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Kids sue Obama over climate change

by BlytheDouglas Posted on August 14, 2015

Kids sue Obama over climate change

By on 14 Aug 2015commentsShare

A new lawsuit filed against President Obama and a handful of federal departments and agencies condemns the government for supporting the fossil fuel industry in the face of a changing climate. The plaintiffs? A group of 21 children aged 8–19, mostly from Oregon. The complaint, originally drafted in green Crayola, holds the president culpable for the effects of historical and future carbon emissions and demands immediate climate action on constitutional grounds. The filing itself is a hefty document, but the argument looks something like this:

1. The government has known about the climatic effects of carbon emissions for decades. There’s scientific consensus on climate change and ocean acidification, and the story is pretty awful.

2. In spite of the danger, the government encouraged and subsidized the fossil fuel industry. The continued authorization of new fossil fuel projects (like the proposed Jordan Cove natural gas export terminal in Oregon) will further harm the children in question.

3. Climate change disproportionately affects youth because they’ll live more of their lives in a turbulent world.

4. Mitigating the effects of climate change and shifting to clean energy is possible, and the government has admitted it is the trustee of the nation’s “air (atmosphere), seas, shores of the sea, water, and wildlife.”

As such, the kids — a coalition of youth activists — allege that the government has violated the due process and equal protection principles of the Fifth Amendment, violated their rights that fall outside of the Constitution but are still protected by the Ninth Amendment, and violated the public trust doctrine of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Which boils down to the broader allegation that support of the fossil fuel industry infringes upon youths’ fundamental rights to life, liberty, and property.

As Responding to Climate Change reports, the complaint also outlines the kids’ relationship with a changing climate:

11-year-old Hazel spends a lot of time at the coast, bodysurfing and rock-pooling, as well as relying on it as a food source. By the time she is an adult, she fears that both of these benefits will be lost.

Perhaps most shocking is the testimony of 8-year-old Levi Draheim, who lives on a barrier island [in Florida] which separates the Indian River Lagoon from the Atlantic Ocean. Faced with rising sea levels, Levi has been forced to accept the potential loss of his home.

The lawsuit comes in the wake of a similar legal case in Washington which earlier this year set a new, science-based emissions trajectory for the state.

Some claims are more extreme than others. (Compare “Levi can no longer swim in the Indian River Lagoon because of increasing flesh-eating bacteria and dead fish” to “Kelsey enjoys snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, and snow camping.”)

The lawsuit is likely a long shot, but in aggregate, the stories embedded in the complaint help paint a picture of the effects of climate change in human terms. In a world that has repeatedly demonstrated that it couldn’t care less about the polar bears, that’s a good thing.

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8-year-old takes US government to court over climate change

, RTCC.

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Oceans 15


How catching big waves helped turn this pro surfer into a conservationistRamon Navarro first came to the sea with his fisherman rather, found his own place on it as a surfer, and now fights to protect the coastline he loves.


What seafood is OK to eat, anyway? Ask an expertWhen it comes to sustainable seafood, you could say director of Seafood Watch Jennifer Dianto Kemmerly is the ultimate arbiter of taste.

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Achtung! Don’t Help Your Kids With Their Math Homework.

by CaitlynEoff Posted on August 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Pacific Standard reports today on a recent study about learning math, but I think they bury the lede. “New research finds that when parents with math anxieties try to help their kids, their efforts could backfire,” says the headline. But here’s the text:

Remarkably, the more that math-anxious parents helped their kids with their homework, the worse the kids did on end-of-year math tests, an effect that in the worst cases cut students’ progress in math nearly in half. Meanwhile, among low-anxiety parents, the team found that parents helping their children with math homework had little to no effect on the kids’ test scores. That effect remained even after controlling for parents’ education levels, teachers’ math anxiety and ability, and other factors, such as a school’s socioeconomic status—a good indication that parents were passing their arithmetic-specific anxieties on to their kids.

In other words, forget about whether you have math anxieties or not. Don’t help your kids with their math homework, full stop. At worst, you’ll screw them up. At best, you’ll do nothing. Use the time for something more constructive, like cutting your fingernails or watching Judge Judy.

Anyway, while we’re on the subject, here’s a math story from my childhood that backs up the results of this study. I guess this would have been around first or second grade. I must have asked my father some question or another, and the upshot was that he told me about negative numbers and how one arrived at them. Some time later, I was filling out an arithmetic workbook at school, and one of the problems was something like “What is 2 – 3?” I wrote in -1, probably feeling kind of smug, and got marked down. I protested to no effect. I was supposed to say that there was no answer because you can’t subtract a bigger number from a smaller one. Thanks a lot, dad!

