind whoever can bring them the White House even if they may find Trump's personality distasteful.
  • horowitzza on 27 May 16
     
    The tides have turned!
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A Trans-Atlantic Role Reversal - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ns-atlantic-role-reversal.html history foreign policy European US war isolationism
shared by Javier E on 03 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • if nationalism is making Europeans more militaristic, in America it’s inclining us to lay down the burdens of empire, to retreat into a self-sufficient Arcadia all our own.
  • That’s a subtext of Trump’s rhetoric. Making America great again involves crushing ISIS, yes, but otherwise it seems to involve washing our hands of military commitments — ceding living space to Putin, letting Japan and South Korea go nuclear, calling NATO obsolete. And it’s simply the text of Bernie Sanders’ campaign. He’s running explicitly as the candidate of Venus (or Scandinavia, if you prefer), promising socialism at home and an end to military adventures abroad.
  • ut over the longer run, in a more fractured country and a more chaotic world, the desire for splendid isolation may only increase. There’s no mass constituency for liberal hawkishness in the Democratic Party anymore. The ease with which Trump dispatched Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio suggests that neoconservatism, too, is vulnerable to a “come home, America” message
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  • What’s interesting, and somewhat in tension with Kagan’s original argument, is that all of this is happening without a major change in the relative power of the United States and Europe. We’re still the only hyperpower; they’re still militarily wea
  • This unstable combination suggests that the trans-Atlantic relationship may be headed for a strange inflection point, a kind of through-the-looking-glass version of the Iraq debate.
  • The time is the late 2020s, let’s say, and the French and Germans and Poles demand that the United States lend our still-unparalleled military strength to a conflict that seems essential to European security — toppling a nascent caliphate in North Africa, or recovering W.M.D. from a collapsing post-Putin Russia
  • And a Socialist administration in Washington, backed by more than a few Trumpian Nationalists in Congress, looks across the ocean at Europe’s wars and whispers, “not this time.”
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Under U.S. Pressure, U.N. Withdraws Iran's Invitation to Syria Talks - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...syria.html
shared by B Mannke on 21 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • the United Nations on Monday withdrew an invitation to Iran to attend the much-anticipated Syria peace conference, reversing a decision announced a day earlier.
  • Under intense American pressure, the United Nations on Monday withdrew an invitation to Iran to attend the much-anticipated Syria peace conference, reversing a decision announced a day earlier.
  • The United States had said it was surprised by the invitation because Iran had not agreed to conditions for the talks, to be held on Wednesday in Montreux, Switzerland.
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  • “Given that it has chosen to remain outside that basic understanding, he has decided that the one-day Montreux gathering will proceed without Iran’s participation,” Mr. Ban’s spokesman said in the statement.
  • must publicly endorse the mandate of the conference, which is outlined in a communiqué from a 2012 meeting in Geneva. That mandate says that the conference’s purpose is to negotiate the establishment of a transitional administration that would govern Syria by the “mutual consent” of Mr. Assad’s government and the Syrian opposition.
  • all parties can now return to focus on the task at hand, which is bringing an end to the suffering of the Syrian people and beginning a process toward a long overdue political transition.”
  • “The Syrian coalition announces that they will withdraw their attendance in Geneva II unless Ban Ki-moon retracts Iran’s invitation,” a Twitter message said, quoting Louay Safi, a coalition spokesman.
  • The United States and several of its allies have opposed Iran’s presence at the conference in part because Iran has been a strong supporter of the Assad government, sending it arms and paramilitary fighters from its Quds force.
  • “the war against terrorism” in his country. He described the idea of sharing power as “totally unrealistic,” and said there was a “significant” likelihood that he would seek a new term as president in June.
  • “We have always rejected any precondition for attending the Geneva II meeting on Syria.”
  • “Negotiations involve sitting at the table not just with those who you like, but with those whose participation the solution depends on,”
  • that if any breakthroughs are achieved, they will take place in Geneva,
  • the negotiations were not expected to yield major results, except perhaps to open up certain parts of Syria to the delivery of humanitarian aid
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BBC News - Nasa reverses conference's ban on Chinese scientists - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-asia-24618824 nasa conference ban chinese us
shared by grayton downing on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The US space agency has said it will allow Chinese scientists to attend an astronomy conference in California next month, reversing an earlier ban.
  • Nasa put the earlier ban down to a misinterpretation of its policy on foreign nationals.
  • agency faced criticism from Chinese officials and US scientists who claimed Chinese students and researchers in their labs were being subjected to discrimination.
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  • Earlier this month the US government partially shut down operations for 16 days, putting hundreds of thousands of federal employees on leave.
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​Duke reverses plan to allow Islamic call to prayer from campus chapel - CBS ... - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...l-to-prayer-from-campus-chapel religion
shared by qkirkpatrick on 16 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • A "credible and serious security threat" was a primary reason that Duke University officials on Thursday abandoned plans to allow Islamic students to start broadcasting a weekly call to prayer from the Duke Chapel tower, a university spokesman said.
  • Members of the Duke Muslim Students Association were supposed to start the three-minute weekly call or chant, known as adhan or azan, on Friday afternoon.
  • "Duke remains committed to fostering an inclusive, tolerant and welcoming campus for all of its students,"
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  • More than 700 of Duke's 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students identify themselves as Muslims.
