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Post-Brexit, U.K. favorite for prime minister is Trump-Lite on climate change

by Boyce74F42 Posted on June 24, 2016

Mojo BoJo

Post-Brexit, U.K. favorite for prime minister is Trump-Lite on climate change

By on Jun 24, 2016Share

The British Bulldog. The Iron Lady. BoJo?

Former London Mayor Boris Johnson might not fit the grand tradition of British prime ministers. (He once compared his chances of becoming PM to being blinded by a champagne cork.) But Johnson is poised to lead the Conservative Party — and thus the country — in a post-Brexit world. Even sillier than his nickname is that this otherwise sharp politician is a climate waffler in the Donald Trump vein. His waffling just sounds a lot smarter.

The widely-regarded frontman of the successful Vote Leave campaign, Johnson is a favorite to take the nation’s helm in October when current Prime Minister David Cameron steps down in the wake of Thursday’s vote. And since the next U.K. general election isn’t until 2020, he’ll likely be sticking around for awhile.

Environmentalists had expressed deep concern with the thought of the U.K. leaving the EU, often citing the tendency of the “Leave” camp to deny climate science. BoJo himself has climate views that have been described as “an embarrassment to London’s scientists.” His closest climate consultant is Piers Corbyn, a fierce proponent of global cooling (apparently a thing that people still research). Johnson previously suggested Britain was witnessing the onset of a mini-ice age.

Yet the former mayor is also a previous deputy chair of the C40 Climate Leadership Group, and he recently declared that it is “vitally important that world cities unite and work together to mitigate climate change.” As the Brits would say, what in blazes is going on?

Just as Donald Trump signed a public letter urging climate action back in 2009, Johnson appears to adjust his language as a function of political convenience. It’s hard to know what he truly believes.

The real problem then is that, unlike Trump, Johnson is usually level-headed and articulate — which makes his equivocation on climate seem a bit more sinister. In a December column for the Telegraph, he wrote: “We ordinary human beings are not so rational; we are no different from all earlier cultures in that we have to put ourselves in the story, and to attribute this or that individual weather event to our own behaviour or moral failures. Think of Agamemnon at Aulis, unable to get the wind he needed to sail for Troy.”

This is an intelligent person saying intelligent-sounding things. But they’re intelligent-sounding things that imply it’s a mistake to assign humans responsibility for a changing climate. He’s singing the skeptic’s song to the tune of “God Save the Queen.”

Our advice with Johnson in charge (even temporarily): Watch out for flying corks.

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Post-Brexit, U.K. favorite for prime minister is Trump-Lite on climate change

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Brexit could have serious repercussions for the climate

by WillaAbercrombi Posted on June 24, 2016

Brexit Stage Right

Brexit could have serious repercussions for the climate

By on Jun 24, 2016 10:41 amShare

Britain has voted to leave the European Union by a 52–48 margin. Environmentalists and climate hawks are worried about what that might mean.

Many green leaders had called on voters to oppose a British exit from the EU — or Brexit — arguing that the EU has raised environmental standards in the U.K. and the rest of Europe. They noted that environmental problems are international in nature, so international cooperation is necessary to fight them effectively.

Outgoing United Nations climate head Christiana Figueres also warned against Brexit, saying earlier this week that the U.K. increased the ambition of European climate negotiators before and during the Paris climate talks last December.

So now what happens?

With respect to the climate, the short-term effects of Britain’s decision could potentially be positive. Economists have predicted a Brexit-driven, economy-wide slowdown, which almost certainly implies a drop in Britain’s carbon emissions. During the 2008 recession, for example, global emissions fell by about 1.5 percent. Already today the British pound fell to its lowest level since 1985, and global financial markets have taken a big tumble.

It’s unclear how Brexit will affect energy markets. Oil prices plummeted on Friday. Businesses and investors planning new energy developments in the U.K. — renewable energy projects and fracking projects alike — may postpone them, Politico notes. In the EU emissions trading system (ETS), carbon prices have already fallen more than 15 percent.

