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Obama: Paris Climate Agreement Could Be a "Turning Point For the World"

by AugustaBeem Posted on December 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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More than seven years ago, Barack Obama told campaign supporters that one day, Americans would be able to tell their children that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Saturday* evening—just hours after international leaders agreed to a historic deal to fight global warming—Obama told the nation that the accord could represent “a turning point for the world” and would help humanity “delay or avoid some of the worst consequences of climate change.”

“We may not live to see the full realization of our achievement, but that’s OK,” Obama said. “What matters is that today we can be more confident that this planet will be in better shape for the next generation.” You can watch Obama’s remarks above.

The deal, known as the Paris Agreement, includes commitments from countries around the world to reduce their emissions and pledges from high-polluting, developed nations help help poorer countries transition to clean energy and adapt to climate change. You can read more about the details of the agreement here.

Obama portrayed the hard-won deal as a product of American leadership. He said that the joint plan to control emissions that he and China’s President Xi Jinping announced last year inspired other countries to make ambitious climate commitments. “Over the past seven years,” Obama said, “we’ve transformed the United States into the global leader in fighting climate change.”

Obama also took a shot at his Republican critics, who have bitterly opposed his regulations on power plant emission and his other climate policies. “Skeptics said these actions would kill jobs,” said Obama. “Instead, we’ve seen the longest streak of private-sector job creation in our history.”

Still, Obama acknowledged that the Paris Agreement is far from sufficient to end the dangers posed by climate change. Negotiators pledged to limit warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. They also agreed and to “pursue efforts” to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

However, all of the emissions cuts promised by countries thus far won’t come anywhere close to meeting those goals. Scientists estimate that these commitments would put the planet on course for 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming—and that’s only if countries actually follow through on them.

“The problem’s not solved because of this accord,” said Obama. “But make no mistake, the Paris Agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis.”

* Day corrected

Original source – 

Obama: Paris Climate Agreement Could Be a "Turning Point For the World"

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Breaking: World Leaders Just Agreed to a Landmark Deal to Fight Global Warming

by Bart70735787193 Posted on December 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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There was relief and celebration in Paris Saturday evening, as officials from more than 190 countries swept aside monumental differences and agreed to an unprecedented global deal to tackle climate change.

The historic accord, known as the Paris Agreement, includes emissions-slashing commitments from individual countries and promises to help poorer nations adapt to the damaging effects of a warming world. Negotiators also agreed on measures to revise, strengthen, and scrutinize countries’ contributions going forward.

“This is a tremendous victory for all our citizens,” said Secretary of State John Kerry during the final session of the summit. “It’s a victory for all of the planet and for future generations.”

However, the deal leaves some key decisions to the future, and it is widely recognized as not representing an ultimate solution to climate change. Instead, it sets out the rules of the road for the next 10 to 15 years and establishes an unprecedented international legal basis for addressing climate issues. Within the agreement, nearly every country on Earth laid out its own plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change impacts. Although those individual plans are not legally binding, the core agreement itself is.

The deal sets a long-term goal of keeping the increase in the global temperature to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels and calls on countries to “pursue efforts” to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees C. It adds that “parties aim to reach a global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible.”

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who has served as chair of the two-week summit, said the deal is the most ambitious step ever taken by the international community to confront climate change.

In announcing the deal, President Barack Obama clinched a major foreign policy success years in the making and secured long-term action on climate change as a core part of his legacy, despite extraordinary opposition at home from the Republican majority in Congress. During the second week of the talks in Paris, Kerry was a driving force, delivering several high-profile speeches in which he sought to cast the United States as a leader on climate action. For Kerry, who has been a prominent voice in climate summits for two decades, it was essential to craft a deal to which the United States could agree and not to return home empty-handed.

The deal signals that world leaders are now committed to responding to the dire scientific warnings about the impacts of warming. Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels and other human activities are threatening to usher in an era of rising sea levels, sinking islands, scorching heat waves, devastating droughts, mass human migration, and destruction of ecosystems.

Among the deal’s biggest successes is a commitment to produce a global review of climate progress by 2018 and to bring countries back to the negotiating table by 2020 to present climate targets that “will represent a progression beyond the Party’s then-current” target. In other words, countries are committed to ramping up their ambition in the short term. This was an essential item for many people here, since the current raft of targets only keeps global warming to 2.7 degrees C, not 1.5 degrees. The deal also promises to hold every country accountable to the same standard of transparency in measuring and reporting their greenhouse gas emissions; this was a provision that the United States had pushed hard for in order to ensure that other big polluters such as China and India abide by their promises.

