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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/wake-hurricane-ida-fox-doubling-down-climate-denial-order-attack-bidens-infrastructure

Fox News is using Hurricane Ida to downplay the seriousness of climate change and attack President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, including the infrastructure bill which contains measures to make us more resilient in the face of extreme weather.

The fingerprints of climate change on the recent Hurricane Ida, which caused extensive damage from the Southeast to the Northeast U.S., were clear. One was its rapid intensification over very warm Gulf waters before pummeling Louisiana. Another was the amount of heavy rainfall that the storm brought in the Northeast that broke records in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, and caused major flash flooding. Beyond clearly showing that climate change is happening now,Ida’s devastating impacts, particularly in the Northeast, exposed how ill-prepared we are for it. And much of the coverage of Hurricane Ida was permeated with the theme that “the infrastructure in place today was built for a climate that no longer exists.”

In fact, with increased media coverage of events such as Ida, the public is beginning to increasingly understand the dangers of climate change and the need for actions that not only reduce climate-causing emissions, but make our communities less vulnerable to the climate impacts that are already happening. But as the public and more media outlets are starting to connect extreme weather to the need for climate action, Fox News coverage seeks to break those links.

Fox networks downplayed climate change and accused Biden of politicizing Hurricane Ida to push a climate agenda

Since September 2, the day after Ida’s remnants ravaged the Northeast, Fox News and Fox Business have aired at least a dozen segments, combined, that claimed that the Democrats are using Ida as a pretext to implement a massive climate agenda including through the infrastructure bill [W/ CORP Tax increase]. These attacks, coupled with instances of climate denial, show the network’s ultimate goal is to stop the implementation of Biden’s climate agenda by all means necessary.

Fox’s favorite new climate contrarian Michael Shellenberger appeared on two Fox programs to downplay climate’s impact on Ida and to argue that the climate crisis is actually overblown, first on the September 2 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, and later on the September 7 edition of The Ingraham Angle. In both segments, Shellenberger accused Democrats of using climate change only as a cover to make the economy more dependent on renewable energy sources like solar power, which he has a history of attacking. (Shellenberger is useful for Fox News because he doesn’t outright deny that climate change is happening; he only -- and falsely -- suggests that it’s not a major problem. In this sense, he provides the perfect cover for the fossil fuel industry to keep polluting the planet.)

Perhaps one of the more egregious examples came during a discussion of Biden’s response to Hurricane Ida during the September 3 edition of Fox Business’ Mornings With Maria. Guest Patrice Lee Onwuka of the Koch-funded Independent Women's Forum accused Biden of using the “fallacy” of climate change to get his agenda passed:

[vid]

paTRICE LEE ONWUKA (INDEPENDENT WOMEN’S FORUM): I think President Biden is absolutely looking out for what kind of a legacy he wants to leave behind, and he will try his best to get his agenda passed, using whatever fallacy that he can find. I mean, it’s remarkable that we're talking about, you know, a hurricane, and people who’ve lost livelihoods, some who’ve lost their lives, and we’re still pivoting to this idea that it’sall driven by climate change, when frankly, the facts dispute that. So it is unfortunate that the American people are subjected to this every single day, but this is going to continue.

There is no “fallacy” here and she is wrong on the facts -- climate scientists know that climate change has an impact on hurricanes, from things like rainfall to intensity level to how slow they move, and these impacts will only get worse in the future unless carbon emissions are rapidly cut.

There were many other examples that attacked Democrats for politicizing extreme weather events and threw cold water on the infrastructure bill. On the September 3 edition of Fox News’ Your World With Neil Cavuto, correspondent Chad Pergam began a segment on the infrastructure bill by stating, “Democrats are using the storm to justify their push for the infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion bill. It's loaded with environmental provisions.”[which are obviously inherently bad?!]

During the September 4 edition of Bongino Unfiltered, host Dan Bongino began a segment on Ida by also claiming, “Democrats wasted no time demanding action against climate change.” The segment which displayed chyrons like “Democrats’ Climate Power Play” and “Dems Push Climate Alarmism After Deadly Storms” also featured a Democratic strategist squaring off against longtime climate denier Marc Morano. Morano used his time to argue that the climate crisis is overblown. Although climate “both-sides” debates should be a relic of the past as they were promoted solely by polluting interests wanting to advance the narrative that climate change is “debatable,” Fox had no qualms in reviving it here despite overwhelming evidence of climate’s impact on Ida.

In addition, Fox invited climate-denying meteorologist Joe Bastardi on the September 8 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight.The segment began with guest host Brian Kilmeadeclaiming that Joe Biden is “using these disasters for political purposes” in order to pass the infrastructure bill. Bastardi then backed up Kilmeade’s claim by dismissing the climate impacts of Ida, simply noting that other bad storms have happened in the past. He also falsely claimed, “The sun, the oceans, the events, the very design of the system, always try to fight back, and at the very least you can't tell what CO2 is doing.”

During an interview withU.S. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) on the September 4 edition of Fox News Live, co-anchor Anita Vogel referenced Biden’s and Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) comments on Ida and climate change, and asked Malliotakis if “it's appropriate to blame this on climate change. … Should he be bringing politics into this when people are suffering?” Malliotakis responded, “We all need to do our part to be more environmentally friendly and reduce our footprint, but at the end of the day, you know, they're using this to push their radical-left agenda to try to pass a $3.5 trillion socialist wish list.”

Some Fox hosts also made similar comments in the wake of Ida. On the September 2 edition of Fox News’ Hannity, host Sean Hannity began a segment that ultimately downplayed the climate impacts of Ida by stating, “The left is blaming climate change for the heavy rainfall, severe weather and using it as another pretext to push their Green New Deal socialist agenda.” On the September 5 edition of Fox News’ The Next Revolution With Steve Hilton, hostSteve Hiltondid a short segment on Democrats using Ida to implement the Green New Deal.

Although the infrastructure bill is not the Green New Deal, that hasn’t stopped congressional Republicans, Fox News, and other right-wing media outlets from trying to compare the two. Fox is utterly obsessed with the **Green New Dea**l and is using it to undermine basically every climate action that is proposed, however modest.This time, it’s the infrastructure bill the costs of which would pale in comparison to what unchecked climate change would do to the global economy.

Ida hit the U.S. against the backdrop of the recent report from U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that conclusively linked climate change “to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes since pre-industrial times.” It also followed a summer of harrowing extreme weather events that also had climate fingerprints all over them, including Western U.S. wildfires and drought, and a brutal Pacific Northwest heat wave. The fact that, despite all these events, Fox continued to diminish climate’s impact on Ida and argued for continued delayed action on climate change shows how much of a dangerous threat the network is to the discourse on climate change.

### :{Fox’s “news” side spreads fake story that Biden wants to ban hamburgers:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

04/26/21 1:43 PM EDT

### Fox’s “War on Earth Day”

04/23/21 3:11 PM EDT

### Fox rehashes old bad-faith arguments and misinformation in covering Green New Deal reintroduction

04/22/21 4:34 PM EDT

521 morono bs

Eating Insects and 'Climate Lockdowns': What the Outrageous 'Green New Deal' Means for Your ...

