Archives for category: Environment
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Joyce Vance: DOGE Is Gutting the National Weather Service, Which Serves All of Us

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2025 //
16

Joyce Vance is a former federal prosecutor in Alabama who writes a blog called “Civil Discourse.” In this post, she explains the damage that Elon Musk and his DOGE boys are imposing on NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By making NOAA less effective, they are setting it up to be privatized and available for a fee, not freely available to the public. Their destruction of NOAA will hurt everyone, red and blue states alike.

She writes:

On March 12, there was reporting that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was preparing to lay off more than 1,000 workers as part of the Trump administration’s “reductions in force” directive to federal agencies. Cuts like that call into question whether NOAA will continue to provide the early warnings and predictive modeling that help people prepare for weather emergencies in advance. People who live in hurricane and tornado country keep their “NOAA weather radios” handy, and they are especially important for events that occur, as they frequently do, when most of us are asleep.

In theory, it sounds like one more bad thing to worry about. In practice, it’s much worse. We’ve just had a demonstration of precisely how effective NOAA is and what we stand to lose without it. 

Beginning on Friday, violent, long-track tornadoes with damaging winds of up to 80 mph and large hail materialized across the Midwest and South. This was the news Friday night. NOAA’s early warning system, transmitted on social media, radio, television, and by word of mouth, kept it from being much worse.

Saturday was even worse. Here in Birmingham, the alerts started midday.

At 12:27 pm, I got the first alert through the UA campus system, telling me that in light of what was expected, I should seek shelter now instead of waiting for an actual tornado warning. The system sends alerts after the National Weather Service makes the call about what to expect. The National Weather Service (NWS) is a component of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

We’ve grown accustomed to getting this level of detail. NOAA’s information gets pushed out ahead of these events, causing people to plan in advance. Hard helmets were in short supply here yesterday as people prepared for the storms.

We were relatively lucky in Birmingham. But other places were far less fortunate. By Saturday morning, ABC News reported 36 people were dead in the wake of the storms. This was what the devastation looked like in Tylertown, Mississippi. As I’m writing this, the storm is heading east into Georgia.

How much worse would it have been without the accurate forecasting that let our local news people and local emergency systems warn folks in the storms’ paths sufficiently in advance to get to their safe places? As much as I don’t like to think about it, if Trump and DOGE stay on their current path, we are going to be forced to. Mother Nature doesn’t care who you voted for. If there’s a tornado headed your direction, you need access to early warning systems. Gutting NOAA means you won’t have that.

An example of the tornado warnings issued by National Weather Services offices in Alabama throughout the day Saturday, permitting people to find shelter and take cover in advance.

At 8:52 p.m., local television in central Alabama pushed out a message from the National Weather Service: Talladega, take cover now. It was a tornado on the ground near the famous Superspeedway. Alerts meant people were able to stay safe, which is a good thing—this photo of a bus that ended up on the roof of a nearby high school makes it clear that these early warning systems are critically important. What happens if the National Weather Service is no longer there to do that?

Image

Apparently, the Trump administration is not concerned with that. ABC is reporting that NOAA is down about 2,000 employees since January “as a result of the first round of the Trump administration’s cuts.” California Congressman Jared Huffman, who chairs one of the relevant House subcommittees, said, “There is no way to absorb cuts of this magnitude without cutting into these core missions. This is not about efficiency and it’s certainly not about waste, fraud and abuse. This is taking programs that people depend on to save lives and emasculating them.”

Cuts that sound like a good idea to Elon Musk and Donald Trump have real impacts on the rest of us. That is only just beginning to dawn on people, who I’m sure you’re hearing, like I am, saying, “But I didn’t vote for this.” Trump 2.0, as I’ve written previously, isn’t a pick-your-own-adventure experience. You go to the carnival, you get all of the rides.

We were fortunate last night. Everyone in our house (chickens included) is okay, we just have a little cleanup to do. But so many people weren’t that lucky. They lost houses and lives. They will need support from FEMA and other federal services. If DOGE continues its romp through essential federal work that we, as taxpayers, fund and rely on, it’s only going to get worse. 

When will Republicans wake up? Will their Senators and members of Congress protest what DOGE is doing? Will they even fight for their own backyards? If they continue to bend the knee on this, then instead of demanding that government work for their constituents, they are permitting it to work for the financial interests of the powerful. 

We know what to do about this. With this piece, and the one Friday night about an Idaho Fair Housing Council that I hope you’ll go back and readif you missed it, we’re putting a face on the people DOGE hurts. It’s not about waste and fraud; it’s about people. People who need their government to work for them. Here’s the phone number for the House switchboard: (202) 224-3121. Here’s that number for the Senate: (202) 224-3121. Make sure your representatives know how you feel.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Categories Disruption, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Musk, Elon, Privatization, Stupid, Trump

Quick: What’s the Purpose of the EPA?

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2025 //
3

The EPA is the Environmental Protection Agency. It was established in 1970 during the Nixon administration. The creation of EPA was a response to public and scientific concern about pollution of the air, land, and water by chemicals discarded by industry.

Republicans at the time were conservatives, and they prided themselves on championing clean air and clean water.

But in the age of Trump, environmental protection is considered a hindrance to industry. It also is a burden to the coal industry.

