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Garrison Keillor: Our House Is on Fire, Time to Act

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2021 //
11

I subscribe to Garrison Keillor’s blog and find him to be consistently interesting and often entertaining. This column is dead serious. It reminds us that we face a serious crisis that endangers us all. Human activity and negligence endangers our environment, on which we all depend. He says in his title that it’s time to talk. I say it’s time to act.

Garrison Keillor writes:

My generation, the pre-Boomers, now known as the Humors, had it pretty easy, coming of age in the afterglow of World War II, believing in perpetual prosperity and progress, much of which came true, even as rock ’n’ roll provided the pleasure of rebellion without any consequence. Great medical advances came along just as we needed them, and Medicare to pay for them. We are lucky to have been born when we were.

I see the thousands of young protesters in the streets of Glasgow bearing signs such as “I Have To Clean Up My Mess, Why Don’t You Clean Up Yours?” and “The Dinosaurs Thought They Had Time Too” and “Stop Climate Crime” and “If Not Now, When?” at the UN Climate Change Conference, where the United States and China have issued vague promises of eliminating carbon someday but without a timetable. So much for American leadership; I guess we’re waiting for Iceland or Ecuador to show the way.

The young people in the streets are aware that a time of suffering lies ahead. Science is pretty clear about the ecological impact of industrial agriculture and the rapacious destruction of forests and overfishing of the seas and the virtual disappearance of many insect species, but none of this has enough political impact to turn the ship of state. Statistics don’t move people, recognizable images do, such as the plight of a polar bear on an ice floe miles from land. We’re fond of polar bears in zoos, and if we could get a video of this bear drowning in glacial melt, it would move people. Or if Yellowstone blew up and ushered in a year of darkness. That could be the Pearl Harbor that moves our country to action.

Greta Thunberg, the 18-year-old Swedish activist who, in 2018 after Sweden’s fierce hot summer of wildfires and omens of disaster, sat outside the Swedish parliament every day to get her message across. Her message was simple: “Our house is on fire.”

Five words, not one wasted, and you could paint it on any wall and everyone would know what you mean.

Children have great power to shame the rest of us, as every parent knows, and this cause is worth their effort. It’s about the survival of our kind. Everything we love is in the balance, language, art, music, history, the art of story, dance, Eros, baseball, bird-watching, and the effect of apocalypse on the bond market would not be good.

The last Good War was won by boys who rushed to sign up, after seeing newsreels of sunken battleships in Hawaii. My hero Bob Altman was 16 and lied about his age to get into the Army Air Force and pilot a B-17 bomber in the Pacific. The children marching in Glasgow are capable of heroism, but they’ve put their faith in the conscience of politicians, not a good bet. One of the two major American political parties is in denial that global warming exists because it is devoted to an illiterate leader. That party appears likely to take over Congress in 2022 and two years later No. 45 may well become No. 47. If he does, we may have a constitutional convention at which the presidency is made a lifetime term. Meanwhile, we have a Supreme Court with a solid majority of Ayn Rand justices who deny that the state has the right to govern individual behavior. Gun control will be dead, conservation will be an individual responsibility.

I don’t see that bunch leading the country toward clean energy. So we’ll go on enduring wildfires and horrific hurricanes and drought and the melting of the arctic ice cap and nothing will change. We’re living in a tunnel and a train is approaching. Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk can move to the moon but the rest of us are earthlings.

I put my faith in scientific enterprise. Someone will come up with a way to turn plankton into something that looks like and tastes like ground beef. Someone else will figure out how to make linguine from dead leaves. Then there’ll be nuclear airliners.

People don’t like to be lectured and made to feel stupid, Mr. Science. Get busy and invent a car that runs on urine. So much gas is wasted by people driving around looking for a lavatory. This will come as a great relief.

To subscribe to Garrison Keillor and Friends Garrisonkeillor.Substack.com


Categories Environment

Republicans Stoop to Role of Schoolyard Bully

By dianeravitch
November 8, 2021 //
68

This article by Ed Montini in the Arizona Republic explains the childish behavior of Republican leaders, who engage in taunts instead of reasoned discourse about their agenda. They don’t want to expand Medicare. They don’t want universal pre-K. They don’t support efforts to combat climate change. They oppose paid family leave for families in need after surgery or childhood. They are against a federal guarantee of two years tuition-free community college. They oppose higher taxes on billionaires. They don’t care about voting rights. They don’t want to expand opportunity. They don’t want to reduce inequality. They don’t invest in the future.

