Tag Archives: institute

India will jump on the bandwagon for global climate action.

by NellCarrillo Posted on September 26, 2016

Myron Ebell, a director at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute, would head Trump’s EPA transition team, E&E Daily reports. Ebell also chairs the Cooler Heads Coalition, a pro-business group focused on pushing climate denial.

While Ebell generally maintains that climate change is a hoax, he’s also argued that if it does exist, it’s actually a good thing. “Life in many places would become more pleasant,” he wrote in 2006. “Instead of 20 below zero in January in Saskatoon, it might be only 10 below. And I don’t think too many people would complain if winters in Minneapolis became more like winters in Kansas City.” He has less to say about the summers in Minneapolis, which, if current emissions trends continue, will feel like summers in Mesquite, Texas, by 2100.

Ebell’s waffling is in-line with the candidate’s, who seems to have spontaneously changed his mind about climate change during the first presidential debate. When accused by Hillary Clinton of calling climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, Trump flat-out denied it, despite a notorious tweet saying just that.

Ebell joins energy lobbyist Mike McKenna, George W. Bush’s former Interior Department solicitor David Bernhardt, and oil tycoon Harold Hamm on Trump’s team.

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India will jump on the bandwagon for global climate action.

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California has an ambitious plan to tackle climate change. Could it work?

by ChangFbvhjauy Posted on September 16, 2016

Best coast

California has an ambitious plan to tackle climate change. Could it work?

By and on Sep 16, 2016Share

California took a giant step to fight climate change last week, passing ambitious legislation to slash its greenhouse gas emissions. Hailed as world-leading, historic, and other excited adjectives, it sets a goal of cutting emissions below 1990 levels by 2030.

If you know about this triple-dog-dare legislation that Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law, you’ve probably heard that it’s not only going to continue California’s tradition of feeling smug about how green it is compared to other states, it’s going to usher in a glorious new era of renewable energy innovation. Maybe you also heard that it’s further proof that Californians are crazy, because the state is just too big, hot, and suburban to meet such a formidable challenge.

The thing is, both of these statements may be true. The state had already passed a slightly less ambitious carbon-cutting plan in 2006, targeting 1990 levels by 2020. And California hasn’t hit that goal yet.

Is the state’s climate policy working? Are the new goals realistic? Can it survive political attacks? Is this whole thing equitable? So many important questions! We have answers. Here’s a short primer to help you understand the state’s carbon-cutting plans.

California’s efforts haven’t lowered the state’s emissions any faster than overall U.S. emissions.

Brown effectively doubled down on the state’s climate targets. That raises the question: Is the previous plan working?

“We’re always hearing from California that we are leaders in carbon-dioxide emissions and that we’ve  been leading the U.S. as a whole in policy making,” says James Sweeney, director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford University. “But as a whole, our greenhouse gas emissions have been lowering at about the same rate as the U.S.”

Sweeney made the following graph to show what he’s talking about. It’s good for comparing rates of change, and bad for comparing absolute numbers. At first glance, it looks like California is — absurdly — emitting more than the U.S. as a whole. The point here is that, since 2000, the emissions of both have risen and fallen at about the same rate.

James Sweeney

California’s relative averageness is a problem for champions of its climate policy. Are the state’s rules having any effect?

They are, but here’s the thing: Other states have managed deep cuts in emissions by switching from coal to natural gas plants. California was already pretty green to start. It had low-carbon hydroelectricity, cleaner industry, and mild weather, so most of the low-hanging fruit was already picked.

It didn’t help California when drought sapped its hydropower capacity, or when one of the state’s last two nuclear power plants shut down in 2012. “A bunch of dirty power plants were turned on to replace that,” said Greg Dalton, founder of the California climate symposium Climate One.

California Air Resources Board

Dalton also points out that the climate plan, though a decade old, took a while to overcome early obstacles. In the beginning it was slowed by lawsuits, and regulators had to produce reams of documents to figure out how to count carbon. The state only recently phased in its regulations for gasoline, and it’s just starting to look at agriculture.

So the state could pick up momentum and make bigger reductions. Still, California has now said it will drive down emissions much faster than the rest of the United States, and it’s never done that before.

Are California’s goals realistic?

California had already committed to bringing its emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020. It’s looking like the state will hit that target, said Alvar Escriva-Bou, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. But the new law sets a much more ambitious goal. Can it get there?

