Author Archives: JenniHarlow

Here’s What Today’s Primary Voters Think About the Planet’s Most Important Issue

Mother Jones

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Residents of five Northeastern states are voting Tuesday in crucial presidential primary contests. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton has a chance to all but clinch the nomination with a strong showing. On the Republican side, Donald Trump is looking for massive victories that could put him one step closer to securing a majority of the delegates at the GOP convention in Cleveland.

The presidential election will, of course, have enormous implications for a range of issues—but some of the biggest consequences will relate to the fight against global warming. Clinton essentially wants to continue President Barack Obama’s climate policies. Her opponent, Bernie Sanders, wants to go even further by enacting a carbon tax. Trump and his closest rival, Ted Cruz, are both outspoken climate change deniers. John Kasich is somewhat less extreme on the issue but has still made contradictory statements about the science, and he refuses to commit to any meaningful action.

But what do the voters think?

Back on March 1—as a dozen or so states around the country voted on Super Tuesday—we pointed out that the electorate that day contained an awful lot of deniers. Less than half of adults in those states—48 percent—agreed with the scientific consensus that humans are mostly responsible for recent warming, according to data from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Drawing from more than 13,000 interviews, the Yale researchers used a complicated statistical model to estimate the 2014 views of residents of every state, county, and congressional district on key climate science and policy questions.

This Tuesday, the voters look a bit different than they did on March 1. Residents of the Northeast hold some of the country’s most progressive (and accurate) views on climate change, according to the Yale study. Small majorities in most of Tuesday’s state’s—as well as in nearby New York, which voted last week—embrace the scientific consensus.

Here’s another way to crunch the same data. The researchers combined people who said global warming is caused mostly by humans with those who attribute it to both humans and nature. They also combined two kinds of climate science deniers: people who think the warming is natural and those who don’t think the planet is getting warmer at all.

Those numbers look pretty good for science, especially when you compare them with those from some of the Southern states that voted on Super Tuesday.

But here’s the thing: Trump may insist global warming is a “hoax,” but that isn’t stopping him from winning in states where most people understand he’s wrong. He won Massachusetts and Vermont on Super Tuesday. He won overwhelmingly in New York last week. And he’s leading in the polls in every state voting Tuesday.

That’s probably because voters in Republican primaries don’t have the same views on science as the average resident of their states. In New Hampshire, for instance, large majorities of Democrats and independents say humans are the main cause of global warming. But only a small minority of Republicans agree. Trump won New Hampshire by 20 percentage points.

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Here’s What Today’s Primary Voters Think About the Planet’s Most Important Issue

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Donald Trump’s 47 Percent Moment

Mother Jones

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Last week, Mitt Romney, the twice-failed GOP presidential candidate, delivered a speech that blasted Donald Trump, the current Republican front-runner, calling the tycoon “a phony, a fraud” and citing Trump’s “dishonesty” and his “bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.” It was a clear move on Romney’s part to rally the GOP establishment against the celebrity real estate mogul whose endorsement he warmly embraced during the 2012 campaign. Naturally, Trump responded in kind. Within hours, at a campaign rally in Portland, Maine, he lashed out at Romney.

Trump noted that Romney had “failed horribly” four years ago. He claimed that Romney had begged Trump to endorse him in that race: “I could have said, ‘Mitt, drop to your knees.’ He would have dropped to his knees.” His audience roared with laughter. And Trump went on:

It was a campaign that should have never been lost. You’re running against a failed president. He came up with the 47 percent. He demeaned 47 percent of the people in our country, right? The famous 47 percent. Once that was said, I’ll be honest, once that was said, a lot of people thought it was over for him.

On Monday, after Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) assailed him, Trump returned to this line of attack, tweeting, “Lindsey Graham is all over T.V., much like failed 47% candidate Mitt Romney. These nasty, angry, jealous failures have ZERO credibility!”

In Trump’s view, Romney lost partly due to the infamous remarks, reported by Mother Jones, in which Romney said at a private fundraiser that 47 percent of Americans “believe that they are victims…that government has a responsibility to care for them…that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” Romney noted that these people do not pay income taxes and do not “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” His comments indicted nearly half of the nation as moochers and freeloaders who do not contribute to society.

