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Coronavirus postpones crucial U.N. climate conference

by NatalieRay317 Posted on April 1, 2020

COP26, the landmark United Nations climate conference of 2020 — originally planned to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, in November — will be delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“The world is facing an unprecedented global challenge & countries are rightly focusing on fighting #COVID19,” wrote Alok Sharma, the president of COP26 and a member of the U.K. parliament, on Twitter. “Due to this, #COP26 has been postponed.”

Policymakers and scientists have speculated for weeks about whether the conference, which would bring together delegations from almost 200 countries around the world, would be rescheduled due to the pandemic spreading across the globe.

Some had urged decision-makers not to delay the talks, saying that COP26 was a crucial step to advancing the goals of the 2016 Paris Agreement. “If it is going to be canceled, that should only be done at the last possible minute — in October,” Yvo do Boer, a former chief of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), told the Guardian in mid-March. (The UNFCCC, the UN treaty responsible for preventing dangerous climate change, is the framework for the annual COP, or “Conference of the Parties,” meetings.)

But with national governments reeling from almost 900,000 cases of coronavirus worldwide, the possibility of a successful and productive COP26 looked increasingly slim.

The conference will be held instead in 2021, but the United Nations and the U.K. have not agreed upon a new date. This is not the first COP to experience logistical problems — last year, COP25 had to be moved abruptly from Chile to Spain due to social unrest — but the disruption in this case will be much more significant.

Countries were expected to present updated national emissions targets at COP26, and there was hope that many countries would pledge to reduce their emissions to net-zero by 2050. The world is currently far off-track to meet the goals set by the almost 200 countries that signed onto the Paris Agreement four years ago.

While the coronavirus may have slowed global emissions for the moment, experts worry that the pandemic will hinder the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy in the long run. And the COP26 delay could drive attention away from the need to reduce fossil fuel use as quickly as possible.

“COVID-19 is the most urgent threat facing humanity today,” Patricia Espinosa, U.N. executive secretary for climate change, said in a statement. “But we cannot forget that climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity over the long term.”

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Coronavirus postpones crucial U.N. climate conference

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Meet the teens schooling us on climate

by BevFrenchjqxxd Posted on February 27, 2018

Generation Z — millennials’ younger brothers and sisters — are increasingly finding their voices in the Trump era, expanding media-savvy campaigns for racial equality and gun control to encompass climate change. A group of high school students are now planning a nationwide series of climate marches on July 21, when they will confront lawmakers in Washington, D.C., with a list of their demands for a livable climate.

“I’d say I do about three hours of conference calls every single day,” says the lead organizer of the march, Jamie Margolin, a 16-year-old high school sophomore in Seattle. “I’m not new to the climate activism world.”

It’s true. Margolin is one of 13 young plaintiffs suing Washington state government for not taking sufficient action to address climate change. She frequently spends lunches answering emails instead of hanging out with friends. And the Seattle teen is not an anomaly: Statistically, young women of color like Margolin are the demographic most engaged on climate issues.

Margolin started planning the upcoming climate march, which she calls “Zero Hour,” last August, after the Trump administration announced its plans to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. She recruited Mrinalini Chakraborty, head of strategy for the national Women’s March, to help the students file for permits and plan logistics. Now, the organizing committee includes dozens of youth from Connecticut to California. The official website for the march launched last week.

Now, the group is drawing inspiration from the teen-led movement for federal gun control in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Margolin was particularly impressed when the Parkland students confronted lawmakers about accepting money from the NRA — which produced some predictably awkward stammers. Her team is considering making similar demands for politicians to refuse money from the fossil fuel industry.

The fervor of Parkland activists as they take their fight to national and state officials gives Margolin confidence that Zero Hour is on the right track, she says. For her, her youth and gender are natural assets in the fight against climate change. “I’m a 16-year-old Latina girl,” she says, “I can help.”

Despite the recent uptick of attention, youth environmental activism isn’t new. There have been youth factions at the United Nations’ annual climate conference, for example, since the beginning of that process nearly 30 years ago. And over the past week, I’ve heard from dozens of young people from around the country who want to see more aggressive climate action.

Therese Etoka, a 17-year-old climate activist from Boise, Idaho, grew up with an awareness about the increasing frequency of wildfires. She now focuses on making actionable demands from those in power, including (successfully) testifying before the Idaho State Senate in support of stricter classroom science standards, on the day of the Parkland shooting. She sees the similarities between NRA and Exxon influencing policy, and sees it as her job to speak up before it’s too late: “This cannot be normal. We’ve had it.”