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Climate skeptic Marc Morano, a best-selling author who has testified before Congress about climate change, says, "We've been had." Related ...

Climate Activists Target Pet Owners, Dogs and Cats

KFI AM 640

And dogs and cats are just one of them,” says the Climate Depot's Marc Morano, author of 'Green Fraud: Why The Green New Deal Is Even Worse ...

AOC pushes for $10B taxpayer-funded 'Climate Corp'

Yahoo News

... of a 1.5 million-strong group of civilians to work on federally funded projects addressing climate change; 'Green Fraud' author Marc Morano reacts.

Climate deniers are very mad at Bill Nye (and science)

Red, Green, and Blue

Marc Morano, who would probably argue with you if you said second hand smoke causes cancer, and who would definitely argue with you if you ...

Materials Acquisition For Global Industrial Change (MAGIC) – OpEd

Eurasia Review

(For a full reality check, read books by Gregory Wrightstone, Marc Morano, Indur Goklany, Patrick Moore, Roy Spencer, Jennifer Marohasy and Obama ...

Materials Acquisition for Global Industrial Change

Townhall

(For a further reality check, read books by Gregory Wrightstone, Marc Morano, Indur Goklany, Patrick Moore, Roy Spencer,Jennifer Marohasy and ...

Rush Exposed the Big Climate Lie Decades Ago

Rush Limbaugh

It's by Marc Morano, the best-selling author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, which I think is a brilliant reference guide, and a ...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/republicans-fantasy/

in the real world, there are real problems that serious people are worried about: global pandemic, climate change, economic inequality, systematic racism, mass shootings, and gendered violence, just to name a few. The problem for Republicans, of course, is that they are, quite literally, on the wrong side of pretty much each of those issues, and spend their time either actively making problems worse or getting in the way of people who want to fix things. Outside of sociopaths, Fox News hosts, and people with "Pepe" memes in their Twitter profiles, however, few people want to look in the mirror and see a villain gazing back at them. So right-wing media, which has always been addicted to selling its audiences on imaginary threats and preposterous fairy tales of conservative victimhood, has only been escalating such nonsense in recent months as the Republican policy agenda has been increasingly exposed to be nonexistent.

If your "team" is on the side of the Capitol insurrectionists and Derek Chauvin, it's hard to suppress the haunting fear that you're the baddies. So Fox News is on hand to spoon out alluring fantasies that recast liberals as the bad guys and conservatives as the long-suffering heroes.Tucker Carlson — a Fox News host who clearly relishes being a cartoon villain (think: "Dan White Society") — coughed up an almost too-perfect sample of the form Monday night, when he encouraged his audience of millions to harass ordinary people minding their own business under the guise of "helping."

Using as cover the recent reports that much of outdoor masking is unnecessary to prevent the transmission of COVID-19, Carlson told his audience that people wearing masks outside are "the aggressors" and that "the next time you see someone in a mask on the sidewalk or on the bike path, do not hesitate" to get in their face and demand they remove the mask. Carlson claimed this can be done "politely but firmly," but of course, it's categorically impossible to "politely" boss other people around about choices that simply do not affect you. And no, his story about how masks "prevent intimacy and human contact" is not enough. Strangers on the street do not owe you "intimacy," despite what creeps who follow women around and demand smiles might wish to believe.

Carlson then escalated by asking his viewers to call the police when they see children wearing masks because it "should be illegal." [call cops and cps till they show] Of course, Carlson also knows full well how dangerous such nuisance calls (which are *actually* illegal) can be if the target is a person of color — and likely, he's counting on it, Derek Chauvin defender that he is.

Skipping a mask outside does, indeed, seem to be mostly harmless, which means that the common-sense response is to simply leave other people alone while you also do what you want. But conservatives want revenge because they've been made to wear masks where it is necessary. Carlson is only too happy to feed them a narrative that allows them to pretend to be heroes while continuing to be jerks for no good reason whatsoever.

Over the weekend, we saw another comically over-the-top example of right-wing fake victimhood narratives when a totally fake — and obviously fake — conspiracy theory about President Joe Biden imposing severe beef rations tore through the right-wing media and exploded on social media.

Jon Skolnik explained here at Salon how right-wing media distorted a study about reducing meat consumption to impact climate change, pretended it somehow was part of Biden's infrastructure plan and ran wild with it. But what was truly remarkable wasn't just that the folks at Fox News and other outlets deliberately misled the public with false claims that Biden planned to "limit" beef consumption to four pounds a year. It was how this lie managed to spread rapidly, infecting every corner of the country, in record time.

"It's tempting to dismiss this attack as too absurd to be believed," Dan Pfeiffer wrote in his Message Box newsletter, but warned that, "But too often, Democrats focus on the absurdity of the specifics and ignore the believability of the general impression."

Indeed, watching the "Biden's banning beef" lie spread out over social media, boosted by supposedly "apolitical" Instagram influencers and other such conduits, it was easy to see how this worked. Many people — possibly most — had wholly emotional reactions when they heard or read the lie, and were too focused on lashing out angrily to think critically about the story. So many reactions online were variations of "how dare you criticize me" and "fake meat tastes bad," instead of the more helpful "is this even true?"

The best right-wing B.S. works in this way, by activating people's pre-existing guilt and making them feel defensive. A lot of Americans, even on the right, already feel bad about how much beef they eat. It's not just because it's bad for the environment, but because they know it's bad for their health, and American discourse around food and health tends to be highly moralistic. The Biden beef lie works first by activating that sense of shame and then giving people a story that makes them feel better about themselves, about how they're actually the good guys here. They get so focused on trying to make their defensive feelings go away that they don't stop to search Snopesor Politifact and find out if it's even true.

Carlson is playing the same game with his mask nonsense.

Conservatives obviously have a lot of sublimated guilt over refusing to take the pandemic seriously and are therefore on a hair-trigger for defensive reactions. So they're ready to hear how someone else wearing a mask is a judgment on them, about how they're the "real" victims, and mask-wearers are the "real" bad guys. Truth and common sense are crowded out by these over-the-top emotional reactions, driven by their own — in many cases, completely earned — sense of shame.

As Pfeiffer notes, the only way to push back on nonsense like this is for ordinary people to confront those who are spreading it on social media. The problem is that these right-wing freakouts are fueled by conservatives feeling angry, ashamed, and judged — frankly often because they deserve to feel bad about their behavior. Unfortunately, that means that the smarter reactions are ones that turn the temperature down, not up. It can help a lot for interlocutors to focus on facts, instead of moral judgments about things like mask-wearing or beef-eating, and save the moral discussion for another time, when folks are in a less defensive mindset.

Either way, the amount of culture war debris that the right-wing media will be churning out is going to be immense over the next few years. Conservatives have a lot of guilt for their terrible behavior and beliefs, and therefore will be easy marks for any and every story that lets them believe they're the victims and not the victimizers. Right-wing media, as these examples show, is incredibly good at kicking up fake controversies that feed off those defensive feelings. Conservatives are addicted to these lies, and like most addicts, they need increasingly stronger stuff to get their fix. Be prepared.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/green-new-deal/

Author and environmentalist Naomi Klein argued in a New York Times column Sunday that Republicans rushed to attack the Green New Deal as disaster struck in Texas because the popular push for a sweeping transformation of the U.S. energy system poses a genuine threat to the deregulated, fossil-fuel dependent status quo that left the Lone Star State vulnerable to extreme weather driven by the climate crisis.