  • qkirkpatrick on 16 Jan 15
     
    Duke University changes plans to have call to prayer from campus chapel tower
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In A Major Reversal, Rand Paul Pushes For Higher Defense Spending - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...-paul-budget-amendment-defense hawk foreign policy defense budget GOP
shared by Javier E on 27 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Republican presidential hopeful Rand Paul filed an amendment to the Senate budget on Wednesday calling for a significant boost to defense spending, a reversal for the libertarian senator who has previously called for across-the-board cuts to domestic and military spending.
  • The amendment, filed without public notice and first reported by Time, is the latest of several moves by the Kentucky senator seemingly aimed at placating the GOP's ascendant hawkish wing ahead of a reported campaign announcement next month.
  • One of Paul's signature issues has been a non-interventionist foreign policy and less U.S. military involvement around the world, a philosophy that was gaining traction among some Republicans before the emergence of the Islamic State threat. His budgets in prior years have called for reducing spending on defense.
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Opinion | Conservatism After Christianity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vatism-after-christianity.html conservatism christianity trump white identity
shared by Javier E on 16 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • The trend was consistent: The more often a Trump voter attended church, the less white-identitarian they appeared, the more they expressed favorable views of racial minorities, and the less they agreed with populist arguments on trade and immigration.
  • The differences were particularly striking on race. For instance, a quarter of Trump voters who never attend church describe being white as “very important” to their identity; for the most frequent churchgoers voters, it was 9 percent. Among non-churchgoing Trump voters, only 48 percent had warm feelings toward black people, compared to 71 percent of weekly churchgoers; the same sort of pattern held for views of Hispanics, Asians and Jews.
  • their views of Muslims, interestingly, seemed to have been influenced by Trump’s own rhetoric, becoming more hostile between 2016 and 2017.
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  • in general, churchgoing Republicans look more like the party many elite conservatives wanted to believe existed before Trump came along — more racially-tolerant, more accepting of multiculturalism and globalization, and also more consistently libertarian on economics.
  • Secularized Trump voters look more like the party as Trump has tried to remake it, blending an inchoate economic populism with strong racial resentments.
  • The irreligious are less likely to have college degrees, less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced; they’re also less civically engaged, less satisfied with their neighborhoods and communities, and less trusting and optimistic in general.
  • Such a bet might be understandable as an act of desperation. But it’s hard to see how it can reverse de-Christianization, and easy to see how it might accelerate it
  • only about a third of Trump’s 2016 voters are in church on a typical Sunday, and almost half attend seldom or not at all.
  • Despite their resistance to that toxicity, the churchgoers in this survey did vote for him, making a pragmatic bet that his policies on abortion and religious liberty were worth living with his Caligulan personal life and racial demagoguery. To defend that bet, some historically-inclined believers have cited past cases where Christians accepted bargains with a not-particularly moral leaders — including the way the early church accepted the patronage of Roman emperors, from Constantine onward, whose personal piety was limited at best.
  • But the Constantinian bet involved a rising religion allying with a worldly power to accelerate its growth and gains. The bet under Trump involves the reverse sort of situation: A Christian community trying to make the best of its decline, and allying with a leader whose core appeal depends upon and possibly furthers the de-Christianization of conservatism.
  • This seems to support the argument, advanced by Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner among others, that support for populism correlates with a kind of communal breakdown, in which secularization is one variable among many leaving people feeling isolated and angry, and drawing them to the ersatz solidarity of white identity politics.
  • e his ascent was intimately connected to the secularization of conservatism, and his style gives us a taste of what to expect from a post-religious right.
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The Tiny Swiss Company That Thinks It Can Help Stop Climate Change - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-business-climate-change.html climate change tech
shared by Javier E on 13 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • The scientist and historian Vaclav Smil called Haber-Bosch “the most important technical invention of the 20th century.” Bosch had effectively removed the historical bounds on crop yields, so much so that he was widely credited with making “bread from air.” By some estimates, Bosch’s work made possible the lives of more than two billion human beings over the last 100 years.
  • They depend on electric fans to pull air into the ducts and over a special material, known as a sorbent, laced with granules that chemically bind with CO₂; periodic blasts of heat then release the captured gas from the sorbent, with customized software managing the whole catch-and-release cycle.
  • “The first thing they said was: ‘This will never work technically.’ And finally in 2017 we convinced them it works technically, since we built the big plant in Hinwil. But once we convinced them that it works technically, they would say, ‘Well, it will never work economically.’ ”For the moment, skeptics of Climeworks’s business plan are correct: The company is not turning a profit.
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  • it faces the same daunting task that confronted Carl Bosch a century ago: How much can it bring costs down? And how fast can it scale up
  • They believe that over the next seven years they can bring expenses down to a level that would enable them to sell CO₂ into more lucrative markets. Air-captured CO₂ can be combined with hydrogen and then fashioned into any kind of fossil-fuel substitute you want. Instead of making bread from air, you can make fuels from air.
  • What Gebald and Wurzbacher really want to do is to pull vast amounts of CO₂ out of the atmosphere and bury it, forever, deep underground, and sell that service as an offset
  • companies like Climeworks face a quandary: How do you sell something that never existed before, something that may never be cheap, into a market that is not yet real?
  • It’s arguably the case, in fact, that when it comes to reducing our carbon emissions, direct air capture will be seen as an option that’s too expensive and too modest in impact. “The only way that direct air capture becomes meaningful is if we do all the other things we need to do promptly,” Hal Harvey, a California energy analyst who studies climate-friendly technologies and policies, told me
  • In short, the best way to start making progress toward a decarbonized world is not to rev up millions of air capture machines right now. It’s to stop putting CO₂ in the atmosphere in the first place.
