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India may be the next big polluter to announce a climate plan

by JillianKuykenda Posted on December 2, 2014

India may be the next big polluter to announce a climate plan

By on 2 Dec 2014commentsShare

India is poised to unveil a new climate plan as soon as January, an Indian business publication is reporting. That’s yet another bit of good news that makes a 2015 global climate agreement look just a little more likely.

Up until now, India, the third-largest annual emitter of greenhouse gases, has been resistant to calls for limiting emissions. But when the U.S. and China, the two largest climate polluters, announced an agreement to curb their emissions last month, the world’s eyes turned toward the third country in line.

India’s announcement could come this January, when President Obama visits the country at the invitation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The plan “is likely to include an ‘aspirational’ peaking year for India’s greenhouse gas emissions,” writes the Indian Business Standard, which attributes the scoop to three anonymous sources in Modi’s government. The report continues:

The process to make fresh and enhanced commitments to the international community was in the works for the past few months, with the government commissioning studies to assess and project India’s greenhouse gas emissions. The results of these studies are due in December. A joint US-China announcement has incentivised India to make an early announcement in this regard.

Though the announcements by the US and China weren’t seen as ambitious by the Indian government, these were appreciated for their political significance. …

A source in the government said, “The consultations have begun for it. We should be able to narrow down on the nature of targets we should aspire to. It is likely to include an indicative year by which India’s emissions could peak, as well as a fresh target for lowering the economy’s carbon intensity.”

India’s timeline (that is, its timeline for announcing its pollution-cutting timeline) fits with what U.N. climate negotiators are hoping for. Countries are supposed to announce their emission-reduction goals — their “intended nationally determined contributions,” referred to as INDCs or NDCs — by March 2015. Then, if all goes according to plan, in December of next year world leaders will commit, at a big U.N. climate summit in Paris, to hold one another to their INDCs. The criteria that negotiators will use to evaluate whether each country’s INDC is appropriate — i.e., whether each country is actually pulling its weight — is one of many items on the agenda at this week’s climate conference in Lima, Peru.

Of course, this initial Business Standard report won’t quite have climate hawks doing gleeful backflips. There are still big questions, like, when will this “‘aspirational’ peaking year” be? How high will emissions be allowed to rise before they peak? And how probable is it that India will even achieve its aspirations? Many are worried that the countries that have yet to make commitments will allow their emissions to peak too late or too high. Greenpeace noted in a recent working paper on its hopes for Lima that “Countries should neither be allowed to come up with too many different timelines for their commitments, nor should the targets be locked in for 2030, as there is a real risk of the targets being too low, in which case low ambition would be locked in for 15 crucial years.” But there’s a possibility that India will do both.

Still, India has historically been granted more leeway than other countries because of its deep poverty and its comparatively low per-capita emissions. Around 300 million of its more than 1.2 billion people don’t have electricity, and giving them access to it could lead India’s emissions to balloon for decades to come. Recognizing this possibility, the U.N. came up with an unrealistic but not impossible model for how the world could avoid catastrophic climate change while India’s emissions continue to grow substantially as it hooks its poor up to power.

But it’s not a foregone conclusion that India’s development has to come hand-in-hand with greater emissions, nor is it a given that the Indian people will want it to. The country is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and its major cities already deal on a regular basis with air pollution levels that put Beijing to shame; the capital is considering a plan to close schools on days when pollution poses a high risk to human health. (Indians checking the day’s Google Weather forecast for New Delhi will often find that it’s “Smoke.”) India’s plans to double coal production in the next five years won’t help. But its plans to rapidly expand solar energy, which Modi’s delegation intends to tout in Lima, will.

So even though a lot is still up in the air (ahem) with regard to India’s future, the Business Standard report is another positive development in what’s starting to resemble a trend: The biggest greenhouse gas emitters are stepping up and demonstrating that they’re doing something to tackle this looming threat, even if not yet enough. This year has seen China, the U.S., and the European Union (the latter of which, if taken as a single entity, pollutes more than India) announce new goals and timelines. Now India may follow suit. Who’s next?

Source:
India may set bigger climate change targets before Obama’s R-Day visit

, Business Standard.

