Is the Trump/Pence Regime Trying to Kill Americans?

The title of this post might seem extreme, but when one factors in the consequence of the Trump/Pence regime's agenda - and that of the GOP in general - the inescapable conclusion is that some Americans will die as a result of this regime's policies.  Through its quest to eliminate regulations that protect everything from clean air and water to the safety of the food we eat, the agenda is to bring back some of the worse aspects of the Gilded Age.  The purpose?  To allow large corporations and certain preferred industries to rake in more money while the health of average Americans is harmed.  Throw in the goal of eliminating the Affordable Health Care Act while proposing no meaningful replacement, and the death toll soars. Meanwhile, the wealthiest Americans only care about increasing their obscene wealth and evangelical Christians fixated on imposing a Christian version of Sharia Law think that they will somehow be exempt from the deadly effects of the Trump/Pence agenda.  A column in the New York Times looks at the real harm being done.  Here are excerpts:

Even if he’s a one-term president, Trump will have caused, directly or indirectly, the premature deaths of a large number of Americans.

Some of those deaths will come at the hands of right-wing, white nationalist extremists, who are a rapidly growing threat, partly because they feel empowered by a president who calls them “very fine people.”

Some will come from failures of governance, like the inadequate response to Hurricane Maria, which surely contributed to the high death toll in Puerto Rico. (Reminder: Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.)

Some will come from the administration’s continuing efforts to sabotage Obamacare, which have failed to kill health reform but have stalled the decline in the number of uninsured, meaning that many people still aren’t getting the health care they need. Of course, if Trump gets his way and eliminates Obamacare altogether, things on this front will get much, much worse.

But the biggest death toll is likely to come from Trump’s agenda of deregulation — or maybe we should call it “deregulation,” because his administration is curiously selective about which industries it wants to leave alone.

Consider two recent events that help capture the deadly strangeness of what’s going on.

One is the administration’s plan for hog plants to take over much of the federal responsibility for food safety inspections. And why not? It’s not as if we’ve seen safety problems arise from self-regulation in, say, the aircraft industry, have we? . . . Or as if there was a reason the U.S. government stepped in to regulate meatpacking in the first place?

Now, you could see the Trump administration’s willingness to trust the meat industry to keep our meat safe as part of an overall attack on government regulation, a willingness to trust profit-making businesses to do the right thing and let the market rule.

[W]e normally think of Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, as people who minimize or deny the “negative externalities” imposed by some business activities — the uncompensated costs they impose on other people or businesses.

[T]he Trump administration wants to roll back rules that limit emissions of mercury from power plants. And in pursuit of that goal, it wants to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from taking account of many of the benefits from reduced mercury emissions, such as an associated reduction in nitrogen oxide.

But when it comes to renewable energy, Trump and company are suddenly very worried about supposed negative side effects, which generally exist only in their imagination.

So it’s deregulation for some, but dire warnings about imaginary threats for others. What’s going on?

Part of the answer is, follow the money. Political contributions from the meat-processing industry overwhelmingly favor Republicans. Coal mining supports the G.O.P. almost exclusively. Alternative energy, on the other hand, generally favors Democrats.

Whatever the drivers of Trump policy, the fact, as I said, is that it will kill people. Wind turbines don’t cause cancer, but coal-burning power plants do — along with many other ailments. The Trump administration’s own estimates indicate that its relaxation of coal pollution rules will kill more than 1,000 Americans every year. If the administration gets to implement its full agenda — not just deregulation of many industries, but discrimination against industries it doesn’t like, such as renewable energy — the toll will be much higher.

So if you eat meat — or, for that matter, drink water or breathe air — there’s a real sense in which Donald Trump is trying to kill you. And even if he’s turned out of office next year, for many Americans it will be too late.

Coal Country's Embrace of Fantasy

Coal producing areas of the country, including the increasing backward Southwest Virginia, embraced Der Trumpenführer and his lies about the "war on coal" for many reasons, not the least of which was the desire of voters to return to "the god old days" in the coal industry.  Never mind that (i) there was no "war on coal" and (ii) domestic and global demand for coal is headed in a downward spiral never to return to past levels.  Rather than admit economic reality and to face the task of accepting change - and modern thinking - it was far easier to embrace Trump/GOP lies.  Wanting something to be true, however, doesn't make it true as a piece in Think Progress underscores.  These fantasy embracing voters are going to be most disappointed and Democrats need to find a way to turn their disappointment against the Republicans who played them for fools.  Here are article highlights:

Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) has a message for the new president: You are not going to bring coal back.