Edgar McGregor, also 17, often tweets about his anxiety from living in drought-prone southern California. He has been teaching himself climate science to understand what might be in store for his home state in the future.

“Teenagers like me have often wondered how to combat climate change,” McGregor recently tweeted. But he believes activism alone no longer works: “The ones who are speaking out must be the ones that change … and do the work themselves.”

It seems as though fearlessness among teenagers who haven’t yet reached voting age is one symptom of the cultural and environmental anxieties their generation is steeped in. Scientists agree that the world is fast approaching — and perhaps already past — key climate turning points, and that actions in the next few years will have centuries-long ripple effects. Combine that near-inevitability of radical environmental change with a federal government that holds climate denial as an official position — and you’ve got a generation that accepts radical political change as the only reasonable option.

“The powerful thing about youth is that I don’t have a hidden agenda,” says Margolin. By default, teenagers’ only vested interest is their future. “I don’t get paid for this, I’m not lobbying on behalf of anybody. I’m only doing this because it feels so urgent.”

As Margolin watched the students from Parkland make bold and unflinching demands for a world that values their safety, disregarding both the conservatives who double down on thoughts and prayers and the older liberals who say they’ve seen this fight before, she saw the common ground clearly.

“The Parkland youth are asking for their right to live without the fear of gun violence, and we’re asking to live without climate chaos, and without that fear,” Margolin says. “We’re both just asking to live.”

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Meet the teens schooling us on climate

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The Genius Who Helped Unlock the Human Genome Is Taking On the Opioid Crisis

by KarinJoske6 Posted on May 20, 2017

Mother Jones

Francis Collins, the gregarious 67-year-old who directs the National Institutes of Health, doesn’t shy away from a challenge. Collins made a name for himself in the early 2000s when, as director of the Human Genome Project, he oversaw the completion of sequencing 3 billion genes. Now, as the head of the nation’s foremost biomedical research engine, Collins faces a new task: finding solutions to the opioid epidemic, which killed more than 33,000 Americans in 2015.

At the Prescription Drug Abuse and Heroin Conference last month, Collins announced a public-private partnership, in which the NIH will collaborate with biomedical and pharmaceutical companies to develop solutions to the crisis. President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price “strongly supported” the idea, he said. This isn’t Collins’ first such partnership: During his tenure as director—Barack Obama appointed him in 2009—Collins has developed ongoing collaborations with pharmaceutical companies such as Lilly, Merck, and GlaxoSmithKline for Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis. For each partnership, the NIH and the companies pool tens of millions of dollars, with the agreement that the resulting data will be public and the companies will not immediately patent treatments. The jury’s still out on results—the partnerships are about halfway through their five-year timelines. But Collins, a self-described optimist, remains hopeful. “Traditionally it takes many years to go from an idea about a drug target to an approved drug,” said Collins at the conference. “Yet I believe…a vigorous public private partnership could cut that time maybe even in half.”

I talked to Collins about the partnership, potential treatments in the pipeline, and the NIH’s role in confronting the ongoing epidemic.

Mother Jones: Why is a public-private partnership needed?

Francis Collins: While NIH can do a lot of the good science, and we can accelerate it if we have resources, we aren’t going to be the ones making pills. Many of the large-scale clinical trials are not done generally by us but by the drug companies. A successful outcome here—in terms of ultimately getting rid of opioids and the deaths that they cause—would not happen without full engagement by the private sector.

MJ: Which companies will be involved?

FC: It will be a significant proportion of the largest companies. I can’t tell you the total list—as I said, the 15 largest were there. Certainly the groups that already have some drugs that are somewhere in the pipeline will be particularly interested in ways to speed that up.

MJ: What do you hope will come out of it in the short term?

FC: I think that we could increase the number of effective options to help people get over addiction, and the treatments for overdose, particularly when fentanyl is becoming such a prominent part of this dangerous situation. The current overdose treatments are not necessarily as strong as they need to be. We could make progress there pretty quickly, I think—in a matter of even a year or two—by coming up with formulations of drugs that we know work but in a fashion that would have new kinds of capabilities. The drugs would be stronger, as in the overdose situation, or have the potential of longer-acting effects, as in treating addiction. It’s not necessarily a different drug, but a different formulation of the drug. And drug companies are pretty good at that.

MJ: And in the long term?