Another big unknown is how this will affect the Paris climate agreement. Britain’s climate-action pledge was included in the EU’s pledge. “From the point of view of the Paris agreement, the U.K. is part of the EU and has put in its effort as part of the EU, so anything that would change that would require then a recalibration,” said Figueres. As it sorts out what to do without the U.K., the EU will likely see a slow-down in its ratification process.

Climate hawks are also concerned that a new government in Britain could be less committed to climate action. Prime Minister David Cameron pushed for the Paris Agreement, but he won’t be around for much longer. He had led the failed “Remain” campaign, and on Friday morning, after the results of the referendum came in, he announced his intention to resign in October. At that point, another member of the Conservative Party will become prime minister. Many of the conservatives who had campaigned for Brexit are also climate deniers, and they will likely have more power in a new government.

The impact could go beyond the climate. Farming minister George Eustice, a notable Brexiteer, previously announced his desire to get rid of EU environmental directives that protect birds and habitats. He and other campaigners have advocated for a new, more flexible approach to environmental protection, but opponents of the Vote Leave campaign are skeptical that such an approach will be equally effective.

“Don’t tell me that a new Brexit-led British government is going to put environmental regulations at top of its pile on June 24,” Stanley Johnson, co-chair of Environmentalists for Europe, told the Guardian late last month. “It is not going to happen.”

Other energy experts, though, point to Britain’s leadership on clean energy and climate action and argue that the vote will ultimately be good news for the climate. Michael Liebreich, founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, called the referendum a “historic opportunity to loosen the ties that bind” Britain to Europe’s “anti-innovation bias.”

Britain’s exit from the EU won’t be immediate; first comes a two-year exit negotiation process. As the U.K. cuts and restitches ties to Europe, the world will be watching to see if the nation emerges as a climate leader.

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Brexit could have serious repercussions for the climate

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Volkswagen protestor creates a glorious ruckus over emissions scandal

by AntonyHambleton Posted on March 2, 2016

Volkswagen protestor creates a glorious ruckus over emissions scandal

By on 1 Mar 2016commentsShare

“It doesn’t need repairs. It’s a perfect car!” said Volkswagen automobile executive Juergen Stackmann, suddenly defensive when a protestor interrupted his speech and scurried across the stage at a Geneva Motor Show on Tuesday. Outfitted in a Volkswagen repairman uniform, the protestor, British comedian Simon Brodkin, pretended to install a “cheat box” on the car — a funny, fake version of events that were not funny and very real.

In 2015, environmental regulators discovered that Volkswagen had been installing “defeat devices” that tricked regulators into thinking its diesel cars met U.S. emissions standards, when they were actually releasing too much pollution to meet the standards all the time. The software allowed Volkswagen to “cheat” on emissions tests by detecting when the engine was being tested, and alter its performance.

According to The Telegraph, Brodkin is the same man who threw fake money at suspended FIFA president Sepp Blatter last year.

The prank lasted a glorious five seconds, with Brodkin even managing to poke his head under the car’s bumper. Alone on the stage for a few moments before security ushered the protester away, Stackmann did his best to fend off the weight of the biggest automobile scandal in decades.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you very much!” Stackmann said, probably praying for a swift and painless end to his living nightmare.

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Meet Grist’s new executive editor — and awesome senior editors

by NolanGooch Posted on March 1, 2016

Scott Dodd, Rebecca Leber, and Matt Craft.

Meet Grist’s new executive editor — and awesome senior editors

By on 1 Mar 2016 4:41 pmcommentsShare

We’re thrilled to announce that, upholding a long tradition of convincing people to leave perfectly respectable jobs and cast their lot with our scrappy enterprise instead, we’ve added three top-notch editors to the Grist ranks this spring. We expect climate change to shut up and go away now — or at least to behave itself a little better.

Here comes the general: First and foremost, Scott Dodd is taking the helm as Grist’s executive editor. The award-winning journalist brings decades of experience as a reporter and editor, a strong leadership background, and a keen sense of humor to the role. And doughnuts. He brings doughnuts.

