Trump can attempt to reverse the Clean Power Plan, though that would also require lengthy court battles and a new regulatory proceeding. But he can slow the plan down, and can say he’s not going to enforce it. Executive orders and executive actions—like President Obama’s moratorium on coal leases on federal land—would be easier to overturn.
It’s possible he’ll change his mind, since he isn’t deeply ideological. But even if he doesn’t do the maximum amount of damage possible, it’s also very unlikely that he’ll do what’s needed to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Even meeting the Paris agreement, scientists say, wouldn’t go quite far enough.
The good news: Businesses, along with state and city governments, can help fill at least some of that gap and drive climate action themselves. And that’s already happening.
“We’ve got hundreds of CEOs and hundreds of the world’s biggest businesses fully committed to act on climate, both the risks and opportunities,” says Nigel Topping, head of a U.K.-based climate coalition called We Mean Business. “They’re working in a context where their competitors are all going in the same direction because of Paris and local regulations. I think largely the course has been set by major businesses.”
Last week, Walmart announced a new target to cut its emissions in line with the Paris agreement, making an 18% reduction in its own operations by 2025. By 2030, all of its suppliers will have to do the same thing, reducing emissions by a gigaton
It’s one of hundreds of major corporations to commit to climate action. Many, like Apple, Facebook, and General Motors, have committed to transitioning to 100% renewable energy (by 2015, Apple had already reached 93% renewable energy). That offsets a large amount of power that otherwise might have come from fossil fuels, and it’s also beginning to reshape how state governments think about their power grids. Continue reading “Portlandia: Climate Action was Already Local. So, Crank it to 11”
I really wasn’t a big fan of Leonard Cohen‘s later work that everyone raves about, last 30 years or so. If I’m missing something, enlighten me.
What I always remember from him is the first time I heard the song above as part of the track for “McCabe and Mrs Miller”, 1971, a Robert Altman film with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, which I happened to see at the very beginning of adolesence’ darkest period. Perfect.
I do appreciate the lyrics to “Anthem” – which are not bad advice for any of us in times like these.
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
A U.S. Muslim civil rights group said on Thursday it was monitoring reports of several incidents targeting Muslims in the United States since Republican Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday and called on the president-elect to denounce the attacks.
The reports included at least two assaults on women in Islamic head scarves, as well as racist graffiti and bullying of immigrant children, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, and other civil rights groups.
“It’s the inevitable result of the mainstreaming of Islamophobia we’ve seen in recent months with the presidential campaign,” CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said in a phone interview. “Unfortunately, it really is up to Donald Trump to repudiate this kind of bigotry.”
Trump’s campaign could not be reached for comment.
During the campaign, Trump called for banning Muslims from entering the country for security reasons. The wealthy businessman, who won his White House bid with strong support from white voters, has made calls for unity since the election.
Hooper said the president-elect’s supporters appeared to be getting a different message.
A female student in a hijab at San Diego State University was assaulted and robbed on Wednesday, the university said. The assailants were reported to have made comments to the victim in support of Trump and hurled anti-Muslim insults at her, the school said in a statement, adding the case was being investigated as a hate crime.
At San Jose State University in California, a man on Wednesday pulled at the head scarf of woman walking in a parking garage, the university said in a statement.
For those wondering how Donald Trump could ever have won a state like Michigan after it supported Barack Obama this video explains a lot.
A small group of students at Royal Oak Middle School in Detroit, Michigan broke out into chants of “Build the wall” the day after the election, according to The Detroit News.
According to a Facebook video of the event that has now gone viral, “Latino children were crying.” Dee Perez-Scott, who posted the video, said, “the taunts, the “Build that Wall” with such bullying power and hate from children to children. Just Horrifying!”
“We addressed this incident when it occurred. We are addressing it today,” Royal Oak Schools superintendent Shawn Lewis-Lakin said in a statement today. “We are working with our students to help them understand the impact of their words and actions on others in their school community,” the statement continued.
As of Thursday morning, officers from the Royal Oak Police Department have been on hand and will be throughout the day, Lt. Keith Spencer said.
Not a fan of Joe Scarborough, and he might well be asked why he did not make a point of offering as much free time to Bernie Sanders, and yes, Hillary, as he did to Donald Trump.
But he has a reasonable take above.
“We probably did put on too many of his campaign rallies,” Jeff Zucker, CNN’s president, conceded during a talk at Harvard last month, a rare admission from a media mogul that saturated television coverage of Mr. Trump, while profitable, may have yielded unexpected repercussions.
On climate, our task now is not to put our heads down, save what little we can.
Our task is to raise our vision, and fight for everything.
The Republican strategist Rick Wilson recently tweeted a Times graphicshowing that Trump had received an estimated $1.9 billion worth of free media coverage — nearly nine times what Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio each received and two and a half times what Clinton received — with the words: “Never forget. There was no movement. The media handed him this on a plate.”
