041 The Erickson Report, Page 5: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Clowns]

041 The Erickson Report, Page 5: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Clowns]

Now for a regular feature, Two Weeks of Stupid, Clowns and Outrages. And we start, as usual, with the Clowns.

Our first Clown this time out is President Joe Coal Baron Manchin. After his event at the Economic Club of DC on October 26, three climate hunger strikers confronted him on his demand to cut climate provisions from the reconciliation package.

Manchin replied by asserting “the United States has done more than any other country. All the emissions are coming from Asia.”

So apparently all that West Virginia coal from which he gains a million a bucks a year from investments is being used for what, doing artists' sketches?

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Next there is Texas Republican state Rep. Matt Krause, who has a 16-page list of roughly 850 books and he intends to "investigate" to see if Texas school libraries might be harboring any of them.

Krause has used his position as chair of the House Committee on General Investigating to dispatch a letter wanting school districts to report whether they have any copies of any of the named books and if so, to report how many of them and how much money the district spent to get them.

Beyond such titles as The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the list, not at all oddly, seems obsessed with LGBTQ+ titles and ones about reproduction.

A peek under Krause's mattress might be interesting.

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Then there is the case of a reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch uncovering a flaw in the website of Missouri's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education that left the Social Security numbers for 100,000 staff members vulnerable. The information was contained in the html source code for the site.

The paper notified the agency and held the story until the agency had a chance to correct the error.

But it seems true that no good deed goes unpunished, because Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, apparently jealous of all the other GOPpes who've been awarded The Order of Big Red Nose, is vowing to prosecute the staff of the paper, charging they are "hackers" who "decoded" the source code to uncover the data. He claimed such an investigation would cost taxpayers $50 million.

Now, not only is that figure manifestly absurd, the thing is, the source code for a website is easily available to anyone with at most a couple of clicks because your own computer must have access to that information in order to display the web page correctly. Try it. Look for the Tools menu in your web browser, where you should find something listed like "View source code." In fact, if your browser is Firefox, just do control-u.

In other words, all this proves is that Mike Parson has absolutely no idea what hacking is.

I love this one because it gets back to the true meaning of Clown.

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But finally, sometimes it's hard to say if something is a Clown or an Outrage, it straddles the line between. Here's an example.

It's an unnamed teacher at Ridgefield Memorial High School in Ridgefield, New Jersey.

On October 18, Mohammed Zubi, A Muslim Arab-American senior at the school, asked for an extension on completing a math assignment. The teacher responded with 'We don't negotiate with terrorists."

Shortly after making the comment, the teacher supposedly told Zubi he did not “mean it like that.”

Excuse me, teacher person, but just how the hell did you mean it?

A supporting Clown award goes to the school administration which initially dismissed it as a “personal matter.” Only after the incident became known through social media did school board members take it seriously. In a statement a couple of days later, the district said it is conducting a full investigation and that the teacher in question has been suspended until further notice.

The Erickson Report for November 11 to 24, Page 3: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Outrages]

The Erickson Report for November 11 to 24, Page 3: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages [the Outrages]

For the Outrages, we need to be looking to the future and expecting that, as dangerous as a second term for Tweetie-pie would have been, he still has something around 10 weeks to do as much damage as he can.

And we should expect him to try to punish the nation - or at least the states that voted for Biden.

He said it himself. Writing at Raw Story, journalist David Cay Johnston notes that in Tweetie-pie's book Think Big he summed up his life philosophy in a single word: revenge.

"Then," quoting Johnston now, "he went on for 16 pages about how what gives him pleasure is ruining the lives of anyone who does not do as he asks. His long diatribe was intermingled with observations about his desires to do violence, especially against women."

In Tweetie-pie's own words, "If you don't get even you are just a schmuck!"

So for our Outrages we have four examples of Tweetie-pie trying to deny the truth that he is a thoroughgoing schmuck and a loser.

In chronological order:

On October 27, before the election but with the ultimate outcome clearly in sight, the EPA relinquished its oversight of a number of environmental issues across 38 federally recognized tribes’ lands in Oklahoma. Federal authorities mandated under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Safe Drinking Water Act, among others, will now be overseen by the state of Oklahoma.

The move means that fossil fuel and agriculture corporations will no longer have to consult with tribal governments about environmental issues related to, among others, fracking, the dumping of hazardous waste, and factory farm pollution runoff.

Those living on tribal lands are now subject to the by no means tender mercies of the state government of Oklahoma, whose fawning over the dirty fuelers and polluters leaves little doubt about the effect on native communities, which will become dumping grounds for toxic waste and a long list of other poisons and pollutants.

Next, for nearly 20 years, the "roadless rule" has protected wilderness by prohibiting timber harvesting and road construction in designated areas.

On October 28, the Tweetie-pie gang announced an intention to strip the protection of the roadless rule from Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.

Tongass is our largest national forest, covering 26,000 square miles (68,000 square kilometers) of southeast Alaska, and is called the nation’s "crown jewel” by the US Forest Service. It is a pristine and rare temperate zone rainforest whose ecosystems provide critical habitat for grizzly bears, wolves, bald eagles all five species of Pacific salmon, and numerous other species.

I picked one picture to show the Tongass, but one picture can't do it justice, not when its ecosystems include ice fields, glaciers, old-growth forests, and islands facing the Pacific Ocean.

As a result of that rule change - done in the face of the fact that 96% of public comment on the change was against it - more than half of the Tongass can be opened to logging and mineral exploration.

Getting in one more kick to the national groin before the election, on November 1, the beginning of the 2021 open enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act, the Whitest House announced a waiver for the state of Georgia, allowing it to avoid using Healthcare.gov website, the marketplace for plans under the ACA, in the state.