“Countries have united around a historic agreement that marks a turning point in the climate crisis,” said Jennifer Morgan, global director of the climate program at the World Resources Institute. “This is a transformational long-term goal that should really send clear signals into the markets” about the imminent decline of fossil fuel consumption.

The deal is expected to be a boon for the clean energy industry, as developing and developed countries alike increase their investments in wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources. Early in the talks, a high-profile group of billionaire investors, including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, promised to pour money into clean energy research, and a critical component of the agreement is a commitment for developed countries to transfer clean technologies to developing countries.

“If we needed an economic signal from this agreement, I think this is rather remarkable,” said Michael Jacobs, a senior advisor at New Climate Economy.

Still, parts of the deal left some environmental groups unsatisfied, particularly with respect to financing for clean energy technology and climate change adaptation. The deal requires all developed countries to “provide financial assistance to assist developing country Parties with respect to both mitigation and adaptation.” Although the deal sets a floor of $100 billion for that assistance and calls for that number to be raised by 2025, it doesn’t specify a new higher target and does not commit any country, including the United States, to any particular share of that. The deal also specifies that nothing in it can be construed as holding countries with the biggest historical contribution to climate change—most importantly the United States—legally or financially liable for climate-change-related damages in vulnerable countries. And it provides no specific timeline for peaking and reducing global greenhouse gas emissions; according to some scientists, that will need to happen within the next few decades for the 1.5 degrees C target to be achievable.

“There’s not enough in this deal for the nations and people on the frontlines of climate change,” said Kumi Naidoo, international executive director of Greenpeace, in a statement. “It contains an inherent, ingrained injustice. The nations which caused this problem have promised too little help to the people who are already losing their lives and livelihoods.”

The task of delegates at Le Bourget, a converted airport north of Paris, over the past two weeks was substantial. After all, more than two decades of UN-led climate talks had failed to produce a global deal to limit greenhouse gases. The Copenhagen talks in 2009 collapsed because officials couldn’t agree on how to level the playing field between rich and poor countries, sending negotiations into a morass of recriminations. Before that, the Kyoto protocol in 1997 also failed—the United States and China didn’t ratify it, and it only covered about 14 percent of global carbon emissions. This year’s negotiations, the 21st in the series of UN climate talks, had to be different.

One of the major reasons negotiators were able to reach a deal was that much of the work had been done in advance. By the time Paris rolled around, more than 150 countries had promised to change the way they use energy, detailing those changes in the form of individual commitments. Known as INDCs, these pledges formed the basis of Saturday’s deal. Of course, the INDCs won’t be legally binding, and even if most countries do manage to live up to their promises, they aren’t yet ambitious enough to prevent dangerous levels of warming.

The latest estimate is that the INDCs will limit global warming to about 2.7 degrees C above pre-industrial levels. That’s above the limit of 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) that scientists say is necessary to avert the worst impacts of global warming—and far above the 1.5 degrees C target that negotiators in Paris agreed to aim for. But it’s also about 1 degree C less warming than would happen if the world continued on its present course.

The Paris summit began as the largest meeting of government leaders in history (outside the UN building in New York) just two weeks after ISIS-affiliated terrorists killed 130 people across the city. While French officials immediately promised the talks would continue, they soon banned long-planned, massive climate protests, citing security concerns. That decision set the stage for several skirmishes between police and protesters, who remained committed to disrupting the talks in order to highlight issues such as sponsorship from big oil companies and the plight of poorer countries. At one protest, an estimated 10,000 people formed a human chain in the Place de la République, the site of a spontaneous memorial to the victims of the Paris attacks. There were scores of arrests.

But the climate talks themselves went ahead as planned. Some 40,000 heads of state, diplomats, scientists, activists, policy experts, and journalists descended on the French capital for the event. Perhaps the biggest factor driving the negotiators’ unprecedented optimism was the fact that the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters, and the world’s two biggest economies—the United States and China—had made a public show of working together to get an agreement. A landmark climate deal between the two countries in November 2014 built critical momentum. China later promised to create a national cap-and-trade program to augment a suite of emissions control policies. The Obama administration, meanwhile, pushed through its Clean Power Plan regulations, despite aggressive resistance from Republicans. Still, as the talks neared their conclusion on Friday, tensions were rising between the so-called “High Ambition Coalition”—a negotiating bloc including the United States, the European Union, and dozens of developing countries—and China and India.

Nevertheless, a rare alliance between world leaders ultimately prevailed: Pope Francis, for one, campaigned tirelessly for a climate deal ahead of the talks, decrying the “unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem.”

