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By law, New York has to protect communities from climate change. Cuomo’s budget ignores that.

Nearly 300 climate activists from across New York State gathered in the halls of the capitol building in Albany late last month during an environmental conservation hearing. They formally submitted testimonies to the committee, spoke with Assembly members, and rallied inside the building, occupying the lobby and one of the grand staircases. They were there to tell New York Governor Andrew Cuomo that they’d noticed he had some unfinished business with regard to the state’s climate policy.

The rally came after Cuomo released his 2021 budget proposal. Although it included a $33 billion, five-year plan to fight climate change, environmental groups were surprised to see that the budget didn’t mention anything about protecting vulnerable communities from the climate crisis — even though the state is required to do just that under the Empire State’s ambitious new climate law, Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA).

The CLCPA, which commits the state to net-zero emissions by 2050, was signed last July and officially went into effect on January 1, 2020. The final version of the bill was not exactly what advocates had hoped it would be. They envisioned it as the state’s version of the national Green New Deal: sweeping legislation that would curtail the state’s greenhouse gas emissions and transition to a greener economy while also addressing racial and economic issues. But last-minute changes made by Cuomo slashed the original bill’s social justice and labor provisions — making it look a lot less like the federal Green New Deal.

What the CLCPA does contain, however, are provisions to address climate impacts on disadvantaged communities. The law says that state agencies, authorities, and entities shall direct resources “in a manner designed to achieve a goal for disadvantaged communities to receive forty percent of the overall benefits of spending on clean energy and energy efficiency programs, projects, or investments” and “no less than thirty-five percent.” But Cuomo’s spending plan for fiscal year 2021 does not mention anything with regard to that provision.

In a letter to state representatives, New York Renews — a statewide coalition of nearly 200 advocacy groups — expressed their disappointment in Cuomo’s spending plan. “You passed a law designed to protect communities, but the governor’s budget does not include the funding necessary to do so,” the group wrote. “The governor’s status quo climate budget ignores disadvantaged communities as if the CLCPA was never signed into law.”

The $33 billion climate portion of Cuomo’s budget proposal includes plans to invest in resilient infrastructure, planting more trees, preserve fish and wildlife habitats, expand renewable energy, install electric-vehicle charge stations, ban single-use plastics, and permanently ban fracking in the state. But for New York Renews, these proposals don’t go far enough because they don’t address the unequal impacts of climate change and environmental contamination.

“Low-income communities and communities of color across New York State have consistently faced the worst impacts of pollution and climate change, yet the Governor’s budget does not meet the standard set by the CLCPA that at least 35 percent of climate and energy spending target frontline communities,” NY Renews coalition coordinator Stephan Edel told Grist in an email. “This is a grave oversight, but there’s still time to fix it.”

As part of the solution, NY Renews is pushing for the Climate and Community Investment Act, which would fine corporate polluters. The money generated by that fine would go to large-scale renewable energy projects, updates to the electric grid, environmental justice community projects, energy-efficient transit systems, helping low-income New Yorkers with their energy bills, and providing financial assistance to workers and nearby communities when fossil fuel infrastructure closes. Since it will take time for the Climate and Community Investment Act to go into effect and begin collecting money from polluters, New York Renews is demanding a $1 billion Climate and Community Investment Fund to be added to this year’s budget to jumpstart spending to benefit low-income communities.

In response to a request for comment from Grist, a representative for Cuomo said in an email that state agencies, in coordination with a new Climate Justice Working Group, will figure out how to devote at least 35 percent of clean energy funding to disadvantaged communities as required by the CLCPA.

State budget negotiations between Cuomo and the legislature will continue through March and will be finalized by March 31. New York Renews is committed to pushing its demands: On February 28, the group is set to gather around 300 activists to visit state legislators within their districts to talk about the budget and the Climate and Community Investment Act. It also plans to start working with the Climate Action Council, a policymaking body that was created under the CLCPA and is set to convene for the first time this month to begin setting specific emissions reductions targets for the state.

“We’re hopeful that the Assembly and Senate budgets will include new spending for climate justice and frontline communities, and that those provisions will be included in the final New York state budget,” Edel said. “Make no mistake, we’ll continue to fight for climate, jobs, and justice at every step of the process.”

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By law, New York has to protect communities from climate change. Cuomo’s budget ignores that.

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The Bundy bros are back at it.

The Republican candidate on Monday promoted his plan to purportedly save the government $100 billion over eight years. It involves cutting all federal spending on climate change programs, both domestic and international.