Is this story true? I don’t know. I swear I remember it, but it sounds kind of unlikely, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s just a trick of memory? Could be, but it’s an odd thing to invent out of whole cloth. In any case, my father is no longer around to protest his innocence, so we’ll never know for sure.

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Achtung! Don’t Help Your Kids With Their Math Homework.

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Hillary Clinton Threads the Needle on College Tuition Plan

by BryceRftuxmc Posted on August 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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Hillary Clinton plans to offer a major proposal to deal with skyrocketing student debt:

With Americans shouldering $1.2 trillion in student loan debt, and about eight million of them in default, Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday will propose major new spending by the federal government that would help undergraduates pay tuition at public colleges without needing loans.

….Under the plan, which was outlined by Clinton advisers on Sunday, about $175 billion in grants would go to states that guarantee that students would not have to take out loans to cover tuition at four-year public colleges and universities. In return for the money, states would have to end budget cuts to increase spending over time on higher education, while also working to slow the growth of tuition, though the plan does not require states to cap it.

….Her plan does not go as far as some liberal advocacy groups would like, because she still expects families to make a “realistic” contribution to cover some tuition costs — through savings or loans — while students would contribute based on wages from 10 hours of work per week. In contrast Mr. O’Malley proposed “an aggressive goal — to give every student and their family the opportunity to go to college debt-free,” said Lis Smith, his deputy campaign manager.

Hillary is Hillary, so I’m sure when this is announced it will be accompanied by a detailed policy paper that makes a very good case for how it can work. My initial reaction is that it sounds kind of complicated, and I wonder if this kind of incentive can really keep states from finding ways to spend less and less on higher education. Will tuition costs go down only to be replaced by ever-increasing “fees”?

At the same time, this is pretty carefully crafted to appeal to multiple constituencies. It will appeal to middle-class voters by guaranteeing that tuition costs at state universities will be kept to a reasonable level. But it will also appeal to low-income voters with little chance of sending their kids to college. They probably wonder why taxpayers should subsidize a free education for mostly middle-income kids who are going to use that education to make more money after they graduate. Clinton has threaded this needle by insisting that families still have to contribute and students should work at least part-time.

I doubt this will become a major campaign issue. However, it will cost $350 billion over ten years, and Democrats have to be careful about how many programs like this they propose. Once you put a price tag on them, Republicans can start adding up the damages and asking where the money will come from. In this case, Clinton says it will come from effectively raising taxes on the rich, but that can only go so far. If she has very many more of these programs to announce, eventually middle-class families will have to shoulder some of the bill. That’s catnip for Republicans.

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Hillary Clinton Threads the Needle on College Tuition Plan

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New York Fast-Food Workers Just Scored a Big Win In Their Fight For a Living Wage

by HungBeirne676 Posted on July 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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In a widely expected move, a panel appointed by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recommended today that the state’s minimum wage for employees of fast-food chain restaurants be raised to $15 an hour.

The recommendation comes three years after strikes by New York City fast-food workers set off a national labor movement that has led to the passage of a $15 minimum wage in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. But unlike those cities, New York doesn’t have the power to set its own minimum wage—it’s up to legislators in Albany.

When New York lawmakers balked at raising the minimum wage last year, Gov. Cuomo convened a board to examine wages in the fast food industry, which employs 180,000 people in the state. The state’s labor commissioner, a Cuomo appointee, has the power to issue an order putting the proposal into effect. If he approves the wage hike, fast-food workers currently earning the state’s minimum wage of $8.75 will get a 70 percent raise, effective by 2018 in New York City and 2021 in the rest of the state.

“It’s hard to explain to my children why they can’t do things other kids do,” Barbara Kelley, a Buffalo mother who works at Dunkin’ Donuts and takes home an average of $150 a week, said in a statement released by labor organizers. “With $15 an hour, I will be able to get by and maybe reward my kids in little ways, like ice cream after a long day, and in big ways like being able to save for the future.” Labor organizers are optimistic that the $15 wage will be adopted and will spur raises in other industries.

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I Want to Hear a Good Argument Against Obama’s Deal With Iran

by OscarBenham9 Posted on July 16, 2015

Mother Jones

Max Fisher talked to another arms control expert today, and Aaron Stein says it’s a very good agreement. The Iran nuclear deal “exceeds in all areas. It makes the possibility of Iran developing a nuclear weapon in the next 25 years extremely remote.”

Fine. The technical experts are all impressed. But what about the opponents of the deal? What do they think?