All of this cleared the way for large groups of developed and developing countries to cooperate at the talks. Bigger countries appeared ready to work with the 43-country-strong negotiating bloc of highly vulnerable developing nations. Recent changes of leadership in Canada and Australia, notable adversaries of climate action in recent years, switched these mid-sized players into fans of a deal before the talks. Even Russia’s Vladimir Putin seemed to have an eleventh-hour change of heart—or, at least, of rhetoric—and called for action.

Read the final draft of the agreement below.

More details to follow.

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Breaking: World Leaders Just Agreed to a Landmark Deal to Fight Global Warming

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Can the Paris Climate Deal Save This Tiny Pacific Island?

by Jana9324cuf Posted on December 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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

You’ve probably never heard of Nauru. But you might want to learn its name. It may not be around much longer.

Nauru is a speck in the South Pacific. It’s the tiniest island nation and the third smallest nation in the world. At roughly 8 square miles and with just over 10,000 residents, Nauru isn’t exactly a political heavyweight on the world stage. But Nauru is sinking, drying out, and generally in peril due to the ever-accelerating effects of climate change. And it may spark a debate at the Paris climate talks currently underway about what to do with populations on the verge of becoming climate refugees with literally nowhere to go.

Nauru is not your typical drowning-island scenario. What used to be a Pacific island oasis is now, by many accounts, a physical example of how quickly paradise can be destroyed. In the early 1900s, a German company began strip-mining the interior of the island for phosphate, the main component of agricultural fertilizer. Then came Japan, which occupied the country during World War II, and continued the phosphate mining. The U.S. bombed Japan’s airstrip on Nauru in 1943, preventing food supplies from entering the island. Less than a year later, Japan deported 1,200 Nauruans to work as forced laborers on a nearby island—only 737 of them survived the ordeal to be repatriated after the war just three years later. After the war, Australia took control of the country, and phosphate mining resumed as an Australian enterprise, before mining rights were transferred to Nauru when the nation became independent in 1968.

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For more than three decades after that, Nauruans enjoyed the second highest per-capita GDP of any nation in the world. Western food arrived on the island, where topsoil is scant and little food is grown locally. Now, “instant noodles, soda and anything in a tin” are the staple foods on Nauru, according to NPR. Rates of Type 2 diabetes are high, and until recently, Nauru held the title of the nation with the highest obesity rate. Nearly 40 percent of Nauruan men are obese, four times the global average.

But in the early 2000s, the phosphate ran out. By that time, 80 percent of the sland’s land area had been strip-mined. In a This American Life report from 2002, journalist Jack Hitt described peering into the interior of the island as “one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen.”

“Almost all of Nauru is missing, picked clean, right down to the coral skeleton supporting the island…it’s all blindingly white,” he said.

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Today, almost all of Nauru’s economy is based on foreign assistance and income generated by a controversial Australian detention center, sometimes referred to “Australia’s Guantanamo,” used to detain refugees seeking asylum in Australia. Refugees from Syria, Iraq, and other war-torn nations have been held there for years under what critics say are harsh conditions; the center has sparked a human rights debate in Australia.

Meanwhile, the complete destruction of the island’s interior has severely limited Nauruans’ ability to adapt in the face of climate change. People can only live on a thin strip around the perimeter, which means, unlike many other island nations, there’s nowhere to move to even temporarily avoid sea level rise, explains Koko Warner, a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report and an expert on climate change-related human migration. According to a survey of Nauruans she and colleague Andrea Milan recently conducted for United Nations University, 40 percent of households on the island say they’ve already experienced sea level rise in the last ten years.

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Nauruans’ precarious coastal living makes them uniquely vulnerable to extreme storms, which scientists predict climate change will make make more severe in the region. “A one-degree change in the path of the cyclone could make all the difference,” Warner says.

Nauru’s other big problem is drought. The country has no clean groundwater nor does it have any lakes or rivers to supply freshwater, according to Warner and Milan’s report. The rainy seasons have become irregular, and more than half of Nauruans say they’re concerned about drought.

What does that mean for the future of Nauru? “In the coming five-to- 10 years, barring a massive cyclone, life will probably continue more or less the same. But pushing beyond 10 years, real uncertainty arises,” Warner says. One thing is certain: Without freshwater stores, and without the ability to migrate within their own country, Nauruans will have to go somewhere; 30 percent of the island’s population, according to Warner’s survey, say they’d likely migrate if drought, sea level rise, and flooding worsens.

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Already, the neighboring island nation of Kiribati has leased land on Fiji in anticipation that its residents will become climate change refugees. Nauru hasn’t followed in Kiribati’s footsteps—and only one quarter of Nauruans say they have the financial means to make migration possible themselves.

