THE DON JONES INDEX… |
GAINS
POSTED in GREEN LOSSES
POSTED in RED |
|
4/30/21… 14,210.23 4/23/21… 14,210.58 6/27/13…
15,000.00 |
DOW JONES INDEX: 5/7/21…32,862.30; 4/23/21…33,815.90; 6/27/13…15,000.00)
LESSON for April 23, 2021 – “JOE does DEATH!”
A year and a half ago, a small… admittedly sour… Swedish teenager
named Greta Thunberg came to America to lecture the Congress in Washington and,
a few days later, the united Nations, on what they were doing wrong and what
she, Greta insisted that they do or else many of the autocrats, Democrats,
plutocrats and such would not only be dooming their children and grandchildren,
those who were, at least, under fifty, would be dooming themselves to a hot and
horrible death – sometime over the next twelve to thirty years (the actual time
of extinction remains a topic of debate among scientists).
Wherever she went, she told the Congress: “…I seem to be surrounded by
fairy tales. Business leaders, elected
leaders all across the political spectrum spending their time making up and
telling bedtime stories that soothe us, make us go back to sleep.” (“No One is Too Small to Make a Difference”)
Remember, Donald Trump was still President and would be so for more
than another year. She might well have
added that some of the fairy tales were of the darker sort about pulling those
who disagree with you away from their desks and outside to the gallows, to be
hanged. But she was young – and naďve. “The climate and ecological crisis is beyond
party politics. And our main enemy right
now is not our political opponents. Our
main enemy now is physics. And we cannot
make “deals” with physics.”
Advance forward that same year and a half to Earth Day, 2021;
President Joe and thirty nine other world leaders participating in a (virtual)
summit on climate change, variously urging human change and blaming other
people for the problem.
“President Biden’s Earth Day Climate
Summit sought to reclaim U.S. global leadership on climate change,” the business
magazine Forbes declared, before cynicism crept in like fog. “At the Summit, Biden pledged that the U.S.
would cut carbon emissions by 50-52% by 2030,
with 2005 as the baseline (for reference, in 2015, President Obama had pledged
a 25 to 28% reduction
by 2025). Biden’s credibility with the international audience depends on
whether he can show a domestic policy
pathway to the promised 50% reduction. Moreover, he needs to make sure that
the climate targets do not get tied to other issues that might invite strong
domestic opposition.”
(See Attachment One)
Some things (and people) change.
Others stay the same. Still more
others manage to appear to be doing both.
A somewhat
unlikely climate champion after years as a political moderate, Biden came into
office with a number of big climate and clean energy goals. On his first day in
office, noted the online magazine Vox, he reentered the US into the Paris
climate agreement and issued a flurry of executive
orders to accelerate the transition off fossil fuels,
protect biodiversity, and address environmental injustice.
“To
underscore America’s renewed commitment, Biden this week announced an ambitious
new nationally determined contribution (NDC). Actually getting there will
require a massive transformation of the US economy toward clean energy and a big
investment in electric vehicles.”
Gee,
holly golly. Over the course of a few
years, addressing climate had gone from being a backburner issue to a
centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, a crucial plank of his
economic policy. A career moderate, the Voxxaterians
reported. Biden is an unlikely champion
of the issue. But as the politics and urgency around climate change has
shifted, so too has Biden.
The
biggest news out of the virtual event was
the commitments various countries made to reduce their emissions. At the top,
Biden formally
pledged America would cut its greenhouse gas emissions
by 50 to 52 percent relative to 2005 levels by 2030 — the most ambitious target
the US has set to date. Still, as Vox’s
Umair Irfan laid out, some believe the goal is not big enough
given the sheer scale of the current climate crisis and the pace of
warming. (See below and Attachment Two)
The key reasons for the new geopolitical consensus are
clear. Earth has already warmed dangerously -- by around 1.2° Celsius, or 2.7°
Fahrenheit over the past 250 years -- and will continue to warm at around 0.2° C per
decade or higher unless the global energy system is decarbonized.
President Biden’s climate goals
carry a big risk — “or a big potential payoff”, intoned the New York Times…
inadvertently (or vertently) taking the “floor” position
on climate change deadlines, as apposed to the 2050 deadline for the planet
preferred by many other “moderates”.
Scientists say that his pledge to
cut America’s climate warming emissions in half by 2030 is technologically
feasible and ecologically imperative. The speed of the economic transition away
from fossil fuels, however, risks exposing vulnerabilities in the nation’s
electricity system and unsettling its transportation sector. But the rewards
could be high: lower risk of catastrophic climate change, new jobs and renewed
global leadership for American companies.
Separately, a major U.N. report
to be released next month will declare that slashing emissions of methane, the
main component of natural gas, is far more vital than previously thought to ward
off the worst effects of climate change.
To wit…
NBC News reported, Wednesday,
that glaciers are melting faster, losing 31 percent more snow and
ice per year than they did 15 years earlier, according to three-dimensional
satellite measurements of all the world’s mountain glaciers.
Scientists
blame human-caused climate change.
“Using
20 years of recently declassified satellite data,” they say, scientists
calculate that the world’s 220,000 mountain glaciers are losing more than 328
billion tons (298 billion metric tons) of ice and snow per year since 2015,
according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature. “That’s enough melt
flowing into the world’s rising oceans to put Switzerland under almost 24 feet
(7.2 meters) of water each year.
The
annual melt rate from 2015 to 2019 is 78 billion more tons (71 billion metric
tons) a year than it was from 2000 to 2004. Global thinning rates, different
than volume of water lost, doubled in the last 20 years and “that’s enormous,”
said Romain Hugonnet, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich
and the University of Toulouse in France who led the study.
Half
the world’s glacial loss is coming from the United States and Canada.
Alaska’s
melt rates are “among the highest on the planet,” with the Columbia glacier
retreating about 115 feet (35 meters) a year, Hugonnet
said.
For
perspective, at a 2017 climate march in Washington, DC, progressive Sens.
Bernie Sanders (VT) and Jeff Merkley (OR) unveiled a new bill calling for 100
percent of US energy to be generated by clean and renewable sources by 2050.
Four years later, Biden is speeding up the timeline significantly.
The
wild swings from Obama to Trump to Biden and a lack of stable federal policy on
climate and clean energy has been difficult to contend with, experts told Vox.
A recent
study from the Rhodium Group found that though the US is
indeed on target to hit the Obama-era emissions goals, that hasn’t happened
purely because of the good intentions of American business and industry. The
Rhodium Group study found that the Covid-19 pandemic suddenly grinding the
economy to a halt led to a 10.3 percent drop in US greenhouse gas emissions in
2020.
“With
coronavirus vaccines now in distribution, we expect economic activity to pick
up again in 2021, but without meaningful structural changes in the carbon
intensity of the US economy, emissions will likely rise again as well,” the
Rhodium Group study concluded. In other words, the federal government can’t
count on businesses to do the right thing. It needs to set the tone moving
forward.
By every standard, President Joe Biden's virtual
climate change summit (summoning forty world leaders onto Zoom to make virtual
pronouncements) was a remarkable success, according to Jeffrey Sachs of CNN.
“With great diplomatic dexterity,” he gushed.
“Biden and climate envoy John Kerry assembled world
leaders representing 82%
of world carbon emissions, 73% of the world population and 86% of world
economic output to commit to bold climate action.”
(See a list and some remarks from their hometown media
as Attachment Fourteen)
CNN even reported that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro
had done a U-turn… after long parroting Trump's anti-environmentalism, Bolsonaro “abruptly fell in behind Biden by announcing
Brazil's intention to reach net-zero
emissions by 2050” and to scale-up nature-based
solutions in Brazil's vast Amazon rainforest… the so called lungs of the planet
as have been rather wracked by slash and burn agriculture as those lungs of
individuals unfortunate enough to have encountered the plague (or tobacco, or
ongoing pollution… speaking of China, whose President Xi Jinping “not only
underscored China's commitment to reach net-zero emissions by 2060, but also to
draw down coal use after 2025, a major step forward, and one that will likely
put China on the path to reach net zero by 2050, alongside the US.”
Well, that’s what CNN said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi both promised climate action but offered
few new details. Russia is of course heavily dependent on fossil fuels, yet
Putin knows that Russia needs to change as foreign markets for Russia's gas
exports inevitably decline. India is still coal dependent, yet the Indian government
recognizes India's vast solar power potential, its high vulnerability to global
warming and the serious risks of losing export markets if India delays its
energy transformation.
And they have certain… other
problems… at present.
Vox celebrated the “big pledge from Chinese President Xi Jinping” to
reduce coal consumption between 2026 and 2030. But Xi’s
announcement was short on specifics, and China’s overall targets — hitting peak
carbon emissions by 2030 before getting to net-zero emissions by 2060 —
remained unchanged.
“Even if the pledges from the US and other
countries were broadly encouraging,” Vox reported, “the real test of whether
these countries will actually make good on them is yet to come. Many are
putting economic growth first after a year of stagnation due to the Covid-19
pandemic; air pollution levels are already
soaring again in China.
China, according to a recent article in
Time, is also among the first economies that are recovering rapidly from the
outbreak. Beating pessimistic forecast, Beijing expanded its economy by 2.3 percent in 2020, making it the
only major economy registering positive growth last year.
“What is also rebounding is its air pollution level.
According to Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA),
by early May levels of concentration of air pollutants
– PM2.5, NO2, SO2 and ozone – all returned to or exceeding the
monthly levels recorded the previous year. In October, PM2.5 concentrations in
the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the China-equivalent to Germany’s densely
packed Ruhr region, saw an increase of 15.6 percent over the same month
last year, raising concerns that the region risks falling short of its winter
pollution control targets.
In 2019, more than 66 percent of the electricity in
China was generated using coal power, which is a leading contributor to air
pollution in China. Convinced that high economic growth ultimately leads to
environmental improvements, some Chinese elites insist that economic
development is a sine qua non for solving the country’s
environmental problems. Justin Yifu Lin, a renowned
government economist in China, even argued that
economic growth was not the primary factor behind China’s smog problem, and
that China should speed up growth to fundamentally solve its environmental
crisis. In September 2019, Premier Li Keqiang reaffirmed that
economic development be taken as the central goal.”
The great, gray New York Times
cited America’s Six Steps to Sanity – “Lo
and behold, (governments) are finding that decarbonizing the energy system is
not some pie-in-the-sky dream, but is rather a practical and achievable task,
with six basic steps in the transformation:
“First, stop building any new fossil fuel-based power
generation (such as coal-fired power plants) and replace all mothballed power
plants and new generation capacity with zero-carbon power (such as wind, solar,
nuclear, etc.).
“Second, electrify transport. All of today's
automakers and many aspiring automakers of the future know that the automotive
future lies in electric vehicles. Major auto producers will shift fully from internal
combustion engines to battery electric vehicles by around
2035. (Biden's
infrastructure plans also invest in other steps. For example, they support the
transition to electric vehicles through investments in charging stations and
R&D for advances in battery technology.)
“Third, electrify buildings. New buildings will be fit
with electric heat pumps and electric cooking, and old buildings heated with
home heating oil and natural gas will be retrofitted for electricity.
“Fourth, improve energy efficiency through smart
appliances, improved building design, better materials and other cost-effective
energy savers.
“Fifth, produce "green" fuels such as
hydrogen using zero-carbon electricity for use in industrial applications that
can't be electrified directly. Hydrogen or other zero-carbon fuels will be used
in sectors such as aviation, ocean shipping and steel production.
“Sixth, adopt nature-based solutions to store more
carbon dioxide in forests and soils by creating more protected nature reserves
and by shifting from extensive (land-using) agriculture to intensive
(land-saving) agriculture.”
These are all worthy and… if you believe President
Joe… goals that not only preserve life on Earth, but produce jobs and profits,
too. Republicans, whose support he will
need to enact domestic legislation and spur or shame foreigners into compliance,
do not seem to be on board the S.S. Biden.
Soon, however, would be heard some discouraging words.
Vox
had reported that the “breakout” star of Biden’s climate summit is 19-year-old
climate justice activist and organizer with Fridays for Future Xiye Bastida. In fiery remarks delivered
during a session on climate solutions, Bastida, who
relocated to New York from Mexico with her family at the age of 11 when they
were displaced by drought and floods, joined the swelling army of “youth
climate activists” demanding governments “act decisively using the tools
available to end the climate emergency.”
When
pushed to address Bastida’s concerns at a press conference following
the summit, climate envoy Kerry said President Biden’s climate summit is a big
step in the right direction. “Is it enough? No. But it’s the best we can do
today.”
Bastida
clearly had made an impression. Speaking at a White House press conference
later on Thursday, Kerry described her impassioned plea as “profoundly
meaningful” and “moving.”
“That’s
where a lot of the younger generation is today, appropriately,” Kerry said.
“Pretty upset at the adults — the alleged adults — who are not getting their
act together to make happen what needs to happen.”
Even
the arch-conservative Breitbart agreed (sort of), at least about Bastida’s sincerity (if not her vision)…
The Breitbarters called Bastida ”anticolonial”
and “anticapitalist” for her anti-American,
anti-West, anti-white and anti-capitalist accusations (something Kerry
preferred not to echo).
Bastica accused world leaders of perpetrating economic
systems that disproportionally harm black, brown, and indigenous people.
“We demand that you stop systematically targeting the
global south, and black and brown and indigenous communities through
environmental plunder, the exploitation of our lands…” she said.
Bastida also called for “comprehensive non-Eurocentric and
intersectional climate education” as well as “literacy on climate justice,
Environmental racism, and ancestral and indigenous wisdom.”
As if, perhaps, channeling Marianne Williamson (or
Gwyneth Paltrow?), BB reported that the speaker had challenged world leaders
for not doing enough on climate change, calling them to “live in harmony with
Mother Earth.”
And they
reported that a Russian video feed showed the American President and cohorts
Kerry and Blinken as the only climateers
wearing masks “even though they have been
presumably vaccinated for the coronavirus and were sitting six feet apart from
each other.”
What a trio of old fuddy-duddies!
(BB did not mention whether virtual Indian boss Modi was
masked – given the… uh… circumstances
in his country.) He wasn’t.
The grand old goat of the (RINO) right, National
Review, attempted to right its Trump-skeptical course by jumping into the fray with
a full-scale, three pronged attack on President Joe and his virtual summit,
calling the event “unserious”, the perpetrator a “denialist” (that dread term
weaponized against his predecessor’s scientific acumen for simple proposals
like making everybody drink bleach and, speaking of government coercion, joined
the tinfoil crowd in declaiming that Joe really, really DID want to ban meat.
(See Attachments Four; A, B and C)
There was even dissent from the left – “…history will
judge Biden not by how much he cares or what he says, but by which policies and
investments his administration and Democrats in Congress put in place, how they
are implemented and enforced, the emission reductions they produce, and whether
they lead to further policy,” warned another Vox correspondent, David Roberts,
in another composition. (Attachment Five)
And a NYT correspondent, while mostly approving of the
effort to restart the issue after the Paris debacle, warned that: “Leaders of many other countries understand that
climate change and extreme weather can cause problems for them. The leaders
also see clean energy as a growing industry and want their companies to be
leaders. The U.S. can’t simply dictate terms. Both China and India, for
example, will remain more reliant on coal than Biden administration
officials wish.” (Attachment Six)
During Barack Obama’s presidency,
and now Biden’s, “Republicans have almost uniformly opposed significant
legislation, be it on health care, climate change, Wall Street regulation or
economic stimulus.” (nyt)
And Vox, tolling off a list of winners and losers, consigned the Grand Old
Party to the later (even though “loss” on this issue means loss of life for all parties, partisans and
people – whether by 2030, 2050 or even 2100.)
In the
days leading up to the summit, House Republicans halfheartedly and unsuccessfully tried to
reverse the cemented narrative that their official climate platform is to deny
scientific reality. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy published a video
touting the Energy Innovation Agenda, a package of “dozens of bills and
solutions” the GOP has to address climate change and infrastructure as a
counterpoint to Biden’s agenda.
No
president of either party has so fully embraced tackling climate change before,
Vox allowed, “but the hardest part for Biden is yet to come. Though White House
officials have insisted they have multiple pathways to halve emissions from
2005 levels in less than a decade, it will be difficult without passing Biden’s
American Jobs plan through a divided Congress.
“That
policy change has been driven by a significant transformation, essentially the
zeitgeist of climate change,” Julian Brave NoiseCat,
vice president of policy and strategy at Data for Progress, told Vox in an
interview. “The conversation used to be about how the heck do we get people to
care about climate change when it feel so far off.”
Compiling
data for the past 13 years, researchers at Yale and George Mason universities
used to see about 12 percent of people they classified as “alarmed” about
climate and the same amount who were “dismissive” about the issue. Over the
years, the
numbers have shifted. Those in the alarmed group have
grown to about 26
percent (there’s another 29 percent who classify
themselves as “concerned” about climate change), while the number in the
dismissive category has shrunk to 8
percent.
“The
bigger question is, is public engagement in climate increasing — and the answer
is unequivocally yes,” said Edward Maibach, director
of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.
For
the most part, Republicans are no longer the party of outright climate denial, recognizing
a fundamental shift in the electorate. At the same time, their initial plans to tackle climate change revolve around
planting 1 trillion trees worldwide and investing in technologies to remove
carbon from the atmosphere — rather than reorienting the American economy to
not produce carbon in the first place. And the GOP is sounding the alarm about
Biden’s decarbonization targets, saying a departure from fossil fuels will
wound the economy.
“I’d
say there isn’t an overall Republican strategy to combat the climate crisis
where it is,” said Joe Bonfiglio, president of the
Environmental Defense Action Fund. “What we’re seeing now is a party grappling
with a need to have climate plans that neatly fit under the policy umbrella of
all of the above energy strategy that doesn’t reduce fossil use.”
Vox also called Climate Czar John Kerry’s faith in markets another “loser”
“Kerry’s
faith in the private sector as the silver bullet is somewhat naive. The private
sector is an important partner to meet ambitious climate goals, but it will
also take serious investment across all levels of government to get there.”
