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How are Republicans dealing with Green New Deal enthusiasm? As well as you’d expect.

by MeriditFurphy Posted on February 11, 2019

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This post has been updated to include Senator Klobuchar’s endorsement of the Green New Deal.

Congressional Republicans don’t have a plan to tackle climate change — an issue voters across the political spectrum now agree needs to be addressed — but it only took a weekend for the GOP to come up with a response to the Green New Deal proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey.

Surprise! The right is not a fan of the proposal, which calls for rapid decarbonization of the economy alongside other agenda items like universal healthcare, housing, and a federal jobs guarantee. Already, more than 15 percent of the House — 68 members — have signed on as sponsors of the deal. Supporters include five high-profile presidential contenders, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, and, most recently, Amy Klobuchar.

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Republicans, banking on the hope that backing such an ambitious proposal will come back to bite Democrats during the presidential election next year, unleashed a torrent of backhanded encouragement.

“It would be great for the so-called ‘Carbon Footprint’ to permanently eliminate all Planes, Cars, Cows, Oil, Gas & the Military – even if no other country would do the same. Brilliant!,” President Trump tweeted on Saturday. Eliminating airplanes and oil and gas would be great for our carbon footprint, but the resolution doesn’t actually call for an end to fossil fuels.

“I would like them to push it as far as they can. I’d like to see it on the floor. I’d like to see them actually have to vote on it,” Idaho Republican Representative Mike Simpson told Politico, adding, “It’s crazy. It’s loony.” South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham tweeted on Friday, “Let’s vote on the Green New Deal!”

Other Republicans took a more straightforward approach. Wyoming Republican and Environment Chair John Barrasso called the deal a “socialist manifesto.” “I think everyone on our side would say that the Green New Deal is a little bit much,” Michigan Representative Fred Upton told journalists.

Clearly, Republicans are a bit skeptical of the goals outlined in AOC and Markey’s resolution. But I think the Democrats pushing the deal would agree with Senator Graham: “Let’s vote on the Green New Deal!”

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How are Republicans dealing with Green New Deal enthusiasm? As well as you’d expect.

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Western voters care more about climate than ‘energy dominance’

by georgettae58 Posted on February 10, 2019

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This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

According to a recent poll, voters across the West are substantially more worried about climate change now than they were just two years ago. What’s more, a majority identify as “conservationists.” These attitudes are at odds with the priorities of President Donald Trump’s administration, which have included aggressively cutting environmental regulations while shrinking national monuments and encouraging fossil fuel production on public lands.

These findings come from Colorado College’s annual Conservation in the West poll, which surveys residents in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming on issues of climate, energy, and public lands. This year, a majority of the approximately 400 respondents in each state rated climate change a serious problem, and every state saw an increase in climate concern.

These fears may be driven by climate change’s growing impacts in the West, such as drought and fire. Nearly 70 percent of poll respondents said that wildfires were more of a problem today than ten years ago. Climate change is playing an increasing role in the West’s lengthening fire season and intensifying blazes, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Indeed, the survey found that climate impacts have started to surpass more traditional political preoccupations, like the economy: Respondents rated low river and stream levels, water quality, and insufficient water supplies of greater concern than wages and unemployment.

Approximately two thirds of respondents also prioritized environmental protections and public lands access for recreation, compared to 24 percent who support Trump’s “energy dominance” policy of ramping up energy production on federally regulated land. Almost every state polled had at least a 30 percent margin in favor of conservation, including states that tend to vote red in statewide elections, including Arizona, Idaho, and Utah. Only Wyoming stood apart, with just an 8 percent gap between those who emphasize public lands and those who support increased energy production. In all, a significant bipartisan majority — almost 90 percent of respondents — rated the outdoor recreation economy as important to their state, while 70 percent called themselves “outdoor recreation enthusiasts.”

The poll has habitually found bipartisan support for the outdoor recreation industry and land access, said Corina McKendry, director of the State of the Rockies Project and an associate professor of political science at Colorado College. But “the rejection of the current administration’s priorities is particularly intense here,” she said in a press release.

Whether that influences upcoming elections — such as 2020 re-election bids by Trump and by the politically vulnerable Colorado Senator Cory Gardner, a Republican who will face questions about his ties to the administration and support of fossil fuel industries — is unclear. Public opinion polls often find widespread concern regarding climate change and support for policies to address the crisis. But these issues rarely swing elections, where foes of climate policies often highlight the economic and social costs of increased environmental regulations. In Colorado, where poll respondents overwhelmingly claimed to prefer environmental protection over energy production, voters roundly rejected a ballot measure in 2018 to limit hydraulic fracturing, following an industry-backed publicity campaign against the measure.