“Without improved access to international migration, some Nauruans will be ‘trapped’ by worsening environmental conditions, declining well-being and no opportunity to either migrate or generate income necessary for adapting,” Warner and Milan wrote. There must be a way, Warner says, for a country to learn how to best make migration possible, and there must be an international structure in place for such a country to seek funding for it.

But the impact of a warming planet on human migration needs were, until recently, largely absent from international climate change talks, Warner says. Now, nations are beginning to pay attention: The European Commission’s webpage for the Paris climate talks, for example, calls it a “crisis in the making,” noting that the “greatest single impact” of climate change “could be on human migration, with millions of people displaced by shoreline erosion, coastal flooding and agricultural disruption.”

It remains to be seen if the final document to come out of the Paris talks—expected to emerge Saturday—will include language that addresses migration, but Warner is hopeful. “‘Human mobility,'” she says. “The words need to be in there.”

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Can the Paris Climate Deal Save This Tiny Pacific Island?

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SantaCon Is the Devil. We Apparently Created It. We Are So Sorry.

by JaimieEnderby Posted on December 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Every day I wake up and check my iPhone and read hundreds of comments from Twitter eggs calling me a stupid libtard intern who hates America and only got his job (or is it an internship?) at pinko commie rag Mother Jones because of nepotism. As though my dad called up SAG and was like “I am an actor from the 70s. Get my son a job at a magazine …founded in the 70s?” It grows tiring, but I get it: It’s an act! It’s a show stupid people—or who my beloved Welsh call “simple”—engage in to demonstrate to their team or to God or to whoever that they are the type of person who doesn’t like our type of publication.

Team sports is what politics is all about. No one wants to admit it, but it’s a well studied field. No one cares about every issue. It would be a huge waste of time to do that. They care strongly about one or two issues, identify with the team that shares their position and then take on the rest of the team’s platform as a form of solidarity, albeit unconsciously,

(A great example of this is southern Democrats who loved infrastructure spending but hated black people and then became Republicans because Democrats were too nice to black people and suddenly they also hated infrastructure spending.)

Anyway, Mother Jones isn’t perfect. Far from it. A lot of our articles I disagree with. But Mother Jones doesn’t really have institutional opinions. The articles are the vetted and edited opinions of the bylined author. (For instance: Not everyone here loves Love Actually)

However, one of the things we here at Mother Jones totally deserve group collective criticism for is being inadvertently responsible for New York City’s worst event of the year: SantaCon.

Atlas Obscura explains:

The original inspiration for SantaCon actually came from a 1977 article in Mother Jones about a four-day event organized by Solvognen, a socio-politically charged anarchist theater group in Denmark. Solvognen, literally “Chariot of the Sun,” took their name from Norse mythology and the name of a highly prized national artifact that represents a horse pulling the sun across the sky.

I hate SantaCon. I hate their vomit. I hate their attitudes. I hate their irascibility. I hate their piss-soaked costumes. I hate their souls. I hate them on a profound level. If I were the type of person who believed in letting people drown, these are the type of people I would let drown. I wish they would just go back to whatever hell they came from (Long Island? Staten Island? Murray Hill?). Their very existence in New York makes me wish we had never fleeced this land from the Native Americans.

SantaCon is just an excuse for people with severe emotional problems to get together and act extra out of control because they’re in a mob. It’s like if The Ox-Bow Incident were set at Christmas and filled with vomit. Or if the Stanford Prison Experiment were set at Christmas and, well, filled with vomit.

I know what you’re going to say: “Oh, the fun police are here! Policing our fun!” I am not a member of the fun police. I am a member of the social contract, which dictates there are ways to act in public police. If you want to drink half a bottle of Jäger and piss yourself while shouting about some imaginary injustice you suffered playing Madden ’98 on Nintendo Dreamcast, go right ahead. But do it in your own home. Don’t do it in public. Being in public means being in public, and when you are in public dressed like Santa—drunk, covered in piss, shouting about some nonsense—you are ruining the experience of other people who happen to be in public. You are a selfish jerk.

What about Halloween or Saint Patrick’s Day, you say? Well, those days are awful too. They’re all just excuses for stupid people who lack the conviction to do what they want to do—be drunk and piss themselves—on a normal day. They need society to arbitrarily say it’s okay to be a stupid drunk with your stupid drunk friends this one day a year. If you were at least an honest asshole you’d let your sociopathic flag fly and be a stupid drunk with your stupid friends just because it’s a Tuesday! Or a Monday! Or Easter! On any given day you can win or you can lose, but if you do it because of an email blast saying other people are going to make it nominally socially acceptable, then you’re a coward. SantaCon is not legally binding. It’s not like The Purge but for bros to act out. You do you, bros. But just know that the fact that you’re doing your thing on the day when normal society has tried to cordon you off means you’re a sheep.

