Tag Archives: obama

Two Charts That Show How the US Is Shortchanging the World

by Antony9244 Posted on November 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tim McDonnell

This morning, the New York Times reported that President Obama is poised to announce a pledge of $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund, a United Nations-administered account to help poor countries deal with climate change. That’s the biggest single pledge of any country so far (see chart above); it doubles the total size of the fund and is a major step toward the UN’s target of raising $15 billion before next month’s climate talks in Lima, Peru. Other notable carbon emitters, such as the UK, are expected to announce contributions by the end of next week.

But viewed in a different context, the US contribution looks much less impressive. The idea behind the fund is to reconcile one of the cruel ironies of climate change: Many of the nations that will be hit hardest by global warming—countries in Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands, for example—have done very little to cause the problem. Bangladesh was recently ranked as the country that is most vulnerable to climate change, but its per-capita carbon dioxide emissions are 44 times smaller than the US’s per-capita emissions, according to the World Bank. So the fund is meant to bridge the gap between the rich countries whose carbon pollution causing climate change and the poor countries that are suffering from it.

As the chart below shows, the US’s contribution to the Green Climate Fund looks a lot smaller when it’s adjusted to take into account America’s extremely high emissions:

Tim McDonnell

Cumulatively since 1980—the earliest year for which consistent data from the Energy Information Administration is available—the US has emitted more carbon than any other country, including China. (In 2008, China overtook the US as the leading annual carbon polluter). So it’s probably fair to say that the US is more to blame for global warming than any other single country. And yet Obama’s pledge to the Green Climate Fund only translates to about $17,100 per million metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted from 1980 to 2012—placing it ninth among the 13 countries that have announced pledges. That’s a bit like crashing a friend’s car and only offering to pay to fix the steering wheel. By contrast, Sweden’s pledge equates to $292,000 per million tons of CO2 emissions—17 times greater than the US pledge.

It’s great and necessary that Obama is willing to help poorer countries adapt to climate change. But I think it’s fair to say the US is getting away pretty cheap.

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Two Charts That Show How the US Is Shortchanging the World

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3 Ways Obama’s Immigration Executive Action Changes Everything (and One Way It Doesn’t)

by eltonwagner4653 Posted on November 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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The details of President Barack Obama’s much-rumored, much-debated executive action on immigration have been leaked to the press, and the broad outline, according to Fox News and the New York Times, includes deportation relief for upwards of 5 million people.

Republicans are already lining up to block the White House’s plans, and Obama’s successor could go ahead and reverse course in 2017, anyway. Still, here are three reported provisions that could have a dramatic impact on the lives of the United States’ 11 million undocumented immigrants:

1. Expansion of DACA, the program for DREAMers: Back in 2012, a Department of Homeland Security directive known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) extended deportation relief to those young immigrants who came to the United States before their 16th birthday and went on to graduate from high school or serve in the US military. As Vox‘s Dara Lind has reported, the program has been a success for the roughly 600,000 immigrants who received deferred action by June 2014, although just as many are eligible but haven’t yet applied. According to the Fox News report, Obama’s executive action would move the cutoff arrival date from June 2007 to January 1, 2010, and remove the age limit (31 as of June ’12); a Migration Policy Institute (MPI) report from September detailed how changes to the initial plan could make hundreds of thousands of immigrants DACA-eligible:

“Executive Action for Unauthorized Immigrants,” Migration Policy Institute, 2014

2. Relief for the undocumented parents of US citizen children: According to the Times, a key part of the executive action “will allow many parents of children who are American citizens or legal residents to obtain legal work documents and no longer worry about being discovered, separated from their families and sent away,” a move that would legalize anywhere from 2.5-3.3 million people. The Huffington Post reported in June that more than 72,000 parents of US-born children were deported in fiscal year 2013 alone; of those, nearly 11,000 had no criminal convictions. (One 2013 report estimated that 4.5 million US-born kids have at least one undocumented parent.)

3. Elimination of mandatory fingerprinting program: Under Secure Communities, or S-Comm, immigrants booked into local jails have their fingerprints run through a Homeland Security database to check their legal status. (If they’re unauthorized, they can be held by local authorities until the feds come pick them up.) The program, which began under President George W. Bush and was greatly expanded under Obama, has long come under fire for quickly pushing people toward detention and potential deportation, as well as for contributing to racial profiling and even the detention of thousands of US citizens. According to one 2013 report, S-Comm led to the deportation of more than 300,000 immigrants from fiscal years 2009 to 2013.