Luckily, Matt Yglesias did the legwork to confirm what I had already concluded anecdotally: they don’t really have any serious arguments against the deal. Oh, they toss out a few tidbits here and there about inspection times and so forth, but it’s just fluff. The inspection regime is actually very tough. No, the problem is that conservatives simply don’t want a deal. Period. They want sanctions to remain in force forever. Or they just want to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities. Or they don’t say much of anything except that Iran is a bad country, and we shouldn’t do deals with bad countries.

All of this is fatuous, and the critics know it. Sanctions never last forever. If we tried to keep them in place without ever offering Iran a reasonable bargain to lift them, our allies would desert us. Bombing would be just as bad. Instead of keeping Iran in check for ten or more years, it would merely set them back two or three. And it would confirm their belief that the only defense against the United States is a nuclear deterrent. They’d be even more determined to build a bomb after that. As for Iran’s leadership not being choir boys, no kidding. You don’t make deals like this with friendly countries. You make them with antagonists. That’s the whole point.

I don’t want Iran to build a nuclear bomb. It would quite likely set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, which is the last place on the planet that we want to have one. And as near as I can tell, this deal is our best chance to keep Iran nuclear free for a good long time. If any conservative can offer a better plan, I’m all ears. Either:

Describe a tougher deal that you can reasonably argue Iran would have accepted.

or

Explain why some other course of action would be better at keeping Iran nuclear free than a negotiated deal.

No name calling, no comparisons to Neville Chamberlain, no complaints that Iran hates Israel, and no blather about appeasement. Make an argument. A real argument about a course of action that would be better than the deal currently on the table. Let’s hear it.

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I Want to Hear a Good Argument Against Obama’s Deal With Iran

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The Latest From Greece: A Quick Rundown

by dgod36 Posted on July 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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A quick summary of Greece to start my morning (or ease you into lunch if you’re on the East coast):

The Greek parliament has passed the first batch of legislation demanded by the Europeans.
This seriously split Syriza, and could even lead to the downfall of the government. In the meantime, there was rioting in the streets of Athens.
The European Central Bank responded by providing €900 million to Greece’s banks. It’s not much, and capital controls will stay in place for a while. But it keeps the ATMs churning out €60 per day, which is better than €0 per day.
Mario Draghi, the head of the ECB, said it was “uncontroversial” that Greece needs substantial debt relief. It all depends on Greece keeping its side of the deal. So now both the ECB and the IMF—two-thirds of the Troika—are publicly on board with debt relief.

That’s about it for now. Amid the chaos, things are moving forward. Nonetheless, the religious types among you should give thanks daily that you don’t live in Greece.

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The Latest From Greece: A Quick Rundown

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Do Republicans Really Want to Scuttle the Iran Deal?

by ShoshanBeavers Posted on July 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Greg Sargent reports that Republicans are gearing up to torpedo the Iran nuclear deal:

Republicans are very, very confident that they have the political advantage in the coming battle in Congress over the historic Iran deal announced yesterday. Multiple news reports today tell us that Republicans are gearing up their “attack plan,” and those reports are overflowing with GOP bravado.

Well, of course they are. That’s just smart politics. If you want to build a bandwagon, you have to act like a winner.

In fact, though, Republicans have very little chance of blocking the deal. To do so they have to vote to disapprove the agreement, which President Obama will veto. Then they have round up a two-thirds vote to override the veto. That’s very, very unlikely.

(And why this odd procedure where the deal takes effect unless Congress disapproves it? They can thank one of their own, Sen. Bob Corker, for proposing this unusual procedure. And anyway, his legislation passed 98-1, so it was pretty unanimously the will of the Senate. The theory behind it was that Obama could simply enact any deal as an executive order without involving Congress at all, and this was at least better than that.)

But then Sargent brings up another one of those 11-dimensional chess conundrums:

But here’s the question: Once all the procedural smoke clears, do Republicans really want an endgame in which they succeeded in blocking the deal? Do they actually want to scuttle it?

Perhaps many of them genuinely do want that. But here’s a prediction: as this battle develops, some Republicans may privately conclude that it would be better for them politically if they fail to stop it. The Iran debate may come to resemble the one over the anti-Obamacare lawsuit that also recently fell short.

The idea here is that if Congress kills the deal, several things will happen. First, the rest of the signatories (UK, France, Germany, EU, China, Russia) will still lift their sanctions if Iran meets its end of the bargain. So that means the sanctions regime will effectively disintegrate. Second, our allies will blame us for tanking the deal. Third, Iran will have an excuse for pushing the boundaries of the agreement and remaining closer to nuclear breakout than they would be if the deal were intact.