A new
coalition, launched Thursday last, seeks to funnel at least
$1 billion in payments to countries that show they’re preventing tropical
deforestation and its associated emissions. The US, Britain, and Norway are
driving the effort along with a number of major corporations, including Amazon,
Nestlé, Unilever, and Salesforce, forming what the group called “one of the
largest ever public-private efforts to help protect tropical forests.”
“Bringing
together government and private-sector resources is a necessary step in
supporting the large-scale efforts that must be mobilized to halt deforestation
and begin to restore tropical and subtropical forests,” Kerry said in a
statement when the group, known as the Lowering Emissions by Accelerating
Forest Finance Coalition (LEAF), was announced Thursday. (See Attachment Three)
Hollywood,
at least, is on board.
Back
in 2019… seems like long, long ago, President Donald Trump mocked Thunberg on Twitter after the 16-year-old excoriated world leaders for not doing enough to tackle
the climate crisis. (See Attachments
Eight A, B and C)
“She
seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful
future. So nice to see!” Trump posted on Twitter, replying to a video of
Thunberg’s speech at the United Nations climate action summit earlier in the
day.
Trump’s
penchant for Twitter insults and online confrontations with people he sees as
political adversaries is well known, though CNN did acknowledge that the tweet
was “a striking display of the President teasing a child.”
Thunberg
appeared to take Trump’s slight in stride. By late Tuesday morning, she had
updated her Twitter bio to read: “A very happy young girl looking forward to a
bright and wonderful future.”
Trump,
on the other hand, went ballistic after Time nominated the teenybopper as its
Person of the Year.
They say revenge
is a dish best served cold, the Guardian UK reiterated – citing Don Corleone
and Greta Thunberg, the teenage environmental activist mocked by Donald
Trump in a tweet when
she was named Time magazine’s person of the year, waited exactly 11 months
before delivering the perfect riposte.
In his December
2019 insult, Trump told Thunberg, 17, to work on her “anger management problem”
and to “go to an old-fashioned movie with a friend”.
“Chill Greta,
chill!” the president implored in the tweet, which began with him branding her
Time award as “so ridiculous”.
On Thursday
afternoon, with Trump raging on Twitter in all
capital letters and throwing out baseless allegations of voter fraud even as
his election day lead in Pennsylvania and other states continued to erode,
Thunberg threw his words straight back at him.
“So
ridiculous,” Thunberg
tweeted in reply to Trump’s earlier “STOP THE COUNT!” rant.
“Donald must work
on his Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a
friend! Chill Donald, Chill!”
Within two hours
of posting it, the tweet had amassed more than 452,000 likes, double the total
for Trump’s original message.
And now, Greta
has new rivals on both her left and right flanks. The
“breakout star of Biden’s climate summit” was 19-year-old climate justice activist
and organizer with Fridays for Future Xiye Bastida.
In fiery remarks delivered
during a session on climate solutions, Bastida, who
relocated to New York from Mexico with her family at the age of 11 when they
were displaced by drought and floods, demanded governments act decisively using
the tools available to end the climate emergency.
The Washpost
(see Attachment Nine) reported that a right wing think
tank hopes it’s found an
anti-Greta.
Naomi
Seibt is a 19-year-old German who, like Greta, is
blond, eloquent and European. But Naomi denounces “climate alarmism,” calls
climate consciousness “a despicably anti-human ideology,” and has even deployed
Greta’s now famous “How dare you?” line to take on the mainstream German media.
“She’s
a fantastic voice for free markets and for climate realism,” said James Taylor,
director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy
at the Heartland
Institute, an influential libertarian think tank in suburban Chicago
that has the ear of the Trump administration.
Girl scuffles aside, the summit represented a “tipping
point” (Sachs/CNN) with the world's largest economies -- the United States,
Canada, the European Union, China, Japan, Korea, India, United Kingdom, Brazil
-- finally aligning around the goal of deep decarbonization, “meaning the shift
of the energy system from fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) to
zero-carbon sources (solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, biomass).”
They might have added nuclear, but adverse atoms are
still anathema on the left.
Joshua Goldstein, an American,
and Steffan Qvist (yes,
Greta, a Swede!) tout so-called “fourth-generation” nuclear fission, “From a political marketing perspective,” they
advise, “(f)ears about nuclear power, however unjustified, might be mitigated
with the reassurance that fourth-generation designs are even safer (than safe)
and all-around better. And then, they
smile, it’ll be time to break nuclear fusion out of the deathtrap dungeon into
which most Americans put it, thanks to pre-Djonald
crackpot Lyndon LaRouche. (See their book: “A Bright (literally – dji) Future”)
If only those damn private sector
nukers would stop building their doom domes on
earthquake faults, upwind of major cities and next to convenient sources of
drinking water!
Still, the anti-nukers
bump up against another Vox and friends Loser: “The goal to limit global
warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.”
Any country that delays decarbonizing, they say, will
be left with stranded assets and shrinking markets for its exports.
We are still a long way from achieving this goal, but
the debates over the objective -- net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, the timing
(by around 2050, according to CNN), but 2030 is the new 2050 and even the basic
pathways to success -- are largely over.
The
2015 Paris climate agreement has a topline goal of limiting the increase in
global average temperatures this century to below 2 degrees Celsius, but it
also has a secondary, more ambitious target of keeping warming below 1.5°C.
Back
in 2018, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change put out a major report looking
at just how hard it would be to meet the 1.5°C target. It found that every
degree of warming matters, with higher temperatures extracting a higher human
and economic toll. The report concluded that to reach this goal, the world has
until 2030 to slash greenhouse gas emissions by half or more from present.
And
1.5°C is hardly a “safe” climate. The world has already warmed by at least 1°C
on average, and the effects
have been devastating. The longer the world waits to act to
limit emissions, the harder it will get.
The
new US climate target — a 50 to 52 percent cut in emissions relative to 2005 by
2030 — “looks like it is consistent” with the 1.5°C goal, according to a senior
White House official on a call
with reporters on Wednesday. But according to Climate
Action Tracker, a US commitment in line with this target
would actually need a 57 to 63 percent cut.
Many
other countries have also said they are using 1.5°C as their benchmark for
their climate commitments. Rhetorically, it seems there is widespread support
for being more ambitious. However, it’s clear there’s a cavernous rift between
commitments and actions. Global greenhouse gas emissions have only grown since
the 2018 IPCC report. While there was a lull in this growth last year due to
the Covid-19 pandemic, emissions
are poised to rebound around the world, including in the
US, as economies reopen.
So
now, concludes Umair Irfan: “the world has to make even more drastic cuts to
greenhouse gases — and in less time. It’s easy to paint a target years into the
future. It’s much harder to take aim today. And right now, that target is
nowhere in our sights.”
As
for Joe, he celebrated Earth Day with friends, family and maybe even Al Gore,
and then, yesterday, descended to the hallowed, haunted Capitol to address two
hundred Congresspersons chosen by lottery and television cameras, all under
heavy security. It was his Hundredth
(well, 99th) Day Speech, not a State of the Union, per se, but what
is the new normal for 2021… and featured an out-of-left-field accusation that
Joe was going Bloomberg and proposing legislation to ban the eating of meat (as
well as, presumably, eggs, milk, potato chips, chocolate and bananas).
Whole
grain bread and water for you, Mister.
In
the lengthy, wide-ranging and… in a contrast to the usual Trump harangues…
somewhat boring address, Biden recited a number of costly agenda items,
including measures to combat climate change.
Not many, not specific, but more than his predecessor. (See Attachment Ten) The Republican response, from Sen. Tim Scott,
was also very light… in fact, negligible on climate, approached only indirectly
through jobs and infrastructure issues.
(See Attachment Eleven)
Comments
on the speech, by NPR and CNN are attached as Attachments Twelve and Thirteen.
Dirt
is just another name for Earth, and Joe knows Dirt… the kind that flies about
in Washington and then that which behaves itself and stays in its place across
flyby America and, in the process, allowing food to be produced – even meat!
After
scolding Congress in 2019, Greta Thunberg voyaged to New York (presumably by
Flintstones SUV) and engaged the assembled, scowling diplomats – many from the
same countries so effusively praising the objectives (if not the task) of
Biden’s summit eighteen months later.
“You
have taken away my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” the progeriac sweet sixteener told
the men (almost all) in high places.
“And yet I’m one of the lucky ones.
“People
are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is fairy tales of
money and economic growth. How dare
you!”
Happy
Earth Day, 2021!
APRIL 23 – APRIL
29
Friday, April 23, 2021 Infected: 31,992,407 Dead: 571,200 Dow: 34,043.49 |
President Joe declares he’ll raise
the capital gains tax as well as income taxes on the rich to pay for
Coronavirus expenses. Republicans make
a counteroffer to Joe’s 1.9T stim; 568M.
Not taken.
More services and places (like California state universities) demand Vaxx Cards so the usual happens – criminals and forgers
cash in. Experts disagree on how long
immunity will last – weeks, months or years?
Dr. Jha calls J&J “extraordinarily safe” with only one in 500,000
getting clots, but Americans resist anyway.
But plague is far worse in Brazil and India (where there are public
cremations in the streets), although better in Israel.
Leakers in Minneapolis reveal that Derek Chauvin has a history of
knee-strangulation of unarmed blacks as states race ahead of feds on police
reform. Diversitarians
hail first woman appointed head of FEMA and Congress approves statehood (and
2 Senate votes) for Washington DC, though chances of passing through a Senate
filibuster are minimal.
Caitlyn Jenner announces for Governorship of California pending
Newsome recall; hires The Donald’s melted-down Brad Parscale
as manager. |
Saturday,
April 24, 2021 Infected:
32,045,236 Dead: 571,921 |
It’s
Earth Day. President Joe holds his
virtual summit with forty mostly wealthy nations. (See above) Joe’s stimuli variously called American
Economic and/or Family Plans. Highest income
tax rate will rise from 36% to 39.6% for the over-$400,000 earners but
capital gains taxes will become co-equal (a virtual doubling). Republicans howl and vow resistance, Dow
craters and bitcoins sink below $50,000 for the first time in months. J&J re-greenlighted, shots may be
rolling out in days even though clot toll rises to 15 with 3 deaths. Vaxxing as a
whole is falling off; right-wing hardliners blamed. NIH blames the “fragile” American psyche. Border migration crisis send’s Biden’s popularity
plunging like a rock… his 52% approval is better than Trump, but worse than
most Presidents nearing their 100th day in office. He growls at Central America’s corrupt
dictators. No action ensues. Vice
President Harris appointed to seek the “root causes”, experts cite drought
and crop failures in Guatemala, silence on corruption. |
Sunday,
April 25, 2021 Infected:
32,077,076 Dead: 572,387 |
Vaxxed
Americans now comprise 53% of the population.
Dr. Fauci says the world is now looking to
America as the “gold standard” in plague fighting. More street
cremations as India’s health system implodes; shortage of PPE, vaxxes and oxygen have healthcare workers and hospitals
“gasping for breath” with 2,600 deaths in a single day. 80 killed in fire at Iraqi plague
hospital. Indonesian submarine found
in three pieces at the bottom of the ocean.
No survivors. “I can’t breathe”
cop Chauvin will be sentenced on June 16th. More police shootings fill the gap – juvenile
old knife wielder Mahkia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio;
Andrew Brown in North Carolina, Isaiah Brown in Virginia. Attorney General Garland promises meetings. A Republican
publican offers guarded praise to President Joe. “He just needs to keep politics boring.” |
Monday,
April 26, 2021 Infected:
32,124,369 Dead: 572,666 Dow: 33,981.57
|
It’s National Pretzel Day.
Oscar aftermath finds mixed messages on diversity; Asian power swells,
with Chloé Zhao winning Best Director for “Nomadland” (best picture) and Yuh-jung
Younwins Best Supporting Actress. Tyler Perry wins Humanitarian Award, tells
story about giving shoes to a homeless woman who then says: “My feet are no
longer on the ground.” 32 states
resuming J&J vaxxes, but 73% reject it. First male clot victim in California. So America will send surplus doses and PPE
to India, where Dr. Jah says plague is worsening. Dr. Fauci says vaxxees don’t need to wear masks outdoors. In the skies
above: UFOs and a pink Supermoon. |
Tuesday, April 27, 2021 Infected: 32,173,383 Dead: 573,378 Dow: 33,984.64 |
Census results
in Congressional redistricting; Texas gains seat, New York loses one (by 89
returns) and so does California, where recall of Governor Newsome makes the
ballot. Florida also gains a seat and
announces that they will release genetically modified celibate mosquitoes
into neighborhoods. Experts say India is reporting only 20% of
plague deaths. CDC follows Fauci in dropping mandatory outdoor masking – President
Joe goes on TV, rips off his black mask and promises a normal Fourth of July…
voice dropping into a creepy whisper warns Don Jones to get vaxxed “now, now!”
Americans are washing their hands less often and prizes for vaxxees abound… free drinks at the bar and West Virginia
considers a $100 bounty. (Those who
already got shot curse their luck.) Consumer confidence said to be back to
pre-plague levels. Vegas is booming
again. One result… inflation. Used cars, Crocs and chicken wing prices
are up and Spotify raises its rates.
In the aftermath of Earth Day and the Zoom climate summit, Epicurious
Food Magazine will no longer publish recipes for meat (insisting “we’re not
anti-meat, we’re pro-planet”) and Jeff Bezos proposes a substitute… edible
seaweed. (The Japanese love it.) |
Wednesday, April 28, 2021 Infected: 32,229,327 Dead: 574,329 Dow: 33,820.38
|
President Joe celebrates his 99th
Day with an “address” to Congress (above) with only 200 in attendance at the
Capitol as opposed to the usual 1,600 despite CDC’s Walensky
pivot from “impending doom” to “turning a corner” as a result of over half
Americans now shot at least once. But,
she warns: “We know that this virus is an optimist… er…
opportunist.”
Angry Republicans respond that Joe’s taxes will destroy America. Mitchy decries a
“smorgasbord” of special interest giveaways like the proposed 200M for pre-K
education.
Taliban celebrate victory as American troops start leaving
Afghanistan. Iranian navy said to be “swarming”
American ships in the Persian Gulf. A
Texas man is killed by hundreds of bee stings. Feds swarm Rudy G’s home and office,
seizing documents and computers – accuse him of being a secret lobbyist for a
foreign “power”… Ukraine. Apple’s new privacy apps “make war” on Facebook;
the Zuck thunders back that he wants to “inflict
pain” on Tim Cook. |
Thursday, April 29, 2021 Infected: 32,274,941 Dead: 575,193 Dow: 34,060.36 |
Pundits and partisans toll off
“takeaways” from JoeSpeech, but Don (well, Dawn)
Jones’ favorite was his tribute to the two women (Harris and Pelosi) directly
behind him. Nancy’s desk defiler
finally granted bail after four months in the klink. Joe says he “likes to meet people with
different ideas” then flies down to Georgia to meet ex-Prexy
Jimmy Carter. Tim Scott (R-SC) gives
rebuttal… urges Americans to trust God and fight “Washington dreams and
Socialist schemes.” Real socialist
Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) said 30 to 40% of Americans do not believe in
democracy; “they want a strongman” and that makes them easy prey for
conspiracy theorists.
Hardcore resistance means thousands of shots are expiring; experts
shipping them off to Brazil and India which are trading places as worst
plague hotspots.
NFL draft in Cleveland (relocated from voter-suppressing) Georgia,
Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence goes to Jacksonville as first pick. A pair of Michael Jordan’s 40 year old
sneakers expected to sell for $100,000 to $150,000 (if autographed, they’d
garner half a mil). Australian town
invaded by thousands of “destructive” (i.e. incontinent) cockatoos – some
talking, some not. |
The media have made a much of a muchness about America’s
return to the New Normal – supposedly including a booming economy that will
generate jobs and justify President Joe’s new taxing and spending
initiatives. But, at least for this
week, the performance of the markets was anaemic. Employers now say that lazy Americans would
rather sit on their ass and collect kited unemployment handouts than go back
to work – labor sorts reply that more and more of the good jobs are going bye
bye and the bad jobs that replace them… at minimum
wage or worse… can’t feed their families.
Everybody says that the solution is a more competent, motivated and
educated workforce, but Democrats say this can’t happen without more handouts
for schooling from the cradle to (if not the grave that our climate is
digging) than at least into their late 20s or thirties. So jobs from healthcare to truck driving to
Governorships are going unfilled and the military drawdown means that Army
training is on the chopping block too. Whether or not the cost of re-educating Don Jones for the jobs
of the future is worth the cost will be a part and parcel of next week’s
Lesson on taxes and their benefits (or lack) but while Republicans vow to
destroy the Biden agenda by claiming that the borrowing will come from China…
some will, some won’t… inflation is also a reality. While the general state of the Jones was
another more or less break-even wash, the statistics that stood forth were on
housing… higher prices, fewer sales.
As for inflation, those numbers are on the way. They won’t be pretty. THE DON JONES INDEX CHART of CATEGORIES w/VALUE ADDED to
EQUAL BASELINE of 15,000 (REFLECTING… approximately… DOW
JONES INDEX of June 27, 2013) See a further
explanation of categories here… ECONOMIC INDICES (60%)
The Don Jones Index for the week
of April 23rd through April 28th, 2021 was DOWN 0.35 points. The Don Jones Index is sponsored by the Coalition
for a New Consensus: retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate Jack “Catfish” Parnell, Chairman; Brian Doohan,
Administrator/Editor. The CNC denies,
emphatically, allegations that the organization, as well as any of its
officers (including former Congressman Parnell,
environmentalist/America-Firster Austin Tillerman and cosmetics CEO Rayna
Finch) and references to Parnell’s works, “Entropy and Renaissance” and “The
Coming Kill-Off” are fictitious or, at best, mere pawns in the web-serial
“Black Helicopters” – and promise swift, effective legal action against
parties promulgating this and/or other such slanders. Comments, complaints, donations (especially SUPERPAC
donations) always welcome at feedme@generisis.com or: speak@donjonesindex.com |
|
ATTACHMENT ONE – from Forbes
Apr 28, 2021,04:20pm
HERE’S WHY DOMESTIC POLITICS SHAPED
BIDEN’S CLIMATE SUMMIT AGENDA
President Biden’s Earth Day Climate
Summit sought to reclaim U.S. global leadership on climate change. At the
Summit, Biden pledged that the U.S. would cut carbon emissions by 50-52% by 2030,
with 2005 as the baseline (for reference, in 2015, President Obama had pledged
a 25 to 28% reduction
by 2025). Biden’s credibility with the international audience depends on
whether he can show a domestic policy pathway to the promised 50% reduction.