Trump appointed one of his most loyal allies to lead EPA. This is how he defines its mission:

“We are driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion to drive down cost of living for American families, unleash American energy, bring auto jobs back to the U.S. and more,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a news release.

  1. To drive down the cost of living.
  2. To unleash American energy.
  3. To bring back auto jobs to the U.S.

Notice what’s missing? Any reference to reducing toxic pollution from the air, land, and waters.

Zeldin announced that he intends to eliminate dozens of EPA regulations. More toxic chemicals will be dumped into lakes and streams. More smokestacks will belch smoke into the air. More brownfields of chemicals will poison the land.

A sad day for America.

Categories Corruption, Environment, Evil, Extremism, Health, Science, Trump

How Elon Musk Took Control of the Federal Government

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2025 //
20

The New York Times reported on Elon Musk’s takeover of the federal government. Trump has given Musk the power to close down agencies authorized by Congress, like the USAID and the Consumer Financial Control Board. Not a peep from the Republican-dominated Congress, as the world’s richest man flaunts his power to redesign the government and Trump meekly accedes to his every demand.

If you click this link, the story is a gift article.

Who ever dreamed that the election of Trump would lead to Elon Musk terrorizing every agency, a Cabinet whose members are dedicated to the destruction of the agencies they lead (possible exception: Rubio), and a foreign policy aligned with Russia against Europe? A domestic team determined to stamp out civil rights, defend bigotry, take away access to Medicaid, and privatize as much of the government as they can?

The DOGE plan is a coup. The richest man in the world has taken ownership of the federal government, with the consent of an eccentric, ignorant dotard in the Oval Office who was probably elected thanks to rigging and suppressing of votes by Musk and Putin.

Here are excerpts from the article in The New York Times about Elon Musk’s biggest acquisition. The federal government. His motive: he was angry about being regulated by the federal government. This is the government that funded Musk’s empire; he has received some $38 billion in federal subsidies since 2008, when he took charge of a near-bankrupt Tesla company. He loved the subsidies but hated the regulatuon. How could he stop the oversight of his business empire by the feds? Give almost $300 million to Trump and get the promise that Trump would give him free reign to wipe out the bureaucracy and replace it with AI.

From The New York Times:

It started as Elon Musk’s musings at a 2023 dinner party about how he would gut the federal bureaucracy. It evolved into an operation that has given him a singular position of influence over the government.

The plan for his Department of Government Efficiency was mapped out in a series of closely held meetings in Palm Beach, Fla., and through early intelligence-gathering efforts in Washingto

Without ceding control of his companies, the richest man in the world has embedded his engineers and aides inside the government’s critical digital infrastructure, moving with a swiftness that has stunned civil servants.

The story begins:

On the last Friday of September 2023, Elon Musk dropped in about an hour late to a dinner party at the Silicon Valley mansion of the technology investor Chamath Palihapitiya.

Mr. Musk’s visit was meant to be discreet. Still skittish about getting involved publicly in politics, he told the guests he had to be careful about supporting anyone in the Republican nomination fight. And yet here he was — joined by Claire Boucher, the singer known as Grimes and the mother of three of his children — at a $50,000-a-head dinner in honor of the presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who was running as an entrepreneur who would shake up the status quo.

As the night wore on, Mr. Musk held forth on the patio on a variety of topics, according to four people with knowledge of the conversation: his visit that week to the U.S.-Mexico border; the war in Ukraine; his frustrations with government regulations hindering his rocket company, SpaceX; and Mr. Ramaswamy’s highest priority, the dismantling of the federal bureaucracy.

Mr. Musk made clear that he saw the gutting of that bureaucracy as primarily a technology challenge. He told the party of around 20 that when he overhauled Twitter, the social media company that he bought in 2022 and later renamed X, the key was gaining access to the company’s servers.

Wouldn’t it be great, Mr. Musk offered, if he could have access to the computers of the federal government?

Just give him the passwords, he said jocularly, and he would make the government fit and trim.

What started as musings at a dinner party evolved into a radical takeover of the federal bureaucracy. It was driven with a frenetic focus by Mr. Musk, who channeled his libertarian impulses and resentment of regulatory oversight of his vast business holdings into a singular position of influence.

Without ceding control of his companies, the richest man in the world has embedded his engineers and aides inside the government’s critical digital infrastructure. Already, his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has inserted itself into more than 20 agencies, The New York Times has found.

Mr. Musk’s strategy has been twofold. His team grabbed control of the government’s human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management, commandeering email systems to pressure civil servants to quit so he could cull the work force. And it burrowed into computer systems across the bureaucracy, tracing how money was flowing so the administration could choke it off. So far, Musk staff members have sought accessto at least seven sensitive government databases, including internal systems of the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service.

Mr. Musk’s transformation of DOGE from a casual notion into a powerful weapon is something possible only in the Trump era. It involves wild experimentation and an embrace of severe cost-cutting that Mr. Musk previously used to upend Twitter — as well as an appetite for political risk and impulsive decision-making that he shares with President Trump and makes others in the administration deeply uncomfortable.

In reporting how Mr. Musk and his allies executed their plan, The New York Times interviewed more than 60 people, including DOGE workers, friends of Mr. Musk’s, White House aides and administration officials who are dealing with the operation from the inside. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, many described a culture of secrecy that has made them afraid to speak publicly because of potential retaliation.

