U.N. Climate Report: Expect Extreme Coastal Flooding Every Year

Donald Trump - who has denied the reality of climate change and sought to reduce limits on carbon emissions and to weaken clean water and clean air laws - is now, belatedly, facing a formal impeachment inquiry.  But while this massive political event begins, something that will more directly impact millions of Americans was outlined in a new United Nations Climate Change report. Rising sea levels, increased heat waves, and multiple other adverse impacts are becoming ever more of a reality and coastal cities are looking at annual coastal flooding events in the not too distant future. The report ought to be a clarion call, but one cannot help but fear that all Republicans will be focused on is protecting their toxic and utterly unfit leader - in short, fiddling while Rome burns, if you will.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the disturbing report.  Here are excerpts:  

Climate change is already causing staggering impacts on the oceans and ice-filled regions that encompass 80 percent of the Earth, and future damage from rising seas and melting glaciers is now all but certain, according to a sobering new report from the United Nations.

The warming climate is already killing coral reefs, supercharging monster storms, and fueling deadly marine heat waves and record losses of sea ice. And Wednesday’s report on the world’s oceans, glaciers, polar regions and ice sheets finds that such effects only foreshadow a more catastrophic future as long as greenhouse gas emissions remain unchecked.

Given current emissions levels, a number of serious impacts are essentially unavoidable, says the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Extreme floods that have historically struck some coastal cities and small island nations once every 100 years will become an annual occurrence by 2050, according to the IPCC. In addition, if emissions continue to increase, global sea levels could rise by more than three feet by the end of this century — around 12 percent higher than the group estimated as recently as 2013. . . . “The conclusion is inescapable: The impacts of climate change on the ocean are well underway. Unless we take very serious action very soon, these impacts will get worse — much, much worse.”

More than 100 scientists from around the world contributed to the latest report by the IPCC, which found that profound and potentially devastating consequences lie ahead for marine life, Arctic ecosystems and entire human societies if climate change continues unabated.

The findings also come as world leaders gathered this week at the United Nations for a much-anticipated “climate summit” aimed at injecting new momentum into the flagging effort to persuade countries to do more to move away from fossil fuels and toward cleaner forms of energy. While dozens of smaller nations did unveil plans for coming years, the world’s largest emitters have stopped short of committing to transformational changes.

“The climate emergency is a race we are losing — but it is a race we can win if we change our ways now,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres told world leaders Tuesday in his latest attempt to spur action.

One of the document’s most striking findings involves the rise in sea level, which is now being driven mainly by the rapid melting of ice in Greenland, Antarctica and the world’s smaller glaciers. Sea level rise is accelerating, and the world could see 3.6 feet in total sea level rise by the year 2100 in a very high-emissions scenario. In 2013, the IPCC had estimated that value at slightly over three feet.

But the truth is that even these estimates may be too small, because when scientists behind the report looked at an alternative method for gauging how much seas could rise — simply canvassing the views of experts — even larger estimates emerged. The group’s findings only highlight “likely” amounts of sea level rise, meaning they do not represent worst-case scenarios.

For some major coastal cities, a historical 100-year flood event will happen annually by the year 2050. That includes large cities such as Jakarta, Manila, Bangkok, Lima, Singapore, Barcelona and Sydney, the report says. In the United States, cities facing fast-moving sea-level danger include Los Angeles, Miami, Savannah, Honolulu, San Juan, Key West and San Diego.

“The world’s coasts provide a home to around 1.9 billion people and over half of the world’s megacities — all of which are in grave danger if we don’t act immediately to prevent rising temperatures and sea levels,” Hildalgo said in a statement. “Extreme high temperatures, coastal flooding, and more frequent natural disasters are becoming the new normal. ... This is what the climate crisis looks like now.”

Ice loss is accelerating in Greenland and Antarctica, scientists found. Permafrost, which contains enormous amounts of carbon that can be released as it thaws, has warmed to “record high levels.” Summer Arctic sea ice extent is now probably lower than at any time in “at least 1,000 years,” and the oldest, thickest ice has already declined by 90 percent.

And then there is the entire world ocean. “Over the 21st century, the ocean is projected to transition to unprecedented conditions,” the report states.

The ocean is losing oxygen, growing more acidic, taking up an increasing amount of heat, and becoming more stratified, with warm water at the surface preventing cooler, nutrient rich waters from rising. All of these changes have profound consequences for marine ecosystems.

Lynn Scarlett, the vice president for policy and government relations at the Nature Conservancy and a top-ranking Interior Department official during the George W. Bush administration, said the grim findings in Wednesday’s report should be a call to action.

America’s Credibility Abroad Is Gone

Traveling to France and the United Kingdom last September, the husband and I found that Americans are still much liked.  The same cannot be said for the Trump/Pence regime which is pretty much widely loathed and for good reason.  The buffoon in the White House - who in his extreme narcissism thinks himself a genius - has made it very obvious that longstanding treaties and alliances mean nothing. And that's not even factoring the Trump initiated trade wars that are harming American consumers who pay the tariffs in the form of higher prices - even as Trump lies to his moronic base and tells them the foreign nations are paying the tariffs.  The long term damage to America's interests will last for years even after Trump is gone from the White House with America's trustworthiness being questioned.  A piece in Slate looks at the damage done to date and how all of us will pay a price.  Here are article highlights: 

Remember Sen. Tom Cotton’s letter to Iran? These days, you can bet that the leaders of Iran do.