“There is strong evidence that Americans support environmental protection and conservation efforts and that they have substantial concerns about environmental issues such as climate change,” said Christopher Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, who has worked on other environmental polling projects.“However, their concerns are often less intense than those regarding other issues.” Midterm exit polls showed healthcare, immigration, the economy, and gun control as the top national issues for voters in 2018.

According to Borick, achieving robust climate policy requires that the environment compete with, and even surmount, these other political concerns. How soon this happens is an open question, even as Westerners increasingly worry about rising temperatures, drying streams, and hotter fires.

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Western voters care more about climate than ‘energy dominance’

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Trump’s EPA isn’t so tough on law-breaking polluters

by EnriqueBarrier Posted on January 1, 2019

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This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Under the Trump administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is more likely to give polluters a pass when they violate laws intended to keep the air healthy and water clean, according to recent reporting by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a watchdog group.

By analyzing public data and interviewing past and current EPA employees, EDGI documented notable declines in agency law enforcement this year, particularly in EPA Region 8, which includes Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, and 27 Indigenous nations. According to an internal EPA report, by mid-year, Region 8 had opened 53 percent fewer enforcement cases in 2018 than in 2017. And it concluded only 53 civil cases in 2018, less than half the number in any year since at least 2006. Nationally, EDGI found a 38 percent drop in the number of orders requiring polluters to comply with the law, and a 50 percent drop in the number of fines.

EDGI’s analyses are based on provisional numbers, which the EPA routinely cleans up at the end of each year, so the exact figures could change when the agency’s annual enforcement report is released. Still, EDGI expects the general trend to hold.

“It’s another iteration of EPA’s industry-friendly approach,” said EDGI member Marianne Sullivan, a public health expert at William Paterson University. “It says we’re prioritizing industry’s needs and desires over the health of our environment and the health of our communities.”

In the short term, dialing back enforcement could be a particularly effective way to relieve industry of the burdens of environmental protections. President Trump’s EPA appointees have tried to formally roll back regulations, such as the Clean Power Plan and a rule safeguarding water from toxic coal ash. But it’s a slow and public process that invites lawsuits. Simply declining to enforce the law, however, can subtly accomplish the same thing, because it happens largely out of public view, and EPA administrators have wide discretion over it.

EPA officials deny ignoring violations of the law. “There has been no retreat from working with states, communities, and regulated entities to ensure compliance with our environmental laws,” spokesperson Maggie Sauerhage wrote in an email. “Focusing only on the number of federal lawsuits filed or the amount of penalties collected fails to capture the full range of compliance tools we use.”

Still, the agency acknowledges a shift in focus from “enforcement” to “compliance.” That means it’s likely to work less as a cop than an adviser with the companies it regulates, an approach critics say could incentivize companies to cut corners.

“Focusing on compliance instead of enforcement is a way of saying, ‘We might make people get back into compliance, but we’re resistant to the idea of punishment,’” explained David Janik, an attorney who managed Region 8’s legal enforcement program until 2011. But punishment helps you achieve compliance, Janik added. It deters polluters from spoiling the air and water in the first place, just as traffic tickets make drivers think twice about speeding. “If I go 90 and I get caught, I’m paying $200 for punishment,” he said. “If one chemical company has a big case and they pay $40 million to settle it, other companies will say, ‘Maybe I should hire another guy to make sure we don’t slip into noncompliance.’”

In some cases, lackluster enforcement since Trump took office appears to have been a boon to corporate pocketbooks, while the environmental benefits remain murky. Consider the difference in how a series of oil and gas cases were handled under President Barack Obama.

In 2015, the EPA and the state of Colorado jointly entered into a landmark settlement agreement with Noble Energy covering thousands of gas storage tanks that were leaking volatile organic compounds. VOCs are part of the toxic soup that contributes to smog levels on Colorado’s Front Range that exceed federal limits, exacerbating asthma and other respiratory diseases.

The settlement required Noble to pay a nearly $5 million fine, spend $60 million to reduce VOC emissions, and report its progress to the public. Two parallel cases resulted in smaller, but still substantial costs to companies in Colorado and North Dakota.

But under [former] EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, three similar cases came with remarkably cushier terms, according to the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project. In all three, the EPA declined to assess fines for the violations at all. And it’s unclear what, if anything, the companies were required to do to fix the problems. The companies were all Oklahoma-based, raising questions of favoritism from Pruitt, a pro-oil-and-gas Oklahoman.

The Noble case was part of an Obama-era National Enforcement Initiatives program focused on air pollution from oil and gas drilling. National initiatives historically targeted problems particular to certain industries and they’re where big enforcement cases were often made. But in August, Susan Bodine, EPA’s current head of enforcement, announced that the program was being renamed “National Compliance Initiatives,” and that the agency would discontinue the campaign on oil and gas in 2019, a move industry pushed for.