  • If the nations of the world were to continue on the current track, it would be impossible to meet the objectives of the 2016 Paris Agreement, which set a goal limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius or, ideally, 1.5 degrees. And it would usher in a world of misery and economic hardship. Already, temperatures in some regions have climbed more than 1 degree Celsius, as a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted last October. These temperature increases have led to an increase in droughts, heat waves, floods and biodiversity losses and make the chaos of 2 or 3 degrees’ additional warming seem inconceivable
  • A further problem is that maintaining today’s emissions path for too long runs the risk of doing irreparable damage to the earth’s ecosystems — causing harm that no amount of technological innovation can make right. “There is no reverse gear for natural systems,” Harvey says. “If they go, they go. If we defrost the tundra, it’s game over.” The same might be said for the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, or our coral reefs. Such resources have an asymmetry in their natural architectures: They can take thousands or millions of years to form, but could reach conditions of catastrophic decline in just a few decades.
  • To have a shot at maintaining a climate suitable for humans, the world’s nations most likely have to reduce CO₂ emissions drastically from the current level — to perhaps 15 billion or 20 billion metric tons per year by 2030; then, through some kind of unprecedented political and industrial effort, we need to bring carbon emissions to zero by around 2050
  • To preserve a livable environment we may also need to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere. As Wurzbacher put it, “if you take all these numbers from the I.P.C.C., you end up with something like eight to 10 billion tons — gigatons — of CO₂ that need to be removed from the air every year, if we are serious about 1.5 or 2 degrees.
  • Through photosynthesis, our forests take extraordinary amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and if we were to magnify efforts to reforest clear-cut areas — or plant new groves, a process known as afforestation — we could absorb billions more metric tons of carbon in future years.
  • we could grow crops specifically to absorb CO₂ and then burn them for power generation, with the intention of capturing the power-plant emissions and pumping them underground, a process known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS
  • Ever since the Industrial Revolution, human societies have produced an excess of CO₂, by taking carbon stores from deep inside the earth — in the form of coal, oil and gas — and from stores aboveground (mostly wood), then putting it into the atmosphere by burning it. It has become imperative to reverse the process — that is, take CO₂ out of the air and either restore it deep inside the earth or contain it within new surface ecosystems.
  • “It’s not about saying, ‘I want to plant a tree.’ It’s about saying, ‘We want to plant a billion trees.’
  • “We have to come to grips with the fact that we waited too long and that we took some options off the table,” Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton scientist who studies climate and policy, told me. As a result, NETs no longer seem to be just interesting ideas; they look like necessities. And as it happens, the Climeworks machines on the rooftop do the work each year of about 36,000 trees.
  • air capture could likewise help counter the impact of several vital industries. “There are process emissions that come from producing iron and steel, cement and glass,” she says, “and any time you make these materials, there’s a chemical reaction that emits CO₂.” Direct air capture could even lessen the impacts of the Haber-Bosch processes for making fertilizer; by some estimates, that industry now accounts for 3 percent of all CO₂ emissions.
  • Wind and solar are now the cheapest forms of energy in the right locations,” Pacala says. “The return on those investments, if you calculated it, would blow the doors off anything in your portfolio. It’s like investing in early Apple. So it’s a spectacular story of success. And direct air capture is precisely the same kind of problem, in which the only barrier is that it’s too costly.”
  • what all the founders have in common is a belief that the cost of capturing a ton of carbon will soon drop sharply.
  • M.I.T.’s Howard Herzog, for instance, an engineer who has spent years looking at the potential for these machines, told me that he thinks the costs will remain between $600 and $1,000 per metric ton
  • He points out that because direct-air-capture machines have to move tremendous amounts of air through a filter or solution to glean a ton of CO₂ — the gas, for all its global impact, makes up only about 0.04 percent of our atmosphere — the process necessitates large expenditures for energy and big equipment. What he has likewise observed, in analyzing similar industries that separate gases, suggests that translating spreadsheet projections for capturing CO₂ into real-world applications will reveal hidden costs. “I think there has been a lot of hype about this, and it’s not going to revolutionize anything,
  • Climeworks’s current goal is to remove 1 percent of the world’s annual CO₂ emissions by the mid 2020s.
  • “Basically, we have a road map — $600, down to $400, down to $300 and $200 a ton,” Wurzbacher said. “This is over the next five years. Down to $200 we know quite well what we’re doing.” And beyond $200, Wurzbacher suggested, things get murkier.
  • To actually capture 1 percent of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025 would, by Gebald’s calculations, require that Climeworks build 250,000 carbon-capture plants like the ones on the roof at Hinwil. That adds up to about 4.5 million carbon collectors
  • The Climeworks founders therefore try to think of their product as the automotive industry might — a piece of mass-produced technology and metal, not the carbon they hope to sequester.
  • “Every CO₂ collector has about the same weight and dimensions of a car — roughly two tons, and roughly 2 meters by 2 meters by 2 meters,” Gebald said. “And all the methods used to produce the CO₂ collectors could be well automated. So we have the automotive industry as a model for how to produce things in large quantities for low cost.
  • n 1954, the economist Paul Samuelson put forward a theory that made a distinction between “private-consumption goods” — bread, cars, houses and the like — and commodities that existed apart from the usual laws of supply and demand.
  • the other type of commodity Samuelson was describing is something now known as a “public good,” which benefits everyone but is not bought, sold or consumed the same way
  • direct air capture’s success would be limited to the size of the market for private goods — soda fizz, greenhouse gas — unless governments decided to intervene and help fund the equivalent of several million (or more) lighthouses.