The letter, sent in March 2015, was one of those events that seemed like a major outrage at the time but now feels like such ancient history that the letter might as well have been written on parchment. At the height of the debate over the Obama administration’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran, the Arkansas senator organized a group of 47 Republican colleagues to send a letter to the “leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” explaining “features of our Constitution … which you should consider seriously as negotiations progress.” Noting that any deal would be merely an “executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei” rather than a formal treaty ratified by Congress and that Barack Obama would be leaving office in January 2017, the letter warned that the next president would revoke it “with the stroke of a pen.”

[T]he thing is, Cotton was completely right: On May 8, 2018, Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal the Obama administration had negotiated and re-imposed sanctions lifted as part of it. Tensions between the two countries have been rising ever since.

The five other countries that were party to the deal and the European Union are still committed to it, as is Iran, but just barely. This week, Iranian nuclear officials announced that they had quadrupled the country’s uranium enrichment production, putting them on a path to exceed limits set by the accord.

If the Iranian regime stays in compliance with the deal, it may be only because they know Trump won’t be in office forever, either. Most of the Democratic candidates running for president in 2020 have promised to rejoin the Iran deal, which would entail lifting the sanctions that Trump has re-imposed. 

Waiting out the Trump administration is a popular idea these days. Susan Thornton, the former acting assistant secretary of state, told a gathering in Shanghai earlier this month that China should be patient amid the ongoing trade war and not rush to resolve it, telling the audience, “If this skeptical attitude towards talking diplomacy continues in this administration, you might have to wait till another administration.” The parties to the Paris climate agreement may also be somewhat heartened that every major Democratic candidate has pledged to keep the U.S. in the agreement. (The U.S. will technically still be a party to the Paris agreement until November 2020 at the earliest, despite Trump’s withdrawal announcement in 2017.)
 This isn’t a very encouraging state of affairs, and not only because there’s a decent chance Trump will be reelected in 2020. If it becomes the norm that agreements struck by a U.S. president will be kept only so long as that president’s party is in power, why would any country ever sign a deal with the U.S. ever again? If the entire disposition of U.S. foreign policy transforms depending on whether a Democrat or a Republican occupies the White House, it will have a destabilizing impact on international relations long after Trump leaves office.
 But presidents of both parties have, at the very least, shared a disposition toward international alliances and broad policy objectives that contrasts with domestic political divides.
 In today’s U.S. political climate, all issues are becoming culture war issues, and more and more official U.S. policies abroad are coming to resemble the Mexico City Policy—switches to be flipped on or off depending on which domestic constituency the party in power wants to appeal to.
 This dynamic has only been getting more acute in recent years. The near impossibility of getting Republican support meant that Obama had to carry out most of his signature diplomatic achievements—the Iran deal, the Paris accord, the normalization of relations with Cuba—via executive action. That also meant those achievements could be undone by executive action.
 Meanwhile, Trump has pulled the U.S. out of negotiations for the planned Trans-Pacific Partnership and the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia. Even the Universal Postal Union hasn’t been safe.

Nearly all the Democratic presidential candidates, to the extent they discuss foreign policy at all, emphasize the importance of rebuilding international alliances. If any of them becomes president, he or she would probably work to rejoin many of the deals and institutions that Trump has pulled out of and reaffirm the U.S. commitment to those, notably NATO, that Trump has simply trashed. But it will be immeasurably more difficult for the next Democratic president to replicate even the limited diplomatic achievements of the Obama years. Why would the leader of any U.S. adversary want to repeat the experience of Iran or Cuba by spending political capital on a rapprochement with the U.S., only to see the offer humiliatingly rescinded by the next president?

The problem isn’t just treaties and agreements. The way Americans view the world, and other countries, is increasingly polarized. Polls show increasing divergences between the parties in views on Mexico, Iran, Russia, Germany, Canada, and other countries. Iran may not be particularly popular on either side of the aisle, but prominent voices on Democratic foreign policy, including Sanders’ foreign policy adviser, have been arguing that Saudi Arabia is viewed as worse. Whether you think the Iranians or the Saudis are a bigger threat to human rights and regional stability may soon become an indicator of partisan loyalty.
 Countries may never be entirely neutral topics in each other’s partisan politics—the U.S. certainly hasn’t always been. But at least the ideal state of affairs is that they’re willing to conduct business with whatever party is in power. And that only works if there’s at least a certain level of continuity in foreign policy outlook and strategic goals as well as a baseline willingness to honor agreements signed by the previous administration, even if the new one doesn’t like them very much. If current trends continue, America’s partisan divide will continue to widen, and foreign policy questions will increasingly be treated as culture war fights between the parties.
 If future presidents share Trump’s disdain for international institutions and agreements, the credibility of U.S. foreign policy stances will suffer. And if these partisan swings become predicable—in other words, if countries know in advance that certain U.S. policies and agreements only apply when one party or another is in office—it will increase incentives for foreign powers to try to influence and meddle in U.S. elections. What’s a few cyberattacks or Facebook ad buys when the entire foreign policy outlook of the most powerful country is at stake?

Americans are increasingly living in two different countries at home. Soon we may be treated as two different countries abroad as well.

Governors Ralph Northam and Larry Hogan: States Can Lead the Way on Climate Change

Ralph Northam being sworn in as Governor of Virginia.