Society hates you.

I hate you, SantaCon. I hate you the way Eddie Murphy hated Alan Arkin when Arkin surprisingly won an Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine and Murphy lost for Dreamgirls. I hate you the way I hate people with poor posture, which many of you stupid Santas have, by the way. The religious say, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” I hate you the way the religious hate the sin.

Why are you the way you are? We could lay you on the couch and play psychology—Daddy wasn’t around! Mommy loved your sister more! You come from a long line of alcoholics with no shame and are just playing the part!—but we don’t have to. Ours is not to wonder why, ours is but to watch in horror as you stumble around drunk, secreting fluids on yourself.

I hope you all make it home alive this Saturday and don’t stumble into the street and drown in your own vomit, but Darwin suggests many of you should probably in fact stumble into the street and drown in your own vomit. I’ve been to the Galapagos. It has a lot of things. It does not have SantaCon.

There’s a line in Richard II where he’s about to be tossed from the throne by Bolingbroke and he says, “Let’s make dust our paper and with rainy eyes write sorrow on the bosom of the world.” Saturday, thousands of drunken bros will make snow their paper and with bleeding kidneys write sorrow on the bosom of our streets.

So anyway, have a great Saturday! (Have a great life!) Stay safe. And for our part in the creation of SantaCon, we’re eternally sorry.

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SantaCon Is the Devil. We Apparently Created It. We Are So Sorry.

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Ohio Attorney General Accuses Planned Parenthood of Illegally Dumping Fetal Remains

by BlancaChau Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ohio officials on Friday accused Planned Parenthood affiliates in the state of disposing of fetal tissue in violation of state law, saying that the health care organization sent the remains to companies that dumped the tissue in landfills.

The accusation was the result of the Ohio attorney general’s investigation into Planned Parenthood over the organization’s donation of fetal tissue from abortions. Attorney General Mike DeWine said in a statement on Friday that his office concluded its investigation of Planned Parenthood and found that the organization had not illegally sold fetal tissue.

But DeWine said his office did find that Planned Parenthood had violated an Ohio regulation requiring that a “fetus shall be disposed of in a humane manner.” According to the attorney general’s investigation, the health care organization sends fetal remains to disposal companies, which then dump the tissue in landfills.

Stephanie Kight, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio, has denied all wrongdoing and says her organization handles fetal tissue legally and in the same manner as other health care providers. Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio is one of the state affiliates mentioned by DeWine.

“We take our responsibility as a health care provider seriously, and if we ever thought that one of our vendors wasn’t handling fetal tissue properly, we would take swift action,” Kight told reporters on Friday.

DeWine’s new accusations are the result of his failed investigation into the sale of fetal tissue, she added. “He has dug up another set of accusations that are equally false.”

Ohio is one of a handful of states that launched investigations into Planned Parenthood following the series of widely debunked sting videos purporting to show the organization’s staff discussing fetal tissue donation. None of the investigations have found evidence that Planned Parenthood illegally sold fetal tissue.

This post has been updated.

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Ohio Attorney General Accuses Planned Parenthood of Illegally Dumping Fetal Remains

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Congress’ Fix for Puerto Rico Comes With Huge Strings Attached

by ShielaDurgin Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Earlier this week, congressional Republicans introduced two bills designed to help Puerto Rico cope with its unsustainable $72 billion debt obligation. Both pieces of legislation—introduced in the House by Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wisc.) and in the Senate by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa)—included language that would create a federally-appointed oversight board to control the island’s finances. The House bill also included provisions that would permit Puerto Rico’s cities and publicly-owned institutions to restructure debt under federal bankruptcy law.

While the island’s legislators and activists have long wanted bankruptcy protection, the creation of such a powerful oversight board immediately prompted a strong and negative reaction among the island’s politicians and activists.

“The bill introduced by Chairman Hatch imposes a federally-appointed board that would have virtually total control over financial decision-making in Puerto Rico, which is unwarranted and unacceptable,” Rep. Pedro Pierluisi, the island’s non-voting representative to Congress, told Mother Jones. Pierluisi said both bills’ version of a federal oversight board were too heavy-handed, and that he would work with Congressional leaders to craft the “level of federal control so that it is fair and proportional.”