FC: The goal really needs to be to find nonaddictive but highly potent pain medicines that can replace the use of opioids given the terrible consequences that surround their use. This will be particularly important for people who have chronic pain, where we really don’t have effective treatments now. The good news is that there’s a lot of really interesting science pointing us to new alternatives, like the idea of coming up with something that interacts with that opioid receptor but only activates the pathway that results in pain relief—not the somewhat different pathway that results in addiction. That’s a pretty new discovery that could actually be workable, and a lot of effort ought to be put into that.

I’d like all of us, the academics, the government, and the private sector, to think about this the way we thought about HIV/AIDs in the early 1990s, where people were dying all around us in tens of thousands. Well, that’s what’s happening now with opioids. This ought to be all hands on deck—what could we do to accelerate what otherwise might take a lot longer? It’s interesting talking to the drug companies, who have really gotten quite motivated and seem to be determined to make a real contribution here. There are quite a number of new drugs that are in the pipeline somewhere, and they haven’t been moving very quickly, because companies haven’t been convinced there was enough of a market—opioids are relatively cheap. And also they’ve been worried that it would be hard to get new pain medicines approved if they had any side effects at all. Now that we’ve seen opioids have the most terrible side effect of all—namely, death—it would seem that as new analgesics come along, that the ability to approve some that might give you a stomachache now and then would probably be better.

MJ: There’s a lot of wariness of big pharmaceutical companies right now, given Big Pharma’s role in creating this problem to begin with. How do you make sure that whatever treatments are developed are affordable?

FC: That’s a very big concern for everybody right now. It’s front and center in these discussions about development of new drugs and pricing of existing drugs. And I don’t know the full answer to that. This is just part of a larger discussion about drug pricing which applies across the board, whether we’re talking about drugs for cardiovascular disease or cancer or, in this case, alternatives for opioids. But we need them. As much as people might want to say, “Oh, pharmaceutical companies, they’re all just out to make money,” they also have the scientific capabilities and they spend about twice what the government does on research and development. If they weren’t there, we’d be completely hopeless as far as new treatment.

MJ: Trump’s latest budget proposes a 20 percent cut to the NIH for 2018. Are you worried about having enough funding?

FC: Of course I am. And not just for this, but for all the other things that NIH is called upon to do as part of our mission. I’m an optimist, and what I have seen in my 24 years at NIH is that opportunity in medical research is not a partisan issue—it’s not something that’s caught up in politics most of the time. And having seen the enthusiasm represented by the Congress in their passage of the 21st Century Cures Act just four months ago with incredible positive bipartisan margins, I think when the dust all settles, people will look at these kinds of investments and see them as a high priority for our nation. But of course, that’s my optimistic view.

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The Genius Who Helped Unlock the Human Genome Is Taking On the Opioid Crisis

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Donald Trump Has Made Socialism Cool Again

by IrwinMiller Posted on April 24, 2017

Mother Jones

A month after President Donald Trump took office, khalid kamau was eating lunch in the cluttered kitchen of the Mayday Space, a leftist community center in Brooklyn. A year earlier, the 39-year-old (who prefers to spell his name without capital letters) had been driving a bus in Atlanta. Then his life took a hard left turn. When the city slashed public pensions, he became a union organizer. He then launched a Black Lives Matter chapter, became a delegate for Sen. Bernie Sanders, and led a walkout at the Democratic National Convention when Hillary Clinton clinched the nomination. In December, kamau announced his candidacy for City Council in South Fulton, Georgia. Not long after that, he joined the Democratic Socialists of America.

kamau, who was wearing a black T-shirt that said, “Don’t let your new president get your ass whooped,” had been a DSA member for all of a few weeks, but he already had big plans. Leaning forward on his wooden stool, he said, “I want to be the Obama of democratic socialism.”

First, kamau needed to win an election. Which is why, on an unseasonably warm weekend in February, he had come to Brooklyn for the Revolution at the Crossroads conference, a gathering of about 300 teen and twentysomething leftists that was sponsored by the Young Democratic Socialists, a subgroup of the DSA. After speaking on the kickoff panel the night before, kamau had taught the attendees how to use the free canvassing app MiniVAN and signed up dozens of volunteers for his campaign. (His organizing paid off; last Tuesday, kamau won his runoff election with 67 percent of the vote.)