With the Trump/Pence regime openly attacking environmental regulations and seeking to undo decades of clean water and clean air policies that have greatly reduced water and air pollution, states are increasingly seeking to step in and protect their own environments and the well being of their citizens.  Indeed, 17 governors are now members of the U.S. Climate Alliance which aims to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions consistent with the goals of the Paris agreement.  A joint editorial by Governors Ralph Northam and Larry Hogan of Virginia and Maryland (one Democrat and one Republican), respectively lays out efforts states can take to blunt the damage being done by the rogue Trump/Pence regime and to protect the air and water quality of their states.  Here are column highlights from the Virginian Pilot:  

THE TRUMP administration’s pursuit of policies to reverse or supplant environmental laws that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions has made combating climate change difficult. But where the federal government refuses to lead, state governments will.

For the sake of our future and the future of our children, it is time to put aside partisan interests and get to work.

Today, nations from around the world are in Poland working on a common set of rules that will govern the implementation of the Paris climate agreement and report on their progress. The residents of Virginia and Maryland, as well as all those of other states across the country, have a stake in ensuring that the agreement succeeds.

That is why we support the elected officials and leaders from cities, tribes, businesses, universities, hospitals and churches who represent U.S. support for the Paris climate agreement. Together, this delegation of leaders will make it clear to the world that we are doing our part to keep the United States on track to fulfill the promise it made in Paris.

We are already experiencing the negative effects of climate change, as the recent National Climate Assessment from 13 federal agencies made painfully clear. . . . . This new report from the federal government confirms what we already know: Climate change can hurt public health and cripple our economy.

Our most important job as governors is ensuring the safety of our constituents. So when we face a threat to people’s livelihoods and way of life, showing leadership means acknowledging the risks and addressing them.

This is why a bipartisan group of governors joined to form the U.S. Climate Alliance. After starting with three governors, the alliance has now grown to 17 state leaders who have committed to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions consistent with the goals of the Paris agreement. We are united in our belief that smart, coordinated state action can ensure that the United States continues to contribute to the global effort to address climate change. Together, we are taking action to implement a range of climate policies — such as lowering the cost of renewable energy and promoting the use of electric vehicles.

In our home states of Maryland and Virginia, we are experiencing rising seas, more extreme weather events, regular high-tide flooding and a changing Chesapeake Bay. That’s why Maryland has become a leader in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and passed a law to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 40 percent, creating a model for others to follow. Maryland also has an active, bipartisan Commission on Climate Change and is a leader in climate resilience and preparedness, as well as in championing green infrastructure, open spaces, and a climate academy for local officials and citizens. Recently, the state has announced its intention to ban the manufacture and use of hydrofluorocarbons, a super-polluting greenhouse gas.

And just to the south, Virginia has begun the process to reduce carbon pollution from power plants by 30 percent by 2030 and recently announced its intention to significantly reduce emissions of methane — a greenhouse gas that is more than 80 times more damaging than carbon dioxide in the short term. Virginia also issued an executive order last month detailing steps to address extreme weather, including the creation of a Coastal Resilience Master Plan to protect private property and critical public assets, using nature-based infrastructure whenever possible.

[W]e will make plans to adapt and protect our residents and our coastlines. These steps will help slow climate change, but we need help. We call on leaders of all political persuasions to get to work and cooperate across aisles and across borders — both national and international — to meet the challenge of climate change.

Elections have consequences.  Had Northam not won in 2017, there is little doubt that Ed Gillespie would be taking a very different approach and joining in with the Trump/Pence regime and hastening the willful degradation the environment. 

Trump and Republicans Mirror Nero on Climate Change

Myth has it that as large areas of the ancient the City of Rome burned in a major fire, Emperor Nero played his fiddle as his subjects suffered.  Fast forward to today and we see Donald Trump and much of the Republican Party doing the equivalent as one dire study after another indicates that the world is headed towards a climate Armageddon if policies are not quickly changed.  Instead of ramping up to face the coming disaster, Trump is loosening regulations to INCREASE the release of carbon into the air and allowing increased pollution.  Meanwhile, his lunatic evangelical base blames disasters on gays and abortion rather than the failed policies of their favored leaders.  The latest report on climate change suggests that the window of opportunity to take corrective action is closing.  Instead of acting on the crisis, Trump continues his Nero imitation while spreading hate and division across America.  An editorial in the New York Times looks at the frightening scenario.  Here are highlights:

When a cautious, science-based and largely apolitical group like the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the world must utterly transform its energy systems in the next decade or risk ecological and social disaster, attention must be paid.

The panel, created in 1988, synthesizes the findings of leading climate scientists, an undertaking for which it received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. It is not in the habit of lecturing governments. But its latest report, issued near Seoul on Monday, is very different. One United Nations official described it as “a deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen” — an alarm aimed directly at world leaders. “Frankly, we’ve delivered a message to the governments,” said Jim Skea, a co-chairman of the panel and a professor at Imperial College, London. “It’s now their responsibility … to decide whether they can act on it.”

Unfortunately, no alarm seems loud enough to penetrate the walls of the White House or the cranium of its principal occupant. President Trump had nothing substantive to say about the report, preferring, his staff said, to focus on celebrating the elevation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Having already announced that he would withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change, having also rolled back a suite of Obama-era efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Mr. Trump thus reaffirmed his sorry role as an outlier in the global struggle against climate change — a struggle few believe can be won without the enthusiastic participation of the United States.