Among Dodd’s extraordinarily impressive accomplishments (it’s never too soon to kiss up to the new boss, right?), he landed a scoop about messy tar sands financial holdings that gained international attention and helped change the course of U.S. politics; he reported on everything from bioweapons to NASCAR in eight years at the Charlotte Observer; and he was part of a team that produced Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina for the Biloxi, Miss., Sun Herald. In addition to his work on the front lines of journalism and as editorial director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Dodd has spent years dispensing wisdom at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

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Dodd, who will oversee Grist’s 18-member editorial department and play an active role in shaping the organization’s future, did some kissing up of his own: “It’s a really exciting challenge,” he said. “Grist has been home to smart environmental writers and thinkers for over a decade, so that’s a tremendous legacy to build on. My job is to make it even more ambitious and essential. I want us to have greater impact and a sharper focus on what matters, while still keeping the edge and irreverence that makes everyone love reading it.”

Sounds good to us! “Scott’s energy and ideas will be a powerful addition to Grist,” Grist President Lori Schmall said. “Everyone who spoke with him during the interview process — from younger writers to seasoned editors — was very excited at the prospect of working with him. He has the leadership background and journalism chops to lead us into a new era as a media organization.”

Their skill with a quill is undeniable: In conjunction with Dodd’s arrival, Grist is pleased to announce the addition of News Editor Rebecca Leber and Senior Editor Matt Craft.

Leber, a former New Republic staff writer and ThinkProgress reporter who has won admiration from across the internet for her climate and politics reporting, will lead Grist’s daily news team. “Rebecca Leber has been making a name for herself with smart, detailed climate coverage for years now,” said Vox writer and former Grist columnist David Roberts. “It’s great to see her in a position to lead a team to the same level of excellence.”

Craft, who will guide the work of our feature writers and columnists, arrives at Grist from the Associated Press. He has deep experience finding ways to make opaque issues more palpable, and has covered the seeds of the Arab Spring in Egypt, oil spills in Louisiana, and everything in between. He also wrangled columnists for Forbes Magazine. While he loved editing billionaires, he says the thousandaires at Grist are more his speed.

With Dodd, Leber, and Craft on board, the Grist team is looking forward to finding even more ways to inform and inspire our monthly audience of 2 million and growing. We’ll experiment with new forms of storytelling and introduce new perspectives as we tackle issues ranging from oil spills to the oily presidential campaign in the year ahead.

“Don’t worry, Grist fans,” Dodd says. “I know how special this place is and what a wonderful opportunity I’ve been given. I won’t cock it up.” Dirty words disguised as British humor? Now we know we’ve found our guy.

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Why Are George Soros-Linked Financiers Giving Big Bucks to Support John Kasich?

by RoslynEllington Posted on February 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Two Wall Street titans who helped financier George Soros make his billions have channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars into John Kasich’s presidential bid. According to Federal Election Commission records, Scott Bessent, who was Soros’ chief investment officer until December, last fall donated $200,000 to New Day for America, the pro-Kasich super-PAC. In August, Stanley Druckenmiller, who was Soros’ lead fund manager from 1988 to 2000, donated $150,000 to the same super-PAC.

Given that Kasich, after retiring as a congressman in 2000, worked for seven years at Lehman Brothers, until its collapse in 2008, it’s not surprising that the Ohio governor is an attractive investment for big finance guys. But Soros is a bogeyman for conservatives, fiercely reviled by the right over the years for his deep-pocketed support of Democrats and progressive organizations. He recently emerged from something of a political slumber, donating $8 million in 2015 to two pro-Hillary Clinton super-PACs, after several years of keeping a relatively low profile as a political donor.

Druckenmiller no longer has a connection with Soros. Bessent, though, is still involved with managing Soros’ wealth. In early January, he announced he was creating a $4.5 billion hedge fund, Key Square Group, with $2 billion from Soros.