And Republicans would take the bulk of the blame for all this. Do they really want that? This is an international agreement, after all. Conservatives like Angela Merkel, David Cameron, and Vladimir Putin have approved it. If we don’t, will they conclude that the US is no longer a partner worth negotiating with? These are things worth pondering, especially if Republicans expect one of their own to be president 18 months from now.

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Do Republicans Really Want to Scuttle the Iran Deal?

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Quote of the Day: The Minimum Wage is Lame, Dude

by MaritzaDesroche Posted on July 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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From boring Midwestern governor Scott Walker:

The left claims that they’re for American workers and they’ve just got just really lame ideas — things like the minimum wage.

Well, there are some economists who would agree with him, but essentially no ordinary Americans. The minimum wage is almost as beloved as Social Security. In fact, ordinary Americans not only like the minimum wage, but about 70 percent of them think it should be raised. So Walker is definitely taking a bold stand here.

Oddly enough, as Steve Benen points out, this has become sort of a thing among Republicans lately. They’ve always opposed increases to the minimum wage, of course, but now a lot of them oppose the minimum wage itself. Where has this suddenly come from? Perhaps someone who follows the right-wing idea network can give us a rundown. I mean, sure, Milton Friedman opposed the minimum wage, but conservatives apparently abandoned anything remotely Friedmanesque during the Great Recession. So it can’t be that.

So what is it? Why has this suddenly jumped from mumblings in Heritage Foundation white papers to campaign platforms for presidential candidates?

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Quote of the Day: The Minimum Wage is Lame, Dude

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Today’s Assignment: A Definition of Family That Everyone Can Love

by MariSepulveda Posted on July 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Will Saletan tweets unhappily that his son was “marked down 5 percent on a high school health test because he chose this ‘incorrect’ definition of family.” David French is unhappy too:

How reassuring that our educators — in their infinite wisdom — have expanded the definition of “family” to “a collection of individuals who care for and about each other.” But to paraphrase The Incredibles — If everyone is family, then no one is. I’ve “cared for and about” my classmates in high school, college, and law school. I’ve “cared for and about” my colleagues at every job I’ve held. I guess we’re all family now.

Look, this is probably just a lousy question. Even Saletan and French, I assume, would agree that answer C is obviously incorrect. Adopted children are family. In-laws are family. Stepfathers are family. “Related by blood” just flatly doesn’t work.

On the other hand, yes, answer E seems mighty broad—though I’m not sure if there’s any decent way to succinctly define family at all. I’ll note that my dictionary needs four separate definitions just to encompass the usage we’re talking about here (i.e., not including crime syndicates, taxonomic classifications, etc.).

But there’s no need to get too outraged about this. There’s certainly value in teaching our kids that sharing DNA isn’t the exclusive definition of family. And while we should probably be able to do better than answer E, the more I think about it, the harder it gets. Anyone want to take a stab? We all promise not to laugh.

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Today’s Assignment: A Definition of Family That Everyone Can Love

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In a Few Years, Gay Marriage Will Be About as Threatening as Cell Phones

by KirbyFelton Posted on June 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jonathan Bernstein gets it right on same-sex marriage:

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Supreme Court’s decision today in Obergefell, which recognizes marriage as a basic right, is that it’s not going to be very controversial.

….How do I know? Because we’ve seen it in state after state in which marriage equality was enacted. There’s no controversy remaining in Massachusetts; for that matter, there’s little or no controversy remaining in Iowa, which had court-imposed marriage equality in 2009. On a related issue, conflict over gays and lesbians serving in the military ended immediately after “don’t ask don’t tell” was replaced four years ago. In practice, extending full citizenship and human rights to all regardless of sexual orientation and identity is actually not all that controversial — at least not after the fact.

I get the fact that gay marriage seems creepy and unnatural to some people. I don’t like this attitude, and I don’t feel it myself, but I get it.

But you know what? Bernstein is right. For a while it will continue to be a political football, but not for long. Even the opponents will quickly realize that same-sex marriage changes….nothing. Life goes on normally. The gay couples in town still live and hang out together just like they always have, and a few marriage ceremonies didn’t change that. In their own houses, everything stays the same. The actual impact is zero. No one is trying to recruit their kids to the cause. Their churches continue to marry whoever they want to marry. After a few months or a few years, they just forget about it. After all, the lawn needs mowing and the kids have to get ferried to soccer practice and Chinese sounds good for dinner—and that gay couple who run the Jade Palace over on 4th sure make a mean Kung Pao Chicken. And that’s it.

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In a Few Years, Gay Marriage Will Be About as Threatening as Cell Phones

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