Mr. Musk’s stealth approach stunned both Democrats and civil servants. Failing to imagine an incursion from inside the bureaucracy, they were caught essentially defenseless.

The Times has learned new details about how the operation came together after the election, mapped out in a series of closely held meetings in Palm Beach, Fla., and through early intelligence-gathering efforts in Washington.

Seasoned conservative operatives like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought helped educate Mr. Musk about the workings of the bureaucracy. Soon, he stumbled on an opening. It was a little-known unit with reach across the government: the U.S. Digital Service, which President Barack Obama created in 2014 after the botched rollout of healthcare.gov.

Mr. Musk and his advisers — including Steve Davis, a cost cutter who worked with him at X and other companies — did not want to create a commission, as past budget hawks had done. They wanted direct, insider access to government systems. They realized they could use the digital office, whose staff had been focused on helping agencies fix technology problems, to quickly penetrate the federal government — and then decipher how to break it apart.

Since this is a gift article, please open the link and read the rest of it.

Never before in American history has there been subversion of the U.S. government that was so well planned and executed.

What will be left? How many agencies will Musk close down? How many highly skilled and knowledgeable civil servants will be fired? Which agencies will be irredeemably crippled by the loss of their best leaders?

This story should lead the news every day.

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Fraud, Musk, Elon, Republicans, Trump

Climate Change is on the Chopping Block

By dianeravitch
February 28, 2025 //
6

At the blog called “Wonkette,” a writer called “Doctor Zoom” described the Trump administration’s determination to ignore climate science. Apparently, the “golden age” of our nation was the 1950s, before most people had given any thought to the environment and to the human role in fouling the air and the waters. Ignorance is bliss when you are ignorant.

Leading the charge to deny climate change and science is Lee Zeldin, the Trump-appointed administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Zeldin was a member of Congress who represented the East End of Long Island, an environmentally fragile area that is constantly threatened by climate change–beach erosion as water levels rise, the die-off of lobsters and scallops due to pollution and the warming of the seas. He should know better, but loyalty to Trump matters more to him than the damage suffered daily by his former district.

Doktor Zoom writes:

The Trump administration appears to be ready to take another wrecking ball to climate science, according to a report in the Washington Post Wednesday (Internet Archive link). EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, acting on yet another of Trump’s first-day executive orders, “has privately urged the White House to strike down a scientific finding underpinning much of the federal government’s push to combat climate change, according to three people briefed on the matter,” who were all not named because they aren’t authorized to say what’s going on in the Fascism Factory. 

Zeldin wants Trump to do away with the agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health, an official statement of widely held scientific consensus that underpins the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide, methane, and other planet warming gases under the Clean Air Act. It’s kind of a big deal, and wiping it away is just one more step in the administration’s agenda of replacing science with far-Right ideology that removes legal constraints on fossil fuel use. 

The original 2009 finding was based on over 100 peer reviewed scientific papers on climate change, involved the work of hundreds of scientists, and included over 500 pages of public comment. It came in response to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that determined that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are “air pollutants” under the Clean Air Act; that ruling directed GW Bush’s EPA to stop fucking around and make a formal determination as to whether greenhouse gases endanger human health or welfare. Bush’s EPA finished its assessment in 2007, determining that yes indeedy, greenhouse gases are not healthy for children or other living things. 

Notoriously, however, Bush’s Office of Management and Budget refused to open the email with the EPA finding, leaving it to whoever won the 2008 presidential election. We shit you not! 

Barack Obama’s administration did its own version of the “endangerment finding,” which went through all the proper rule-making processes, and that’s the one that Zeldin’s EPA wants to undo. Eventually, the 28-page Bush EPA finding was also released in response to a public records request; at the time, an Obama EPA spokesperson said the earlier document “demonstrates that in 2007 the science was as clear as it is today.”

But three months ago, thanks to a narrow plurality of votes, science suddenly became totally different, because Trump and his crowd say it is. Isn’t science amazing?

As the Post explains, Trump’s executive order told the EPA to review the 

“legality and continuing applicability of” the endangerment finding. The order gave Zeldin 30 days to submit recommendations to Russell Vought, the head of the White House budget office.

And you can just bet that Trump knew exactly what he was ordering! No way some oil lobbyists wrote that EO for him. 

This time out, it appears that the EPA has completed its review and found that greenhouse gases are in fact no big deal, but we won’t see the finding until the administration is good and ready. EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou didn’t offer any comment to the Post either, simply saying in an email that “EPA is in compliance with this aspect of the President’s Executive Order.”

We bet once it’s released, it’ll be backed up by some very compelling science, like calling climate change a Marxist plot to destroy American prosperity. Those three anonymous insiders say that the effort to undo the endangerment finding has been getting advice from “Mandy Gunasekara, who served as EPA chief of staff at the end of Trump’s first term and wrote the EPA chapter in the conservative blueprint Project 2025,” and that’s probably all the science necessary. Gunasekara is so good at science that she’s not only a climate and energy expert, she also moonlights as an expert for Republican congressional hearings on how woke corporations are turning children transgender, so how’s that for a broad range of expertise? Yes, we know: You were told there’d be no polymaths.

Haha, we are kidding! In fact, Ms. Gunasekara probably knows less about climate science — or any science — than the average blogger, because she is not a scientist at all, but a paid liar about science. She has an undergrad degree in communication and media studies, and a law degree from U of Mississippi, and that’s enough to have gotten her quite a few jobs lobbying against science and praising the poor victimized oil industry. 

