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Magic Mike: How Bloomberg became the world’s greenest mayor

green4us

Is Michael Bloomberg America’s climate hero? Wikimedia Commons It has become a common assertion, repeated ad nauseum by hack pundits such as yours truly, that New York City’s outgoing mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has become one of the world’s most forceful opponents of climate change. Journalists typically refer to Bloomberg’s blueprint for reducing New York’s carbon footprint and adapting to climate change, known as PlaNYC. But such passing references typically fail to offer details of how exactly Bloomberg has done it: What are the components of New York’s sustainability agenda, and what is the story behind its adoption? Into that void steps InsideClimate News with its e-book, Bloomberg’s Hidden Legacy: Climate Change and the Future of New York City. In almost 25,000 words, InsideClimate reporters Katherine Bagley and Maria Gallucci have brought us the definitive account of Bloomberg’s greatest achievement. Keep reading at Grist.

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Magic Mike: How Bloomberg became the world’s greenest mayor

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Do Governors Make the Best Presidents?

Mother Jones

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Apparently the latest hot topic of conversation among our nation’s governors is the indisputable merit of electing a governor as our next president. I don’t have a lot to say about this. Instead, I offer only the brief table of postwar presidents below. If anyone can find any reason to prefer one column over the other, I’m all ears.

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Do Governors Make the Best Presidents?

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Winning Elections is Good, But How Will Republicans Do It?

Mother Jones

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Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru have a timid—but lengthy!—piece in National Review today that takes to task the purists in the Republican Party who think that the road to victory is always and everywhere to demand more confrontation, more obduracy, and more loyalty to the one true cause:

It is a politics of perpetual intra-Republican denunciation. It focuses its fire on other conservatives as much as on liberals. It takes more satisfaction in a complete loss on supposed principle than in a partial victory, let alone in the mere avoidance of worse outcomes. It has only one tactic — raise the stakes, hope to lower the boom — and treats any prudential disagreement with that tactic as a betrayal. Adherents of this brand of conservative politics are investing considerable time, energy, and money in it, locking themselves in unending intra-party battle.

….The need for greater purity, the ever-present danger of betrayal: These have been long-standing themes on the right. When our people get power, they immediately stop being our people, the great conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans quipped decades ago. Yet this assessment of what ails conservatism has grown less and less true with time.

This is a good point. The tea party faction seems unable to recognize that, in fact, they have very clearly taken over the Republican Party. Moderate Republicans are no longer a real force. For better or worse, right wingers finally have the party they’ve always wanted—or at least as much of it as any faction is ever likely to get in real life.

But now that they have it, they’ve discovered that it isn’t doing them any good, and Lowry and Ponnuru identify the obvious reason for this: We live in a democracy. The tea partiers may control the Republican Party, but they don’t command majority support among the American public. Without that, they’ll never be able to advance their agenda, and the more apocalyptic they get, the less likely they are to ever win the kind of broad-based victories that Ronald Reagan did.

So why do I call this piece timid? Not because it’s full of caveats about how understandable the frustrations of the tea partiers are or how much their hearts are in the right place. That’s standard boilerplate in a piece like this.

No, it’s timid because, in the end, Lowry and Ponnuru pull back, seemingly unwilling to make any truly robust recommendations for changing things:

For the country to be governed conservatively, however, conservatives have to win more elections….There is no alternative to seeking to expand the conservative base beyond its present inadequate numbers and to win the votes of people who aren’t yet conservatives or are not yet conservatives on all issues. The defunders often said that those who predicted their failure were “defeatists.” Yet it is they who have given in to despair. They are the ones who entertain the ideas that everything has gotten worse; that the last few decades of conservative thought and action have been for nothing; that engagement in politics as traditionally conceived is hopeless; that government programs, once begun, must corrupt the citizenry so that they can never be ended or reformed; that the country will soon be past the point of regeneration, if it is not there already.

OK, but how will conservatives win more elections? L&P explicitly disavow the notion of the party turning left, suggesting only that they’re skeptical of “the idea that moving in the opposite direction will in itself pay political dividends.” But if they have no concrete suggestions—either in policy or tone or messaging or something—then this is just mush. When Democrats went through this kind of introspection in the 80s, the DLC, for better or worse, drove a conversation that included lots of painfully concrete ideas. That produced plenty of noxious infighting, but it also produced results.

It would be fascinating to see National Review start to play the same kind of role on the right. That’s unlikely, I suppose, but one way or another, they need to choose up sides. It’s easy and obvious to say that Republicans need to win electoral victories if they want to promote the conservative cause. The bigger question is what Republicans need to do in order to win those victories. Tackling that question in a forthright way will make NR a lot more enemies, but it might, eventually, also produce some actual electoral victories.