“It’s really about who’s going to benefit,” Sullivan said. “If industry doesn’t have to capture as much pollution, that may be good for their bottom line. But it puts the burden on the public. You can’t pollute for free. Either industry pays to capture it, or people pay with their health.”

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Trump’s EPA isn’t so tough on law-breaking polluters

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Trump administration rolls back protections for migratory birds, drawing bipartisan condemnation

by ChetMcKelvy6778 Posted on January 27, 2018

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks have sparked a lot of outrage. But one recent action by the Interior Department drew unprecedented protest from a bipartisan group of top officials who go all the way back to the Nixon administration: a new legal opinion that attempts to legalize the unintentional killing of most migratory birds.

Under the new interpretation, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act forbids only intentional killing — such as hunting or killing birds to get their feathers — without a permit. The administration will no longer apply the act to industries that inadvertently kill a lot of birds through oil drilling, wind power, and communications towers. Critics fear that these industries might now end the bird-friendly practices that save large numbers of birds.

An American coot on an oil-covered evaporation pond at an oilfield wastewater disposal facility. An estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 migratory birds die each year in oilfield wastewater pits.

A letter sent by 17 former wildlife officials on Jan. 10 urges Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to suspend the “ill-conceived” opinion, saying it makes it nearly impossible to enforce a 100-year-old law protecting migratory birds. The former officials’ message is clear: The Trump team’s assault on environmental regulations is not just the normal pendulum swing between Democratic and Republican administrations. Rather, Trump’s rollbacks are attacking fundamental principles of conservation supported by both Republican and Democratic administrations for many decades.

The 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act makes it illegal to kill birds without permission, though hunters can obtain permits. For decades, the threat of prosecution gave industries that unintentionally kill a lot of birds an incentive to collaborate with the federal government on minimizing bird deaths. For instance, hundreds of thousands of birds die each year from getting poisoned or trapped in the toxic muck of drilling companies’ wastewater pits. To remedy this, oil and gas companies can store the waste in closed tanks or put nets over their pits to limit the number of deaths.

In other industries, fishing boats that drag long lines with baited hooks accidentally drown albatross, petrel and other seabirds. After working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, fishing companies started attaching weights to their lines so they descend more quickly into the water. At communications towers, neotropical songbirds, especially warblers, are attracted to the steady red lights that warn pilots, and as a result, millions are killed each year. So the industry, working with several government agencies, figured out that flashing lights — which don’t attract birds — are just as good at preventing airplane collisions. It’s a cheap fix, because the towers already have strobe lights; they just have to turn off the steady ones.

Companies that refused to cooperate risked criminal prosecution. Duke Energy and PacifiCorp Energy were both prosecuted during the Obama administration for failing to take steps to protect birds at their Wyoming wind farms, despite the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s efforts to get them to do so.

Under the Trump administration’s new interpretation, however, companies would no longer be prosecuted for failing to protect birds. The new opinion was written by Interior’s principal deputy solicitor, Daniel Jorjani, a Trump appointee who came to Interior from Freedom Partners, a political organization largely funded by the Koch brothers, fossil-fuel billionaires with an anti-regulatory agenda who are major players in elections around the country. Freedom Partners’ board of directors is made up of Koch executives.

The opinion was issued just before Christmas, along with other anti-environmental actions. Brad Bortner, who was Fish and Wildlife’s chief of migratory bird management until the end of December, says he and his staff were not consulted or even given a heads-up. Paul Schmidt, a top official in the migratory bird program under both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, became the “spark plug” for the opposition to the new policy. He contacted his counterparts in other administrations as well as higher-ranking officials who served presidents from both parties. “One hundred percent all agreed immediately that was a bad interpretation,” Schmidt says. They waited for Bortner’s retirement to be official so he could sign their protest letter, and then they sent it to Zinke.

All but one of the agency’s directors since 1973 signed the protest, as did top Interior officials from the administrations of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon. “People were aghast at this announcement,” says Dan Ashe, former president Barack Obama’s Fish and Wildlife Service director. “It’s a complete giveaway, principally to the energy industry, but to industry writ large, at the expense of a resource that is precious and vulnerable.”

“This legal opinion is contrary to the long-standing interpretation by every administration (Republican and Democrat) since at least the 1970s, who held that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act strictly prohibits the unregulated killing of birds,” the letter states.

The former officials’ protest underscores that the resistance to the Trump administration’s assault on environmental protections is broadening. Former Republican Environmental Protection Agency administrators already had joined the chorus of Democrats, environmental groups, and hunting and fishing groups decrying the Trump administration’s pro-industry agenda. But the Migratory Bird Treaty Act letter marked the first time such a broad group of former Interior Department officials had signed on to such a protest. Zinke has not yet responded.