It’s possible in theory, according to a model created by Jeffrey Greenblatt of Berkeley Lab. As you can see in this graph from that model, California could dip under its 2030 emission target if it follows the green path:

Greenblatt

But at the moment, it seems California is following the blue path. To get to that “S3” green curve, the state would need to keep its last remaining nuclear power plant running until 2045 (it’s scheduled to shut down in 2025), build 3 gigawatts of batteries and power storage (way more than currently planned), replace 30 percent of gasoline with low-carbon biofuel (still unclear if that will be viable), and do a bunch of other equally tough stuff. If California makes this happen, the state will look very different 15 years from now.

California’s climate plan is popular

Some 70 percent of Californians support the state’s climate regulations. And the rules are not only popular, they are durable. At the depths of the last recession, voters handily defeated a measure that would have suspended regulations until California’s unemployment numbers improved.

The laws don’t appear to have hindered the economy. When California was phasing in transportation fuel rules that increased gas prices about 10 cents a gallon, critics predicted chaos breaking loose at gas stations. “But no one really noticed,” Dalton said.

The policy has survived multiple legal attacks. There’s currently another lawsuit pending against it, and the legislature will need to pass more supporting laws, but if past is prologue California is likely to push past these challenges.

The new law attempts to address concern on the left about the climate plan

Some Democrats and social justice advocates point out that the climate policy could hurt poor people and minorities because it has raised the price of electricity and fuel while allowing pollution to continue in black and Latino neighborhoods.

California’s policy relies on a cap-and-trade system that requires  businesses to clean up their dirty facilities, or keep polluting and buy climate credits to spur emissions reductions elsewhere. That’s the economically efficient way, but it doesn’t help the people who live downwind of a polluting plant and inhale lungfuls of particulate matter often released with carbon. Brentin Mock at City Lab highlights the body of research, including the graph below, that suggests plants are more likely to keep polluting if they are surrounded by non-white people.

Cushing et al.

To address this environmental-justice problem, the legislature has introduced a new provision that directs regulators to crack down on specific polluters. Until now, regulators had just laid out the rules and then stepped back to let the market sort out a response. This new law would allow the government to step in and say, “This facility in this particular neighborhood has to install better filters.”

Of course, concern is not limited to the left. Politicians on both sides of the aisle understand that if regulations become too onerous they would push industry out of the state. Environmentalists share this concern: The policy won’t be a success if it just shifts greenhouse gas production out of state.

Some countries have lowered their emissions by moving manufacturing abroad — the industry and the pollution winds up in poorer countries. That’s a pretty terrible way to reduce carbon because it hurts the economy, dumps pollution on people with fewer resources (though they also get some jobs), and does nothing to slow climate change.

So California is trying to push industries, but not so hard that industries pack up their factories and move them to China. There’s a vigorous ongoing debate over how much the regulations are affecting the economy and the environment (a version of this debate is planned for Sept. 20).

So far California’s manufacturing sector has remained fairly steady as the climate policies have phased in. And the example of Sweden, shows that you can successfully slash emissions while industry grows.

All in all, California’s new climate law is cause for both alarm and celebration. The reality is that California, and the rest of the world, need to clear a bar this high. It’s just what needs to be done. It’s only “ambitious” because the goal is so far out of reach.

A goal this ambitious shows just how far away American cities actually are from cutting carbon emissions to a level that will protect them in the long run. The good news is, now that California is trying to do this impossible-seeming thing, it just might figure it out.

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California has an ambitious plan to tackle climate change. Could it work?

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This Is How We Know Congress Isn’t Really Serious About Election Fraud

by Vince4171216 Posted on September 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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The debate over possible Russian meddling in US elections was a major theme in a US House hearing Tuesday on protecting the 2016 elections from cyberattacks and machine-voting attacks. Even though election preparations have been underway for months around the country and early voting in many states begins soon, committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said the hearing was to review the security of the election system.

“This discussion is timely as many concerns have been raised in recent months about the vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines, voting over the internet, and online voter registration,” Smith said.

Concerns about the security of the US voting system have been heightened after the recent hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and some high-profile Democratic politicians. The DNC, along with several US government officials and security research firms, have fingered Russian intelligence as responsible for the hacks of Democratic targets. Add to that the recent revelation that state election databases in Arizona and Illinois had been hacked, although the degree of success in each attack, and the ultimate purpose, remains unclear. Even though the Russian government has denied being involved, Democrats within Congress have called on the Obama administration to publicly accuse Russia of trying to interfere with US elections.