There are other parts to Obama’s plan, including hundreds of thousands of new tech visas and even pay raises for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers. Still, given this year’s border crisis, it’s notable that the president’s plan seems to make little to no mention of the folks who provoked it: the unaccompanied children and so-called “family units” (often mothers traveling with small kids) who came in huge numbers from Central America and claimed, in many cases, to be fleeing violence of some sort.

The administration has been particularly adamant about fast-tracking the deportation of those family unit apprehensions, whose numbers jumped from 14,855 in fiscal 2013 to 68,445 in fiscal 2014, a 361 percent increase. Meanwhile, ICE has renewed the controversial practice of family detention (a complaint has already been filed regarding sexual abuse in the new Karnes City, Texas, facility) and will soon open the largest immigration detention facility in the country, a 2,400-bed family center in Dilley, Texas—just as Obama starts rolling out what many immigration hardliners will no doubt attack as an unconstitutional amnesty.

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3 Ways Obama’s Immigration Executive Action Changes Everything (and One Way It Doesn’t)

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Obama’s Deal With China Is a Big Win for Solar, Nuclear, and Clean Coal

by johnsmith2345as Posted on November 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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The plan announced last night for the United States and China to join forces in the fight against climate change is a big deal. It sets a new, more ambitious greenhouse gas reduction target for the US (although the target will only bring emissions slightly below 1990 levels, which isn’t as aggressive as climate scientists have advocated). It establishes a goal for China to get one-fifth of its power from low-carbon sources by 2030. And it lays out what both countries will bring to the table at next year’s international climate negotiations in Paris. That should help other countries set their own goals, and it increases the likelihood that the talks will be productive.

More coverage of the historic US-China climate deal.


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Awkward: Watch a Supercut of Republicans Using China As an Excuse to Do Nothing About Climate Change


Deep Inside the Wild World of China’s Fracking Boom


Here Comes the Sun: America’s Solar Boom, in Charts

The deal could also be a big win for the clean energy sector. It calls for more funding for research and development projects focused on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and clean vehicles. It also includes a major new pilot project in China to study carbon capture and sequestration, the controversial technology that—at least in theory—could help China curb its emissions while continuing to burn coal for electricity.

Perhaps most significantly, the plan says that for China to meet its clean energy production target, it will have to roll out an additional 800 to 1,000 gigawatts of low-carbon energy sources by 2030. That’s roughly equivalent to the size of the US’s current electric grid, but made up entirely of non-fossil energy. So the renewable energy market in China, already the world’s biggest, is poised to grow by a lot over the next decade or so. That’s not necessarily a new development, but now we know that the growth expectation is nailed down to some specific numbers—and that it will happen with the support of the US government and American companies.

In other words, China’s climate goals represent a big economic opportunity for both countries.

“I think the technology stuff is the most important part of this agreement,” said Alex Trembath, an energy analyst with the Breakthrough Institute. “This is what energy innovation looks like: Not only partnerships in deploying new technologies, but innovation that takes advantage of demand in growing markets” like China.

Up to this point, trade relations on clean energy have been a little icy between China and the US, especially on solar power. Over the last couple years, the explosion of the solar power market has led to some bitter trade wars between Chinese and American solar panel manufacturers, with US regulators complaining that Chinese companies were dumping super-cheap panels on the American market. The Commerce Department already raised tariffs on Chinese solar technology this summer, and it’s poised to do so again in December.

But Nick Culver, a solar market analyst for Bloomberg New Energy Finance, says yesterday’s announcement effectively signals a pivot in the Obama administration’s attitude that will ultimately benefit the US solar industry.

“Folks in the solar world are worried about a discrete number of things that can really throw the brakes in US, and one of those things is a trade war with escalating tariffs,” Culver said. “This seems like it really relieves that fear,” because the plan makes it US policy to promote, not inhibit, China’s clean energy sector.

Culver cautioned that it could be several years before China’s new commitments translate to a noticeable uptick in manufacturing, so don’t expect solar stock prices to necessarily skyrocket right away. The bilateral plan is light on details, so it’s hard to say exactly when and how China envisions ramping up its solar deployment. But now the tone is set for a relationship between the countries that is less combative and more collaborative.