Moreover, he needs to make sure that the climate targets do not get tied to
other issues that might invite strong domestic opposition.
The
Manchin Factor: The Road to Climate Progress runs through West Virginia
The 50% emission reduction target will
be achieved by a mix of regulation and federal spending. Biden’s ambitious $2
trillion infrastructure plan generously funds climate projects. But domestic
spending programs require Congressional approval. This is where Senator Joe
Manchin (D-WV) comes in. He chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources
Committee. But more importantly, given the 50-50 split in the U.S. Senate,
Manchin is the crucial swing vote.
Manchin’s room to maneuver on climate
issues (which are perceived as anti-coal and deeply unpopular in his state) is
limited. In 2020, Trump secured 69% of votes in West Virginia, behind only
Wyoming at 70%. Moreover, Manchin’s winning margin in the Senate elections has
declined from 24% in 2012 to 3.3% in 2018. This means Biden’s climate
proposals need to make sure that West Virginia’s concerns are addressed.
What does Joe Manchin want? Like any
other leader, he wants jobs and prosperity for his state. Specifically, the
subject of “just transition” for coal-dependent communities is critical. No
wonder, the second day of Summit was focused on jobs and technology.
On the same day, the White House
released the first report of
its Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic
Revitalization. The report “identified nearly $38 billion in existing federal
funding that could be accessed by energy communities for infrastructure,
environmental remediation, union job creation, and community revitalization
efforts.”
Given the scale of the just transition
challenge, this level of funding is probably inadequate. Sizable new support
would be required for projects such as carbon capture, broadband Internet, coal
mine reclamation, and tax credit for investing in coal-dependent communities.
Further, new investments would be needed for public services, such as schools,
which will get defunded as the fossil fuel economy declines. Indeed, Senator
Martin Heinrich, representing the oil and natural gas rich New Mexico, endorsed
Senator John Barrasso’s (R-WY) proposal to
compensate school districts for the revenue decline due to decarbonization
policies. He noted: “We support their schools, and throughout this transition
we should support the people who have kept the lights on and made this country
the greatest energy country on the face of the Earth.”
Climate
Migration and Climate Aid Have Low Priority
The Summit ignored the subject of
migration, which is accentuated by climate change. If
a community cannot adapt to say prolonged droughts or frequent floods, people
are forced to migrate. Thus, scholars note that migration is a form of climate
adaptation. President Biden recognized this link in his February 4 Executive Order.
And yet, the Summit did not talk about
climate migration probably because it is a politically charged issue,
especially with the surge on the US-Mexico border. News about
unaccompanied minors is heartbreaking. But Biden Administration lacks a
coherent response on this subject, see the flip-flop on the issue of the 15,000 refugee
cap. Vice-President Kamala Harris, who is leading the administration’s
response to the migration crisis, is yet to address a press
conference on this subject.
The ongoing human displacement crisis is
vast. The UNHCR reports
that 1% of global population, about 79 million, is displaced. Both Europe and
the U.S. have struggled to craft an appropriate policy response, especially
with the rise of nativist sentiment.
Biden recognizes that governance
failure, poverty, and now climate change, motivate migration. Thus, overseas
aid to strengthen climate resilience could reduce the incentives to migrate.
Following this logic, did the U.S. announce a substantial increase in overseas
climate funding?
It did not. Climate aid does not have a
vocal domestic constituency: the Green New
Deal does not even mention it. Although countries had pledged
to create a $100 billion Green Climate Fund under the Paris Agreement, they
have contributed barely 10% of the amount. The Obama Administration had pledged
$3 billion and was able to appropriate $1 billion. Trump canceled future
payments. Biden has pledged $1.2. billion,
but this falls short of even the remaining $2 billion that
Obama had committed.
Moving
Forward
Biden is wise to pay close attention to
domestic political realities. He has a narrow window to pass climate
legislation. If history is any guide, Republicans will probably take back the
House in 2022. While Biden may still achieve some policy progress through
Executive Orders, a Republican-controlled House is unlikely to support climate
laws or his spending initiatives, such as the infrastructure plan.
Biden probably has 18 months to change
the climate policy trajectory. Can he mobilize support in the House and the
Senate to do it?
ATTACHMENT
TWO – from Vox
HOW CLIMATE BECAME
THE CENTERPIECE OF BIDEN’S ECONOMIC AGENDA
The
politics and urgency around climate change are shifting.
By Ella
Nilsenella.nilsen@vox.com Apr
22, 2021, 12:40pm EDT
At
long last, combating climate change is having a moment in the United States.
Over
the course of a few years, addressing climate went from being a backburner
issue to a centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, a crucial
plank of his economic policy. A career moderate, Biden is an unlikely champion
of the issue. But as the politics and urgency around climate change has
shifted, so too has Biden.
The
Biden administration on Thursday formally committed to cutting America’s
greenhouse gas emissions 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Biden’s
campaign pledge on emissions was getting the US to net-zero emissions by 2050,
and getting the American economy to run on 100 percent clean and renewable
energy by 2035.
“Transforming
the energy system was both essential and a tremendous opportunity,” John
Podesta, the founder of the Center for American Progress and former climate
adviser to President Barack Obama, told Vox in a recent interview. “It went
from being a down-the-list environmental issue to the center of his economic
project.”
For
perspective, at a 2017 climate march in Washington, DC, progressive Sens.
Bernie Sanders (VT) and Jeff Merkley (OR) unveiled a new bill calling for 100
percent of US energy to be generated by clean and renewable sources by 2050.
Four years later, Biden is speeding up the timeline significantly.
Public
polling from the Yale Program on
Climate Change Communication shows that while a slimmer
majority of voters believe the US should tackle global warming, transitioning
to clean energy sources like wind and solar is broadly popular across parties.
That could be a boon for Biden as he aggressively sells his $2.25 trillion
American Jobs Plan to Congress — a jobs and infrastructure package that doubles
as a climate bill.
There’s
no doubt Biden was influenced by young climate activists and other progressives
in the Democratic Party pushing him to embrace the Green New Deal and go big on
climate. While Biden has been careful to separate his plan from the Green New
Deal, he has also adopted some of its key tenets. For one, Biden recognized the
ability to pair his climate ambitions with an optimistic economic message:
“When I think about climate change, the word I think of is ‘jobs,’” Biden said
during a July campaign speech.
No
president of either party has so fully embraced tackling climate change before,
but the hardest part for Biden is yet to come. Though White House officials have
insisted they have multiple pathways to halve emissions from 2005 levels in
less than a decade, it will be difficult without passing Biden’s American Jobs
plan through a divided Congress.
Obama’s
signature climate bill, cap and trade, failed in 2010. And though the Clean
Power Plan, Obama’s regulatory effort to lower emissions, largely withstood
President Donald Trump’s efforts to weaken it, the Biden administration wants
to implement something more ambitious.
“That
policy change has been driven by a significant transformation, essentially the
zeitgeist of climate change,” Julian Brave NoiseCat,
vice president of policy and strategy at Data for Progress, told Vox in an
interview. “The conversation used to be about how the heck do we get people to
care about climate change when it feel so far off.”
How the public perception around climate
has changed
The
politics around climate change — and what to do about it — have changed
significantly over the past decade.
Compiling
data for the past 13 years, researchers at Yale and George Mason universities
used to see about 12 percent of people they classified as “alarmed” about
climate and the same amount who were “dismissive” about the issue. Over the
years, the numbers have
shifted. Those in the alarmed group have grown to about 26 percent (there’s
another 29 percent who classify themselves as “concerned” about climate
change), while the number in the dismissive category has shrunk to 8 percent.
“The
bigger question is, is public engagement in climate increasing — and the answer
is unequivocally yes,” said Edward Maibach, director
of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.
At
the same time, Maibach and his colleagues have noted
there’s widespread support among voters for the US to embrace clean energy. In
a December survey, Maibach and his fellow researchers found that 66 percent of
registered voters said developing sources of clean energy should be a “high” or
“very high” priority for the president and Congress. That number was 13 percentage
points higher than the number of registered voters who said global warming
should be a high or very high priority for the president and Congress, the poll
found. And 72 percent of registered voters supported transitioning the US
economy from fossil fuels to 100 percent clean energy by 2050. (Of course, it’s
worth repeating that Biden wants to speed up this timeline.)
“While
there is clearly a divide in America between liberals and conservatives on the
issue of climate change, that divide is much much smaller
with regard to clean energy and support for clean energy,” Maibach
said. “It is still true that Democrats are much more likely to support an
aggressive pivot toward transitioning to clean energy; it’s also true a large
majority of Republicans support the same.”
As
Democrats have wholeheartedly embraced climate as both an environmental and an
economic issue, Republican politicians are still trying to articulate the
party’s position.
For
the most part, Republicans are no longer the party of outright climate denial,
recognizing a fundamental shift in the electorate. At the same time,
their initial plans to
tackle climate change revolve around planting 1 trillion trees worldwide and
investing in technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere — rather than
reorienting the American economy to not produce carbon in the first place. And
the GOP is sounding the alarm about Biden’s decarbonization targets, saying a
departure from fossil fuels will wound the economy.
“I’d
say there isn’t an overall Republican strategy to combat the climate crisis
where it is,” said Joe Bonfiglio, president of the
Environmental Defense Action Fund. “What we’re seeing now is a party grappling
with a need to have climate plans that neatly fit under the policy umbrella of
all of the above energy strategy that doesn’t reduce fossil use.”
Republicans
are also not going along with Biden’s infrastructure and climate push,
releasing their own, narrower plan that deals more with fixing the nation’s
roads and bridges. While Democrats can pass Biden’s American Jobs Plan through
the Senate without Republican support using an obscure procedural tool
called budget reconciliation,
they have a limited window to get policy through Congress and shovels in the
ground.
The Biden
White House is very aware of the potential for climate progress to be reversed
by Republicans if and when they win in the midterms or the next presidential
election. That’s why it is far more focused on proposing concrete changes that
are “hard to roll back,” a White House official told Vox.
Many in the energy industry are moving
ahead
When
slashing environmental regulations and
lowering emissions standards, Trump often cast his actions as being friendly to
businesses.
At
the same time, many businesses and utilities recognized that the broader
economy was heading toward renewable sources of energy, in large part because
wind- and solar-generated energy has become much cheaper than energy generated
from fossil fuels. There are about 3 million clean energy workers in America,
according to the latest annual jobs report from the national
nonpartisan group E2. Nearly three times as many workers are employed in clean
energy, compared to fossil fuel extraction and generation workers.
“It
is consensus that the urgency around this is growing, so that momentum has been
moving for quite some time,” said Mike Boots, executive vice president of
Breakthrough Energy. “It’s always helpful to have a consistent and durable
policy at the federal level.”
The
wild swings from Obama to Trump to Biden and a lack of stable federal policy on
climate and clean energy has been difficult to contend with, experts told Vox.
“Investors
like certainty, and they haven’t gotten any certainty at the federal level,”
Karen Wayland, policy adviser to electricity utility coalition group Gridwise Alliance, told Vox. “The utilities have embraced
this decarbonization agenda, and they do long-term planning.” In the Trump
years, Wayland added, utilities were “setting goals absent federal policy.”
At
the same time, a recent study from the Rhodium
Group found that though the US is indeed on target to hit the
Obama-era emissions goals, that hasn’t happened purely because of the good
intentions of American business and industry. The Rhodium Group study found
that the Covid-19 pandemic suddenly grinding the economy to a halt led to a
10.3 percent drop in US greenhouse gas emissions in 2020.
“With
coronavirus vaccines now in distribution, we expect economic activity to pick
up again in 2021, but without meaningful structural changes in the carbon
intensity of the US economy, emissions will likely rise again as well,” the
Rhodium Group study concluded. In other words, the federal government can’t
count on businesses to do the right thing. It needs to set the tone moving
forward.
Biden’s
promise to modernize the electrical grid and invest in cleaner sources of
energy is welcome to some industry groups and leaders, but there are many more
who oppose the push. Oil and gas groups are not happy, and some unions are uneasy about
what the transition could mean for workers who have made more, on average, from
fossil fuel jobs.
The
2019 median annual wage for solar photovoltaic installers was $44,890,
according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
while the median annual wage for wind turbine service technicians was $52,910.
Comparatively, jobs in the fossil fuel power sector pay between $70,310
and $81,460, and tend to be more heavily unionized compared to the emerging
clean energy sector.
“In
order for us to get where all of us want to go, we have to bring everyone along
with us,” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka told Vox
recently. “We can’t just jettison people. That’s the transition we have to
strike, and I think this administration understands that transition.
“When
people talk about climate, I think jobs,” Biden said during his Thursday
speech. “Within our climate response lies an extraordinary engine of job
creation and economic opportunity ready to be fired up.”
A
somewhat unlikely climate champion after years as a political moderate, Biden
came into office with a number of big climate and clean energy goals. On his
first day in office, he reentered the US into the Paris climate agreement and
issued a flurry of executive orders to
accelerate the transition off fossil fuels, protect biodiversity, and address
environmental injustice.
To
underscore America’s renewed commitment, Biden this week announced an ambitious
new nationally determined contribution (NDC). Actually getting there will
require a massive transformation of the US economy toward clean energy and a
big investment in electric vehicles.
This
very concept — rerouting the American economy to be powered by wind, solar, nuclear, and other
renewables — is the big idea in Biden’s economic vision. He’s pledged 100
percent of America’s energy to be carbon-free by 2035, and his infrastructure and jobs plan calls for a
clean electricity standard, tax credits to accelerate wind and solar
development, and $174 billion to be put into electric vehicle infrastructure
alone.
The
Deepwater Wind offshore wind farm at Block Island in Rhode Island on August 14,
2016. Mark Harrington/Newsday RM via Getty Images
But
Biden also has a challenging road ahead in actually implementing this policy;
he needs Congress to pass it. He can certainly direct his agencies to tighten
vehicle emission standards and use the power of federal procurement to help get
the US there, but passing his infrastructure plan is crucial for reaching the
goals.
“That
one package doesn’t make or break the 50 percent target,” Nathan Hultman, the director of the University of Maryland’s
Center on Global Sustainability, told Vox. But “it’s certainly extraordinarily
helpful. There’s no doubt.”
Negotiations
are already underway on Biden’s infrastructure plan, and the next few months
could determine exactly how bold the US goes on clean energy. But Biden’s
pledge was a good start. —Ella Nilsen
Winner: Climate activists
It’s
hard to imagine President Biden choosing to hold this summit or to center his economic agenda
on climate change without the persistent pressure of a wide
range of climate activists — young and old, in the US and around the world. In
the past few years, they have doggedly and persuasively demanded that world
leaders increase their ambition and follow through on climate plans.
Biden’s
climate summit and the new pledges are examples of the success of applying that
pressure.
The breakout
star of Biden’s climate summit is 19-year-old climate justice activist and
organizer with Fridays for Future Xiye Bastida. In fiery remarks delivered
during a session on climate solutions, Bastida, who
relocated to New York from Mexico with her family at the age of 11 when they
were displaced by drought and floods, demanded governments act decisively using
the tools available to end the climate emergency.
RELATED
Youth climate activists are
back with new, sharper demands for countries and corporations
When
pushed to address Bastida’s concerns at a press conference following the
summit, climate envoy Kerry said President Biden’s climate summit is a big step
in the right direction. “Is it enough? No. But it’s the best we can do today.”
Bastida
clearly had made an impression. Speaking at a White House press conference
later on Thursday, Kerry described her impassioned plea as “profoundly
meaningful” and “moving.”
“That’s
where a lot of the younger generation is today, appropriately,” Kerry said.
“Pretty upset at the adults — the alleged adults — who are not getting their
act together to make happen what needs to happen.”
In the
US, the Sunrise Movement is sure to continue to push the Biden
administration to scale up its infrastructure plan. And activists
around the world will maintain pressure on world leaders in the buildup to
COP26 in Glasgow. —Jariel Arvin
Loser: John Kerry’s faith in markets
US
climate envoy John Kerry is enormously optimistic about what’s happening in the
private sector around clean energy.
Talking
to reporters at a Thursday White House briefing, Kerry said that even if
another Trump-like politician comes along with regressive climate policies, it
won’t necessarily matter. His reasoning? The market is trending too much toward
clean energy to go back.
“No
politician, no matter how demagogic or how potent and capable they are, is
going to be able to change what that market is doing, because it will have
moved,” Kerry said, pointing in particular to the heavy demand for Tesla’s
electric cars in the US. “It’ll have four years of entrenchment. And those jobs
will be there.”
This
is not the first time Kerry’s faith in markets has come up. In remarks to the
Institute of International Finance, Kerry said he believed “no
government is going to solve this problem” of climate change, adding,
“Solutions are going to come from the private sector.”
Special
Presidential Envoy for Climate and former Secretary of State John Kerry waits
for the beginning of day two of the virtual Leaders Summit on Climate at the
East Room of the White House April 23, 2021, in Washington, DC. Anna
Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images
Kerry
has good reason to feel this way. The cost of renewable energy has fallen sharply
over the past few years; it’s now cheaper than fossil fuels.
“The
costs have plummeted quite rapidly, they’ve gone faster than expected,” Hultman told Vox. “You actually have a lot of choices that
are clean, at the same cost, [or] sometimes lower costs than alternate, dirtier
technologies.”
Loser (reiterated): John Kerry’s faith in
markets (again!)
But
Kerry’s faith in the private sector as the silver bullet is somewhat naive. The
private sector is an important partner to meet ambitious climate goals, but it
will also take serious investment across all levels of government to get there.
Having
lived through the Trump years, members of the Biden administration seem very
aware that progress can be short-lived. They want to get shovels in the ground
on projects and build out physical infrastructure like 500,000 electric vehicle
charging stations, offshore wind turbines, and solar farms before another US
leader tries to go in the opposite direction.
Furthermore,
the market forces at play now happened in part due to government intervention.
Investment and production tax credits in President Obama’s 2009 stimulus
bill spurred tremendous development in
renewables. The low cost of solar panels didn’t happen in a vacuum. “It was
driven, at every stage, by smart public policy,” Dave Roberts wrote for Vox in
2015.
The
private sector can be an important partner in combating climate change. But
plenty of experts warn it needs strong signals from the highest levels of
government, and it can’t be implicitly trusted to do the right thing. —EN
Loser: The coal industry
One
message came out loud and clear from the summit: In a world committed to
climate action, government support for coal power is rapidly waning.
In
the United States, where the coal industry is being pushed out of the market by
cheaper energy sources, there are 191 plants still
operating. To hit Biden’s target of reducing greenhouse gas pollution by 50
percent, it’s likely that all of them will have to shutter before 2030. That is
the conclusion of multiple studies on the paths to reach Biden’s goal,
including from the environmental groups Environmental Defense Fund and Natural Resources Defense
Council, the research groups Energy Innovation and Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, and the coalition America Is All In.
According
to Energy Innovation, “Without eliminating coal emissions by 2030, achieving US
emission reductions in line with a 50 percent reduction is impossible.” Even
the United Mine Workers, the major labor group representing coal miners, has
acknowledged that reality by embracing Biden’s
infrastructure package — and a transition to clean energy — in the days leading
up to the summit.
His
plan already asks Congress to pass a national clean energy standard that would
raise utilities’ renewable targets and ratchet down their coal and gas
dependency by a deadline of 2035. And his EPA is already working to
prepare new power plant regulations that take the place of the Obama-era Clean
Power Plan and the weak Trump rule that the courts struck down.
But
coal’s decline hasn’t been as swift in many other parts of the world, where
renewable energy and natural gas have been slower to replace it. In major
economies like China, India, Japan, and Indonesia, governments have continued
to rely on coal — and finance the development of new plants overseas.
RELATED
Why China is still clinging to
coal
That’s
why several new commitments to phase out coal consumption and financing at the
summit are so notable. China’s
President Xi reiterated his country’s goal to hit peak pollution sometime
before 2030 but elaborated for the first time on a specific timeline for the
coal industry. In China’s next five-year economic plan, from 2026 to 2030, it
would “strictly limit” the
increase in its consumption of coal, he said. Another major announcement came
from South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who said the country would cut off
all overseas financing of
coal.
None
of this means coal will disappear overnight. But major world leaders signaling
the demise of coal and coal financing is a clear sign the fuel is becoming a
smaller fraction of the world’s energy mix. —Rebecca Leber
Winner: Countries rich in tropical forests
Even
as economies slowed last year from the pandemic, tropical deforestation
worldwide paced ahead — jumping 12 percent,
compared to 2019. And that number came with a big toll on the climate: carbon
emissions equal to roughly double the annual tailpipe emissions of cars in the
US, according to the World
Resources Institute. A large chunk of those emissions can be tied to
Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Bolivia, which saw the highest
rates of deforestation last year.
Enter
a new coalition, launched Thursday, that
seeks to funnel at least $1 billion in payments to countries that show they’re
preventing tropical deforestation and its associated emissions. The US,
Britain, and Norway are driving the effort along with a number of major
corporations, including Amazon, Nestlé, Unilever, and Salesforce, forming what
the group called “one of the largest ever public-private efforts to help
protect tropical forests.”
“Bringing
together government and private-sector resources is a necessary step in
supporting the large-scale efforts that must be mobilized to halt deforestation
and begin to restore tropical and subtropical forests,” Kerry said in a
statement when the group, known as the Lowering Emissions by Accelerating
Forest Finance Coalition (LEAF), was announced Thursday.
ATTACHMENT
THREE – from L.E.A.F.
THE LEAF COALITION
The
Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest finance (LEAF) Coalition aims to mobilize at
least $1 billion in financing, kicking off what is expected to become one of
the largest ever public-private efforts to protect tropical forests, to the
benefit of billions of people depending on them, and to support sustainable
development.
Coordinated
by assorted corporate sponsors. See link
above for list.
The importance of forests
Tropical
forests around the world are under threat. The world lost more than 10 million
hectares of primary tropical forest cover last year, an area roughly the size of
Switzerland. Ending tropical and subtropical forest loss by 2030 is a crucial
part of meeting global climate, biodiversity and sustainable development
goals. Protecting tropical forests offers one of the biggest opportunities
for climate action in the coming decade.
Harnessing public and private action
The
LEAF Coalition can help reverse the trend by providing unprecedented financial
support to tropical forest governments implementing forest protection,
contributing to green and resilient growth through sustainable investments. The
LEAF Coalition empowers tropical and subtropical forest countries to move more
rapidly towards ending deforestation, while supporting them in achieving their
Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement.
Reductions in emissions are made across entire countries or large states and
provinces (“jurisdictions”) through programs that involve all key stakeholders,
including Indigenous peoples and local communities.
Read and download
the full press release here.
Why is LEAF the right approach?
Working at scale
Engaging tropical forest countries and states to reduce
deforestation on a jurisdictional level and supporting their investments in
sustainable development
Robust social
protections
Ensuring the full and effective participation of local
and Indigenous peoples in line with the Cancun Safeguards
Raising ambition
Private sector support is in addition to, not instead
of, deep cuts in their own value chains in line with science-based emission
reduction targets
Environmental
integrity
Using the independent and rigorous ART/TREES standard
to ensure uncompromising environmental and social integrity
Results based
finance
Payments made by public and private sectors for
demonstrated results that increase the speed and scale of forest protection
Mobilizing finance
Catalysing private capital at scale, providing an avenue for
companies to go beyond individual efforts to support global action
How it works
1 Jurisdictions reduce deforestation through national or
sub-national scale forest protection programs
2. Emission
Reductions (ERs) verified and issued by ART
3. Transaction of ART credits from jurisdictions
purchased or paid for via intermediary after diligence and internal approvals
4. ERs will transact at a minimum price of $10 per ER
via intermediary, as applicable
5. Funds channelled to jurisdictions according
to fund management best practice
ATTACHMENTS FOUR
(A), (B) and (C) – FROM the national review
ATTACHMENT FOUR
(A)
BIDEN’S UNSERIOUS
CLIMATE SUMMIT
PResident Joe Biden is convening a “virtual climate summit” — which
is a very fancy thing to call a conference call — to be addressed by Xi Jinping
and Vladimir Putin, among others. It comes as Biden announces a fuzzy plan to
reduce U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by more than half by the end of the decade
(details to come . . . eventually) while congressional Democrats led by
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Senator Ed Markey (D.,
Mass.) offer up a plan to put 1.5 million Democratic activists on the federal
payroll by creating a “Civilian Climate Corps.”
It would be difficult to organize all of this by order
of seriousness, though the character of the Civilian Climate Corps proposal is
suggested by Senator Markey’s infomercial-style salesmanship, promising that
the program would “combat the interlocking crises of the moment — climate
change, racial injustice, a global pandemic, and income inequality.” One
expects him to promise that it doubles as a salad spinner and makes fresh-pressed
juice, too. This is the classic Democrat approach to complex problems: “Give us
money to give to the people who support us politically.” On the issue of
climate, we can expect this approach to produce the same great results it has
achieved with the public schools in St. Louis.
Senator Markey is an unserious man. Xi Jinping is a
serious one. (Vladimir Putin is serious, as two-bit gangsters go, but one gets
the feeling the Russians are included in this sort of thing mainly for old
times’ sake.) Xi’s regime is, among other things, an operator of concentration
camps, but China’s maximum leader would like the world to believe that he and
his country stand for global cooperation — and, further, that his government
should be entrusted with a more prominent role in global leadership. Speaking
at the Boao Forum for Asia this week, Xi (without directly mentioning the United States) put the
Biden administration on notice that his government will oppose American-led
efforts “to arrogantly instruct others and interfere in internal affairs.” He
warned about “unilateralism” and against a “new cold war and ideological
confrontation.”
The climate-change debate creates an opportunity for
Xi, because on the issue there is a real divide between the United States and
our allies in Europe and Japan, and — even more useful to Xi — a deep divide on
the issue within the United States, where climate change is, like practically
every other issue, wrapped up in a broader culture-war contest. Hence, Senator
Markey’s rhetorical linkage of the climate question to racial and economic
issues. By turning up the heat, so to speak, on the climate debate, Biden may
be fortifying his left flank, but he is putting the country in a worse position
by making it even easier for Xi et al. to exploit our internal and
international cleavages.
·
Is Climate Change More
Important Than Genocide?
·
Yes, Climate-Change Activists
Want to Ban Hamburgers
The climate radicalism of Ocasio-Cortez and of the
Biden administration itself is mostly a radicalism of rhetoric and posture. If
the goal is to radically reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in a way that
mitigates climate change some decades down the road, then creating a jobs
program for Democratic activists is not a meaningful proposal. It is simply a
way to raid the treasury while linking the political priorities of the moment
of New Deal nostalgia. The fact that it is unserious does not mean that it
cannot do both political and economic damage in the real world, if it is
pursued with sufficient vengeance. One suspects that Chairman Xi understands
that even if President Biden doesn’t quite.
Biden’s Vindictive
Capital-Gains Tax Hike
Russia Challenge Remains Even
as Ukraine Crisis Abates
Vaccination Is Our Ticket Out
of the Pandemic
If we could set aside the culture war for a half a
minute, we might discover some points of cooperation. For example, the U.S.
electricity-generating sector has significantly improved its greenhouse-gas
profile in recent years, not because it was visited by bright young things
employed by a Civilian Climate Corps but thanks to — prepare to clutch your
pearls — fracking. Natural gas is a much cleaner fuel than coal from a
carbon-emissions point of view, and an abundance of inexpensive natural gas
enabled normal economic forces to act in the green interest. We could be
exporting enormous quantities of the stuff to the rest of the world, helping to
displace coal power with cleaner gas power while doing precisely what it is
Senator Markey and his congressional allies say they want to do at home:
creating good jobs. But that would require, among other things, infrastructure,
from pipelines and storage facilities to new export terminals on the West
Coast. Private investors are ready to build these at their own expense, but the
Biden administration and its allies stand in the way of this and other practical
measures that have a chance at producing both consensus and results. Neither
“Green New Deal” radicalism nor puffed-up summitry credibly promises as much.
Biden can sign a piece of paper and say the United
States is back in the Paris Agreement, but this will amount to nothing until
and unless we can come up with a set of policies rooted in a broad and
bipartisan internal consensus. Unlike Xi, Biden has to take
into account domestic disagreement, both about the content of climate
policy and the priority that should be given to the issue. New Deal nostalgia
and the quasi-religious approach to climate change cultivated by progressive
activists is not going to get the job done — in fact, it is going to make
things worse.
Which is to say, if Joe Biden wants to be a world
leader on climate, then he has to begin by being a leader at home, taking an
intellectually and politically serious approach to building consensus on
climate policy. There is very little reason to believe that he is inclined to
do so or even capable of doing so. Instead, he is committed to governing by
talking point and symbolism. It is unlikely that he will ever do as much
practical good on climate change as Elon Musk or George Mitchell.
Xi genuinely wants to be seen as a leader on climate —
not out of any gauzy green sentimentality but because it suits his own
interests. At the top of his to-do list is supplanting the United States as a
world leader by exploiting discord in Washington and between the United States
and its allies. Secretary of State Antony Blinken
talks often about “the need to engage China from a position of strength,” which
is truistic, but — where’s the strength?
About that, and much else, Biden is a bit vague.
ATTACHMENT FOUR (B)
JOE BIDEN’S CLIMATE DENIALISM
In anticipation of Thursday’s virtual Leaders Summit
on Climate, a two-day global gathering of more than 40 world leaders, President
Joe Biden declared that the
United States had a “moral imperative” to adopt an “ambitious” goal of cutting
greenhouse-gas emissions by 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 and 100 percent
by 2050.
Such an effort, if we were serious about it, would
entail massive destruction of wealth, a surrender of our international trade
advantages, the creation of a hugely intrusive state-run bureaucracy at home,
the inhibition of free markets that have helped make the world a cleaner place,
and a precipitous drop in the living standards of most citizens — especially
the poor.
Of course, it should be said that those who oppose the
expansion of fracking and nuclear energy — most elected Democrats, it seems —
aren’t even remotely serious about “tackling” carbon emissions, anyway. Around
80 percent of American energy is generated by fossil
fuels and nuclear right now. Around 20 percent is generated by “renewables” —
predominantly wind and hydropower (which is unavailable in most places). Only
around 2 percent of our portfolio consists of inefficient and unreliable solar
power — this, even after decades of subsidies and mandates.
·
Joe Biden’s Executive
Incoherence
·
Biden’s Trillion-Dollar Train
Wreck
·
Uncle Sam Does Not Belong in
Girls’ Dorms or Showers
It’s always funny to hear people speak about solar
panels as if they were some sort of cutting-edge technology. The discovery of
the photovoltaic effect goes back to 1888. President Jimmy Carter declared a
national “Sun Day” in 1978 and put 30 solar panels atop the White House. One of
those panels is now on display at
the Science and Technology Museum in China — not only the top producer of solar
panels and carbon emissions, but also the nation that would most benefit from
the United States’ unilateral economic capitulation.
To reach Biden’s goal, the United States would need to
envelop most of the nation in panels and windmills, and then rely on enormous
Gaian prayer circles — may she grant us sunshine and gale-force winds. We would
be compelled to eliminate most air travel and cars — making new ones produces
lots of carbon emissions — and retrofit every home, factory, warehouse, and
building in America to utilize this type of energy. We would need to
dramatically cut back on our meat and dairy intake as well.
“The signs are unmistakable, the science undeniable,”
Biden claimed. “Cost of inaction keeps mounting.” Now, I realize that people
repeat these contentions with religious zeal, but the evidence is
extraordinarily weak. For one thing, there is action. Market innovations keep
creating efficiencies all the time. For another, we live in the healthiest,
most equitable, most prosperous, most safe, and most peaceful era in human
existence. Affordable fossil fuels have done more to eliminate poverty than all
the redistributionist programs ever concocted. By nearly every quantifiable
measure, the environment is also in better shape now than it was 20, 30, or
even 50 years ago. A lot of that is grounded by an economy that relies on
affordable energy. Also, though every weather-related event is framed in a
cataclysmic way, not that long ago, being killed by the
climate was serious concern for most people. Today, it is incredibly rare.
Progressives, however, regularly maintain that we are
facing an existential crisis. One might point out that science’s predictive
abilities on climate have been atrocious. But, really, these days, “science” is
nothing but a cudgel to push leftist policy prescriptions with little
consideration for tradeoffs, reality, or morality.
The Malthusian fanaticism that’s been normalized in
our political rhetoric is also denialism. “Science,” as the media and political
class now practice it, has become little more than a means of generating
apprehension and fear about progress. It is the denial of the modern technology and competitive markets
which continue to allow human beings to adapt to organic and anthropogenic
changes in the environment. Even people who mimic doomsday rhetoric seem to
understand this intuitively. The average American says they are willing to spend up
to $177 a year to avoid climate change, not the approximately $177,000,000 per
person it would cost to set arbitrary dates to get rid of a carbon-energy
economy.
The choice we’re given now pits a thriving open
economy against an economy weighed down by centralized (and unratified)
worldwide climate-change treaties such as the Paris Agreement that put little
burden on growing economies such as China and India, and all of it on you.
What does that burden look like? After shutting down a
large chunk of its economy in 2020, and spending trillions to keep those
affected afloat and avert a depression, the United States emissions only fell by 13 percent. Imagine what 50
percent might entail. When confronted with these nagging specifics, we often
hear how these are aspirational goals. Why would we aspire to make life worse
for billions of people?
AND… ATTACHMENT FOUR (C)
YES, CLIMATE-CHANGE ACTIVISTS
WANT TO BAN HAMBURGERS
We’ve been hearing about the importance of eliminating
meat for a long time, no matter what the media say today.
The media like to play this neat trick in which they highlight
some conservative hyperbole about Democrats, and then pretend the entire
underlying concern that motivated discussion of the topic is nothing but a wild
conspiracy theory cooked up in a vacuum.
Take the issue of meat.
“Biden is not coming for Americans’ Big Macs, chicken
wings or bacon,” the Washington Post informs us. CNN ran
one of their typically idiotic chyrons yesterday: “BIDEN PREPS
ADDRESS TO NATION AS GOP CONSPIRACISTS SPREAD FALSE CLAIMS ON MASK-WEARING,
BEEF AND BOOKS TO ATTACK HIM.” All of this concern was prompted by a Daily Mail story suggesting
Joe Biden would need to limit America’s meat consumption to meet his
climate-change goals.
However, Biden’s climate-change goal of
cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by 100 percent from 2005 levels isn’t achievable
without severely restricting factory farming. As a recent Science study found, food-system emissions alone
make the Paris Agreement’s target limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius
unreachable. And Biden argues that his climate plan exceeds those targets.
“Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on
Earth,” another Science study
tells us, per the Guardian.
Of course, while the media gaslight on the issue,
we’ve been hearing about the importance of eliminating meat for a long time.