  • An intervention could take a variety of forms. It could be large grants for research to find better sorbent materials, for instance, which would be similar to government investments that long ago helped nurture the solar- and wind-power industries. But help could also come by expanding regulations that already exist.
  • The Climeworks founders told me they don’t believe their company will succeed on what they call “climate impact” scales unless the world puts significant prices on emissions, in the form of a carbon tax or carbon fee.
  • “Our goal is to make it possible to capture CO₂ from the air for below $100 per ton,” Wurzbacher says. “No one owns a crystal ball, but we think — and we’re quite confident — that by something like 2030 we’ll have a global average price on carbon in the range of $100 to $150 a ton.” There is optimism in this thinking
  • A company that sells a product or uses a process that creates high emissions — an airline, for instance, or a steel maker — could be required to pay carbon-removal companies $100 per metric ton or more to offset their CO₂ output. Or a government might use carbon-tax proceeds to directly pay businesses to collect and bury CO₂.
  • “It doesn’t cost too much to pump CO₂ underground,” Stanford’s Sally Benson says. Companies already sequester about 34 million metric tons of CO₂ in the ground every year, at a number of sites around the world, usually to enhance the oil-drilling process. “The costs range from $2 to $15 per ton. So the bigger cost in all of this is the cost of carbon capture.”
  • The weekend before, Gutknecht told me, he received 900 unsolicited inquiries by email. Many were from potential customers who wanted to know how soon Climeworks could bury their CO₂ emissions, or how much a machine might cost them.
  • A Climeworks app could be installed on my smartphone, he explained. It could then be activated by my handset’s location services. “You fly over here to Europe,” he explained, “and the app tells you that you have just burned 1.7 tons of CO₂. Do you want to remove that? Well, Climeworks can remove it for you. Click here. We’ll charge your credit card.
  • The vast and constant market demand for fuel is why Carbon Engineering has staked its future on synthetics. The world currently burns about 100 million barrels of oil a day.
  • “So let’s say you’d have to supply something like 50 million barrels a day in 2050 of fuels,” he said. “That’s still a monster market.”
  • Carbon Engineering’s chief executive, added that direct-air-capture synthetics have an advantage over traditional fossil fuels: They won’t have to spend a dime on exploration
  • our plants, you can build it right in the middle of California, wherever you have air and water.” He told me that the company’s first large-scale facility should be up and running by 2022, and will turn out at least 500 barrels a day of fuel feedstock — the raw material sent to refineries.
  • Climeworks recently joined a consortium of European countries to produce synthetic methane that will be used by a local trucking fleet. With different tweaks and refinements, the process could be adapted for diesel, gasoline, jet fuel — or it could be piped directly to local neighborhoods as fuel for home furnaces.
  • the new fuels are not necessarily cheaper. Carbon Engineering aspires to deliver its product at an ultimate retail price of about $1 per liter, or $3.75 per gallon. What would make the product competitive are regulations in California that now require fuel sellers to produce fuels of lower “carbon intensity.” To date this has meant blending gas and diesel with biofuels like ethanol, but it could soon mean carbon-capture synthetics too.
  • Since they’re made from airborne CO₂ and hydrogen and could be manufactured just about anywhere, they could rearrange the geopolitical order — tempering the power of a handful of countries that now control natural-gas and oil markets.
  • From an environmental standpoint, air-capture fuels are not a utopian solution. Such fuels are carbon neutral, not carbon negative. They can’t take CO₂ from our industrial past and put it back into the earth
  • Even so, these fuels could present an enormous improvement. Transportation — currently the most significant source of emissions by sector in the United States — could cease to be a net emitter of CO₂
  • “If you can do one carbon-capture facility, where Carbon Engineering or Climeworks can build a big plant, great. You need to do that 5,000 times. And to capture a million tons of CO₂ with direct air capture, you need a small power plant just to run that facility. So if you’re going to build one direct-air-capture facility every day for the next 30 years to get to some of these scenarios, then in addition, we have to build a new mini power plant every day as well.
  • It’s also the case that you have to address two extraordinary problems at the same time, Peters added. “To reach 1.5 degrees, we need to halve emissions every decade,” he said. That would mean persuading entire nations, like China and the United States, to switch from burning coal to using renewables at precisely the same time that we make immense investments in negative-emission technologies.
  • this would need to be done even as governments choose among competing priorities:
  • “The idea of bringing direct air capture up to 10 billion tons by the middle or later part of the century is such a herculean task it would require an industrial scale-up the likes of which the world has never seen,”
  • Pacala wasn’t pessimistic about making a start. He seemed to think it was necessary for the federal government to begin with significant research and investments in the technology — to see how far and fast it could move forward, so that it’s ready as soon as possible
  • Gebald and Wurzbacher seemed to regard the climate challenge in mathematical terms. How many gigatons needed to be removed? How much would it cost per ton? How many Climeworks machines were required? Even if the figures were enormous, even if they appeared impossible, to see the future their way was to redefine the problem, to move away from the narrative of loss, to forget the multiplying stories of dying reefs and threatened coastlines — and to begin to imagine other possibilities.
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Fact check: Democratic presidential debate with Biden vs. Sanders - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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  • Washington (CNN)Welcome to CNN's fact check coverage of the eleventh Democratic presidential debate from Washington, DC, ahead of the nation's third super Tuesday, where primaries will be held in Arizona, Florida, Illinois and Ohio on March 17.