“We’re going to put America first,” Trump said at a Michigan rally. “That includes canceling billions in climate change spending for the United Nations, a number Hillary wants to increase, and instead use that money to provide for American infrastructure including clean water, clean air, and safety.”

As Bloomberg BNA reports, Trump didn’t give a precise tally for how he got to $100 billion:

[The] campaign press office said that the figure combined an estimate of what the Obama administration had spent on climate-related programs, the amount of U.S. contributions to an international climate fund that Trump would cancel, and a calculation of what Trump believes would be savings to the economy if Obama’s and Clinton’s climate policies were reversed.

That math, however, doesn’t work out: According to a 2014 report from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, a global temperature increase of just 3 degrees C would cost the United States 1 percent of GDP, or $150 billion a yearby damaging public health and infrastructure and battling sea-level rise, stronger storms, declining crop yields, and increased drought and wildfires.

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The Bundy bros are back at it.

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Flame Retardants in Your Baby’s Crib Mattress? Here’s How to Avoid It

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Flame Retardants in Your Baby’s Crib Mattress? Here’s How to Avoid It

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The 6 Dumbest Government Shutdown Myths

Mother Jones

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The government shutdown is awful. It’s awful in a lot of different ways—to kids with cancer, to firefighters, to domestic violence centers, to goats. Another way in which this awful manifests itself is through a parade of misinformation and bad memes about what’s going on during this impasse. Here are six of the dumbest myths you’ve probably heard about the government shutdown:

1. Obama closed the ocean.

On Saturday, Breitbart’s Mike Flynn posted a piece, titled “Feds Try to Close the Ocean Because of Shutdown”, that reads, “before the weekend, the National Park Service informed charter boat captains in Florida that the Florida Bay was ‘closed’ due to the shutdown.” A bunch of people started tweeting about how Obama had shut down the ocean, including this Republican congressman from Arizona:

And on Monday, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly had the cast of Fox’s The Five on her new show to talk about what Miley Cyrus looks like when she twerks, but also about Obama closing the ocean.

Barack Obama did not close the ocean. Officials are indeed restricting access (fishing, for instance) to Florida Bay, a body of water that’s part of a national park. Florida Bay encompasses roughly a half-million acres, but exceptions are being made for transit, access for emergencies, and access for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to monitor the population of algae. “It’s an exaggeration to state that Obama has tried to shut down the entire ocean—or even to suggest that he has shuttered the Atlantic Ocean or all of the waters in the Keys,” PolitiFact.com concludes. “Tourists and locals can continue to fish, swim and play in the ocean, even in the Keys.”

2. Obama is personally paying to keep a Muslim culture museum open.

During the weekend edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Anna Kooiman claimed that President Obama offered to pay “out of his own pocket” to keep the International Museum of Muslim Cultures open during the shutdown—while refusing to allow World War II veterans to visit their memorial in Washington, DC. Here’s the clip:

This would be outrageous and bizarre—if the claim weren’t based on a piece published on a satirical website. Kooiman later apologized on Twitter, and Fox is set to issue an on-air correction this Saturday.

3. Obama shut down the Amber Alert program.

Conservative bloggers were appalled this week to find that the federal government nixed Amber Alerts during the shutdown. Though the website was down briefly, the program itself was never shuttered. Also, the child abduction alert system is actually a state-based program, two alerts went out during the shutdown, and the website is now back up and running. So that’s that.

4. NASA won’t tell you about world-ending asteroids because #shutdown.

This one tweet kicked off a swirl of speculation and bad headlines about how NASA’s asteroid detection staff had been axed—even though the Asteroid Watch Twitter feed clarified that many observatories and astronomers would continue to monitor the skies. Ninety-seven percent of NASA staff was furloughed, and government social-media accounts took hits across the board. But there’s no reason to think that government officials wouldn’t be able to tell America that a Ben Affleck movie was becoming terrifying reality just because they aren’t currenlty allowed to do it on Twitter.

5. Priests are being threatened with arrest.

“In a stunning development, some military priests are facing arrest if they celebrate mass or practice their faith on military bases during the federal government shutdown,” the Daily Caller reported on Friday, with the provocative headline, “Priests threatened with arrest if they minister to military during shutdown.” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) tweeted the story, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor responded:

The Caller story was picked up by various right-winger pundits and bloggers, including Fox News radio host Todd Starnes, who interpreted this as yet another one of Obama’s attacks on religious freedom. This all quickly morphed into the meme that Obama was threatening military chaplains and priests with jail time. This simply isn’t the case, and the Obama administration has yet to initiate any kind of crackdown on Catholic priests. On Saturday, the House passed a measure allowing military chaplains to lead Sunday mass without fear of penalty. The Senate has yet to take up the bill.