What are they for? Tax breaks for the rich.

Since they have no agenda, their goal is to make sure Biden can’t succeed. After blocking everything he proposes (with the help of Senator Manchin of West Virginia and Senator Krysten Sinema), they have nothing to offer other than the schoolyard chant.

Ed Mancini was walking his dog early one morning, and he saw two other dog owners engage in conversation, a man and a woman. As they part ways, the man says to the woman, “Let’s go, Brandon!” then turning away.

The woman is puzzled and asks Montini if he knows what that phrase means.

So, first thing in the morning I am called upon to explain this recent cultural phenomenon to one of the few American grown-ups who has managed to remain a fully functioning adult, while most of the rest of us have been transformed by social media into crude, smart-alecky 8-year-olds.

There’s that Southwest Airlines pilot

This particular sign was a the Boston College-Syracuse football game Oct. 30. A fan’s juvenile jab at President Joe Biden.Joshua Bessex

For instance, the woman had not heard about the Southwest Airlines pilot who recently signed off on a flight, telling passengers, “Let’s go, Brandon.”

Or about how the whole thing began when a race car driver named Brandon Brown won a NASCAR race and, while being interviewed on TV, the crowd started chanting, “F–k Joe Biden.” The flummoxed interviewer suggested they might be saying, “Let’s go, Brandon.”

After that, the phrase became a way for grown-up 8-year-olds to say the f-word about Biden without actually using it.

Really.

Elected Republican politicians in Washington, D.C., started using the phrase.

Donald Trump began selling “Let’s go Brandon” T-shirts through his Save America PAC for $45, and grown-up 8-year-olds in America actually purchased them.

$45.

There are adults who channel their 8-year-old selves by bringing signs saying, “Let’s go, Brandon” to public events, as well as some who scribble the message in paint on the rear window of their automobiles….

How to answer someone who says such a thing

Of course, we all learned as children that infantile behavior tends to draw some type of backlash….

After I explain the whole “Let’s go, Brandon” thing to the woman who’d been walking her dog she says, “That seems incredibly childish. How are you supposed to answer someone who says such a thing?”

I tell her that, as a grown-up, she would be best served simply ignoring it.

As for the rest of us, suffering as we do from social-media-induced age regression, I’d respond, “I’m rubber and you’re glue …”

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

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Categories Accountability, Biden, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Early Childhood Education, Education Reform, Environment, Republicans

Harold Meyerson on Biden’s Half Full, Half Empty Plan

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2021 //
25

After months of negotiations among Democrats over the fate of President Biden’s historic $3.5 trillion proposal, a compromise seems to have been reached (although nothing is certain). At the insistence of Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema, the size of the ambitious plan has been cut in half. Many of its parts were cut away, including two years of free community college and 12 weeks of paid family leave for medical reasons (the U.S. is the only major nation that doesn’t provide it). Three Democratic members of the House killed the provision to lower prescription drugs. And of course the Republicans opposed everything.

This is how Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect described it.

World’s Biggest Half-Full, Half-Empty Glass

Biden’s bill is historically great and bitterly disappointing.


Well—had we not anticipated, had it never seemed, that the Democrats, having won control of Congress and the White House, would proceed to enact paid family leave, expansions of Medicare, a permanent Child Tax Credit, disincentives to fossil fuel use, the ability to negotiate down drug prices, and such—had we not counted on that, then today would be a day of unmitigated celebration. Instead, celebration of the groundbreaking social provisions that actually are in the bill President Biden outlined today—universal pre-K, child care subsidies, incentives for clean energy, commonsense tax reforms that will compel corporations to pay some taxes, and the like—has to be mitigated by the fate of the even more commonsense provisions that now lie on the cutting-room floor.