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India may be the next big polluter to announce a climate plan

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Good News From Iraq: Baghdad Finally Cuts a Deal With the Kurds

by GeorgiannaChewi Posted on December 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Politically, the primary challenge facing Iraq’s new Shiite leaders is forging a government that includes significant participation from the Sunni minority and slowly regains their trust in a unified state. It’s been Job 1 from the start. That said, building a political accommodation with the northern Kurds is a close second, and today brought some good news on that front:

In a far-reaching deal with the potential to unite Iraq in the face of a Sunni insurgency, the government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi agreed on Tuesday to a long-term pact with the autonomous Kurdish region over how to divide the country’s oil wealth and cooperate on fighting Islamic State extremists.

The deal unites Baghdad and Erbil, the Kurdish capital in the north, over the issue of oil revenues and budget payments, and is likely to halt a drive — at least in the short term — by the Kurds for an independent state. It includes payments from the central government for the salaries of Kurdish security forces, known as the pesh merga, and also will allow the flow of weapons to the Kurds from the United States, with the government in Baghdad as intermediary.

….The reconciliation between Baghdad and the Kurdish region also appeared to validate one element of President Obama’s strategy in confronting the Islamic State: pushing for a new, more inclusive leader of Iraq. When the extremists swept into Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in June, Mr. Obama decided that Mr. Maliki had to go before the United States would ramp up its military efforts against the Islamic State.

A deal with the Kurds was always going to be easier than regaining the participation of the Sunnis. Kurdistan has long had de facto autonomy from Baghdad, and negotiating over oil wealth is a fairly straightforward bit of dealmaking. An accommodation has been possible all along whenever Baghdad was willing to compromise—and the ISIS threat gave the new government there plenty of motivation to do just that.

The same can’t be said of accommodation with the Sunnis. The Sunni-Shia divide in the Arab regions of Iraq is deeper and more fundamental, and there’s no single, well-defined Sunni region with established leadership and relatively clear demands that can be negotiated with cleanly. There are just years—or decades or centuries, depending on how you want to count—of mistrust and bad blood. Combine that with nearly a decade of rampant corruption and tribal jingoism under Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite government and you don’t have a problem that can be solved either quickly or easily.

Still, the Kurdish deal suggests that Haider al-Abadi may be genuinely willing to do the work necessary to rein in tensions and provide the Sunni minority with the representation and influence it wants. Maybe. As always, it’s not wise to read too much into this. But it’s a good sign.

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Good News From Iraq: Baghdad Finally Cuts a Deal With the Kurds

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Climate Negotiators Are Working on History’s Most Important Mad Lib

by KeithMercer Posted on December 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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The latest round of United Nations climate negotiations kicked off today in Lima, Peru. For the next two weeks, delegates from 195 countries will hash out the framework for what they hope will become a major international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when negotiators reconvene in Paris next year. The Lima meeting will also be a chance to hear how far some major carbon-polluters—Brazil, India, Mexico, and more—are willing to go to slow global warming.

The goal of the Lima talks is to set a standard for how countries will formally submit their proposed emissions pledges in preparation for next year’s big summit. You can think of it like a climate action Mad Lib, where the story outline is now being drafted in Lima, and each country will fill in its blanks (but with emissions goals instead of nouns and verbs) before Paris. One of the big debates prior to Paris will be whether developed and developing countries will be required to meet the same criteria for setting those goals, and whether the goals will be legally binding.

This month’s talks will also be the first key test of President Obama’s climate pact with China, which was announced last month. The deal was important for a few key reasons. It set new carbon reductions goals: The US will reduce carbon emissions 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, while China promised to peak its emissions by 2030. It includes a plan to jump-start clean energy trade between the two countries. But perhaps most importantly, it could be a powerful incentive for other countries to create their own ambitious targets.

“The mood music will change,” said Michael Jacobs, a former environmental advisor to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Jacobs, who is in Lima this week with a climate economics think tank run by former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, added, “I think we will see…that if the US and China are both committed, then other countries will not want to look like they aren’t coming to the table.”

That’s a big deal, because widespread political participation is a prerequisite for the kind of global accord UN officials are hoping for in Paris. And it’s a big shift from past climate summits, like the 2009 one in Copenhagen, which have fallen apart thanks to a lack of cooperation from the US and China. Those two countries, the world’s top carbon emitters, have traditionally dragged their feet when it comes to global warming. Neither one of them ratified the last international climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.

But climate hawks are optimistic that the US-China accord has already advanced the future Paris negotiations into uncharted waters. As the Harvard economist Robert Stavins pointed out, the Kyoto Protocol covered only about 14 percent of global carbon emissions. But the Paris agreement will be structured differently. Instead of a single unified treaty that every country is expected to sign on to (an approach seen as a political dead end), the Paris agreement will be built around a patchwork of “nationally-determined contributions.” The US-China pact essentially serves as both countries’ commitment, and combined with the European Union commitment announced in October, already more than 50 percent of global carbon emissions are covered.

