Tag Archives: government

Google Says It Will Achieve 100 Percent Renewable Energy Next Year

by EfrenGell0 Posted on December 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Tech giants are jockeying to be the first to hit a 100 percent renewable energy goal. Google, which has invested in solar and wind energy for a decade, intends to get there by 2017.

Google is the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy and plans to buy enough wind and solar energy to offset all the electricity used by its 13 data centers and offices in 150 cities worldwide, the company said Tuesday.

Apple seems close to reaching its own 100 percent goal as well. The company said it achieved 93 percent in 2015. An Apple spokeswoman said the company has yet to set a year for when they would likely cross the finish line.

For Google, hitting the 100 percent target means for every unit of electricity it consumes—typically from coal or natural gas power plants—it would buy a unit of wind or solar electricity. The company wouldn’t say how much electricity it will need to have purchased by the end of next year to reach its 100 percent goal, but did say that the amount would exceed the 5.7 terawatt-hours solar and wind energy that it bought in 2015.

“We want to run our business in an environmentally responsible way, and energy consumption is the largest portion,” said Neha Palmer, head of energy strategy and development at Google’s Global Infrastructure Group.

Google is taking a big leap to that 100 percent goal, having achieved just 37 percent in 2014. The company has invested in renewable energy ever since it kicked off the construction of a 1.6-megawatt solar energy system in 2006. Since 2010, it’s signed 2.6 gigawatts worth of solar and wind contracts.

The tech giant isn’t alone in setting the 100 percent target. A global campaign to promote 100 percent renewable energy use in the business world includes Ikea, Facebook, Starbucks and Johnson & Johnson.

Businesses, like homeowners, have historically relied on their local utilities for power. In 2015, about 67 percent of the electricity generated in the United States came from fossil fuels. Businesses would have to build and run their own solar or wind farms if they want to hit their 100 percent more quickly, but that will require hefty investments and expertise they don’t have. As a result, when companies set strong renewable energy goals, they often reach them by buying enough solar and wind electricity or renewable energy credits to offset their use of electricity from coal or natural gas power plants.

Some companies, such as Google and Microsoft, have invested in solar and wind power plants to help increase the amount of renewable energy in the local electric grids. Or, using their clout as large energy customers, they work on convincing their local utilities to invest in renewable energy.

Once extremely expensive, solar and wind have seen their prices falling significantly in the past 10 years. Government tax breaks have also helped to make solar and wind more affordable to both businesses and homeowners.

The price for building large solar farms that have the scale to supply utilities dropped 12 percent in 2015, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, part of the US Department of Energy.

Market analysts expect the prices to continue to fall even with the abundance of cheap coal and natural gas. The pressure on countries around the world to meet their targets from the Paris climate agreement, which went into effect last month, will make renewable energy attractive, said Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The research firm has projected that solar and wind will become the cheapest sources of electricity for “most of the world” after 2030.

“Renewable energy has become incredibly cost effective,” said Dan Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California-Berkeley. “There is no company on the planet that can’t make a 100 percent energy target a viable, cost-effective strategy.”

Yet most businesses have yet to set a renewable energy target. That’s because cost isn’t the only issue. Big companies tend to have an advantage over smaller firms because they have the resources to understand the energy markets and negotiate contracts to buy renewable energy, said Colin Smith, solar analyst for GTM Research.

“You’re talking about very complex deals and arrangements with unique risk profiles that most companies aren’t fully well equipped to understand,” he said.

Google currently pays for wind and solar power from 20 renewable energy projects in the United States and abroad, in places such as Sweden and Chile. However, it doesn’t limit itself to buying solar and wind only in regions where it operates and sees itself as a champion of reducing the emissions produced by the electric industry, which is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

“Wind and solar developers couldn’t get financing without us guaranteeing to pay for the power in the long term,” said Palmer.

Setting the 100 percent renewable energy goal is not the only way to reduce a company’s carbon footprint, said Dan Reicher, executive director of the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University.

Businesses should first look at cutting down on their energy use and becoming more energy efficient, said Reicher. That will then reduce the amount of renewable energy they need to procure.

