Tag Archives: ronald-reagan

EPA employees speak out about the agency’s problems under Trump.

Two years ago, a paper came out arguing that America could cheaply power itself on wind, water, and solar energy alone. It was a big deal. Policy makers began relying on the study. A nonprofit launched to make the vision a reality. Celebrities got on board. We named the lead author of the study, Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson, one of our Grist 50.

Now that research is under scrutiny. On Monday, 21 scientists published a paper that pointed out unrealistic assumptions in Jacobson’s analysis. For instance, Jacobson’s analysis relies on the country’s dams releasing water “equivalent to about 100 times the flow of the Mississippi River” to meet electricity demand as solar power ramps down in the evening, one of the critique’s lead authors, Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science, told the New York Times.

Jacobson immediately fired back, calling his critics “nuclear and fossil fuel supporters” and implying the authors had sold out to industry. This is just wrong. These guys aren’t shills.

It’s essentially a family feud, a conflict between people who otherwise share the same goals. Jacobson’s team thinks we can make a clean break from fossil fuels with renewables alone. Those critiquing his study think we need to be weaned off, with the help of nuclear, biofuels, and carbon capture.

Grist intends to take a deeper look at this subject in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

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EPA employees speak out about the agency’s problems under Trump.

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This tiny program keeps our coasts safe. Trump’s gutting it, of course.

The semi-annual meeting of the Sea Grant Association in Washington, D.C., is usually a straightforward affair. It’s typically a time for administrators from around the country to discuss coastal research and hash out the association’s business.

But as members gather to start their meeting on Tuesday, there’s plenty of drama. The Trump administration reportedly plans to slash the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and gut federal funding for NOAA’s Sea Grant program.

This time, Sea Grant’s very existence is at stake.

“My initial reaction [to the news] was horror and disgust,” says Jim Eckman, director at California Sea Grant. “I think we’re facing a much graver crisis that we’re going to have to deal with.”

Though hardly a household name, Sea Grant funds important work, supporting over 3,000 scientists and paying for coastal research through 33 university programs. Sea Grant projects shed light on sea-level rise, ocean acidification, the effect of melting glaciers on kelp beds, and much, much else.

Congress created the Sea Grant program in 1966 in part to improve scientific understanding for the fishing industry. Since then, it has helped pay for projects that encourage commercial fishers to adopt sustainable practices off the coast of Ventura, California. It has backed efforts to improve water quality in the Chesapeake Bay and to forecast the loss of wetlands from hurricanes hitting Louisiana.

Sea Grant directors get federal money and hustle to match it with private and state investment for research. Sometimes they manage to double what the government gives them. But without a federal commitment, the program would be finished, says MaryAnn Wagner, a spokesperson for Washington Sea Grant.

Coming to grips with the reality of climate change is scary enough. Dealing with its assault on coasts without the extensive research to understand the consequences? Downright devastating, administrators say.

In coming days, directors will start mapping out plans to defend the program. “Big fights are a-brewin’,” Eckman says.

The Trump administration reportedly wants to use the cuts to NOAA and its $73 million Sea Grant program to help pay for a $54 billion boost in military spending.

Eckman and other directors doubt Sea Grant’s bipartisan support in Congress will erode so quickly for a program it has supported for decades. They hope Congress will have their backs.

“I have to assume there are some wise people in our Congress who see the flaw” of prioritizing defense over science, says Paul Anderson, who directs Maine Sea Grant. “Mr. Trump is setting up for a political battle.”

Sea Grant’s managers say Trump’s proposal underscores the administration’s disrespect for science. They suspect similar cuts will come to programs at the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Forest Service — at a cost to scientific understanding.

Slashing funding for scientific research would be “a disservice to everybody in the nation and the world,” Anderson says. “It’s like flying blind. Why would we fly blind if we don’t have to?”

Though the cuts seem drastic, it’s not the first time a president has threatened to obliterate the Sea Grant program. In 1981, the Reagan administration proposed pulling federal funding. A task force assembled to defend Sea Grant. An analysis of 57 examples from the program found the $270 million the government spent on Sea Grant during its first 14 years yielded $227 million in economic benefits each year. Congress was ultimately swayed to protect it.

A similar political dance could happen this time. According to Wagner from Washington Sea Grant, every federal dollar spent returns about $8 in economic benefits. A NOAA analysis shows the program helped support $575 million in economic development and more than 20,000 jobs in 2015. “This is a small but mighty program,” Wagner says.

Knowing Sea Grant has survived a challenge before buoys hope that maybe the Trump administration won’t succeed in scrapping it. “It makes me less worried,” says Linda Duguay, a Sea Grant director at the University of Southern California. “But then, I thought the election was going to go in a different direction.”