One of her early jobs was as an aide to the late Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma); Gunasekara was the lucky staffer who got to hand him the very snowball that he tossed on the Senate floorin 2015 to prove there’s no such thing as global warming. 

That was a decade ago, and despite that demonstration, the planet has just kept getting hotter. That’s the thing about science: It’s true even if you don’t believe it. It’s true even if it leads to conclusions that might hurt oil industry profits. It will keep being true even when (we could say “if,” but come on) the EPA proclaims that greenhouse gases do not endanger humans and that Donald Trump is wearing a fine new suit of clothes that only smart people can see. 

Needless to say, climate advocates aren’t planning to let Mad King Donald redefine greenhouse gases as Our Industrious Friends, even if his uncle was a professor at MIT and he has a “natural instinct for science.” David Doniger, an attorney and senior strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the Washington Post that if Trump’s EPA “proceeds down this path and jettisons the obvious finding that climate change is a threat to our health and welfare,” well then, “We will see them in court.”

And even if the Supreme Court somehow decides science isn’t real and that a president has the power to nullify it, setting back the fight against climate change for as long as he holds power and making America a pariah nation, we can still point to the evidence — the rest of the world will keep it — and say, “And yet it warms.”

Categories Environment, Extremism, Science

California: Trump’s Water Release Didn’t Help Los Angeles or Farmers: A Stunt

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2025 //
19

The Los Angeles Times reported that Trump used the devastating Los Angeles fires to stage a pointless stunt: He sent the Army Corps of Engineers to release water from two Northern California reservoirs. He claimed that he released the water to help put the fires out, but by the time he did it, the fires were almost completely extinguished, and it would not have flowed to Los Angeles anyway.

Now the farmers who rely on the water in the reservoirs are worried if they will have enough water this summer.

Days after President Trump startled some of his most ardent supporters in California’s San Joaquin Valley by having the Army Corps of Engineers suddenly release water from two dams, many in the region and beyond were still perplexed.

Acting on an order from Washington, the corps allowed irrigation water to flow down river channels for three days, into the network of engineered waterways that fan out among farm fields in the San Joaquin Valley. Coursing from rivers to canals to irrigation ditches, much of the water eventually made its way to retention basins, where it soaked into the ground, replenishing groundwater.

“It’s been recharged to the ground,” said Tom Barcellos, president of the Lower Tule River Irrigation District and a dairyman and farmer. That sounds good, except farmers in parts of the San Joaquin Valley typically depend on water from the two dams to irrigate crops in the summer. In other words, the release of water this time of year, when agriculture usually doesn’t require it, means that growers are likely to have less water stored in the reservoirs this summer, during a year that so far is among the area’s driest on record….

The sudden, unplanned release of water from the dams has led to criticism from some residents, water managers and members of Congress, who say the unusual discharge of water seems to have been intended to make a political statement — to demonstrate that Trump has the authority to order federal dams or pumps to send more water flowing as he directs.

“These kinds of shenanigans, they hurt smaller farmers,” said Dezaraye Bagalayos, a local water activist. Small growers have already been struggling, and the release of water from the dams means they will have less when they need it, Bagalayos said.

“The last thing in the world California water management needs is somebody like Trump calling shots when he doesn’t know how anything works,” Bagalayos said. “It’s making an already hard situation very, very difficult. We don’t have a lot of wiggle room in the state of California to be messing around with our water supply like this….”

The action occurred after Trump’s visit to fire-devastated Los Angeles, when he pledged to “open up the valves” to bring the region more water — even though reservoirs that supply Southern California’s cities were at record levels (and remain so).

As the water poured from the dams, Trumpposted a photo of one of them, saying it was “beautiful water flow that I just opened in California.” The Army Corps of Engineers said the action was “consistent with the direction” in Trump’s recent executive order, which calls for maximizing water deliveries.

Neither Trump nor the Army Corps of Engineers provided details about where the water was intended to go. But water released from the two dams serves agriculture in the eastern San Joaquin Valley. It typically does not reach the Los Angeles area, which depends instead on supplies delivered from the aqueducts of the State Water Project on the other side of the valley.

The water releases lowered the levels of the two reservoirs: Lake Success, near Porterville, had been about 20% full. It fell to 18%. Lake Kaweah, near Visalia, was roughly 21% full and similarly dropped to 19% of capacity over the weekend.

Federal records show that more than 2 billion gallons were released from the reservoirs over three days.

If anyone knows of a cure for “stupid,” please contact the White House.

Categories Accountability, California, Disruption, Environment, Ignorance, Los Angeles, Stupid, Trump

ProPublica: Trump Chooses Lawyer as #2 at EPA Who Opposes EPA Regulations

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2025 //
1

Trump’s picks for his Cabinet are appalling. His choices for #2 are a five-alarm fire. For the #2 position at the Environmental Protection Agency, he selected a lawyer who represents corporations who oppose EPA regulations.

ProPublica reports:

The man tapped by President Donald Trump to be second-in-command of the federal agency that protects the public from environmental dangers is a lawyer who has represented companies accused of harming people and the environment through pollution.