  • As Vice President, Biden campaigned with New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2015 to increase the state minimum wage to $15 an hour.
  • Asked whether he would order a national lockdown to combat the coronavirus pandemic, Biden took a swipe at Sanders' "Medicare for All" proposal. He pointed to Italy, saying that its single-payer health care system hasn't worked to stem the outbreak there.
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  • Facts First: This is partly true. As the experience of Italy and other countries shows, having universal coverage and a government-run health system is not enough on its own to stem the spread of coronavirus. But the US is at a disadvantage in fighting the coronavirus because tens of millions of Americans are uninsured or face high out-of-pocket costs before their insurance kicks in -- which may make people hesitant to seek testing or treatment.
  • "Addressing coronavirus with tens of millions of people without health insurance or with inadequate insurance will be a uniquely American challenge among developed countries," tweeted Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at Kaiser. "It will take money to treat people and address uncompensated care absorbed by providers."
  • President Donald Trump has tweeted his support of the package. The Senate is expected to take up the measure when it returns to session this week.
  • Laboratories in Germany developed tests to detect the coronavirus which the WHO adopted and by last week, the WHO sent out tests to 120 countries. Other countries, like the US and China, chose to develop their own tests, according to the Washington Post.
  • On February 12, the Center for Disease Control reported that some of the coronavirus test kits shipped to labs across the country were not working as they should.
  • Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the experts leading the administration's response to the coronavirus told Congress Thursday that the US was "failing" when it came to getting Americans tested.
  • In an exchange about how the government bailed out banks during the 2008 financial crisis, Biden asserted that Sanders voted against a bailout for the auto industry.
  • Facts First: Sanders is right, but this needs context. Sanders voted for a bill that would have bailed out the auto industry -- but it failed to pass the Senate. He voted against a different bailout measure, the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which passed. That program released money to banks -- and a portion of that money eventually went to automakers.
  • Facts First: Biden's claim is misleading by omission. Biden was an advocate of ending the Saddam Hussein regime for more than a year before the war began in 2003. While Biden did begin calling his 2002 vote a "mistake" in 2005, he was a public supporter of the war in 2003 and 2004 -- and he made clear in 2002 and 2003, both before and after the war started, that he had known he was voting to authorize a possible war, not only to try to get inspectors into Iraq. It's also unclear whether Bush ever made Biden any kind of promise related to the use of force.
  • Facts First: The true number of Americans who die because they are uninsured or lack adequate coverage is not known. Some studies suggest the number is in the tens of thousands per year, but other experts have expressed skepticism that the number is as high as Sanders says.
  • Biden, who was a US senator at the time of his vote, responded, "I learned that I can't take the word of a President when in fact they assured me that they would not use force. Remember the context. The context was the United Nations Security Council was going to vote to insist that we allow inspectors into determining whether or not...they were, in fact, producing nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction. They were not."
  • Sanders on Sunday cited two figures about the number of people he claimed die because of the inadequacy of the US health care system.
  • During an exchange about Sanders' views on authoritarian countries, Biden claimed that China's income gains have been "marginal."
  • One way to measure standard of living is through a country's gross domestic product per capita at purchasing power parity. In other words, looking at a country's GDP per person in international dollars, a hypothetical currency used to measure purchasing parity between different countries.
  • Fact First: This Sanders' claim needs a lot of context. Biden did repeatedly support freezes in Social Security spending and at times called for raising the retirement age. In 2011, he said "changes" would have to be made to entitlements, saying they wouldn't be sustainable -- but he didn't specify what changes. Overall, the claim leaves out that Biden was typically talking about any changes to entitlements in the context of a broader legislative package.
  • And comments Biden made during a 1995 speech on the Senate floor show he was willing to make cuts to Medicare, but only as part of a broader deal that did not advocate cuts as big as Republicans want.
  • "If we are serious about saving Social Security, not raising taxes on the middle class, and not cutting back on benefits desperately needed by many senior citizens, we must adjust this artificial ceiling on Social Security taxes and make the Social Security tax more progressive."
  • Biden said upon his June 2019 reversal that he made "no apologies" for his past support of the amendment. He argued that "times have changed," since, he argued, the right to choose "was not under attack as it is now" from Republicans and since "women's rights and women's health are under assault like we haven't seen in the last 50 years."
  • Facts First: While it's unclear which ad Sanders was referring to, at least one super PAC connected to Biden, Unite the Country, ran a large television ad campaign that implicitly criticized Sanders without mentioning him by name..
  • For instance, it includes a clip from a Biden speech, in which Biden says" Democrats want a nominee who's a Democrat" -- an apparent challenge to the party bonafides of Sanders, who serves as an independent in the US Senate and describes himself as a democratic socialist.
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The Most Powerful People in American Politics Are Over 65 - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...biden-trump-seniors.html COVID-19 us politics
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  • President Trump is 73. His leading rival is 77. And many of their strongest supporters — vulnerable to the coronavirus but enormously influential politically — are eligible for Social Security.
  • Mr. Biden’s ability to connect with Ms. Honkala’s age group — through his résumé and more centrist tendencies, his talk of shared values and his perceived general election promise — helped him regain his footing in Nevada, surge to victory in South Carolina and catapult to his perch as the likely Democratic nominee. It was a rapid reversal of fortunes fueled by overwhelming support first from older black voters and, ultimately, from older voters more broadly, a key part of his larger coalition.