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This tiny program keeps our coasts safe. Trump’s gutting it, of course.

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My Job Just Got a Lot Easier

Mother Jones

Donald Trump held a remarkable press conference today—about which more later—but first I have to thank him. Here’s an exchange with NBC’s Peter Alexander:

ALEXANDER: You said today that you had the biggest electoral margin since Ronald Reagan, 304, 306 electoral votes. But President Obama had 365….

TRUMP: Well, I’m talking about Republicans.

ALEXANDER: George H.W. Bush, 426 when he won as president. So why should Americans trust you?

TRUMP: Well no, I was given that information. I don’t know, I was just given—we had a very, very big margin.

ALEXANDER: I guess my question is why Americans should trust you when you use information…

TRUMP: Well, I don’t know, I was given that information. I was given—I actually, I’ve seen that information around.

This is great! I mean, I write for a magazine, and let’s face it: fact checking is a pain. I know my fellow writers will back me up here. I suppose it’s good for readers, who want accurate information, but it’s a huge time sink for us content creators. Next time, my conversation will go like this:

FACT CHECKER: You say in your article that hippos are the largest mammals. Are you sure?

ME: I don’t know, I was given that information. They’re really big.

FACT CHECKER: And mice are the smallest?

ME: I’ve seen that information around.

This is going to make my job a lot easier. Thanks, Mr. President!

Continued:

My Job Just Got a Lot Easier

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Big-name Republicans are taking a carbon-tax plan to the White House.

The Seattle City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to withdraw $3 billion from the bank, in part because it is funding the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the city’s mayor said he would sign the measure.

The vote delivered a win for pipeline foes, albeit on a bleak day for the #NoDAPL movement. Earlier in the day, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced that it will allow construction of the pipeline’s final leg and forgo an environmental impact statement.

Before the vote, many Native speakers took the floor in support of divestment, including members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Tsimshian First Nation, and Muckleshoot Indian Tribe.

Seattle will withdraw its $3 billion when the city’s current contract with Wells Fargo expires in 2018. Meanwhile, council members will seek out a more socially responsible bank. Unfortunately, the pickings are somewhat slim, as Bank of America, Chase, CitiBank, ING, and a dozen other banks have all invested in the pipeline.

While $3 billion is just a small sliver of Wells Fargo’s annual deposit collection of $1.3 trillion, the council hopes its vote will send a message to other banks. Activism like this has worked before — in November, Norway’s largest bank sold all of its assets connected to Dakota Access. With any luck, more will follow.

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Big-name Republicans are taking a carbon-tax plan to the White House.

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Can Donald Trump Get Away With Proposing to Destroy the US Government?

Mother Jones

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Today the Wall Street Journal asks a vital question:

Donald Trump’s Plans Don’t Add Up. Do Voters Care?

Oh please. Bernie Sanders’ plans don’t add up and his followers couldn’t care less. Paul Ryan’s plans don’t add up. Republicans don’t care. Mitt Romney’s plans didn’t add up. No one cared. John McCain’s plans didn’t add up. No one cared. George Bush’s plans didn’t add up. No one cared. Ronald Reagan’s plans didn’t add up. No one cared.

Now, I admit that Trump is performing a destruction test on this theory. His tax plan blows a $9.5 trillion hole in the deficit and he plans to increase spending on infrastructure and national defense and he promises not to touch Medicare or Social Security. He claims he’ll make up for this by cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and I suppose one could view this as the ultimate test of just how much waste, fraud, and abuse the public thinks the American government is responsible for. Unfortunately, the historical evidence probably doesn’t favor a rational answer.

So what does Trump’s budget look like? Someone must care, after all. At no small effort, I have created the colorful chart below. I used the CBO’s projections as my baseline. Trump says he wants to balance the budget, so that puts a firm cap on overall spending. He says he wants to spend more on defense, so I added a modest $20 billion per year to the baseline projection. He says he won’t touch Social Security or Medicare, so I left those at their baseline projections. The revenue number comes from TPC’s analysis of Trump’s tax plan. Ditto for the interest number. Trump says he wants to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure, so I bumped up the current infrastructure budget by $100 billion and carried it through each year.

As you can see, by the end of eight years, not only are we spending zero dollars on nearly every government program, but infrastructure spending is also wiped out and we can make only a fraction of our interest payments:

So yeah, you could say this doesn’t add up. Or you could say it’s more of Trump’s usual buffoonery. Or that Donald Trump couldn’t care less about the federal budget. So why doesn’t this get more attention? Let’s take a series of guesses:

Most people find numbers confusing and boring. One trillion, ten trillion, whatever.
The press shies away from focusing on stuff like this because their readers find it confusing and boring and don’t read it.
Also because they routinely give Republicans a pass on this stuff. They figure it’s mostly just routine pandering, and all politicians do it.
In any case, the public takes tax and budget plans mostly as statements of values, not as things that will ever actually happen.