Founded in 1982, the DSA claims to be the largest socialist organization in the country. It’s not a political party along the lines of the Communist Party USA or the Green Party. Many of its members are Democrats or the kind of left-­leaning independents who usually vote for Democrats. But just as the Obama era ushered in a boomlet of libertarianism on the right, the DSA is banking on Trump to make socialism great again. Its goal is not just to stop Trump’s worst policies, but to push the political conversation on the left even further to the left through a mix of political action and cultural engagement. There are signs it’s already working.

Fueled by disenchantment with the traditional institutions of the Democratic Party, the promise of Sanders’ candidacy, and the specter of Trumpism, DSA membership has more than doubled since the election. The DSA now boasts more than 20,000 members and more than 120 local chapters. Sure, you could fit just about everyone comfortably inside Madison Square Garden, but being a socialist hasn’t been this cool in years.

“The Bernie campaign really opened that Overton Window,” said Winnie Wong, a 41-year-old activist who co-founded the group People for Bernie and coined the phrase “Feel the Bern.” “We funneled thousands of people, hundreds of thousands—15 million people!—through to the other side. Are those people democratic socialists? No. Do they feel comfortable with the idea of socialism? Well, yeah! Because they voted for it.” Normalizing socialism, she said, is “the most important thing we can do.”

MAD LIBS: A quick guide to channeling your anti-Trump fervor

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Revolution at the Crossroads existed in a parallel universe to other political confabs, such as the Conservative Political Action Conference, known for its corporate sponsors, bad suits, and ritzy Beltway hotels. The opening panel was delayed because the speaker system was picking up an AM radio station. An attendee joked that “neoliberal capitalism”—”neoliberal” being the epithet of choice among the DSA set—was to blame. Sleeping bags littered the side walls. The dress code was plaid.

Socialism’s hipster makeover has been accelerated by a flowering of leftist media and culture. The DSA’s unofficial hype man is not Sanders—who is not a member—but the comedian Rob Delaney, who joined up after the election, inspired by his positive experiences with the British National Health Service as an expat living in England. Delaney has tweeted about the DSA more than 100 times since November and describes himself as a “fucking cockroach” for socialism, because of his persistence. “A lot of people have written me and said that they’ve joined because I won’t shut up about Democratic Socialists on Twitter,” he told me. He even raised money to defray expenses for some of the students who traveled to Brooklyn.

A popular gateway drug for democratic socialists is Chapo Trap House, a podcast hosted by a small clique of millennial Sandernistas that takes its deliberately head-scratching name from the jailed Mexican cartel king. It is incisive and irreverent but often scathing toward politicians, journalists, or anyone else insufficiently in line with its politics. (For instance: Clinton is an “entitled fucking slob,” and Democratic leaders should have “fucking killed themselves” after losing the election.)

Outside the conference, activists hawked Workers Vanguard, the ubiquitous Trotskyist newspaper. But inside, students chatted with writers from the two-year-old journal Current Affairs (“the world’s first readable political publication”) and Jacobin, a quarterly launched in 2010 by Bhaskar Sunkara, then an undergrad at George Washington University. Jacobin aims to do for socialism what National Review did for conservatism half a century ago. It’s polemical but not stodgy; its writers are as likely to discourse on the NBA as they are to inveigh against Uber. The magazine’s audience doubled, to 30,000 subscribers, in the four months after the election.

At the conference, where he was selling the most recent issue from a folding table along the wall, Sunkara, also a vice chair of the DSA, was a minor celebrity. “I think there’s a feeling that with the center kind of defeated, or at the very least temporarily discredited, we are the new center-left,” he told me. That newfound popularity has caused him to rethink the limitations of leftist politics. “Compared to where the goalposts were five years ago, we’re already basically there,” he said. Socialists won’t run Washington by 2020—but maybe they will in his lifetime.

But the DSA’s continued growth is hardly guaranteed. One challenge as it seeks to broaden its appeal is messaging. Members of the new socialist vanguard pride themselves on a certain degree of unfiltered vulgarity, and they target mainline liberals as often as they do Trump-backing conservatives. Amber A’Lee Frost, a Chapo co-host and YDS panelist, has referred to her cohort’s style as the “Dirtbag Left.” Frost contends that rudeness is essential to disrupting the political status quo. It is, however, a weird way to make new friends. Coalition politics are hard when everyone else is a sellout.

More pressing than its inability to play nice is the movement’s inescapable whiteness. If the audience at the conference was any indication, the DSA’s future is doomed to demographic failure—a point kamau emphasized on the event’s opening night. “I want you to look around the room,” he said, “and then I want you to realize that we’re in Flatbush, Brooklyn, right?” It was Bushwick, but the point stood. “I love Bernie, but I also think that the leaders of the Democratic Party and the leaders of the left are going to have to come to terms with the fact that the American left is a movement of black and brown people,” he told me. “And the leadership of the Democratic Party doesn’t look like that—the leadership of the DSA doesn’t look like that.”