  • Now that age group is top of mind for many Americans as the nation confronts the staggering costs of the coronavirus crisis. It’s a vulnerable population in terms of the outbreak — and has become the focus of the public conversation. Health officials are pleading for young people to stay home to protect their parents and grandparents, while in Texas, Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor, suggested that older people might be willing to take risks in order to protect the economy, sparking a national controversy.
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  • Those Democratic grandparents, especially, tend to be more moderate, more swayed by traditional government experience and more keenly focused on the tactics they believe are needed to defeat President Trump, strategists and pollsters said.
  • “Older voters, after African-American voters, have been the single most important constituency for Joe Biden,” said Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster and political strategist who works with the Biden team but spoke in her personal capacity.
  • But politically, the primary results this election season have highlighted the extraordinary, sustained power of older Americans: Exit polls, surveys and interviews with political strategists and demographers show that the concerns and preferences of these voters have played a critical role in defining the trajectory of the Democratic race so far, and are poised to do so in the general election as well.
  • Certainly, Mr. Sanders, the overwhelming favorite with younger voters, is continuing to campaign. And while the Vermont senator has acknowledged that younger voters did not appear to turn out at the rate he had hoped for, polls and exit surveys show that Mr. Biden faces major challenges with that constituency, a liberal slice of the electorate that, his advisers acknowledge, he will need to energize if he is the nominee.
  • Even in the midterm elections in 2018, hailed as a high-water mark for youth voting because the share of 18- to 24-year-olds nearly doubled from the previous midterm election, the gap with older voters remained about the same. About 66 percent of eligible older people turned out, compared with about 36 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.
  • Mr. Biden, who once faced significant competition for older Americans, emerged in recent weeks as the dominant front-runner among those highly committed Democratic voters who have now helped bring him to the cusp of his party’s presidential nomination.Older voters have punched above their political weight for years, with turnout among those 65 and older often double, or more, that of the youngest voters. As Americans age and become more rooted in their communities, political participation tends to rise with their stake in society.
  • “The irony is that the pattern is about to reverse in the general,” Ms. Lake said, pointing to Mr. Trump’s overall strength with older voters, even as she added that “Donald Trump is despised by younger voters.”
  • The virus has thrown politics completely, and unpredictably, up in the air. What will happen in Florida’s retirement communities — some of the most vulnerable in the nation to the virus — if Mr. Trump’s push to reopen the country fast comes to pass? It’s a question with potentially partisan implications.
  • Older people have long leaned Republican. A majority have chosen Republicans in four of the last seven presidential elections, according to Mr. Frey. In recent years they have also become more demographically distinct from the rest of the country: About 78 percent of eligible senior voters are white, compared with just 67 percent of eligible voters in the country as a whole.
  • This presents a challenge for Mr. Biden, should he win the nomination: how to get younger voters — who did not prefer him to begin with — to turn out for him, while persuading their older counterparts, who tend to choose Republicans, to vote for him over Mr. Trump.
  • In recent weeks, Mr. Biden has increased his efforts to appeal to younger and more progressive voters, ramping up outreach and embracing portions of proposals from Mr. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren that take aim at the student debt burden.
  • Older Americans will soon be even more important. Mr. Frey noted that the large “Baby Boom” generation has only just begun entering the older American voting bloc. He has calculated that the number of senior eligible voters will rise to 68 million in 2028 from 47 million in 2016.
  • But first, there is still a primary contest, and the age gap between Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders has been on vivid display all year. The senator favored large rallies that attracted devoted young people, while Mr. Biden’s events, even in his strongest states, tended to be smaller, with crowds that tilted older.
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'A bold agenda': hopes rise for US climate change reversal as Deb Haaland sworn in | Cl... - 0 views

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  • Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary in US history and a member of the Laguna Pueblo, was sworn in to her post last week and has vowed to be a “fierce advocate” for public lands. Wildlife, parks and climate advocacy groups have hailed her confirmation as a major win for public lands and say that under Haaland’s leadership the interior department will renew its focus on fighting the climate emergency.
  • Haaland is charged with managing natural resources and federal lands that comprise one-fifth of the United States and are responsible for a quarter of the country’s annual carbon emissions.
  • As a US representative, Haaland backed the Green New Deal and sponsored a bill that aimed to protect 30% of US lands and oceans by 2030, a commitment Biden later made by executive order.
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  • National parks are warming twice as fast as the rest of the country, said Brengel, the NPCA’s vice-president of government affairs. “We’re seeing the effects, whether it’s invasive species, wildfires, sea level rise or wildlife being pushed out of its usual habitat.”
  • The corps established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s, by way of comparison, put 3 million jobless Americans to work and helped create national park infrastructure.
  • In its first two months, the Biden administration has started to reverse some of Donald Trump’s most controversial decisions, directing the interior department to review the boundaries of the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments – a step toward restoring their protections – and paused the sale of new oil and gas leases on public lands.
  • “I think the encouraging thing is they want to do something and they’re being very inclusive,” said David Willms, the senior director for western wildlife with the National Wildlife Federation.
  • The National Parks Conservation Association hopes to see the department move away from the last administration’s energy dominance agenda, enhance water protections, support more wildlife corridors and expand national park land. And Haaland is the right person for the job, Brengel said.
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Lawmakers Renew Fight To Reverse 'Anti-Choice,' 'Blatantly Racist' Hyde Amendment | Huf... - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...ion_n_605ba083c5b67593e0553922 US policy Politics economics gop
shared by clairemann on 25 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The landmark Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade has protected a person’s right to a safe and legal abortion since 1973. But many people, especially low-income women and women of color, still face heightened barriers to access the medical procedure due to the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal health insurance programs like Medicaid from covering abortions, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother. 