Over a dozen states have gotten such waivers because they had developed either their own state-based exchanges or some other mechanism that provides coverage at least equal to that mandated under the ACS. Georgia - which didn't expand Medicaid - doesn't have its own online marketplace or any similar mechanism, so for practical purposes no one in Georgia will be able to sign up for Obamacare. Instead, people will have to go through brokers or do their own research on private websites. In other words, any Georgian in need of health insurance has just been dumped into the individual market. And good luck to them.

But don't worry, according to Seema Verma, director of the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, the waiver will "usher in a groundswell of healthcare innovation that will deliver lower costs, better care, and more choice to Georgians" - just like the individual market always did in the past.

That could have been a good for a Clown Award - but considering that it's estimated that tens of thousands of people in Georgia will lose coverage because of this and so it can be reasonably said that people will die as a result, it's too serious for that.

Finally, one from after the election. It came out on November 9 that Tweetie-pie has removed the director of the National Climate Assessment, the federal government’s definitive report on climate change, which is updated every four years. The fifth one is due in 2022.

Michael Kuperberg, a climatologist who has held the post since 2015, was abruptly replaced by David Legates, who was first appointed by Tweetie-pie to a post as a deputy assistant secretary at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and is - you won't be surprised - someone who has claimed, among other things, that increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in fact are good for the planet and has dismissed his critics in the scientific community as “a bunch of thugs.”

Last month, it was reported that the Trump administration was delaying work on the Fifth National Climate Assessment. It looks now that delaying it has been upgraded to wrecking it.

Remember: Three of these examples are from before the election, when Tweetie-pie was only scared of losing. The tantrums he will throw now that he has lost - and make no mistake, he doesn't believe a word of the crap he's throwing around, he's just trying to avoid admitting that his presidency is as bankrupt as most of his businesses - can be expected to be much worse.

Revenge. It's what the next weeks will all be about. And that is an Outrage.

Some Good News amid all this

Some Good News amid all this

I wrote a number of time in the past about the struggle over the Dakota Access Pipeline, or DAPL, as Native American groups staged large-scale civil disobedience and protest in the attempt to block the pipeline from putting water supplies at risk.

Now comes some long overdue Good News on that front.

On March 25, the Washington, DC, federal district court ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers violated federal law when it affirmed federal permits for the pipeline originally issued in 2016.

The ruling, which came in response to a suit filed by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, found that in approving the project the Corps had violated the National Environmental Protection Act by, among other things, failing to take into account the criticisms by the Tribe's experts and paying insufficient attention to the safety record of the parent company, one which the court said "does not inspire confidence."

The original parent company, Energy Transfer Partners, has merged with Sunoco over the course of the legal battle over the pipeline.

The pipeline, designed to carry oil 1200 miles (1930 km) from North Dakota to Illinois, crosses the Missouri River near Standing Rock Sioux lands, threatening their water supply. After a lot of dithering, in December 2016 outgoing President The Amazing Mr. O denied the required permits - only to have Tweetie-pie reverse the decision his first week on the throne. The pipeline was completed in June 2017.

However, a suit challenging parts of the approved permits continued. Now, the court has ordered the Corps to undertake a full review and prepare a full Environmental Impact Statement, which the Corps has thus far avoided doing. Such a review could take years, during which the pipeline may - this has not yet been decided - have to be shut down.

Hopefully, in light of the finding that the project went ahead in violation of federal law, the court will do the obvious and shut it down until the review can be completed (since the result could be to find that the pipeline never should have been built, at least in its present configuration or on its present route). But we can't count on it: In 2017 the same court allowed construction of the pipeline to continue and in October 2017 said the pipeline could continue to function while the suit continued.

Still, the order for a full Environmental Impact Statement is different from a remand order to address details, so maybe the court will feel differently this time. In any event, the new decision is still Good News.

The Erickson Report, Page 9: India

The Erickson Report, Page 9: India

I'll end with this, because I swear if I were doing a Clown Award this week I would have a runaway winner.

New Delhi, the capital city of India, has been experiencing record levels of air pollution.

How bad? Consider that on the Air Quality Index, an international metric used by public health officials, any reading above 100 is considered unhealthy. In some areas of Delhi, that being the province in which the city of New Delhi is located, during the first week of November that index was well over 900.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said the city had been "turned into a gas chamber."

Not just there, either: In the industrial hub of Kanpur, home to 3 million people, air quality readings have been consistently above 500 for several days.

a street in New Delhi

There have been steps taken to deal with this: Construction activities that could add to the dust in the air were halted temporarily. Schools were shut, government advisories were issued, asking people to stay indoors. Factories that hadn't shifted to piped natural gas were temporarily shut down. Odd-even driving days were instituted.

But even in the middle of this  mess, some people just had to prove what clowns they are. India's Minister for Health and Family Welfare tweeted that eating carrots would help and the Minister of Environment, Forest & Climate Change tweeted an encouragement for affected citizens to "start your day with music."

Not to be outdone by mere bureaucrats, Vineet Agarwal Sharda, a leader of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, said that the pollution should not be blamed on stubble burning or industrial emissions, the most commonly cited caused, but on Pakistan and China, either of which, he said could have released poisonous gases into India because, he said, "they are afraid of us."

Yeah, well, you are pretty scary.

The Erickson Report, Page 6: New Zealand

The Erickson Report, Page 6: New Zealand

On November 7, New Zealand lawmakers approved a bill that commits the country to being carbon neutral by the year 2050. The measure, which passed 119 votes to 1, demonstrates the cross-party support that climate protection has in the Pacific island nation.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she was grateful that in the past 10 years, Parliament had progressed from debating whether global warming is real to discussing what to do about it.

The Zero Carbon bill aims to provide a framework to implement climate change policies. It's in line with an international effort under the Paris Agreement to limit the global average temperature increase to 1.5° Celsius above preindustrial levels.

New Zealand's bill sets an ambitious target: to reduce all greenhouse gases to net zero by 2050.