For me, the most absurd relegation to that floor has been killing the proposal to give Medicare the ability to bring down drug prices. Seldom is a serious change to social and economic policy backed by more than three-fourths of the public, but this one surely was. Reportedly, President Biden has persuaded Kyrsten Sinema to accept a deal so preposterously weak—one that enables Medicare to negotiate down the price of drugs whose patents have expired (that is, after the big drug companies have wrung out the lion’s share of profits on those drugs, and which simply incentivizes those companies to extend their patents)—that few Democrats on the Hill seem inclined to vote for it. (Its merits are so nonexistent that the provision was omitted from Biden’s bill.)

By opposing giving Medicare the capacity to stop Big Pharma from charging Americans vastly more for their medications than they charge the citizens of any other nation, Sinema and three House Democrats effectively killed the one provision of the proposed $3.5 trillion package that would have most reduced the cost of living, significantly slowed the pace of inflation, and quite possibly moved more swing votes into the Democrats’ column than any other.

Leading the resistance to this measure in the House was Scott Peters, the California Democrat whose North San Diego County district includes many of the biotech companies that reap fortunes from high drug prices. While Sinema and the two other House Democrats who joined with Peters can likely be successfully primaried, the economy of Peters’s district is so dependent on high drug prices that he might well survive such a challenge…

One provision of the PRO Act—which, taken as a whole, would have been a new Magna Carta for American workers—has made it into Biden’s bill. The provision requires employers to pay fines ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 when they commit unfair labor practices, such as firing employees for their pro-union activities. Under current law, there are effectively no penalties assessed on employers when they’re found guilty of such practices. By excluding the more fundamental provisions of the PRO Act from Biden’s bill, chiefly because they don’t fit under rules of reconciliation, the employer-employee playing field remains steeply tilted toward employers, but if these fines pass muster with the Senate parliamentarian (an open question), they do reduce that tilt by a decidedly modest margin.

As befits a half-empty, if also half-full, glass.


~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Categories Accountability, Biden, Democrats, Early Childhood Education, Environment, Ethics, Funding, History

Linda Lyon: We Are Killing the Planet: Does Anyone Care?

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2021 //
38

Linda Lyon, a military veteran and former president of the Arizona School Board Association, writes here about the devastating effects of climate change and the lack of will to confront it.

Consider some of the evidence she offers:

The news over the past month has been full of climate change stories. You’ve no doubt seen that Lake Powell, Lake Mead and the Great Salt Lake are all at record lows and although drops were predicted, the pace at which they are happening, is shocking. Lake Powell is now below the target level requiring mandatory cutbacks next year to Arizona, Nevada and Mexico with California following if the decline continues.

Record heat blasted the Pacific Northwest last month, with Portland hitting 116 degrees and Seattle 108 degrees, both record highs. Even more surprising, was the 121 degree temperature hit in the British Columbiavillage of Lytton.

The deaths of almost 200 people is attributed to the recent Pacific Northwest heat wave, 50 hawk chickswere found to have flung themselves from their nests 50 feet high just to try to escape the heat, an estimated one billion mussels, sea stars and other shore-dwellers died from exposure to unusually hot air, and countless fish are struggling to survive, including the endangered Chinook salmon which can’t survive beyond their egg stage in overheated waters.

And it isn’t just in the Pacific Northwest. As of July 23rd, the U.S. had set 585 all-time heat records, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). One place, Death Valley, hit 130, considered the hottest reliable temperature ever recorded there.

According to the University of Nebraska’s Drought Monitor, 60% of the U.S. West is in exceptional or extreme drought with less than 1% of the West not in drought or abnormally dry. Average rain- and snowfall per year in the West has fallen from 22 inches per year in the 1980s and 1990s, to 19 inches from 2010 to 2020 and only 13.6 inches from July 2020 to June 2021. Now in a megadrought, the West has extremely low soil moisture, setting the stage for more frequent, and much larger and hotter wildfires.

These fires now rage across the U.S. West, and in Oregon alone, over 475,000 acres have burnt thus far in eight fires, with the largest, the Bootleg fire, generating so much energy and extreme heat that it’s creating its own clouds and thunderstorms and sending dense smoke 3,000 miles from one side of the country to the other. By the third week in July, 60 other fires were burning across the American West for a total of over one million acres consumed by fire. In fact, the average million acres burned in wildfires each year has doubled in the past two decades. And, they are happening earlier in the year and more often over the years, negatively impacting the ecosystem’s ability to regenerate.

Open the link and read it all.