That attitude applies beyond solar power. China is the world’s biggest coal consumer; it gets more than 70 percent of its power from coal. Thanks to China’s skyrocketing growth, its coal addiction is expected to rise until 2030, when the International Energy Agency predicts China will, at its peak, consume more than half the world’s coal. To reconcile China’s need for more cheap energy with its climate goals, the plan calls for a major pilot project to study carbon capture and sequestration, a technology intended to capture carbon dioxide from coal plants and either bury it underground or repackage it for use as an industrial chemical.

The project will be a fresh opportunity to prove that CCS can be made economically viable—the closest equivalent project in the US, a coal plant in Mississippi, is a $5 billion boondoggle.

“Having CCS called out specifically is a good sign that the technology is necessary” for China to meet its climate goals, said Elizabeth Burton, director of the Global CCS Institute, a Melbourne-based think tank.

Nuclear power could also be a winner. China already has 26 nuclear reactors in the works, with an additional 60 planned, according to the Nuclear Energy Institute. These will likely become a key component of China’s push for low-carbon energy.

Trembath said the agreement is a model for international collaboration on climate action that reduces our collective carbon footprint without the geopolitical hassle of a legally binding global treaty.

“If you really want to gather momentum for clean energy,” Trembath said, “you have to take advantage of China.”

Original source – 

Obama’s Deal With China Is a Big Win for Solar, Nuclear, and Clean Coal

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Obama Takes a Good Half Step Toward an Unequivocal Ban on Torture

by GloryGibbbrq Posted on November 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s worth mentioning that the Obama administration has finally decided to take a more expansive view of where torture and “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” is banned:

The Obama administration, after an internal debate that has drawn global scrutiny, is taking the view that the cruelty ban applies wherever the United States exercises governmental authority, according to officials familiar with the deliberations. That definition, they said, includes the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and American-flagged ships and aircraft in international waters and airspace.

But the administration’s definition still appears to exclude places like the former “black site” prisons where the C.I.A. tortured terrorism suspects during the Bush years, as well as American military detention camps in Afghanistan and Iraq during the wars there. Those prisons were on the sovereign territory of other governments; the government of Cuba exercises no control over Guantánamo.

Why exclude black sites? Administration officials apparently say this is just a “technical matter of interpretation, underlined by concerns that changing the jurisdictional scope could have unintended consequences, like increasing the risk of lawsuits by overseas detainees or making it harder to say that unrelated treaties with similar jurisdictional language did not apply in the same places.”

I can….almost buy that. Lawyers and diplomats get pretty hung up on stuff like this. Nonetheless, I’d be a lot happier if Obama could be a little more Bush-like here, and simply overrule the legal eagles and insist on a clear and unequivocal policy. It’s hard to believe there isn’t a way to do that which wouldn’t somehow wreck a bunch of other treaties at the same time.

So two cheers for doing the right thing. But not three.

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Obama Takes a Good Half Step Toward an Unequivocal Ban on Torture

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Is the US-China Climate Pact as Big a Deal as It Seems?

by NicholeWooldrid Posted on November 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in The Atlantic and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

I’ve been offline for many hours and am just now seeing the announcements from Beijing. The United States and China have apparently agreed to do what anyone who has thought seriously about climate has been hoping for, for years. As the No. 1 (now China) and No. 2 carbon emitters in the world, and as the No. 1 (still the US) and No. 2 economies, they’ve agreed to new carbon-reduction targets that are more ambitious than most people would have expected.

More coverage of the historic US-China climate deal.


The US and China Just Announced a Huge Deal on Climateâ&#128;&#148;and It’s a Game Changer


Is the US-China Climate Pact as Big a Deal as It Seems?


Obama’s Deal With China Is a Big Win for Solar, Nuclear, and Clean Coal


Awkward: Watch a Supercut of Republicans Using China As an Excuse to Do Nothing About Climate Change


Deep Inside the Wild World of China’s Fracking Boom


Here Comes the Sun: America’s Solar Boom, in Charts

We’ll wait to see the details—including how an American president can make good on commitments for 2025, when that is two and possibly three presidencies into the future, and when in the here-and-now he faces congressional majorities that seem dead-set against recognizing this issue. It’s quaint to think back on an America that could set ambitious long-term goals—creating Land-Grant universities, developing the Interstate Highway System, going to the moon—even though the president who proposed them realized that they could not be completed on his watch. But let’s not waste time on nostalgia.

Before we have all the details, here is the simple guide to why this could be very important.