Donald Trump won the presidency with claims that he is a brilliant businessman who will create jobs. He railed against a political “war on coal” supposedly waged by President Obama, one Trump claimed was “killing American jobs.” On his first day in office, Trump deleted all the climate change references on the White House website, replacing it with an “energy plan” that asserts he is “committed to… reviving America’s coal industry.”

In a new analysis, leading independent energy experts at BNEF dismantle these claims. “Whatever President Trump may say, U.S. coal’s main problem has been cheap natural gas and renewable power, not a politically driven war on coal,’” explain BNEF chair Michael Liebreich and chief editor Angus McCrone. Therefore “it will continue being pushed out of the generating mix.”

They note global electricity demand has grown much less than expected (thanks in part to energy efficiency).  . . . .  In a world of flat demand, the electricity market is a ruthless game of musical chairs — where the slowest and most unwieldy power sources keep losing their seat.

Coal power is just too costly and inflexible, explains BNEF: “Super-low-cost renewable power — what we are now calling ‘base-cost renewables’ — is going to force a revolution in the way power grids are designed, and the way they are regulated.”

When you add the revolution in cheap fracked gas — which Trump has pledged to double down on — it’s no surprise the country shut down over 40 gigawatts of coal-fired power stations since 2000. “These will not reopen whatever anything President Trump does,” explains BNEF, “nor do we see much appetite among investors for ploughing money into U.S. coal extraction — stranded asset risk will trump rhetoric.”

[C]oal’s woes are not merely being driven by a collapse in the economic case here. It’s also being driven by a collapse in the export market, as countries from Europe to Asia also move away from coal because of its economic and human cost. Coal pollution is killing people and destroying the climate.

“Peak coal is coming sooner than expected,” Goldman Sachs told clients in a September research note. BNEF agrees.

So Trump won’t be bringing back the domestic coal industry. And even if he could, he can’t bring back the jobs because it’s the coal industry itself that wiped out most of those jobs through productivity gains from “strip mines and machinery,” as Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman explained in 2014.

The fact is clean energy jobs are the only major new source of sustainable high-wage employment in the coming decades. Tragically, Trump’s misguided policies — his war on clean energy — mean the U.S. may not benefit from this exploding $50-trillion industry.

Hillary Clinton Unveils Far Reaching Climate Change Plan

While the flat earth Republicans continue to deny that climate change is occurring much less that mankind is playing a role in creating the problem, Hillary Clinton has unveiled a proposed plan to address climate change that includes far reaching changes.  It goes without saying that the knuckle dragging, spittle flecked masses of the core GOP base will assail the plan, but one can hope that Democrats and independents will view the plan as proof that they need to embrace the future and Democrats rather than the failed policies of the past so loved by the GOP base.  Another piece in the New York Times looks at the policy announcement.  Here are excerpts:

Setting ambitious goals for producing energy from the sun, wind and other renewable sources, Hillary Rodham Clinton seized on an issue Monday that increasingly resonates with Democratic voters and sets up a stark contrast with the Republican presidential field.

With many Republican candidates saying they do not believe that climate change is a threat or requires government intervention, Mrs. Clinton assailed their logic, saying, “The reality of climate change is unforgiving no matter what the deniers say.”

She set a goal to produce 33 percent of the nation’s electricity from renewable sources by 2027, up from 7 percent today — a higher goal than the 20 percent that President Obama has called for by 2030.

Mrs. Clinton’s strategists see climate change as a winning issue for 2016. They believe it is a cause she can advance to win over deep-pocketed donors and liberal activists in the nominating campaign, where she is facing Democratic challengers to her left on the issue. It is also one that can be a weapon against Republicans in a general election. Polls show that a majority of voters support candidates who pledge policy action on the warming climate.

The Clinton campaign emphasized that her targets cleared a bar set last week by the billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, who spent $74 million on political races in 2014. He announced that for candidates to receive his support in 2016, they must offer policies that would lead the nation to generate half its electricity from clean sources by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050. 

Just as liberal Democrats have tried to pull Mrs. Clinton to the left on economic issues, environmental groups have sought stronger statements from her opposing hydraulic fracturing, oil trains and drilling in the Arctic.