“Energy efficiency tends not to sound as sexy, just as putting solar panels on your roof is more interesting than putting an efficient furnace in your basement,” he said. “But from an economic and environmental perspective, you want to start with energy efficiency.”

Reicher also noted that electricity isn’t always the biggest source of energy for a business. FedEx, for example, uses far more energy in transportation, he said.

“Often a big chunk of a company’s business goes beyond electricity,” said Reicher. “What are they doing on the industrial side, on the transportation side, for heating and cooling?”

The election of Donald Trump as president has worried renewable energy supporters about the progress made to make solar and wind competitive against coal and natural gas.

With the new administration under Donald Trump, renewable energy supporters worry that the government will stop supporting renewable energy. Trump has vowed to revive the coal industry, which has seen half a dozen bankruptcies in recent years as it struggles to compete with the cheaper natural gas. But whether the new administration will create anti-renewable energy policies remains to be seen, Reicher said.

Google doesn’t anticipate changes to its renewable energy initiatives in the near future.

“The results of any one election won’t change our plans,” said Palmer.

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Google Says It Will Achieve 100 Percent Renewable Energy Next Year

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Obamacare Repeal Is Doomed

by Teofilnpc Posted on December 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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The current hotness in Republican circles is “repeal and delay.” That is, they want to pass legislation that repeals Obamacare in, say, 2019, but doesn’t replace it with anything. Then they can spend the next couple of years figuring out what should take its place. There’s only one problem with this:

Republicans. Can’t. Repeal. Obamacare.

Oh, they can repeal big parts of it. Anything related to the budget, like taxes and subsidies, can be repealed via the Senate procedure called reconciliation, which needs only 51 votes to pass. But all the other parts can be filibustered, and it takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Republicans don’t have 60 votes in the Senate.1

This leaves quite a few elements of Obamacare that can’t be repealed via reconciliation, but I think Democrats should focus on one: pre-existing conditions. This is the provision of Obamacare that bans insurers from turning down customers or charging them extra for coverage, no matter what kind of pre-existing conditions they have. I tell the whole story here, but there are several reasons this is the best provision to focus on:

It’s an easy thing to understand.
It’s very popular.
Republicans say they favor keeping it.
Donald Trump says he favors keeping it.
It’s not a minor regulation. It is absolutely essential to any health care plan.
It’s fairly easy to explain why repealing Obamacare but leaving in place the pre-existing conditions ban2 would destroy the individual insurance market and leave tens of millions of people with no way to buy insurance.

The last point is the most important. Take me. I’m currently being kept alive by about $100,000 worth of prescriptions drugs each year. If I can go to any insurer and demand that they cover me for $10,000, that’s a certain loss of $90,000. If millions of people like me do this, insurance companies will lose billions. In the employer market, which covers people who work for large companies, this is workable because insurers have lots and lots of healthy, profitable people at each company to make up these losses. In the individual market—after you’ve repealed the individual mandate and the subsidies—they don’t. They will bear huge losses and they know it.

What this means is not just that Obamacare would collapse. It means the entire individual market would collapse. Every insurance company in America would simply stop selling individual policies. It would be political suicide to make this happen, and this means that Democrats have tremendous leverage if they’re willing to use it. It all depends on how well they play their hand.

The current Republican hope is that they can repeal parts of Obamacare, and then hold Democrats hostage: vote for our replacement plan or else the individual insurance market dies. There’s no reason Democrats should do anything but laugh at this. Republicans now control all three branches of government. They’ve been lying to their base about Obamacare repeal for years. Now the chickens have come home to roost, and they’re responsible for whatever happens next. If the Democratic Party is even marginally competent, they can make this stick.

Plenty of Republicans already know this. Some have only recently figured it out. Some are still probably living in denial. It doesn’t matter. Pre-existing conditions is the hammer Democrats can use to either save Obamacare or else demand that any replacement be equally generous. They just have to use it.

1Of course, Republicans do have the alternative of either (a) getting rid of the filibuster or (b) firing the Senate parliamentarian and hiring one who will let them do anything they want. If they do either of those things, then they can repeal all of Obamacare and replace it with anything they want. I don’t think they’ll do either one, but your mileage may vary on this question.