None of the witnesses—Dr. Charles Romine of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler, David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, and Dr. Dan Wallach of the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University—suggested Russians were attempting to hack election infrastructure, only that they, too, had received this information specific to the DNC and the DCCC from press accounts.

“The nature of the threat is that they don’t want you to see them there,” said Wallach. “So we can’t assume that if we haven’t seen them that they’re absent. What we do know is that we’ve established motive. The attack on the DNC’s email server is motive—it shows that they did it for explicit partisan purposes.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said the Russians’ goal might not necessarily be to manipulate vote counts or tamper with voter registration databases, but to create chaos in the system and undermine confidence. “The focus of this hearing is on the voting systems, but really the question is about the election,” she said. “It’s pretty clear that the Russians have attacked, have engaged, in a cyberattack on the DNC and the DCCC.”

For Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-Calif.), Russian involvement in trying to hack or access actual election systems around the country lacked any evidence. “We have seen article after article after article about how Russia is compromising the integrity of our election system, and Mr. Chairman, the panelists are just saying that is false,” Rohrbacher said. “We want our country to be safe, but we also don’t want to just continually vilify Russia and turning them into the bad guys. If we’re going to have integrity of our system, I think we have to look at home for real threats to the integrity of our voting system.”

Lofgren disagreed. “To downplay the role that the Russians have had in this is a huge mistake, when you take a look at what they did to the DNC and the DCCC,” Lofgren said, urging members to avoid making the discussion about hacking partisan. “If you attack one of the major parties, somehow that’s okay if it could be to your advantage,” she said. “I like to think if the Russians had attacked the Republican National Committee, Democrats would be as outraged as Republicans. It’s an attack on America. It’s not an attack on a party.”

The hearing came the same day that Guccifer 2.0, the hacker or hackers who have publicly taken credit for the hack of the DNC, issued a rambling statement about information security at a London cybersecurity conference where he was supposed to appear (he didn’t), according to Motherboard. Guccifer did release roughly 600 megabytes of documents containing information about DNC fundraising efforts and other Democratic planning documents at the conference, according to Politico.*

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the documents released today by the hacker Guccifer 2.0 came from a Democratic contracting firm. We regret the error.

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This Is How We Know Congress Isn’t Really Serious About Election Fraud

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Bombs and Backbiting: The Syrian Cease-fire Is Off to a Great Start

by HoseaO868858 Posted on September 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Saturday, just hours after Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov announced an imminent cease-fire in Syria, government planes bombed a crowded marketplace killing 61 and wounding 100 more. By weekend’s end, at least 90 people had died in regime airstrikes, including 28 children. Today, President Bashar al-Assad publicly vowed to “recover every inch of Syria from the terrorists” and decried those in the opposition who “were betting on promises from foreign powers, which will result in nothing.”

In other words, the long-awaited Syrian cease-fire appears to be off to a great start.

The agreement, which was announced early Saturday morning in Geneva, officially began at sundown today. It comes after 10 months of failed attempts to reach a political settlement to a conflict that’s killed nearly half a million people and spawned the largest refugee crisis since World War II. While some observers argue that the cease-fire is the best opportunity to bring a pause to the violence, the plan has been greeted mostly with skepticism.

If the truce endures for a week and humanitarian aid begins to flow into besieged areas, the United States and Russia say they will put aside their differences over the legitimacy of the Assad regime and work to target two jihadist groups, ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the former Al Qaeda-affiliate that recently rebranded as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS).

In theory, the cease-fire deal prohibits the Syrian Air Force from flying raids over opposition-held areas, except for those controlled by ISIS or JFS. Kerry called this “the bedrock of the agreement,” labeling the Syrian Air Force the “main driver of civilian casualties.” But as Michael Weiss of The Daily Beast writes, outside of excluding ISIS and JFS, the deal does not clearly define the ideologically mixed groups that make up the Syrian opposition forces.