On Jan. 1, Puerto Rico must come up with $957 million in interest payments, which would be difficult given the current financial pressures. Congressional intervention would probably be attached to the omnibus spending bill, which is likely to be voted on by December 16. Pierluisi, the island’s governors, and others have asked Congress for months to change the law that prohibits Puerto Rico from restructuring debts under federal bankruptcy law. They’ve also asked for equitable treatment under federal spending programs like Medicaid, but so far Congress has been unwilling to act.

“As a result of our pressure, this issue is being discussed and debated at the highest levels of the U.S. government,” he said. “That in itself is a remarkable achievement for a territory that is usually ignored or an afterthought in Washington.” He’s hopeful that a deal can be reached by Wednesday of next week.

Just before the legislation was introduced, Pierluisi said on the House floor that along with years of financial mismanagement locally, the problems Puerto Rico faces are at least as much due to the US’ colonial relationship with the island. He called the situation a “national disgrace.”

Puerto Rico Gov. Alejandro García Padilla told Puerto Rico’s main newspaper Friday that the financial oversight plan was just the beginning of negotiations, and that any financial oversight board would need to respect Puerto Rico’s political autonomy.

But Nelson Denis, a journalist, author, and former New York state assemblyman who has long studied the Puerto Rico/US federal government relationship, pointed out that as currently written, the Senate version of the the financial oversight body creates an authority that has the power to make financial decisions for the island, conduct its own investigations, subpoena witnesses, file for administrative or criminal charges against island officials who don’t comply, and take out loans for which island taxpayers—not the US federal government—would be liable.

“This is where our ‘Commonwealth’ relationship to the US has gotten us,” wrote Denis, whose mother is Puerto Rican and who is also the author of War Against All Puerto Ricans, a book about the island’s struggle for independence and failed revolution. “A dictatorship in the Caribbean, created in Washington, operated from Wall Street, all disguised as a ‘management assistance authority.'”

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Congress’ Fix for Puerto Rico Comes With Huge Strings Attached

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A Diplomatic, Apocalyptic Game of Jenga

by JacobTonkin Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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

Draft three of the Paris climate document is here, but it ain’t over yet. The delegates still have plenty of sleepless hours left.

And they have plenty of brackets to argue over, too. Those areas of disagreement—especially in the three seemingly intractable topics of finance, differentiation, and loss and damage. For the uninitiated, that’s paying for the future, reparations for the past, and whether the countries footing those bills are long term developed places like the US, or if they should include developing countries like China. On the positive side, the draft looks like it’s finally converged on a goal: To keep the global average temperature from warming between 1.5 and 2 degrees C above historic levels.

That said, this version of the agreement is actually starting to look like an agreement. Today’s bracket-count is a solid 50, down from 361 in Wednesday’s draft. “To extent that unbracketed sections of text reflect agreement, it seems like a lot has been streamlined,” says Dan Bodansky, a legal expert on climate change at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.

The fights continue, of course. Rich countries don’t want to pay the damages climate change has already done to poor countries (heat waves, drought, sea level rise, etc.) Some countries want an independent agency or body to track emissions, and the results to be transparent. Other countries say that encroaches on their sovereignty.

But we’re close, right? Well…after French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius unveiled Wednesday’s draft, a bunch of countries sounded off with complaints about sections of the document that had been removed from brackets—which is to say, that everyone had agreed upon.

Is that confusing to you? Frustrating, perhaps? Welcome to COP freaking 21. See, when a section of text loses its brackets, that’s not necessarily because the countries have all agreed on it. In the negotiating process, countries and groups of countries wheel and deal over various aspects of the agreement. Some of this happens in large plenary gatherings, some of it happens in smaller working groups, and some of it happens in hotel rooms and hallways. All along the way, Fabius is keeping tabs. It is his job to interpret the decisions and write the agreement. In diplomatic slang, this is called “having the pen.” (I may have oversimplified the treaty process slightly. Ahem.)

That means Fabius can add or subtract brackets whenever he wants. Removing brackets tends to move discussions along. But Fabius is playing a diplomatic, apocalyptic game of Jenga. If he pulls too many at once, or demonstrates some kind of favoritism, the other countries can vote to take the pen away from him. “If I were the French, I would be concerned if push too far too early there will be a backlash and undercut your ability to do more,” says Bodansky. The trick is to calibrate the debracketing, so that the 11th hour draft is close enough an agreement that it gets voted in. It takes a very steady hand.

Fabius seems to be pretty good at this. Just about every other country’s delegates spend the first 30 seconds of their podium time lavishing praise on the guy. It doesn’t seem like the usual diplomatic BS. Then they get into their complaints with the document. C’est la vie. (Because I’m in France!)