2Just for the record, it’s worth noting that Republicans can’t modify the pre-existing conditions ban either. Democrats can filibuster that too.

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Obamacare Repeal Is Doomed

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This senator has given 150 pleas for climate action. Now, he has a few words for Trump.

by OdessaMarr66 Posted on November 29, 2016

Amnesty International investigators interviewed laborers as young as 8 working on plantations that sell to Wilmar, the largest palm-oil trader. Palm oil goes into bread, cereal, chocolate, soaps — it’s in about half of everything on supermarket shelves.

Wilmar previously committed to buying palm oil only from companies that don’t burn down forest or exploit workers. Child labor is illegal in Indonesia.

When Wilmar heard about the abuses, it opened an internal investigation and set up a monitoring process.

It’s disappointing that Wilmar’s commitments haven’t put an end to labor abuses, but it’s not surprising. It’s nearly impossible to eliminate worker exploitation without addressing structural causes: mass poverty, disenfranchisement, and lack of safety nets.

Investigators talked to one boy who dropped out of school to work on a plantation at the age of 12 when his father became too ill to work. Without some kind of welfare program, that boy’s family would probably be worse off if he’d been barred from working.

The boy had wanted to become a teacher. For countries like Indonesia to get out of poverty and stop climate-catastrophic deforestation, they need to help kids like this actually become teachers. That will require actors like Wilmar, Amnesty, and the government to work together to give laborers a living wage, and take care of them when they get sick.

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This senator has given 150 pleas for climate action. Now, he has a few words for Trump.

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This nine-step program is like Alcoholics Anonymous for climate anxiety.

by CliffordWhalen4 Posted on November 29, 2016

Amnesty International investigators interviewed laborers as young as 8 working on plantations that sell to Wilmar, the largest palm-oil trader. Palm oil goes into bread, cereal, chocolate, soaps — it’s in about half of everything on supermarket shelves.

Wilmar previously committed to buying palm oil only from companies that don’t burn down forest or exploit workers. Child labor is illegal in Indonesia.

When Wilmar heard about the abuses, it opened an internal investigation and set up a monitoring process.

It’s disappointing that Wilmar’s commitments haven’t put an end to labor abuses, but it’s not surprising. It’s nearly impossible to eliminate worker exploitation without addressing structural causes: mass poverty, disenfranchisement, and lack of safety nets.

Investigators talked to one boy who dropped out of school to work on a plantation at the age of 12 when his father became too ill to work. Without some kind of welfare program, that boy’s family would probably be worse off if he’d been barred from working.

The boy had wanted to become a teacher. For countries like Indonesia to get out of poverty and stop climate-catastrophic deforestation, they need to help kids like this actually become teachers. That will require actors like Wilmar, Amnesty, and the government to work together to give laborers a living wage, and take care of them when they get sick.

Link:

This nine-step program is like Alcoholics Anonymous for climate anxiety.

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Thousands have fled their homes as historic wildfires burn in Tennessee.

by Scotty24Wtablvi Posted on November 29, 2016

Amnesty International investigators interviewed laborers as young as 8 working on plantations that sell to Wilmar, the largest palm-oil trader. Palm oil goes into bread, cereal, chocolate, soaps — it’s in about half of everything on supermarket shelves.

Wilmar previously committed to buying palm oil only from companies that don’t burn down forest or exploit workers. Child labor is illegal in Indonesia.

When Wilmar heard about the abuses, it opened an internal investigation and set up a monitoring process.

It’s disappointing that Wilmar’s commitments haven’t put an end to labor abuses, but it’s not surprising. It’s nearly impossible to eliminate worker exploitation without addressing structural causes: mass poverty, disenfranchisement, and lack of safety nets.

Investigators talked to one boy who dropped out of school to work on a plantation at the age of 12 when his father became too ill to work. Without some kind of welfare program, that boy’s family would probably be worse off if he’d been barred from working.

The boy had wanted to become a teacher. For countries like Indonesia to get out of poverty and stop climate-catastrophic deforestation, they need to help kids like this actually become teachers. That will require actors like Wilmar, Amnesty, and the government to work together to give laborers a living wage, and take care of them when they get sick.