In South Fulton, a mostly working-class, African American community of 100,000 people, kamau sees an opportunity to broaden the appeal of democratic socialism. He believed his race, which was nonpartisan, was a chance to act on a DSA manifesto that calls for running “openly democratic socialist candidates for local office, in and outside the Democratic Party,” and “taking out pro-corporate, neoliberal Democrats.” YDS had given each conferencegoer a three-page reading list with titles by writers such as Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Barbara Ehrenreich. Wong suggested that young socialists study up on the hard lessons of electoral politics instead. “Learn about the mechanics it takes to win these elections,” she said. “You’re not gonna learn those by reading all three volumes of Capital, I promise you.”

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Donald Trump Has Made Socialism Cool Again

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Scott Pruitt’s New Plan for the EPA Will Destroy Towns Like This One

by DJCCecilia Posted on April 19, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator has found a slogan for his embattled agency’s new direction. Last week, Scott Pruitt announced a #Back2Basics campaign that proposes returning the EPA to its supposed roots: protecting the environment, spurring job growth, and not burdening industry with rules and regulations. Pruitt might see firsthand the problems with this vision on Wednesday when he visits East Chicago, Indiana, a mostly black and Latino city of 29,000 that is home to a Superfund site and a host of other environmental problems.

Local officials, including Indiana’s Republican governor, Eric Holcomb, urged Pruitt to visit the site and address the issues surrounding the cleanup process, which has been lagging for several years. The site is known as USS Lead, referring to the smelting facility that operated there between 1906 and 1985, turning refined copper and lead into batteries and other products and, in the process, contaminating the soil in the area with lead and arsenic. The site was added to the National Priorities list in 2009, which means it’s one of the most polluted sites in the country.

The EPA began conducting soil tests at the site in late 2009 and finally reached a consent decree with the liable companies in 2014. The White House has proposed a cut to funding for the Superfund program, but Pruitt told the U.S. Conference of Mayors in March that he believes it’s vital. But his #Back2Basics plans for the EPA, which includes rolling back regulations for companies, would lead to additional problems in East Chicago. Abigail Dillen of Earthjustice.org said the plan is simply getting rid of “the health and environmental protections we all rely on—protections only the government can provide.”

The pollution from the Superfund site is not the only issue facing the city. In March, the residents of East Chicago signed a petition, urging the agency to address an urgent crisis of lead in the water supply. The EPA sent officials to the city to test the water of the homes near the Superfund site and found that not only were there high levels of lead in the tested homes, but that the contamination was likely city-wide problem; lead pipes and water that had been improperly treated for decades were the culprits. The EPA expressed concern about corrosion control chemicals in the city’s drinking water. During the water tests, the agency asked city officials which chemicals they were using for water treatment and sent emails to city officials with links to a report about why the chemical the city was using was insufficient to protect the water.

“There are a lot of issues,” says Anjali Waikar, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, “but we’re also hoping for clear affirmative action from the EPA with respect to the drinking water.”

Marc Edwards, one of the Virginia Tech scientists who researched the water system in Flint, Michigan, said the corrosion control chemical the city began using in 1992 was not effective for preventing lead leaching. He also said the chemical the city began using in 2015 could be worse than having no corrosion control at all. East Chicago Utilities Director Greg Crowley told the Times of Northwest Indiana that it would have been “helpful if the EPA had been more hands-on” in helping the city make the switch to different chemicals.

But federal oversight is not on the EPA’s new agenda. Pruitt criticized the Chesapeake Bay cleanup plan as “federal overreach” during his Senate confirmation hearing. In his many lawsuits filed against the EPA when he served as attorney general of Oklahoma, he alleged that the EPA “had acted in excess of the authority granted to it by Congress.”

One of the specific priorities in #Back2Basics is “clearing the backlog of new chemicals” waiting approval from the agency so companies can “innovate and create jobs.” After the White House solicited policy advice from industry leaders on which regulations were impeding their businesses and which should get the ax, nearly half of the 168 submitted comments targeted the EPA. A typical example is from a chemical manufacturing company in Newark, New Jersey, which claims it is being hamstrung by the EPA’s Superfund program. Forty-eight of those comments related to the Clean Air Act and 29 to the Clean Water Act. Before environmental laws, no legal avenue existed to stop companies from polluting the land and water.