The report, written by 91 scientists from 40 countries, came about at the request of several small island nations that took part in the Paris talks . . . . Fearing that their countries might someday be lost to rising seas, they asked the intergovernmental panel for further study of a lower threshold, 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius). The panel’s report concluded that the stricter threshold should become the new target. The alternative is catastrophe — mass die-offs of coral reefs, widespread drought, famine and wildfires, and potentially conflict over land, food and fresh water.

The panel said a mammoth effort is needed, beginning now and carrying through the century, to decarbonize global energy systems. The next 10 years are absolutely crucial: Emissions will have to be on a sharp downward path by 2030 for any hope of success. Greenhouse gases must be cut nearly in half from 2010 levels. Renewable energy sources must increase from about 20 percent of the electricity mix today to as much as 67 percent. The use of coal would need to be phased out, vanishing almost entirely by midcentury.

As an early piece in the Times noted, Trump is pandering to mining interest in Appalachia and certain western states to the detriment of the nation as a whole:  

Trump, who has questioned the accepted scientific consensus on climate change, continues to praise “clean beautiful coal” and has directed his Environmental Protection Agency to reverse major strides undertaken by the Obama administration to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. This is unbelievably reckless. In addition to undermining the fight against climate change, the president's efforts to prop up the dirtiest of all fuels will also exact a significant toll on public health, on the hearts and lungs of ordinary Americans.

The E.P.A.’s bedrock mission is to protect public health and welfare. Its basic tools are 50 years of federal clean air and water laws meant to limit Americans’ exposure to environmental poisons and pollutants.

The latest example is a proposal his agency [EPA] sent to the White House for review and approval that would, in broadest terms, greatly devalue the public health benefits of reducing air pollution. The proposal is specifically aimed at a 2011 finding by the Obama administration that when the agency devises rules to control a particular pollutant — mercury, in this case — it must take into account not only the compliance costs to industry but the additional health benefits that arise from the reduction in other harmful gases like soot and smog that occur as a side effect. Though the health benefits of controlling mercury alone were quite small, and the costs to industry large, those costs were outweighed by savings to the country in annual health costs and lost workdays when the co-benefits were factored in. [T]he Trump administration’s laughably weak replacement plan would cause (by the Trump E.P.A.’s own calculations) as many as 1,400 premature deaths annually by 2030, as well as 15,000 new cases of upper respiratory disease and billions of dollars in new health care costs, mainly from an increase in fine particulate matter linked to heart and lung disease. What we are dealing with here, in other words, is a bit of a shell game — hard to follow, costly to the public, satisfying to those who are running it. We are also dealing with people who won’t let inconvenient forecasts about death and disease deter them from their appointed goal of satisfying Mr. Trump’s pro-coal agenda, and who also seem eager to keep such forecasts hidden.

How "Conservative Charities" Fueled Rejection of the Paris Climate Accord

Despite seeing evidence of climate change before our very eyes - the melting of the polar ice caps plus three simultaneous hurricanes fueled by much warmer ocean water than in the past are but two plainly visible examples -  one has to wonder how Donald Trump and far too many Republicans have been so willing to deny what is otherwise obvious.  As a lengthy investigative report in the Washington Post reveals, much of it is due to the work of "conservative charities" that masquerade as "educational charities" furthering  public education when in reality they are little more than propaganda fronts for large corporations or religious extremists.  Having followed various "conservative" and "Christian" charities for over two decades, they are one of the biggest scams on the public and further ignorance and the rejection of knowledge not to mention unrestricted vulture capitalism that cares nothing about future generations. How they are allowed to continue to scam the IRS rules is at first baffling until one realizes that they often pay larges sums to "conservative" politicians.  Here are highlights from the Post's story:

For nearly two decades, Ebell has led the Cooler Heads Coalition, an umbrella group of tax-exempt public charities and other nonprofit organizations in the vanguard of efforts to cast doubt on the gravity of climate change and thwart government efforts to address it.

Coalition members have called climate science a hoax and denounced environmentalists as “global-warming alarmists.” They have written letters, blasted out emails, pressured lawmakers, sponsored seminars, appeared on television and made a documentary movie.

It was all part of a wave that crested with Trump’s rejection on June 1 of the Paris agreement, a landmark accord by nearly 200 countries in 2015 to limit greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

The story behind the coalition illuminates the influential, little-known role that tax-exempt public charities play in modern campaigns to sway lawmakers and shape policy in the nation’s capital, while claiming to be nonpartisan educational organizations.

It also offers insight into the forces behind a Trump decision that infuriated scientists and environmentalists, mystified U.S. allies and went against the advice of some major corporations.

[T]he Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which helped start the Cooler Heads Coalition in 1997. The coalition, with a rolling membership of more than three dozen groups over the years, describes itself on its website as “informal and ad-hoc,” and focused on education.

Interviews, tax filings, internal documents and news accounts show that its members are well funded and dedicated to advancing a conservative, free-market agenda.

The Post found that the coalition is part of a far larger network of tax-exempt nonprofit groups, linked by ideology and funding, that supported Trump while disparaging Democrat Hillary Clinton in last year’s presidential campaign.

The Cooler Heads have received more than $11 million in donations over the years from coal and oil companies. They’ve taken in tens of millions more from nonprofit foundations, such as those controlled by the wealthy Koch brothers, and the Scaife and Mercer families, according to interviews and Internal Revenue Service filings.