Originally posted here: 

Thousands have fled their homes as historic wildfires burn in Tennessee.

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Trump Considers Petraeus for Top Job, But His Security Violations Were Worse Than Clinton’s

by CarsonCallaway Posted on November 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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After months of attacking and threatening to jail Hillary Clinton for allegedly mishandling classified information, President-elect Donald Trump has apparently decided none of that stuff really matters. Trump is meeting today with retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus to consider him for Clinton’s former job as Secretary of State. Petraeus pleaded guilty last year to sharing classified information with his mistress in a case that was more serious than the Clinton email server episode.

Petraeus admitted to passing secret information to Paula Broadwell, a former Army officer with whom he had an affair while she was writing a biography of him in 2011 and 2012. Petraeus was CIA director at the time, and he gave Broadwell eight notebooks of highly sensitive information that, according to the Washington Post, “included code words for secret intelligence programs, identities of covert officers, war strategy and deliberative discussions with the National Security Council.” The scandal broke in 2012 when Broadwell began harassing Jill Kelley, a Tampa socialite whom she may have thought was making advances on Petraeus. Kelley went to the FBI, which discovered intimate emails between Broadwell and Petraeus and uncovered his security breaches, forcing him to resign as CIA director in 2012. In a plea deal, Petraeus acknowledged that his actions had been “in all respects knowing and deliberate, and were not committed by mistake, accident or another innocent reason.” He also lied to FBI investigators, telling them he had not given secrets to Broadwell, a charge that is a felony in itself. He was eventually charged with only a misdemeanor and sentenced to two years’ probation and a $100,000 fine.

Trump often claimed during the campaign that Petraeus’ case was far less serious than Clinton’s, but FBI Director James Comey said the truth was the exact opposite. During a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in July, Comey contrasted Petraeus’ case to Clinton’s in response to Rep Elijah Cummings’ (D-Md.) question: “Do you agree with the claim that General Petraeus, and I quote, ‘Got in trouble for far less,’ end of quote? Do you agree with that statement?”

“No, it’s the reverse,” Comey replied.

Days before the hearing, Comey announced that the FBI would not bring charges against Clinton, saying there was no evidence that Clinton or her staff had intentionally mishandled or deleted the information. Petraeus’ case, however, was a clear-cut and grave violation, and Comey did not mince words. “The Petraeus case, in my mind, indicates the kind of cases that the Department of Justice is willing to prosecute,” he said. “You have obstruction of justice, intentional misconduct and a vast quantity of information.”

If Petraeus receives a job in the Trump administration, he won’t be the only former general in the new administration who committed serious security violations. According to a recent article in the New Yorker, soon-to-be National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, a onetime Army general and Defense Intelligence Agency director, was investigated for improperly giving classified information to other NATO countries and “had technicians secretly install an Internet connection in his Pentagon office, even though it was forbidden.” The latter action is a major violation of security procedures for top-secret information, which is held in tightly controlled facilities that ban outside phone and Internet connections. Former NSA lawyer Susan Hennessey said on Twitter, “Honestly, other than actual espionage, I’ve never seen as serious a willful security breach.”

As a candidate, Trump professed great scorn for anyone who improperly handles classified information. Yet as a president-elect, he has changed his tune: from lock-her-up to let-them-in.

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Trump Considers Petraeus for Top Job, But His Security Violations Were Worse Than Clinton’s

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Ben Carson Likened Housing Desegregation to "Failed Socialist Experiments"

by FaustinIllingwo Posted on November 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has offered retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson the role of secretary of housing and urban development. That’s surprising for two reasons. Just a week ago, Carson’s close adviser and friend Armstrong Williams told The Hill that the former Republican presidential candidate had told Trump he was not interested in a Cabinet position because he felt “he has no government experience” and “he’s never run a federal agency.”

But perhaps more important, Carson has no obvious qualifications for the role. His career has been in medicine, and he was thought to be a top candidate to head the Department of Health and Human Services or possibly the Department of Education. Instead, Trump surprised nearly everyone on Tuesday by tweeting that he was considering Carson for HUD, and then by offering him that role.

Still, Carson has weighed in on matters of housing and urban development—by criticizing efforts to combat housing segregation.