Anti-Keystone protesters have greeted Mrs. Clinton on the campaign trail in New Hampshire and even outside a May fund-raiser for her at Mr. Steyer’s home in San Francisco overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Hillary Clinton is just half the way there,” said Bill McKibben, head of the group 350.org, which has led the grass-roots movement calling for Mr. Obama to reject the Keystone pipeline. “This is a credible commitment to renewable energy, and a recognition that the economics of electricity are changing fast. Now, we need Clinton to show she understands the other half of the climate change equation — and prove she has the courage to stand up against fossil fuel projects like offshore and Arctic drilling, coal leasing in the Powder River basin, and the Keystone XL pipeline.”

Her campaign put the cost of her clean electricity initiatives at about $60 billion over 10 years, which it said would be offset by ending tax breaks for oil and gas producers.   “We’ll stop the giveaways to big oil companies and extend, instead, tax incentives for clean energy, while making them more cost-effective for both taxpayers and producers,” Mrs. Clinton said.

A January poll conducted by The New York Times, Stanford University and Resources for the Future found that two-thirds of Americans said they were more likely to vote for political candidates who campaign on fighting climate change.

“This issue now polls better than any other issue for Democrats,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former top climate change official in the Clinton administration. “It’s in Clinton’s interest to talk about the issue, both for primary voters and to highlight Republican vulnerabilities in the general election.”

The Vatican Issues a Warning on Climate Change

While I hold the Vatican in less than high esteem, in one of his "Dr. Jekyll" phases Pope Francis has issued an encyclical on climate change that has immediately garnered attacks from Rick Santorum and Jebbie Bush, both of whom like to wear their Catholicism on their sleeves, especially for campaign purposes, and reactions from the GOP that make the party faithful seem either severely constipated and/or in need of extra strength Midol.  As much as the Koch brothers and their allies in the carbon fuels industry spin out misinformation - a polite term for lies - most Americans do seem to be catching that the climate is indeed changing.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Poper Francis' encyclical and things that can be done to begin to make a difference in mankind's contribution to climate change.  Here are highlights:

The document is eloquent and intelligent, especially in its handling of science. “Most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity,” it says. “Concentrated in the atmosphere, these gases do not allow the warmth of the sun’s rays reflected by the earth to be dispersed in space.” That is as lucid a two-sentence description of the mechanism of global warming as I have read.

The encyclical is gloomy. But in fact, remarkable changes are taking place that could put the planet on a much more sustainable path. You get a sense of them if you read another important report that was issued this week, to much less fanfare than the pope’s missive — the International Energy Agency’s special report on energy and climate change.

The report points out that last year the global economy grew at 3 percent but that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions stayed flat, the first time this has happened in 40 years. Renewables accounted for nearly half of all new power generation last year, and the energy intensity of the global economy dropped by twice as much as it has on average annually over the past decade. With concerted action, we could actually push global emissions downward in the next few years.

The cost of solar cells has plummeted, leading to their widespread use. Cars, buildings and machines are becoming much more energy efficient. And over the horizon, one can see progress in batteries, nuclear power and biofuels, which could collectively produce a new energy ecosystem.

We need a revolution in public policy as well. Fred Krupp, head of the Environmental Defense Fund, points out that most of the improvements that have been made in technology and efficiency would not have happened without rules and laws. And a series of smart policies — which are not very costly or disruptive — could dramatically accelerate the shift to a cleaner economy. First, stop doing harm. 

Even Bjorn Lomborg, a skeptic about many efforts to tackle global warming, argues for a reduction in the massive, market-distorting subsidies for fossil fuels. The IEA estimates that last year these subsidies globally amounted to $510 billion, about four times those provided to renewable energy.

[S]olar power could become far more widespread if governments were not as beholden to utility companies and their phalanx of lobbyists. “There are lots of nonmarket barriers to renewables, placed at the behest of the established players,” he said. 

Natural gas is better than coal, but its production, transport and use release significant amounts of methane, which has much worse effects on the climate than carbon dioxide. The good news is that serious studies have found that these emissions could be reduced relatively cheaply with new regulations. 

The smartest new policy would be the simplest, . . . a carbon tax — effectively putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions to encourage companies to adopt cleaner technologies. This seems impossible to imagine — yet this month, several major oil companies in Europe [BG Group, BP, Eni , Royal Dutch Shell, Statoil and France's Total] came out in favor of a price on carbon, whether through a tax or an emissions trading system like those used in California and Europe.