The country is well-positioned to do it. It already generates 80% of its electricity from renewables, and that portion will be higher by 2035 as offshore oil and gas are phased out. The government is shifting its fleet to electric vehicles and is working to transition other vehicles to electric, too. The government also has restarted a program to subsidize home insulation and is putting $14.5 billion over the next 10 years into transit, biking and walking infrastructure. In addition, New Zealand has already committed to planting 1 billion trees by 2028.

All of which is to the good - but when officials say "all greenhouse gases," they don't actually mean "all." The bill creates an exemption for biogenic methane, which is emitted by plant and animal sources. That loophole is actually a big deal.

Methane does not persist in the atmosphere as long as CO2 - decades as opposed to centuries - but it's far more potent, trapping about 30 times as much heat as CO2 does.

Ruminant animals such as sheep and cattle release methane as they digest grass and other leaves. Such animals made up 34% of New Zealand's total emissions of greenhouse gases. Overall, agriculture is the largest single source of greenhouse emissions in New Zealand, accounting for a whopping 48% of the total.

So in the case of biogenic methane, New Zealand isn't aiming for net zero but just to reduce emissions by 24-47% over the next 30 years. Which means that if those targets are met, in 2050 New Zealand overall still will be emitting about a quarter to over a third of what it does today. Which would be a dramatic achievement - but it ain't net zero. And it's legitimate to ask how far short of net zero we can go before it's simply not good enough.

Dozens of countries have declared a goal of net zero. Costa Rica, Denmark, Fiji, France, Germany and the UK have all said they intend to achieve net zero emissions by 2050; Sweden has gone them one better by aiming to do it by 2045.

Meanwhile, the world's largest greenhouse gas emitters - China, the United States and India - have not made any zero-carbon national commitments, although a number of US states, including California, Washington, and New Mexico, along with a large number of US cities, have pledged net zero on their own.

The New Zealand nature advocacy organization Forest and Bird called the bill's passage an important first step but says the work is far from over, which is particularly true since the main conservative opposition party, despite supporting the bill, nevertheless promised changes if it wins the next election.

The left giveth and the right taketh away.

The Erickson Report, Page 1: Five Things Noted in Passing

The Erickson Report, Page 1: Five Things Noted in Passing

We start this time with Five Things Noted in Passing. Every time I pull out five items I think worth noting but which aren’t going to get a lot of time. So let’s go.

A survey released in September by the Commonwealth Fund found that 58 percent of US small business owners, "small" being defined as fewer than 500 employees, support Medicare for All.

As the Commonwealth Fund pointed out in its overview, small businesses, which make up 99 percent of US employers and create 66 percent of new private-sector jobs, have been harder hit by rising health care costs than large corporations, because they don't have the same economic clout in negotiating with the private insurance industry. Which is likely why, when the survey asked small business owners which of eight issues was the biggest challenge facing their business, "Cost of providing health care coverage to employees" came out on top.

So despite the claims of the nanny-nanny naysayers, small businesses have much to gain from a single-payer system - and many of those owners know it.

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Fun fact, from a calculation someone did: If you came to America in 1619 and made $1 million every day for the next 400 years, and put it in a chest in your backyard, today you would have a few hundred million dollars less than Jeff Bezos.

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Here's something to brighten your day.

The UK's first Chick-fil-A is going to close just six months after it opened.

The Oracle, a shopping center located in Reading, England, decided not to extend Chick-fil-A’s lease beyond a six-month pilot period. A spokesperson for the mall said management had decided it was "the right thing to do," following community backlash against the fast food chain’s history of support of anti-LGBTQ bigotry.

Chick-fil-A tried some CYA, insisting that the company never intended for the Reading location to be open for more than a limited time and trying to imply the non-renewal was a mutual decision. The company claimed that having "pop-up locations" was part of a "long term strategy" to "expand our international presence" - but could not provide any plans for any future such "pop-up" sites.

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In the wake of Tweetie-pie's abandonment of the Kurds in northern Syria, Frontier Alliance International, a nonprofit Christian organization that provides medical aid in the Middle East, planned to hold an event titled "A Night of Prayer for the Kurds."
However, the event was abruptly canceled by the hotel where it was scheduled to be held.

The administrator of Frontier Alliance International, Charlene Struebing, said hotel staff had said "they’ve gotten a lot of security concerns and they couldn’t accommodate enough security. I think it’s more related to people protesting our event than it was anything we were doing."

Considering that a DC police spokeswoman said that it had not "received any information regarding potential security threats or concerns with this event" and that who the hell would be protesting a prayer event makes me suspect there was another factor at play: the fact that the event to pray for the Kurds was to be at Tweetie-pie's DC hotel.

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A bit late but still definitely worth noting. According to the US Energy Information Administration, in April, for the first time ever, utility-scale renewable energy generated more power than coal. Renewables - hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass - provided 23% of total generation, with coal at 20%.
That may not persist month after month because coal power generation varies seasonally, but the clear trend can't be denied.

Heroes and Villains: climate change

I had a fall during the taping of Episode 4 of The Erickson Report, delaying production for a week. So I thought I would post a couple of things intended for that show but which will not be used now.

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Heroes and Villains: climate change

Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg is a 16-year-old Swedish activist who, in August 2018 at age 15, began an on-going solitary protest outside the Swedish parliament about the need for immediate action to combat climate change and has since become an outspoken climate activist.

She initiated the school strike for climate movement in November 2018. On March 15 of this year, an estimated 1.4 million students in 112 countries around the world staged strikes and protests. Another event involving students from 125 countries took place on May 24.

She is of course not alone but she is a symbol of a movement becoming more assertive about the need for immediate action on climate, a movement that is coming to embrace nonviolent direct action, as mass protests over the weekend of June 22-23 showed.

For just one example, on June 22 in Germany, hundreds of activists under the slogan "We are unstoppable - another world is possible!" stormed an open-pit coal mine in Germany while thousands of others maintained separate blockades of the nation's coal infrastructure.

Greta Thunberg

Meanwhile, in New York City police arrested 70 environmental protesters outside the New York Times headquarters who laid down in the street and climbed onto the building to demand the newspaper start referring to climate change as a climate emergency.