1) To have spent any time in China is to recognize that environmental damage of all kinds is the greatest threat to its sustainability—even more than the political corruption and repression to which its pollution problems are related. (I’ll say more about the link some other time, but you could think of last week’s reports that visiting groups of senior Chinese officials have bought so much illegal ivory in Tanzania that they’ve driven the black market price to new highs.)

You can go on for quite a while with a political system like China’s, as it keeps demonstrating now in its 65th year. But when children are developing lung cancer, when people in the capital city are on average dying five years too early because of air pollution, when water and agricultural soil and food supplies are increasingly poisoned, a system just won’t last. The Chinese Communist Party itself has recognized this, in shifting in the past three years from pollution denialism to a “we’re on your side to clean things up!” official stance.

Analytically these pollution emergencies are distinct from carbon-emission issues. But in practical terms pro-environmental steps by China are likely to help with both.

2) To have looked at either the numbers or the politics of global climate issues is to recognize that unless China and the US cooperate, there is no hope for anyone else. Numbers: These are far and away the two biggest sources of carbon emissions, and China is the fastest-growing. As John Kerry points out in an op-ed in tomorrow’s NYT, reductions either of them made on its own could just be wiped out unless the other cooperates. Politics: As the collapse of the Copenhagen climate talks five years ago showed, the rest of the world is likely to say, “To hell with it” if the two countries at the heart of this problem can’t be bothered to do anything.

We see our own domestic version of this response when people say, “Why go through the hassle of a carbon tax, when the Chinese are just going to smoke us to death anyway?” This new agreement does not mean that next year’s global climate negotiations in Paris will succeed. But it means they are no longer guaranteed to fail.

3) China is a big, diverse, churning, and contradictory place, as anyone who’s been there can detail for hours. But for the past year-plus, the news out of China has been consistent, and bad.

Many people thought, hoped, or dreamt that Xi Jinping would be some kind of reformer. Two years into his watch, his has been a time of cracking down rather than loosening up. Political enemies and advocates of civil society are in jail or in trouble. Reporters from the rest of the world have problems even getting into China, and reporters from China itself face even worse repression than before. The gratuitous recent showdown with Hong Kong exemplifies the new “No More Mr. Nice Guy” approach.

A nationalistic, spoiling-for-a-fight tone has spilled over into China’s “diplomatic” dealings too. So to have this leader of China making an important deal with an American president at this stage of his political fortune is the first news that even seems positive in a long while.

We’ll wait to see the details. But at face value, this is better news—about China, about China and America, and about the globe—than we’ve gotten for a while.

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Is the US-China Climate Pact as Big a Deal as It Seems?

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No, Obama’s carbon limits won’t mean massive power outages

by KennithKyngdon Posted on November 12, 2014

No, Obama’s carbon limits won’t mean massive power outages

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12 Nov 2014 1:36 PMShare

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The overseer of our electric grid is warning that the EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan poses a threat to the dependability of our power systems. Queue the ominous music and prepare for rolling blackouts? Not so fast. Other energy experts say there’s really nothing to worry about — except for, you know, climate chaos.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a not-for-profit regulatory authority in charge of keeping the juice flowing, suspects that the EPA is overly optimistic about how quickly we can transform the grid by shutting down coal plants, increasing efficiency, and building massive gas, wind, and solar infrastructure. From an initial review it released last week:

The proposed timeline does not provide enough time to develop sufficient resources to ensure continued reliable operation of the grid by 2020. To attempt to do so would increase the use of controlled load shedding and potential for wide-scale, uncontrolled outages.

“Wide-scale, uncontrolled outages”?!?! Sounds pretty dire. But it turns out that NERC has a history of fear-mongering, issuing periodic warnings that shuttering coal plants will bring blackouts.

Here’s one reason why NERC’s analysis is balderdash: It leaves out the growing contributions of wind and solar. Yes, that’s right. In assessing the effects of a policy designed specifically to encourage carbon reductions, the report acknowledges that wind and solar electricity will increase, and yet doesn’t count these additions in calculating the total amount of power the grid can deliver.

The Union of Concerned Scientists contrasts the preliminary NERC report with a more rigorous study on the impacts of transforming Minnesota’s electricity system away from fossil fuels toward renewables. This evaluation was also performed by an organization responsible for grid reliability, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator. Turns out, when contributions from renewables, energy efficiency, and boring demand response are considered — and transmission needs are thoroughly analyzed rather than assumed to be insurmountable — a concrete plan emerges for reliably providing 40 percent of the state’s electricity with wind and solar.