But seriously, for a contrast to Fabius’ perspicacité, Look back to the 2009 Copenhagen climate meeting. It was the culmination of four years of negotiations during with the Danes had the pen. At the end, they revealed a document they’d written—and it bore little to no resemblance to what the negotiators had spent so long working on. Everyone basically walked away. And the world got hotter.

Comparatively, the French have been pretty canny. The question is whether they can keep pushing both hard, and soft, enough.

Excerpt from – 

A Diplomatic, Apocalyptic Game of Jenga

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Will the Planet Survive the Next 24 Hours?

by DenaeTina858 Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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The next 24 hours could make or break humanity’s chances of staving off the worst impacts of climate change.

Negotiations in Paris for an international agreement to limit and adapt to global warming are in their final moments, after diplomats pulled their second consecutive all-nighter to crash through a few critical remaining questions in the 28-page document. The most recent draft, released Thursday evening, resolved one of the most important questions on the table: an agreement to at least attempt to limit long-term global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, a crucial half degree less warming than had been on the table before. For climate activists and diplomats from the world’s most vulnerable countries, that was a huge win.

Now, the question is whether the agreement will actually have the necessary tools to achieve that target. Many of the critical pieces needed to make the deal as strong as possible—most importantly, increased funding for climate adaptation in developing countries and a plan to ramp up greenhouse gas reductions over time—are still on the table. That’s a good thing. But there’s no way to know how many of them will survive the night.

“We’re in a good position. The sunlight is really in front of us,” said Li Shuo, a campaigner with Greenpeace in China. Still, he added, “we have tremendous risk that this very could be watered down tomorrow.”

The most important issue under debate right now is the “ratchet mechanism,” which would require countries to boost their climate ambitions incrementally over time. It’s an essential component for actually meeting the 1.5 degrees C target (or even the less ambitious 2 degrees C target), because the promises countries have made so far add up to about 2.7 degrees C—a level of warming that could ultimately prove catastrophic around the world. At the moment, the text requires countries to report their greenhouse gas emissions every five years. But it is still vague about how countries that lag behind could be penalized, how countries could be required to increase their efforts over time, and how exactly their reporting could be internationally fact-checked. Secretary of State John Kerry has been ambiguous on this point; he said on Wednesday that in the agreement, “there’s no punishment, no penalty, but there has to be oversight.”

Crucially, negotiators have also not agreed on when those reviews need to start happening. The view of most experts here is that in order to stay within the 1.5 degrees C target, the reviews should start as soon as possible—certainly before 2020. That way, there’s time to correct course before it’s too late. But the Chinese delegation has resisted that timeline. Last night President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke on the phone, according to Chinese state television; what exactly they discussed was unclear, but the call raised some eyebrows here about a possible wedge emerging between the two countries.

Some tension at this stage is to be expected, said David Waskow, director of the international climate initiative at the World Resources Institute.

“What’s happening here is the world is trying to craft a new way of collaborating,” he said. “We’re seeing the growing pains of that process.”

China and the United States were among the first countries to take a strong bilateral stand in advance of the Paris talks, when they released a joint plan to fight climate change last November. Many people I’ve spoken to here have said that this early partnership was one of the biggest reasons to be optimistic about these talks, since disagreements between the two countries has been a key reason that past climate summits have collapsed. So if that mood is changing, it could really improve the final deal in Paris.

China has yet to sign onto the “High Ambition Coalition,” a negotiating bloc that includes the United States, European Union, and dozens of developing countries. That coalition has emerged in the past few days to fight for what it portrays as the strongest possible agreement. I’ve heard concern from many activists here that the coalition is really just a way for the United States to seem like it’s on the right side of history, without actually taking very ambitious steps, while simultaneously painting China and India as the villains. (Eric Holthaus at Climate Desk partner Slate did a good job breaking down that dynamic.)

“Everyone is trying to hide behind the political smog,” Shuo said.

Meanwhile, the United States seems to be obstinately resisting language in the agreement that would make more money available for developing countries to expand their clean energy sectors, and for a compensation fund for the most climate-impacted countries. And negotiators are still squabbling over how exactly to determine which countries should be obliged to do what.

So now, it’s a waiting game. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my days at this summit, it’s to not even bother looking at the official procedural schedule. Anything can happen anytime because most of the action is taking place behind closed doors. That will continue through Friday night; the next draft of the agreement is due Saturday at 9 a.m. Paris time. At that point, it’s more or less up to the French officials leading the summit to decide whether to force an up-or-down vote or to let diplomats pull their red pens out again.