Bessent is perhaps best known for his role in a 2013 move by Soros to bet against the yen, which netted Soros’ fund about $1 billion when the Japanese currency fell. Bessent, who did not respond to a request for comment, also donated $2,700, the maximum allowed, directly to Kasich’s campaign. He has a history of contributing to candidates and PACs on both sides of the aisle. Last March, he donated to $5,400 to Democratic Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.), $1,500 to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and $5,000 to Right to Rise, the pro-Jeb Bush super-PAC. In 2013, he gave $25,000 to Ready for Hillary, a pro-Clinton super-PAC. But, by far, his largest political donation has been to Kasich.

Druckenmiller has focused his political giving largely on Republicans, but he has donated to a few Democrats. Last year, prior to donating that $150,000 to the pro-Kasich super-PAC, he wrote Right To Rise a check for $103,000. He also gave $100,000 to a super-PAC backing Chris Christie, who dropped out of the presidential race this week.

Druckenmiller and Soros “broke” the Bank of England in 1992, shorting the British pound and making more than $1 billion in a single day when the currency plummeted. That windfall made Soros famous and one of the world’s richest men. Eight years later, Druckenmiller left Soros to manage his own hedge fund. He retired in 2010. He has publicly campaigned for cuts to Social Security payments, arguing that baby boomers’ retirement costs will prove disastrous for future generations.

There’s no word yet on how the donations to the Kasich presidential effort from these Soros-linked financiers will effect Glenn Beck’s theory that Soros is the puppet master behind…well, everything.

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Why Are George Soros-Linked Financiers Giving Big Bucks to Support John Kasich?

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There May Soon Be More Plastic in the Oceans Than Fish

by WiltonIacovelli Posted on January 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Discarded plastic will outweigh fish in the world’s oceans by 2050, according to a report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. That is, unless overfishing moves the date up sooner.

The study, a collaboration with the World Economic Forum, found that 32 percent of plastic packaging escapes waste collection systems, gets into waterways, and is eventually deposited in the oceans. That percentage is expected to increase in coming years, given that the fastest growth in plastic production is expected to occur in “high leakage” markets—developing countries where sanitation systems are often unreliable. The data used in the report comes from a review of more than 200 studies and interviews with 180 experts.

Since 1964, global plastic production has increased 20-fold—311 million tons were produced in 2014—and production is expected to triple again by 2050. A whopping 86 percent of plastic packaging is used just once, according to the report’s authors, representing $80 billion to $120 billion in lost value annually. That means not only more plastic waste, but more production-related oil consumption and carbon emissions if the industry doesn’t alter its ways.

The environmental impact of plastic waste is already staggering: For a paper published in October, scientists considered 186 seabird species and predicted that 90 percent of the birds—whose populations have declined by two-thirds since 1950—consume plastic. Plastic bags, which are surprisingly degradable in warmer ocean waters, release toxins that spread through the marine food chain—and perhaps all the way to our dinner tables.

Most of the ocean’s plastic, researchers say, takes the form of microplastics—trillions of beads, fibers, and fragments that average about 2 millimeters in diameter. They act as a kind of oceanic smog, clouding the waters and coating the sea floor, and look a lot like food to small marine organisms.

In December, President Barack Obama signed a law banning microbeads, tiny plastic exfoliaters found in toothpaste and skin products that get flushed into waterways. But the MacArthur report urges plastic producers to step up and address the problem by developing products that are reusable and easily recycled—and that are less toxic in nature—and working to make compostable plastics more affordable.

The 2050 prediction is based on the assumption that global fisheries will remain stable over the next three decades, but a report released last week suggests that may be wishful thinking. Revisiting fishery catch rates from the last 60 years, Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller of the University of British Columbia found that the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization drastically underestimates the amount of fish we pluck from the seas. The United Nations relies on official government data, which often only captures the activities of larger fishing operations. When the British Columbia researchers accounted for smaller fisheries, subsistence harvesting, and discarded catches, they calculated catches 53 percent larger than previously thought.

There was a glimmer of hope in the findings, though: The researchers write that fishing rates, after peaking in 1996, declined faster than previously thought—particularly among large-scale industrial fisheries. Whether that trend will hold is another story.