The same day in Bath, Maine at General Dynamics' Bath Iron Works, where some of the Navy's most advanced warships are built, 22 people were arrested for civil disobedience calling for Congress to "Fund Climate Solutions, Not Endless War"

And on July 2, the day this is being recorded, a UK group called Extinction Rebellion is staging a die-in, putting an independent edge to the opening of the London's city-organized, officially-sanctioned Climate Action Week.

Again, Greta Thunberg is not alone, but she still is a symbol of a movement that is no longer content to wait until the corporations and the politicians decide action is in their own interest. And for that she is a Hero.

The villain here may come as something of a surprise. It is Phil Goldberg, director of the Center for Civil Justice at the Progressive Policy Institute, an allegedly progressive organization - I mean, it's right in the name and all - connected to the Dimocratic Party.

Phil Goldberg

Various mayors around the country have been filing lawsuits against fossil fuel corporations for their pollution and contribution to global warming, arguing that "we did what the law required" is inadequate as a defense when they knew for a fact that those standards were inadequate. They failed to exercise due diligence, the argument goes, to exercise appropriate care, and thus can be held liable.

Phil Goldberg, who apparently needs to look up just what "justice" means, has been, precisely because of his association with PPI, an industry-useful leading point person denouncing such lawsuits. You know the game: He becomes "proof" that "even the lefties are against this."

In fact, this "lefty" is a former lobbyist for coal giant Peabody Energy and serves as special counsel to the National Association of Manufacturers in its fight against climate litigation besides having recently worked for Grow America’s Infrastructure Now, a front group funded by several oil and gas trade associations, helping prepare a report on how tort law can be used to go after what the authors call “anti-pipeline activism.”
  
That's why he's the guy writing that the cities' "copycat lawsuits" are "ineffective political stunts" that "strike at the heart of our way of life" because they don't "balance" environmental concerns with the climate destroying fossil fuel production on which his bosses' profits depend.

That's why he's the guy doing it. That he's doing it under the cover of supposedly being progressive and supposedly concerned with civil justice, that's why he's our villain.

The Erickson Report, Page 1: Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages - the Clowns

Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages - the Clowns

We're going to start the show with one of our frequent features, called Two Weeks of Stupid: Clowns and Outrages and this time we're going to start with the Clowns.

Our first clown is the Department of Energy. I’ll note that this is from a little more than two weeks back but it's too good to let pass.

1. In an otherwise mundane press release on May 28 announcing approval of more exports by a Freeport LNG terminal off the coast of Texas, the DOE declared the expansion of exports to be "critical to spreading freedom gas throughout the world" and that more such exports will allow for "molecules of U.S. freedom to be exported to the world.”

So it’s kind of like freebasing but without the kick.

2. Next up is the news that the Wicked Witch of the Desk and Clown Lady Supreme Sarah Huckabee Sanders is leaving us. She’s going home to spend more time lying to her family.

Actually, since there hasn't been a press briefing for about three months, I thought she left some time ago.

My favorite memory of her infamous career is when she told the press after Tweetie-pie fired James Comey that the White House had heard from “countless” - that was her word - “countless” FBI agents that they has lost faith in him only to have to tell investigators for Robert Mueller - a moment when there might be actual consequences for lying - that those comments were based on "nothing."

3. Our next clown is Sinclair Broadcasting, infamous for top-down corporate control of the well over 200 local TV stations it owns,control including distributing "must-run" segments touting the corporation's right-wing blather, including sometimes having it included in news shows as if it were a real news item.

One demand was that local stations use a huge "code red day" graphic any time there was a prediction of severe weather. Joe Crain, a meteorologist at WICS-TV in Springfield, Illinois, complained about the system on-air, noting that the dramatic, one-size fits all style is not nearly as informative as the more graded system used by the National Weather Service system and adding that many viewers had complained about it before calling it "a corporate initiative."

A day later, Crain disappeared from the air and a job listing for a meteorologist at WICS appeared - interestingly, not on WICS’s website, but on Sinclair's.

Robert Samuelson

4. Finally on this, Robert Samuelson, a Washington Post columnist who several years ago wished the Internet would just go away, well deserves his red nose.

In a column on June 12, he bemoaned the fact that the population of Japan is shrinking a little, predicting all sorts of dramatic, hideous outcomes as a result: Labor shortages! Deficits! Crushing debt burdens!

Of course, Japan is ten times as densely populated as the United States, so it would seem it could use a little more room.

Oh, but it's debt has ballooned! Well, yes it has, so much so that its debt service burden - which is the real measure of the “burden” of a debt, not how big it is but how much it costs to service it - its debt service burden will be about 0.1% of GDP, which in the US, allowing for the differences in the sizes of the two economies, would be about $20 billion. Utterly crushing.

But you know what makes it really bad in Samuelson's eyes? According to him, “Half of Japanese children born in 2007 are expected to live to 107.” The utter horror.

By the way, why is this a problem to him? Because capitalism is based on growth. There always has to be more: more people, more stuff, more production, more waste, more resource extraction, more more more. Without a constant flow of more, capitalism falters and ultimately fails.

Which means the dire future he sees for Japan is not dire for the Japanese but for capitalism.

37.4 - Not Good News: CO2 levels reach record high; ocean plastic bigger hazard then thought

Not Good News: CO2 levels reach record high; ocean plastic bigger hazard then thought

It's good we have some Good News on the environment because we also have some Not Good News on the same topic.

According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), concentrations of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere surged to a record high in 2016, reaching a level not seen in 800,000 years.

The figure of 403.3 parts per million is based on measurements taken in 51 countries.

Just as worrisome is that it wasn't just an increase to a new high, it was the largest year-to-year increase the WMO has seen in the 30 years it's had the current reporting network and was 50% higher than the average year-to-year increase of the part 10 years.

Scientists fear this could put global temperature targets intended to head off the worst of global warming largely out of reach.