[M]embers of the Cooler Heads Coalition are allied with trade groups, public relations companies and lobbyists working to influence public debate about global warming.

“Public charities serve as so-called independent think tanks, providing analysis to create the appearance they are independent, third-party voices,”

Long dismissed as cranks by mainstream scientists and politicians in both parties, Ebell and his Cooler Heads colleagues were embraced last year by the Trump campaign. Ebell served as the transition director at the Environmental Protection Agency. This spring, he leveraged those connections to arrange a White House briefing in opposition to the Paris agreement, according to an email from Ebell to participants that was obtained by The Post.

Such advocacy is in effect supported by American taxpayers, because contributors to groups organized under 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code can deduct donations from their taxes, which means less revenue for the federal government. Under IRS rules, such organizations may not devote a substantial part of their work to lobbying. But the laws are vague and hard to enforce. And the IRS provides little oversight, because it is financially strapped and has too few auditors. Agency officials are also wary of enforcing prohibitions on political activity, after the conservative backlash triggered by the agency’s focus on tea party groups several years ago, according to knowledgeable officials.

After long questioning global warming, Ebell now acknowledges that “climate change is occurring and human beings have a role in it.” But he said global warming still is not a crisis. He frames climate change as an ideological issue, saying that giving the government more authority to address it would stimulate a “regulatory onslaught,” damage the U.S. economy and subvert human freedom.

Climate scientists said there is no doubt about the reality of climate change and its consequences, including melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels and the intensification of storms. Benjamin Santer, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award for groundbreaking climate research, told The Post that Ebell and his Cooler Heads colleagues are attempting to turn back the clock on knowledge and science.

The Cooler Heads Coalition was formed in the spring of 1997 by a group called Consumer Alert that drew funding from Chevron, Philip Morris and other large corporations. An allied public charity, the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, soon took over management of the coalition, a cross section of nonprofit groups already fighting policies promoted by progressives and a growing number of liberal public charities and nonprofit organizations.

Joining later were groups such as the Heartland Institute, a libertarian group in the Chicago area, and an influential nonprofit organization, Americans for Prosperity, begun by the Koch brothers to “mobilize citizens” to press for economic growth through “government restraint,” tax filings show.

In early 1998, Ebell and others associated with Cooler Heads met with energy industry executives and lobbyists in closed-door meetings at the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association. Their goal was to convince the American people that climate science was purely speculative and that the scientists were “out of touch with reality,” according to a copy of an internal memo written by an API official who organized the meetings.

One former Cooler Heads member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of a punitive backlash, said the coalition’s mission under Ebell was to be a “Johnny-on-the-spot for climate denialism” and to simulate a “cacophony of voices” against climate-change science.

An article that spring [2005] by Mother Jones reporter Chris Mooney, now at The Post, revealed that ExxonMobil had cultivated an intricate web of nonprofits, news media outlets, columnists and activists who “have sought to undermine mainstream scientific findings on global climate change.”

A 2009 IRS filing for the Competitive Enterprise Institute — inadvertently made public without redactions — disclosed funding from two coal mining companies. 

In 2013, Brulle completed a study showing that between 2003 and 2010, energy companies, corporations and conservative foundations contributed hundreds of millions to 91 nonprofit “think tanks,” educational groups and associations involved in the fight against global-warming regulations — more than three quarters of them tax-exempt charities whose donors were largely anonymous.

From September to Jan. 19, 2017, Ebell worked on an “action plan” for the president [Trump]. It incorporated the promises Trump had made during the campaign, including the rejection of the Paris accord. Ebell also proposed gutting the agency by cutting thousands of EPA employees.

In effect, taxpayers have indirectly funded these organizations which are fronts for some of the worse polluters that care nothing about clean air and clean water or the nightmares suffered by cities and citizens as the impacts of global warming increase.  

Allies Start Planning a Life Without America

Vladimir Putin must be smiling.  How could he not be as we witness America's allies moving forward with plans for their security and economies with America no longer a dependable ally.  The champagne must be flowing in at the Kremlin.  Der Trumpenführer has accomplished what decades of Soviet and then Putin efforts failed to do: splinter American alliances and fray the ties of NATO. An editorial in the New York Times looks at this phenomenon which could prove disastrous for America down the road.  Here are excerpts:

Many governments must be thinking along the same lines, but few have spelled it out so clearly. Germany did, when Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “The times in which we could rely fully on others — they are somewhat over.” Now Canada, a country tightly bound to its neighbor by history, alliance and the longest border in the world, has declared the need to recognize that the United States is relinquishing its role as the “indispensable nation.”

“The fact that our friend and ally has come to question the very worth of its mantle of global leadership puts into sharper focus the need for the rest of us to set our own clear and sovereign course,” Canada’s foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, told her Parliament this month.

Ms. Freeland never mentioned Donald Trump. That wouldn’t be diplomatic. But every line of her speech before a silent House of Commons was clearly about a world order thrown into crisis as President Trump scoffs at trade agreements, hectors allies, rips up the landmark Paris climate accord and otherwise demonstrates disdain for anything that isn’t “America First.” Canada’s course, Ms. Freeland said, would be the opposite of Canada First; it would be “the renewal, indeed the strengthening, of the postwar multilateral order.” The problem is that it’s not so much Mr. Trump’s policies as his chaotic absence of clear policies that is pushing Canada, Germany and other allies to draw back from Washington. Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, sought early in the Trump administration to find ways of working together. But according to Canadian news reports, Mr. Trump’s rejection of the climate agreement was what finally persuaded Mr. Trudeau that he had to find his own way. Ms. Freeland’s powerful speech was, in effect, the proclamation of a new Trudeau Doctrine of actively pursuing multilateral trade, strengthening multilateral institutions and building a stronger military.