Lynn Scarlett, who was deputy Interior secretary and acting Interior secretary under George W. Bush, says the old interpretation of the law protected birds without being too onerous for industries. Companies were prosecuted only after ignoring repeated warnings. “The act and the way it has been implemented for many years has made people come to the table and think about important actions to protect birds,” says Scarlett, now managing director of The Nature Conservancy. “Narrowing that is going to adversely affect birds and diminish the motivation for creative conservation partnerships.”

Some former officials who signed the letter say Interior’s new legal opinion defies the clear wording of the act, which states: “It shall be unlawful to hunt, take, capture, kill … by any means whatever … at any time or in any manner, any migratory bird.”

But the Trump administration argues that the act was implemented in an overly aggressive or threatening way. “Interpreting the (act) to apply to incidental or accidental actions hangs the sword of Damocles over a host of otherwise lawful and productive actions, threatening up to six months in jail and a $15,000 penalty for each and every bird injured or killed,” Jorjani wrote. The Trump administration has told reporters it will take several months to develop guidelines on how the legal opinion impacts the way field staff work.

While campaigning for the presidency, Trump blasted the Obama administration’s use of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act against the oil industry as “totalitarian tactics.” “The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against seven North Dakota oil companies for the deaths of 28 birds while the administration fast-tracked wind projects that kill more than 1 million birds a year,” Trump said in May 2016, calling the case an example of “government misconduct.”

National Renewable Energy Lab researchers release a bald eagle from a lift during research to develop a radar and visual systems that prevent bird strikes with wind turbines.

He was echoing Harold Hamm, chairman, chief executive officer, and founder of Continental Resources Inc., who fought the prosecution for bird deaths in oil fields in North Dakota, calling it “patently wrong” because his drilling operation didn’t intentionally kill birds. A federal judge agreed with him and threw out the case.

Federal courts have been split over whether the act applies when birds are killed as a result of otherwise legal activities. Last year, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican, sponsored a provision of the House energy bill that would amend the act so it no longer applies when birds are accidentally or incidentally killed. Conservationists worry that if passed, her provision could permanently enshrine the Trump administration’s new policy with disastrous consequences for birds. The bill could get a vote early this year in the House, but a Senate bill has yet to emerge.

Bob Dreher, a vice president of Defenders of Wildlife, says his conservation group will look for ways to block the new interpretation, but it won’t be easy. Legal opinions can have enormous impact on how the government functions but cannot be challenged in court the way regulations can be. Ashe says this reality inspired the former officials to sign their protest letter: “The public has no opportunity to comment, no opportunity to challenge the decision. They get no day in court.”

Some companies say they will continue to work with Fish and Wildlife to protect birds despite the Trump administration’s new policy. “We don’t want to be killing birds,” says Sherry Liguori, environmental manager of Rocky Mountain Power, the division of PacifiCorps that operates in Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. PacifiCorps, one of the West’s leading power companies, retrofits 10,000 utility poles a year to make them less likely to electrocute birds, according to Liguori. Costs range from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars. On average the company spends $1,000 to $2,000 per pole, she says. “I can’t speak for other companies, but I know for Rocky Mountain Power, we’re looking at the long term,” Liguori says. “We don’t see a reason not to do this. We’ve found that it’s effective. It’s a win-win for birds. It’s a win-win for the company and customers.”

Still, the legal opinion is likely to limit much of the cooperation companies have provided in the past. “A lot of Americans don’t know anything about the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, but they love birds,” says Dreher, former acting assistant attorney general for the environment and natural resources division of the Justice Department and former associate director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. “This administration is selling out birds for industry — and dirty industry at that.”

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Trump administration rolls back protections for migratory birds, drawing bipartisan condemnation

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The DNC Chair Race Is Over. Now Comes the Real Battle.

by UlrikeSteffen Posted on February 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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And to think, that was the easy part. Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez was elected as chair of the Democratic National Committee on Saturday, edging out Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison in the first competitive election for the job in decades. The 55-year-old Perez, the first Latino chair of the party, will now inherit the most thankless job in politics—rebuilding a party that is at its lowest point since the 1920s.

The race was often miscast as a proxy fight between supporters of Bernie Sanders and supporters of Hillary Clinton, a framing that was unfair to both Ellison and Perez, dynamic and progressive political operatives running for a job often reserved for staid political figures. In the end, Perez’s win was not a rejection of Ellison’s vision of the party; in key ways, his campaign was an affirmation of it.

Party chair is a position typically of interest only to political junkies. But with organizers still amped up from the presidential election, the race had the feel and structure of a competitive primary, with a half-dozen candidate forums across the country and an intensive push from rank-and-file voters that recalled previous courting of superdelegates. “I’ve been lobbied consistently by phone, by email, by Facebook, by Twitter for the last month,” said Melvin Poindexter, a DNC member from Massachusetts who was supporting Ellison.