The report also raised another concern: The levels of methane in the atmosphere have seen a rapid rise over the past few years and scientists don't understand why. There is fear it's a sign of a positive reinforcement cycle where methane released from natural sources helps drive temperature increases which result in those natural sources releasing more methane which drives additional warmth, and so on.

Methane is not nearly as abundant in the atmosphere as is CO2, but it is by volume significantly more potent as a greenhouse gas.

And yet we have people like President Tweetie-pie and EPA Director Scott Pee-yew-itt and their ilk dismissing the whole idea of climate change. I've come to the conclusion that these people must hate civilization, hate the future, and hate their children. There is no other logical explanation.

And while you're thinking about that, here's another way humans have screwed things up.

Ocean plastic is an indiscriminate hazard. It harms fish and kills seabirds, which wash up with bellies full of trash. Turtles swallow it. It damages plankton and corals, which sometimes are found with particles wedged in their guts.

For years, biologists and conservationists assumed that most sea creatures ate plastic by accident. But a growing number of studies suggests another more disturbing reason. Marine animals aren't eating our plastic waste because they are hungry or lazy or confused but because they want to. Because they like it.

Put another way, the plastics we make taste good. And we don't even know what ingredient or ingredients it is that make this non-nutritious, non-biodegradable, damaging junk so tasty.

37.3 - Good News: wilderness protected; cities go 100% renewable

Good News: wilderness protected; cities go 100% renewable

Okay, two more little bits of Good News, these on environmental issues.

First: Adopted in the closing days of the Clinton administration, the Roadless Rule prohibits most logging and road construction in roadless areas of national forests. These lands, today equal about 50 million acres, about the size of Nebraska.

The rule was popular with the public and the Forest Service - but not with political leaders with ties to the logging and timber industries. When the Shrub administration failed to protect the rule, in fact tried to overturn it, a group called Earthjustice stepped in.

Now, after 16 years of court fights against at various times the states of Idaho, Wyoming, and Alaska and the Shrub administration, Earthjustice may have achieved a final court victory - with the rule still intact.

This still could be appealed, but the history of repeated court victories in favor of the rule make such an appeal unlikely.

I freely admit it's been some time since I've been able to take advantage of wilderness and I never was a wilderness camper - but preserving what of it there is? Yeah, I say that's Good News.

Okay, second, the Sierra Club has a list of 44 cities, four counties, and one state committed to providing 100% of their electricity by renewable sources no later than 2035 - and be 100% renewable for all energy needs by 2050.

The Good News to note here is that five of those cities already obtain 100% of their electricity from renewables. None of them are particularly large - they range in size from Greensburg, Kansas, with a population of about 800 to Burlington, Vermont, population about 42,000 - so again, it may not seem like any big good news, but the point is, they show it can be done. What's more, Georgetown, Texas, population 64,000, expects to become the sixth such city in 2018 and San Jose, California, population 1 million-plus, intends to get there just four years later.

So yes, it can be done - and in at least some places, it already is.

35.4 - Not Good News: Dakota Access pipeline to continue operations during review

Not Good News: Dakota Access pipeline to continue operations during review

Unfortunately, this week we also have some Not Good New.

You remember, I surely hope, the activism and protest around the Dakota Access Pipeline, a 1,200-mile oil pipeline to be part of the system to get tar sands oil from Canada across the Midwest and ultimately to the Gulf Coast.

Still, a bit of history to get you up to date. The planned route of the pipeline, being built by a corporation called Energy Transfer Partners, crossed the Missouri River just upstream from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota, threatening lands sacred to the tribe as well as its source of drinking water.

The outpouring of support that lead to the mass protests at the site were undoubtedly part of what moved the Obama administration to deny the final permits to cross the river and to promise a full environmental review that considered the Tribe's treaty rights as well as alternative routes.

And of course almost immediately on taking office, TheRump reversed all that and gave the permits.

The Tribe filed a lawsuit to challenge this decision, but construction went ahead and was completed while the case was proceeding.

In June, just weeks after pipeline operations had begun, the US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers had not complied with environmental review laws before issuing permits for the pipeline to cross the Missouri River. The court ordered the Corps to do a new analysis of critical issues it hadn't properly addressed.

Here's where the Not Good News comes in: The court also ordered a separate briefing to assess whether the pipeline should be shut down while this so-called "remand" process is going on.

On October 11, the DC District Court ruled that the pipeline can keep operating. It rejected the claim that shutting it down would cause substantial economic harm to the company, noting that Energy Transfer Partners got itself into that situation by starting operations while the case was being litigated, but also ruled that because it is "possible" that when the remand is complete the Corps can justify its decision not to conduct a full review, the gunk can keep moving.

The Tribe had also asked for additional measures to reduce the risk of oil spills; that is still before the court.

For now, the Tribe intends to focus on the remand process and has a team of experts assisting it in providing input. The Corps of Engineers has stated that remand process should be complete by April 2018 and the court admonished the Corps not to treat this process as a "bureaucratic formality" but to give "serious consideration" to the errors identified by the court.

So the fight goes on, but right now the news is not good.

32.1 - Harvey, Irma, and global warming

Harvey, Irma, and global warming

The big news of late, at least in the US, has been the twin hits of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. The economic cost of the devastation is estimated to exceed $200 billion. Some 106 were killed in the US plus at least 44 more dead in Caribbean, which was devastated particularly by Irma.

There are multiple ways to assist the victims, both in the US and the Caribbean and I urge you to explore them.

But I also have to mention the gorilla in room, which actually did get mentioned sometimes in the coverage of the storms, but which needs to be slammed home: anthropogenic global warming - or climate change, call it what you will, they mean the same thing.

Now, this does need to be noted at the top: You can't say that Harvey or Irma were caused by global warming in the sense that they would not have happened in the absence of global warming. We can't say that. Hurricanes are caused by weather conditions.