For Trump, that insult helped doom Romney’s campaign. But last year, Trump voiced a strikingly similar sentiment. During a June 2015 one-on-one interview on Fox News, host Sean Hannity asked Trump if he, as president, could get 50 million Americans out of poverty. Of course, Trump said, and he added:

I would create incentives for people to work. People don’t have an incentive. They make more money by sitting there doing nothing than they make if they have a job. We have to create incentives that they actually do much better by working. Right now they have a disincentive. They have an incentive not to work.

This was a routine conservative contention: Assistance programs cause people not to work. And Hannity pressed Trump: Would he insist that recipients of food stamps, welfare, and other government assistance “have to work for it?” Trump replied that this could be necessary, and he remarked that Bill Clinton had pushed such a approach with welfare reform. Then Trump made a broader point:

The problem we have right now—we have a society that sits back and says we don’t have to do anything. Eventually, the 50 percent cannot carry—and it’s unfair to them—but cannot carry the other 50 percent.

So one half of the nation is carrying the other half, and the attitude of those in the latter half is, “we don’t have to do anything.” This is darn close to Romney’s 47 percent analysis, but 3 percentage points greater. Trump was depicting 50 percent of Americans as people seeking a free ride.

Both Romney’s and Trump’s comments hail back to a right-wing talking point—this is a country of takers and makers—that distorts actual statistics. In 2011, 46.4 percent of US households did not pay federal income taxes. (The number was higher that year than the usual 40 percent or so, due to the recession that hit during the Bush-Cheney years.) This is the stat that Romney had obviously had in mind. The problem comes—the demeaning, as Trump would put it—when folks who do not pay income taxes are equated with lazy ne’er-do-wells merely angling for a handout. That’s not what the numbers show. In 2011, 60 percent of those who didn’t pay income taxes did pay taxes for Social Security and Medicare. These people essentially did not make enough money to qualify for the income tax. Another 22 percent of the people who didn’t pay income taxes were retirees. Only 8 percent of US households paid no federal taxes at all. According to a Washington Post analysis, that was “usually because they’re either unemployed or on disability or students or are very poor.”

So many of the those who didn’t pay income taxes are working and paying some form of tax, and many others within this group—pensioners and poor people—shouldn’t be expected to pay income taxes. These people are not shirkers who say, “We don’t have to do anything.”

But Trump, like Romney, seems to believe the country is indeed equally split between strivers and loafers. And last year Trump had no reluctance in demeaning 50 percent, not 47 percent.

His comment, not surprisingly, didn’t cause a stir. He’s been spraying a fire hose of outrageous remarks since he entered the presidential race, and this one got lost in the wash. It’s also a statement fully in sync with his arrogant schtick that divides the world into winners and losers. Though he’s now blasting Romney for the original 47 percent insult to Americans, Trump, too, apparently views many Americans as parasites. The only difference is that his estimate is higher.

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Donald Trump’s 47 Percent Moment

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Scientists Hooked Up an Inflatable Bag to a Cow Stomach. The Timelapse Video Is Insane.

Mother Jones

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Cows are gassy beasts. And this gas is bad for the planet. Last year, my colleague Josh Harkinson detailed just how dangerous this gas has become in our atmosphere:

Cows are already the nation’s single largest source of methane, a greenhouse gas produced by oil extraction, decomposing trash, and the guts of grazing animals that’s as much as 105 times more potent than carbon dioxide. A single cow farts and belches enough methane to match the carbon equivalent of the average car. According to a 2006 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report, the world’s 1.4 billion cows produce 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases—more than the entire transportation sector.

Our hunger for beef is a big problem for the climate: More cows, more methane, faster warming. Now we have a sensational new visual way to understand exactly how much methane we’re talking about, thanks to a new documentary called Racing Extinction, which airs on Discovery Channel Wednesday night in 220 countries and territories around the world—a date designed to coincide with the early days of the high-stakes UN climate summit, where diplomats are attempting to forge a new global deal to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

To measure just how much a single cow emits every day, scientists at the National Institute of Agricultural Technology hooked up inflatable plastic bags to cows’ stomachs. Then they fed them. And then, they watched the methane bags inflate. Check out the time-lapse:

Look, they even have special belch-backpacks:

Watch the entire fascinating segment below, courtesy of Discovery. And check out the documentary Wednesday night, at 9 pm ET:

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Scientists Hooked Up an Inflatable Bag to a Cow Stomach. The Timelapse Video Is Insane.

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