Technology and policy innovations are happening, just not on the scale that they need to be. That’s why the pope’s warnings are so useful and important . . . .

Kansas, Wind Energy and the Koch Brothers

Among the most toxic and reactionary elements in politics today are the Koch brothers who seem happy to take America back to the Gilded Age, trash the environment, and hasten climate change through their love for carbon emitting energy sources.  Ironically, in Kansas these horrid individuals and their Republican sycophants  - perhaps political whores is a better term - are facing a blow back as their policies seek to undo efforts to push renewable energy sources, especially wind energy.  The insatiable greed of the Koch brothers and their utter lack of concern for others and/or the environment are all symptomatic of today's GOP which feigns support for "Christian values" even as it pursues policies that are the exact opposite of what the social gospel commands.  Think Progress looks at the surprising struggle in Kansas.  Here are highlights:

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback once supported wind energy, but that was before petrochemical billionaires and Kansas natives Charles and David Koch became his largest campaign donors. Now, Brownback and the Kochs find themselves enmeshed in a highly competitive governor’s race, one that has become a referendum on the much-heralded notion that scaling back government and slashing taxes for the wealthy will lead to economic growth.

A key aspect of this debate hinges on the role of renewable energy in the state and the future of the Kansas’ Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), a law requiring a certain portion of a state’s energy mix come from renewable sources. The Koch brothers have devoted a significant amount of time and money into repealing the standard and as of late, Brownback has wavered in his support. His Democratic opponent, Paul Davis, has taken a stand, saying he would “veto a bill that repeals our RPS” during the first gubernatorial debate.

Davis said the RPS repeal is being championed by a very narrow group of far right special interests with heavy investments in the oil industry. He said this is despite the fact that the policy remains incredibly popular among everyday Kansans and public and private sector leaders who understand the importance of diversifying the state’s energy portfolio. In fact, Kansas’ RPS — which requires investor-owned utilities to get 20 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2020 — is almost entirely fulfilled several years ahead of schedule.

“Frankly, the RPS has become controversial because those who want to repeal the RPS have poured millions into Sam Brownback’s re-election campaign, which has caused him to suddenly change his position,” said Davis.

The wind blows through Kansas powerfully enough to meet the state’s electricity needs more than 90 times over. However, neighboring Iowa — with a lesser wind resource — is currently far outpacing Kansas in wind power capacity. 

Wind advocates in Kansas say their competitive disadvantage comes from political attacks on policies that would boost clean energy development. For Kansas is not only home to plentiful wind resources, it is also home to the ultraconservative Kochs, whose affiliated groups have spearheaded many of the attacks on clean energy across the country. 

“We’ve had this policy on the books for five years and it’s been extremely successful,” said Kimberly Gencur Svaty, owner of Gencur Svaty Public Affairs and board member at the Kansas-based Climate + Energy Project. “Kansas is desperately trying to get back on the right economic track and we have lots of large companies like Walmart, Kroger, and Google that want to invest in a state that shows commitment to renewable energy.”

There was a push to repeal Kansas’ clean energy standard in the last legislative session and Koch Industries lobbied hard for the measure. In the end, the bill passed the Senate but not the House. Dr. Michael Smith, associate professor of political science at Emporia State University in Kansas, said that “some ‘strong arm’ tactics were used to get it passed in the Senate.”

The ultimate failure of the latest repeal effort may have damaged the governor’s standing with his largest donors. Smith said an elected official recently told him that Koch Industries is not supporting Brownback’s re-election campaign because the RPS repeal effort was unsuccessful. This would follow the pattern of the Kochs lashing out at even very conservative state legislators who didn’t support the repeal.

91 percent of Kansas voters are strongly supportive of using renewable energy, with 88 percent responding that they believe boosting renewable energy will lead to new investments in Kansas and help grow the state’s economy, according to a poll conducted by North Star Opinion Research in early 2014. It also found that 73 percent of Republicans support the 2009 RPS.

Kansans who don’t want four more years of Brownback’s extremely conservative policies, and who see merit in the RPS, are rallying behind Davis. . . . According to the Davis campaign, Republicans for Kansas Values, a group representing Republicans who support Davis’ candidacy, has over 500 current and former elected Republican leaders’ endorsements. 

[T]he Koch brothers, at 24 million metric tons of greenhouse gases a year, their climate pollution outpaces oil giants such as Valero, Chevron and Shell.