Hurricane Harvey

But here's the point: Hurricanes draw their strength from warm waters. So as the climate warms, as the oceans warm, there is more energy for storms to draw on.

So what we can say is that climate change makes storms like Harvey and Irma more likely. That is, we can't say that there will be more hurricanes - that actually is regarded as one of the weaker predictions of climate change - but we can say that the hurricanes we see are more likely to be stronger and more destructive: Remember that  Irma was the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the open Atlantic (that is, outside the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico).

Which leads directly to the next point: Despite the claims of the nanny-nanny naysayers to the contrary, we can say it is possible to attribute some extreme weather events to climate change.

Not necessarily individual storms, but extreme weather patterns - such as drought, heat waves, and floods - can in at least some cases can be attributed directly to climate change.

That's one of several significant findings in a climate change report by the staff of 13 federal agencies, which found that average temperatures in the United States have risen rapidly and drastically since 1980, that recent decades have been the warmest of the past 1500 years, and Americans are feeling the effects of climate change right now.

The authors note that thousands of studies, conducted by tens of thousands of scientists, have documented climate changes on land and in the air that have been confirmed by many lines of evidence which together demonstrate that human activities are the primarily cause.

And people know it. Not just around the world, where we've come to expect that people are aware of the dangers and the need for action, but even in the US.

According to the latest survey from Morning Consult/Politico, two-thirds of registered voters are concerned about climate change, with 41 percent "very concerned" and another 26 percent "somewhat concerned."

But this is one really got me and shows how far perceptions have changed. A few months ago, the New York Times reported a survey finding that 69 percent of Americans support limiting global-warming-creating carbon dioxide emissions from existing coal-fired power plants. But more than that, more than that, a majority of adults in every single congressional district in the country agreed. Even in deep coal country in places like Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky, a majority said yes, limit the emissions.

But still the nanny-nanny naysayers and their corporate backers drive Congress and the White House. That report from those 13 agencies was for the next National Climate Assessment, due in 2018. The draft was to be submitted on August 18. On August 20, TheRump disbanded the federal advisory panel overseeing the report.

This supposedly will not affect the current assessment, the one due next year, but it does mean that absent future action, it will be the last one as the determination of the nanny-nanny naysayers in and out of government to ignore reality grows even more determined and strident.

And our time is running out.

Link for the Pope Francis quote:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pope-francis-climate-change-denial-stupid_us_59b6ed8ae4b09be416574f72

30.9 - For the Record: federal support for fossil fuels

For the Record: federal support for fossil fuels

For the Record: A new report released July 5, the result of a cooperative research effort by Oil Change International, Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, and the World Wildlife Fund's European Policy Office, shows that the US government provided about $6 billion annually in financial support to the oil, gas, and coal industries between 2013 and 2015 - during the term, let it be noted, of the Amazing Mr. O.

That's over four times the amount that went to clean energy, which received just $1.3 billion.

30.2 - Good News: solar farm in Plains, GA

Good News: solar farm in Plains, GA

Next up, it may be a little thing in the grand scheme, but still it's worth noting.

Jimmy Carter and family leased leased 10 acres of land in Plains, Georgia and arranged to put in a solar farm which is now ready to provide about 1.3 MW of power every year - more than half the electricity needs of the whole town. They followed that up by having 324 solar panels installed on the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, which will provide about seven percent of the library's power.

A little historical footnote: In 1979, then-President Jimmy Carter installed 32 solar panels on the White House to provide some of the hot water for the building. Ronald Reagan had them removed.

27.2 - Good News: EPA can't delay methane leak rule

Good News: EPA can't delay methane leak rule

Another bit of Good News, this one on the environment.

On July 3, a three judge panel of the Court of Appeals for Washington, DC, ruled that EPA administrator Scott Pruitt had overstepped his authority in trying to delay implementation of an Obama-era rule requiring oil and gas companies to monitor and reduce methane leaks.

Pruitt had announced in April that he would delay by 90 days the deadline for oil and gas companies to follow the rule, so that the agency could reconsider the measure. He then said in June that he was going to extend that delay for an additional two years.

Scott P-U-itt

In a split decision, the court disagreed with Pruitt’s contention that industry groups had not had sufficient opportunity to comment before the 2016 rule was enacted and also said that he had no authority to make the “unreasonable,” “arbitrary,” and “capricious” decision to delay the rule from taking effect.

The reason the decision is important is that methane is by volume about 20 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide is and environmental groups contend that actual methane emissions from leaks and intentional venting at fossil-fuel operations are far greater than what is now reported.

Environment-hater and fossil-fuel-industry-lapdog Scott P-U-itt has been trying as hard as he can to undo the gains of the past several decades. This time, at least, he got smacked down hard. And that is Good News.

25.2 - Good News: DC District judge rules against DAPL

Good News: DC District judge rules against DAPL

Here's some I-did-not-expect-this Good News: On June 14, Judge James Boasberg of the Federal Distict Court in Washington, DC, ruled that the federal permits authorizing the Dakota Access Pipeline to cross the Missouri River just above the Standing Rock reservation, permits hastily issued by the Trump administration just days after the inauguration, violated federal law in some critical respects.

The Court found that the Army Corps of Engineers

did not adequately consider the impacts of an oil spill on fishing rights, hunting rights, or environmental justice, or the degree to which the pipeline's effects are likely to be highly controversial.

The court did rule against the Standing Rock Sioux on some other issues, finding that the decision to allow the pipeline was legal in some respects, and unfortunately did not require that the pipeline be shut off pending a resolution of the case, leaving that to additional briefings and a status conference next week.

Be that as it may, even if it's not as sweeping as we would like, this is still an excellent victory in a case and on an issue thought to have been lost. Which most certainly is Good News.

24.9 - Outrage of the Week: TheRump quits Paris Accord

Outrage of the Week: TheRump quits Paris Accord

Now for our other regular feature, the Outrage of the Week - and this week, you're probably not surprised, it's TheRump's withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement in a statement chock full of nonsense and lies about the environment, global warming, and the economy and in a decision opposed by the American public by better than 2-1.