Categories Environment

Politico: Climate Change Threatens Us All

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2021 //
41

This is a realistic and frightening analysis of the paralysis in Washington, D.C. on climate change. President Biden proposed an ambitious agenda to act against the pernicious causes abd effects of climate change. The Republicans refused to support Biden’s plans and they refuse to tax the rich, the billionaires whose gold will be useless on a dead planet.

Michael Grunwald of Politico writes:

CRUEL SUMMER — The heat wave that fricasseed the Pacific Northwest this week, along with the evocatively named Lava Fire in northern California, has inspired a lot of rhetoric about a “climate emergency.” But the newest inconvenient truth is that climate change isn’t the kind of emergency that inspires emergency action in Washington.

Most of President Joe Biden’s ambitious climate proposals were stripped out of the bipartisan infrastructure bill that he’s urging Congress to pass. And it’s not even clear whether Congress will comply.

This is partly a human nature problem. The now-focused, more-wanting, change-averse biases of our species aren’t well-suited for an all-out war against an invisible enemy that won’t kill most of us in the short term but can’t be defeated unless we transform our civilization in the not-too-long term. This week’s 116-degree nightmare in Portland, Ore., ought to remind us that we’re gradually filling our atmosphere with the same heat-trapping gases that have rendered Venus inhospitable to human life. 

But most of the earth is still quite hospitable most of the time, and many of us have air conditioners for when it isn’t. We’ll freak out again this summer as wildfires rage across California, and then we’ll stop freaking out once the fires stop burning.

A thermometer sign displays a temperature of 117 degrees Fahrenheit on June 15 in Phoenix.

A thermometer sign displays a temperature of 117 degrees Fahrenheit on June 15 in Phoenix. | Caitlin O’Hara/Getty Images

The fact is, even though many of us acknowledge the climate is in crisis, few of us live with a real crisis mentality, as if we truly believed our planetary home was on fire. We’re busy. We’re not going on #ClimateStrike with Greta Thunberg. We don’t like thinking about the enormousness of the crisis, and we don’t like the screechy apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding it. We default to the blasé reaction lampooned in the classic Onion headline: “Yeah, Yeah, Nation Gets It, We Rapidly Approaching End of Critical Window to Avert Climate Collapse or Whatever.” 

But this is why we ordinary citizens outsource our crisis-response responsibilities to elected representatives, who are supposed to deal with urgent threats to our civilization whether or not most of their constituents are screeching for action. Their failure to do that is not just an existential human-nature problem. It’s also a prosaic Washington problem.

The problem is that Biden doesn’t have the votes he needs for all the climate action he wants. Most Washington Republicans either don’t want to give Biden a win in a zero-sum partisan war, reject climate science, aren’t willing to risk the wrath of climate-science-rejecting voters, or some combination of those factors. 

Five Republican senators were willing to support a stripped-down infrastructure bill that included generous funding for public transit and electric-vehicle chargers, but not massive wind and solar subsidies, tax credits for electric-vehicle buyers, and other climate provisions.

Biden has said he plans to fight for the rest of his climate agenda, including a strict clean electricity mandate, in a separate reconciliation bill that would require only Democratic support. But it’s not clear how much of that agenda the quasi-deputy-president Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia will accept.

The young climate activists of the Sunrise Movement have been protesting outside the White House, calling Biden a coward, screaming “No Compromises, No Excuses.” But not having the votes in your own party’s Senate caucus to avoid a compromise is a pretty good excuse.

Washington enacted $6 trillion worth of Covid relief, proving that it’s capable of responding to an emergency that was killing thousands of Americans every day. Climate change has never been treated like that kind of emergency. Time Magazine called for a war on global warming with a green-bordered cover in 2008, but we never went to war. Bloomberg BusinessWeek ran a wake-up cover declaring “It’s Global Warming, Stupid” after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Record-shattering heat in Seattle might be another wake-up call. The last seven years were the seven hottest years in recorded history. 

One illuminating battle in the current infrastructure wars involves “pay-fors,” as Republicans push for the infrastructure bill to be paid for in part by new user fees on electric vehicle owners. They’re not just trying to impose a political tax on electric cars that they see as a Democratic form of transportation favored by rich urban progressives; they also make the legitimate substantive argument that electric-vehicle drivers are literal “free riders” who contribute to the wear and tear on U.S. highways without paying the gasoline taxes that help finance highway maintenance.