For a decade now, the United Nations has been urging a
global meat-and-dairy-free diet. The topic has been one of the hobbyhorses of
left-wing political outlets like Vox. “Let’s Launch a Moonshot for
Meatless Meat,” popular New York Times columnist Ezra
Klein proposed last
week. In a 2018 documentary of Jonathan Safran Foer’s bestselling anti-meat
book, Eating Animals, co-narrator Natalie Portman explains the
immorality of consuming meat.
Bill Gates’s recent book is titled How to
Avoid a Climate Disaster. Reviewers lauded the book’s “effective
approaches” and “its bracing mix of cold-eyed realism and number-crunched
optimism.” The Associated Press says the book is a “calm, reasoned,
well-sourced explanation” on how society can deal with a crisis of survival.
One of the main ideas in the book is a severe cutback on meat and dairy. “I do
think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef,” Gates explains. “You can get
used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste
even better over time.”
In 2019, CNN put on a Dantesque
town hall to talk about the “climate crisis.” Here’s how the network described it in one
of its pieces:
For a whopping seven hours, 10 Democratic
candidates for president on Wednesday outlined what they would do to
address the earth’s changing climate.
One issue that sizzled: Beef
production.
It’s peculiar that such an esoteric topic, supposedly
the purview of conservative conspiracists, should come up so prominently on the
network. The CNN reporter offers quotes from various candidates opposing any
legal restrictions on meat consumption, but then decides not to quote an
exchange in which Erin Burnett asks the future vice president, Kamala Harris,
if she would “reduce red meat specifically.”
Her answer: “Yes, I would.”
Then, of course, the Green New Deal’s goals — embraced by the
Biden administration as the aspiration for its own policies — include the
long-term hope of getting rid of “farting cows.” Now, granted, I’m not a
farmer, but my assumption is that most bovine engage in this activity. The
Green New Deal plan also calls for “farmers and ranchers to create a
sustainable, pollution and greenhouse gas free, food system that ensures
universal access to healthy food.”
Further, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Urges Kids to Save
the Planet by Ditching Meat and Dairy,” is not a headline cooked up in the
imagination of conservatives. The
congresswoman says, “Maybe we shouldn’t be eating a hamburger for breakfast,
lunch and dinner. Like, let’s keep it real.”
Is Ocasio-Cortez a member of the Democratic Party in
good standing or is she someone we shouldn’t be taking seriously? Let us know.
Getting rid of “hamburgers” is not one of Biden’s
policy prescriptions. No one should claim otherwise. We are, however, in the
normalization stage of the meatless idea, an aspiration of most
environmentalists. That’s the goal. The media want to mock and gaslight those
who point out that restricting factory farming is a popular topic on the
progressive left — it reminds me of the games they play with “defund the
police” — because it’s still unpopular among most Americans. As with many
things, they want it both ways.
ATTACHMENT FIVE – FROM Vox
AMERICA IS MAKING
CLIMATE PROMISES AGAIN. SHOULD ANYONE CARE?
Policy,
not aspirations, will determine Biden’s legacy on climate change.
By David Roberts Apr
27, 2021, 3:20pm EDT
In
2015, when President Barack Obama signed the US on to the Paris climate agreement,
he did what all participating nations must do and made an emissions reductions
pledge: The US would reduce its emissions 26 to 28 percent from 2005 levels by
2025.
President
Donald Trump notoriously yanked the US out of the
Paris agreement. Now President Joe Biden is getting the US back in,
and once again, an emissions reductions pledge is required. Last Thursday,
Biden offered it: The
US will reduce emissions 50 to 52 percent from 2005
levels by 2030.
That
is not, contrary to some of the more enthusiastic headlines, a doubling of
Obama’s target or a halving of current emissions. It is a relatively modest
boost in ambition and a halving of 2005’s much higher emissions. (Vox’s Umair
Irfan has a great piece on this.)
The US is expected to announce a climate goal of cutting
emissions 50% below 2005 levels by 2030
One thing we need to clear up:
**This is not double the Obama-era pledge for 2025**
28% by 2025 is equivalent to ~38% by 2030
So 50% isn't even a one-third increase in ambition! pic.twitter.com/1u5rHkVT7P
—
Simon Evans (@DrSimEvans) April 22, 2021
Nonetheless,
it is an ambitious target that would require sweeping changes across US
society, on which Biden’s infrastructure plan would
be a mere down payment.
What does it take for the US to cut greenhouse gas
emissions 50% below 2005 levels, as the Biden Adminstration
is expected to announce later this week? Researchers at UMD modeled one
pathway. Here's how it adds up. https://t.co/MODMHIGTK3 pic.twitter.com/pA5KR8I0Hh
— JesseJenkins (@JesseJenkins) April 22, 2021
I
suppose I should be excited about it, but reader, I must confess: I am not.
I
know that targets and pledges serve an important signaling function. They
communicate intentions within countries — when they come from states,
provinces, cities, or companies — and between them, in the context of
international climate relations. They “send a message.” Sometimes, a
particularly bold target or pledge will even go so far as to “change the
conversation.”
But
messages and conversations do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Policies
reduce emissions, by driving changes in behavior, and targets and pledges are
not policies. They are vouchers, promises to pass policies in the future. They
are wrapping paper. It’s the policy inside that matters.
In
part because it has involved so much talk and so little action, climate
politics has always been preoccupied with symbolism, with grand gestures,
statements of intent, coalitions, declarations, and treaties — words, words,
words. But history will judge Biden not by how much he cares or what he says, but
by which policies and investments his administration and Democrats in Congress
put in place, how they are implemented and enforced, the emission reductions
they produce, and whether they lead to further policy.
There’s
a better-than-average chance that
Democrats will lose the House in the 2022 midterm elections, and with it the
ability to legislate. They may have nothing but the next 18 months in which to
make their mark on the country’s near future. There is precious little time to
spend on symbolism.
Despite
their centrality in international climate negotiations, especially in the Paris
climate agreement, it’s not clear that national carbon targets have much effect
on the national emissions of the countries that offer them. The history of the
Paris agreement so far is one of escalating targets without the domestic
policies needed to reach them.
It
seems there is enough domestic political will in most countries to force
policymakers to promise the moon, but not enough to force through the tangible
policy changes that would fulfill those promises.
Time to update my chart on Canada's miserable history on
climate targets. I don't yet have 2020 emissions data (likely a temporary drop
of around 10%), but Canada is still projected to miss its Paris pledge by
15-20% under current policy. pic.twitter.com/CA0nfXmpbm
—
Dr. Steve Easterbrook (@SMEasterbrook) March 28, 2021
The
new US climate pledge is unlikely to be exempt from this general rule. It
boasts four features that it shares with many other national targets across the
world, which reveal why targets are such an unreliable guide to action or
results.
First, it isn’t enough. US Special
Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry has acknowledged as much.
Given that the US is the largest historical emitter and has arguably benefited
more from dumping carbon into the atmosphere than any other country, activists argue that
it should be aiming for something more like a 70 percent reduction by 2030,
with a ramp-up of assistance for developing countries to decarbonize.
Second, it almost certainly promises more than US
national politics can deliver. It certainly promises more than Biden can
deliver. Even assuming he is reelected in 2024 and serves through 2028 without
being impeached or overthrown by a lawless Republican opposition, to reach the
target, he will need the cooperation of Congress and the courts.
He
does not have control of either. And both are heavily weighted in favor of a
revanchist reactionary minority that does not want to reduce
fossil fuel use or submit to international agreements.
Biden’s
pledge reflects the worldview and intentions of the Democratic majority that
gave him 7 million more votes in the
2020 election. It reflects the intentions of Democrat-led
states, hundreds of cities, more than 100 companies, thousands of
researchers and entrepreneurs, and thousands more civic, academic, and
scientific institutions. It reflects the global scientific and political
consensus.
But
in the context of US politics, it reflects the will of a party that is likely
to lose control of Congress in
2022. Even in the best-case scenario, it won’t hold Congress all the
way through 2030. It can’t help but rely, for any 2030 goal, on some help from
Republicans — which it can’t rely on and certainly can’t promise to the
international community.
Third, it is not connected to any policymaking
levers. It doesn’t make anything happen or bind anyone to anything.
Biden will surely try to reduce emissions, but there’s no reason to believe
he’ll try any harder, or be capable of any more, in the wake of this pledge
than he was before it.
That’s
why the US debate (such as it is) over the Paris agreement has always been so
surreal. Trump said all kinds of deranged things about
Obama’s pledge, including that it would shut down whole industries and cause
blackouts and destroy the oil industry.
In
fact, America’s Paris pledge won’t do anything. It doesn’t trigger any policy
process. There’s no penalty for not meeting the target. The only enforcement
mechanism is the opinion of other nations.
This
was the entire premise of the Paris
agreement: Rather than agreeing to a legally binding target, which
had been pursued fruitlessly for decades, countries offer voluntary pledges for
how much they believe they can reduce emissions. Every five years there is an
international “stock take,” wherein countries report their progress.
Presumably, they don’t want to report failure, so the public pledge creates
some pressure.
But
it’s only pressure. It’s not policy. Policy involves a whole separate process,
subject to the dynamics and restrictions of domestic politics, over which
international agreements have very little sway.
Fourth,
even with a compliant Congress, Biden’s
climate policies can’t guarantee any particular target. In reality, the
only policy that could truly guarantee a particular emission target is a
loophole-free, legally enforceable, economy-wide, declining cap on carbon — a
policy that does not exist anywhere in the world.
National
Democrats aren’t even aiming for cap and trade anymore, anyway. They are
pushing standards, investments, and
justice (SIJ), the elements of old-school industrial policy.
The kinds of investments and incentives Biden would put in place would reduce
emissions, but there’s no way to know (certainly not a decade in advance)
exactly how much they would reduce emissions. The specificity of Biden’s
target, and all similar targets, is faux.
Targets can have a useful role in signaling intent and
convince others to adopt more ambitious measures. At the same time, there’s a
disconnect between the types of industrial policies that the Biden
administration is pursuing and the specificity implied by the 2030 target.
ATTACHMENT
SIX – from the New York
Times
LEADERSHIP
MATTERS |
From Al Drago, NYT: When I was last in China, in 2019, I
met an entrepreneur named Gao Jifan, who told me a
story that I’ve been reflecting on during President Biden’s climate summit
this week. |
Back in the 1990s, Gao
received a letter from an old friend who was living in the United States. The
letter included a photo clipped from a newspaper, showing President Bill
Clinton as he announced a plan
to outfit one million homes with solar power. |
“It was like a light
bulb,” Gao recalled, as we were sitting in his office in Changzhou, about 100
miles northwest of Shanghai. Clinton’s initiative caused Gao — a chemist by
training — to think that he should start a company to meet the coming demand
for solar equipment. That company, Trina Solar, has since
made Gao a billionaire. |
For the inspiration, Gao
is grateful to the U.S. But he is also befuddled by the American approach to
climate change. |
“There is really
conflicting policy,” he said. He rattled off the names of recent presidents —
Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump — and moved his hand back and forth, to
describe the sharp policy changes from
one to the next. Those changes, he added, had hurt the solar industry and
other clean-energy efforts: If the U.S. took a more consistent approach, the
global struggle to slow climate change would be easier. |
A ‘lost four years’ |
Many Americans have come
to believe a different story — namely, that U.S. climate policy hardly
matters compared with the actions of China, India and other countries that
account for a growing share of emissions. As some congressional Republicans
have been asking this week, why should the U.S. act to slow climate change
unless other countries do so first? |
But that view is not
consistent with history, either the recent history of climate diplomacy or
the broader history of American influence. |
“There aren’t many other areas of
policy where we say, ‘Why don’t we let everyone else lead, and we’ll
follow?’” as Nathaniel Keohane of the Environmental Defense Fund says. The
U.S., for all its problems, remains the world’s most powerful country. When
it wants to influence the policies of other countries, it can often do so,
especially when those countries see it as being in their own interests to
change. |
Climate is just such an issue. Leaders
of many other countries understand that climate change and extreme weather
can cause problems for them. The leaders also see clean energy as a growing
industry and want their companies to be leaders. |
The U.S. can’t simply dictate terms.
Both China and India, for example, will remain more reliant on coal than
Biden administration officials wish. But the U.S. can often have an effect.
Relative to many other issues, in fact, climate diplomacy is sometimes
easier: President Xi Jinping has largely rejected U.S. entreaties on Hong
Kong, Xinjiang and the South China Sea, but he has been willing to deal on
climate change. |
President Barack Obama
and Xi came to multiple agreements that involved both countries moving to
reduce emissions. They started small, with the relatively narrow topic of
refrigerants, and expanded from there.
As my colleague Brad Plumer says, “There’s a reasonable argument the Obama
administration’s and China’s joint agreement on climate change in 2014 helped
set the table for the Paris climate agreement.” |
Crucial to these efforts
was a U.S. willingness to act at home: It’s much easier to agree to take
economic risks when your main global competitor is doing the same. And the
U.S. still leads the world in per-person
emissions, about 75 percent above China, according to recent
numbers. |
The Trump administration
slowed global efforts on climate change by dismissing it as a threat and
allowing more pollution at home. A Chinese official last week mocked the U.S.
for “the lost four years.” The Biden administration is now trying to reverse
course, with an emissions-reduction goal that’s larger than many advocates
expected. |
The cynical view — that
the U.S. can only follow, not lead, on climate policy — has it backward. As
Gao told me, one of the biggest obstacles to progress on climate change has
been the lack of consistent American leadership. |
ATTACHMENTS
SEVEN (A) and (B)
ATTACHMENT
SEVEN (A) – from Vox
BIDEN’S FAKE
BURGER BAN AND THE RISING CULTURE WAR OVER MEAT
Biden’s
not taking away your meat, as Republicans claimed this weekend. But partisan conflict
over eating animals is just getting started.
By Zack
Beauchamp Updated Apr 26, 2021, 3:47pm EDT
Over
the weekend, Republicans accused Joe Biden of trying to ban meat.
The
claim, which you’ve heard from the likes of Donald Trump Jr.
and Texas Gov. Greg Abbot,
is that Biden’s climate plan will
prohibit Americans from chowing down on burgers in an effort to limit
greenhouse gas emissions associated with industrial agriculture.
On
Fox News this Friday, former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow warned
of a Fourth of July where “you can throw back a plant-based beer with your
grilled Brussels sprouts” (Kudlow doesn’t seem to be aware of what beer is made from).
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) dubbed Biden “The Hamburglar.”
Of course,
Biden’s climate change plan does not limit meat-eating in
any way. A Washington Post fact-check traced
the burger-banning Biden myth back to a misleading article in the Daily Mail, a UK
tabloid known for sensationalist coverage and right-wing politics. Biden’s
actual climate policies so far have focused on reducing emissions from cars
and power plants, with no effort to block meat production or
consumption.
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Biden administration’s unprecedented burst of policymaking. Sign up to receive our newsletter each Friday.
At
first blush, this is yet another instance of a fake outrage cycle in the
right-wing echo chamber pegged to a lie. But there’s something more distressing
here too — it’s the latest example of how efforts to curb the climate crisis
and our reliance on meat are becoming just the latest flashpoints in our
all-consuming culture wars.
The
grain of truth in the Republican claims (agri-pun
intended) is that any serious climate change plan needs to do something about
meat production. A recent paper in Science, a leading academic
journal, found that food-related emissions alone put
the Paris climate agreement’s warming target of 1.5 degrees Celsius out of
reach. The most effective way to address these emissions, according to the
paper’s authors, is a global shift away from meat consumption.
Biden’s
climate policies so far have not advanced this goal, so those conservative
potshots over the weekend were lies. But here’s the thing: Biden’s plan
absolutely should do something about industrial farming. Any plan to tackle
climate change should do something to decrease America’s reliance on the meat
industry — moonshot subsidies for
lab-grown meat, for example.
But
everything nowadays is bound up in our political identities, and meat has a
cultural and economic significance few other things can match. Anything
Democrats propose to address the problem of animal agriculture’s emissions will
be — is already being — met by major backlash from the right.
Increasingly,
America’s meat-eating ways are being subsumed into our culture wars. It’s yet
another sign of how polarized our country is and how hard this polarization
makes tackling a catastrophic threat like climate change.
The anatomy of a meat smear
On
Thursday, the Daily Mail published an article with a
characteristically inflammatory headline: “How Biden’s climate plan could
limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH.”
The
use of the word “could” there is crucial, as the article’s content is entirely
speculative. It takes Biden’s recently announced climate
change targets — cutting 50-52 percent of America’s emissions
per month — and attempts to make projections about what policy changes might be
needed to reach that target. Though Mail reporter Emily Crane admits that Biden
“has yet to release any firm details on exactly how such a plan will affect the
daily lives of ordinary Americans,” she goes ahead and makes some sketchy
guesses.
“Americans
may have to cut their red meat consumption by a whopping 90 percent and cut
their consumption of other animal based foods in half,” Crane writes. “To do
that, it would require Americans to only consume about four pounds of red meat
per year, or 0.18 ounces per day. It equates to consuming roughly one average
sized burger per month.”
The
estimate is based on a University of Michigan paper on how much hypothetical diet
changes could reduce American climate emissions, which found that
the US could achieve a 51 percent reduction in food-related emissions by
reducing beef consumption by 90 percent and all other animal-based foods by 50
percent. But there is no evidence presented that the Michigan estimate is
informing Biden’s climate policy.
We
cannot assume that, in order to hit a 50 percent reduction overall, Biden would
attempt to reduce emissions in each sector of the economy by exactly 50
percent. The plans for the agricultural sector may end up being more or less than
that, and they may aim to accomplish them by means other than reducing domestic
meat consumption (like reducing the use of nitrogen in
plant agriculture). As the Mail itself admits, we genuinely have no
idea.
Despite
these flaws, the Mail’s article took off in the right-wing media world, with
many interpreting it as an actual summary of Biden’s policy aims. According
to the Post’s fact-check,
the most influential vector was Fox News, which made an easily shareable
infographic about “Biden’s climate requirements” that launders the Mail’s
misinformation as an authoritative claim about Biden’s plan stemming from the
University of Michigan itself.