Wilson’s not wrong. A Shorenstein Center survey of eight major print and broadcast outlets (including The Times) found that between June and December 2015, Trump received more than a third of all the coverage devoted to Republican presidential candidates — more than Bush and Rubio combined. If this reflects Trump’s status as, in the Shorenstein report’s words, “arguably the first bona fide media-created presidential nominee,” it also reflects a self-interest that media executives have at times not even bothered to conceal. “The money’s rolling in, and this is fun,” Les Moonves, chairman of CBS, said in February. “It’s a terrible thing to say. But bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” Perhaps no single person enabled, and benefited from, Trump’s political ascent more than the president of CNN, Jeff Zucker, who as head of NBC Entertainment greenlit “The Apprentice” and in his current role is reportedly anticipating $100 million in extra profits thanks to CNN’s wall-to-wall Trump coverage.
But then how do you explain Bernie Sanders? The Vermont senator won 22 states in the Democratic primary with less media coverage than either Bush or Rubio and more negative coverage than Trump. This year, the failings of the country’s elites, political and otherwise, unleashed in both parties forces that were beyond those elites’ control — but in only one party did they take the form of a political revolt that sanctions white nationalism, embraces conspiracism and openly considers armed resistance and extrajudicial imprisonment of its enemies.
The election also affects how we should talk about climate change. In the US, and in many other countries, opposing steps to cut carbon pollution has become a litmus test for conservative politicians. So, in this sense, conservatives now own climate change. I can just imagine the slogans, “Climate change, brought to you by your neighborhood conservatives.”
George W Bush was the worst president ever on climate change. Back then, with the reality of climate change not as widely known, it is conceivable to give voters a pass. But not now. Anyone who voted for Trump shares the responsibility for what is now inevitable.
It’s really too bad because many conservatives certainly don’t want to destroy the Earth’s climate. Furthermore, there are some conservatives who do take climate change seriously. However, when a central belief to conservatism results in decades of inaction, it makes it impossible to avoid staring facts in the face.
Conservatives own climate change.
Conservatives own the consequences of climate change.
They own the increased droughts, more severe storms, sea level rise, and floods.
They own the heat waves, the loss of habitat and the shifting climate zones.
They own the climate refugees, the resulting political strive, and climate conflicts.
A display hanging above a coffee shop in Tuscaloosa caught several people off guard, with many calling it racially insensitive.
A woman who wants to remain anonymous sent a tip about what appeared to be a figure hanging by a rope above the O’Henry’s Coffee shop in Tuscaloosa. She isn’t the only person who expressed concern.
“It looks like a man hanging, a black African-American man hanging,” Tuscaloosa residen tJames Crawford said.
He’s referencing a picture that was taken by a woman who saw something hanging from a balcony of a building on University Boulevard and Lurleen Wallace Boulevard. The coffee shop is directly below the balcony.
Trump’s embrace of babbling nonsense on the subject of climate change, for example, is a direct outgrowth of the party’s long-standing disdain for intellectualism and for science. It is horrifically new for a modern major party nominee to express racism so openly, but virtually the entire GOP has been engaged in a dedicated effort to keep black people from voting for decades now. And when you spend years telling your voters that the media peddles nothing but lies and that the president is illegitimate, you are eventually going to be saddled with someone who simply raises the stakes: The media isn’t just dishonest; it’s part of a worldwide conspiracy. The president isn’t just illegitimate; he’s a Kenyan usurper. Continue reading “Reactions to the New Landscape”
In the home stretch of the election cycle, with political polls continuing to fluctuate, one thing has remained constant throughout the entire campaign: Americans agree they want more clean energy, and wind energy in particular.
This trend began in the spring, when Wall Street investment firm Lazard, Inc. found 91 percent of likely voters support growing wind power, including 81 percent of self-described conservatives
Over the next several months, other surveys confirmed these findings, regardless of geographical location or political leanings. Results were similar in states as diverse as New York and Texas. 89 percent of New Yorkers want more wind energy, according to a Nature Conservancy poll, while 85 percent of Texans responded the same way in a poll conducted by a nonpartisan group that supports both natural gas and renewable energy.
Then there’s Iowa, whose residents know wind energy as well as anyone since the state has the most installed wind power by area in the country. In a poll of the Third District, 91 percent of voters supported wind, demonstrating the more people know about wind, the more they like it.
That’s not too surprising. Wind energy provides a financial boost for communities that host the turbines. In Van Wert County, Ohio, for example, the extra tax base paid for laptops for every student; fully funded the laptop repair and replacement fund; and built a new athletic center that was opened to every county resident.
It’s good for everyone who pays an electric bill, too. Wind-generated electricity has come down in cost by two-thirds in six years, and now saves consumers billions of dollars a year on each of the regional electric grids in America.
In a time of division, wind power continues to be an issue that unites Americans.