As part of the agreement, more moderate rebel groups must distance themselves from JFS or risk being targeted. But Syria’s mainstream armed opposition forces, as Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, puts it, “are extensively ‘marbled’ or ‘coupled’ with JFS forces…This is not a reflection of ideological affinity as much as it is merely a military necessity.” Lister wrote on Saturday that “not a single one has suggested any willingness to withdraw from the frontlines on which JFS is present. To them, doing so means effectively ceding territory to the regime, as they have little faith in a long-term cessation of hostilities holding.”

Under the new deal, the Syrian government is only banned from striking areas agreed to by both Russia and the United States, and the Assad regime and Russia are permitted to strike JFS (the group formerly known as Nusra) without prior American consent if it’s in response to “imminent threats.” Weiss asks, “What is to stop Damascus and Moscow from suddenly finding ‘imminent threats’ everywhere against parties they insist are Nusra or Nusra-affiliated before Washington can concur?”

Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake points out that the Pentagon and the US intelligence community are deeply skeptical about sharing intelligence with the Russians on Syria. Even if the first week’s truce holds, he writes, “is it even desirable for US intelligence officers to be sharing the locations of US-backed rebels in Syria with a Russian Air Force that has been bombing them for nearly a year?”

On Sunday, rebel groups sent a letter to the United States agreeing to “cooperate positively” with the cease-fire. But they added that they have deep concerns “linked to our survival and continuation as a revolution.” Among their top concerns: The agreement neglects many besieged areas outside of Aleppo, lacks guarantees or sanctions against violations, and doesn’t ban Syrian jets from flying for up to nine days following the beginning of the cease-fire. It also called the exclusion of JFS, but not Iranian-backed Shiite militias, a double standard. One American-backed rebel faction has already called the deal a “trap.”

Perhaps to no one’s surprise, reports of alleged cease-fire violations emerged within one hour of its official start on Monday night, as the Assad regime launched artillery strikes on Al-Hara and dropped a barrel bomb on Aleppo.

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Bombs and Backbiting: The Syrian Cease-fire Is Off to a Great Start

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A Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Bill?

by eunicewalters13 Posted on September 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Has the moon turned blue? Has Hell frozen over? Could there actually be a bipartisan campaign finance reform bill in this of all years?

OK, it’s far from the kind of sweeping change that backers of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United want. And it’s a long way from public financing for congressional elections. But supporters of Rep. Paul Gosar’s Stop Foreign Donations Affecting Our Elections Act are billing it as an important sign that Democrats and Republicans can find ways to work together on an issue that has long been hyper-partisan.

Gosar, an Arizonan who belongs to the staunchly conservative House Freedom Caucus, has rounded up 81 co-sponsors for his bill, including 30 Democrats. They run the political gamut from political giant-killer Dave Brat, who defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) by running to his right in a primary, to Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), whom the nonpartisan GovTrack ranks among the most liberal members of the US House. Two Democrats who are running for Senate in their respective states, Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, also have signed on.

The bill is also supported by all nine members of the House Administration Committee, which is charged with clearing the legislation for floor action. “I work it,”grins Gosar, a loose-limbed 57-year-old with a boyish fetlock, explaining how a lawmaker of his strong ideological bent (he made headlines for boycotting Pope Francis’ speech to Congress) managed to put together such a diverse coalition. He’s hoping for a House vote soon.

What Gosar describes as a “commonsense bill”would require federal candidates who accept political donations by credit card to verify the donor’s identity by obtaining the credit card verification code (the three- or four-digit number that most commercial vendors already insist on having with a purchase), as well as the card’s billing address.

Because that information currently is not required, “it leaves the door wide open”to violations of campaign law, including illegal contributions from foreign donors, according to John Pudner, a former Republican political consultant whose last gig was managing the Brat campaign that unseated Cantor. He has since started a conservative campaign finance reform group called Take Back Our Republic.

At a forum this summer sponsored by Federal Election Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, Pudner described a scenario that would enable donors to violate both the federal limits on campaign donations and the prohibition on foreign donors by using the same credit card over and over to make contributions under the $200 limit above which the FEC requires names and addresses of the donors.

“If I was an unscrupulous political consultant and didn’t care about foreign law, I’d set up a room full of people, retype over and over the credit card number, $200 a pop,”Pudner said. “That avenue is there and so easy.”Does Pudner actually believe it’s happening? “The longer you have a loophole like this, the more likely it is to be abused,”he said.