On
Monday, Fox News’ John Roberts admitted
the error on-air: “a graphic and the script incorrectly implied it [the
Michigan study] was part of Biden’s plan for dealing with climate change. That
is not the case.” But it was too late: the graphic had already motivated of the
more prominent false claims on social media, with prominent conservatives
retweeting it as though it were accurate:
Not gonna happen in Texas! pic.twitter.com/zqYS9kH8CU
—
Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) April 25, 2021
I’m pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday.
That’s going to be a hard NO from me. https://t.co/wvGC19cN6R
—
Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) April 24, 2021
As
we’ve seen in the past, lies that circulate unchallenged in the right-wing media
ecosystem can sometimes harden into myths. Birtherism
and the Obamacare “death panel” rumors began as fringe claims pushed with
little to no factual basis; once amplified by conservative media, they
became widely embraced by the GOP base
and elements of the official Republican Party. The notion that the
2020 election was somehow stolen, while similarly factually challenged, spread even faster (largely
because its progenitor was also the incumbent president and party leader).
Because
so many conservatives distrust the mainstream media, fact-checks like the
Post’s are not going to change the Fox-Republican narrative. As Biden continues
to roll out his climate change policies, expect
some conservatives to say it bans beef — even if it does nothing of the kind.
The culture war over meat begins
Here’s
the problem, though: If Biden’s climate plan doesn’t do something about meat,
it’s probably going to fail.
Globally
speaking, livestock production represents a significant portion of
overall greenhouse gas emissions. The reasons for this are intrinsic
to meat production itself; there is no way for humans to consume meat in the
way we do without abetting catastrophic
warming.
Ruminant
animals like cows, kept in numbers much larger due to meat and dairy demand,
emit methane gas through their bodily functions —
a pollutant more potent than carbon dioxide. Raising allegedly more
climate-friendly meats, like chicken, also emits significantly more greenhouse
gases than plant-based protein productions. Animal agriculture
necessitates clearing huge amounts of land, a significant cause of
deforestation in places like Brazil’s Amazon.
Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), factory farms where animals
are crowded into tiny cages and
kept in horrific conditions, create massive feces lagoons that
intensify the methane problem.
There
is, in short, no way around the problem: If we want to keep climate change at a
manageable level, we need to change the way we produce and consume animal
products.
The
Biden administration may or may not eventually take steps to deal with this
problem. But the hysterical reaction to a falsehood that it is going to be
doing so suggests just how explosive the reaction will be if Biden actually
moves in this direction.
Both
in the United States and globally, meat’s
cultural significance is hard to overstate. Humans have eaten animals for
millennia, and it’s become deeply ingrained in our cultural rituals and
self-understanding. In America, meat is linked with masculinity and
ideals about the virtuous traditional American farmer — central concepts in a
Republican Party dominated by culturally conservative rural whites.
To
make matters worse, animal agriculture is also a huge business, meaning that
billions of dollars would likely line up behind pro-meat Republicans. A new
study reported by my colleague Sigal
Samuel found that animal agriculture industries have already spent
millions trying to undermine climate policy, when there’s been no federal
effort to intentionally reduce American meat consumption. Imagine how hard
they’d fight if there was one.
This
conjunction of forces — the cultural power of meat and the interests of Big
Agriculture — make the issue of reducing meat consumption politically
challenging.
When
a draft FAQ about the Green New Deal mentioned the problem of animal
methane emissions, conservatives responded by falsely claiming the
policy would ban cow production — seeing this as a potent attack line. There’s
a reason Biden’s team responded to the current rumors by tweeting a picture of Biden
grilling patties: This is a fight they don’t want to have directly.
Even
the most palatable meat alternatives, like lab-grown meat and Impossible-style
plant proteins, threaten both conservative self-images of America and the
bottom line of the agriculture industry. When current Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) ate at a plant-based vegan restaurant in
Atlanta during the 2020 campaign, his opponent David Purdue mocked him by
tweeting a picture of himself eating bacon. The
caption? “Pick your side, America.”
The
unstoppable force of climate change advocacy on the left is about to hit the
immovable object of attachment to meat on the right. The resulting fight will
implicate issues at the very core of American identity, a country where animal
agriculture is a major part of our mythologized cowboy past and economic
present.
With
the stakes so high, there’s every reason to believe that meat could be the next
big fight in our all-consuming culture war. “Biden bans burgers” isn’t a
one-off lie; we may look back on it as the meat wars’ Fort Sumter.
ATTACHMENT
SEVEN (B) – from the Daily
Mail, UK
By EMILY CRANE PUBLISHED: 18:08 EDT, 27 April 2021 | UPDATED: 00:42
EDT, 28 April 2021
Experts say
Americans WILL have to cut back on meat for the US to meet Biden's climate
change goal as president faces pressure to come clean on how he actually plans to
slash greenhouse emissions
·
Experts say
Americans will have to dramatically reduce their meat intake to avoid the most
severe climate change scenarios
·
President Biden
now faces mounting pressure to come clean on what his ambitious climate plan
means for agriculture and meat consumption in the US
·
Biden still hasn't
detailed how the lives of Americans will be impacted a week after announcing he
aims to slash greenhouse emissions by 50 to 52% by 2030
·
His hasn't
disclosed if if Americans will have to change their
diets to meet goals
·
Multiple
scientific studies and climate change campaigners have acknowledged eating
habits will need to be adjusted to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions
Americans will have no choice but to reduce meat
consumption if President Joe Biden is
going to slash greenhouse gas emissions by half in the next 10 years, experts
say - even if the president is mum so far on how he'll actually achieve that
goal.
Biden hasn't laid out a plan beyond the big number:
reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent from their 2005 levels by
2030.
To do that, experts say meat will have to be a target
because of the greenhouse gases emitted in producing and raising beef - especially
methane.
In the UK, for instance, the government has already
told its citizens they'll have to reduce meat intake by 20 percent for the
country to meet its climate goals.
Brent Kim, a Maryland-based expert at the Johns
Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, which researches food and climate issues,
told DailyMail.com that it was clear, based on evidence, that Americans would
have to reduce their meat and dairy intake if the US is to deal with climate
change.
'To avoid the most catastrophic climate change
scenarios, the evidence is clear that citizens in high-meat consuming countries
- such as the United States - need to dramatically reduce their meat and dairy
intake,' he said.
Kim acknowledged that Biden had yet to release a concrete
plan that involved cutting meat consumption, saying the president's goal
emphasizes the urgency of decarbonization, which is moving away from a
dependency on polluting fossil fuels.
Still, he said, government policies 'do influence what
Americans eat.'
President
Joe Biden has still not detailed how the lives of Americans will be
impacted a week after announcing that he is aiming to slash greenhouse
emissions by 50 to 52 percent from 2005 levels by 2030
'I'm not talking about banning certain foods or
force-feeding anyone broccoli… but our food choices don't occur within a
vacuum. For better or for worse, what Americans choose to eat is heavily
influenced by the availability of certain foods in their community, how much
they cost, and whether healthy plant-based options are offered in our schools
and institutions.
'These are all factors that are affected, directly or
indirectly, by local, state, and federal policy,' he said. 'So there is a strong
case to be made that when our tax dollars are being used to fund meals at
public institutions, for example, people should be given the option of choosing
healthy, climate-friendly, plant-based meals.'
If Biden does meat consumption details to his stated
goal on climate change, they are likely to include meat-reducing efforts
through all kinds of policies: taxes, transportation rules, food
stamps, dietary recommendations and a whole host of government
edicts. It won't 'ban' meat or other food.
'The plan also alludes to many opportunities to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions within the agriculture sector, including helping
farmers to reduce soil erosion and store carbon in soils - ideas that are good
for farmers, and good for the environment,' Kim said.
His comments come as experts weigh in on Biden's goal
to reduce climate change so drastically - buying largely into the 'Green New
Deal' that's been pushed by the liberal wing of the Democratic
party.
President Biden has still not detailed how the lives
of Americans will be impacted a week after announcing that he is aiming to
slash greenhouse emissions by 50 to 52 percent from 2005 levels by 2030.
The plan, which would set the US on a path of a zero
emissions economy by no later than 2050, includes broad strokes and huge
investments including $174 billion on electric car development, $85 billion to
modernize US transit, and $10 billion on climate corps.
It is not clear when Biden will specifically lay out
how to achieve his goal.
The initial announcement does not mention if Americans
will have to change their diets - even though multiple scientific studies and
climate change campaigners have acknowledged eating habits will need to be
adjusted to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The only reference to agriculture in Biden's plan,
according a fact sheet on the White House website, says the US can
reduce emissions from forests and agriculture through 'a range of programs and
measures including nature-based solutions for ecosystems ranging from our
forests and agricultural soils to our rivers and coasts'.
There are no clear targets yet for agriculture. Ag
production accounts for 10 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in the US -
mostly from fertilizers, livestock and manure, according to the Environmental
Protection Agency.
Methane, the greenhouse gas emitted from belching
cows, is 28 time more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to its
contribution to global warming, according to experts at the University of California-Davis - making it
an especially important piece to meeting a goal of pushing down the world's
temperature.
The failure to
mention meat consumption in Biden's plan comes despite academics, campaigners
and even politicians suggesting for years that a change to how Americans eat
will likely be required to reduce emissions to levels similar to those outlined
by the president
Biden's current broad plan is leaning toward providing
'incentives' to farmers so they can adapt their operations and adopt new
practices to help get rid of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, Politico reports.
The agriculture industry, as well as lawmakers in
states where it is big, have already slammed efforts to reduce meat
consumption, including a push for things like 'meat-less Monday'.
Among them is Nebraska's Governor Pete Ricketts,
whose state is among the top for beef production in the US.
The Republican governor is demanding that Biden
release clear plans about what his plans mean for the industry.
'Green New Deal climate activists have put meat production
and consumption in the crosshairs,' Gov Ricketts told DailyMail.com.
'So far President Joe Biden has failed to make clear
statements about what his plans mean for agriculture and meat
production. It's time for President Biden to decide whose side he's on:
Radical climate activists or America's farmers and ranchers.'
The failure of the Biden administration to provide
details on its climate goals when it comes to eating meat comes despite
academics, climate campaigners and even politicians suggesting for years that a
change to how Americans eat will likely be required to reduce emissions to
levels similar to those outlined by the president.
Other countries with similar goals to Biden's, such as
the United Kingdom, have already laid out what life could look like for
citizens.
The British government told its citizens last week -
the same day Biden announced his plan - that meat consumption would have to be
reduced by a fifth over the next decade in order to reach the ambitious goal of
cutting emissions by 78 percent.
In Britain, that would mean a person who has meat for
every three meals could only do this twice a week. Similarly, the average
Briton would need to shave a fifth of the average milk consumption down to 16ml
a day - or roughly three teaspoons.
Various researchers, who have no known links to
Biden's plan, have previously warned cuts to meat consumption and dairy will be
needed for Americans as well.
High-profile activists and climate change supporters
have also offered similar warnings.
he University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Systems released
a study back in 2020 suggesting that Americans may have to cut red meat by 90
percent to in order to cut greenhouse emissions by half in the next decade.
The study, titled Implications of Future US Diet
Scenarios on Greenhouse Gas Emissions, explored the effect of greenhouse gas
emissions based on hypothetical cuts to animal-based food consumption across
the US.
Based on four scenarios, the study examined how
different levels of changes to diet could influence reductions in greenhouse
emissions.
The fourth
scenario examined in the study looked at how a 90 percent reduction to beef, as
well as a 50 percent reduction in other meats, could potentially achieve a 50
percent cut to in diet-related greenhouse gas emissions associated with
agricultural production.
In that specific scenario, Americans would only
consume about four pounds of red meat per year, or 0.18 ounces per day.
Based on DailyMail.com's
calculations, that reduction would equate to consuming roughly one average
sized burger per month.
A report published in the Science academic
journal in November 2020 found that emissions from food production alone
would make it impossible to limit the planet's warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius
this century.
This is the goal set out by the Biden administration
and in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord.
The report, titled 'Global food system emissions could
preclude achieving the 1.5° and 2°C climate change targets,' was authored by
academics at Oxford University, University of Minnesota, University
of California, Santa Barbara and Stanford University.
Meanwhile,
the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health issued a
report in 2019 citing 37 world-leading scientists that said a 'radical
transformation of the global food system is urgently needed'. (They
recommend climate-friendly proteins such as small fish, mollusks and insects.)
See link for charts and graphs!
Climate
initiatives in Biden's $2trillion infrastructure plan
$85billion to modernize existing transit and help
agencies expand their systems to meet rider demand
$174billion on electric car development
$111billion to replace lead pipes and service lines
and to modernize drinking water and sewer systems
$100billion to protect nature-based infrastructure –
lands, forests, wetlands, watersheds, and coastal and ocean resource; to build
up electrical system; expand tax credits for clean energy generation and
storage; plug orphan oil wells and mines; and redevelop Superfund sites
$40billion to improve the infrastructure of the public
housing system in America
$100billion to upgrade electrical grid
$100billion to upgrade and build new public schools
$10billion in the modernization, sustainability, and
resilience of federal buildings
$35billion investment in climate science
$10billion for a new Civilian Climate Corps
The report called for a 50 percent reduction in meat
and sugar consumption as part of a healthy human and planetary diet. It
recommended a largely plant-based diet, with small and occasional allowances
for meat, dairy and sugar.
It suggested eating 300 calories worth of animal
protein, or 12 percent, based on the recommended daily 2,500 calorie
intake. That is based off CO2 emissions reaching zero by 2050.
The report also recommends a 'low food chain' diet
that combines plant-based food with climate-friendly proteins such as small
fish, mollusks and insects.
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of
the United States of America released a study in 2019 stating that reducing
meat consumption in higher income countries - such as the United States is
'vital to protect the environment and improve public health'.
Janet Ranganathan told Carbon Brief in September 2020 that ruminant meat (mostly
beef) supplies only 3 percent of calories and 12 percent of protein but
contributes to roughly half the average person's diet related to greenhouse gas
emissions.
Ruminant meat comes from animals - including cattle -
that mainly eat plant-based food in order to digest. The word 'ruminant' comes
from the Latin ruminaire, which means to 'chew over
again'.
A July 2020 report in Sustainability found
that most countries are reluctant to address meat and dairy consumption in
diets and an analysis by the World Wildlife Fund in August the same year concluded
that most nations focus on food production and waste rather than diet.
Kamala Harris has previously supported changing
dietary guidelines to reduce red meat
In 2019, prior to becoming Vice President, Kamala
Harris said she would support changing dietary guidelines in the US to reduce
the amount of red meat people consume.
Speaking at a climate change town hall when she was a
presidential candidate, Harris was asked: 'Would you support changing the
dietary guidelines? Reduce red meat specifically?'
'Yes, I would,' she said.
'But I will also say this: The balance we have to
strike is frankly about what the government can and should do around creating
incentives, and then banning certain behaviors.'
The federal diet guidelines do not mandate what people
can eat. They can only address federal programs such as school lunches.
Where does the United Nations and other countries
stand on cutting down on meat?
United Nations: In 2013, the UN's Food and
Agriculture Organization said livestock supply chains account
for 15.5 percent of all human caused greenhouse has emission releases.
This adds up to 7.1 gigatonnes
(GT) of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-eq) per year.
In 2019, the UN released a report saying
there needs to be a drastic change in global land use, agriculture and human
diets to curb emissions.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) said plant-based diets would cut emissions.
By 2050, dietary changes could free up several million
square miles of land and reduce global emissions
Hans-Otto Pörtner, an
ecologist who co-chairs the IPCC's working group on impacts told
Nature.com: 'We don't want to tell people what to eat. But it would
indeed be beneficial, for both climate and human health, if people in many rich
countries consumed less meat, and if politics would create appropriate
incentives to that effect.'
New Zealand: In January 2020, New Zealand introduced its new
climate change curriculum into schools, urging students to eat less meat and
dairy.
The report pointed to intensive agriculture as one of
the primary causes of greenhouse gases and urged students to have a meatless
day a week, eat more fruit and vegetables.
It also suggested driving less, recycling and buying second
hand MEAT? vomit when possible.
Farmers in a nation where more than 60 percent of
exports are from agriculture feel they were unnecessarily targeted.
'If they are going to continue to bite the hand that
feeds them, and farming feeds New Zealand, then they are going to lose out in
the long term,' dairy farmer Malcolm Lumsden from the country's northern
Waikato region told Reuters.
India: In 2020, the Indian government recommended a
plant-based diet to help fight climate change.
Italy: In 2019, the Italian government made climate
change mandatory in climate schools to make 'environment and society at the
core of everything' children learn in schools.
Other nations have loosely suggested diet changes but
have steered clear of dictating what people eat.
Experts say Americans WILL have to cut back on meat
ATTACHMENTS
EIGHT (a, b and c)
ATTACHMENT
EIGHT A – from cnn
Trump mocks teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg
By Veronica Stracqualursi,
CNN Updated 4:56 AM EDT, Wed September
25, 2019
(CNN)
— President Donald Trump mocked Swedish climate activist Greta
Thunberg on Twitter late Monday night after the
16-year-old excoriated
world leaders for not doing enough to tackle the climate
crisis.
“She
seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.
So nice to see!” Trump posted on Twitter, replying to a video of Thunberg’s
speech at the United Nations climate action summit earlier in the day.
Trump’s
penchant for Twitter insults and online confrontations with people he sees as
political adversaries is well known, though Monday’s tweet is a striking
display of the President teasing a child.
Thunberg
appeared to take Trump’s slight in stride. By late Tuesday morning, she had
updated her Twitter bio to read: “A very happy young girl looking forward to a
bright and wonderful future.”
In
the video shared by Trump of her speech, Thunberg is visibly frustrated and at
times appears to be holding back tears of anger as she dresses down the UN
General Assembly.
“People
are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in
the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and
fairy tales of eternal economic growth,” Thunberg said.