6. Shutdowns are “normal.”

On a recent episode of CNN’s Crossfire, co-host Newt Gingrich (who, as former Speaker of the House, led Republicans during the last big shutdown) claimed that shutdown-related hysteria was overblown. “There is an amazing amount of hysteria and vitriol over what is a normal part of the constitutional process,” Gingrich said on September 30. “The government shut down 12 times under Democratic House speaker Tip O’Neill. It was only shut down twice while I was speaker.”

The stated number of shutdowns under O’Neill is misleading, given that they were very short and that nearly half of them weren’t technically government shutdowns. Of the seven genuine shutdowns of the O’Neill era, the longest lasted three days, and the cumulative duration of all seven was 13 days—half the combined length of Gingrich’s two shutdowns (26 days). Via PolitiFact:

In addition, three of those happened primarily on weekends, further minimizing their impact.

A one-day shutdown in October 1982, the Washington Post recently noted, stemmed from a particularly innocuous reason: Congress delayed a session because President Reagan had invited lawmakers to a White House barbecue, and Democrats were holding a $1,000-a-plate fundraising dinner. The funding question was resolved the next day.

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The 6 Dumbest Government Shutdown Myths

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Watch: Rush Limbaugh On Why Climate Change Is Like Affirmative Action

Mother Jones

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Friday morning in Stockholm, the the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a key section of its Fifth Assessment Report on global warming, which found that climate change is “unequivocal,” that humans are “extremely likely” to be the cause, and that the recent slowdown in the rate that surface temperatures are rising doesn’t contradict any of this. (Read a summary of the report or our live blog from Sweden.)

Awesome graphic: The Rush Limbaugh show

Rush Limbaugh would beg to differ. On his show on Friday, Limbaugh launched into a sprawling, 15-minute tirade against the IPCC, Al Gore, and affirmative action—all at the same time. Limbaugh argued that climate scientists and activists are perpetuating the global warming “hoax” because “the longer this goes, the richer they get.” At one point, Limbaugh likened this to Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who, he said, “would be out of business” if racism ended in the United States. (Full transcript here.)

Later, Limbaugh said that the global warming “narrative” is “never gonna end,” adding, “Just like affirmative action will never end” (emphasis added):

If I’m in a global warming movement, and it hasn’t warmed up in the last 15 years, I’d claim credit for it. I say it’s all the hybrids. It’s the reduction in coal! I claim that everything I’ve been advocating is the reason, and then I’d say,”We need to do more of this.” I mean, if their objective is to downsize this country and downsize our lifestyle and downsize our progress, we had a golden opportunity.

Fifteen years of no warming! They could have claimed credit and probably had a pretty good chance of being supported by the media in advocating further lifestyle change. But they didn’t, did they? Because they don’t want the issue changing in any way. They don’t want the premise changed. The premise is it’s getting warmer and we’re causing it, and nothing is gonna change that narrative. Nothing. Even if they can claim success in it.

The narrative, the template is, “It’s getting warmer, we’re causing it, we have to pay a price,” and it’s never gonna end. Just like affirmative action will never end. There will never be a day where somebody says, “You know what? Okay, we’ve had enough reverse racism now that we’ve evened the score, and we’re gonna get rid of it and we’re now in a level playing field.” They (sic) will never happen. The price will never be paid.

Limbaugh wasn’t the only one railing against the IPCC’s climate change report, of course. Rassmusen Reports ran a commentary by conservative pundit Michael Barone that compared global warming believers to a religious sect run amok:

Religion has ritual. Global warming alarmism has recycling and Earth Day celebrations.

Some religions persecute heretics. Some global warming alarmists identify “denialists” and liken them to Holocaust deniers.

Religions build grand places of worship. Global warming alarmists promote the construction of windmills and solar farms that produce uneconomic and intermittent electricity.

Global warming alarmism even has indulgences like the ones Martin Luther protested. You can buy carbon offsets to gain forgiveness for travel on carbon-emitting private jet aircraft.

Limbaugh and Barone’s comments are extreme, but they do highlight a persisting ideological divide between parties on climate change. According to Gallup, as of March 2013, 85 percent of Democrats think there is strong evidence that global warming exists, but only 48 percent of Republicans and 65 percent of independent voters agree.

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Watch: Rush Limbaugh On Why Climate Change Is Like Affirmative Action

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