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There May Soon Be More Plastic in the Oceans Than Fish

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How Donald Trump Killed the Biggest Cliché in Politics

by FranklynSwanton Posted on January 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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The first candidate to use one of the most abused clichés in electoral politics at least had the facts on his side. Just before 5 p.m. on October 11, 1948, President Harry Truman pulled into the train station in Willard, Ohio, and addressed the crowd from the rear platform. In a brief speech that lasted no longer than 12 minutes, he accused his Republican challenger, New York Gov. Thomas Dewey, of obsessing over public-opinion surveys, and then made a historic prediction. “I think he is going to get a shock on the second of November,” Truman predicted. “He is going to get the results of one big poll that counts—that is the voice of the American people speaking at the ballot box.”

And good for him. Four years after Gallup’s preference for Republican candidates prompted congressional hearings, the preeminent polling firm predicted Dewey would win by five points. Truman won by 2 million votes. You’ve all seen the photo.

As candidates dealt with the increasing omnipresence of polls, Truman’s mantra became a handy crutch. At first, the historical allusion was explicit. “In one respect I’m like Harry Truman about polls,” Vice President Richard Nixon told the New York Times in 1959. “We share that in common, plus the fact that we both play the piano. I believe the only poll that counts is that on election day.” As he prepared to face Sen. John F. Kennedy the next year, he told Democrats, “I can agree with the distinguished member of your party, Mr. Truman, when he said that the only poll that counts is the one on election day.”

Nixon’s habitual usage of the term helped usher it into the mainstream. In 1972, his daughter Tricia declared that “the only poll that really counts is the vote on election day.” Four years later, Tricky Dick sent a private note of encouragement to his successor, President Gerald Ford: “Keep that confident, fighting spirit—and the only poll that matters will come out alright on November 2.” Within two years, yet another president, Jimmy Carter, was quoting from the Book of Harry: “Look, the only poll that matters in politics is the poll that the people conduct on election day.”

By 1980, when Carter was still holding out hope for the one true poll, the Times felt comfortable calling the use of the cliché a classic gesture of “politicians running behind.” It has even traveled across the pond (as a corollary to the very British phrase, “Every jockey knows the fence that counts is the last one”), and found an ironic second life among college football fans.

The problem now is that it’s no longer true, for wildly divergent reasons. The polls have been all over the place in 2016, and they’re only getting worse because, as Jill Lepore explained in the New Yorker, the pool of people who participate in them is becoming smaller and less representative. But at the same time, the polls matter more than ever. For the first time in a party-nominating contest, they were used to split the Republican candidate field into two tiers of debates—more than a year before election day.

If the cliché is truly dead (it may be indestructible), then Donald Trump killed it. In a rebuke to the Nixons and Trumans—and basically everyone else—who came before him, he has decided that polls are, in fact, fantastic. He can rattle off the latest results off the top of his head; at the most recent debate, in South Carolina, he even corrected a moderator who misstated the size of his lead. And it’s working. The effect has been to turn the polling industry into a political perpetual-motion machine; poll numbers beget media coverage about poll numbers, which beget even higher poll numbers.

After all this, maybe there’s only one way this story can end:

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How Donald Trump Killed the Biggest Cliché in Politics

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Alan Rickman Dies at 69

by JuliusWilliford Posted on January 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Alan Rickman, the British film and theater actor known for his roles in movies such as “Harry Potter” and “Die Hard,” has died at 69.

The Guardian reports he was suffering from cancer. Rickman’s family confirmed the news and said that he died in London “surrounded by family and friends.”

“Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling reacted to news of Rickman’s death on social media:

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Alan Rickman Dies at 69

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America’s Food System Could Be More Vulnerable to Climate Change Than We Thought

by DemetriusBruns Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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For billions of people around the world, the most immediate threat posed by climate change is at the dinner table, as staple crops face a steadily worsening onslaught of drought, heat waves, and other extreme weather events. The United States certainly isn’t immune to these challenges; for proof, just look at California, where an unprecedented drought has cost the state’s agriculture industry billions.

Still, the conventional thinking among many scientists is that developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia—where people are typically hit harder by food price spikes and generally more reliant on agriculture as a primary source of income—are the most vulnerable to food-related climate impacts.