She
did not name Trump or any other world leaders in her speech, but her message was
pointed.
“How
dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you’re doing enough
when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight,” she said.
“You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency, but no matter how sad
and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood
the situation and still kept on failing to act then you would be evil and that
I refuse to believe.”
Former
White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who recently
withdrew his support for Trump, criticized the President for
his comment about Thunberg.
“Parents
in America and around the world: he went after a 16 year old girl yesterday. @realDonaldTrump unfit to serve,” Scaramucci tweeted
on Tuesday.
Trump briefly
attended the UN climate summit on Monday in an impromptu stop
on his way to his administration’s priority event on religious freedom. But the
US did not speak at the event and Trump – who has repeatedly said he thinks
climate change is a hoax – left after 15 minutes.
Thunberg,
who has helped galvanize a global
movement demanding more action to address climate change,
crossed paths with Trump at the UN General Assembly. Video captured her staring
down the US President.
The
young Swede has been open
about her diagnosis of Asperger’s, calling it a “superpower” that
helps her activism.
“My
diagnosis has definitely helped me keep this focus. When you are interested
about something you just continue to read about it and you get super focused,”
she told CNN’s Bill Weir in an interview this
month.
CNN’s
Nicole Gaouette and Ivana Kottasová
contributed to this report.
ATTACHMENT
EIGHT (B) – FROM npr
After Greta Thunberg Wins 'Time' Honor, Trump Suggests
She 'Chill' And Watch A Movie
December 12,
20192:51 PM ET Updated at 3:20 p.m. ET
Sixteen-year-old
activist Greta Thunberg has quickly risen to prominence with her clarion call
for climate action and Time's naming her
its 2019 Person of the Year this week.
Since her first
school strike for action in August 2018, Thunberg has grown her protest into a
global youth movement calling on the world leaders of today to take decisive
action on climate change and prevent further global warming.
One leader is
evidently not impressed with accolades the young Swede has earned: Donald
Trump.
"So ridiculous,"
Trump tweeted on
Thursday morning. "Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then
go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!"
Thunberg, who
delivered an address at the U.N. climate conference on Wednesday in Madrid,
responded like the social media-savvy teenager she is, changing her Twitter profile to read: "A
teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and
watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend."
Trump and Thunberg
crossed paths in September at the United Nations in New York. Thunberg was seen
staring down the U.S. president as he arrived to attend a meeting on religious
freedom.
At U.N. Climate
Action Summit, Thunberg gave an
impassioned speech in which she implored officeholders:
"You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen
my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I'm one of the lucky
ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are
collapsing."
Trump later made a
surprise visit to the same auditorium where Thunberg spoke, arriving shortly
after she concluded her remarks.
He mocked Thunberg
at the time, as well. "She seems like a very happy young girl looking
forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!" he tweeted.
Trump has
historically had strong opinions about the Time designation.
He was named the
Person of the Year in 2016, which he called "a tremendous honor." The
following year, he said he
"took a pass" on the title, an account that Time disputes.
The magazine instead honored "The Silence Breakers," women who spoke
out during the #MeToo movement.
In 2018, he said he
couldn't think of anyone but himself that was suited for the honor: "I
can't imagine anybody else other than Trump. Can you imagine anybody other than
Trump?"
Apparently Time could.
"The Guardians" — journalists who were imprisoned, persecuted or
killed — graced the 2018 covers.
In 2017, The
Washington Post reported that
fake Time covers featuring Trump's image were hanging in at
least five of his clubs. The magazines were dated March 1, 2009, though there was
no March 1 issue and Trump appeared on no covers of Time magazine
that year.
The mock-cover
idea was revived on Thursday, as Trump's 2020 campaign team tweeted out
an image of the new Time cover, now with Trump's head pasted
onto Thunberg's body.
Thunberg is the
youngest Time's Person of the Year.
She was honored,
the magazine said, for "sounding the alarm on humanity's predatory
relationship with the only home we have ... for showing us all what it might
look like when a new generation leads."
ATTACHMENT EIGHT
(c) – from guardian UK
'CHILL!': GRETA THUNBERG RECYCLES TRUMP'S MOCKERY OF
HER AS HE TRIES TO STOP VOTES
Swedish teen environmental
activist took her shot at the president’s rage tweet as the US formally exits
from the Paris climate agreement
By Richard Luscombe Thu 5 Nov 2020 17.45
EST
They say revenge
is a dish best served cold. Greta Thunberg, the teenage environmental activist
mocked by Donald Trump in a tweet when
she was named Time magazine’s person of the year, waited exactly 11 months
before delivering the perfect riposte.
In his December 2019
insult, Trump told Thunberg, 17, to work on her “anger management problem” and
to “go to an old-fashioned movie with a friend”.
“Chill Greta,
chill!” the president implored in the tweet, which began with him branding her
Time award as “so ridiculous”.
On Thursday
afternoon, with Trump raging on Twitter in all capital letters
and throwing out baseless allegations of voter fraud even as his election day
lead in Pennsylvania and other states continued to erode, Thunberg threw his
words straight back at him.
“So
ridiculous,” Thunberg tweeted in reply to Trump’s earlier “STOP THE COUNT!” rant.
“Donald must work
on his Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a
friend! Chill Donald, Chill!”
Within two hours
of posting it, the tweet had amassed more than 452,000 likes, double the total
for Trump’s original message.
Thunberg has
proved something of a nemesis for the climate crisis-denying president, the
original Twitter exchange coming barely two months after the pair crossed paths
at the United Nations in New York. Trump skipped the climate summit at which
Thunberg told world leaders, “You are failing us,” but she fixed Trump with an icy stare in
a hallway as he made his way to another event on religious freedom.
This
week has added poignancy for Thunberg due to the formal exit from the Paris
climate agreement by the United
States on Wednesday. In October, Thunberg endorsed Trump’s election
rival Joe Biden, who has pledged to
return the US to the global pact on his first day in office.
ATTACHMENT
NINE – from the Washington
Post
THE ANTI-GRETA: A
CONSERVATIVE THINK TANK TAKES ON THE GLOBAL PHENOMENON
How a group allied with the Trump
administration is paying a German teen to question established climate science.
Feb.
23, 2020 at 7:53 p.m. EST
For climate
skeptics, it’s hard to compete with the youthful appeal of global
phenomenon Greta Thunberg. But one U.S. think tank hopes
it’s found an answer: the anti-Greta.
Naomi
Seibt is a 19-year-old German who, like Greta, is blond,
eloquent and European. But Naomi denounces “climate alarmism,” calls climate
consciousness “a despicably anti-human ideology,” and has even deployed Greta’s
now famous “How dare you?” line to take on the mainstream German media.
“She’s
a fantastic voice for free markets and for climate realism,” said James Taylor,
director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy
at the Heartland Institute, an influential
libertarian think tank in suburban Chicago that has the ear of the Trump
administration.
In
December, Heartland headlined Naomi at its forum at the UN climate conference
in Madrid, where Taylor described her as “the star” of the show. Last month,
Heartland hired Naomi as the young face of its campaign to question the
scientific consensus that human activity is causing dangerous global warming.
If imitation is the highest form of flattery, Heartland’s
tactics amount to an acknowledgment that Greta has touched a nerve, especially
among teens and young adults. Since launching her protest two years ago outside
the Swedish parliament at age 15, Greta has sparked youth protests across the
globe and in 2019 was named Time magazine’s “Person of the Year,” the youngest
to ever win the honor.
The teenager has called on the nations of the world to
cut their total carbon output by at least half over the next decade, saying
that if they don’t, “then there will be horrible consequences.”
“I want you to panic,” she told attendees at the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year. “I want you to feel the fear I
feel every day. And then I want you to act.”
Naomi, for her part, argues that these predictions of dire
consequences are exaggerated. In a video posted on Heartland’s website, she
gazes into the camera and says, “I don’t want you to panic. I want you to
think.”
Graham Brookie directs the
Digital Forensic Research Lab, an arm of the nonprofit Atlantic Council that
works to identify and expose disinformation. While the campaign “is not
outright disinformation,” Brookie said in an email,
it “does bear resemblance to a model we use called the 4d’s — dismiss the
message, distort the facts, distract the audience, and express dismay at the
whole thing.”
Brookie
added: “The tactic is intended to create an equivalency in spokespeople and
message. In this case, it is a false equivalency between a message based in
climate science that went viral organically and a message based in climate
skepticism trying to catch up using paid promotion.”
Naomi said her political activism was sparked a few years
ago when she began asking questions in school about Germany’s liberal
immigration policies. She said the backlash from teachers and other students
hardened her skepticism about mainstream German thinking. More recently, she
said that watching young people joining weekly “Fridays For Future” protests
inspired by Greta helped spur her opposition to climate change activism.
“I get chills when I see those young people, especially
at Fridays for Future. They are screaming and shouting and they’re generally
terrified,” she said in an interview. “They don’t want the world to end.”
Naomi said she does not dispute that greenhouse gas emissions
are warming the planet, but she argues that many scientists and activists have
overstated their impact.
“I don’t want to get people to stop believing in man-made
climate change, not at all,” she said. “Are manmade CO2 emissions having that
much impact on the climate? I think that’s ridiculous to believe.”
Naomi argues that other factors, such as solar energy,
play a role — though the amount of solar energy reaching the Earth has actually declined since
the 1970s, according to federal measurements. A slew of peer-reviewed reports,
from scientific bodies in the U.S. and elsewhere, have concluded that
greenhouse gas emissions are the dominant cause of warming since
the mid-20th century, producing a range of devastating effects from massive
marine die-offs in South America to severe wildfires in Australia and sinking
ground in the Arctic.
In addition to climate change, Naomi echoes far-right
skepticism about feminism and immigration. The German media have described her
as sympathetic to the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD),
the biggest opposition party in parliament, whose leaders have spoken of
fighting “an invasion of foreigners.” Naomi says she is not a member of AfD — she describes herself as libertarian — but
acknowledges speaking at a recent AfD event.
Her path to Heartland began in November with a speech at
EIKE, a Munich think tank whose vice president is a prominent AfD politician. By then, Naomi was already active on
YouTube, producing videos on topics ranging from migration to feminism to
climate change. In the audience was Heartland’s Taylor. He said he immediately
recognized her potential and approached her about working with Heartland.
Founded in 1984 and funded largely by anonymous donors,
Heartland has increasingly focused on climate change over the past decade. Its
staff and researchers enjoy ready access to the Trump administration, and one
of its senior fellows, William Happer,
served as a senior director on the White House National Security Council
between September 2018 and 2019.
An emeritus professor of physics at Princeton University,
Happer has repeatedly argued that carbon emissions
should be viewed as beneficial to society — not a pollutant that drives global
warming. During his time with the Trump administration, he sought to enlist
Heartland’s help in promoting his ideas and objected to a U.S. intelligence official’s finding that
climate impacts could be “possibly catastrophic,” according to documents
obtained by The Washington Post.
Why would an American think tank want to get involved in
German politics? Because it worries that Berlin’s strong stance on reducing
greenhouse-gas emissions could be contagious, according to a recent
investigation aired on German television.
For two decades, Germany has been a leader in pressing
other nations to curb carbon output and shift to renewable energy. Though it is
falling short of its ambitious goals, Germany has pledged to cut its greenhouse
gas emissions this year by 40 percent compared to 1990 — and by up to 95
percent by mid-century.
In December, during the Madrid climate conference, two
undercover staffers from the nonprofit investigative newsroom CORRECTIV
approached Taylor and claimed to work for a wealthy donor from the auto
industry who wanted to give Heartland a half-million euros. Taylor took the
bait, and followed up with a three-page proposal outlining a campaign to push
back against German efforts to regulate emissions.
“These restrictive environmental programs are largely
unnecessary,” says the document, a copy of which was obtained by The Post.
“Worse, other nations — including the United States and European Union nations
— are increasingly being influenced by unwise German policy.”
The proposal described Naomi as “the star” of a “Climate
Reality Forum” organized by Heartland during the Madrid talks. With “over
100,000 people viewing her talk on climate realism,” the proposal said, Naomi
was well-positioned to fight German climate policies.
“Funding for our Germany Environmental Issues project
will enable Heartland to provide Naomi with the equipment and the sources she
needs to present a series of effective videos calling attention to the negative
impacts of overreaching environmental regulations,” the proposal says.
CORRECTIV aired its report on Heartland earlier
this month on German TV. Taylor dismissed the report, saying, “Heck, I would
have spoken with them if they told us who they were, and the answers would have
been pretty much the same.”
The investigators filmed Naomi at a public event, posing
as would-be donors. She struck back with her own video response. Invoking
Greta, she said, “To the media, I have a few last words: How dare you?"
Greta Thunberg confronts world leaders at the U.N. climatre summit: 'How dare you?'
Despite echoes of Greta’s style, Naomi has objected to
the comparison.
“The reason I don’t like the term anti-Greta is that it
suggests I myself am an indoctrinated puppet, I guess, for the other side,” she
says in one video. Asked if she meant that as a criticism of Greta, Naomi says:
“That sounds kind of mean, actually.” She added: “I don’t want to shame her in
any way.”
Taylor said the tendency to associate Naomi with Greta is
“kind of natural” — and benefits Heartland’s message.
“To the extent that Naomi is pretty much the same, just
with a different perspective, yeah, I think that it’s good that people will
look at the two as similar in many ways,” he said.
Still, Naomi has a long climb to reach the level of
global attention lavished on Greta. While Greta measures her social media
following in the millions, Naomi counts slightly under 50,000 YouTube
subscribers.
Through her spokespeople, Greta declined to comment.
ATTACHMENT TEN – from Whitehouse.gov
Excerpts (on climate) from President
Biden’s Address to Congress
“No one nation can deal with all the crises of our time
alone – from terrorism to nuclear proliferation to mass migration,
cybersecurity, climate change – and as we’re experiencing now, pandemics.
There’s no wall high enough to keep any virus away.
As our own vaccine supply grows to meet our needs –
and we are meeting them – we will become an arsenal of vaccines for other
countries – just as America was the arsenal of democracy in World War Two.
For too long, we have failed to use the most important
word when it comes to meeting the climate crisis. Jobs. Jobs. For me, when I
think about climate change, I think jobs….
“The climate crisis is not our fight alone, either.
It’s a global fight. The United States accounts for less than 15% of carbon
emissions. The rest of the world accounts for 85%. That’s why – I kept my
commitment to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement on my first day in office. And
I kept my commitment to convene a climate summit right here in America, with
all of the major economies of the world – from China and Russia to India and
the European Union in my first 100 days.
I wanted the world to see that there is consensus that
we are at an inflection point in history. And the consensus is if we act, we
can save the planet – and we can create millions of jobs and economic growth
and opportunity to raise the standard of living for everyone in the world.”
ATTACHMENT ELEVEN – FROM Sen. Tim Scott
EXCERPTS FROM HIS
REPUBLICAN REBUTTAL ON CLIMATE
“Good evening. I’m Sen. Tim Scott from the great
state of South Carolina. We just heard President Biden’s first address to
Congress. Our president seems like a good man. His speech was full of good
words. But President Biden promised you a specific kind of leadership.
He
promised to unite a nation, to lower the temperature, to govern for all
Americans, no matter how we voted. This was the pitch. You just heard it again.
But
our nation is starving for more than empty platitudes. We need policies and
progress that brings us closer together. But three months in, the actions of
the president and his party are pulling us further and further apart…
“Another issue that should unite us is
infrastructure. Republicans support everything you think of when you think of
infrastructure: roads, bridges, ports, airports, water ways, high speed
broadband. We’re in for all of that. But again, Democrats want a partisan wish
list. They won’t even build bridges to build bridges.
Less
than 6 percent of the president’s plan goes to roads and bridges. It’s a
liberal wish list of big government waste. Plus, the biggest job killing tax
hikes in a generation…
“…we
passed Opportunity Zones, criminal justice reform and permanent funding for
historically Black colleges and universities for the first time ever. We
fought the drug epidemic, rebuilt our military and cut taxes for working
families and single moms like the one that raised me.
Our
best future will not come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams. It
will come from you, the American people, Black, Hispanic, white and Asian,
Republican and Democrat, brave police officers and Black neighborhoods…
“May
the Lord bless you and keep you, make his face shine upon you and be gracious
to you. May his presence go before you and behind you and beside you, in
your weeping and your rejoicing, He is for you. May his favor be upon our
nation for a thousand generations and your family and your children and their
children. “
Goodnight
and God bless the United States of America.
ATTACHMENT TWELVE – FROM NPR
BIG GOVERNMENT IS BACK, AND 3 OTHER TAKEAWAYS FROM
BIDEN'S ADDRESS TO CONGRESS
April 29, 2021 5:01 AM ET BY DEIRDRE WALSH
President Biden
addressed a joint session of Congress. Biden made the pitch for a larger federal
role in American society and marked history in the House chamber with two top
women: Vice President Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
President Biden's
joint address to Congress looked back over the challenges he faced taking
office 100 days ago in the midst of a pandemic — and declared "America is
on the move again."
But the speech
also outlined an ambitious, active role for the government to continue helping
Americans struggling, as well as new proposals to boost the country's ability
to compete. It amounted to an updated New Deal, but one that faces a precarious
path to get through razor-thin margins in both the House and Senate.
Because of the
pandemic and Biden' personality, the hour-plus speech was a stark contrast from
his predecessor's. It was a more low-key and traditional litany of policy
priorities instead of the often unpredictable and unscripted moments seen in
former President Donald Trump's speeches on Capitol Hill.
Instead of facing
a crowded chamber of lawmakers ready to interrupt with loud cheers, Biden spoke
to a mostly empty chamber — only 200 attendees instead of the usual 1,600. The
former senator felt at home, ad-libbing references to his former colleagues in
Congress, and seeming nostalgic about his time walking the halls in the
Capitol. But he also spoke to a deeply divided room that almost had polar
opposite reactions to the bulk of his presentation.
