Month: February 2018

President Trump, no surprise,  is nominating a cadre of the stupidest and most ideologically driven judicial candidates in history.

The moron above had to withdraw – but there’s plenty more where he came from,  and the GOP Senate has been more than happy to pass on the overwhelming majority so far.

Yale Environment 360:

Lawyer Richard Ayres has been fighting for the environment in federal courts for nearly five decades, but he says he’s never seen an onslaught on basic environmental protections like the one coming out of the Trump White House. Still, something scares Ayres even more than the determination of the Trump team to dismantle President Barack Obama’s climate change initiatives, shrink federally protected lands, weaken smog standards, scale back habitat for rare species, and expand drilling into the Atlantic and Arctic oceans.

What most unnerves Ayres and other veteran environmental lawyers and legal experts is the unprecedented opportunity President Trump has to fill the federal judiciary with anti-regulatory, pro-business appointees.

Trump has far more openings to fill than previous presidents, and Democrats have far less power to block his nominees than the opposition party has had in the past. And while Trump has trailed his predecessor in nominating officials for the executive branch, he has far outpaced recent presidents in selecting federal judges. So far, he’s nominated 31 judges to fill 140 open slots out of the 890 federal judgeships. By contrast, Obama had 54 openings for federal judges when he took office.

Not only will these judges potentially play a role in upholding Trump’s rollbacks of environmental protections, they likely will remain in their posts for decades after Trump leaves office. Federal judges are appointed for life, and so far Trump’s appointees are younger on average than appointees of previous presidents.

“Trump is going to appoint a lot of judges that will change the complexion of the court system for a long time,” says Ayres, who has been a prominent environmental lawyer since 1970 and was one of the founders of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It very well could be the biggest impact he has on the environment. Imagine another 10 percent of the judiciary filled with Trump appointees. Environmental organizations will fight back and litigate and save some things, but there’s a whole lot of damage that will take forever to repair — if it’s repairable.”

Among Trump’s early nominees is Ralph Erickson for the 8^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis. As a judge on the U.S. District Court in North Dakota, Erickson in 2015 blocked the implementation of President Obama’s Clean Water Rule in 13 states that had sued the Environmental Protection Agency; the rule expanded federal jurisdiction over certain streams, wetlands, and headwaters. The Trump administration plans to repeal the rule, a move opposed by conservationists but backed by many agriculture, construction, and energy groups.

Alliance for Justice:

On February 18, 2015, Judge John Tinder of Indiana took senior status from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. After Senator Daniel Coats did not return the blue slip for President Obama’s nominee to the court, Myra Selby, on May 8, 2017, President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett, a professor at the Notre Dame Law School, to fill the vacancy. Alliance for Justice opposes Barrett’s nomination.

Continue reading “Trump’s Judges: The GOP’s Slow Poison for Democracy, and the Planet”

As a sage observer noted, ” We did not leave the Stone Age because we ran out of stones.”

Astounding that, as renewable energy has become one of the most popular government programs across the political spectrum, that a GOP congress captured by the global fossil fuel industry, as well as the Gas powered Russian Oligarchy, continues to try to force the world back to the 19th century.

Washington Post:

The Trump administration is poised to ask Congress for deep budget cuts to the Energy Department’s renewable energy and energy efficiency programs, slashing them by 72 percent overall in fiscal 2019, according to draft budget documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Many of the sharp cuts would probably be restored by Congress, but President Trump’s budget, due out in February, will mark a starting point for negotiations and offer a statement of intent and policy priorities.

The document underscores the administration’s continued focus on the exploitation of fossil fuel resources— or, as Trump put it in his State of the Union address, “beautiful clean coal” — over newer renewable technologies seen as a central solution to the problem of climate change.

The Energy Department had asked the White House for more modest spending reductions to the renewable and efficiency programs, but people familiar with the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share unfinished budget information, said the Office of Management and Budget had insisted on the deeper cuts.

The cuts would also be deeper than those the Trump administration sought for the current fiscal year but was unable to implement because of the budget impasse in Congress. The federal government has been operating on a series of continuing resolutions that have maintained existing spending. The current continuing resolution expires Feb. 8.