"Texans are living through the collapse of a 40-year experiment in free-market fundamentalism, one that has also stood in the way of effective climate action," Klein wrote. "Fortunately, there's a way out—and that's precisely what Republican politicians in the state most fear."

Klein characterized the ongoing power, water, and food crises in Texas as the consequence of "an energy-market free-for-all" stemming from "a fateful series of decisions [that] were made in the late-'90s, when the now-defunct, scandal-plagued energy company Enron led a successful push to radically deregulate Texas' electricity sector."

"As a result, decisions about the generation and distribution of power were stripped from regulators and, in effect, handed over to private energy companies," Klein wrote. "Unsurprisingly, these companies prioritized short-term profit over costly investments to maintain the grid and build in redundancies for extreme weather. Today, Texans are at the mercy of regulation-allergic politicians who failed to require that energy companies plan for shocks or weatherize their infrastructure (renewables and fossil fuel alike)."

In the aftermath of Winter Storm Uri, ordinary Texans are beginning to see the direct impact of the deregulatory push on their material wellbeing as electric companies hit them with bills topping $17,000—"a consequence," Klein argued, "of leaving pricing to the whims of the market."

Alluding to her previous work on "the shock doctrine"—a term she coined to describe how the right has exploited past disasters to force through unpopular privatization and austerity agendas—Klein noted that "large-scale shocks... become ideal moments to smuggle in unpopular free-market policies that tend to enrich elites at everyone else's expense."

"I often quote a guru of the free market revolution, the late economist Milton Friedman," Klein wrote. "In 1982, he wrote about what he saw as the mission of right-wing economists like him: 'Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable."[gop sez BO cos chic guy]

The difference between past shocks such as the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 financial crisis and the current emergency in Texas, Klein argued, is that "Republican ideas are no longer lying around—they are lying in ruin."

Texas' Republican Gov. Greg Abbott [tucker] attacked the Green New Deal—a proposal that has not even been implemented—in an appearance on Fox News last week because he knows its promise to "create millions of union jobs building out shock-resilient green energy infrastructure, transit, and affordable housing" is "extremely appealing" to Texans as they "suffer under the overlapping crises of unemployment, houselessness, racial injustice, crumbling public services, and extreme weather," Klein wrote.

"All that Texas' Republicans have to offer, in contrast," Klein added, "is continued oil and gas dependence—driving more climate disruption—alongside more privatizations and cuts to public services to pay for their state's mess, which we can expect them to push in the weeks and months ahead." [death spiral]

As The Houston Chroniclereported last week, Republican members of the Texas state legislature are already signaling that "one of the most immediate reforms they will push for is recalibrating the state's electricity grid to ensure more fossil fuels are in that mix and fewer renewables."

But Klein contended that "unlike when the Republican Party began deploying the shock doctrine, its free-market playbook is no longer novel."

"The horrors currently unfolding in Texas expose both the reality of the climate crisis and the extreme vulnerability of fossil fuel infrastructure in the face of that crisis," Klein wrote. "So of course the Green New Deal finds itself under fierce attack. Because for the first time in a long time, Republicans face the very thing that they claim to revere but never actually wanted: competition—in the battle of ideas." twt

in recent days, as Common Dreams has reported, progressive advocacy groups such as the youth-led Sunrise Movement and Greenpeace USA have made the case that—contrary to the GOP's bad-faith attacks—a Green New Deal is precisely what's needed to help Texas equitably recover from the present emergency and build the resilience necessary to withstand future climate-driven disasters.

"Many people across the country are realizing for the first time that fossil fuels are not only polluting, they are unstable. Millions of Texans are being let down by coal, oil, and gas right now," Greenpeace climate campaigner Ashley Thomson said last Thursday.

On Monday, activists with the Sunrise Movement of Texas are expected to rally at the state capitol in Austin to demand immediate relief for struggling Texans, the resignations of Abbott and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas.), and passage of a Green New Deal that would "make our state and country more resilient to future disasters, and create millions of good union jobs in the process of transforming these necessary structures."

"Texas is the perfect example of what happens when our politicians cater to fossil fuel executives instead of the young people who have been shouting from the rooftops for years, warning of an impending climate emergency like this," said Chante Davis, a 17-year-old Sunrise Movement leader and Houston resident.

"I've survived three once in a lifetime storms in my 17 years of life," added Davis, whose family moved to Texas in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. "We need change, and the Green New Deal is the obvious, urgent solution. As our communities come together to fill the void of our government, our leaders must invest in us to provide jobs that directly address the crises we face."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Update:

This afternoon on the House GOP’s live webcast, Rep. Bob Latta (R-OH) praised the anti-health reform protesters for arriving to the Capitol without any assistance paying for the buses. He also said no central organization was orchestrating the effort:

LATTA: Some stakes took over 20 buses […] You know, they’re not rabble-rousers.KINGSTON: Who paid for them?LATTA: They all paid for themselves. You know, these people came down on their own.

Watch it:

ref tim p 404

http://dnserrorassist.att.net/search/?q=http%3A//wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/05/29/afp-timphillips-astroturf/&r=&t=0&bc=

https://archive.thinkprogress.org/tim-phillips-the-man-behind-the-americans-for-prosperity-corporate-front-group-factory-8437d7fa8a7e/

lee f 5/09

he rate at which the Koch Industries funded Americans for Prosperity (AFP) churns out front groups to promote its right-wing corporate agenda sets the organization out among similar conservative “think tanks.” This week, AFP created their latest front group called “Patients United Now,” an entity set up to defeat health care reform. Patients United follows a familiar pattern AFP has used for their other front groups: create a new stand alone website, fill it with lines like “We are people just like you” to give the site a grassroots feel, and then use the new group to recruit supporters and run deceptive advertisements attacking reform. This “astroturfing” model has been used by AFP to launch groups pushing distortions against other progressive priorities:

— The “Hot Air Tour” promoting global warming skepticism and attacking environmental regulations. — “Free Our Energy,” a group promoting increased domestic drilling. — The “Save My Ballot Tour,” a group that pays Joe the Plumber to travel around the country smearing the Employee Free Choice Act. — “No Climate Tax,” a group dedicated to the defeat of Clean Energy Economy legislation. — “No Stimulus,” a group launched to try to stop the passage of the Recovery Act.

Notably, AFP was also instrumental in orchestrating the anti-Obama, anti-tax tea party protests in April.

With nearly 70 Republican operatives and former oil industry spokesmen working behind the scenes of AFP’s various fronts and disclosures that point to ever increasing oil and corporate donations to the group, one must wonder, who is guiding this massive front group factory? The answer is Tim Phillips, the President of AFP who has built a long career of inventing fake grassroots causes. In Phillips’ official biography, there appears to be over a 10 year gap — but that period was when Phillips developed his very first astroturf groups to do everything from smearing his opponents with anti-Semitic attacks to laundering money for criminal lobbyists.