Ellison, for his part, tried to tamp down the barrage of phone calls on his behalf, which one state party chair unfavorably described as “anarchy.” But aggressive lobbying proved critical. Kerman Maddox, a DNC member from California, explained that he’d chosen Perez in part because “Tom called me more than any of the other Democratic candidates”—a sentiment echoed by other voting members.

After the results were announced, a dozen Ellison supporters—including the congressman’s brother, Eric—chanted “party for the people, not big money” from the back of the Atlanta ballroom, with a few cries of “bullshit!” thrown in. While the formal final vote, sealed on the second ballot, was 235 to 200, in a show of unity, Perez was subsequently elected by acclamation. In his first move as chair, he announced that Ellison had agreed to serve as his deputy chair.

“If you’re wearing a ‘Keith’ t-shirt—or any t-shirt—I am asking you to give everything you’ve got to support chairman Perez,” Ellison told the room. Afterward, they switched campaign pins in a show of solidarity.

In the run up to the vote, some Ellison backers argued that there was no real case for a Perez chairmanship—that he was running as a check on Sanders’ influence and little more. But DNC members I spoke with seemed to understand Perez’s pitch quite clearly: he was a turnaround artist who had retooled complex bureaucracies toward progressive ends, first at the Maryland Department of Labor, then at the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, and finally as President Barack Obama’s Labor Secretary. If progressives had forgotten what they liked about Perez, they needed to look no farther than the conservative Breitbart News, which once heralded Perez “the most radical cabinet secretary since Henry Wallace,” the New Dealer who eventually bolted the Democrats to mount a third party challenge in 1948.

The fights that Perez has waged over the course of his career track closely with those Ellison cut his teeth on in Minneapolis—housing discrimination, voter suppression, and living wages. Neo-liberal stooges still have a place in the Democratic party. But the DNC chair isn’t one of them.

Beyond their shared political priorities, Perez even offered a similar diagnosis as Ellison. The party had become top-heavy, focusing too much on the presidential race, and had neglected to compete on a county-by-county level. He advocated something resembling a restoration of former chair Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy, and proposed to spend more time knocking on doors in off-year elections. There was no talk of compromising with President Donald Trump; Perez dubbed him “the worst president in the history of the United States.”

Ellison sought to win the same way he always has, through a mastery of coalition politics. His backers included American Federation of Teachers, the AFL-CIO, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Rep. John Lewis, and Sanders—many of whom found themselves on opposing sides during the president primary. The threat by OJ Simpson counsel and Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz< to leave the party if Ellison won did not appear to have a substantial effect on voters. (Maybe they were waiting to hear from F. Lee Bailey.) He ran not as Sanders 2.0, but as a restoration of an even older form of Democratic progressivism, one evoked by the spruce-green colors on his t-shirts and tote bags—the campaign colors of his political idol, the late Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone.

Just a few hours before the election, there was an indication Ellison might come up short when the committee members voted on a resolution that would reinstate the party’s ban on corporate donations. The ban, which was first implemented by president-elect Barack Obama in 2008, had been dropped last year by the previous party chair, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. Ellison had supported the reinstatement of the ban and envisioned a party’s fundraising model in the mold of Sanders’ small-dollar campaign. Perez never committed to reinstating the contribution ban.

The resolution brought on the most contentious 10 minutes of a weekend that, up until then, had been a love-fest. Bob Mulholland of California, the leading critic of the ban, chided critics as naive. He cited corporate opposition to ousted North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory as proof that corporations aren’t all evil. Supporters of the ban, some of the new party leaders whom had been recently elected to their posts with the backing of Sanders’s supporters, implicitly tied the resolution to the senator’s one-time candidacy, warning that the party risked alienating voters who cared about money in politics. Jessica Sell Chambers, a Sanders backer and the newly minted national committeewoman from Wyoming, offered a succinct appraisal: “I belong to the party of the people and the last time I checked corporations aren’t people.”

Inside the Westin, where Democrats began assembling on Thursday, the notion that the chair candidates were engaged in a rancorous, existential fight seemed far-fetched. Perez, who was hoarse from two days of lobbying as he made a last-minute push Friday night, had taken to calling the event “Unity Saturday.” Even the most die-hard Ellison supporters were optimistic that the party would be in good hands win or lose. Each of the leading candidates devoted portions of their stump speech to a call for unity no matter who won.

“I really just want to like put at least four of them together,” said Dolly Strazar from Hawaii, a Sanders supporter who ended up backing Perez. Another voting member, Aleita Huguenin of California, predicted that the fight would quickly simmer down. “I’ve been through too many of them,” she said. “People are a little disappointed, they have two dinners, and will be back together.”