But when it comes to the greenhouse-gas-emitting activities that are making the earth a bit more like Venus every day, we’re all free riders. The big problem with America’s fossil-friendly public policies since the Industrial Revolution is that they haven’t imposed user fees on us for contributing to the wear and tear on our atmosphere — by flying, eating meat, and especially these days, running our air conditioners.

The whole point of climate policies like clean energy subsidies or Biden’s clean electricity standard or a carbon tax or Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal is to encourage us to pay a user fee for our use of the atmosphere, creating a financial incentive to reduce our impact on the environment. But it’s going to be tough to pass those kinds of policies until our politicians act like the emergency is real.

Categories Biden, Environment, Republicans

Should KIPP Be Allowed to Build a School on a Toxic Waste Site?

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2021 //
17

The tiny city of Cudahy, California, is locked in battle with the mega-powerful KIPP charter chain over KIPP’s determination to build a charter school on a toxic waste site. KIPP is avoiding the usual environmental review that would be required for public schools. Local environmental activists and parents are raising money to fight the KIPP machine.

Larry Buhl writes in “Capital & Main”:

At issue are a state law allowing different building standards for different types of schools, and a planning code, obscure to most local residents, that allows a charter school company to build a new school without thoroughly cleaning up the site’s alleged toxins.

Using a process that allows the company to skirt state environmental rules, KIPP SoCal Public Schools plans to build a new elementary school on land that its own reports show contains toxic substances including lead and arsenic. The company can do that because the regulations for building or renovating charter and private schools are less restrictive than for state-funded district schools, and because Cudahy has, according to critics and plaintiffs in a lawsuit, used the wrong planning code to approve the project.

If charter schools were public schools, there would be a full environmental impact review.

Categories California, Charter Schools, Democracy, Environment

Republicans Falsely Blame Wind Power for State’s Deep Freeze

By dianeravitch
February 17, 2021 //
29

Governor Greg Abbott of Texas and a bevy of rightwing commentators blamed wind turbines, which supply 10% of the state’s energy, and “the Green New Deal, which doesn’t exist, for the failure of the state’s power supply. He learned “the Big Lie” from his hero Trump.

As millions of people across Texas struggled to stay warm Tuesday amid massive cold-weather power outages, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) directed his ire at one particular failure in the state’s independent energy grid: frozen wind turbines.


“This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott said to host Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis. … It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary.”


The governor’s arguments were contradicted by his own energy department, which outlined how most of Texas’s energy losses came from failures to winterize the power-generating systems, including fossil fuel pipelines, The Washington Post’s Will Englund reported. But Abbott’s debunked claims were echoed by other conservatives this week who have repeatedly blamed clean energy sources for the outages crippling the southern U.S.


[The Texas grid got crushed because its operators didn’t see the need to prepare for cold weather]


In fact, typically mild winters and a lack of state regulations in Texas combined to leave electricity providers unprepared for the extreme cold that has suddenly hit the state, The Post reported. Nearly every source of energy — from wind turbines to natural gas to nuclear power — have failed to some degree following a harsh storm that covered the region with thick layers of snow and ice.
Although renewable energy sources did partially fail, they only contributed to 13 percent of the power outages, while providing about a quarter of the state’s energy in winter. Thermal sources, including coal, gas and nuclear, lost almost twice as many gigawatts of power because of the cold, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s electric grid operator.

Critics have also noted that wind turbines can operate in climates as cold as Greenland if they’re properly prepared for the weather.


Despite the much larger dip in energy from fossil fuels, Republican politicians have seized on the outages to attack the Green New Deal and Democrats’ push to address climate change by reducing the consumption of fossil fuels.


In his Fox News interview, Abbott did not address the fact that most of the state’s power comes from fossil fuels and that ERCOT had planned to produce far more power from natural gas than became available as the cold set in, contributing a stunning deficit amid the freezing weather. On Tuesday, Abbott called for a state investigation into ERCOT’s failings, saying the agency had been “anything but reliable” following the winter storm.


Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Tuesday.
The governor was not the only prominent Texas Republican to blame clean energy for the historic power outages. After Fox News host Tucker Carlson inaccurately told viewers that the state’s power grid had become “totally reliant on windmills,” former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who served as energy secretary under President Donald Trump, joined Carlson in railing against the Green New Deal, which has not been enacted in Texas or nationally.


“If this Green New Deal goes forward the way that the Biden administration appears to want it to, then we’ll have more events like we’ve had in Texas all across the country,” Perry said in another Fox News segment.


Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.) shared a detailed accounting on Twitter of how the state’s power grid failed, noted the roles that natural gas and nuclear power played — but also used the moment to attack wind turbines on Tuesday.


“Bottom line: Thank God for baseload energy made up of fossil fuels,” Crenshaw tweeted. “Had our grid been more reliant on the wind turbines that froze, the outages would have been much worse.”


Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who has been a strong proponent of the Green New Deal proposal, slammed Texas Republicans early Wednesday.
“The infrastructure failures in Texas are quite literally what happens when you don’t pursue a Green New Deal,” she said in a tweet.


Texas Democrats also criticized Abbott in a statement Monday, calling out Republican leaders for allowing the power to go out in the state that produces the most energy in the nation.
“If we had a governor open to alternative sources of energy, Texas might be in a situation in which we have energy reserves to efficiently power our state, instead of the reckless leadership we have witnessed time and time again from Greg Abbott,” the Texas Democrats said.


Wind turbines are working very well in far colder climates. Abbott probably outsourced the state’s energy needs to profit-seeking entrepreneurs who cut corners to make more money.

In another article in the Washington Post, the blame is placed where it belongs: on short-sighted politicians who didn’t plan for a worst-case scenarios.

When it gets really cold, it can be hard to produce electricity, as customers in Texas and neighboring states are finding out. But it’s not impossible. Operators in Alaska, Canada, Maine, Norway and Siberia do it all the time.


What has sent Texas reeling is not an engineering problem, nor is it the frozen wind turbines blamed by prominent Republicans. It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service.


It’s a “Wild West market design based only on short-run prices,” said Matt Breidert, a portfolio manager at a firm called Ecofin.


And yet the temporary train wreck of that market Monday and Tuesday has seen the wholesale price of electricity in Houston go from $22 a megawatt-hour to about $9,000. Meanwhile, 4 million Texas households have been without power.


One utility company, Griddy, which sells power at wholesale rates to retail customers without locking in a price in advance, told its patrons Tuesday to find another provider before they get socked with tremendous bills.


The widespread failure in Texas and, to a lesser extent, Oklahoma and Louisiana in the face of a winter cold snap shines a light on what some see as the derelict state of America’s power infrastructure, a mirror reflection of the chaos that struck California last summer.


Edward Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, said the disinvestment in electricity production reminds him of the last years of the Soviet Union, or of the oil sector today in Venezuela.
“They hate it when I say that,” he said.

Categories Economy, Environment, Failure, For-Profit, Texas

Biden Announces: Science and Facts Are Back!

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2021 //
22

After four years of science-denial, Biden is introducing a new era. Science and facts are in again. Truth matters. No alternative facts. Ignorance and stupidity are no longer honored or tolerable.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. said on Saturday that he was “always going to lead with science and truth” as he announced top science and technology officials on his White House staff, reaffirming trust in the kind of expert research that the Trump administration often ignored or disdained.

Extolling what he called “some of the most brilliant minds in the world,” Mr. Biden said his new team’s mission would be to ask: “How can we make the impossible possible?” He vowed to elevate scientific research and thinking on topics like the coronavirus, cancer research, climate change, clean-energy jobs, artificial intelligence, 3-D printing and other fast-advancing technologies.

The appointees included Eric S. Lander, whom Mr. Biden will nominate to be director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, a position that will for the first time hold cabinet rank.

President Trump left the position of science adviser unfilled for 18 months and his administration routinely ignored the guidance of government scientists on issues ranging from the coronavirus pandemic to climate change.

Without specifically mentioning Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris drew an implicit contrast with his administration’s dismissive attitude toward expert opinion.

“The science behind climate change is not a hoax,” Ms. Harris said during the introductions, held at the Queen Theater in Wilmington, Del. “The science behind the virus is not a lie.”