Negotiators in Lima are also designing a system for the international community to review countries’ proposed contributions to ensure that their proposed carbon cuts are sufficiently aggressive and that their calculations make sense. This would be the first time a peer review process is used in international climate talks, said Jennifer Morgan, a senior analyst at the World Resources Institute. Pushing for a strong review framework is a top priority of the US delegation, she said, speaking this morning from Lima.

Countries have until the spring to announce their emissions reduction pledges, so it’s not yet clear if there will be more announcements from Lima. Many eyes are on India, the world’s third-biggest carbon polluter, whose emissions are projected by WRI to climb 70 percent above 2000 levels by 2025. Without cooperation from India, a global accord would be much weaker; Narendra Modi, the country’s new prime minister, has so far been lukewarm on climate action.

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Climate Negotiators Are Working on History’s Most Important Mad Lib

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Here’s a Video of the GOP’s Next Top Obama Investigator Losing a Leg-Wrestling Match to Stephen Colbert

by SunnyBugden Posted on December 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Next year, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) will take over the chairmanship of the House oversight committee, replacing the current chair, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), as the GOP’s lead investigator. Chaffetz’s position comes with a lot of power—he will be able to subpoena Obama administration officials, and his committee has investigative jurisdiction over nearly every imaginable scandal, from security lapses by the Secret Service to the US Postal Service’s ongoing financial problems. Benghazi is also likely to remain a high priority for the committee under Chaffetz—despite a report released last month by the GOP-run House intelligence committee that debunked nearly every conspiracy theory about the attack.

To better familiarize our readers with the incoming chairman, here’s a video of Chaffetz losing a leg-wrestling match against comedian Stephen Colbert in 2009:

The Colbert Report
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Colbert Report on Facebook

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Here’s a Video of the GOP’s Next Top Obama Investigator Losing a Leg-Wrestling Match to Stephen Colbert

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The Scary Mystery of Angela Merkel Is….Still a Mystery

by Juli34Bfuc Posted on December 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last night I got around to reading George Packer’s long New Yorker profile of German chancellor Angela Merkel, and it turned out to be a surprisingly absorbing piece. Unfortunately, that’s due more to Packer’s skill as a writer than to anything he ends up revealing about Merkel. In fact, the truly astonishing thing is that he manages to write 15,000 words about Merkel without really enlightening us in any serious way about what makes her tick. Apparently she’s really that enigmatic. Here, for example, is what he says about why a sober-minded East German chemist, who had never before displayed any political ambitions, suddenly decided to visit a political group that had formed after the Berlin Wall fell to ask if she could help out with anything:

Merkel’s decision to enter politics is the central mystery of an opaque life. She rarely speaks publicly about herself and has never explained her decision. It wasn’t a long-term career plan—like most Germans, she didn’t foresee the abrupt collapse of Communism and the opportunities it created. But when the moment came, and Merkel found herself single and childless in her mid-thirties—and laboring in an East German institution with no future—a woman of her ambition must have grasped that politics would be the most dynamic realm of the new Germany.

Well, OK then. Packer reports that Merkel is smart, methodical, genuinely unpretentious, and “as lively and funny in private as she is publicly soporific.” But her political views? Apparently she barely has any:

Throughout her Chancellorship, Merkel has stayed as close as possible to German public opinion….“The Chancellor’s long-term view is about two weeks,” a Merkel adviser says. The pejorative most often used against her is “opportunist.” When I asked Katrin Göring-Eckardt, the Green leader, whether Merkel had any principles, she paused, then said, “She has a strong value of freedom, and everything else is negotiable.”

….“People say there’s no project, there’s no idea,” the senior official told me. “It’s just a zigzag of smart moves for nine years.” But, he added, “She would say that the times are not conducive to great visions.”

….The most daunting challenge of Merkel’s time in office has been the euro-zone crisis, which threatened to bring down economies across southern Europe and jeopardized the integrity of the euro….Merkel’s decisions during the crisis reflect the calculations of a politician more mindful of her constituency than of her place in history. When Greek debt was revealed to be at critical levels, she was slow to commit German taxpayers’ money to a bailout fund, and in 2011 she blocked a French and American proposal for coördinated European action.