Then there are concerns about administration plans to shrink the agency. According to Politico, budget director Mick Mulvaney wanted the EPA to identify two regional offices for closure on June 15. This week, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that one of those could be EPA Region 5, which has been plagued with problems, but is the office responsible for flagging improper water treatment in East Chicago.

“Pruitt wants to take the EPA out of the mix and put power back into state and city regulators’ hands,” says Waikar. “But East Chicago is a clear example of how that’s not working.”

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Scott Pruitt’s New Plan for the EPA Will Destroy Towns Like This One

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Why Kansas’ Fiscal Implosion Is Bad News for Trump

by AlvaroBirdwood Posted on February 23, 2017

Mother Jones

An ambitious effort by a Republican governor to drastically cut his state’s taxes is crumbling—and that’s a bad omen for Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress who are hoping to slash tax rates at the national level.

Shortly after he became governor of Kansas in 2011, Sam Brownback went to work on rewriting the state’s tax code. Together with the Republican-dominated legislature, he eliminated the top income tax bracket, lowered everyone else’s income tax rate, and created a loophole that allowed some business owners to pay no state income taxes at all.

Brownback sold the cuts as a way to jolt the Kansas economy to life, promising major job growth thanks to the lower tax rates. To pass these tax measures, Brownback worked to replace moderate Republicans in the legislature who opposed his ideas with true-believer conservatives. He helped knock off nine moderate Republican incumbents, and the effort paid off when his tax reform passed in 2012.

Read more about how Sam Brownback created a Kochtopia in Kansas.

But instead of the miracle growth that Brownback promised, the tax cuts have left a widening crater in the state budget. State economic growth has lagged behind the national pace, and job growth has stagnated. Lawmakers have been left scrambling each year to pass unpleasant spending cuts when tax revenue comes in below expected levels, leading to contentious fights in the legislature and state courts over reduced public school funding. When the state legislature convened last month, it faced a $320 million budget shortfall that needed to be closed before the end of the current fiscal year in June—and a projected additional $500 million shortfall for the next fiscal year.

After more moderate Republicans joined the GOP-dominated legislature following last November’s election, the party has appeared more willing to concede defeat and ditch Brownback’s tax experiment. Last week, the state House and Senate passed a bill that would generate more than $1 billion by eradicating most of Brownback’s reforms. It would raise personal income tax rates (though still not as high as the pre-Brownback rates) and end the loophole that has allowed 330,000 business owners—including subsidiaries of Wichita-based Koch Industries—to avoid paying income taxes.

The fate of that bill is still in doubt. Brownback vetoed the measure on Wednesday morning, after explaining, “I am vetoing it because the legislature failed to fulfill my request that they find savings and efficiencies before asking the people of Kansas for more taxes.” But the House quickly fought back, voting 85-40 to override the veto. But late Wednesday afternoon, the Senate fell three votes short of the the two-thirds majority necessary to pass the law without Brownback’s approval, leaving the fate of the state’s tax system uncertain.

So what’s all of this got to do with Trump? Brownback’s failures could complicate national tax-reform efforts, which have been high on the Trump administration’s agenda. “Lowering the overall tax burden on American business is big league,” Trump told airline executives earlier this month. “That’s coming along very well. We’re way ahead of schedule, I believe. And we’re going to announce something I would say over the next two or three weeks that will be phenomenal in terms of tax.”

Like many of Trump’s policy plans, his tax agenda remains largely a mystery. But the proposal he outlined during the presidential campaign shared many features with Brownback’s experiment. It would slash personal income tax rates and reduce the number of brackets. It wouldn’t eliminate business income taxes, but it would lower them to 15 percent, allowing many super-wealthy Americans to avoid paying high tax rates by funneling their income through their businesses.

That’s not entirely coincidental. Trump and Brownback share a tax guide: Reaganomics guru Art Laffer. Laffer is best known for the Laffer curve, a diagram of his hypothesis that lowering tax rates could increase tax revenue by boosting economic output. Kansas paid $75,000 for Laffer to spend three days consulting with lawmakers on the state’s tax plans. Laffer also visited Trump Tower to consult on tax reform last year, and in December he called Trump’s campaign tax plans “terrific.” When Trump’s treasury secretary nominee went before the Senate last month, Trump’s transition press office emailed reporters a list of endorsements that started with glowing praise from Laffer. “Steven Mnuchin is a wonderful choice for Treasury Secretary,” Laffer said. “He has a great understanding of finance, markets, and housing. He is committed to tax reform that will get our economy growing, create jobs, and make America the best place to do business.”