In reality, the contentious fight over the future of the party never really described the DNC race—but there is such a battle playing out across the country. Already, Sanders supporters, both organically and with the support of the Senator’s non-profit Our Revolution, have begun targeting the party’s apparatus at state, county, and local levels. They are poised to take over the California Democratic party in May, after winning a majority of delegates to the state convention in January. The Sanders wing is ascendant in Nebraska and Wyoming, and setting its sights on Florida and Michigan. Beyond party positions, re-energized Sanders supporters are talking openly about primary challenges to Democratic officeholders who support Donald Trump’s policies.

Less than a year after only 39 of 447 DNC members endorsed Sanders’ presidential campaign, his chosen candidate came about 15 votes short of taking over the whole thing. The numbers reflect Sanders’ forces growing strength in the party, a gradual upheaval that may only be sped along by Perez’s victory. DNC members from Wyoming—where the Vermont senator notched a huge caucus victory but due to party rules emerged with few delegates—who are not on board are feeling the heat. When Bruce Palmer, the party’s vice chair, told me he was supporting Tom Perez, he conceded that it may be to his own detriment. After all, he’s got an election next month.

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The DNC Chair Race Is Over. Now Comes the Real Battle.

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Watch Betsy DeVos Say She’d Allow Guns In Schools "To Protect From Potential Grizzlies”

by Lucia67Nhv Posted on January 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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At Tuesday’s confirmation hearing, longtime gun control proponent Sen. Chris Murphy asked Michigan billionaire and Donald Trump’s pick for education secretary Betsy DeVos outright whether guns had any place around schools.

“That’s best left to locales and states to decide,” DeVos responded. When pressed further by Murphy, who represented the district covering Newtown where the nation’s deadliest school shooting took place more than four years ago, DeVos looped back to a question asked earlier by Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming about an elementary school in his state. “I would imagine that there’s probably a gun at the school to protect from potential grizzlies,” DeVos noted.

Watch the exchange below.

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Watch Betsy DeVos Say She’d Allow Guns In Schools "To Protect From Potential Grizzlies”

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Why One Scientist Went Public With Her Sexual Harassment Story

by JackMurrell231 Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the past few years, sexual harassment in the sciences has become an increasingly visible problem. Disturbing allegations about the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Park Service, and the former head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have all made headlines. So have a number of cases involving prominent university professors.

On the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Kishore Hari talks to Sarah Ballard, an accomplished exoplanet researcher who was also a complainant in one of the most high-profile recent harassment controversies. Last year, Buzzfeed reported that Geoff Marcy, a renowned astronomer at the University of California-Berkeley, had faced sexual harassment accusations. A report produced by the university found that Marcy had “violated the relevant UC sexual harassment policies”; it cited allegations that he had inappropriately touched students. Initially, Marcy was placed on probation; he was instructed by the university to comply with its sexual harassment policies and to avoid physical contact with students (except to shake their hands).

But the Buzzfeed story sparked a national outcry, and many began demanding a more severe punishment. Marcy posted an apology on his website, though he denies some of the allegations in the report and says that his actions didn’t harm his students’ professional lives. He ultimately retired under pressure from faculty at the university.

On Inquiring Minds, Ballard depicts Marcy as a professor who praised her talent yet abused her trust. She first met him when she was an undergraduate student in one of his classes, but her excitement to work with one of the world’s foremost experts on exoplanets soon took a dark turn. On one occasion, Marcy told Ballard a detailed story about his sexual history. On another occasion, she says, he attempted to massage her neck after driving her home.

After that, Ballard agonized over whether to confront Marcy about his behavior, ultimately deciding to do so. As described in the Berkeley report, this prospect caused “great anxiety” for Ballard, “in part because she believed such a confrontation would effectively forfeit any opportunity of receiving a letter of recommendation” from Marcy. But it never came to that. Ballard says Marcy’s behavior suddenly changed and the harassment stopped. She later found out that a graduate student had confronted Marcy about unwelcome behavior Marcy had allegedly exhibited toward a different student.

Marcy didn’t deny Ballard’s allegations—though he does deny some of the other allegations in Berkeley’s report. (According to the Berkeley report, he told the university investigator that he didn’t recall touching Ballard in the car but that it was possible he did.) In an interview with Mother Jones, Marcy’s attorney, Elizabeth Grossman, argued that Marcy’s actions weren’t serious enough to justify the backlash he’s experienced. “There is not a single allegation of sexual assault against Marcy,” said Grossman. “There is not a single allegation of soliciting sex, of requesting sex in exchange for academic favor. There is not a single suggestion of his interfering with anyone’s ability to thrive on campus.”