At the very least, it’s pretty safe to say that the chances of the talks totally collapsing are slim to none. Instead, it’s a question of whether the deal will actually be as ambitious as leaders such as Kerry have repeatedly said they want it to be, or whether it will be something more milquetoast. Either way, no one expects this agreement to actually solve climate change. But this is the most optimistic activists and diplomats have been in the 20-year history of these talks.

As Tine Sundtoft, the Norwegian environment minister, told reporters this afternoon, “There’s no real danger that we will lock in low ambition for decades to come.”

Master image: Triff/Shutterstock

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Will the Planet Survive the Next 24 Hours?

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We’re Eating Less Meat—But Using More Antibiotics on Farms Than Ever

by GeorgettaEmmons Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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The meat industry’s massive appetite for antibiotics just keeps growing. That’s the takeaway from the Food and Drug Administration’s latest annual assessment of the issue, which found that agricultural use of “medically important” antibiotics—the ones that are prescribed to people when they fall ill—grew a startling 23 percent between 2009 and 2014. Over the same period, the total number of cows and pigs raised on US farms actually fell a bit, and the number of chickens held steady. What that’s telling us is that US meat production got dramatically more antibiotic-dependent over that period.

Even more disheartening, medically important antibiotic use crept up 3 percent in 2014 compared to the previous year—despite the FDA’s effort to convince the industry to voluntarily ramp down reliance on such crucial medicines. True, the FDA’s policy, which was first released in 2012, contained a “three-year time frame for voluntary phase-in.” One might have hoped, however, that by 2014, the needle would point downward, not implacably upward.

Note, too, that the last time the FDA saw fit to release numbers on human antibiotic use, in 2011, the total stood at about 3.3 million kilograms. The chart below tells us that farms now using nearly 9.5 million kilograms—nearly three times as much. The news comes in the wake of warnings from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the World Health Organization, and the Centers for Disease Control that the meat industry’s drug habit contributes to a growing crisis in antibiotic-resistant pathogens that kill 23,000 people each year in the United States and 700,000 globally. Then there was the recent news that in China—which has patterned its meat industry on the antibiotic-ravenous US model—a strain of E. coli had evolved on hog farms that can resist a potent antibiotic called colistin, considered a last resort for pathogens that can resist all other drugs.

Here are the numbers:

FDA

Link: 

We’re Eating Less Meat—But Using More Antibiotics on Farms Than Ever

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Shit Is About to Get Real in California, El Niño Report Predicts

by RefugioDurbin Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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After four years of drought, Californians are bracing for another potentially destructive weather event: El Niño. Earlier this week, FEMA released a disaster plan including what to expect from the upcoming rainy season. Here are the key takeaways:

This may be the strongest El Niño on record. Weather reports indicate that this year will be warm and wet—perhaps even more so than the winter of 1997-1998, which is currently the strongest recorded El Niño. That year, California evacuated 100,000 people.
The dry conditions mean more flooding. The lack of soil moisture has made the soil “harden and act like cement,” making it, paradoxically, less likely to soak up the rain. The chance of flooding is far higher than usual, especially in the productive farm country of Central Valley and the surrounding area—including America’s the state’s capital. “The primary risk areas are in populated areas mostly notably in Sacramento,” the report reads—and because of that, “a major flood situation would have significant impact on the economic, cultural, and political life of California.” Additionally, a catastrophic levee failure in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta would jeopardize a major source of water for 60 percent of California homes and for a portion of the state’s agricultural industry.” One in five Californians lives in a flood zone.
Wildfires in the summer mean more landslides in the winter. The wildfire season this year was devastating in California, scorching more than 300,000 acres. Mudslides are common in these scorched areas, called “burn scars,” because water quickly runs off and there aren’t trees to keep the soil, rocks, and other debris in place. Southern Californians got a little taste of what this might look like when rain led to severe landslides in October.
King Tides, El Niño, and the Blob mean higher sea levels and more potential damage. Sea levels typically rise a few inches during El Niño, but this winter, scientists predict that the giant swath of warm water off the West Coast dubbed the Blob will lead to a rise of between 8 and 11 inches. State officials are particularly concerned about the potential damage caused by storms towards the end of both December and January, when the highest tides of the winter, called King Tides, are expected.
The rains may ease the drought, but won’t solve it. All this water will certainly ease the drought and raise levels in the state’s depleted reservoirs. But because the state is so behind on precipitation, it’s very unlikely that it will make up for the state’s now four-year water deficit.

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Shit Is About to Get Real in California, El Niño Report Predicts

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