By now, it’s clear that Brownback’s tax experiment hasn’t produced the growth he promised. But that hasn’t put an end to Republican efforts to replicate it on the national level. In December, Brownback suggested to the Wall Street Journal that Kansas’ tax reforms could offer a model for Trump. And on Thursday morning, Brownback is scheduled to speak—almost certainly about his taxation model—at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC, on a panel titled “How Governors are Reclaiming America’s Promise.”

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Why Kansas’ Fiscal Implosion Is Bad News for Trump

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Jam the courts, blow the whistles, shut down the kitchen: Here are The Resistance’s latest strategies

by TereseHeathersha Posted on February 17, 2017

In the aftermath of America’s Most Baffling Press Conference, let’s cut to the chase: People are calling out Trump and his administration in meaningful, productive ways all across the land. Here’s what went down:

Despite unprecedented calls from EPA employees for senators to block his confirmation and a judge’s order to release years of emails with fossil fuel industry figures, Scott Pruitt is now EPA administrator. Are you enraged? Will you be in Boston this weekend? That’s something else to be upset about, but bear with us: Thousands of scientists are in town for the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference. On Feb. 19, scientists and their allies will hold a rally in Copley Square to protest the Trump administration’s anti-science rhetoric and policies.

If you’re trying to reach anyone in the Department of Energy, you might have a tough time of it, because their phone directory was taken offline on Thursday morning. Cool! Anyway, California Rep. Ted Lieu and Virginia Rep. Don Beyer have published a guide for whistleblowers as a show of strength against the Trump administration’s “strapp[ing] a muzzle on federal agencies.” The Union of Concerned Scientists also released a guide to help scientists bring important information to the public discreetly and securely. Environmental science and public health shouldn’t be political, and these guides are a means to protect them.

Earthjustice filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Standing Rock Sioux in a new attempt to block construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline, which is already underway. A bit of good news for the anti-pipeline movement: The hearing may be expedited.

On Feb. 16, the American food industry may have looked a little … thin. That’s because immigrants across the United States took the day off to show what an America that operates on deportations and immigration bans would look like. (Spoiler: It doesn’t have a lot of food.) In case you were wondering if Washington would notice (via The New York Times): “The Pentagon warned its employees that a number of its food concessions, including Sbarro’s [sic], Starbucks, and Taco Bell, were closed because immigrant employees had stayed home and that they could expect longer lines at restaurants that were open.”

And in response to an ongoing rash of deportations, a coalition of Mexican lawmakers under the name Monarca is aiming to protect Mexican immigrants by exploiting the U.S. legal system’s greatest weakness: It’s a bureaucratic nightmare that’s already heavily backlogged!

And, ICYMI on Grist:

The movement to divest from Dakota Access is growing fast.
Big name Republicans are taking a carbon tax plan to the White House.

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Jam the courts, blow the whistles, shut down the kitchen: Here are The Resistance’s latest strategies

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Trump gives his classic right-wing energy plan a scary historical name

by KatheriIVGI Posted on September 23, 2016

What’s in a name?

Trump gives his classic right-wing energy plan a scary historical name

By on Sep 23, 2016 12:51 pmShare

Donald Trump gave another speech on Thursday promoting his old energy ideas — not just the same ones he’s been talking about for months, but the same ones Republicans have been talking about for years. While the substance might be standard GOP fare, he’s given it a name that harkens back to a reactionary movement most Republicans would rather forget: the America First Energy Plan.

The phrase “America First” has a chilling history. It was a rallying cry in the 1930s for fascists, isolationists, and anti-Semites who didn’t want the United States to join World War II. Whether Trump intends it as a dog whistle to the far-right or not, the label is accurate: Trump is disregarding the needs of everyone outside of America (not to mention everyone inside America who isn’t in the fossil fuel business). Climate change is a global problem, and Trump wants to make sure the U.S. is not part of the global solution. On top of his plan to dramatically increase dirty energy production, he wants to pull the U.S. out of the international Paris climate agreement.

Lying about Clinton’s energy agenda

Trump added another new bit to his shtick on Thursday, while speaking at a fracking conference in Pittsburgh: He totally misrepresented Hillary Clinton’s energy agenda.