Last year, while vying for the Republican presidential nomination, Carson took to the Washington Times op-ed page to weigh in on a HUD fair housing rule that required cities receiving federal funds from HUD to examine existing housing patterns and set goals to reduce segregation. Carson likened the endeavor to “the failure of school busing,” arguing that the rule would alter the nature of communities by “encouraging municipalities to strike down housing ordinances that have no overtly (or even intended) discriminatory purpose—including race-neutral zoning restrictions on lot sizes and limits on multi-unit dwellings, all in the name of promoting diversity.” He claimed that busing did not statistically improve integration in the 1970s and that the practice was unpopular among both black and white families. Others have argued that the desegregation efforts during that period narrowed the racial gap in reading scores and that students throughout the South, Midwest, and West saw gains from attending more integrated schools by the late 1980s.

“These government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality create consequences that often make matters worse,” Carson wrote. “There are reasonable ways to use housing policy to enhance the opportunities available to lower-income citizens, but based on the history of failed socialist experiments in this country, entrusting the government to get it right can prove downright dangerous.”

A month earlier, Carson had made a similar argument against federal intervention to promote housing integration. In June 2015, Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson raised the issue of subsidized housing with Carson, in audio surfaced by BuzzFeed, alleging that “the people of eastern Iowa have to recruit from Chicago their poverty-afflicted individuals, to bring them to Iowa in order for them to qualify for Section 8 housing.” Mickelson alluded to a voluntary compliance agreement between HUD and the city of Dubuque, Iowa, in 2014 that eliminated a housing policy that HUD had found to discriminate against African Americans.

“This is just an example of what happens when we allow the government to infiltrate every part of our lives,” Carson told Mickelson. “This is what you see in communist countries where they have so many regulations encircling every aspect of your life that if you don’t agree with them, all they have to do is pull the noose. And this is what we’ve got now.”

Carson has yet to accept the HUD job, but he wrote on Facebook Wednesday that he “can make a significant contribution particularly to making our inner cities great for everyone” and that “an announcement is forthcoming about my role in helping to make America great again.”

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Ben Carson Likened Housing Desegregation to "Failed Socialist Experiments"

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Trump Has a Serious Conflict-of-Interest Problem. Maybe Congress Will Investigate Him.

by DarbyUHAGsdltui Posted on November 14, 2016

Mother Jones

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) requested a formal congressional investigation into Donald Trump’s “financial arrangements” Monday, urging a key congressional committee to examine the president-elect’s sprawling business empire for any conflicts of interests.

“I am writing to request that the Oversight Committee immediately begin conducting a review of President-elect Donald Trump’s financial arrangements to ensure that he does not have any actual or perceived conflicts of interest, and that he and his advisors comply with all legal and regulatory ethical requirements when he assumes the presidency,” Cummings wrote in a November 14 letter to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Cummings, the top Democrat on the committee, wrote that the United States has “never had a president like Mr. Trump in terms of his vast financial entanglements and his widespread business interests around the globe.” Given Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns, Cummings added, it’s impossible to know how the real estate mogul’s many businesses will affect his future decision-making.

A spokeswoman for Chaffetz did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks also did not respond to a request for comment.

Michael Cohen, an attorney for Trump, told CNN last week that three of Trump’s children—Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric—would run the Trump Organization’s interests through what he called a “blind trust.” The next day it was announced that all three would also serve on Trump’s presidential transition committee, further muddying the ethical waters. On Sunday, Trump adviser and potential cabinet appointee Rudy Giuliani said “there would have to be a wall” between Trump’s children and their father on business and government matters, according to the Associated Press.

It’s no secret that Trump’s conflicts of interest are extensive. As Russ Choma reported in Mother Jones this summer, Trump has at least $364 million in loans through Deutsche Bank, an organization that is currently negotiating with the US Department of Justice regarding a $4 billion to $5 billion settlement for “misselling of mortgage-backed securities in the run up to the financial crisis of 2008,” according to CNBC. The New York Times reported in August that Trump has a “maze” of real estate holdings, and the companies he owns “have at least $650 million in debt,” twice the amount reported in public filings released at the start of his presidential campaign. Two companies holding some of that debt, the Times reports, are the Bank of China and Goldman Sachs.