Part of the appeal of Gosar’s bill for some Republicans is that it can be cast as a poke at President Barack Obama, whose 2008 and 2012 campaigns pulled in millions in small donations, some from unverified credit cards. Pudner, who says he has spoken with Obama campaign veterans about the measure, doesn’t think the president’s team was trying to violate the law, calling the loophole an “unintended consequence”of Obama’s aggressive fundraising strategy.

This year, Pudner said, both Hillary Clinton’s and Donald Trump’s campaigns are verifying the identities of credit card donors but Bernie Sanders — whose spokesman scoffed at Gosar’s bill as “a solution in search of a problem”— did not. A 2012 report by the conservative Government Accountability Institute found nearly half the members of Congress are not verifying credit card donations.

Longtime campaign finance advocates have pointed out that there are many other ways for illegal foreign contributions to find their ways into the political system, either through the “dark money”groups that, because of their 501(c)4 status, don’t report donors, or legally, through the US subsidiaries of foreign-owned companies.

But Pudner — who says his group gets financial backing from both conservative activists and foundations, such as the Stuart Family Fund, as well as more traditional campaign finance reform funders such as the Rockefeller Brothers and the Democracy Fund — argues that the Gosar measure represents an important first step to recognizing that, as he said at the FEC forum, “there’s real grounds for agreement”between conservatives and liberals on some campaign finance reform measures.

Though Gosar hardly sounds ready to jump aboard the get-big-money-out-of-politics bandwagon (“a well-educated electorate is very important,”he said), the congressman doesn’t disagree.

“Who knows? I mean start on the things you agree on and go from there,”he said. “To be honest, you take baby steps. You crawl before you walk and you walk before you run.”

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A Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Bill?

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Aliens Are (Maybe) Finally Knocking. The Pentagon’s Plan Is Underwhelming.

by Sean43618048 Posted on August 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Saturday, Paul Gilster, who blogs about deep space exploration and other interstellar issues, broke the news on his blog that in May 2015, a team of Russian scientists had detected an interesting signal coming from a star system about 95 light-years from Earth. Gilster was very measured in his report, noting that “no one is claiming that this is the work of an extraterrestrial civilization, but it is certainly worth further study.” The researchers involved believe the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, a nonprofit organization that’s looking for life in the universe and has the equipment to scan the skies for signals from deep space, might follow up on the lead.

But that didn’t stop others from going wild, most notably the New York Observer, which published an attention-grabbing story Monday titled “Not a Drill: SETI Is Investigating a Possible Extraterrestrial Signal From Deep Space.”

SETI is, in fact, scanning for the signal, according to Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the organization, who discussed the matter in a blog post available on the group’s website. “Could it be another society sending a signal our way?” he wrote. “Of course, that’s possible. However, there are many other plausible explanations for this claimed transmission—including terrestrial interference. Without a confirmation of this signal, we can only say that it’s ‘interesting.'”

UFOs, extraterrestrials, and life in outer space has gained new currency over the last year or so. Last fall, a team from Yale University announced they had found a star that gave off such unique light patterns that some speculated it was being orbited by an alien megastructure. Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, have both repeatedly discussed the need for the release of information about US government research into extraterrestrials. (You can read more about Clinton’s history with the UFO issue that goes back more than 20 years here.) A week ago, scientists announced they had found a potentially life-supporting, Earthlike planet just 4.5 light-years away, within Earth’s closest celestial star system neighbor.

This whole thing got us thinking: What would happen if extraterrestrials not only reached out to communicate, but showed up on our doorstep? Is there a plan?

I put this question to the Department of Defense last fall when I profiled Stephen Bassett, the only registered lobbyist in Washington whose major focus is to force the US government to reveal what it knows about extraterrestrials contact with the human race. To people like Bassett, the question of what to do when they show up is moot because it has already happened; the people who need to deal with it already are.

The Department of Defense does not agree. Here’s the answer I got from them: “The Department of Defense does not maintain plans for hypothetical dangers for which we have absolutely no information—either to the likelihood of the danger, or to what form the danger would take.” For what it’s worth, the DoD spokesman also said the department doesn’t have an office or organization that handles “issues related to UFOs and/or extraterrestrials,” and the DoD has never interacted with or recovered any kind of material related to extraterrestrials.