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Winning Elections is Good, But How Will Republicans Do It?

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America to EPA: We missed you, babe

America to EPA: We missed you, babe

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During the 16-day federal government shutdown, clueless GOP staffers posted a top 10 list of “Reasons The Government Shutdown Isn’t All Bad” on a Senate website. The list mostly celebrated the fact that the EPA’s work was crippled by the budget spat.

“Fewer bureaucrats at the EPA makes it less likely that they’ll make up science on new regulations,” was among the witticisms listed on the blog post. The post then rattled off fantastical agency scandals that sounded cribbed from a fossil fuel industry dream journal.

But polling commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council over the Columbus Day weekend revealed that EPA bashing is unlikely to win much public sympathy for the Republicans. The vast majority of people polled were bummed out that fighting in Washington had prevented the EPA from doing its job.

In Virginia, where the environment is routinely trampled by mining companies and power plant owners, 68 percent of people polled [PDF] said they opposed the furloughing of EPA inspectors. Nationally, 71 percent [PDF] were in opposition. From an NRDC blog post:

The public broadly backs environmental protection — 60 percent of Americans think the EPA is doing just the right amount or not enough to protect the environment — but an even greater percentage of Americans opposed EPA being shut down. That phenomenon also carried through in Speaker Boehner’s own district, where 52 percent think EPA is doing just the right amount or not enough, while 58 percent oppose it being shut down. Even more oppose an EPA shutdown when reminded of specific EPA responsibilities.

That includes EPA’s responsibility to address climate change. 65 percent of Americans are opposed to a shutdown that “interferes with [EPA] developing carbon pollution limits.” This sentiment holds firmly across every state and district we examined. It’s even higher in Maine and North Carolina where 70 percent of respondents opposed this interference. Even in John Boehner’s district, 62 percent of constituents are opposed to the interference.

This poll should also be a warning to once-moderate House Republicans who have thrown in their lot with the Tea Party radicals. Take for example, Rep. Leonard Lance of New Jersey, who waffled on the shutdown. In his district, 63 percent of constituents oppose the shutdown and almost the same amount — 62 percent — opposed EPA being shuttered. Even a majority of Republicans in Lance’s district opposed EPA being shut down.

More highlights from the national poll:

NRDC


Source
Key findings from polls of Americans’ views about work of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, NRDC
Poll Holds Warning for Tea Party Republicans: Don’t Try This Again, NRDC

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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America to EPA: We missed you, babe

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GMO corn crop trials suspended in Mexico

GMO corn crop trials suspended in Mexico

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Sin maíz transgénico permitido.

Mexico, birthplace of modern maize, will remain (virtually) free of genetically modified varieties for now.

A moratorium on the growing of GMO corn has been in place in Mexico since 1988, but the government has recently made moves to allow the practice. That raised the ire of activists, farmers, and human rights groups — dozens of whom filed a lawsuit seeking to block field trials by Monsanto and other international companies.

Last week, a Mexican federal judge issued an order that suspends field trials from moving forward, citing risks of imminent environmental harm.

GMO corn imports will continue to be allowed. For Mexico, this is a battle over farming practices and environmental impacts, such as pesticide use and damage caused to insects; it’s not a fight about the safety of eating genetically modified food. From a report in Agriculture.com:

“The issue at hand relates to cultivation,” Andrew Conner, manager of global technology for the U.S. Grains Council told Agriculture.com Wednesday. …

The release of genetically modified corn is a controversial issue in Mexico, the birthplace of corn. It is the home to scores of traditional corn varieties as well as its wild grass ancestor, teosinte. And scientists have found low levels of modified genes in native corn, even though a moratorium on planting genetically modified corn has been in effect since 1998.

The Mexican government has been moving toward approval of planting genetically modified corn in an effort to increase the crop’s production in a nation that imports almost a third of the corn it consumes, mostly for livestock feed.

In a press release by La Coperacha, one of the NGOs involved in the lawsuit, human rights activist Miguel Concha said the ruling reflected the fact that Mexico is legally obliged to protect human rights from the economic interests of big business.

The groups say they aim to eventually turn the suspension into an outright ban.


Source
Acción colectiva de ciudadanos y organizaciones logra medida judicial histórica, La Coperacha press release
No export effect likely from Mexican GMO ban, Agriculture.com

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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GMO corn crop trials suspended in Mexico

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