Burt rather than dwell on his inanity, I want instead to note two things: One is that much of the world reacted pretty much along the lines of "the heck with you and no, we are not going to 'renegotiate' this" and that domestically, many local governments are prepared to pick up the ball that TheRump fumbled so badly.

There is a growing list of at last count 289 mayors and 10 governors who have denounced the decision to withdraw and more importantly, have vowed to ignore TheRump's decision and to continue to abide by the federal Clean Power Plan and the Paris accord, including looking to meet the goal of reducing emissions to 26%-28% below 2005 levels, in their own cities and states.

Three states - California, New York, and Washington - created the United States Climate Alliance to serve as a way for states to coordinate efforts to deal with climate change. As one small sign of what can be done, those three states together make up about a fifth of the US population and a fifth of the US GDP - but produced just 11 percent of US emissions in 2014.

As of June 8, a total of 12 states and Puerto Rico, representing together a third of the US population and a third of the US GDP, had joined.

And this doesn't even address the many businesses and corporations that have realized how much of a threat global warming is to their bottom lines and so have committed to continue to do at least something to avoid the worst effects.

So the bottom line is that most of the world and at least a good part of the US are saying to TheRump, "screw you, keep peddling your fantasies about coal jobs that are never coming back and we'll get on with saving the world without you."

And that is definitely not an outrage.

23.8 - Clown Award: Rep. Tim Walberg

Clown Award: Rep. Tim Walberg

Now for one of our regular features, the Clown Award, given for meritorious stupidity.

As always, there were plenty of nominees this week.

For example, we had Ben Carson, secretary of HUD, heading up a department he himself said before his nomination he wasn't qualified to lead, telling an interviewer that "I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind."

Then we had TheRump himself, after a Reuters report that the way his aides get him to read national security briefings is by mentioning his name in as many paragraphs as possible.

The there was one Alex Gardega, who decided to make a supposedly artistic comment on the "Fearless Girl" statue facing the charging bull on Wall Street by placing a statue of a pug appearing to pee on the girl's leg.

But our winner topped them all. So this week the Big Red Nose goes to Rep. Tim Walberg.

Tim Walberg

At a constituent town hall on May 26, Walberg, asked a question about climate change, gave the by-now familiar dodge "the climate is always changing" - actually it's not; climate tends to be relatively stable for long periods - and then added that he's not concerned about climate change because, quoting,

I believe that there is a creator, God, who's much bigger than us. And I'm confident that, if there's a real problem, he can take care of it.

He then topped that off by saying that he won't take a back seat to anyone on a commitment to be "a good steward" of the Earth, proving it by recalling trout fishing in some mountain stream.

So yuppers, no need to worry about climate change. God will fix it. Just like God has stepped in to head off every other major catastrophe, plague, or extinction throughout history.

Do I need to say it? Tim Walberg is a clown.

21.3 - Bad news and some hope about global climate change

Bad news and some hope about global climate change

Last week I celebrated the large turnout for the Peoples Climate Marches, and I use the plural because there were hundreds of events, both in the US and around the world, with something around or even over 250,000 taking part in the US, so I wanted to follow up on that with some related news.

You have by now, I'm sure, heard about how the White House is hiding away information about climate change, including taking down several EPA websites containing detailed climate data and scientific information.

Agency mouthpiece J.P. Freire justified the moves, saying "we can't have information which contradicts the actions we have taken in the last two months," which amounts to an admission that what they have done contradicts the science, but they have far too little self-awareness to notice.

Freire also said the removal of the scientific data was to "make room" to "reflect the views of the leadership of the agency." Funny, I didn't realize the Internet was running out of space.

What makes the news particularly disturbing is that it comes against a background of an ever-higher mountain of evidence.

For one thing, a new scientific study from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that global temperatures could exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above their pre-industrial levels within the next 8 years.

The study focuses on a natural planetary system known as the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, or IPO (sometimes referred to as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation). It's an alternating pattern of ocean temperatures that shifts periodically between warm and cool phases, helping to drive temperature and weather patterns all over the world.

It's similar to the more familiar El Niño/La Niña cycle, but the phases of the IPO tend to last much longer - sometimes a decade or more.

For most of the 2000s, the IPO has been in a negative, that is, a cooling phase, and scientists think its effect has helped to offset the effect of climate change. In other words, it has kept the climate cooler than it otherwise would have been.

Many scientists believe that the IPO is now transitioning back into a positive, or warming, phase, which would amplify, rather than offset, human-caused climate warming. And that could mean the Earth could hit the 1.5-degree threshold as early as 2025, five years sooner than current projections. Five years might not seem like a long time but it does mean having five years less to act.

The figure of 1.5 degrees is not important in an of itself as a number, no more inherently significant than 1.4 degrees or 1.6 degrees, but it is a marker, a milepost, which takes its significance from the fact that the Paris Climate accords are geared around striving to keep global temperature from rising any more than that if only to provide a buffer against the standard "beyond here it gets really bad" level of a two degree increase.

That buffer may be hard to maintain, however, considering that a long-feared natural feedback loop for warming appears to be developing.

A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is reporting an increasing volume of carbon dioxide entering the air from thawing permafrost in the Alaskan tundra.

permafrost

Because Alaska is warming, the permafrost is thawing earlier and deeper in the spring and summer and refreezing later in the fall and winter, allowing more time for decomposing plant material to release CO2. Since 1975, there has been a 73 percent increase in the amount of carbon lost from the Alaskan tundra in the months of October through December. More CO2 means more warming which means more thawing which means more carbon release which means more warming and around and around you go.

There had been a hope that the "greening" of Alaska - because the warming also means a longer growing season - would allow the area to be a carbon sink, as growing plants suck up the CO2, but this latest study says that the loss from the thawing permafrost is outweighing that gain.