“She plans … the aggressive restriction of American energy production,” Trump said. “Her plan will help only her wealthy donors, and global special interests, who benefit from the rigged system. Hillary Clinton wants to put the coal miners out of work, ban hydraulic fracturing in most places, and extensively restrict and ban energy production on public lands and in most offshore areas.”

Does Clinton really want to make America as unenergetic as Jeb Bush? No. Trump’s caricature is filled with falsehoods.

Clinton does not propose to restrict American energy production. She plans to restrict American dirty energy production while increasing solar energy capacity by 700 percent — adding jobs to an industry that already employs more people than oil and gas.

She does not propose to ban fracking in most places — much to the consternation of many environmentalists. Rather, she proposes to regulate fracking to better protect public health and safety.

She does not propose to end energy production on public lands or offshore areas. She has pledged to reform fossil fuel leasing policies so companies have to pay a more fair price to taxpayers for what they extract from federal property. And she plans to increase wind and solar energy production on public land tenfold.

Whatever one thinks of Clinton’s energy agenda — climate activists think it doesn’t go far enough, conservatives think it’s bad for the economy — it’s just bizarre and nonsensical to claim it will only benefit “her wealthy donors.” Who are these titans of wind and solar energy Trump is talking about? Whoever they are, their ability to donate to campaigns and influence politics is much smaller than the oil, gas, and coal executives that Trump is sucking up to — like fracking magnate Harold Hamm, who even got a shout-out in Trump’s speech.

Changing his mind about the EPA

Trump made one more tweak to his agenda in his speech yesterday: He no longer wants to abolish the EPA. That’s a marked shift from his previous campaign rhetoric. “I will refocus the EPA on its core mission of ensuring clean air, and clean, safe drinking water for all Americans,” he said.

That might sound good, but Trump is still proposing to get rid of key regulations that make it possible for EPA to achieve that core mission. He pledged yet again to “eliminate” the Waters of the U.S. rule, which protects water supplies, and the Clean Power Plan, which would rein in not just climate pollution but the air pollution that directly harms people’s health. Essentially, he’s come around to the standard Republican position: keep the EPA, but don’t let it inconvenience business interests.

Despite the conventional wisdom that Trump represents a new, populist kind of Republican, his energy plans are the same old fossil fuel industry giveaways.

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Trump gives his classic right-wing energy plan a scary historical name

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Chicago just named a street for an environmental justice hero.

by SallyLandon Posted on September 15, 2016

At the Our Ocean Conference in Washington, D.C., this week, Obama announced the creation of The Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, which will protect deep-sea ecosystems off the coast of New England.

The monument, which lies about 150 miles east of Massachusetts, includes three submerged canyons — one of them deeper than the Grand Canyon — and four underwater mountains. The designation means that commercial fishing will be phased out of the region, and resource extraction such as mining and drilling will be prohibited. That’s good news for creatures like endangered whales, sea turtles, and deep-sea coral — and those less sexy microorganisms that sustain all of them, like plankton.

According to a recent study by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, ocean temperatures in this section of the Atlantic are projected to warm three times faster than the global average. This new monument, according to the White House, “will help build the resilience of that unique ecosystem, provide a refuge for at-risk species, and create natural laboratories for scientists to monitor and explore the impacts of climate change.”

President Obama has protected more land and water than any other American president — including the world’s largest marine protected area in the Pacific.

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Chicago just named a street for an environmental justice hero.

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Voter Fraud Is Still a Myth, and 11 Other Stats on the State of Voting Rights in America

by RandolphBeaureg Posted on August 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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Three years ago, the Supreme Court gutted an important provision in the Voting Rights Act, opening the door to a succession of voting restrictions. But recent court decisions have stymied efforts by mostly Republican-led legislatures to restrict voting access in Texas, North Carolina, North Dakota, and elsewhere before the November election.

Still, as the following stats show, the fight for voting access isn’t over yet:

Sources: Card 1: Brennan Center for Justice; Card 2: National Conference of State Legislatures, Brennan Center for Justice; Card 3: North Carolina State Board of Elections, Veasey v. Perry opinion, Frank v. Walker opinion, University of California, San Diego; Card 4: TMJ4, Frank v. Walker opinion; Card 5: University of California, San Diego; Card 6: The Sentencing Project; Brennan Center for Justice; Card 7: 2012 Survey on the Performance of American Elections; Card 8: Justin Levitt, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

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Voter Fraud Is Still a Myth, and 11 Other Stats on the State of Voting Rights in America

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