Click More To Read The WonkRoom’s Investigation Of AFP’s Tim Phillips

As a Virginia-based political consultant, Phillips got his first big break managing the campaign of Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA). After serving as Goodlatte’s chief of staff for four years, Phillips joined former Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed in 1997 to create an astroturf lobbying and campaign consulting operation called Century Strategies. The firm promised to mount “grassroots lobbying drives” and explained its strategy as “it matters less who has the best arguments and more who gets heard — and by whom.”

After being recommended by Karl Rove, Century Strategies signed its first major corporate client — Enron. Phillips and Reed were paid $380,000 to mobilize “religious leaders and pro-family groups” to push energy deregulation in Congress and on the state level, a policy shift that led to the energy crisis and economic meltdown of 2001. The Washington Post reported that the pair informed Enron that they had leveraged their relationships with members of Congress and “placed” articles in prominent papers like the New York Times.

Part of Phillip’s role at Century Strategies was to manage the firm’s direct mail subsidiary, Millennium Marketing. In 1998, now disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff hired Phillips’ firm to pressure members of Congress to vote against legislation that would have made the U.S. commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands subject to federal wage and worker safety laws. A federal report “found that Chinese women were subject to forced abortions and that women and children were subject to forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry.” Nonetheless, Phillips sent out mailers claiming Chinese workers “are exposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ” while on the islands, and many “are converted to the Christian faith and return to China with Bibles in hand.” The mailers then encouraged the recipients to contact lawmakers and ask them to oppose the Marianas labor reform legislation.

The Marianas stealth lobbying effort was not the only time Phillips worked with Abramoff. Reed and Phillips conspired to generate conservative Christian outrage towards gambling at Indian casinos in a cynical plot to encourage those same tribes to hire Abramoff to lobby on their behalf. In some cases, Phillips’ anti-gambling crusade would simply be part of an effort to kill off competition to Abramoff’s clients. And while Phillips and Reed postured to be motivated by anti-gambling Christian values, the pair helped launder lobbying money from an Abramoff Internet gambling client called eLottery.

Though Phillips and Reed are best known in the campaign consulting world for engineering the dual victories of Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) and Republican Gov. Sonnie Perdue in Georgia (by associating images of with the incumbent Democratic senator), the pair can also be credited with the most below the belt tactics ever seen in modern Republican primaries. The duo “spearheaded” the telemarketing and direct mail efforts for George Bush against John McCain in the 2000 primaries. It is widely believed that Century Strategies executed the mass mailers and robo-calls which accused McCain of fathering an illegitimate child with a black woman, using the image of McCain’s adopted daughter from Bangladesh.

Phillips’ brass knuckled hits on fellow Republicans almost prevented the only Jewish Congressman in the GOP caucus from ever being elected. Phillips set up a 527 called “The Faith and Family Alliance,” a group supposedly designed to support conservative and Christian causes. But like his other front groups, Phillips used the Family Alliance to simply slime his political opponents with an organization that appeared to represent a grassroots community. The Richmond Times Dispatch reported that Phillips was hired by State Sen. Stephen Martin to manage his direct mail campaign against State Del. Eric Cantor in the 2000 Republican primary for the Congressional seat being vacated by Rep. Tom Bliley (R-VA). Phillips used his Family Alliance to blast robo-calls and mass mailers claiming Cantor did not represent “Virginia values” and that his opponent was the “only Christian in the contest.”

Larry Sabato, a political analyst and the director of University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, noted:

A despicable, underground campaign that was unquestionably anti-Semitic nearly beat Cantor in the GOP primary for U.S. House to succeed Tom Bliley in June 2000. Cantor had been heavily favored over state Sen. Steve Martin, but in the end he won by a couple hundred votes. Now the national and state GOP appears grateful for its lone Jewish House member — but the Republican base and some Christian groups almost insured his defeat. I’m amazed that Democrats and even Republicans haven’t raised this matter.

Indeed, after the Phillips’ anti-Semitic attacks, Cantor went from being high in the polls to barely winning the primary by a mere 264 votes. Phillips still holds rallies — under the umbrella of AFP — to boost his old client Sen. Martin.

Phillips managed to escape most of the controversy that eventually embroiled his partners Reed and Abramoff. Working under the slush fund provided by oil baron David Koch — with a salary approaching $300,000 a year and at least a $7 million annual budget — Phillips continues to lead AFP in building front group after front group to advance his radical right wing agenda.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-melts-down-over-bidens-climate-speech

many lnx some vids

fox News melts down over Biden’s climate speech

The network continues its toxic rhetoric against climate action

Special PROGRAMS

CLIMATE & ENERGY

WRITTEN BY ALLISON FISHER, EVLONDO COOPER & TED MACDONALD

PUBLISHED 07/15/20 3:52 PM EDT

On Tuesday, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden unveiled his revamped climate plan, which now calls for a $2 trillion investment in clean energy over four years with a goal of getting the U.S. to run on 100% clean electricity by 2035.

Since the release of the climate plan yesterday, six Fox programs, The Daily Briefing, Bill Hemmer Reports, The Five, Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox & Friends, and Fox News @ Night have discussed it -- and they have covered it exactly how you think they would.

The plan triggered the usual hysterical claims by Fox anchors, hosts, and their guests about any policy or plan related to the reduction of carbon emissions: It’s part of a radical agenda, based on climate alarmism, pushed by extreme elements of the Democratic Party that will devastate the U.S. economy.

Or the shorthand of that narrative: the Green New Deal.

All six programs invoked this narrative while providing little substance around the goals of the plan or the multiple crises it’s intended to address including climate change, the country’s aging and toxic infrastructure, and mass unemployment.

Three programs -- Bill Hemmer Reports, Tucker Carlson Tonight, and Fox News @ Night -- brought on guests to discuss the plan. But these discussions were lousy with falsehoods and agenda pushing.

Fox “news side” kicks off the dishonest attacks on Biden’s climate plan

In a well-worn routine, the Fox “news” team provided the network’s right-wing stars with an opportunity to opine about the news of the day, which in this instance was Biden’s climate plan. The network’s “straight news” anchors have not been honest brokers on climate change and energy; yesterday was no exception.

The Daily Briefing with Dana Perino, which carried live Biden’s speech introducing the plan, invited anchor Bret Baier to weigh in on it.

Although Baier, in particular, has a reputation for not being as bad on climate issues as some of the more explicit climate deniers on the network, he has given climate skeptics a platform to attack climate science and climate action, often with very little pushback. Baier was the first person to disingenuously label Biden’s plan “a light green new deal that would still have a big government price tag to it.”