Still, still, still there is hope. Because it is possible - not possible in the sense of hypothetical but possible in the sense of yes it can be done - to move the United States to an economy powered entirely by renewable energy by 2050 and yes that includes heating and transportation. In 2014, an organization called The Solutions Project developed state-by-state proposals for a shift in the US to all renewables, varying by what mix would be most efficient in each case.

And it's not even just the US: It is technologically feasible to accomplish this for the entire world. A 2015 Greenpeace study done in conjunction with the German Aerospace Centre found that, in the words of the study:

There are no major economic or technical barriers to moving towards 100% renewable energy by 2050.

It also found that the world could be producing 85 percent of its energy needs with renewables in just 15 years.

The investment involved in this would be substantial, on the order of $1 trillion a year, but that may not be as much as it sounds when you consider that in 2015 the US GDP was over $18 trillion and the world product was over $74 trillion.

Even better, the study estimates that the costs would be covered by the slightly over $1 trillion a year in savings on fuel costs alone. What's more, such a project would create 20 million jobs over the next 15 years and would provide energy access to the one-third of the people of the world who currently lack it.

So yes, it is possible and according to a group called "Go 100%," 12 Countries, 70 Cities, 62 Regions or States - including major countries such as Denmark and Germany - have pledged to go 100% renewable by 2050.

And even as TheRump considers dropping out of the Paris agreement - which technically he can't do until November 2019 but he can just refuse to take any steps to implement it - the United States is already about halfway to meeting its commitment under that accord to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

All of which means that the only thing lacking for such a transition to an all-renewable economy is the political will.

Some in the Congress are trying to find that will. On April 27, two days before the Peoples Climate Marches, Senators Jeff Merkley, Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey, and Cory Booker introduced the "100 by '50 Act," laying out a plan to move the US to all renewables by 2050.

It involves phasing out fossil-fuel generated electricity supply in favor of renewables, electrifying transportation and heating systems by means including a requirement for zero-emission vehicles, ending new fossil fuel investments such as the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, ending subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, placing tariffs on imported carbon-intensive products, and creating and auctioning Climate Bonds to raise extra funds for projects - while at the same time making sure that poor and disadvantaged communities share in the benefits and workers affected by the changes are protected.

Yes, yes, yes, it's true, this bill will go nowhere in the current Congress - but nonetheless it is important that, again, the ground has been staked out; this can serve as a rallying cry, an organizing tool; this is not "gee, can we maybe cut back a little, please, if it's not too much trouble," this is calling for what should be done, can be done, not calling for what you maybe think might possibly get passed this session. And that is to the good.

All in all, things still seem dark to me with regard to climate change. I still have no faith that people - that Americans in particular, who often seem more inclined to fight than switch to renewables - can be roused from their corporate- and media-induced slumber in time to make a difference.

But at a time when at least a few Senators are waking up, when Bloomberg has opened a new website devoted to the idea that climate change is an economic issue, when sixteen Fortune 100 companies have signed a letter to the White House calling on the US to stay in the Paris Agreement, and when even Tiffany & Company, for pity's sake, can take out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the same thing, even an old cynic like me can't help but feel a little hope.

What's Left #21

What's Left
for the week of May 11-17, 2017

This week:

The goal is universal health care
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/cbo-coverage-numbers
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/05/05/pre-existing-conditions-american-obamacare-repeal-american-health-care-act/22071483/
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/676
https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2017/04/26/medicare-all-bill-reaches-record-breaking-104-co-sponsors-congress
http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/325814-sanders-says-he-will-introduce-medicare-for-all-bill

The USPS is under attack again
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/05/08/three-government-programs-that-are-dangerously-in-the-red/22076644/
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/search?q=usps

Bad news and some hope about global climate change
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/04/28/epa-website-removes-climate-science-site-from-public-view-after-two-decades/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/05/09/earth-could-break-through-a-major-climate-threshold-in-the-next-15-years-scientists-warn/?wpisrc=nl_p1most-partner-1&wpmm=1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/05/08/alaskas-tundra-is-filling-the-atmosphere-with-carbon-dioxide-worsening-climate-change/?utm_term=.1dea03a03b9d
http://thesolutionsproject.org/
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/february/fifty-states-renewables-022414.html
http://newatlas.com/united-states-renewable-energy-2050/37938/
http://www.ecowatch.com/100-renewable-energy-possible-by-2050-says-greenpeace-report-1882097113.html
https://thinkprogress.org/this-report-says-the-world-can-go-100-percent-renewable-by-2050-19062448be80
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD
http://www.go100percent.org/cms/
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/index.php?page=view&type=99&nr=24&menu=1449
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/paris-agreement_us_5908f524e4b05c397683d404
https://www.merkley.senate.gov/news/press-releases/merkley-sanders-markey-booker-introduce-landmark-legislation-to-transition-united-states-to-100-clean-and-renewable-energy
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-05-04/the-jersey-shore-would-rather-fight-flooding-with-walls-than-retreat
https://mediamatters.org/blog/2017/04/21/bloomberg-editors-new-climate-website-climate-change-fundamentally-economic-story/216145
https://www.c2es.org/docUploads/business-letter-white-house-paris-agreement-final-04-26-2017.pdf
http://www.glamour.com/story/tiffany-and-co-makes-a-strong-statement-against-president-donald-trump?mbid=synd_aollife

For the Record: Vermont legislature approves recreational pot
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/05/10/vermont-legislature-approves-marijuana-legalization-bill/22080534/

For the Record: Six states celebrate fighting for slavery
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/05/10/confederate-memorial-day-plane-flag-south-carolina/22080075/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_Memorial_Day

For the Record: The most common description of TheRump in a national poll is "idiot"
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/05/10/poll-trump-idiot-buffoon-bigot-narcissist-unqualified-stupid-crazy-disaster/22080411/
https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2456

For the Record: Chelsea Manning is being freed next week
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/09/politics/chelsea-manning-release-from-prison/index.html