Do we really not have any plans in place should we be contacted by an alien race? I checked the DoD’s answer with Christopher Mellon. A former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, among other roles, he said, “I think you got an honest answer from DoD. How would you plan for the arrival of an advanced civilization without any understanding whatsoever of their capabilities, technology or intentions?” He added that his sense was that the government had “little if any idea” of what we’d be up against and “whatever it is would be so far beyond us it would look and appear magical or spiritual, totally beyond our ability to cope with or resist if hostile. If such an event occurred we’d simply have to muddle through as best we could.”

“Meanwhile,” he says, “DoD has an overflowing plate already and I suspect the Joint Staff has little patience for such seemingly unlikely, open-ended and ill-defined scenarios.”

Nick Pope, a former official with the British Ministry of Defense whose job it was to investigate UFO sightings, doesn’t think powerful governments should get off that easy. He told me Tuesday he’s long advocated some sort of contingency plan but never saw any evidence that the British or US governments had one. When he asked colleagues in the intelligence and military world about plans, “there was no real enthusiasm for it. It was a combination of skepticism and almost this feeling that this was the ultimate taboo, that something like this could just not be put down on paper.”

Pope said news about a potential signal from another civilization should trigger a whole series of thorny questions: Is this just a signal letting us know they’re there, or is there information encoded within it? If there is information in it, can we decode it? Should we? If we could, should that information be disclosed? Who should control the information in the signal, if there’s anything there?

That’s a far cry from a scenario that finds us dealing with an extraterrestrial craft in orbit around Earth or actually landing. “The No. 1 priority would obviously be avoiding getting in a fight with these people,” he said. But what do we do then? Who’s in charge? Who speaks for planet Earth? What is the message?

Pope admits that the possibility of this scenario playing out is miniscule, describing it as “the ultimate low probability, high impact scenario.” But, he said, “We don’t need to go into Star Trek territory to say it’s possible we could be visited. That being the case, it just seems prudent to have a plan.”

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Aliens Are (Maybe) Finally Knocking. The Pentagon’s Plan Is Underwhelming.

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Greens won’t let Obama get away with bragging about his public lands record

by VivienEgan Posted on August 25, 2016

line of lease resistance

Greens won’t let Obama get away with bragging about his public lands record

By on Aug 25, 2016Share

President Obama may have protected more land and water than any other U.S. president — 265 million acres of it — but he’s also responsible for leasing more than 10 million acres of federal lands for oil and gas development.

WildEarth Guardians and Physicians for Social Responsibility plan to push his environmental limits even further. On Thursday, the groups filed a lawsuit against the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Land Management, in the hope that his (or the next) administration will halt oil and gas federal leases while reviewing systemwide reform. Interior’s coal leasing program is undergoing a similar review.

The latest in a string of lawsuits to curtail federal oil and gas leasing, the groups are looking to block 397 lease sales across 380,000 acres. They claim the federal government is violating the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to consider environmental impacts.

A 2016 analysis from the Stockholm Environment Institute found that cutting off future lease sales and declining to renew existing ones for coal, oil, and gas would reduce global carbon pollution by 100 million metric tons annually by 2030.

In other words, fossil fuel development on federal lands isn’t an insignificant portion of U.S. climate emissions. The 10 million acres leased to fossil fuels under Obama’s watch adds up to an area bigger than Olympic, Smoky Mountains, Everglades, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite, combined.

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Greens won’t let Obama get away with bragging about his public lands record

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Venezuela Is Descending Into Chaos. Now This Issue Is on America’s Doorstep.

by Adan Baird Posted on August 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Earlier this year, Venezuelan journalist and political scientist Francisco Toro described his home country as “the world’s most visibly failing state.” And now, amid a worsening economic crisis, a crackdown on political opposition, and increasing violent crime, more and more of his countrymen are seeking haven in the United States.

Over the past year, the United States has experienced a surge in asylum applications from Venezuela, according to new data from the Pew Research Center. So far in fiscal 2016, applications from Venezuela soared past 10,000, an increase of 168 percent compared with the fiscal year 2015.

Venezuela’s economic collapse has been making headlines for more than a year. Oil prices plummeted, and price controls led to shortages of basic staples like food and medicine. A recent study from Simón Bolívar University found that 9 out of 10 Venezuelans can no longer afford to buy enough food. Now, people wait in line for hours for essentials like rice and cooking oil, sometimes even fending off armed thieves. As food riots became a daily occurrence, President Nicolás Maduro—who succeeded Hugo Chávez after his death in 2013—put the army in charge of rationing. Food is now transported by armed guards, and police protect against looters. The International Monetary Fund has estimated that Venezuela’s inflation rate will reach 480 percent this year, and more than 1,600 percent next year. Unemployment is around 17 percent and is expected to grow to a quarter over the next three years.