Ballard, however, says she was deeply affected by her interactions with Marcy. “To have Marcy say, ‘You are talented, you are full of promise’— that is so compelling,” she explains. “And then to have all of the sudden the knowledge that…that message might not have been delivered in good faith: You feel like the rug has been pulled out under you. So does that mean that I’m not promising? Does that mean that all of it was a lie?…It was profoundly rattling to my nascent sense of self as an astronomer, as a scientist.”

Years later, when Ballard heard that allegations against Marcy were going to become public, she made the decision to come forward and identify herself as one of the victims. She hopes that by doing so, she’ll make things easier for other women.

“There was one principle which helped me to unravel the tangled knot of my feelings that I could always return to…and that was you have to be the woman you needed then,” says Ballard. “You couldn’t protect yourself then, but you can protect younger you today, and you can protect women who are 20 today.”

Ballard went on to receive a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard (she notes that Marcy wrote a recommendation letter that helped her get into the prestigious university). She now researches exoplanets at MIT. But across the country, many other women have left the sciences. That’s partly because of widespread sexual harassment, argues Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.). Indeed, a 2014 study found that roughly two-thirds of female scientists surveyed said they had experienced harassment while doing field research.

In January, Speier gave a speech on the floor of the US House of Representatives recounting the allegations against Timothy Slater, who taught astronomy at the University of Arizona and is now a professor at the University of Wyoming. Speier had obtained the results of a confidential 2005 investigation conducted by the University of Arizona. “Dr. Slater himself admitted that he gave an employee a vegetable-shaped vibrator and that he frequently commented to his employees and students about the appearance of women,” said Speier on the House floor. “My staff spoke with one female grad student who was required to attend a strip club in order to discuss her academic work with Dr. Slater. The woman has since left the field of astronomy.” After reading the report, “I was physically sickened,” Speier says on Inquiring Minds.

Slater declined to answer specific questions from Mother Jones about the allegations, though he did provide a letter his lawyers had sent to the University of Arizona threatening to sue the university for defamation and breach of privacy over the release of the report. In the letter, Slater’s attorneys said the university’s report “contains numerous false and misleading allegations, which Rep. Speier and the media has reported as fact.” Specifically, the attorneys state that Slater “never gave a vibrator” to “any graduate student, ever” and that Slater “denies that he ever pressured anyone to go to the strip club or that anyone ever complained about going to strip club.”

Speier proposes one solution to the problem of sexual harassment in the sciences. The federal government has the power under Title IX to fight harassment, she notes. Because so many universities, even private ones, rely on federal dollars, they could lose federal funding in the form of grants or student loans if they violate the law. Last week, she introduced legislation requiring universities to inform federal grant-making institutions when they determine a professor has engaged in sexual harassment.

Speier isn’t optimistic that the bill will pass in the current Congress, but she wants harassment victims to know they have an advocate on Capitol Hill. Her message to them? “They’ve been heard.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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Why One Scientist Went Public With Her Sexual Harassment Story

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There Are Likely Twice as Many Transgender Americans as We Thought

by mtibkz48 Posted on June 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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The number of transgender Americans may be twice as big as we thought. According to a new analysis of state and federal data, an estimated 1.4 million adults in the United States, or 0.6 percent of the total population, do not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.

The analysis by the Williams Institute at UCLA comes as policymakers increasingly consider questions of transgender rights in schools, workplaces, and the military.

Previously, the most widely accepted estimate suggested 0.3 percent of American adults were transgender. That figure came from a smaller analysis by the Williams Institute in 2011, based on a health survey in Massachusetts and a survey about tobacco use among LGBT people in California. The new analysis draws on a much bigger set of data from 19 states that have since started asking about gender identity in questionnaires about health risk behaviors run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The researchers also used Census Bureau data to estimate the transgender populations in the 31 other states.

Williams Institute

The study’s authors say their analysis is the first in the United States to estimate the transgender population in each state. Hawaii, California, Georgia, and New Mexico had the biggest percentages of adults who identified as transgender, at 0.8 percent each. North Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota had the smallest percentages, at about 0.3 percent each. Young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 were most likely to identify as transgender (0.7 percent), compared with 0.6 percent of those between the ages of 25 and 64 and 0.6 percent of adults older than 64.

The District of Columbia had a far higher rate of transgender identity than any state in the study, at an estimated 2.8 percent of adults.

The Census Bureau does not ask about gender identity in its population count, so we still don’t know exactly how many Americans identify as transgender. In May, Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona introduced a bill that would require federal agencies to include questions about gender identity in national demographic surveys.

“The findings from this study are critical to current policy discussions that impact transgender people,” says Jody Herman, one of the study’s authors. “Policy debates on access to bathrooms, discrimination, and a host of other issues should rely on the best data available to assess potential impacts, including how many people may be affected.”