Neither Canada nor any other ally, of course, can begin to match the United States in might or wealth, and it remains to be seen whether Mr. Trudeau comes up with the money to achieve the goals Ms. Freeland enunciated. But it is surely to the advantage of Canada and other allies to step out from under America’s long shadow and take more responsibility for their shared security and values. How much better that would be, however, if they were not doing it largely to escape a shadow that has turned dark, turbulent and dangerous.

Trump's Clueless About Pittsburgh - Just Like Everything Else

If there is one thing that one can depend upon, it is that Donald Trump, a/k/a Der  Trumpenführer, doesn't know what the hell he is talking about and that his facts and figures are more or less pulled out of his ass.  A case in point is his comment about Pittsburgh when he was declare that the United States would be withdrawing from the Paris climate accord.  Specifically, he said he was more concerned about the citizens of Pittsburgh than the citizens of Paris.  The reality, however, is that Pittsburgh cared little for Trump and Hillary Clinton garnered 56.4% of the vote as  opposed to Trump's measly 40% (Gary Johnson got 2.5% of the vote).  Stated another way, almost 60% of Pittsburgh voters did not want Der Trumpenführer.  And then there's they myth that Pittsburgh longs for the "good old days" of coal and steel.  As a piece in Politico points out, the city has long since moved on and now has one of the most educated and truly is indifferent about Trump's false claims that he will revive the moribund coal industry.  Here are article excepts:

Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States is withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords was framed as his obligation to “represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” The line conjures an image that a reindustrialized Pittsburgh will return to its smokestack roots, becoming once again the center of the nation’s steel production, fueled by Appalachian coal, and delivering raw material to vastly expanded American manufacturing industries. And it seems to suggest that this blessed future awaits not just Pittsburgh, but virtually all of the American Rust Belt, once crippling environmental regulations have been vanquished.

But Pittsburgh is not muddling through a post-industrial funk. In fact, it is a leading example of a city, and a region, that has rebuilt itself to compete in the post-industrial 21st century economy. Much of that transformation has only been possible because of the concerted efforts to clean the land, air and waterways damaged by virtually unregulated industrial use for over a century. Yet Pittsburgh has been able to generate new jobs, attract new workers and successfully compete against the world.

This truth got lost in the 2016 election which radically oversimplified the debate about how to strengthen America’s manufacturing industries and declining regions.

Three decades ago, a handful of macro-economic forces—the mass obsolescence of industrial capital, contractionary monetary policy, global over-capacity and disruptive technology within the steel industry—came together to eviscerate Pittsburgh's historic advantages in producing steel. Until then, few regions had fought harder, or failed more dramatically, to retain their industrial base than Pittsburgh. Moving forward was made all the more difficult by the scale of the collapse that the region endured in the 1980s. Over 150,000 manufacturing jobs permanently disappeared from southwestern Pennsylvania, and the Pittsburgh metropolitan region contracted by 176,000 people—the single largest population loss of any metropolitan region over the decade.

A lot has happened in Pittsburgh in three decades that followed the worst of the job destruction. Pittsburgh has been forced to redefine itself, a transformation that started with its workforce. Where once Pittsburgh was possibly the most blue-collar city in the nation, the region today relies on a workforce that is one of the most educated in the nation. . . . . . Once dependent on a singular industry, Pittsburgh has created new jobs across a range of industries. Building upon a core of stability in both the health and education sectors, employment has been shifting into finance and a broad range of professional service industries. Of late, Pittsburgh has attracted new technology-based investment by the likes of Google and Uber and looks to become a center of self-driving cars.

One pole of the city’s growth has been the expansion of both academic research and enrollment at Pittsburgh’s universities and colleges. Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh—the city’s two largest universities—together expanded their annual research and development expenditures to over $1 billion dollars for the first time in 2010. Much of that growth has been fueled by federal research funding that appears to be at risk in the new priorities coming from Washington. Take into account that Pittsburgh’s university-based research is focused in the fields most agree are economic drivers for the nation: life sciences, information technology, robotics and more, the potential harm of diminished research funding is even greater.

More than anything else, the public has been told relaxed environmental regulations will aide a beleaguered coal industry. Yet, peak employment in the coal industry in both Pennsylvania and West Virginia came a full century ago. Today, less than a thousand coal miners are still employed across the Pittsburgh metropolitan region. Fewer than 6,000 coal miners are employed across Pennsylvania, and this is less than were employed in the state before the Civil War.

The hope that a reinvigorated coal industry will in the long run help Pittsburgh, or its neighbors across northern Appalachia is a false one. Regulation is easy to blame for coal’s continuing decline as a fuel choice, but new domestic supplies of natural gas have put coal at a competitive disadvantage that will be almost impossible to offset short of direct subsidies.

Make no mistake, Pittsburgh’s transformation is incomplete, uneven and ongoing, but there is no rational reason for the region to turn back on the progress it has made.