Dr. Lander, who will also serve as presidential science adviser, was a leader of the Human Genome Project. As Dr. Lander’s deputy in the science and technology office, Alondra Nelson, whom was also named by Mr. Biden, is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, who has studied the intersection of science with social inequality and race.

Mr. Biden also named two co-chairs of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology: Frances H. Arnold, the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Maria Zuber, a geophysics and planetary science expert and the first woman to lead a NASA spacecraft mission.

Mr. Biden also said that Dr. Francis S. Collins would remain as the director of the National Institutes of Health.

Categories Biden, Environment, Science, Stupid, Trump

Michigan: Former Governor Snyder Charged for “Willful Neglect of Duty” in Flint Water Case

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2021 //
9

Prosecutors charged former Governor Rick Snyder for “willful neglect of duty” for his role in the Flint water crisis, which led to death and poisoning of that city’s population after a Snyder-appointed emergency manager tried to save money by switching the source of the city’s water to the Flint River.

The charges, revealed in an online court record, are misdemeanors punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.

The charges are groundbreaking: No governor or former governor in Michigan’s 184-year history had been charged with crimes related to their time in that office, according to the state archivist….

The alleged offense date is April 25, 2014, when a Snyder-appointed emergency manager who was running the struggling, majority Black city carried out a money-saving decision to use the Flint River for water while a regional pipeline from Lake Huron was under construction.

The corrosive water, however, was not treated properly and released lead from old plumbing into homes in one of the worst manmade environmental disasters in U.S. history.

Despite desperate pleas from residents holding jugs of discolored, skunky water, the Snyder administration took no significant action until a doctor reported elevated lead levels in children about 18 months later….

Authorities counted at least 90 cases of Legionnaires’ disease in Genesee County, including 12 deaths. Some experts found there was not enough chlorine in the water-treatment system to control legionella bacteria, which can trigger a severe form of pneumonia when spread through misting and cooling systems.

The disaster made Flint a national symbol of government dereliction, with residents forced to line up for bottled water and parents fearing their children had suffered permanent harm. Lead can damage the brain and nervous system and cause learning and behavior problems. The crisis was highlighted as an example of environmental injustice and racism.

Categories Accountability, Environment, Michigan, Racism

Irish Times: Trump Is Not Yet Finished Destroying Our Government

By dianeravitch
December 29, 2020 //
35

This article in the Irish Times by Fintan O’Toole is one of the best analyses of the reign of Mad King Donald that I have read.

His hairstyle has been toned down. His demeanour – malign, self-obsessed, reckless of truth and decency, revelling in the harm he has done and can still do to the norms and institutions of democracy – has not. 

This continuity is ominous. Trump was able to upend American politics before he was in office. There is every reason to think he will still be able to do so after he is replaced by Joe Biden on January 20th.

It is useful to go back to the period in 2016 when Trump was where his successor is now: the victor in the election but still not president. For it was in this interregnum that Trump took a single action that was scarcely noticed at the time but that, more than any other, defined his presidency.

That action had both the political destructiveness and the personal brutality that would become familiar as the primary weapons in Trump’s armoury. It consisted merely in ordering a load of ring-binders full of carefully compiled documents to be dumped. 

It was the day after Trump’s victory party, held of course in the garish Trump Tower in Manhattan. Chris Christie, who was still governor of New Jersey, a successful Republican in a heavily Democratic state, was the man with the 30 bulging binders.

In them was the transition plan, the crucial details of how a Trump administration was going to work, including shortlists of pre-vetted candidates for all the top jobs in the administration, as well as timetables for action on key policies and the drafts of the necessary executive orders.

It had taken a team of 140 people assembled under Christie’s chairmanship nearly six months to create the plan. 

Fired with immediate effect

When Christie arrived at Trump Tower, he was met by Trump’s then consigliere, Steve Bannon. Bannon told Christie that he was being fired with immediate effect “and we do not want you to be in the building anymore”. His painstaking work was literally trashed: “All thirty binders”, as Christie recalled in a self-pitying memoir, “were tossed in a Trump Tower dumpster, never to be seen again”.

With Trump, the personal and political could never be separated and both were equally at work here. The personal was silverback gorilla stuff, humiliating Christie was a sadistic pleasure and a declaration to established Republicans that Trump was the boss of them all now.