The EPA itself certainly isn’t buying the NERC report. “There are a lot of assertions and claims in the report that aren’t really substantiated by any particular analytics they mention, or supported by a deeper look into the issues,” said one agency staff member made available for comment on condition of namelessness, in response to questions from Greenwire. For example, NERC assumes that all states will take the same approach in complying with the Clean Power Plan’s mandates, but in reality the proposed EPA rules give states extensive flexibility to craft strategies that suit their own power systems.

The mainstream media missed it, but beyond NERC’s dismal bullet-point summary, the report actually also offers some quality recommendations for how regional electricity groups can come to understand what needs to be done to meet the EPA rules, and partner with policy makers to address areas of concern. The report was entitled “Potential reliability impacts of the proposed EPA Clean Power Plan,” but John Moore of the Natural Resources Defense Council suggests a more positive title: “Working together, states and grid operators can strengthen reliability and cut carbon pollution.”

Yes, reliability is an important issue as we convert our energy systems to run without fossil fuels. But Seattle-based climate policy wonk KC Golden pointed out in an email that the bigger threat is to the reliability of the United States as a global leader and partner in the run-up to big U.N. climate talks in Paris in 2015. To say nothing of threats to the reliability of food and water supplies in a warming world.

And remember: Most power outages are caused by extreme weather events. So perhaps the biggest threat to the reliability of our electric grid is the increasing number of strong storms that climate change itself causes. Ultimately, the risk of not meeting the Clean Power Plan’s emissions-reduction deadlines are much worse than the risks posed by a speedy grid overhaul.

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No, Obama’s carbon limits won’t mean massive power outages

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Will China Help Barack Obama Save the World?

by TaniaRizzo Posted on November 11, 2014

Mother Jones

Without active leadership from China and the United States—the world’s biggest economies and carbon emitters—there’s little hope of reaching a global deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at next year’s big climate summit in Paris. That’s why President Barack Obama’s visit to Beijing this week for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit is shaping up to be a big deal for the fight against global warming.

Climate change is, of course, just one part of Obama’s complex agenda in China. But policy experts say his one-on-one meetings with Chinese president Xi Jinping on Wednesday could provide much-needed momentum, potentially signaling to the world the extent to which both countries are willing to slash their carbon pollution.

“It is key we get the Chinese on board before Paris,” said Tim Boersma, an energy security analyst with the Brookings Institution. “And whomever comes up with the formula will have produced a brilliant policy move.”

Obama is hoping it’s his team that comes up with the goods. This week’s talks will build on a series of efforts by the two countries to cooperate on climate policy, says Elliot Diringer, the executive vice president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and a former White House senior environmental policy adviser.

“The success of Paris rests very heavily on US and Chinese participation, there’s no question,” he said, adding that Obama’s team “has worked hard to be a consistent partner” to the Chinese. According to Diringer, the hard work has “helped pay off in some renewed trust.”

That trust—basically telling each other “we’re serious, if you are”—seems to be growing. In 2013, US and Chinese leaders leaders signed a bilateral agreement to reduce HFCs, a family of powerful greenhouse gases used in heavy industry. There has also been cooperation on energy security at the highest levels of both governments. The US-China Oil and Gas Industry Forum, sponsored the two countries’ governments, has been meeting for the last 13 years. In 2009, Obama and then-President Hu Jintao announced an agreement to develop China’s immense shale gas resources, conceived in part as a way to help break China’s coal addiction and reduce emissions.

Now, world leaders are hoping to replace the expired Kyoto agreement to curb greenhouse gases with a new treaty that will be negotiated in Paris. Much is unknown about what form the final agreement will take, but a key first step is for individual countries to make declarations about how much they are willing to cut their emissions. The European Union has already come forward with its proposal: Last moth, EU members agreed to slash emissions by 40 percent by 2030, a figure that environmental groups criticized as not being ambitious enough.

Analysts don’t expect any similarly big announcements to come out of Obama’s meetings in Beijing this week. But Diringer anticipates the countries will privately exchange important information on their intended targets and wait until the end of March to publicly announce how much they intend to cut. “I’d expect a bit of show and tell, but no direct negotiation or deal or target levels,” he added.

Even small maneuvers at such a high-profile meeting can send big signals to the international community, especially if Washington and Beijing publicly commit to getting their emissions targets on the table well in advance of the Paris meeting. Simply putting out a statement outlining a timetable would be be a big deal. “A joint declaration by the world’s two largest carbon emitters that they will put ambitious numbers on the table would inject additional momentum heading into Paris,” Diringer said.

As part of its argument for closer climate ties and stronger action, Obama’s team is highlighting an issue the Chinese are already extremely sensitive to: air pollution. Smog routinely blankets Chinese cities, and the environmental crisis has become a political emergency as Chinese officials worry about the potential for escalating social unrest. The issue has already spurred action: China has begun pushing coal-fired power plants out of major cities and is working on plans for a massive, nationwide cap-and-trade program that is slated to start in 2016.

Pushing China to use cleaner energy is a no-brainer for the US administration. Secretary of State John Kerry told a group of business leaders in Beijing ahead of the summit: “This is a win-win-win-win-win, because in every aspect, you gain in health of your population, you gain in environmental protection, long-term responsibility. You gain in security; you gain in energy independence, energy capacity. You gain in health, where you have air that’s cleaner.”

Heavy smog blanketed Liaocheng, a city in Shandong, last month. US officials are highlighting the impact of pollution as a reason for China to take climate action. Imaginechina/ZUMA

Still, some experts worry that this week’s meetings could actually end up undermining the Paris negotiations. Kyle Ash, a climate policy analyst with Greenpeace, warns that any bilateral arrangements reached between China and the United States over the next year might reinforce the idea that the Paris agreement should be voluntary, since the two biggest emitters would have already signed a their own deal. “We hope that the leaders are not going to be using the bilateral relationships to slow progress on multilateral talks,” he said. “It’s a worry because we’re on a tight timeline.”

Regardless of the risks, Diringer says successful climate talks this week will benefit both countries. China wants to be seen as a powerful leader on the world stage, and an engaged global citizen. Meanwhile, “stronger US action has always run up against the claim that China and India aren’t doing anything. An ambitious number from China will make it easier to sell the Obama climate agenda at home.”

And Obama will need all the help he can get. The GOP takeover of the Senate threatens to undermine international confidence in America’s ability to tackle the climate issue at home, a development that could make progress in Paris even harder.

For both the United States and China, says Ash, “success in Paris will be convincing the world that they’re acting at home.”

Continued:  

Will China Help Barack Obama Save the World?

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Obama Just Announced His Full Support to Preserve Net Neutrality

by AntoineFlannery Posted on November 10, 2014

Mother Jones

In a move strongly backing net neutrality regulations, President Barack Obama announced his plan to reclassify the internet as a utility in order to preserve the web’s “basic principles of openness and fairness.”

Net neutrality has been built into the fabric of the Internet since its creation — but it is also a principle that we cannot take for granted. We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas.

In the announcement, Obama urged the FCC to implement four “common-sense steps” to help protect net neutrality, including increased transparency and the prohibition of paid-priority gatekeeping by internet service providers.

The decision, however, remains up to the FCC, which has thus far proposed new changes to allow content providers to pay cable companies for so-called “fast lanes” of service. Net neutrality advocates say the proposed rules are a threat limiting access to the open internet.

“Simply put: No service should be stuck in a ‘slow lane’ because it does not pay a fee,” Obama said in the Monday morning statement. “That kind of gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet’s growth.”

Unsurprisingly, the GOP is not happy with the president’s plan:

Watch Obama’s announcement in full below:

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Obama Just Announced His Full Support to Preserve Net Neutrality

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Republican Agenda Starts to Take Shape

by EmiliaSawtell Posted on November 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Reading between the lines, I gather that Republicans are starting to coalesce around a legislative agenda to celebrate their recent midterm victory:

Ban abortions after 20 weeks.
Wipe out all of Obama’s new and pending EPA regulations.
Repeal Obamacare bit by bit.
Figure out a way to obstruct Loretta Lynch’s nomination as Attorney General.

Oh, there’s still some desultory happy talk about tax reform and fast-track trade authority and other “areas of agreement,” but that seems to be fading out. Poking a stick in President Obama’s eye is very quickly becoming the order of the day.

And no reason not to, I suppose. Republicans won, after all. But they shouldn’t be surprised if Obama continues to plan to poke back.

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Republican Agenda Starts to Take Shape

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How Environmental Groups Are Reacting to Tuesday’s "Miserable Fucking Failure"

by Kris4442xp Posted on November 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in The Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

To say Tuesday was a bad day for environmental groups would be an understatement.