WASHINGTON—Hundreds of grassroots activists from across the country gathered on Capitol Hill today for the nation’s largest conservative clean-energy event. Their message: Conservatives want clean energy – and they want their representatives in Congress to lead on this issue.
It’s been said by somebody that the greatest risk to the Republican Party and the “Conservative” movement would be if Donald Trump actually won this election.
I was, of course, hoping we would not be running that experiment, but here we are.
We’d best be thinking along the lines of “never let a good crisis go to waste”.
Nothing’s going to stop the rush of technological change that is moving us toward a renewable society, but some things could slow it down.
Consider reaching out to acquaintances across the political spectrum who may be just as horrified as you are.
We have work to do.
One of the ways climate deniers have gamed the media is by taking advantage of journalistic notions of a “balanced” debate. No matter how ridiculous an assertion might be, for instance, “Barack Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya” – it would be allowed as part of serious reporting so as not to appear “biased”.
Similarly, statements like “the planet has not warmed in 16 years”, or “many scientists dispute the consensus on climate change” would be passed over as if they were somehow valid points worthy of consideration.
But Donald Trump has pushed the envelope of credibility so far off the page, that to even appear rational, reporters have had to push back forcefully when Trump or his spokespeople make statements that are simply incorrect, if not downright delusional.
Is this a positive trend that will continue? or a one-off in a weird year?
Spurred by Donald Trump’s unconventional style, controversial statements and tenuous relationship with the truth, many journalists and news organizations became more emboldened in contextualizing, fact-checking and, in some cases, editorializing on developments in the campaign.
The traditional model of “he said, she said” journalism, in which news reports simply put both sides of a story against one another, was thrown out the window in favor of a more aggressive journalism that sought to prioritize accuracy over balance.
To many journalists, political scientists and media experts, this was a welcome change: It unburdened the American press from false equivalency and made them more responsible stewards of information. To critics, especially on the right side of the political spectrum, the whole endeavor laid bare the innate biases of a coastal, liberal news media.
Whatever the interpretation, the change is real, and can be seen in front-page headlines that identify lies, cable news chyrons that fact-check in real time, and the commentary of reporters on television and social media who are more unbridled than ever before in offering their assessments on the state of the race.
“This election has made people appreciate the core value of journalism, which is getting to the truth,” Steven Ginsberg, the Washington Post’s senior politics editor, told CNNMoney. “Sometimes that means calling something a lie. Sometimes that means saying ‘that’s not true.'”
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In other words, fact-checking and analysis — once sidebars to the “news story” — have taken on larger roles in the news stories themselves.
“In 2008, there was the news story, then there was the fact-check. Now fact-checking has become the news story,” David Fahrenthold, the Washington Post reporter, said. “This is a good thing for journalism. Fact-checking is not a separate endeavor.”
“We’ve learned anew and more than ever before that fact-checking shouldn’t be a boring segment nestled in the middle of a show that viewers can skip over. It’s an essential part of the campaign,” Larry Sabato, the political scientist and professor at the University of Virginia, said.
That is a good thing for journalism, and for Americans, Ginsberg said.
“This election should be a wakeup call,” he told CNNMoney. “This is what people want the media to do.
The failure of media to address the biggest problem of our time will be a source of wonder to future historians, if there are any.
Remember, the media built the Trump candidacy from the ground up – due to their unending fascination with celebrity – and willingness to pretend that birtherism was an actual rational position for a sane, viable political candidate, and not an immediately disqualifying pathology.
But we’re told, “we don’t talk about it because no one is interested in climate change”.
Who the hell was interested in candidate Donald Trump until cable news gave him billions of dollars in free air time?
This election season has been unusual in a variety of ways. In one way, however, it’s been entirely normal, just like previous elections.
To wit: Climate change didn’t come up.
This fact barely needs explaining. It is pretty much what you’d expect, given various features of US politics and human psychology (which I get into below).
It is, nonetheless, worth taking a step back and reflecting on how batshit crazy it is.
The stakes involved are almost unthinkably large. We can say, without hyperbole, that the effects of this election will be felt centuries from now. The potential suffering of millions of people is on the line.
And a woman who has promised to see half a billion rooftop solar panels installed by the end of her first term is running against a man who believes climate change is a Chinese hoax.
Yet not a single moderator asked a single climate-related question in the three presidential debates. The media has been consumed with the email pseudo-scandal and the unending torrent of norm-destroying statements and behaviors from Trump.
Hillary Clinton is passionate about stopping global warming. Completely unprompted, she brought it into one of the three presidential debates. She highlighted that we have competitive clean energy options today that both slow global warming and create jobs.
While the design of a campaign website is organized in a certain way for various reasons, it’s also worth noting that “Environment” is the #3 issue in Clinton’s “Issues” menu bar — only behind “Economy and jobs” (which every candidate basically has to focus on in order to win) and “Education” (which isn’t a surprise since Hillary has dedicated decades to helping children and families and clearly sees it as her professional calling).