So there you have it. Trump is testing whether he can get away with literally proposing a tax and budget plan that would bankrupt the country and destroy nearly the entire federal government within just a few years. What do you think?

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Can Donald Trump Get Away With Proposing to Destroy the US Government?

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12 Great Government GIFs

Mother Jones

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Spend enough time browsing government websites and you’re sure to come across a GIF*. Not the bite-sized pop-culture kind, but low-res relics of the days when a GIF was a way to spice up a Web 1.0 site without slowing down Netscape users’ dial-up connections. Here are a dozen taxpayer-funded GIFs you may not be able to stop looking at:

Stinky toxic sludge

EPA

Ronald Reagan meets a turkey

National Archives

This winking, whisker-wagging feline

CDC

This adorably suicidal moon meteor

NASA

This rabid raccoon

CDC

The touch-typing Data Ferrett!

US Census (sadly now defunct)

The Wright Flier

NASA

These menacingly mesmerizing neuroreceptors

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

This low-res lava lamp

NIH

Small man with small change

EPA

This guy riding a space probe

NASA

Citizens demanding more GIFs!

EPA

*It’s pronounced with a hard G, like government.

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12 Great Government GIFs

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These Charts Show How Ronald Reagan Actually Expanded the Federal Government

Mother Jones

One of the many, many problems Jeb Bush faces in his quest for the Oval Office is his break from Republican orthodoxy on president Ronald Reagan’s legacy. In 2012, Bush told a group of reporters that, in today’s GOP, Reagan “would be criticized for doing the things that he did”— namely, working with Democrats to pass legislation. He added that Reagan would struggle to secure the GOP nomination today.

Bush was lambasted by fellow conservatives for his comments, but he had a point: If you judge him by the uncompromising small government standards of today’s GOP, Reagan was a disaster. Here are a few charts that show why.

Under Reagan, the national debt almost tripled, from $907 billion in 1980 to $2.6 trillion in 1988:

Reagan ended his 1988 farewell speech with the memorable line, “man is not free unless government is limited.” The line is still a rallying cry for the right wing, but the speech came at the end of a long period of government expansion. Under Reagan, the federal workforce increased by about 324,000 to almost 5.3 million people. (The new hires weren’t just soldiers to fight the communists, either: uniformed military personnel only accounted for 26 percent of the increase.) In 2012, the federal government employed almost a million fewer people than it did in the last year of Reagan’s presidency.

Instead of praising Reagan’s small government philosophy, maybe Republicans should look to Bill Clinton’s action for guidance. By the end of Clinton’s second terms, the federal workforce was at its smallest size in decades.

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These Charts Show How Ronald Reagan Actually Expanded the Federal Government

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U.S. sailors say Fukushima radiation made them sick

U.S. sailors say Fukushima radiation made them sick

U.S. Navy

The USS Ronald Reagan.

After Japan was pummeled by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011, the U.S. Navy sent the USS Ronald Reagan to deliver aid. The ship unwittingly sailed straight into a plume of radioactive pollution from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was melting down. Now at least 71 of those sailors are seriously ill.

The sailors are suing the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, owner and operator of the plant, alleging that it downplayed the dangers of the radioactivity — radioactivity they say has left them riddled with cancers, thyroid problems, and other ailments. From Environment News Service:

The sailors’ lawsuit alleges that TEPCO officials knew how serious the radiation leak was and knew that American troops were heading to Japan to offer relief, but did nothing to warn them of what they were sailing into. …

According to the lawsuit, radiation experts who assisted in the decontamination say the USS Ronald Reagan sailed straight into a plume of radioactivity, which entered the ship’s water supply. Crew members washed, brushed their teeth and drank potentially contaminated water.

The lawsuit claims active duty and former sailors are suffering from cancer, blindness, impotence, and fatigue as a result of the radiation exposure. They are suing TEPCO for unspecified damages.

Meanwhile, a former Fukushima cleanup worker is alleging that cost-cutting measures employed after the meltdown led to leaks of radioactive water — measures such as the use of duct tape to cover metal cracks, and the use of just four bolts in places where there should have been eight. What is this – California?


Source
U.S. Sailors Sue Japanese Nuclear Plant Owner TEPCO, Environment News Service
More than 70 Radiation-Stricken U.S. Sailors Sue Fukushima Plant Operator, AllGov

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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U.S. sailors say Fukushima radiation made them sick

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