A paper published today in Nature may add a wrinkle to that assumption. Scientists often track the impact that an individual weather disaster has on crops (again, see California), but the new research takes it a step further.

A team of scientists from Canada and the United Kingdom compiled the first-ever global tally of how weather disasters over the past 50 years cut into production of staple cereals. After merging a database of global weather records with a UN record of country-level crop production, the researchers found that, as a rule of thumb, droughts and heat waves typically cut a country’s cereal production by 10 percent. That basically accords with predictions from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s predictions for agricultural vulnerability in the future.

But unexpectedly, the researchers also found that the impacts were 8 to 11 percent more severe in developed countries than in developing ones.

“That was a surprise to us,” said Navin Ramankutty, an agricultural geographer at the University of British Columbia.

Ramankutty said it’s not yet clear why droughts and heat waves tend to hit yields in the United States, Europe, and Australia harder than those in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But he suspects it relates to how farmers set their priorities. In developed countries, the emphasis is often on maximizing profit with big monoculture farms that work great in good climates but get trashed when the weather turns sour. Farmers in developing countries, by contrast, may prioritize minimizing their risk, taking a smaller yield in exchange for better resilience.

Of course, these findings don’t mean developing countries are out of harm’s way. They still face major challenges from climate change, since comparatively small yield losses can have an outsized impact on local economies and food security. But Ramankutty says the new research shows that even in the developed world, farmers may be more at risk from climate change than anyone previously realized.

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America’s Food System Could Be More Vulnerable to Climate Change Than We Thought

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Our ISIS Problem Is That Everyone Wants Someone Else to Take Out ISIS

by DerickQAWfhh Posted on December 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Michael Knights writes today about why it’s so damn hard to destroy ISIS, even though they’re not really all that formidable a force. Basically, it’s because everyone except the United States has bigger fish to fry:

All of our allies and rivals have far more complex goals than degrading and defeating the Islamic State. For them, the current battle is really a game of positioning for the truly decisive action that will begin as soon as the Islamic State is defeated.

The first priority of most actors is consolidating their control on the ground. The Kurds in Syria and Iraq are staking out their long-term territorial claims. Iranian-backed groups like Badr are carving out principalities in Iraqi areas like Diyala and Tuz Khurmatu. Abu Mahdi al-Muhadis, the most senior Iranian proxy in Iraq and a U.S.-designated terrorist involved in the deaths of U.S. and British troops, is seeking to quickly build the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) into a new permanent institution akin to a ministry.

….The Assad regime in Syria is integrating with the Russian military machine….Syrian Sunni groups are tightening military ties to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. Iranian-backed groups in Iraq continue to deepen their ties with Russia and Iran….The Baghdad Operations Command continues to hold around half of the offensive-capable Iraqi military units in reserve in the capital despite the declining risk of an Islamic State attack on Baghdad. Why? To offset the risk posed by the Shia militias.

The whole thing is worth a read, even if, in the end, it boils down to our old friends Team Sunni vs. Team Shia. Basically, everyone is willing to give lip service to fighting ISIS, but for most of the actors in the Middle East it’s not really a high priority. They’d rather keep their powder dry for the main event. In that respect, ISIS is sort of like Donald Trump. All the other Republicans want to get rid of him, but they don’t want to spend a lot of their own energy doing it. They want someone else to do it, so that it will be someone else who’s too worn out to win the actual nomination fight.

More generally, Knights is concerned that the US has no good post-ISIS strategy. We simply have too many allies who hate each others’ guts, and we’re not willing to just take a side in the Sunni-Shia civil war and let the chips fall. “Though Washington may seek to play the role of the balancer between these camps, the U.S. government is faced with impossible choices between traditional Sunni allies and the up-and-coming Shia actors who are critical players in the war against the Islamic State.”

Personally, I’m not convinced there’s a workable answer, which means we need to maintain a pretty light touch in the region and not get sucked into its endless sectarian feuds. But who knows? Maybe President Trump will be able to thread this delicate needle after his landslide victory next November.

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Our ISIS Problem Is That Everyone Wants Someone Else to Take Out ISIS

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