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Republicans Beg Their Party to Finally Do Something About Global Warming

by tfem31x Posted on February 8, 2017

Mother Jones

You wouldn’t know it by looking at Congress or the White House, but the GOP isn’t in complete lockstep when it comes to climate change denial. The deniers just happen to be the ones who hold all the political power within the party. They drown out the other side—the conservatives who are urging their party to actually do something about global warming.

The contrast was especially clear this week. Just a day after Republicans on the House science committee accused government scientists of fabricating climate research, a group of Republican luminaries who don’t currently hold public office held a press conference calling for climate action. Specifically, they released a report—titled “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends“—in which they advocated a tax on carbon emissions.

The report, which was published by the Climate Leadership Council, calls for a tax on carbon starting at $40 per ton and rising over time, with revenue returned to taxpayers in the form of quarterly Social Security dividends. The authors include James Baker, who served as secretary of state and secretary of the treasury in the Reagan and first Bush administrations; Henry Paulson, who served as treasury secretary in the second Bush administration; Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz; and Martin Feldstein and Gregory Mankiw, who chaired the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under Reagan and George W. Bush, respectively. They see the tax as a replacement for the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations on greenhouse gases, including the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. The proposal would also include a border adjustment designed to tax products from countries that do not have a similar carbon price.

For these conservatives, a carbon tax would be like insuring against the worst risks of climate change—and they see it as a more efficient solution than EPA regulations. They describe their plan as “win-win”—even if some of them still claim to quibble with the science.

“For too long, we Republicans and conservatives haven’t occupied a real place at the table during the debate about global climate change,” Baker said at a Wednesday press conference. “Instead, we have tended to dispute the fact of climate change and particularly the extent to which man is responsible for any changes in the Earth’s climate. Now I need, in the interest of full disclosure, to tell you that I was and remain somewhat of a skeptic about the extent to which man is responsible for climate change. But I do think that…the risks are too great to ignore, and that we need some sort of insurance policy.”

None of the report’s authors currently hold public office. But Baker was scheduled to meet Wednesday with Vice President Mike Pence, Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner (who serves as a presidential adviser), and Trump adviser Gary Cohn to discuss the recommendations.

There’s a very different conversation underway in the House, where Republicans are obsessed with finding a smoking gun that would expose global warming as a myth. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who chairs the science committee, held a hearing yesterday titled “Making EPA Great Again,” during which he and his colleagues accused federal agencies of falsifying data and pushing a climate hoax.

Smith cited allegations made by former NOAA data scientist John Bates that the agency mishandled data used in a 2015 study challenging the belief that global warming had “paused” in recent years.

“Everything I have read suggests that NOAA cheated and got caught,” Smith said. At another point, he said NOAA scientists wanted to “falsify data to exaggerate global warming.” (Bates, for the record, told the Associated Press that his concerns don’t undermine the scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet and that his NOAA colleagues had done “nothing malicious.” He said the controversy is “really a story of not disclosing what you did. It’s not trumped up data in any way shape or form.”)

For the conservatives behind the Climate Leadership Council report, the debate about science isn’t the point. Benefits of a carbon tax “accrue regardless of one’s views on climate science,” the paper’s authors write.

But this message has hardly gotten anywhere with GOP politicians in the past. And even Baker cautioned against optimism that Trump’s White House will reverse course. “We have no assurance at all that this is going to be something that the administration will grab hold of,” he said. “We happen to believe that this will help make America great again, but that’s our view.”

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Republicans Beg Their Party to Finally Do Something About Global Warming

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New Research Confirms Guns on College Campuses Are Dangerous

by tfem31x Posted on November 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Eight states currently have laws that allow people to carry guns on college campuses. In 24 others, individual colleges can decide whether to allow firearms on the premises. The primary rationale for these laws, according to their supporters, is safety: School shooters, they say, are less likely to succeed in their attacks if students and teachers are armed and able to fight back.