Unlike Pittsburgh, much of Trump country will not be able to transform itself through education and recruitment of new industries.  In contrast to Pittsburgh, they eschew education, reject scientific knowledge and have few reputable colleges and universities. I'm sorry, but unaccredited bible colleges will not make a positive impression of progressive and innovative business.  Nor will right wing Christian extremism and open racism and bigotry. Pittsburgh demonstrates the route to economic improvement and an embracing of the 21st century.  Sadly, most of Trump country wants to return to the 1950's - something that will not happen - and the war against modernity and diversity will only accelerate the economic death spiral for these regions.  Bigotry and the embrace of ignorance (much of it Bible inspired) carries a huge economic cost. .   

Why Evangelical Christians Reject Climate Change

Throughout our lives we face many choices some of which are easy and others of which are difficult - for Fox News viewers, sexual orientation isn't one of them.  Often making decisions or failing to make them comes down to intellectual laziness and/or an unwillingness to face facts and knowledge that cut against childhood indoctrination.  Most of us grow up and come to think for ourselves.  One block of Americans do not: evangelical Christians.  When confronted with inconvenient facts - e.g., the human genome project says that Adam and Eve never existed as historical persons - the reaction of this group is to reject them and to double down in the embrace of ignorance and to cling more desperately to myths and fairy tales.  Anything and anyone that challenges their serious thought free "world view" is deemed an enemy and lashed out at. Gays represent by one group that challenges their childish beliefs and bigotries.  Which brings us to climate change where 72% of evangelicals refuse to believe in it.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the deliberate embrace of a book authored by uneducated, Bronze Age goat herders over scientific acknowledge.  As the piece notes, climate change is but one of the numerous idiocies that the "godly folk" embrace.  Here are highlights:

The United States will withdraw from the Paris agreement on climate change, President Trump announced Thursday. Environmental scientists say the consequences could be catastrophic for the planet. But for some Trump supporters, there’s no reason to worry.

“As a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us,” Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) told constituents last week at a town hall in Coldwater, Mich. “And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, he can take care of it.”
 Among conservative evangelicals, that is not an unusual opinion. . . . only 28 percent of evangelicals believe human activity is causing climate change. Confidence that God will intervene to prevent people from destroying the world is one of the strongest barriers to gaining conservative evangelical support for environmental pacts like the Paris agreement. Climate change isn’t the first issue where such faith has presented itself. During the Cold War, premillennialist evangelicals, who believe that the Second Coming of Christ is imminent, argued that God wouldn’t allow humanity to destroy itself in a nuclear war. Conservative evangelicals during the Cold War often saw disarmament as a greater threat to the United States than the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Jerry Falwell adopted the slogan “Peace through Strength” in the early 1980s and declared that a nuclear freeze would be “national suicide.” Premillennialists such as televangelist James Robison preached that the Antichrist, who was destined to unite the world under his leadership, would use fear of nuclear weapons and a promise of peace to deceive the world into accepting world government. When scientists began sounding the alarm over climate change in the 1980s, conservative evangelicals, who had been somewhat accepting of environmentalism in the 1970s, became convinced that the Antichrist would use the fear of climate change to seize power. The 1970s environmental movement had enjoyed widespread support as it focused on smaller issues like pollution and litter. In the 1980s, though, scientists revealed problems like the depletion of the ozone layer and global warming, which required worldwide cooperation and significant economic changes to redress.  For Christians like Walberg, globalism is the most dire threat to the United States, not rising oceans and more powerful hurricanes. Just as conservative evangelicals opposed arms treaties during the Cold War, they see environmental pacts, like the Paris agreement, as paving the way for a charismatic world leader to form a global government and begin the seven-year Tribulation that precedes the Second Coming of Christ.  Trump’s anti-globalism was part of what made him attractive to conservative evangelicals in last year’s Republican primaries and the general election — and still now as president. Even if Trump’s personal life is an affront to Christian values, his message means that the United States will be standing against the potential forces of the Antichrist.  Trump doesn’t seem to have any firm beliefs, religious or otherwise. He didn’t pull us out of the Paris accord because he truly shares the conservative evangelical beliefs of many of his supporters and advisers. Still, by calling climate change a Chinese hoax, he’s shown a willingness to use similar arguments for his own purposes. We must accept that a number of conservative evangelicals, especially from older generations, will never support significant action on climate change, especially if it means signing a global treaty. Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement has proven that he lacks the flexibility and foresight of Reagan, who dared negotiate with the country he declared an “evil empire.” But we can appeal to moderate and liberal evangelicals with different or milder end-times beliefs, and nonevangelical conservatives can still be convinced to cooperate if persuaded that inaction threatens U.S. standing in the world. We have no choice but to give up on Trump now, but maybe we can hope the party of Reagan will find the moral courage to combat climate change.   

In my view, the author is too optimistic about the Republican Party.  Evangelical Christians are akin to a cancer within the party that has metastasized and rendered the party in a terminal condition.  As for the fears of an Anti-Christ , I would argue that their vote him in the White House.  The only way to deal with evangelicals is to reject them socially and politically.  Their "faith" - i.e., embrace of ignorance - deserves zero respect nor do they.  They constitute a clear and present danger to America. 