The political message was one that took longer to sink in. A transition plan implied some kind of basic institutional continuity, some respect for the norms of governance.

At the beginning, as at the end, the idea of an orderly transition of power was anathema to Trump.

Why? Because a timetable for action and a commitment to appoint, to the thousands of positions filled by the incoming president, people with expertise and experience, would constrain him. He was not going to be constrained.

Too many people did not get this. It is hard, after such a relentless barrage of outrage and weirdness over the last four years, to remember what the broad consensus about Trump was at the beginning of 2016.

It was that he wouldn’t be nearly as bad as he looked. To adapt the old saw about campaigning in poetry but governing in prose, he had campaigned in Gothic horror but he would surely govern in the realistic novel…

At worst, Trump would do nothing. He’d sit around eating cheeseburgers and making calls to Fox News, while the serious people got on with serious things.

All of this was to grossly underestimate Trump. He may have done plenty of the cheeseburgers and Fox News stuff. But he also kept his eye on the great strategic prize: the creation in the US of a vast and impassioned base for anti-democratic politics.

The big question to be answered about Trump is why he did not do two things that might have seemed obvious: infrastructure and war.

One of the things that was genuinely appealing about Trump in 2015 was that he said something that everyone knows but that American politicians avoid acknowledging because it is too downbeat.

This truth is that the infrastructure of the richest country in the world – the roads, railways, bridges, dams, tunnels – is woefully substandard. Trump said this and promised to fix it. Polls showed that two-thirds of voters approved.

Did not start a war

But he didn’t fix it. He presented a plan in 2018 for a relatively tiny $200 billion investment (supposedly to be supplemented by $1.5 trillion of private money). It went essentially nowhere.

The other thing he didn’t do is war. For all his belligerence and violently nationalist and xenophobic rhetoric, Trump didn’t start a new war or escalate an existing one, which makes him unusual among modern presidents.

Arguably, these two things – building infrastructure and starting a military conflict – might just have got Trump re-elected. So why did he not do either of them?

His personal laziness is certainly one explanation: galvanising and directing such huge efforts is hard work.

But there is a deeper reason. Great building projects and military engagements validate the idea of government itself. Trump’s overwhelming instinct was to destroy that idea.

It is not just that Trump really was not interested in governing. It is that he was deeply interested in misgovernment.

He left important leadership positions in government departments unfilled on a permanent basis, or filled them with scandalously unqualified cronies. He appointed people to head agencies to which they had been publicly hostile.

Beneath the psychodrama of Trump’s hourly outbursts, there was a duller but often more meaningful agenda: taking a blowtorch to regulation, especially, but by no means exclusively, in relation to the environment.

This right-wing anarchism extended, of course, to global governance: the trashing of international agreements, withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, sucking up to the leaders of mafia states, and open contempt for female leaders like Angela Merkel and Theresa May. 

With this discrediting of democratic governance, it is not just that we cannot disentangle the personal motives from the political ones. It is that the replacement of political institutions by personal rule was precisely the point.

Trump’s aim, in the presidency as in his previous life, was always simple: to be able to do whatever the hell he wanted. That required the transformation of elective office into the relationship of a capricious ruler to his sycophantic courtiers.

In this nexus, the madder the better. Power is proven, not when the sycophants have to obey reasonable commands, but when they have to follow and justify the craziest orders.

Wild swings of position

There is no fun in getting your minions to agree that black is black. The sadist’s pleasure lies in getting them to attest that black is white. The “alternative facts” that Trump’s enabler Kellyanne Conway laid down at the very beginning of his administration are not just about permission to lie. They’re about the erotic gratification of making other people lie absurdly, foolishly, repeatedly…

This is his legacy: he has successfully led a vast number of voters along the path from hatred of government to contempt for rational deliberation to the inevitable endpoint: disdain for the electoral process itself.

In this end is his new beginning. Stripped of direct power, he will face enormous legal and financial jeopardy. He will have every reason to keep drawing on his greatest asset: his ability to unleash the demons that have always haunted the American experiment – racism, nativism, fear of “the government”.

Trump has unfinished business. A republic he wants to destroy still stands. It is, for him, not goodbye but hasta la vista. Instead of waving him off, those who want to rebuild American democracy will have to put a stake through his heart.

Categories Cruelty, Environment, Trump
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