Here are some takeaways from
the joint address:
1. Era of big government is
back, and Biden is all in
Former President Bill
Clinton notably declared in his 1996 State of the Union address that "the
era of big government is over," marking a shift for Democrats then trying
to show attention to fiscal responsibility. But Biden, in unabashedly rolling
out new, liberal federal programs, rejected that and instead argued government
was the solution.
Biden already
notched one legislative achievement on his belt with the $1.9 trillion coronavirus
relief bill that he signed in March. Less than three weeks
later, he unveiled a $2.3 trillion infrastructure
bill, dubbed the American Jobs Plan, which calls for spending on a
range of items like roads, bridges, water systems and broadband access. But it
also expands beyond traditional infrastructure spending to include plans to
address racial inequity and combat climate change.
Lawmakers on
Capitol Hill have spent weeks debating what should ultimately qualify as
infrastructure, and Republicans introduced their own, much more-targeted $568
billion proposal.
And Biden spent
much of the primetime speech Wednesday outlining another massive domestic
program — his American Families Plan —
a nearly $2 trillion plan that includes initiatives pushed by progressives like
Sen. Bernie Sanders. These would dramatically widen the social safety net for
Americans from preschool age to those on Medicare. It would convert some items
initially designed as temporary coronavirus relief to more permanent federal
mainstays for millions of families.
Biden was viewed
as the moderate in the 2020 Democratic field. But since swearing in, he's made
clear that he views his role is to use the government to transform the economy,
targeting those at the lower rungs of the economic ladder. The Families Plan
provides money for two years of preschool and two years of free community
college, extending the current 12 years of public school American students now
get. Biden also said low-income Americans should be guaranteed to spend no more
than 7% of their income for child care for kids up to the age of 5. He insisted
the U.S. should support up to 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave.
In total, Biden
outlined almost $6 trillion in spending — another $4 trillion on top of what
Congress already approved. This is a staggering sum, especially with the U.S.
facing record deficits. It's also an ambitious effort politically after
Democrats muscled through a COVID-19 relief bill through both chambers
essentially on party-line votes due to universal GOP opposition.
Biden faces long odds
to get the entire scope of his proposal through — he urged both parties to come
together, but there's little evidence he'll get much, if any GOP support. He
still needs to sell members of his own party on the merits of his plans. West
Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, a critical vote in the 50-50 Senate, told
reporters on Capitol Hill before the speech that the size of the series of
programs made him "uncomfortable."
2. Biden framed expanded
federal programs as a New Deal for middle class to compete
Republicans have
tagged Biden's expansive vision for more federal spending as
"radical" and mocked his argument that items like health care
subsidies and child care tax credits are forms of infrastructure. But instead
of engaging in that debate, Biden argued that the U.S. should be compelled to
provide these types of programs now because it was falling behind globally. He
said these programs would equip Americans to compete with other countries in
the 21st century — with education the cornerstone to close the gap.
Biden said he
wanted ideas from Republicans, and there was room for compromise, but he made
it clear he wouldn't wait if negotiations didn't progress, saying: "Doing
nothing is not an option."
"We can't be
so busy competing with each other that we forget the competition is with the
rest of the world to win the 21st century.
To win that competition for the future, we also need to make a
once-in-a-generation investment in our families, in our children," Biden
said.
The president, who
regularly touts his own blue-collar roots, maintained that his plan was
targeted to those who had been left behind as other nations emerged as leaders
in the development of new technologies.
"The American
Jobs Plan is a blue-collar blueprint to build America," he said. He argued
his proposal to tax wealthy Americans and corporations was a fair approach,
since the small number of ultra rich only expanded their portfolios during the
pandemic while middle-class and low-income workers suffered.
"Wall Street
didn't build this country. The middle class built this country. And unions
build the middle class," Biden said.
3. Biden tied the success of
his presidency to reasserting democracy abroad
Biden didn't mention
Trump by name, but as he talked about his conversations with foreign leaders
and his pledge that America was reengaging in alliances around the world, he
stressed that he was pivoting away from the past four years.
Standing in the
Capitol that was attacked on Jan. 6 by pro-Trump extremists who disputed the
2020 election results, Biden said, "the insurrection was an existential
crisis — a test of whether our democracy could survive."
He framed the
government's success at quickly distributing vaccines as a model for the rest
of the world — that the American way is superior and more effective than those
led by "the autocrats of the world."
"It's time we
remembered that we the people are the government. You and I. Not some force in
a distant capital. Not some powerful force we have no control over," Biden
said. Americans have a responsibility to "do our part" — a contrast
from Trump's emphasis on an "America First" foreign policy.
Biden said:
"If we do, then we will meet the central challenge of the age by proving
that democracy is durable and strong. The autocrats will not win the
future."
4. Marking history
Presidents
frequently argue that they are making historic strides in their annual
prime-time speeches, touting a policy accomplishment or statistics about a
record-breaking economic indicator.
But Biden made the
point of pausing at the start of his speech to emphasize the image of him
standing for the first time as president of the United States before two women
on the rostrum. That moment — streaming online and on television screens to
millions — was a compelling moment for women, and for communities of color.
"Madam speaker, madam vice president — no president has ever
said those words from this podium, and it's about time," Biden
said, acknowledging the first female vice president, Kamala Harris, sitting
behind him, alongside Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
Later the
president mentioned tasking the vice president with leading the effort to
implement his American jobs plan, and her role in the diplomatic effort to
address the immigration crisis in talks with Central American countries.
ATTACHMENT
THIRTEEN - FROM CNN
5 TAKEAWAYS FROM PRESIDENT BIDEN'S FIRST ADDRESS TO CONGRESS
By Kevin
Liptak, CNN Updated 11:17 PM ET, Wed April 28, 2021
(CNN)President Joe Biden made a sweeping case
Wednesday for massive new programs that would transform the
government's role in Americans' lives, claiming nothing less than the future of
the country is at stake as he delivered his first address to Congress.
Coming later than usual, on the eve of his 100th day
in office, Biden delivered his speech amid swirling health and economic crises
he has spent his term combating.
But his message went beyond simply ridding the country
of coronavirus or getting Americans back to work. In Biden's telling, the
results of those efforts could determine whether American Democracy survives at
all: a live-or-die proposition that escalated his calls for trillions of
dollars in new spending into an existential question for his audience of
lawmakers.
His speech was laden with symbolism, from its scaled-down audience to the
historic pair of women sitting behind him. It was a speech decades in the
making for a president who has waited longer than most to be introduced with the
familiar call: "Madam Speaker, the President of the United States."
Here are five takeaways from Biden's speech:
A long wait ended
— and Biden wants to move fast
For more than 40 years — and after two failed presidential
bids — Biden watched as the House Sergeant at Arms announced another president
into the House chamber for speeches to Congress. He sat dutifully behind
President Barack Obama for eight years, bantering with a succession of House
speakers in the spot reserved for the number two.
On Wednesday, it was Biden's name in lights on the
marquee -- a testament to an extraordinary degree of political patience that
few politicians can rival.
"It's good to be back," he declared as he
opened his remarks.
Yet if anything, Biden's speech reflected a distinct
impatience, now that he is in office, to wait long to see his agenda passed. He
made no apologies for passing a $1.9 trillion stimulus without Republican
support in the first weeks of his presidency, insisted it was urgently needed.
And he urged lawmakers to rapidly take up the next bills, declaring it a matter
of imminent national consequence.
BIDEN'S FIRST 100 DAYS
·
Biden's moved fast
since his swearing-in. Here's an interactive look at what he's gotten done.
·
Majority of
Americans approve of Biden and his priorities in first 100 days, a new
CNN poll finds.
·
This is how
the Biden presidency looks from one pivotal Pennsylvania county,
100 days in.
"America is moving -- moving forward. And we
can't stop now," Biden said. "We're in a great inflection point in
history. We have to do more than just build back. We have to build back
better."
"I'd like to meet with those who have ideas that
are different. We welcome ideas," he said later, addressing his
willingness to work with Republicans. "But the rest of the world isn't
waiting for us. I just want to be clear: from my perspective, doing nothing is
not an option."
Biden and his advisers recognize his window for
accomplishing major things is narrow. In fact, he called on Congress to pass
the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act by the one-year anniversary of Floyd's
death next month. Biden called on Congress to come together, pointing to the
ongoing discussions between Democrats and Republican Sen. Tim Scott, the GOP
pick to respond to Biden's address.
The pandemic has heightened Americans' desire for
government aid. And like most presidents he is enjoying a post-inauguration
polling honeymoon.
But largely because of the vaccination effort Biden
has overseen, the pandemic is waning. And any number of summertime troubles --
a continued surge of migrants, unrest around policing, high gas prices -- could
see his popularity wane. And that is before the congressional election cycle
begins in earnest, when Republicans will likely be even less willing to
cooperate. Historical patterns aren't kind to first-term presidents at their
first midterms.
Biden, who has been waiting decades to make the speech
he delivered Wednesday, made clear he could not wait while the moment slipped
past.
Biden argues big
government is better government
If there was one argument animating Biden's speech --
and his entire presidency to date -- is that more government, when working
right, can improve Americans' lives. It's a simple proposition that bucks a
decades-long trend in both parties toward a smaller, less interventionist
Washington.
"We have to prove democracy still works. That our
government still works -- and can deliver for the people," Biden said in
his speech, referencing items he said proved government's worth: the
vaccination campaign and job creation initiatives.
It's a distant cry from President Bill Clinton's
declaration in his 1996 State of the Union that "the era of big government
is over." Speaking from the same podium 25 years later, Biden seemed to
argue the exact opposite: that now is the time for big government to return --
and with it the chance to prove that it's still working.
Referencing scientific investments like developing the
Covid-19 vaccine, Biden said, "These are the investments we make together,
as one country, and that only government's in a position to make."
The theme isn't new for Biden. But never before has it
been more clearly distilled than when he laid out his legislative
accomplishments so far, and the plans he still hopes to pass. In total, Biden
is pressing for almost $6 trillion in new spending -- including the $1.8
trillion plan he proposed Wednesday shoring up education, child care and paid
family leave -- a massive bet on government's ability to solve the most
intractable problems.
Biden has on his side a generational health crisis and
its incumbent economic meltdown that have altered Americans' views of what
their government can do for them. But he's also benefited from shifting views
on longer-term issues like climate change and criminal justice reform, which
will require government intervention to produce the types of results more
Americans are asking for.
Polls, including a CNN survey conducted by SSRS, show
a majority of Americans approve of Biden's job performance at this stage in his
presidency. But they also show some appetite for Biden's expansive view of
government. An NBC News poll found 55% of Americans said government
"should do more to solve problems" compared to 41% who said it's
doing too much.
Covid is impossible to ignore
There was little question the coronavirus pandemic
would occupy a major part of Biden's speech. It's the single greatest challenge
he faces and the issue he and his advisers believe will make or break his
presidency.
But even had Biden said nothing about the pandemic,
the scenery on Wednesday provided a constant reminder of the ongoing crisis.
Gone was the familiar packed-in crowd of lawmakers. There were no guests to
point to in the first lady's box. And the two women sitting behind Biden were
both wearing masks.
The contrast with past years felt strange. The many
empty seats caused the usual din of applause to feel more like the polite
clapping at small theater, with individual lawmakers' murmurs and clapping able
to be heard during the traditional entrances before the speech.
Biden's message was one of distinct optimism about the
trajectory of the pandemic, hoping to provide a high-profile boost in the
national spirit after a year of lockdowns and tragedy.
"Our progress these past 100 days against one of
the worst pandemics in history is one of the greatest logistical achievements
our country has ever seen," he said.
But his remarks also laid bare the lingering concerns
within the administration about Americans who aren't rushing to get vaccinated.
In a worst case scenario, administration health officials fear the country
won't be able to achieve widespread immunity if enough people decide not to get
a shot.
Whether Biden's entreaties on Wednesday make any
difference remain to be seen. He's been encouraging eligible populations to get
vaccinated for months. And even he has acknowledged the still-hesitant groups
aren't likely to listen to him.
"Go get vaccinated," he pleaded from the
podium. "They're available now."
Symbolism on
display
Addresses to Congress are about more than just the
address. What is usually the most-watched televised speech of the year is also
laden with visual symbols, no more so than this year.
If the most glaring symbol was the pandemic-altered
room, the most historic was the tableau behind Biden: for the first time, two
women were seated in the spots reserved for the vice president and House
speaker.
"Madame Speaker. Madame Vice President. No
president has ever said those words from this podium — no president has ever
said those words — and it's about time," Biden said at the start of his
address.
Later, Biden gave Harris a new assignment: overseeing
his proposed expansion of broadband internet.
Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi, both Californians from
the Bay Area, are not strangers to one another. And there was little question
the historic weight of the moment wasn't lost on either of them.
"To have two women behind him as he speaks is
cause for a lot of excitement," Pelosi said ahead of the address.
"I've been getting calls from -- globally -- about that they can't wait to
see."
The sparsely-filled House chamber also served to
illustrate the fresh memory of the January 6 riot, where would-be
insurrectionists sought to prevent Biden from becoming president. Fallout from
the moment still lingers as enhanced security surrounds the Capitol.
In his speech, Biden made reference to the event.
"As we gather here tonight, the images of a
violent mob assaulting this Capitol -- desecrating our democracy -- remain
vivid in our minds. Lives were put at risk. Lives were lost. Extraordinary
courage was summoned," Biden said. "The insurrection was an
existential crisis -- a test of whether our democracy could survive. It
did."
A case to the
world
Biden's primary focus in his early days -- and his
primary audience for Wednesday's address -- is Americans.
But he has made no secret that his efforts at home are
also meant to signal to the world -- and specifically to China -- that
perceptions of the United States' decline are mistaken.
On Wednesday, China was the consistent subtext -- and
at moments it wasn't so subtle -- of his speech. He named President Xi Jinping
three times; speaking off-script about his Chinese counterpart, Biden said,
"He's deadly earnest about becoming the most significant, consequential
nation in the world."
Biden has framed his entire agenda as a battle between
democracy and autocracy. And he believes passing major pieces of legislation
are signals to the world that democracy will win out.
"The autocrats will not win the future,"
Biden said as he concluded his speech. "America will."
Foreign policy is usually a secondary topic in any
State of the Union -- "It's never as much foreign policy as the foreign
policy team wants," Biden's press secretary Jen Psaki said this week --
and Wednesday wasn't an exception.
He referenced his decision to withdraw US troops from
Afghanistan by September 11, competition with China, the nuclear programs in
Iran and North Korea and relations with Russia.
But even if national security wasn't at the heart of
the speech, Biden would likely argue it was there in more existential form.
"In my conversations with world leaders, and I've
spoken to over 38, 40 of them now, I've made it known -- I've made it known
that America is back," he said. "And you know what they say? The
comment I hear most of all from them is they say, 'We see America's back, but
for how long? But for how long?' "
"My fellow Americans," Biden went on,
"we have to show not just that we're back but that we're back to
stay."
ATTACHMENT
FOURTEEN – FROM
whithouse.gov and various sources
PRESIDENT
BIDEN INVITES 40 WORLD LEADERS TO LEADERS SUMMIT ON CLIMATE
MARCH 26, 2021 • STATEMENTS
AND RELEASES
Today,
President Biden invited 40 world leaders to the Leaders Summit on Climate he will
host on April 22 and 23. The virtual Leaders Summit will be live streamed
for public viewing.
President
Biden took action his first day in office to return the United States to the
Paris Agreement. Days later, on January 27, he announced that he would
soon convene a leaders summit to galvanize efforts by
the major economies to tackle the climate crisis.
The
Leaders Summit on Climate will underscore the urgency – and the economic
benefits – of stronger climate action. It will be a key milestone on the
road to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) this November in
Glasgow.
In
recent years, scientists have underscored the need to limit planetary warming
to 1.5 degrees Celsius in order to stave off the worst impacts of climate
change. A key goal of both the Leaders Summit and COP26 will be to
catalyze efforts that keep that 1.5-degree goal within reach. The Summit
will also highlight examples of how enhanced climate ambition will create good
paying jobs, advance innovative technologies, and help vulnerable countries
adapt to climate impacts.
By the time of the Summit, the United States will announce an ambitious 2030
emissions target as its new Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris
Agreement. In his invitation, the President urged leaders to use the
Summit as an opportunity to outline how their countries also will contribute to
stronger climate ambition.
The
Summit will reconvene the U.S.-led Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate,
which brings together 17 countries responsible for approximately 80 percent of
global emissions and global GDP. The President also invited the heads of
other countries that are demonstrating strong climate leadership, are
especially vulnerable to climate impacts, or are charting innovative pathways
to a net-zero economy. A small number of business and civil society
leaders will also participate in the Summit.
Key
themes of the Summit will include:
·
Galvanizing
efforts by the world’s major economies to reduce emissions during this critical
decade to keep a limit to warming of 1.5 degree Celsius within reach.
·
Mobilizing public
and private sector finance to drive the net-zero transition and to help
vulnerable countries cope with climate impacts.
·
The economic
benefits of climate action, with a strong emphasis on job creation, and the
importance of ensuring all communities and workers benefit from the transition
to a new clean energy economy.
·
Spurring
transformational technologies that can help reduce emissions and adapt to
climate change, while also creating enormous new economic opportunities and
building the industries of the future.
·
Showcasing
subnational and non-state actors that are committed to green recovery and an
equitable vision for limiting warming to 1.5 degree Celsius, and are working closely
with national governments to advance ambition and resilience.
·
Discussing
opportunities to strengthen capacity to protect lives and livelihoods from the
impacts of climate change, address the global security challenges posed by climate
change and the impact on readiness, and address the role of nature-based
solutions in achieving net zero by 2050 goals.
Further
details on the Summit agenda, additional participants, media access, and public
viewing will be provided in the coming weeks.
The DJI will list the forty world
leaders (or as Greta might call them, forty thieves) and how their home nations
responded to their performance. This
will probably take place in our Lesson for May 13th barring… as
happens from time to time… unforeseen circumstances.