The Winners From Trump's Foreign Policy Shifts: Russia and China

To whom does Donald Trump/the Trump Organization owe his/its financial survival? Russia and its oligarchs and the Bank of China, a entity controlled by the Chinese government.  The Russian oligarchs and their laundering of dirty money have kept Trump properties going, and the Bank of China is one of Trump's main financiers (along with Deutche Bank).  Thus, it is no surprise that when one looks at the fallout from Der Trumpenführer's foreign policy actions over the last week, the big winners are Russia and China.  Russia is seeing the NATO alliance split - something Russia has worked at since 1945 - and Trump is likely to lift sanctions and give back Russia's seized spying facilities near Washington, DC. As for China, Trump's trashing o other NATO countries has opened the door for China to pursue trade advantages in Europe, and now, with Trump's withdrawal of America from the Paris Climate accord is positioning China for new potential global leadership.  All so that ignorance embracing Fox News viewers and evangelical Christians can feel self-satisfied and pretend that they are not the worse form of "white trash."  A piece in the Washington Post looks at how China benefits from Trump's - in my view - borderline traitorous actions.  Here are excerpts:

In ditching the Paris accord on climate change, President Trump has cemented his reputation as the international disrupter in chief with the latest in a string of decisions that foreign policy analysts believe could have profound consequences for U.S. global leadership.

The decision to exit the Paris agreement is sure to anger many of the almost 200 nations that signed the commitment to reduce emissions. In one sign of shifting alliances, the European Union and China were expected to issue a joint statement Friday vowing to take a leading role in stemming climate change. China in particular is expected to fill any leadership vacuum created by the U.S. retreat, both in climate change and trade.
 “Having pulled out of the Paris accord, after sowing doubt at NATO and killing the TPP, President Trump is on the way to ending the U.S.-led international order,” said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, a firm that assesses political risks. “I think we’re heading toward a Hobbesian, each-on-his-own world.”

Many in the foreign policy establishment believe the pullbacks have undermined U.S. influence and credibility.

“Other countries will be less willing to engage with us,” said David Victor, director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the University of California at San Diego. “It creates a vacuum others will try to fill. It will make it harder for the United States to advance its interests.”

Now, China is positioned to move into the void left by the United States. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year, Chinese President Xi Jinping gave a speech extolling the virtues of globalized trade as the United States appeared to be turning inward. The U.S. abandonment of the Paris accord represents another opportunity. On Thursday, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang stood beside Merkel in Berlin and declared the fight against climate change a “global consensus” and an “international responsibility.” He noted that China was one of the first countries to ratify the Paris accord.

“Xi Jinping is sitting in Beijing and can’t believe what’s happening to him,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. representative to NATO and now president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “The United States’ retreat from leadership means China can move in America’s wake. We’re seeing the possibility of a shift in global leadership, away from Washington and the United States toward Beijing and China.”

A column by a Nobel prize winning economist in the New York Times likewise trashes Trump's actions.  Here are highlights:

As Donald Trump does his best to destroy the world’s hopes of reining in climate change, let’s be clear about one thing: This has nothing to do with serving America’s national interest. The U.S. economy, in particular, would do just fine under the Paris accord. This isn’t about nationalism; mainly, it’s about sheer spite.

About the economics: At this point, I think, we have a pretty good idea of what a low-emissions economy would look like. I’m sure that energy experts will disagree on the details, but the broad outline isn’t hard to describe.

Clearly, it would be an economy running on electricity — electric cars, electric heat, with internal combustion engines rare. The bulk of that electricity would, in turn, come from nonpolluting sources: wind, solar and, yes, probably nuclear.

Meanwhile, there would be compensating benefits. Notably, the adverse health effects of air pollution would be greatly reduced, and it’s quite possible that lower health care costs would all by themselves make up for the costs of energy transition, even ignoring the whole saving-civilization-from-catastrophic-climate-change thing. The point is that while tackling climate change in the way envisaged by the Paris accord used to look like a hard engineering and economic problem, these days it looks fairly easy. We have almost all the technology we need, and can be quite confident of developing the rest. Obviously the transition to a low-emissions economy, the phasing out of fossil fuels, would take time, but that would be O.K. as long as the path was clear.

Why, then, are so many people on the right determined to block climate action, and even trying to sabotage the progress we’ve been making on new energy sources?

Don’t tell me that they’re honestly worried about the inherent uncertainty of climate projections.

Don’t tell me that it’s about coal miners. Anyone who really cared about those miners would be crusading to protect their health, disability and pension benefits, and trying to provide alternative employment opportunities — not pretending that environmental irresponsibility will somehow bring back jobs lost to strip mining and mountaintop removal. Pay any attention to modern right-wing discourse — including op-ed articles by top Trump officials — and you find deep hostility to any notion that some problems require collective action beyond shooting people and blowing things up.

Beyond this, much of today’s right seems driven above all by animus toward liberals rather than specific issues. If liberals are for it, they’re against it. If liberals hate it, it’s good. Add to this the anti-intellectualism of the G.O.P. base, for whom scientific consensus on an issue is a minus, not a plus, with extra bonus points for undermining anything associated with President Barack Obama.

And if all this sounds too petty and vindictive to be the basis for momentous policy decisions, consider the character of the man in the White House. 

It will be divine justice if China rises to the challenge and takes over American leadership on international trade and climate change.  One can only hope that the cretins and morons that Trump is pleasing by such harmful actions suffer immeasurably as the consequences come home to roost.  Meanwhile, take a good look at Britain which in a similar form of wrongheaded xenophobia has marginalized itself through its Brexit vote to a point where no one seemingly cares what happens there.  America is marching down a similar road.  I hope people remember those responsible for this diminishing of America.