But a new study from Johns Hopkins University shows that campus carry laws are unlikely to deter rampage shooters and may in fact lead to more injuries and deaths. Here are the main takeaways from the research:

Concealed-carry laws do not deter mass shootings

Advocates for looser gun laws have popularized the idea that armed criminals are more likely to attack in “gun free” zones where nobody can fight back against them. Colleges that ban students from carrying weapons are consequently more dangerous, according to proponents of campus carry laws. But this theory is not supported by data, the Johns Hopkins study found. From 1966 to 2015, only 12 percent of 111 high-fatality mass shootings in the United States—at college campuses or elsewhere—took place in “gun free” zones, and only 5 percent took place in “gun restricted” zones, where security guards were armed but civilians were banned from carrying weapons. Another analysis, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, drew similar conclusions: Only 13 percent of mass shootings from 2009 to 2015 occurred in gun-free or gun-restricted zones. What’s more, allowing people to carry concealed weapons has been connected with an increase in violent crime, according to researchers at the Brennan Center for Justice. They noted a 10 percent average increase in violent crime in states that adopted right-to-carry laws.

Armed civilians are not likely to stop a rampage shooter

When a mass shooting does occur, campus carry advocates say, it helps to have responsible gun-toting civilians in the area, so they can thwart the attacker. Pro-gun economist John Lott and other advocates point to 39 incidents where they say armed civilians have helped stop gunmen. But when the Johns Hopkins researchers looked into the cases, they found that only 4 of 39 actually involved an armed civilian stopping a rampage shooter. What about the other 35 alleged incidents? As with various past cases debunked by Mother Jones, they did not stand up to scrutiny: Twenty-two of them weren’t actually mass shootings—sometimes a gun was never even fired. In two mass-shooting incidents, an armed security guard or a law enforcement officer, not a civilian, intervened. In two other incidents, armed civilians helped detain a perpetrator after the shooting had already ended, and they didn’t use guns to do so. In five mass shootings, armed civilians tried but failed to stop the attacker—and three of them were shot in the process.

Separate research from the FBI shows similar results. The bureau looked at 160 active-shooter situations from 2000 to 2013 and found only one case where an armed civilian intervened to stop an attack that was underway. (And that civilian was a US Marine.) In 21 cases, an unarmed civilian interrupted the attack and restrained the gunman. In other words, unarmed civilians were far more likely than those with guns to stop an active shooting in progress.

Respond effectively in an active-shooting situation requires extensive training, the Johns Hopkins researchers noted. “There is no reason to believe that college students, faculty and civilian staff will shoot accurately in active shooter situations when they have only passed minimal training requirements for a permit to carry,” they wrote.

Campus carry could lead to more suicides and other gun violence

College students are much less likely to stop a rampage shooter than they are to use firearms to inflict harm on themselves or others, the researchers found. The brains of young adults are still developing, they explain, and that can compromise impulse control and judgment—both of which “are essential for avoiding the circumstances in which firearm access leads to tragedy.” That could be one reason why 19- to 21-year-olds have the highest rate of homicide offenses, according to FBI data. The risk of violent confrontations increases when you throw alcohol and binge-drinking into the mix, the researchers added.

The risk of suicidal behavior, which peaks at age 16, is also high through the mid-20s, the researchers wrote, noting the prevalence of depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses on college campuses. “Research demonstrates that access to firearms substantially increases suicide risks, especially among adolescents and young adults, as firearms are the most common method of lethal self-harm,” they explained. In one study of 645 college campuses, guns were used in about a third of suicides by male students.

The Johns Hopkins study also broke down gun violence on campuses another way: Of 85 shootings or “undesirable discharges of firearms” on colleges from 2013 to June this year, only 2 percent involved rampage shooters. Much more common were interpersonal arguments that turned into gun violence (45 percent), premeditated attacks on a single person (12 percent), suicides or murder/suicides (12 percent), or unintentional discharges (9 percent).

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New Research Confirms Guns on College Campuses Are Dangerous

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Can We Give Electricity to Everybody and Still Stop Climate Change?

by tfem31x Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by the Atlantic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Last week, the vast majority of the world’s prime ministers and presidents, along with the odd pontiff and monarch, gathered in New York to sign up to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Across 169 targets, the SDGs declare the global aspiration to end poverty and malnutrition, slash child mortality, and guarantee universal secondary education by 2030. And they also call for universal access to modern energy alongside taking “urgent action to combat climate change.”