Spending for the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) is set at $2.04 billion for the current fiscal year, which ends Oct. 1. Last year, the administration asked for st $636.1 million, a decline of more than two-thirds, although Congress did not implement the request. For 2019, the administration’s draft proposal would lower that request even further, to $575.5 million.

The document also suggests substantial staff cuts, down from 680 in the enacted 2017 budget to 450 in 2019.

“It shows that we’ve made no inroads in terms of convincing the administration of our value, and if anything, our value based on these numbers has dropped,” said one EERE employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal budget information.

Continue reading “For GOP: No Shortage of Stones”

New York Times:

CAPE TOWN — It sounds like a Hollywood blockbuster. “Day Zero” is coming to Cape Town this April. Everyone, be warned.

The government cautions that the Day Zero threat will surpass anything a major city has faced since World War II or the Sept. 11 attacks. Talks are underway with South Africa’s police because “normal policing will be entirely inadequate.” Residents, their nerves increasingly frayed, speak in whispers of impending chaos.

The reason for the alarm is simple: The city’s water supply is dangerously close to running dry.

If water levels keep falling, Cape Town will declare Day Zero in less than three months. Taps in homes and businesses will be turned off until the rains come. The city’s four million residents will have to line up for water rations at 200 collection points. The city is bracing for the impact on public health and social order.

“When Day Zero comes, they’ll have to call in the army,” said Phaldie Ranqueste, who was filling his white S.U.V. with big containers of water at a natural spring where people waited in a long, anxious line.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way for Cape Town. This city is known for its strong environmental policies, including its careful management of water in an increasingly dry corner of the world.

But after a three-year drought, considered the worst in over a century, South African officials say Cape Town is now at serious risk of becoming one of the few major cities in the world to lose piped water to homes and most businesses.

Hospitals, schools and other vital institutions will still get water, officials say, but the scale of the shut-off will be severe.

Cape Town’s problems embody one of the big dangers of climate change: the growing risk of powerful, recurrent droughts. In Africa, a continent particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, those problems serve as a potent warning to other governments, which typically don’t have this city’s resources and have done little to adapt.

For now, political leaders here talk of coming together to “defeat Day Zero.” As water levels in the dams supplying the city continue to drop, the city is scrambling to finish desalination plants and increase groundwater production. Starting in February, residents will face harsher fines if they exceed their new daily limit, which will go down to 50 liters (13.2 gallons) a day per person from 87 liters now.

Continue reading “Capetown’s “Day Zero” is a Glimpse of an Altered Earth”

As readers may know, I’m of the belief that Russia’s bold incursion into global electoral politics is not separate from the climate crisis, and the carbon bubble.

Seems appropriate to start with Radio Free Europe.

The directors of Russia’s three main intelligence and espionage agencies all traveled to the U.S. capital in recent days, in what observers said was a highly unusual occurrence coming at a time of heightened U.S.-Russian tensions.

Russia’s ambassador to the United States had earlier confirmed that Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), was in Washington in recent days to meet with U.S. officials about terrorism and other matters.

But the presence of the two other chiefs — Aleksandr Bortnikov, director of the Federal Security Service (FSB), and Lieutenant General Igor Korobov, chief of Russian General Staff’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) — was not previously known.

The Washington Post said on January 31 that Bortnikov and Korobov came to the U.S. capital last week, and that Bortnikov had met with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, as did Naryshkin.

It wasn’t clear whom Korobov may have met with.

The visits came also just days before President Donald Trump’s administration announced new actions against Russia, in compliance with a law passed overwhelmingly by Congress last summer. But the measures taken late on January 29 by the State and Treasury departments were met with disbelief by many observers, who expected asset freezes, travel bans, and other sanctions to be imposed, none of which happened.

In a radio interview in Moscow on January 30, U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman said Pompeo had indeed met with Russian spy officials, but he did not say where the meeting occurred or say specifically who attended.

“Just in the last week, he has had probably the most important meetings on counterterrorism that we’ve had in a very, very long time, at the senior levels,” Huntsman told Ekho Moskvy radiо.

A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

A CIA spokesperson declined to give details of Pompeo’s meetings. Continue reading “We Have to Talk About Russia”