David Fotouhi, a partner in the global law firm Gibson Dunn, played a key part in rolling back climate regulations and water protections while serving as a lawyer in the Environmental Protection Agency during Trump’s first administration.

Most recently, Fotouhi challenged the EPA’s recent ban of asbestos, which causes a deadly cancer called mesothelioma. In a brief filed in October on behalf of a group of car companies called the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, he argued that, for the specific uses that were banned, the “EPA failed to demonstrate that chrysotile asbestos presents an unreasonable risk of injury.”

The EPA banned the carcinogen in March, long after its dangers first became widely known. More than 50 other countries have outlawed use of the mineral. The agency had worked toward the ban for decades, and workers died while lobbyists pushed to delay action, as a 2022 ProPublica investigation showed.

Less than a day after Trump’s inauguration this week, the White House webpage that celebrated the historic ban was gone.

Categories Accountability, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Trump

TIME: Fossil Fuel Billionaires Strike It Rich!

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2025 //
5

Since the beginning of the year, the fortunes of America’s fossil fuel billionaires have surged. Even though the U.S. is pumping more oil and gas than ever, Trump plans to pump more. That’s been great news for the fossil fuel industry.

Rebecca Schneid of TIME magazine reports:

President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 in Washington D.C. brought the world’s wealthiest people together to celebrate his return to the presidency, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, who have a combined net worth of nearly $900 billion, according to Forbes.

As Trump was inaugurated, longtime Trump supporter Harold Hamm—known for fracking and considered “America’s richest oil man” with over $18.5 billion in wealth running Continental Resources— hosted an exclusive inauguration watch party. Invitees included Trump’s pick to run the Interior Department, former Governor of North Dakota Doug Burnam. 

The connection between Trump’s rise and policy choices and American business leaders is especially true for the top fossil fuel billionaires, says the Climate Accountability Research Project (CARP). The group has been tracking the impact of Trump’s latest presidential campaign and election win on the wealth of 15 individual billionaires involved in the fossil fuel industry.

In just one day after Trump’s inauguration, CARP says these 15 billionaires saw their combined wealth increase $3.31 billion, from $317.86 billion to $321.17 billion. And since the new year began, these individuals have made $17 billion, according to a CARP analysis using Bloomberg Data.

This list of top U.S. fossil fuel billionaires includes David Koch’s widow Julia Flesher Koch, Charles Koch, the current chairman and CEO of Koch Inc., Hamm, as well as many other owners of oil and gas companies like Kinder Morgan, Enterprise Products, and Hunt Consolidated.

“A good return on investment,” Chuck Collins, co-founder of CARP tells TIME of the billionaires’ wealth increase since Trump’s election. Collins co-authored a report released this month by CARP tracking connections between Trump’s second run for office and U.S. oil and gas giants.

According to Yale Climate Connections, nearly $23 million in oil and gas industry funds went directly to candidate Trump and the PACs supporting him during his recent election campaign.

At an April 2024 dinner organized with Hamm and attended by oil executives from places including Exxon and Chevron at Mar-a-Lago, Trump asked attendees to donate $1 billion to his campaign. He told these executives they would save that much money and more after he repealed environmental regulations and fast track drilling permits, the Washington Post reported.

CARP’s analysis comes as Trump declares a “national energy emergency,” begins the process of pulling out of the Paris Agreement, and promises to speed fossil fuel project approvals. In his declaration of a “National Energy Emergency,” Trump cited the need to lower energy costs and to boost oil and natural gas production across the country, in line with his mantra throughout his campaign: “drill, baby, drill.”

Trump stayed the same course in his inauguration day address: “We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have—the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it. We’re going to use it.” His remarks received a standing ovation at Hamm’s inauguration watch party at Hay-Adams hotel in downtown Washington, the New York Times reported.

Collins says Trump’s election and his immediate executive orders are a “dream” for oil and gas executives—a dream they can only expect to get better.

“It’s a huge windfall for the industry, and it’s kind of a beginning,” Collins said. “This is the payback for investing millions and millions of dollars to get Trump elected, and clearing the way for members of Congress who are pro industry and climate deniers. This is what they paid for.”

Categories Billionaires, Environment, Trump

Jeff Tiedrich: Trump Goes Full-MAGA on L.A. Fires

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2025 //
21

Jeff Tiedrich is a web designer and graphic artist who has a consistently hilarious and outrageous blog. I can’t redact all the F words, so forgive that. I curse at home, but never in public or in print. Jeff has different rules.

He posted this commentary about Trump politicizing the fires in Los Angeles.

He titled it: Elderly Convict Won’t Stop Running His Ignorant Mouth About L.A. Fires.”

He wrote:

no one has ever accused America’s First Felon of learning. Donny Convict knows what he knows, and he’ll be god-fucking-damned if he’s going to let something stupid like facts change his stubborn mind. 

we saw this during the botched response to Covid, where Donny never stopped insisting that that virus that was killing thousands of people a day was going to magically disappear all on its own, “like a miracle.”

we’re seeing again right now, where, as Southern California burns to the ground, he’s refusing to allow a single fact to penetrate his thick skull.

it’s not like experts haven’t already worn themselves out trying to explain to Donny how climate change will affect California’s ecosystem.