On top of all that, Maduro has been cracking down on his political opponents. In December, the opposition coalition won a major victory, securing a majority of seats in parliament for the first time since Chávez came to power in 1999. After that, Maduro intensified his crackdown. The Venezuelan Penal Forum, which tracks human rights abuses, counted 96 political prisoners in June, compared with just 11 when Maduro became president. Meanwhile, election officials signaled earlier this week that a long-promised recall election to oust Maduro would have to wait until 2017.

This combination of food and medicine shortages, political instability, and increasing violent crime is driving Venezuelans out of the country, according to Julio Henriquez, director of the Boston-based nonprofit Refugee Freedom Program, which currently focuses on helping Venezuelan asylum seekers. “There was a lot of hope that the new parliament would make a big difference in the human rights conditions,” he says, “but human rights conditions have worsened.”

So far, Henriquez says, most of the Venezuelan asylum seekers he’s encountered have been middle-class people who’ve come to the United States via a student or tourist visa and then applied for asylum after their arrival. It’s quite a contrast to the Central American families showing up at the US-Mexico border, a situation which advocates have warned for years amounts to a refugee crisis.

Faye Hipsman, an analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, says some Venezuelan asylum applicants may be taking advantage of excessive backlogs in the application process—delays that allow applicants to stay in the United States for years pending the outcome of their claim. And while many are likely fleeing poverty, hunger, and general violence, Hipsman says, it’s often not enough to qualify for asylum, which requires applicants to prove that they risk persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group.

“A share of these people have legitimate asylum claims,” she says. “But there’s a lot of concern that for legitimate reasons, people don’t want to go back to Venezuela because it’s dangerous there—and the circumstances are really bad.”

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Venezuela Is Descending Into Chaos. Now This Issue Is on America’s Doorstep.

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Trump’s Economic Plan: Light on Details, Heavy on Tax Breaks for the Rich

by JacintoWare2 Posted on August 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump tried to reset his campaign yet again with a Monday visit to Detroit and a promise of an economic agenda. His speech at the Detroit Economic Club was light on details and full of assurances that his campaign website would soon feature specifics on how he’d tackle the economy. But what details did exist undercut his pledge to make life better for low- and middle-income families, instead serving largely to keep more money in the pockets of the wealthy people in his own income bracket.

The centerpiece of Trump’s new plan is a retooled tax system. “Nothing would make our foreign adversaries happier than for our country to tax and regulate our companies and our jobs out of existence,” Trump said. He had already laid out a vision for rewriting the tax code during the Republican primary, one whose benefits tilted heavily toward a lower tax burden for people earning more than $1 million per year. His campaign website tried to erase his previous plan ahead of the Monday speech, though web archives still retain information on that initial proposal.

During the primary, Trump had proposed four tax brackets, with rates of 0, 10, 20, and 25 percent. While his new plan lacks details, on Monday he said he’d now seek to introduce only three brackets, taxed at 12, 25, and 33 percent. That represents a tax hike from his earlier proposal, but it’s still a major tax cut from current rates for the top income tax bracket, which is taxed at 39.6 percent.

Trump also said he’d like to wipe away the estate tax altogether, using the term “death tax” that’s popular among some conservatives. “American workers have paid taxes their whole lives, and they should not be taxed again at death—it’s just plain wrong,” Trump said. “We will repeal it.” But the inheritance tax, as currently constituted, touches only a small segment of the population. The federal government doesn’t take any taxes out of estates unless the inheritance exceeds $5.4 million for individuals or $10.9 million for couples. That leaves just the wealthiest 0.2 percent of families paying any estate taxes and makes its repeal less than a great boost to the working class.

Meanwhile, Trump’s speech included many subtle appeals to corporate interests. He promised to reduce the business tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent. Under a President Trump, there would be a complete moratorium on new federal regulations, a massive handout to the financial industry. “Next,” he added, “I will ask each and every federal agency to prepare a list of all of the regulations they impose on Americans which are not necessary, do not improve public safety, and which needlessly kill jobs. Those regulations will be eliminated.” Given his previous claims that he’d like to ditch the 2010 Dodd-Frank law intended to rein in Wall Street, it sounds likely that Trump would vastly lower the number of rules banks and financial institutions need to follow.