These last two targets are surely important, but they conflict, too: More electricity production is likely to mean more greenhouse-gas emissions. The UN squares that circle by using a definition of modern energy access that involves a pitifully low level of electricity consumption. But that does a disservice to both those worried about development and those concerned by climate change. Poor people are going to have to consume a lot more energy if they are to enjoy a lifestyle that those in the West take for granted—and that is going to take environmental pragmatism in the short term and a revolutionary change in the technology of electricity production in the long term.

More than 1.3 billion people across the planet have no access to electricity. Many of those who do have access suffer brownouts, blackouts, and other forms of limited supply. Absent electricity, people use less efficient and more harmful substitutes: Kerosene lamps are often behind burn injuries and deaths around the world, and working under those lamps is as bad for your health as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. That’s why the arrival of power lines can be so transformative. Electrification in northern El Salvador was associated with a 78-percent increase in time studying and in class among school-age children and a 25-percentage point increase in the likelihood of households operating a business. These businesses made on average $1,000 a year—not bad in an area where local incomes are around $770 per person.

Recognizing the development impact of electricity access, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has championed the idea of “modern energy access” for all, involving universal electricity and clean cooking fuels like natural gas. The IEA claims that the additional electricity consumed by the newly connected (alongside the gas used in clean cooking) would add just 0.7 percent to global greenhouse-gas emissions in 2030. In large part that’s because the organization suggests energy for all would add just 1.1 percent to global energy demand.

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Can We Give Electricity to Everybody and Still Stop Climate Change?

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Donald Trump Has Lost Between $1 and $6 Billion Over His Business Career

by tfem31x Posted on September 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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This post is about Donald Trump—sorry!—but the topic is something I’ve been a little curious about for a while: how much of Trump’s wealth is inherited vs. earned? The basics are easy: Trump’s father turned over control of the family real estate business to him in 1974. At the time, it was worth about $200 million. Trump would eventually inherit one-fifth of this, so his share of the company was worth about $40 million to start with.

Over at National Journal, Shirish Dáte estimates that if Trump had put that money into an index fund of S&P 500 stocks, it would be worth about $3 billion today. If he’d taken the $200 million he was reportedly worth in 1982 and done the same, he’d be worth $8 billion. So how does that compare to Trump’s actual net worth? Here’s Dáte:

“Every year, Trump shares a lot of information with us that helps us get to the figures we publish. But he also consistently pushes for a higher net worth—especially when it comes to the value of his personal brand,” Forbes reporter Erin Carlyle wrote this June, explaining the magazine’s assessment that Trump was worth $4.1 billion, less than half of his claimed net worth. A subsequent review by Bloomberg found he was worth $2.9 billion.

….Perhaps the most deeply researched account of his wealth is a decade old: the book TrumpNation, by former New York Times journalist Tim O’Brien, who found three sources close to Trump who estimated that he was worth between $150 million and $250 million….Trump wound up suing O’Brien for defamation, claiming his book had damaged his business. The suit was eventually dismissed, but not before Trump sat for a deposition in which he admitted that he routinely exaggerated the values of his properties.

….That 2007 deposition also revealed that in 2005, two separate banks had assessed Trump’s assets and liabilities before agreeing to lend him money. One, North Fork Bank, decided he was worth $1.2 billion, while Deutsche Bank found he was worth no more than $788 million.

So….at a guess, Trump is worth somewhere in the neighborhood $2 billion in 2015. Anything above that is based on valuations of his personal brand—which might be worth something in theory, but buys no jet fuel or campaign ads. In terms of actual, tangible net worth, he’s worth considerably less than the $3 billion (or $8 billion) he’d be worth if he’d just dumped his share of the family fortune into a Vanguard fund.

In other words, over the course of the past four decades, Trump’s business acumen has netted him somewhere between -$1 billion and -$6 billion. Ouch. Virtually every person in America can claim a better financial record than that.

Now, in fairness, Dáte’s numbers assume that all dividends are reinvested, which would mean Trump had no income to live on. Obviously he spends a fair amount every year, and if you take that into account the Vanguard strategy wouldn’t look as good. Plus, of course, there’s the fact that Dáte is a THIRD-RATE LOSER who is JEALOUS of Trump’s BRILLIANT CAREER and does anything he can to DEMEAN Trump’s SUCCESS. So take him with a grain of salt.

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Donald Trump Has Lost Between $1 and $6 Billion Over His Business Career

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