CA official: “if we ignore the science and put our head in the sand … we’re not going to succeed together in protecting Californians.”
Donny: “it’ll start getting cooler. you just watch.”
CA official: “I wish science agreed with you.” 
Donny: “I don’t think science knows, actually.”

that was Donny in 2020, insisting — without any facts or evidence — that “it’ll start getting cooler,” because “science doesn’t actually know.” 

let’s fast forward to right now, and see if Donny was right.

hmm. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure a hurricane made of fucking fire is not a hallmark of lower temperatures in California.

the First Felon continues to flap his gums about California’s water system. he was at it again the other day.

“Governor Gavin Newscum should immediately go to Northern California and open up the water main, and let the water flow into his dry, starving, burning State, instead of having it go out into the Pacific Ocean. It ought to be done right now, NO MORE EXCUSES FROM THIS INCOMPETENT GOVERNOR. IT’S ALREADY FAR TOO LATE!”

oh look — the location of the imaginary building-sized faucet that takes a day to turn has moved from Canada to Northern California. where will it pop up next? maybe right here in the room with us?

praise the lord, someone in the media finally pointed out that most of Los Angeles’ water does not come from Northern California.

Trump appeared to be referring to water imported south from the Bay-Delta, fed by Northern California rivers and snowmelt. But most Los Angeles water does not come from Northern California. It comes via the city’s 112-year-old aqueduct that runs from the Owens Valley east of the Sierra Nevada, not the Delta, as well as groundwater. The city also imports water from the Metropolitan Water District, which relays water from the Colorado River and Delta to numerous local agencies. The city was the main motivating force for the building of the Colorado River Aqueduct in the 1930s.

and, of course, we’ve all explained until we were blue in the face that Los Angeles’ hydrant problem stems from having to fight too many fires in too many locations all at once, not because there’s some imaginary faucet that Gavin Newsom won’t turn — but MAGA isn’t listening. they don’t give a fuck about explanations. not when there are political points to be scored.

here’s a thing that happened way back in 2016. the town of Gaitlinburg burned to the ground in what to date has been one of Tennessee’s largest natural disasters.

The 2016 Great Smoky Mountains wildfires, also known as the Gatlinburg wildfires, were a complex of wildfires which began in late November 2016. Some of the towns most impacted were Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, both near Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The fires claimed at least 14 lives, injured 190, and is one of the largest natural disasters in the history of Tennessee

as happened this week in Los Angeles, the fires severely overtaxed Gaitlinburg’s infrastructure, to the point where —

Firefighters from across the state flocking to Gatlinburg to battle a growing firestorm couldn’t be sure the fire hydrants they uncapped would provide any water.

And within two hours of the mega wildfire reaching the city on Nov. 28, the hydrants were running dry.

the wingnutsphere must have shit a massive brick, and called for then-Governor Bill Haslam to resign, right? because as we all know from this week’s howls of MAGA outrage, empty fire hydrants are a sure sign of gubernatorial incompetence. 

nope, crickets. there was nary a peep from the Fox News crowd. no one blamed it on DEI, and no one called for witholding aid to Tennesee until they change their conservation policies — which is definitely a thing Republicans are threatening to do right now to California.

let’s see how Loudmouth J. Fuckwad reacted.

“My thoughts and prayers are with the great people of Tennessee during these terrible wildfires. Stay safe!”

oh, huh. no bombast, no accusations, no demands that Governor Haslam travel to god knows where and open some imaginary spigot. nope, just some worthless thinking and praying.

why were Donny and the screech-monkeys of the MAGAverse silent? because Bill Haslam was a Republican, and there were no political points to be scored.

Categories Accountability, California, Character, Cruelty, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Fake News, Ignorance, Lies, Los Angeles, Shame, Stupid, Trump

As L.A. Fires Destroy Thousands of Homes, Climate Change Deniers Unleash Conspiracy Theories

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2025 //
9

On Tuesday January 9, a fire broke out in The Pacific Palisades, a beautiful, lush, historic neighborhood in Los Angeles. It contains the homes of celebrities, as well as the modest homes of people who bought there decades ago.

The fire started in the Palisades but soon exploded in other neighborhoods. Thousands of homes and businesses have been destroyed, and many people are homeless.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Palisades was a haven for people who were refugees from Hitler. Thomas Mann had a home there, which is now a retreat for German artists, writers, and scholars. The German government bought both the Mann house and Villa Aurora in the Palisades, which are administered by a foundation and funded by the German government. Villa Aurora sheltered Bertolt Brecht, Charlie Chaplin, and others who escaped the war in Europe. So far, neither has been consumed by the fires. But the fires are close.

Scientists say that the Los Angeles conflagration is the result of climate change.

Ian James wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

The devastating wildfires that have ravaged Southern California erupted following a stark shift from wet weather to extremely dry weather — a phenomenon scientists describe as “hydroclimate whiplash.”

New research shows these abrupt wet-to-dry and dry-to-wet swings, which can worsen wildfires, flooding and other hazards, are growing more frequent and intense because of human-caused climate change.

Altadena, CA - January 09: A view of burned down homes and cars along W. Manor Street after the Eaton fire destroyed both sides of the street and thousands of others in Altadena Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“We’re in a whiplash event now, wet to dry, in Southern California,” said Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist who led the research. “The evidence shows that hydroclimate whiplash has already increased due to global warming, and further warming will bring about even larger increases.”

The extreme weather shift over the last two years in Southern California is one of many such dramatic swings that scientists have documented worldwide in recent years.