Video file

CitationFrom the July 14, 2020, edition of The Daily Briefing with Dana Perino

Bill Hemmer, who took over former-anchor Shepard Smith’s news hour timeslot in January, told the Associated Press, “I’m much more comfortable in this news lane than I would ever be as an opinion anchor.”But during yesterday’s episode of Bill Hemmer Reports, the anchor allowed network correspondent Peter Doocy to read the Republican National Committee’s response to Biden’s climate plan with no pushback or contextualization.Hemmer’s subsequent questions to Biden surrogate Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) adopted a right-wing framing about the costs of climate action rather than the costs of inaction.[// lomborg/shill]

Video file

CitationFrom the July 14, 2020, edition of Bill Hemmer Reports

With that, the “news” side had laid the groundwork for the “opinion” side to further distort Biden’s climate plan, which Fox figures did with abandon (more on this below). After the opinion hosts were done for the night, “straight news” anchor Shannon Bream allowed Larry Kudlow, director of the Trump administration’s National Economic Council, to lie about Biden’s climate plan with only the most cursory pushback.

Video file

CitationFrom the July 14, 2020, edition of Fox News at Night

Fox News’ opinion hosts use Biden’s climate plan to beat the Green New Deal drum

For over a year, while other TV news networks have dropped the ball on articulating what the Green New Deal is and what it would accomplish, Fox News has been hammering the same messaging -- tethering the proposal to radical socialism, climate alarmism, and economic devastation, while vilifying those who champion it.

As a result, for Fox viewers, the Green New Deal has become synonymous with extreme socialism manifested by a fake climate crisis. The network’s opinion show hosts readily invoke the Green New Deal every chance they get.

As The New Times noted, right-wing media, in addition to Republican lawmakers and the Trump campaign, “have also labeled virtually every climate change effort as part of the Green New Deal — an ambitious plan championed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, both democratic socialist — whether they are part of the proposal or not.”

Biden’s climate plan is no exception.

Fox’s The Five was the first opinion program to air after Biden's live speech, and co-hosts Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters both invoked the Green New Deal and its chief architects in an effort to align Biden and his plan with socialism and climate alarmism:

CitationFrom the July 14, 2020, edition of Fox News' The Five

Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, whose July 14 edition was guest hosted by Brian Kilmeade invited discredited and self-proclaimed “environmentalist” Michael Shellenberger to respond to the plan. In their exchange, Kilmeade suggested that the plan must have been penned by more radical elements of the Democratic Party to which Shellenberger agreed:

BRIAN KILMEADE (GUEST HOST): Michael, who is writing this stuff? There is a presumption that we heard Jay Inslee talk about, we heard Elizabeth Warren talk about. This has never been part of Joe Biden's agenda. Since when?

MICHAEL SHELLENGERGER: That's probably fair. … I just think that the radical left has just taken a big part of the Democratic Party. One of the things that I was really surprised to discover in researching Apocalypse Never is that really it’s just about a dozen people that were major donors to President Obama who benefited the most from really about 90 billion in subsidies, in taxpayer subsidies.

Kilmeade ramped up his rhetoric even more the next morning while hosting Fox & Friends, claiming that Biden’s plan is based on the idea that the climate crisis, if left unchecked, will mean the end of the world in nine years:

Video file

CitationFrom the July 15, 2020, edition of Fox & Friends

Prime-time host Sean Hannity did not mention Biden’s climate plan explicitly on his eponymous show last night. But during a rant directed at the presidential candidate, Hannity summarized the Green New Deal narrative with precision and demonstrated how foundational it has become to the network’s campaign against the Democratic Party. Hannity claimed that Biden “has taken his cues from the most radical, the most extreme socialist extremist that this party has ever embraced,’ including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY):

Video file

Video Player

CitationFrom the July 14, 2020, edition of Hannity

Fox guests push bad faith arguments and falsehoods

Fox’s guests invoked bad-faith arguments and misinformation to criticize Biden’s climate plan. On Bill Hemmer Reports, longtime Republican operative Karl Rove sidestepped the actual details of Biden’s plan to focus on fracking, which he said that Biden has “endorsed the immediate end” of. Biden’s plan makes no mention of fracking, while Biden himself has not called for a ban on it. In Rove’s mind, only jobs in the fossil fuel industry matter -- despite the fact that clean energy jobs “outnumber fossil fuels jobs nearly three to one.”

Larry Kudlow, appearing on Fox News @ Night, generally echoed Rove. He lamented the loss of natural gas, coal, and oil, and failed to mention the climate catastrophe that mining and using these products are getting us to. And again, he ignored the millions of jobs that Biden’s climate plan intends to create.

More natural gas hype occurred on the July 15 edition of Fox & Friends. Texas Republican congressional candidate Wesley Hunt misleadingly categorized fracking as a technology that made the U.S. energy independent; falsely stated that “we’re doing just fine” through fracking; and repeated the age-old Republican mantra of “innovate for the future” to reduce carbon footprint. In reality, “innovation” to Republicans is just a way to continue burning fossil fuels and worsen climate change.

On Tucker Carlson Tonight, guest-host Kilmeade hosted Michael Shellenberger to criticize the Biden climate plan. Shellenberger, a pro-nuclear activist who has a history of pushing contrarian and bad-faith views about the environmental movement, mentioned a high price tag of renewable energy, even though renewable energy prices are at record lows, even lower than those of fossil fuel and nuclear. He also exaggerated fracking and nuclear power as a climate solution. While replacing coal with natural gas has led to lower U.S. carbon emissions, natural gas is still an incredibly dirty energy source, and its continued usage will be a disaster for climate change. Nuclear power generation, which is incredibly expensive, is also mentioned in Biden’s climate plan, making Shellenberger’s hand-wringing over the issue unnecessary.

Fox News is a key cog in the right-wing climate misinformation network

Fox has played a critical role in undermining the public consensus around climate change by eroding the trust of its viewers in climate scientists and scientific institutions. According to a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists, 72% of Fox News segments about climate science in 2013 “contained misleading statements.” Since then, the network has continued to parade a coterie of network personalities, fringe cranks, and conspiracy theorists to push misinformation about climate change and thwart climate action.

In 2018, “climate denial claims dominated 86% of climate change segments on Fox News,” according to progressive nonprofit think tank Public Citizen. And, in 2019, Fox’s climate denial reached unhinged new levels even as global temperatures reached record heights, natural disasters wreaked havoc on the most marginalized populations, and youth environmental activism sparked large-scale protests around the world.

As the general election campaign ramps up, Fox will continue going to great lengths to avoid having good-faith discussions about tackling the climate crisis. By painting any climate proposal as absurd and ignoring President Donald Trump’s climate denial and ongoing assault on environmental protections, Fox aims to fulfill its role as a propaganda machine for the Trump administration and the fossil fuel industry that is “reaping a regulatory windfall” during his presidential term.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-business-host-charles-paynes-latest-lie-about-clean-energy-jobs

Biden is GND lite? but 2 trillion?

presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden released his overhauled climate plan, which now calls for a $2 trillion investment in clean energy over four years with a goal of getting the U.S. to run on 100% clean electricity by 2035.

Since then, Fox News and right-wing media have promoted their same old hysterical, dishonest messaging about any climate related policy: It’s part of a radical agenda, based on climate alarmism, pushed by extreme elements of the Democratic Party that will devastate the U.S. economy.

https://billmoyers.com/story/jack-abramoff-does-it-again/

june 2020

In 2006, Bill Moyers program Capitol Crimes untangled the web of relationships, secret deals, and political manipulation — including thousands of e-mails, reports, and facts on the record — and opened a window on the dark side of American politics. The documentary focused on Jack Abramoff and the so-called K Street Project. With his strong ties to the Republican National Committee, Christian Coalition, Tom DeLay and Grover Norquist, Abramoff ruled the money game in Washington.