  • The Hyde Amendment — named after former Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde, a vocally anti-abortion Republican — was passed in 1976 and has been renewed every year since. Congress has the opportunity to repeal the Hyde Amendment during the federal appropriations process each spring.
  • Research shows that 1 in 4 low-income women seeking an abortion are forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term when lawmakers restrict abortion coverage under Medicaid. Studies also show that a woman denied an abortion is more likely to fall into poverty than a woman who is able to get one.
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  • President Joe Biden has expressed his support for repealing the Hyde Amendment, giving abortion rights advocates hope that the policy could be reversed under the new administration.
  • “Although they might have the right to an abortion on paper, they certainly cannot exercise it,” Murray said of low-income women affected by the Hyde Amendment. “A right on paper but not in practice doesn’t do you much good. And the consequences can be devastating.”
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GOP group 'Stop Stacey' targets Abrams ahead of expected 2022 run | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...ams-ahead-of-expected-2022-run Politics Georgia targets
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  • GOP group 'Stop Stacey' targets Abrams ahead of expected 2022 run By Julia Manchester - 02/01/21 09:19 AM EST 863 17,083 AddThis Sharing ButtonsShare to FacebookFacebookFacebookShare to TwitterTwitterTwitter Share   Just In... Fauci: CDC will release new guidance for vaccinated Americans 'very soon' Healthcare — 2m 39s ago Veteran PAC slams Tucker Carlson for comments on female service members BriefingRoom BlogRoll — 24m 3s ago US officials debating sending millions of AstraZeneca doses awaiting clearance overseas: report Administration — 48m 11s ago Biden denounces hate, violence against Asian Americans: 'It must stop' News — 1h 29m ago Biden administration to implement testing programs in schools as part of reopening effort field
  • publican strategists aligned with Georgia Gov. Brian KempBrian KempGeorgia Senate votes to repeal no-excuse absentee voting Two Republicans can stop voter suppression Trump fires back at WSJ editorial urging GOP to move on MORE (R) on Monday launched an outside group aimed at stopping a potential 2022 gubernatorial run by Democrat Stacey Abrams.
  • "We will do whatever it takes to expose Stacey Abrams’ radical network, highlight her dangerous agenda, and ultimately defeat her — and her left-wing candidates — at the ballot box," the group's senior strategist, Jeremy Brand, said in a statement. "There is no time to waste: We must stand up, fight back, and Stop Stacey.”
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  • In the two years since Abram's first run, her group Fair Fight has registered tens of thousands of voters in the Peach State and raised $100 million.
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Biden to pledge to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least half by 2030 - The Was... - 0 views

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  • “The Biden-Harris administration will do more than any in history to meet our climate crisis,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a speech Monday. “This is already an all-hands-on-deck effort across our government and across our nation. Our future depends on the choices we make today.”
  • the new pledge will offer the latest glimpse at the profound changes that Biden wants to set in motion, from decarbonizing the country’s energy sector to phasing out gasoline-powered vehicles. Administration officials have made clear that they see the effort not only as a climate pursuit but as a massive investment in a new generation of jobs nationwide.
  • Some nations, including those that are part of the European Union, already have locked in more aggressive emissions-cutting targets. The United Kingdom on Tuesday announced a commitment to reducing its emissions by 78 percent by 2035, compared with 1990 levels — a goal the government said would take the nation more than three-quarters of the way toward reaching net zero by 2050.
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  • “We’re going to do it in a way that’s very deliberate,” White House domestic climate adviser Gina McCarthy told reporters Monday in a call organized by the World Resources Institute. The administration wants to transition to a cleaner economy with good-paying occupations in communities that have been hit hardest by unemployment and underinvestment, she said. “It’s intended to meet the moment we are in.”
  • “We are on the verge of the abyss,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said Monday
  • China, the largest greenhouse gas polluter, has said it plans to reach peak emissions by 2030 and effectively erase its carbon footprint by 2060, though the details remain uncertain
  • despite myriad diplomatic tensions between the two countries, the United States and China vowed Saturday to jointly combat climate change “with the seriousness and urgency that it demands.”
  • The world remains nowhere near meeting the central Paris aim of limiting Earth’s warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels — or ideally, remaining closer to 1.5 Celsius. Failure to hit those targets, scientists have warned, will result in a cascade of costly and devastating effects.
  • “We are way off track,” Guterres said. “This must be the year for action — the make-it-or-break-it year.”
  • To craft the new pledge in the administration’s first 100 days, White House officials scrambled staffers at agencies across the government to look for funding, programs and policies that could help curb emissions in the years ahead. Agency by agency, sector by sector, federal officials tallied up the math in an effort to make Biden’s pledge credible.
  • The International Energy Agency this week projected that global carbon dioxide emissions are set to rise by 1.5 billion tons in 2021 — the second-largest increase in history — as the world comes out of the pandemic-induced downturn
  • “This is a dire warning that the economic recovery from the Covid crisis is currently anything but sustainable for our climate,”
  • In the United States, the power sector represents one of the best opportunities to cut greenhouse gas emissions. On Friday, a collection of 13 utilities, including Exelon, National Grid and PSEG, urged Biden to pursue a range of policies “to enable deep decarbonization of the power sector, including a clean electricity standard that ensures the power sector, as a whole, reduces its carbon emissions by 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.”
  • The Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, are already laying the groundwork to curb methane emissions from oil and natural gas drilling, in part by reviving Obama administration standards reversed under Trump
  • the EPA is moving ahead to phase down the production and importation of hydrofluorocarbons — which are widely used as refrigerants and in air conditioning — by 85 percent over the next 15 years, as mandated by Congress.
  • Environmental activists, Democratic lawmakers, foreign leaders and hundreds of private companies, including Apple and Walmart, have implored the White House to make the boldest climate pledge possible.
  • Advocacy groups and academics have published detailed analyses, demonstrating ways they say the nation could cut at least half its emissions by the end of the decade.
  • But other major emitters, including China, India and Russia, have yet to spell out how exactly they intend to help put the world on a more sustainable trajectory.
  • to reach the 50 percent target, the administration will have to make some difficult-to-guarantee assumptions about the future. For instance, that new regulations aimed at curbing emissions won’t be reversed by a future administration or the courts — even though Trump furiously dismantled key Obama-era climate policies.
  • some Republicans have insisted that the far-reaching changes needed to cut greenhouse gas pollution so fast could harm an already struggling economy, particularly in communities that still depend on the fossil fuel industry.
  • Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has argued that Biden’s aggressive climate actions could kill thousands of jobs in her state. On the Senate floor last month, she called the notion that new policies could quickly replace lost jobs in coal and other fossil fuels with ones in renewable energy “a fantasy world that does not exist.”
  • Persuading other key nations to bolster the promises they made in Paris remains critical if the world is to meet its collective goal of slowing Earth’s warming. The targets set by countries such as China, India, Russia and Brazil could dramatically affect whether the world can reach the goals set almost six years ago.
  • “The international community will have the opportunity to see that Biden is good for his word,” said Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “A lot of diplomacy is about momentum and building momentum.”
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Opinion | How to Actually Make America Great - The New York Times - 0 views

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  • This pivotal moment isn’t just the result of four years of Donald Trump. It’s the culmination of 50 years of social decay.
  • “The Upswing,” a remarkable new book by Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garret
  • A careful work of social science, the book looks at American life from about 1870 to today across a range of sectors that are usually analyzed in separate academic silos.
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  • The first important finding is that between the 1870s and the late 1960s a broad range of American social trends improved: Community activism surged, cross party collaboration increased, income inequality fell, social mobility rose, church attendance rose, union membership rose, federal income taxes became more progressive and social spending on the poor rose.
  • Black school attendance, income gains, homeownership rates, voter registration rates started rapidly improving in the 1940s and then started slowing in the 1970s and 1980s.
  • The American century was built during these decades of social progress. And then, around the late 1960s, it all turned south.
  • Over the past 50 years, the positive trends have reversed: membership in civic organizations has collapsed, political polarization has worsened, income inequality has widened, social trust has cratered, religious attendance is down, social mobility has decreased, deaths of despair have skyrocketed and on and on.
  • Until the late 1960s, American life was improving across a range of measures. Since then, it’s a story of decay.
  • Maybe economic change drove everything? But no, the timing is off. Economic inequality widened a bit later than most of the other trends. Maybe it was political dysfunction? Nope. That, too, happened a bit later.
  • Muckrakers exposed social evils. The survival of the fittest mentality was rejected. Then it was a civic renaissance. Between 1870 and 1920 Americans created civic organizations at a rate that’s never been equaled. Then it was a political movement. By 1912 all three major presidential candidates ran as progressives: William Taft, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt.
  • The frequency of the word “I” in American books, according to Putnam and Garrett, doubled between 1965 and 2008.
  • starting in the late 1960s, there was left wing self-centeredness in the social and lifestyle sphere and right wing self-centeredness in the economic sphere, with a lack of support for common-good public policies
  • “The story of the American experiment in the twentieth century is one of a long upswing toward increasing solidarity, followed by a steep downturn into increasing individualism. From ‘I’ to ‘we’ and back again to ‘I’.”
  • many were operating at the wrong level. They were trying to build programs that would “scale,” but they were swimming against the tide of culture, the pervasive individualistic mentality, and all its social and political effects.
  • I helped found an organization called Weave: The Social Fabric Project that was designed precisely to focus on cultural change. We illuminate, support and connect community builders
  • I’ve found that about a third of the people I encounter in this work get the power of culture and the importance of culture change, and two thirds don’t really see culture. They focus exclusively on what can be quantified.
  • Putnam and Garrett hold up the Progressive Movement, not as something we could go back to, but as a storehouse of lessons for us to adapt. Progressivism was “first and foremost, a moral awakening.”
  • It was based on a fallacy: If we all do our own thing, everything will work out well for everybody.
  • the great missing pieces are in the civic and cultural spheres: a moral vision that inspires the rising generation, a new national narrative that unites a diverse people, actual organizations where people work on local problems.
  • Many of us think that the gains for African-Americans only happened after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but Putnam and Garrett show that the fastest improvements actually happened in the decades before.
  • The first important finding is that between the 1870s and the late 1960s a broad range of American social trends improved
  • This pivotal moment isn’t just the result of four years of Donald Trump. It’s the culmination of 50 years of social decay.
  • Black school attendance, income gains, homeownership rates, voter registration rates started rapidly improving in the 1940s and then started slowing in the 1970s and 1980s.
  • Over the past 50 years, the positive trends have reversed: membership in civic organizations has collapsed, political polarization has worsened, income inequality has widened, social trust has cratered, religious attendance is down, social mobility has decreased, deaths of despair have skyrocketed and on and on.
  • Until the late 1960s, American life was improving across a range of measures. Since then, it’s a story of decay.
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