NPR also reported on “hydroclimate whiplash.”

But no matter what scientists say, there is a determined group of people who are certain that the cause of the fires was nefarious and had nothing to do with climate change.

I scanned the Twitter feed of Governor Gavin Newsom and read scores of tweets that insisted on the following claims:

1. The state of California recently changed the zoning laws to make it easier to convert single-family lots to apartments for multiple families.

@HustleBitch wrote:

GAVIN NEWSOM WORKING WITH DEVELOPERS TO CHANGE ZONING IN BURN AREAS TO ALLOW MASS APARTMENTS

Newsom is allegedly working with developers to convert zoning in Pacific Palisades from R1 (single family) to R3 (apartments)

CONNECT THE DOTS.

Newsom commented: This is not true.

Dozens of other tweets insisted that the fire was deliberately set to enable the development of massive apartment buildings.

2. The fires got out of control not because of climate change or the Santa Ana winds of 80-100 mph, but because the Fire Department embraced DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies. Too many gays, Blacks, Hispanics, and women in the leadership of the Fire Department.

3. The fires were so bad because the state and city diverted money from the Fire Department to buy supplies and housing for illegal immigrants. Or to buy needles and drugs for drug addicts.

4. The green agenda is a plot.

@ptmoon tweeted a video of Rosa Koire explaining that the UN green agenda is a dangerous conspiracy.

Rosa Koire Agenda 21 (aka Agenda for the 21st Century) is: “The inventory and control plan for all land, water, minerals, plants, animals, construction, means of production, food, energy, information — and all human beings in the world.”

Another tweet said that Oregon sent 60 fire trucks to fight the blazes, but the trucks and firefighters were detained in Sacramento for emissions testing. Governor Newsom said this was untrue, that Oregon firefighters have been on site battling the fires for days.

Another tweet said:

LOOTING: Newsom and California Democrats literally decriminalized looting baring [sic] police from arresting looters and prosecutors from prosecuting them. Now he’s opposed to looting.

This was retweeted approvingly by Elon Musk as an example of disastrous WOKE policies.

There were scores of tweets attacking Newsom and his WOKE agenda.

Many of the conspiracy theories originated with Trump’s wild claims blaming Newsom for the fires.

This is all so sad. A tragedy of this scale should be a time when Americans unite to offer help, not nitpick and criticize those on the front lines.

Categories Environment, Los Angeles, Propaganda

Heather Cox Richardson: Biden Strengthens Record on Conservation, Trump Babbles and Threatens Our Allies

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2025 //
2

Yesterday was a day jam-packed with news, which Heather Cox Richardson puts into perspective. We can look forward to–or dread– four years of non-stop lying and bragging and insulting and threatening by Convicted Felon Trump. Among other crazy things he said yesterday, he claimed that Hezbollah terrorists were part of the Jan 6 mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol. Were they carrying Trump banners? Will he pardon them?

She writes:

Today, President Joe Biden signed proclamations that create the Chuckwalla National Monument and the Sáttítla Highlands National Monument, protecting 848,000 acres (about 3,430 square kilometers) of land in southern California’s Eastern Coachella Valley. Under the 1906 Antiquities Act, the president can designate national monuments to protect areas of “scientific, cultural, ecological, and historic importance.”

Yesterday, Biden protected the East Coast, the West Coast, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea—an area that makes up about 625 million acres or 2.5 million square kilometers—from oil and natural gas drilling. While there is currently little interest among oil companies in drilling in those areas, the new designation will protect them into the future. Noting that nearly 40% of Americans live in coastal communities, Biden said the minimal fossil fuel potential was not worth the risks that drilling would bring to the fishing and tourist industries and to environmental and public health.

The White House noted that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have “conserved more lands and waters”—more than 670 million acres of them—and have “deployed more clean energy, and made more progress in cutting climate pollution and advancing environmental justice than any previous administration.” At the same time, oil and gas production is at an all-time high, demonstrating that land protection and energy production can coexist.

While oil executives blasted Biden’s proclamation protecting the coastal waters, Democratic lawmakers on the newly protected coasts cheered his action, recognizing that oil spills devastate the tourism and fishing on which their constituents depend: the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, killed 11 people, closed 32,000 square miles (82,880 square kilometers) of the Gulf of Mexico to fishing, and has cost more than $65 billion in compensation alone.

Biden protected the oceans under the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which enables presidents to withdraw federal waters from future oil and gas leasing and development but does not say that future presidents can revoke that protection to put those waters back into development, meaning that Trump—who similarly protected coastal waters when he was president—will have a hard time overturning Biden’s action.

Nonetheless, Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called Biden’s decision “disgraceful” and claimed it was “designed to exact political revenge on the American people who gave President Trump a mandate to increase drilling and lower gas prices. Rest assured, Joe Biden will fail, and we will drill, baby, drill.”

Journalist Wes Siler, who writes about the outdoors, environment, and the law, notes that there is a major effort underway among Republicans to privatize public lands to benefit oil and gas industries, as well as other extractive industries, just as Project 2025 outlined. Melinda Taylor, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, told Bloomberg Law in November: “Project 2025 is a ‘wish list’ for the oil and gas and mining industries and private developers. It promotes opening up more of our federal land to energy development, rolling back protections on federal lands, and selling off more land to private developers.”