The only problem was, Abramoff got caught breaking almost every lobbying law.

When he fell, scandal rocked Washington on a Teapot Dome scale. In 2006, Abramoff pleaded guilty to felony fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials. Part of his plea deal required him to provide evidence about members of Congress.

In the wake of the scandal, Congress amended the Lobbying Disclosure Act to tighten restrictions on lobbying. Now, Abramoff stands accused of breaking the very rules he inspired.On June 2020, Abramoff pleaded guilty to the Justice Department’s charges of criminal conspiracy and failing to register as a lobbyist. The Securities and Exchange Commission has filed civil charges as well. (Read the Justice Department indictment.)

Watch this excerpt of Capitol Crimes to follow the story of Abramoff’s previous corrupt system: [vid]

new cat resurrection:

omfg

https://thinkprogress.org/green-new-deal-jack-abramoff-opposition-trump-ocasio-cortez-mcconnell-a9015688f09a/

Opposition to the Green New Deal is swiftly taking shape, with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff now attached to an effort targeting progressive initiatives including the sweeping resolution to combat climate change.

A new political action committee (PAC) was launched on Feb. 7 — the Protect American Values PAC — according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings. The New Jersey-based PAC was created by Elizabeth Curtis, whose LinkedIn describes her as a “political complianceassociate.” Abramoff is listed as the PAC’s “honorary chairman.”

According to the PAC’s FEC description, it “supports/opposes more than one Federal candidate.” And the PAC has already begun fundraising via emails to supporters.

The effort to fight the Green New Deal through a serious PAC fundraising push comes as conservatives mobilize against the resolution. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has moved to call for a vote on the proposal in an effort to weaken Democratic support.a

and Abramoff is wasting no time sending emails attacking the Green New Deal and other progressive agenda items on behalf of the PAC.

“These socialists are so confused, and their messaging is getting worse by the minute. They seem to think that cows and airplanes are a threat to our future,” wrote Abramoff in a Feb. 18 email to subscribers, first shared by E&E. He went on to argue that the “radical Left” is working to “force their Green New Deal down your throat” in addition to other proposals, like a 70 percent marginal tax rate.

‘Radical socialism’ and ‘cow farts’: Green New Deal opponents lash out as resolution gains momentum

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t even in diapers when I started fighting the Left, and I’m about to teach her and her cronies a few things they are going to wish they never learned,” Abramoff wrote in his Monday email.

In reaction to the email, Green New Deal supporter Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) pointed to the lobbyist’s scandal-ridden past in a tweet on Tuesday. “If you are undecided on the Green New Deal one data point is that Jack Abramoff has started a super PAC against it,” Schatz wrote.

Indeed, the move marks a dramatic return to the public eye for Abramoff, who pleaded guilty to charges including fraud, conspiracy, and tax evasion over a decade ago. A lifelong conservative who built strong ties with Republican lawmakers and other officials, Abramoff infamously over-billed Native American tribes for casino lobbying, in addition to conspiring to bribe public officials, actions that ultimately led to his imprisonment.

After a six-year prison sentence, Abramoff railed against lobbying and began working as an accountant at a kosher pizza restaurant — a move he touted as an effort to distance himself from money and politics.

But he soon returned to lobbying, working to arrange meetings between President Donald Trump and international officials in countries like the Republic of Congo. He has also been linked to alleged Russian spy Maria Butina — her partner, Paul Erickson, is a long-time friend and business partner of Abramoff. [vid]

and while Abramoff’s Twitter still describes him as a “former” lobbyist, he is currently registered as one — and now appears to be turning his attention to fighting efforts like the Green New Deal....

an 620 imi

Why COVID-19 will force us to rethink many assumptions about the Green New Deal Marshall Auerback / Independent Media Institute

ctr-pt: to covid bailout bill as dis cap'l

https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-crisis-economic-growth-2645724784.html

Every country around the world would see economic gains from combating the climate crisis and trying to keep global heating within the bounds of the Paris agreement, according to a new study published in Nature Communications.

The straw man argument against taking action on the climate crisis is that the cost of limiting emissions and investing in green infrastructure is too steep and would cripple economies. It turns out, according to the research, that the opposite is true.

In fact, the study found that if nations around the world fail to curtail greenhouse gas emissions within the bounds of the Paris agreement, the global economy will lose anywhere from $150 trillion to nearly $800 trillion by the year 2100, as CBS News reported. The upper end of the range is if countries fail to meet their current commitments, which are inadequate to meet the Paris agreement as they are expected to lead to 3 degrees Celsius in warming.

The study's authors, from the Beijing Institute of Technology and other Chinese institutions, billed their findings as a self-preservation strategy for government, according to The Guardian.GUK

The researchers calculated the potential benefits of emissions reductions by looking at the social welfare aspects of cutting greenhouse gases and its affect on economic growth. They found that the benefits from cutting emissions would provide the largest boost to developing countries with large populations of poor and vulnerable people, who are most likely to be negatively affected by droughts, floods, fires, storms and food shortages, as The Guardian reported.

While all countries would benefit in the long term, the most immediate benefits would go to developing countries with high emissions, such as India, Indonesia, Nigeria and China, according to The Guardian.

The Paris agreement is composed of voluntary commitments known as Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, made by each country in the accord. The main aspect of the commitments is to reduce greenhouse emissions by cutting the burning of fossil fuels, thus reducing global warming and the adverse impacts of warming. However, many countries are witnessing economic damage from the coronavirus lockdowns and are rethinking their commitment to their NDCs. Already, government bailouts for the fossil fuel industry and the airline industry are in the works, as well as a rollback of their carbon emission reductions, as CBS News reported.

"A number of studies have proved that current [NDCs] are not enough to achieve the global warming targets," said Biying Yu, from the Beijing Institute of Technology and a co-author of the study, as CBS News reported.

The research shows that the choice between climate action and economic growth is in fact a false dichotomy. The authors' work concludes that countries could reach their climate goals and at the same time see an increase in their net income.

According to CBS News, Yu and her team calculated ideal strategies for countries to improve their NDCs, minimize economic losses and maximize gains. They found that if nations are able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then the net global economic benefit would range between $127 trillion and $616 trillion by the end of the century.

"Early and quick action will provide a better chance to close the widening emissions gap, even though a large amount of abatement cost would occur in the short term," said the study.

"The literature overwhelmingly shows the economic benefits of serious mitigation efforts exceed the costs in the long run," said Noah Kaufman, a climate and energy economist from Columbia University, to CBS News.

However, Yu is concerned that governments will be short-sighted and balk at the upfront cost of investing in infrastructure to combat the climate crisis. She also sees that the climate emergency takes commitments from every country.