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There Are Likely Twice as Many Transgender Americans as We Thought

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Hillary Clinton Is Serious About UFOs

by AliChoatevkr Posted on March 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Once again, Hillary Clinton has pledged that she will discover as much as possible about government involvement in UFO research and share the information with the American people. Clinton was on Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show Thursday night, and Kimmel brought up the fact that he’d asked former President Bill Clinton about his efforts on UFO disclosure during his administration. (Kimmel has also asked President Barack Obama about UFOs.)

“He said that he did do that and he didn’t find anything,” Kimmel said. Hillary Clinton replied, “Well, I’m going to do it again.”

This is the second time during the last few months that Clinton has said she wants to tackle this issue. In late December, Clinton told a New Hampshire reporter that she thought “we may have been visited already,” and that she would “get to the bottom” of the issue if elected president. Three weeks ago, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, an X-Files fan and longtime Clinton aide, told a Las Vegas television station that he’s pressed Clinton on the issue.

“I’ve talked to Hillary about that, this is a little bit of a cause of mine which is that people really want to know what the government knows, and there are still classified files that could be declassified,” Podesta said at the time.

And while many dismiss UFOs with eye-rolling skepticism, Clinton showed Kimmel that she’s familiar with the more scientific side of the issue, correcting his use of the term “UFO.”

“There’s a new name—it’s ‘unexplained aerial phenomenon,'” she said. “UAP, that’s the latest nomenclature.”

UAP is the term used by the scientific and evidence-based wing of the UFO research community, and is an attempt by those interested in the issue to get away from the derision and mockery that the term “UFO” typically provokes. When Podesta was interviewed in Las Vegas, he said, “I think I’ve convinced her that we need an effort to kind of go look at that and declassify as much as we can so that people have their legitimate questions answered and more attention and more discussion about unexplained aerial phenomena can happen without people who are in public life who are serious about this being ridiculed.”

As Mother Jones has reported, the Clintons’ interest in UFOs and information about US government involvement goes back at least until the mid-1990s. During that time, the late Laurance Rockefeller, who was a UFO enthusiast, approached the White House and pushed for the information to be released. Documents released about Rockefeller’s meetings under a Freedom of Information Act request show that Hillary Clinton was involved in those talks. She met with Rockefeller in August 1995 at his Wyoming ranch and probably discussed the issue, according to the FOIA documents. The effort, known by some as the “Rockefeller Initiative,” has been the subject of several big stories lately, including a recent Mother Jones profile of Stephen Bassett, the nation’s only registered extraterrestrial-issue lobbyist.

Hillary Clinton with Laurance Rockefeller at his Wyoming ranch in 1995 Grant Cameron/Stephen Bassett

Last night, Clinton told Kimmel that anything that can be released should be released. “I would like us to go into those files and hopefully make as much of that public as possible,” she said. “If there’s nothing there, let’s tell people there’s nothing there.”

“What if there is something there?” asked Kimmel.

“Well, if there is something there,” she replied, “unless it’s a threat to national security, I think we ought to share it with the public.”

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Hillary Clinton Is Serious About UFOs

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Here’s What Super Tuesday Voters Think About Climate Change

by Myrna Posted on March 1, 2016

Ugh. Super Tuesday voters at Sherrod Elementary School in Arlington, Texas. LM Otero/AP Voters in a dozen or so states are heading to the polls Tuesday for the year’s biggest presidential primary clashes so far. The victors will find themselves a giant step closer to the Oval Office, where they would have a chance to reshape US policy on a wide range of issues, including climate change. So we decided to take a look what voters in the Super Tuesday states think about global warming. Last year, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication released a nationwide study of Americans’ attitudes toward climate science and policy. In many states—especially the large bloc of southern states voting on Tuesday—the results were not particularly encouraging. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, scientists are 95 percent certain that human activities are responsible for most of the dramatic warming since the 1950s. But according to Yale’s estimates, that opinion is shared by less than half of adults in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wyoming. Overall, just 48 percent of adults in the Super Tuesday states accept the scientific consensus. Here’s a slightly different way to look at the data. Yale combined those who believe global warming is mostly driven by humans with those who said it’s caused by both nature and humans. The researchers also combined two types of climate science deniers: those who believe the warming is natural and those who simply don’t believe that the world is getting warmer. This makes the numbers look a bit better, but in many of the Super Tuesday states, a huge number of people still clearly reject the scientific consensus. Stats like this go a long way toward explaining why all five of the remaining GOP presidential candidates continue to reject the realities of climate science. Master image: Luis Molinero/Shutterstock See original article here –  Here’s What Super Tuesday Voters Think About Climate Change ; ; ;

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Here’s What Super Tuesday Voters Think About Climate Change

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