….Throughout the crisis, Merkel buried herself in the economic details and refused to get out in front of what German voters—who tended to regard the Greeks as spendthrift and lazy—would accept, even if delaying prolonged the ordeal and, at key moments from late 2011 through the summer of 2012, threatened the euro itself. The novelist and journalist Peter Schneider compared her to a driver in foggy weather: “You only see five metres, not one hundred metres, so it’s better you are very careful, you don’t say too much, you act from step to step. No vision at all.”

It’s kind of scary, but all wrapped up in a hazy ball of pragmatism that’s hard to get a handle on. Take the eurozone crisis, for example. Over the past five years, Germany has seemed almost spitefully hellbent on destroying the European economy simply because Germans disapprove of the spendthrift southerners responsible for the mess—all the time self-righteously refusing to admit that they themselves played a role that was every bit as lucrative and self-serving in the whole debacle. Because of this, the European economy is now headed for its third recession since 2008.

Does Merkel share this view of things? Or does she recognize what needs to be done but simply doesn’t have either the will or the courage to challenge German public opinion? That’s never clear. And yes, I guess I find that a little scary. This is why I don’t quite get the comparison Packer makes between Merkel and Obama. Initially, he says, Merkel was put off by Obama’s lofty rhetoric:

As she got to know Obama better, though, she came to appreciate more the ways in which they were alike—analytical, cautious, dry-humored, remote. Benjamin Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, told me that “the President thinks there’s not another leader he’s worked closer with than her.” He added, “They’re so different publicly, but they’re actually quite similar.” (Ulrich joked, “Obama is Merkel in a better suit.”)

During the Ukraine crisis, the two have consulted frequently on the timing of announcements and been careful to keep the American and the European positions close. Obama is the antithesis of the swaggering leaders whom Merkel specializes in eating for breakfast. On a trip to Washington, she met with a number of senators, including the Republicans John McCain, of Arizona, and Jeff Sessions, of Alabama. She found them more preoccupied with the need to display toughness against America’s former Cold War adversary than with events in Ukraine themselves. (McCain called Merkel’s approach “milquetoast.”) To Merkel, Ukraine was a practical problem to be solved. This mirrored Obama’s view.

Personality-wise, perhaps, Obama and Merkel are similar. “No drama” could apply equally well to either of them. But politically? I don’t see it. Obama doesn’t strike me as someone with no vision who hews as close as possible to public opinion. It’s true that he can’t always get what he wants, and obviously he faces the same constraints as any politician in a democratic system—especially one who presides over a divided government. But certainly his broad political views are clear enough, as are his political sympathies. He hasn’t been able to change the course of American politics, but not because he wouldn’t like to. He just hasn’t been able to.

So: who is Angela Merkel? After 15,000 words, I still don’t feel like I know. Is she really just someone who’s skilled at keeping her political coalition together and doesn’t much care about anything more than that? It’s a little hard to believe. And yet, that sure seems to be the main takeaway from all this.

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The Scary Mystery of Angela Merkel Is….Still a Mystery

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This Article Has Been Retracted

by MichaelJZDV Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

This story included erroneous information. Waterford, NY, fire chief Donald Baldwin was not the commenter in question. We regret the error and are investigating.

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This Article Has Been Retracted

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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Undergoes Heart Surgery

by Rosie53Xgftn Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is “resting comfortably” after undergoing a coronary catheterization procedure, a press release from the nation’s highest court announced Wednesday morning.

Ginsburg, who at 81 is the Supreme Court’s oldest member, is expected to be discharged in the next 48 hours. From the release:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg underwent a coronary catheterization procedure this morning at MedStar Heart & Vascular Institute at MedStar Washington Hospital Center to place a stent in her right coronary artery. The coronary blockage was discovered after Justice Ginsburg experienced discomfort during routine exercise last night and was taken to the hospital. She is resting comfortably and is expected to be discharged in the next 48 hours.

Ginsburg has pushed back against suggestions she step down while President Barack Obama is still in office. In an interview with Elle last September, she defended her resistance to such calls. “Anybody who thinks that if I step down, Obama could appoint someone like me, they’re misguided. As long as I can do the job full steam…. I think I’ll recognize when the time comes that I can’t any longer. But now I can.”