"Combating climate change is not a matter for one country. It requires collective action and cooperation from all countries around the world," Yu explained, as CBS News reported. "Let's work together and save ourselves."

climate crisis paris agreement greenhouse gases fossil fuels

https://www.ecowatch.com/european-green-deal-exxon-lobbyists-2645438998.html

The European commission's effort to transition the 27-country economic bloc from a high-carbon to a low-carbon emitter in a few decades received input from the fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil in the weeks prior to its passage, according to a watchdog that monitors lobbying activity, as The Guardian guk] reported.

As Common Dreams reported, a report released last week by InfluenceMap revealed that Exxon lobbyists met with commission officials in November to request an extension of the Green Deal's carbon pricing policy, known as the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), to tailpipe emissions.

The report revealed that just ahead of the December announcement of the Green Deal, Exxon lobbyists met with Frans Timmermans, a member of the commission's cabinet, after the company avoided penalties for failing to attend a hearing on climate denial, as the EU Observer reported.

As InfluenceMap wrote in its report:

"In the meeting, the lobbyist for ExxonMobil tried to stall an overhaul of the transportation sector. ExxonMobil representatives pushed for the EU Commission to change its approach to climate regulation in the transport sector, including removing the EU's strict CO2 vehicle tailpipe standards, in what appears to have been an effort to stall a push towards electric vehicles. A direct extract from the meeting notes indicate the un-named ExxonMobil officials argued that the EU should: 'Give serious consideration to extending ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme) beyond stationary sources. Tail pipe emission legislation should be substituted with power plant to wheel emission regulation.'"

According to The Guardian, the maneuver aimed to tamp down knowledge about the carbon footprint of driving a combustion engine running on fossil fuels. And the lobbying effort seems to have worked, since the European Commission did not include plans to phase out combustion engines. It also did not include cars running on fossil fuels in its carbon-pricing plan.

Furthermore, the move aims to create unrest that would be politically unfeasible. The only way for a carbon-pricing plan for tailpipe emissions to be influential is for it to make greenhouse gas emissions very expensive. Yet, that type of action that transfers costs to consumers has been the bedrock of protests like the Yellow Vests protests in France, which stemmed from a proposed tax on diesel and gasoline, as the EU Observer reported.

Edward Collins, a director at InfluenceMap, said the document "represents yet another evidence piece" of ExxonMobil's efforts to protect its profits by thwarting meaningful regulatory action and shifting the focus to long-term technical solutions, as The Guardian reported.

The lack of decisive and meaningful regulatory actions that would change the transportation sector and the energy infrastructure of Europe in the immediate future drew the ire of climate activists, as EcoWatch reported. The Green Deal requires that European countries reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, which many scientists say is too late to stop the climate crisis.

"Net zero emissions by 2050' for the EU equals surrender. It means giving up," Greta Thunberg and 33 other youth climate activists wrote in an open letter published Tuesday and reported by Reuters. "We don't just need goals for just 2030 or 2050. We, above all, need them for 2020 and every following month and year to come."

As Common Dreams pointed out:

"Exxon's attempt to further weaken the European Green Deal represents 'a shift from the propagation of climate science denial towards a range of more subtle tactics and narratives to distract policymakers and the public away from an urgent and robust policy intervention on climate on the scale recommended by the IPCC's 2018 special report on 1.5 [degrees Celsius] warming,' said InfluenceMap."

European Commission Proposes Sweeping European Green Deal

ew 1119

EU Parliament Declares ‘Climate and Environmental Emergency’

an 120

57 climate scientists object after Biden falsely claims ‘not a single solitary scientist’ thinks Sanders’ Green New Deal can work

Jon Queally / Common Dreams

In an open letter, the climate experts say Bernie’s plan “not only possible,” but necessary “if we want to save the planet for ourselves, our children, grandchildren, and future generations

57 sci bernie gnd ~ boden

an 120

no lnx

57 climate scientists object after Biden falsely claims ‘not a single solitary scientist’ thinks Sanders’ Green New Deal can work

Written by Jon Queally / Common Dreams January 29, 2020

After former Vice President Joe Biden late last week falsely claimed that “there’s not a single solitary scientist that thinks” the kind of bold Green New Deal initiative put forth by his 2020 Democratic primary rival Sen. Bernie Sanders “can work,” more than four dozen U.S. climate scientists responded Tuesday to make clear that just isn’t true.

Sanders’ Green New Deal is a sweeping proposal that calls for “100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 and complete decarbonization by at least 2050” while investing $16.3 trillion over ten years to create an estimated 20 million new jobs, support vulnerable communities and a just transition for workers, and fund a massive infrastructure project.

The Vermont senator has said such a plan is necessary to avert the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

Biden made his comment attacking the plan during a campaign event in Iowa on Friday, but climate experts like meteorologist and journalist Eric Holthaus were quick to object:

I’m a scientist, and I think it can work. https://t.co/w2TlbQz4wv

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) January 24, 2020

Sanders also rejected the comment, telling a crowd in Iowa, “Well, Joe, you’re wrong.”

.@BernieSanders responds: “My good friend Joe Biden has recently said, and I quote, “not a single, solitary scientist” endquote agrees with my plan. well Joe, you’re wrong. Many leading scientists agree with our plan. ” https://t.co/RIMk5bhTKU pic.twitter.com/7VoBsrQ4S3

— People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) January 26, 2020

Proof of that support came Tuesday in the form of the succinct yet forceful letter (pdf) addressed to Sanders by 57 climate researchers and scholars. “The top scientific body on climate change, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), tells us we must act immediately to bring the world together to stop the catastrophic impacts of climate change,” the letter states.

“The Green New Deal you are proposing is not only possible, but it must be done if we want to save the planet for ourselves, our children, grandchildren, and future generations,” it continues. “Not only does your Green New Deal follow the IPCC’s timeline for action, but the solutions you are proposing to solve our climate crisis are realistic, necessary, and backed by science. We must protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the planet we call home.”

In a tweet Tuesday night, Geoffrey Supran, a research associate in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, said that while the “scholarship is clear” and the technology to solve the climate crisis is available, “what we lack most is political will.” According to Supran, “Mr. Biden’s comment embodies that.”

The letter is far from the only endorsement of the Sanders’ climate plan. As soon as his Green New Deal plan was released in August of 2019, it was heralded by green groups and climate experts as a “game-changer“; “a roadmap of what we as a society need to do to confront the climate emergency“; and the only proposal “put forward by a major candidate that represents a level of ambition that matches the scale of the unprecedented crisis in which humanity now finds itself deeply entangled.”

According to Dharma Noor, writing for Earther over the weekend:

You can argue about some of the details of Sanders’ climate plan, but you can’t argue about the seriousness of the crisis it will have to take on. The climate crisis is already causing heat waves, wildfires, storms, and floods. And unless we take serious action, it’s going to get far, far worse. On that, the science is clear and the Sanders’ plan is absolutely in line with what’s needed to address it.

“To have any chance of getting to net-zero by 2030, we certainly need a plan that looks a lot more like Sanders’ than Biden’s,” [Dr. Peter Kalmus, Associate Project Scientist at the UCLA Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science & Engineering] said. “I don’t know if we can get to net-zero emissions by 2030, no one knows. But I do know that it’s up to us, and if we don’t try, then we certainly will fail.”