In September, Siler wrote in Outside that politicians in Utah have designed a lawsuit to put in front of the Supreme Court. It argues that all the land in Utah currently in the hands of the Bureau of Land Management—18.5 million acres—should be transferred to the control of the state of Utah.

Those eager to get their hands on the land use the word “unappropriated lands” from the 1862 Homestead Act to claim that the federal government is holding the land “without any designated purpose.”

But, as Siler notes, in 2023, BLM-managed land supported 783,000 jobs and produced $201 billion in economic output, and in Utah alone the use of BLM land created more than 36,000 jobs and $6.7 billion in economic output as more than 15 million people visited the state’s public lands. Utah realized hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes on that activity, and while it’s true that states cannot tax federal government lands—as lawmakers say—the government pays the state in lieu of taxes: $128.7 million in 2021.

Transferring that land to the state would sacrifice these funds, and because the state constitution requires the state both to balance its budget and to realize profits from state land, that transfer would facilitate the land’s sale to private interests.

Twelve states have now joined Utah’s lawsuit, arguing that federal control of “unappropriated” land within states impinges on state sovereignty, and they are asking the Supreme Court to take up the case as part of its original jurisdiction. As Siler noted in a May article in Outside, Chief Justice John Roberts has expressed an eagerness to revisit the legality of the Antiquities Act the presidents use to protect land—as Biden did today—suggesting he would be willing to side with the states against the federal government. Project 2025 also calls for Congress to repeal the Antiquities Act.

In Wes Siler’s Newsletter yesterday, Siler noted that the new rules package adopted for the 119th Congress makes it easier to transfer public lands to state control. The rules strip away the need to justify the cost of such a transfer and to offset it with budget cuts or increased revenue elsewhere.

In a press conference today, Trump said he would rescind Biden’s policies and “put it back on day one,” and complained that the 625 million acres Biden protected feels “like the whole ocean,” although the Pacific Ocean alone is almost 38 billion acres more than Biden protected.

Also today, Trump announced that a developer from Dubai, DAMAC Properties, will invest at least $20 billion in the U.S. to create new data centers that support artificial intelligence and cloud services. Trump claimed that the company’s chief executive officer, Hussain Sajwani, is investing in the U.S. “because of the fact that he was very inspired by the election,” but DAMAC has been connected to Trump for a while.

Sajwani attended Trump’s first inauguration, and a company tied to chair and current board member of DAMAC Farooq Arjomand paid $600,000 to the key witness for the House Republicans seeking to dig up dirt on President Biden. That man was Alexander Smirnov, who in December 2024 pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI when he claimed Biden had taken bribes from the Ukrainian company Burisma.

Data centers are notoriously high users of energy. They consume 10 to 50 times as much energy per floor space as does a typical commercial office building, which might have something to do with why Trump’s team is so eager to increase American energy production even as it is already at an all-time high. Trump has promised companies that invest a billion or more dollars in the U.S. that they will get expedited approvals and permits, including those covering environmental concerns.

But if the larger story of this moment is the plunder of our public resources for private interests, Trump’s press conference in general seemed to have a different theme. It was what CNN perhaps euphemistically called “wide ranging,” as he abandoned his “America First” isolationism to suggest using force against China as well as U.S. allies Denmark, Panama, Mexico, and Canada, which would destabilize the globe by rejecting the central principle of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that countries must respect each other’s sovereignty. He wildly suggested that the Iran-backed Lebanese paramilitary group Hezbollah was part of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and that his people were part of the negotiations for the return of the Israeli hostages.

Trump’s performance was reminiscent of his off-the-wall press conferences during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, which tanked his popularity enough to get his team to stop him from doing them. Trump might have chosen to speak today to keep attention away from the arrival of the casket carrying former president Jimmy Carter to Washington, D.C., where it was transported by horse-drawn caisson to the Capitol, where Carter will lie in state in the Rotunda until his Thursday funeral at Washington National Cathedral. The snow and frigid weather were not enough to keep mourners away, and Trump has already expressed frustration that Carter’s death will mean that flags will be at half-staff for his own inauguration.

But he also might have been trying to demonstrate that the transition from Biden’s administration to his own is taking his time and energy in order to add heft to the argument his lawyers made yesterday. They demanded that Attorney General Merrick Garland prevent the public release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report about his investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election because making Trump respond to the media frenzy the report will stir up would take his attention away from the presidential transition.

Trump managed to defang most of the legal cases against him by being elected president, but he apparently still fears the release of Smith’s report. Today, Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed to the bench and who dismissed the charges against Trump in his retention of classified documents, issued an order preventing the Department of Justice from releasing the report. Constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe noted that the order “has no legal basis and ought to be reversed quickly—but these days nobody can be confident that law will matter.”

The presidential immunity on which Trump apparently is relying has also failed to protect him from being sentenced in the election interference case in which a Manhattan jury found him guilty of 34 felonies. In Civil Discourse, legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained that Trump wants to stop the sentencing process because it triggers a thirty-day period for Trump to appeal. “Once the appeal is concluded,” she explains, “the conviction is final.” Trump was apparently hoping to hold off that process and buy four years to come up with a way out of a permanent designation as a felon.It didn’t work. Today, appeals court judge Ellen Gesmer rejected his attempt to stop the sentencing. It will go forward on Friday as planned.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Lies, Trump
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »