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Get ready for a whole new kind of climate change lawsuit

by ElisabeCavenagh Posted on May 19, 2014

adapt or be sued

Get ready for a whole new kind of climate change lawsuit

By

clarkmaxwell

A very wet Chicago-area neighborhood in April 2013. Now Chicago might get soaked in another way.

Leaders of Chicago-area municipalities will have to explain in court why they didn’t do a better job of bracing for the types of floods that climate change is starting to bring down upon us. If they fail to make their case, then taxpayers could be on the hook for flood-related costs that would normally be borne by insurers.

Farmers Insurance recently filed nine class-action lawsuits on behalf of itself, other insurers, and customers in the wake of heavy flooding a year ago. The damaging floods followed the type of climate change–juiced rainstorms that Chicago’s mayoral advisors had concluded would pose growing threats to the city’s unusual flood control system. Reuters explains:

The legal debate may center on whether an uptick in natural disasters is foreseeable or an “act of God.” The cases raise the question of how city governments should manage their budgets before costly emergencies occur.

“We will see more and more cases,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School in New York. “No one is expected to plan for the 500-year storm, but if horrible events are happening with increasing frequency, that may shift the duties.”

Gerrard and other environmental law experts say the suits are the first of their kind.

Lawyers for the localities will argue government immunity protects them from prosecution, said Daniel Jasica of the State’s Attorney’s Office in Lake County, which is named in the Illinois state court suit.

The strategy is a long shot, according to legal experts, but the potential payout is big enough that Farmers is willing to give it a try.

As if climate adaptation weren’t already urgent enough, now insurers are helping to make sure that government leaders get the message.


Source
U.S. insurer class action may signal wave of climate-change suits, Reuters
Climate change: Get ready or get sued, The Washington Post
Who will pay for climate change? Not us, insurer says, Marketplace

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Get ready for a whole new kind of climate change lawsuit

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There’s No Good Reason for Keeping OLC Opinions Confidential

by JuliaBuley Posted on May 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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President Obama’s nomination of David Barron to the First Circuit Court of Appeals has reopened a fight over whether the White House should release Barron’s memo (written when he worked at the Office of Legal Counsel) justifying drone strikes against Anwar al-Awlaki. Time reports:

Under pressure from liberals and libertarians that threatens to sink a judicial nomination, the Obama Administration is moving closer to releasing a classified legal justification for the use of drone strikes against Americans fighting for al-Qaeda, Administration officials tell TIME.

….The U.S. intelligence community and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence want the Administration not to release the memo. Also against release is the Office of Legal Counsel, which serves as the in-house legal expert on executive branch powers and which vigorously guards its opinions.

Greg Sargent comments:

The case for more transparency was spelled out recently by the New York Times, which argued: “the government has the right to secrets about its operations, but not secrets about its legal reasoning.”

If there is a convincing rebuttal to that argument, I haven’t heard it. Indeed, one person who may agree with it is President Obama, given that in his big national security speech last May, he said he’d tasked his administration to “extend oversight of lethal actions outside of war zones that go beyond our reporting to Congress.” What is the rationale for keeping the legal justification secret?

I’d go further. I’ve never really understood the rationale for any OLC opinions to stay confidential. In some sense, yes, there’s a case to be made for executive privilege: this is advice from one of the president’s aides to the president himself, and courts have ruled that presidents have a legitimate interest in keeping internal advice confidential in order to ensure that they get candid judgments. But that’s a helluva stretch in this case because OLC opinions go beyond mere advice. For all practical purposes, they have the force of law, since presidents use OLC opinions as the basis for determining what they can and can’t do.

Should the United States have secret laws? As it happens, the United States does have secret laws. That is, actual congressional statutes that you and I aren’t allowed to read. So this isn’t quite as unprecedented as it seems. Still, that’s a rare occurrence, while OLC opinions are routinely kept secret. Why? If specific bits and pieces need to be redacted, fine. But in a democracy, the legal reasoning justifying the enforcement of our laws should be a matter of public record. We should all know what the laws of the land are and how the executive branch is allowed to act on them. There’s really no compelling argument on the other side.

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There’s No Good Reason for Keeping OLC Opinions Confidential

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Medicaid Expansion Now an Even Better Deal For States

by LuciaUmbagai Posted on April 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Need some more good news on Obamacare? How about some mixed news instead? Here it is:

Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates released last week show that health reform’s Medicaid expansion, which many opponents wrongly claim will cripple state budgets, is an even better deal for states than previously thought….CBO now estimates that the federal government will, on average, pick up more than 95 percent of the total cost of the Medicaid expansion and other health reform-related costs in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) over the next ten years (2015-2024).

The good news is obvious: the Medicaid expansion is an even better deal for states than we thought. The federal government will pick up nearly the entire cost of expansion, and when you account for money that states will save from reduced amounts of indigent care and greater help with mental health costs, the net cost of expansion gets very close to zero.

The mixed nature of this seemingly good news comes from the reason for CBO’s more optimistic budget projection: it’s because they think the program will cover fewer people than they previously projected. There had always been a fear among states that lots of people who were already eligible for Medicaid—but had never bothered applying for it—would hear the Obamacare hoopla and “come out of the woodwork” to claim benefits. Since these folks weren’t technically part of the expansion, states would be on the hook to cover the bulk of their costs.

CBO now believes this fear was overblown. Apparently most people who didn’t bother with Medicaid before Obamacare took effect aren’t going to bother with it now either. That’s good for state budgets, but obviously not so good for all the people who could be getting medical care but aren’t.

For what it’s worth, this is a tradeoff we’re going to see a lot of. Unless the actual cost of medical care comes down, the budget impact of Obamacare is always going to depend on how many people benefit from it. If lots of people sign up, that’s good for public health but costly for taxpayers. If fewer people sign up, then government spending goes down but fewer people receive medical care. There aren’t very many ways around this iron law.

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Medicaid Expansion Now an Even Better Deal For States

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GOP Senate Candidate Looks For Help From Radio Host Who Wants to Jail Gays

by Aigneis Gaskill Posted on April 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mississippi GOP Senate candidate Chris McDaniel appeared on a radio program on Monday hosted by a controversial social conservative activist who has called for gay people to be imprisoned and has said the “the spirit of the Antichrist is at work” in the Obama White House.

McDaniel, a state senator who is challenging incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran for the GOP nomination, has taken heat over the last week for past comments he made on his own radio show, “The Right Side,” which were reported by Mother Jones in January. The comments, recently picked up by the Wall Street Journal, featured a riff on the merits of using taxpayer funds to pay reparations to the descendants of slaves. “If they pass reparations, and my taxes are going up, I ain’t paying taxes,” the tea party favorite said in 2006. His appearance Monday on “Focal Point” with host Bryan Fischer, the issues director for the American Family Association, was an opportunity to clear the record.

“They’re desperate,” McDaniel told Fischer. “And when these politicians and the establishment in Washington feels threatened, they always react with desperation. I was a conservative talk radio host, actually it was a Christian conservative talk radio show for three and a half four years I hosted that. Two hours a day. And this is the best they’ve got? Most of it is way out of context anyway. They were talking about reparations, for example—let me be real clear, I’m against reparations. I don’t know why that’s a bad thing to say. Maybe Sen. Cochran’s for reparations? He should clarify that for us. But I’m against it. And some of the other things, we were just sitting there, no harm was meant.”

In other clips from “The Right Side,” McDaniel alleged that Democrats were plotting to make polygamy legal in all 50 states, and that Hollywood was whitewashing the evils of Islam. He mocked San Francisco “elites” by alleging a correlation between IQ and “gender misidentification,” and blamed an uptick of gun violence in Canada on hip-hop. Shootings, McDaniels claimed, are “a problem of a culture that values prison more than college; a culture that values rap and destruction of community values more than it does poetry; a culture that can’t stand education.”

But Fischer’s show is an unusual choice for a politician looking to launder his reputation as a conservative shock-jock. In March, Fischer told his listeners that while he didn’t think President Obama is the antichrist, “the spirit of the Antichrist is at work” in the Oval Office. He has said that people turn to homosexuality (which he’d like criminalized) when the Devil takes over their brains. He once called for a Sea World Orca whale to be Biblically stoned after it killed its trainer. He said the secretarial job in his office is “reserved for a woman because of the unique things that God has built into women.” Even some Republicans have distanced themselves from Fischer—at the 2011 Values Voters Summit in Washington, D.C., Mitt Romney condemned Fischer’s “poisonous language.”

McDaniel has received the backing of major Republican groups, including the Senate Conservatives Fund and Club for Growth, but still faces an uphill battle. An April survey from Harper Polling gave Cochran a double-digit edge over McDaniel, 52–35.

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GOP Senate Candidate Looks For Help From Radio Host Who Wants to Jail Gays

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Heartbleed is a Sucking Chest Wound in the NSA’s Reputation

by WinnieBachman Posted on April 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, Bloomberg’s Michael Riley reported that the NSA was aware of the Heartbleed bug from nearly the day it was introduced:

The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said….Putting the Heartbleed bug in its arsenal, the NSA was able to obtain passwords and other basic data that are the building blocks of the sophisticated hacking operations at the core of its mission, but at a cost. Millions of ordinary users were left vulnerable to attack from other nations’ intelligence arms and criminal hackers.

Henry Farrell explains just how bad this is here. But later in the day, the NSA denied everything:

“NSA was not aware of the recently identified vulnerability in OpenSSL, the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability, until it was made public in a private-sector cybersecurity report,” NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines told The Post. “Reports that say otherwise are wrong.”

The White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence echoed that statement Friday, saying neither the NSA nor any other part of the U.S. government knew about Heartbleed before April 2014….The denials are unusually forceful for an agency that has historically deployed evasive language when referring to its intelligence programs.

You know, I’m honestly not sure which would be worse. That the NSA knew about this massive bug that threatened havoc for millions of Americans and did nothing about it for two years. Or that the NSA’s vaunted—and lavishly funded—cybersecurity team was completely in the dark about a gaping and highly-exploitable hole in the operational security of the internet for two years. It’s frankly hard to see any way the NSA comes out of this episode looking good.

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Heartbleed is a Sucking Chest Wound in the NSA’s Reputation

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Two French Unions Ban Work Email After 6 pm

by FilomenaBrother Posted on April 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Huh. A couple of white-collar unions in France have signed a new labor agreement:

The legally binding deal, signed by employers’ federations and unions representing almost one million workers in the digital and consultancy sectors, stipulates that employees should be left alone when they are out of the office.

Staff will be ordered to switch off their professional phones and avoid looking at work-related emails or documents on their tablets and computers. Businesses will be required to ensure that workers are under no pressure to check their messages.

The ban takes effect at 6 pm each night. Remarkable.

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Two French Unions Ban Work Email After 6 pm

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Recyclebank Rewards Schools for Innovative Green Initiatives

by AbdulEncarnacio Posted on April 10, 2014

Photo: Recyclebank

Recyclebank‘s eighth annual Green Schools Program is moving along at full force.

In case you aren’t familiar with the program, it awards grant money to schools for unique projects that will green their classroom and community.

Since 2007, the Green Schools program has granted close to $450,000 that helped more than 150 schools across the country bring their sustainable ideas to life.

From now until March 16, Recyclebank members are encouraged to donate points to schools of their choice participating in the program to help them reach their target funding goals.

Members can learn about the schools’ project ideas, donate their points and track each school’s progress online. For every 250 member points donated, Recyclebank awards schools $1 that can be used toward their green project.

Twenty-nine schools are participating in the program this year, with projects ranging from school gardens and recycling programs to upcycled art projects. Each school can request up to $2,500 in grant money for their project.

“The whole reason we feel so strongly about the Green Schools Program is that we want to empower youth to be thinking about the environment, thinking about what they can do–in their school, in their community, in their home–to make an impact,” Karen Bray, vice president of marketing at Recyclebank, told Earth911.

In addition to member donations, Domtar Corp. is supporting the Green Schools Program for the second year in a row and will contribute additional donation dollars as well as a year’s supply of its EarthChoice Office Paper to the school with the most innovative project.

So far, Burton Elementary School in Huntington Woods, Mich. has already achieved its $2,500 goal to fund a lunchroom waste reduction program. Keith Elementary in Cypress, Texas also met its $850 target to construct an on-site greenhouse for environmental education, while Central High School in Philadelphia crossed the finish line for its $2,000 goal to restore patio boxes for urban gardening.

Two other Philadelphia schools, Springside Chestnut Hill Academy and Philadelphia Performing Arts Charter School, are also tantalizingly close their funding goals to construct birdhouses and launch a recycling program. Other leading projects so far include a horticultural project and a school-wide art installation.

For Recyclebank, these projects represent small changes that carry potentially big impacts for the future of our planet.

“A lot of the conversations around being a little greener center around the next generation,” Bray noted “So what better way to start to build that awareness and that passion than going directly to the students and giving back a little bit?”

To view a full list of participating schools, donate to your favorite and track their progress, visit the Green Schools Program online.

earth911

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Recyclebank Rewards Schools for Innovative Green Initiatives

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More Evidence of Paul Ryan’s "Inner Cities" Problem

by KourtneLoughman Posted on March 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the GOP’s vice presidential nominee in 2012, was still defending his recent comments about inner-cities culture this week, when he appeared on Fox News and told host Bill O’Reilly, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” Ryan was responding to criticism he drew after saying earlier this month, during an interview with conservative radio host Bill Bennett, “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work. There is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.” Some accused Ryan of using racist—or racially-loaded—rhetoric. Ryan replied that he had been “inarticulate” but was not “implicating the culture of one community”—that is, African Americans. Yet his interview with Bennett was not the first time that Ryan, a potential 2016 presidential contender, had given the impression that inner city poverty was linked to the supposed cultural deficiencies of minority Americans.

In 2005, Ryan spoke to the Atlas Society, a libertarian outfit devoted to the philosophy of Ayn Rand. “I grew up reading Ayn Rand,” he noted, “and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff.” And he observed that all political battles “usually” come down “to one conflict: individualism vs. collectivism.” Asked to describe the best Randian argument to advance libertarian notions on Capitol Hill and beat back the welfare state, Ryan replied,

I think the victimization argument. I think that the fact that collectivists speak down to people as victims is not only an arrogant thing to do, but it produces poor results. So backing up, this victimization class that collectivists try to produce, and showing the folks you’re trying to convince that this is not only in their best interests—in their worst interests—that it’s not dignifying, and it’s arrogant. That seems to work. We’re trying to recruit a lot of minority legislators to work with us on personal savings and health accounts because, of all things, it’s in their best interest to fight party bosses from the Democrats, who are really insisting on everybody toeing the line… But I always try to show how victimhood has gotten them nothing.

You can listen to Ryan’s full answer here:

In these remarks, Ryan appeared to be associating the “victimization class” with “minority legislators,” and suggesting that this group of people have gained nothing by accepting “victimhood.” It’s a message close to Mitt Romney’s 47-percent remarks and Ryan’s own takers-verus-makers line. But there is a racial cast to the comment.

In a 2012 interview, Ryan contended that inner city crime was a cultural matter. Speaking to a reporter with the ABC television affiliate in Flint, Michigan, Ryan remarked,

the best thing to help prevent violent crime in the inner cities is to bring opportunity in the inner cities, is to help people get out of poverty in the inner cities, is to help teach people good discipline, good character. That is civil society. That’s what charities, and civic groups, and churches do to help one another make sure that they can realize the value in one another.

A key problem, he appeared to be saying, was with the character of poor people within the inner cities. Given the high percentage of African Americans in such areas, this remark, too, could be seen as racially charged.

It’s no shocker when Ryan—or other libertarians—denounce government assistance programs for breeding dependency and preventing recipients from developing a robust work ethic. But Ryan contends all this assistance leads to a cultural problem. In 2012, he told conservative host Star Parker that the best way to undo the harm caused by a “welfare state that lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency” is to bring “cultural antibodies back in.” And by tying this depraved culture to inner-city Americans, Ryan presents an analysis that can be read to include a racial component. What he said on Bennett’s radio show was not out of sync with his usual rhetoric. It was not inarticulate. It was a view he has expressed before and presumably believes fully.

Excerpt from – 

More Evidence of Paul Ryan’s "Inner Cities" Problem

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What Are Your Favorite Comedies?

by RichelleButterf Posted on March 22, 2014

Mother Jones

They say you can tell more about a person by what he laughs at than by what he cries at. With that in mind, here are ten of my favorite film comedies in no particular order. As you can see, I basically like jokefests. There is little trace of sophistication here:

Real Genius
Life of Brian
Office Space
Groundhog Day
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
Airplane!
This is Spinal Tap
Dodgeball
Galaxy Quest
The Big Lebowski

Marian and I both thought this Minute Maid commercial was funny. I remember telling her that it showed the difference in our senses of humor. I liked it for the first part; she liked it for the second part:

Among older, classic comedies, I would probably choose anything starring Cary Grant and let it go at that. What are your favorites?

JUST FOR THE RECORD: I limited my list to one film per actor/director. So only one Monty Python film, one Steve Martin film, one Abrahams/Zucker film, etc. There are no Mel Brooks films because I’m not really much of a Mel Brooks fan.

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What Are Your Favorite Comedies?

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Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Kal Penn Set to Appear at the White House’s First Student Film Festival

by zB7bB4yB6a Posted on February 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, the White House East Room is set to host its inaugural Student Film Festival. The winning entries, which include stop-motion animation and special-effects-peppered fare, were selected from over 2,000 submissions. The White House announced the contest for American students, grades K-12, last November, and put out a call for short films (three-minute max.) that demonstrate how technology is used in schools today and how it might change education in the future.

President Barack Obama is scheduled to make an appearance at the White House Student Film Festival—as are the following celebrities:

Bill Nye (the Science Guy), who has been on a pro-science, anti-creationism/denialism warpath lately. “I fight this fight out of patriotism,” Nye told me last year. “Nye has been instrumental in helping advance some of the president’s key initiatives to make sure we can out-educate, out-innovate, and out-compete the world,” an Obama administration official said.

Kal Penn, the 36-year-old actor who served stints as associate director for the Office of Public Engagement in the Obama administration and delivered this speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. He was at the White House Science Fair last year. He also wants to help sell you on Obamacare.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, another friend of the Obama White House and science luminary.

Conan O’Brien, though unlike the previous three, he is not set to appear in person. He’ll be sending a video address.

The film fest will also include a sneak peek at the Fox series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (the successor to the show that made Carl Sagan famous), which will be hosted by deGrasse Tyson and executive-produced by Family Guy‘s Seth MacFarlane and Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow.

Click here to check out some of the White House honorable mentions in the festival. Here’s one, titled “A Day In The Life of a Tech Nerd”:

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Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Kal Penn Set to Appear at the White House’s First Student Film Festival

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