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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Undergoes Heart Surgery

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Under Pressure From Obama, France Delays Warship Sale to Russia

by LucioFouts Posted on November 26, 2014

Mother Jones

I confess that I’m surprised to read this:

France has put on hold a controversial deal to supply Russia with two high-tech amphibious assault ships following international concern over Moscow’s military involvement in Ukraine

….After months of wait-and-see messages from the French, Hollande’s declaration Tuesday was at least clear: It would not be appropriate to deliver the control-and-command vessels given the current conflict between Moscow-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine, he said.

….In June, Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, had insisted that the contract had been signed and sealed and had to be honored. On Tuesday, following months of pressure from the United States, Fabius appeared to have changed his mind.

Huh. I guess the weakling Obama really is working quietly behind the scenes on stuff like this, and really does still have some clout on the international stage. Who knew?

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Under Pressure From Obama, France Delays Warship Sale to Russia

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Alabama wants to use Gulf restoration funds to build a $60 million beachfront hotel

by ChristiBrothers Posted on November 25, 2014

sweet hotel, alabama

Alabama wants to use Gulf restoration funds to build a $60 million beachfront hotel

By on 25 Nov 2014commentsShare

Alabama is taking the old adage “make the best of a bad situation” to a new low. The state wants to use restoration funds awarded after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill to rebuild a hotel wrecked by Hurricane Ivan. Yep, that’s right. Nearly $60 million for a beachfront lodge that was destroyed six years before the disastrous BP spill.

Environmentalists, understandably, are peeved and trying to block the project. New Orleans-based group, the Gulf Restoration Network, is suing the Obama administration to cut the funding for the hotel.

The money comes from BP’s $1 billion down payment toward restoring the Gulf. Other projects include marshland restoration, sea turtle habitat improvements, and rebuilding boat ramps. Allocation of these funds is being overseen by the five Gulf Coast states’ trustees and four federal agencies.

Here’s NPR on how Alabama is justifying the project:

Alabama’s strategy is to use the bulk of this immediate money for recreational restoration, says Gunter Guy, commissioner of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. He says that was easier to quantify than ecosystem damage.

“We believe there’s still injury out in the Gulf,” Guy says. “It could be to the fish, to the fauna, to the corals, to those kind of things. But those injuries are going to take longer to identify, and they’re going to take longer to figure out what type of remedies need to be put in place to address those injuries.”

Gunter followed that up with something that sounds straight out of The Onion:

“Sure, we could try to spend that on some more quote-unquote environmental projects, but we chose to do it on what we did because we think it’s the right thing to do,” Guy says. “Sure, is it an opportunity? Absolutely.”

Scare quotes for “environmental” projects? And the right thing to do for whom, Guy? Certainly not for the delicate ecosystems that exist along the coast that could use protection and restoration over a shiny new hotel and conference center.

Guy, buddy: We know the prospect of millions of dollars is a lot to get giddy about. But as the commissioner of your state’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, you should know better. High time to put that “money” toward “the environment.”

Source:
Plan To Use Gulf Oil Spill Funds For Beach Hotel Sparks Lawsuit

, NPR.

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Is Obama Trolling Republicans Over Immigration?

by MabelISSrj Posted on November 25, 2014

Mother Jones

Jonah Goldberg is unhappy with President Obama’s immigration order, but he’s not steaming mad about it. And I think this allows him to see some things a little more clearly than his fellow conservatives:

Maybe President Obama is just trolling?

….As Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution notes, Obama “could’ve done all this quietly, without making any announcement whatsoever.” After all, Obama has unilaterally reinterpreted and rewritten the law without nationally televised addresses before. But doing that wouldn’t let him pander to Latinos and, more important, that wouldn’t achieve his real goal: enraging Republicans.

As policy, King Obama’s edict is a mess, which may explain why Latinos are underwhelmed by it, according to the polls. But that’s not the yardstick Obama cares about most. The real goal is twofold: Cement Latinos into the Democratic coalition and force Republicans to overreact. He can’t achieve the first if he doesn’t succeed with the second. It remains to be seen if the Republicans will let themselves be trolled into helping him.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m pretty certain that Obama did what he did because he really believes it’s the right thing to do. Goldberg just isn’t able to acknowledge that and retain his conservative cred. Still, somewhere in the Oval Office there was someone writing down pros and cons on a napkin, and I’ll bet that enraging the GOP caucus and wrecking their legislative agenda made it onto the list of pros. So far, it looks like it’s probably working. But if Republicans are smart, they’ll figure out some way to follow Goldberg’s advice and rein in their worst impulses. If they go nuts, they’re just playing into Obama’s hands.

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Is Obama Trolling Republicans Over Immigration?

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