But Trump’s speech didn’t contain only the normal Republican calls to lower taxes and cut government oversight of business. He also called for an end to the carried-interest loophole, which allows hedge-funders and others to pay a much lower tax rate on earnings, marking a rare policy agreement with Hillary Clinton. And as Trump launched an usual attack against free trade policies, he cited the liberal Economic Policy Institute to explain potential harms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Trump also proposed a tax deduction for families to offset the cost of child care—but since that benefit is a deduction rather than a credit, its benefits would skew toward the upper middle class rather than working-class families.

Not unlike other Trump speeches, this one was unconstrained by facts. Trump accused Clinton of seeking to raise taxes on the middle class, based on a blatant misreading of a recent speech. (Clinton has in fact vowed to leave taxes untouched for all but the extremely wealthy.) The Republican nominee called the nation’s low unemployment rate a hoax, another claim that has landed him in trouble with fact-checkers in the past.

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Trump’s Economic Plan: Light on Details, Heavy on Tax Breaks for the Rich

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The Growing Push to Arm College Kids

by MagaretFinney Posted on August 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Monday, 50 years to the day since the clock tower massacre at the University of Texas-Austin, a new Texas law made it legal to carry concealed guns at public universities, including in dorms and classrooms. The legislation allows private universities to opt out, and all but one have chosen to do so. The policy has been controversial to say the least; it prompted a lawsuit from three University of Texas professors, who claimed that the law forces state schools to impose “overly-solicitous, dangerously-experimental gun policies” and violates the First and Second Amendments.

Texas is now the eighth state to allow concealed carry on college campuses, with its law among the broadest in terms of where guns are allowed. Other states have passed so-called “campus carry” laws recently, and more could soon follow.

In Tennessee, a new law guarantees concealed-carry rights for full-time university employees. They must register their guns with campus or local law enforcement. In May, Republican Gov. Bill Haslam allowed the measure to pass into law without his signature. “I hope that as a state we will monitor the impact of this new law and listen to the feedback of higher education leaders responsible for operationalizing it,” Haslam said, as the state’s colleges and universities scrambled to prepare for the change.

A broader law may be in the works for Tennessee next year: Republican Rep. Andy Holt, who raffled off two AR-15s after the mass shooting in Orlando, said it was an “important next step” to let students be armed. “My intention is to eliminate all gun-free zones, whether it’s the legislature or a college campus,” he said.

Georgia considered a campus carry bill similar to the one in Texas this year; it passed both the state Senate and House but was vetoed by Republican Gov. Nathan Deal, who said the right to bear arms in “sensitive places” was not guaranteed by the Second Amendment or the Georgia Constitution. “From the early days of our nation and state, colleges have been treated as sanctuaries of learning where firearms have not been allowed,” Deal wrote. “To depart from such time-honored protections should require overwhelming justification. I do not find that such justification exists.”

Utah was the first state to approve campus carry, in 2004. The list has since grown to include Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Texas, and Wisconsin. As in Tennessee now, Arkansas has a law allowing university employees to carry licensed firearms, but not students. Additionally, eight states allow guns to be stored in vehicles on campus grounds, though they disallow carrying them more broadly on campuses: Florida, Georgia, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

The last two years in particular have brought a big push on this issue, though with little success. In 2014, five states introduced legislation to prohibit campus carry, none of which passed, and 14 states introduced legislation to allow concealed carry on campus. Two bills passed.

A driving force behind the push has been Students for Concealed Carry, an activist group born out of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre that claims 43,000 members. The group reportedly was developed by members of The Leadership Institute, an organization focused on recruiting young conservatives that pushed hard for campus carry in Idaho. (In fact, Students for Concealed Carry was not particularly enthusiastic about Texas’ new campus-carry law—arguing that it was rife with too many exceptions.)

Supporters of campus carry argue that these laws make students and faculty safer from attacks like the one that devastated the University of Texas a half century ago. But while there is no evidence that ordinary civilians with guns stop mass shootings, other outcomes have started to materialize, including a professor who accidentally shot himself in the middle of class.

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The Growing Push to Arm College Kids

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