Chaffetz’s committee has been one of the leading Republican vehicles for attacking Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state, and Chaffetz has said his committee’s investigation of Clinton and her former staff would not stop after the election. In his letter, Cummings pressed Chaffetz to use his committee to dig into Trump’s dealings.

“For the past six years, you and other Republicans in Congress have launched numerous investigations against President Obama and Secretary Clinton, and some of these have been used for partisan political purposes,” Cummings wrote. “Now that Republicans control the White House and Congress, it is incumbent on you and other Republicans to conduct robust oversight over Mr. Trump—not for partisan reasons, but to ensure that our government operates effectively and efficiently and combats even the perception of corruption or abuse.”

Read the whole letter here:

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2016 11 14 EEC to JC (003) (PDF)

2016 11 14 EEC to JC (003) (Text)

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Trump Has a Serious Conflict-of-Interest Problem. Maybe Congress Will Investigate Him.

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Senators Press Feds to Stop Locking Up Central American Families Who Have Fled for Their Lives

by LorenD35vd Posted on October 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Roughly 30 Central American women and their children who are applying for asylum in the United States are being held outside Philadelphia in a federal immigration detention center called the Berks County Residential Center. Many have been there for more than a year, and in August, 22 mothers went on hunger strike to protest their prolonged detention. Now, a group of 17 Democratic senators, including former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and current vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, have called on Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson to release the families and end the practice of family detention.

“Many of these mothers have asylum claims based on rape, severe domestic violence, and murder threats,” the senators wrote in a letter released on Tuesday. “It is unconscionable to keep these children locked up and goes against our most fundamental values.” The children at Berks, who make up about half the population of detainees, range in age from 2 to 16 years old. Many have been held for months and, in some cases, more than a year. The senators said family detention is “wrong” and “should be ended immediately,” pointing to research showing that prolonged confinement is harmful to children’s physical and mental health.

The Berks Center is one of three family detention centers in the country. The other two, located in Texas, were opened by the Obama administration in 2014 in response to the surge in unaccompanied minors crossing the border. Around that time, the centers came under scrutiny for poor medical care, lack of access to legal council, and alleged sexual abuse. (Earlier this year, one former guard at Berks was sentenced to prison for sexually assaulting a teenage detainee.)

Last summer, the administration announced a series of reforms to reduce the length of confinement. Shortly afterward, a district court in California ordered the government to release migrant children within three to five days of their initial confinement, or within 20 days under extreme circumstances. The administration says it has taken steps to come into compliance with that court decision. Secretary Johnson has said his agency is detaining families for an average of 20 days or less, but advocates say the experience of the Berks mothers tells another story.

The 17 senators urged Johnson to review their cases and release them unless they are a serious flight risk or threat to public safety. Hillary Clinton has taken a similar position as her running mate and called for an end to family detention.

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Senators Press Feds to Stop Locking Up Central American Families Who Have Fled for Their Lives

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The scandal-embroiled Trump Foundation once donated to a climate advocacy group.

by LeesaLista Posted on September 22, 2016

This week, cities mark World Car-Free Day, an annual event to promote biking, walking, mass transit, and other ways to get around sans motor vehicles (Solowheel, anyone?).

Technically, World Car-Free Day was Thursday, September 22, but participating cities are taking the “eh, close enough” approach to get their car-free kicks in on the weekend. Said cities include Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Brussels, Bogotá, Jakarta, Copenhagen, and Paris, where nearly half the city center will be closed to vehicle traffic on Sunday.

But going car-free, municipally speaking, is becoming more of a regular trend than an annual affair: Mexico City closes 35 miles of city streets to cars every Sunday; the Oslo city government proposed a ban on private vehicles in the city center after 2019; and in Paris, the government is allowed to limit vehicles if air pollution rises above health-threatening levels.

But even if your city isn’t officially participating in World Car-Free Day, you can be the change you want to see in your own metropolis. And by that, we mean: Just leave your keys at home. Horrible, no good things happen in cars.

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The scandal-embroiled Trump Foundation once donated to a climate advocacy group.

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