In his opening remarks at a National Press Club event recapping the election results Wednesday afternoon, League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski joked that environmental groups had thought twice about even holding the event. “It wasn’t the best night for us,” he said.

Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, was even more blunt in an interview Wednesday morning. First, he recounted some of the ways 2014 was a success: It elevated the issue of climate change generally and made candidates in a number of key races change the way they talked about the issue. But when it came to electing a slate of pro-environment candidates, which environmental groups spent an unprecedented amount of money on this year, “on that,” Brune said, “there’s been a miserable fucking failure.”

Environmental groups are mourning the loss of several key allies in the Senate, such as North Carolina Democrat Kay Hagan and Colorado Democrat Mark Udall. And they’re looking at a Senate that is going to be a lot more hostile to their agenda: With Republicans in control, the upper chamber will likely seek to undo many of the actions that the Obama administration has taken to address climate change and other environmental threats.

Republican leaders have made it very clear that a top priority is to pass legislation that would force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Environmental groups have urged President Barack Obama to reject the pipeline, and are holding onto the hope that he’d veto any such measure that comes to his desk.

There are other concerns, like the fact that Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a guy who wrote a book saying climate change was a giant hoax, is poised to take control of the Environment and Public Works Committee, the Senate’s most powerful environmental panel.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Thursday that laid out their legislative agenda, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and likely Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) also pledged to take other measures that they said would “remove barriers to job creation and lower energy costs for families”—i.e., block the Obama administration from implementing a variety of environmental regulations. That’s what makes environmental groups most nervous.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has pushed for a number of measures over the last few years that the Senate will now be likely to take up: blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions and mercury and ozone pollution; preventing the Army Corps of Engineers from updating rules on disposal of mine waste; blocking the Department of the Interior from enforcing rules about drilling on public lands; and limiting the department’s environmental review process for oil and gas lease applications.

The 60-vote filibuster in the Senate will probably keep the worst of those measures from passing as stand-alone legislation, and even if that happens, environmental groups are hopeful that Obama will veto them. A bigger concern is that these provisions could get attached as riders to must-pass spending bills. But environmental advocates are hopeful that Obama will block those as well.

“In previous fights, the president has made clear that he will not be cowed by an appropriations strategy with people trying to load up spending bills with provisions the public doesn’t support,” said David Goldston, director of government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a call with reporters Thursday.

Goldston tried to see the bright side of this. A lot of what the House has passed has flown under the radar, at least in terms of news coverage, because it was not going to clear the Senate. Now, Goldson said, “the public will now see what the Republican agenda actually is and what’s at stake here…As the public sees what the extreme anti-environmental agenda is, there’s a backlash.”

The consequences of Tuesday’s Republican wave go beyond Capitol Hill. In fact, a potentially bigger concern for those who favor addressing greenhouse gas emissions may be the results of a number of gubernatorial elections. Once the Environmental Protection Agency finalizes its new limits on emissions from power plants, each state will have to develop its own plan to meet them. And the midterm elections were mostly bad news on that front. Climate change-denying governors were re-elected in Florida, Maine and Wisconsin, and Republican candidates pulled off surprise wins over the enviro-endorsed Democrats in both Maryland and Massachusetts.

“It was a hard night last night for our governors,” said Sierra Club political director Melissa Williams on Wednesday. “It’s something we’re going to have to figure out as all these states move toward creating their emission plans.”

Environmental groups say they’re not turning down the heat on politicians for the next two years—or the cash. Tuesday was “not a referendum on climate,” said Elizabeth Thompson, president of the Environmental Defense Action Fund, the EDF’s political arm. “It was a really, really bad day for Democrats.” As for the more than $85 million environmental groups spent, she maintained that it was still “too low.”

“It’s really expensive to play effectively in politics,” said Thompson. “I think the resources were very well spent. I think we needed more.”

In the meantime, advocates are looking for the silver linings on this election—whatever linings they can get. One that many pointed to was the advent of the “I’m not a scientist” trope that many Republican candidates are using to answer climate questions. That response, environmental groups believe, might show that the party is shifting away from complete denial of climate change.

“It looks like it is now unacceptable for many candidates to say that they are denying climate science outright,” said the Sierra Club’s Brune. “If that’s true, and if that sticks, that’s significant. It could portend a bigger shift in the party.”

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How Environmental Groups Are Reacting to Tuesday’s "Miserable Fucking Failure"

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