If #NeverTrump, and, of course, I’m refering to those who consider themselves conservatives/libertarians/Republicans, would sit back and look at the record rather than the personality, they’d be cheering
Editorial: President Trump’s very bad year on climate change hurts us all
A few weeks ago the world received the United Nations’ Emissions Gap Report 2019, which again laid out in jarring detail how much humans have heated up the atmosphere through carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels. Not only is the science incontrovertible, but the impacts already are playing out before our eyes, and it’s probably too late, given the fast-rising temperature and political realities, to fully corral the problem. But it’s also inarguable that the world must act anyway — quickly — if it is to avert climate change’s most damaging effects, and that we desperately need innovative, persuasive and courageous political leaders to show the way.
This is all interesting, since Los Angeles would collapse without fossil fuels. Anyhow
Yet over the past year, and in the face of these ever more dire reports and warnings about the crisis that confronts us, President Trump has blithely continued to push policies and regulatory rollbacks that will increase carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. Another study released in November warned that despite the overwhelming evidence that the world needs to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels, humankind will in 10 years be producing twice as much coal, oil and natural gas as it can safely consume and still limit the most severe impacts from human-caused global warming. That is disastrously wrong-headed. Governments around the world should be pursuing policies that will significantly reduce production and consumption while investing to support faster innovations in creating, distributing and storing renewable energy. Instead, Trump’s policies are designed to further increase U.S. production of oil and natural gas as part of his effort to make the U.S. the dominant producer of energy in the world.
So what did the Trump administration do this year to exacerbate the situation? It eased restrictions on the drilling of oil and gas wells in some sensitive habitats and drastically expanded the amount of federal lands available for leases by the oil, gas and coal industries (as well as mineral mining, which creates a different set of problems by exposing sensitive land to degradation). As part of that expansion, it shrank the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah and issued an executive order opening nearly all federal waters to offshore drilling (which the administration put on hold after legal setbacks). Trump loosened regulations limiting methane emissions at drilling sites. And after a Republican-led Congress in 2017 lifted the 35-year-old ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the administration moved this year to fast-track leases even as legal challenges work their way through the courts.
The Trump administration also this year finalized its rollback of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have further restricted greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants, and replaced it instead with the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, a dubiously named policy that would do the opposite of what it seems to promise. The new rule not only contributes to global warming but seeks to shore up a domestic coal industry already dying because of market forces. (Other forms of energy production are cheaper.) The administration also reversed the Obama administration’s rejection of permits for the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline that will increase the flow of tar sands oil from Alberta to U.S. refineries.
Looks like some excellent reasons to support Trump, eh?
A growing share of voters list climate and the environment as their top priority, according to a new poll from the Environmental Voter Project.
Despite the threat climate change poses to human health, very few medical schools have made it a part of their coursework.
(many many paragraphs attempting to defend the way the House held it’s impeachment theater)
A giant parasol that hovers high in orbit to block the sun. Refreezing the melting poles by making submarine-sized ice cubes. Pumping extra carbon dioxide deep underground for indefinite storage. Spraying sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to form clouds to artificially cool the Earth.
Under the new law SB 104 California will offer government subsidized health benefits for undocumented immigrants under the age of 26.
But few are discussing one key aspect of California’s crisis: Yes, climate change intensifies the fires—but the ways in which we plan and develop our cities makes them even more destructive. The growth of urban regions in the second half of the 20th century has been dominated by economic development, aspirations of home ownership, and belief in the importance of private property. Cities and towns have expanded in increasingly disperse fashion, fueled by cheap energy. Infrastructure has been built, deregulated, and privatized, extending services in more and more tenuous and fragile ways. Our ideas about what success, comfort, home, and family should look like are so ingrained, it’s hard for us to see how they could be reinforcing the very conditions that put us at such grave risk.
With the help of Senate Republicans, Donald Trump spent the first three years of his presidency remaking the federal judiciary in his own image. The president has appointed 133 district court judges, 50 appeals court judges, and two Supreme Court justices—meaning about one-fifth of the nation’s federal trial judges, and one-fourth of its federal appellate judges, are Trump appointees. These jurists are leading a conservative revolution that will upend decades of precedent and enshrine reactionary policies into the law. The transformation has only just begun. But for a glimpse of where the judiciary is heading if Trump wins a second term, Americans can look to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A traditionally conservative bench, the court has been newly reshaped by Trump—and quickly got to work translating right-wing priorities into legal doctrine that will govern generations.