According to the climate ranking scorecard put out by Greenpeace, which assess the proposals of all the 2020 candidates, Sanders is the only presidential hopeful who garners an A+ grade, putting him at the top of the chart. Biden, meanwhile, ranks in 5th place—behind Tom Steyer (A), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (A), and Pete Buttigieg (B+)—with a B+.

mod money theory

https://boingboing.net/2019/11/28/neoclassical-cruelty.html

gnd

Virginia Democrats campaigned on their Green New Deal and fighting climate change. And won. 1119 vox

ew 1019

94 World Mayors Call for Green New Deal, Blast Slow National Actions

3rd industrial revo non-hier; must be glob-LOCAL

merkel

china big green grid investment 12 wks after mtg w/ Jeremy Rifkin wrote The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth audio interview 9/19.

rifkin

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/bernie-sanders-green-new-deal-plan-will-nationalize-power-generation-in-the-us/

no lnx

Bernie Sanders’ Green New Deal plan will nationalize power generation in the US

Written by Thomas Neuburger September 10, 2019

“You can’t nibble around the edges any more,” says Sanders in explaining his plan to essentially nationalize electricity production in the U.S. The full interview is here.

Bernie Sanders recently released his plan for implementing the Green New Deal. These include such comprehensive goals as transitioning to 100% renewable energy for electricity and transportation by 2030 and decarbonizing the entire economy by 2050 (full details here).

To get there, Sanders plans a number of ambitious projects, including massive and job-creating infrastucture spending and “declaring climate change a national emergency.” The implications of the latter are not entirely spelled out. A number of candidates have proposals that “declare a national emergency” regarding climate change, but not in the same sense that George W. Bush, for example, may have meant had he declared the 9/11 attacks a national emergency (he didn’t, but he could have).

That kind of national emergency, a Bush-Cheney kind, implies an exercise of presidential power that approaches martial law, something that most pro-climate Democrats don’t contemplate. Does the Sanders plan contemplate a stronger-than-rhetorical response to climate change? It’s not clear yet from Sanders camp messaging.

Nevertheless, the subject of emergency federal power does come up because of the breadth of the Sanders plan, and in particular, because of one key component:

Build enough renewable energy generation capacity for the nation’s growing needs. Currently, four federal Power Marketing Administrations (PMAs) and the Tennessee Valley Authority generate and transmit power to distribution utilities in 33 states.We will create one more PMA to cover the remaining states and territories and expand the existing PMAs to build more than enough wind, solar, energy storage and geothermal power plants. We will spend $1.52 trillion on renewable energy and $852 billion to build energy storage capacity. Together, with an EPA federal renewable energy standard, this will fully drive out non-sustainable generation sources.

We will end greed in our energy system. The renewable energy generated by the Green New Deal will be publicly owned, managed by the Federal Power Marketing Administrations, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Tennessee Valley Authority and sold to distribution utilities with a preference for public power districts, municipally- and cooperatively-owned utilities with democratic, public ownership, and other existing utilities that demonstrate a commitment to the public interest. The Department of Energy will provide technical assistance to states and municipalities that would like to establish publicly owned distribution utilities or community choice aggregation programs in their communities. Electricity will be sold at current rates to keep the cost of electricity stable during this transition.

The whole plan (again, I urge everyone to read it) has been called by some a “new Manhattan Project” and compared to FDR’s reshaping of U.S. industrial policy and capacity during World War II. As Juan Cole writes, “Sanders intends to push [fossil fuel] corporations aside and institute a Federal industrial policy that can make things happen. The analogy is what Franklin Delano Roosevelt accomplished during World War II, when US industrial capacity vastly expanded and 16 million men were mobilized and Social Security was implemented.”

The plan has rightly been called a nationalization of electric power generation. Chris Hayes noted this fact in his recent interview with Sanders, calling it “a federal takeover of the whole thing,” to which Sanders essentially agrees (see video at the top). Other writers have said the same. For example, In These Times, under the headline “Bernie Sanders Calls To Seize the Means of Electricity Production” accurately describes the plan as “moving toward 100% public ownership of power.”

So there really is no doubt. Sanders, if he’s elected, plans to nationalize electricity generation in the U.S.

What are the implications of this proposal? A few thoughts:

Bernie Sanders is serious about addressing climate change. Simply speaking, Sanders is right. It’s long past time for tinkering around the edges of the problem. This chart shows CO2 emissions per capita per country:

Yes, the rest of the world bears responsibility as well, but you have to start with what you can directly control, and the U.S. government can directly control U.S. carbon emissions, if it chooses to. (Dealing with the need for global response is also addressed in Sanders’ Green New Deal plan. I’ll take a separate look at how Sanders plans to globalize the U.S. initiative.)

Are the other candidates as serious about addressing and mitigating climate change at the fastest possible rate? I think several other candidates are sincere in wanting to, but I don’t see any of them willing to act as forcefully, at least not so far in the campaign. This plan, therefore, lays down a marker for other pro-climate Democrats.

The institutional Democratic Party will respond to Sanders’ plan with fear and derision. In addition, their criticism will get widespread and supportive media coverage.

Sanders’ Green New Deal plan allows institutional Democrats to take the charge that Sanders is a “socialist” and part of the “hard left” to eleven, and they will not miss the opportunity to go all out. “Socialism” already smacks of communism, though the connection is usually made in Democratic and mainstream media circles by implication. (This incident, engineered by the producers of the early CNN Town Hall, is a rare counter-example.)

But a planned and federally directed “U.S. industrial policy” can be made to sound very much like a Stalinist “five-year economic plan,” and it wouldn’t be surprising if this comparison is made. It will be especially interesting to hear Elizabeth Warren’s response, since she’s made a point of saying “I’m a capitalist“; I’m almost certain she’ll be asked to give one.

The response on the Right will be “government takeover!” I’ve seen hints already that those who set the agenda for frightened and agitated right-wing base voters are positioning the Green New Deal as a backdoor, left-wing plan for “government takeover” of the economy. In this, their language exactly parallels the language that markets Second Amendment fears to frighten right-wing voters.

The cry on the right will also be cranked up to eleven, including by that master of marketing, Donald Trump, who has already started with the “we’re not socialist” rhetoric. Note that the clip at the top is sourced to a YouTube channel called “GOP War Room.” Expect a lot more of the same from sites with “liberty,” “freedom” and “Fox” in the name.

Finally, this is a conversation that absolutely must be had. Before the U.S. can begin to address climate change meaningfully, we must be open about what’s actually needed so voters can consider those courses of action, even if they end up rejecting them. Calling any discussion of the breadth of needed reform off-limits — whether done perniciously or with good intention — is like hiding a small elephant under a rug, then throwing a cocktail party using the lump as a drinks table; the thing you’re avoiding adds fuel to your blindness.

Put simply, American voters must be allowed to choose whether or not to address climate change meaningfully, regardless of the possibility that they may choose not to address it at all. An honest conversation is the least we owe voters whose descendants will ultimately thank them or hate them for what they finally decide. Letting voters choose for themselves is called democracy.

Despite the fears of many though, there are reasons for optimism. If voters are given a realistic discussion of the alternatives and a realistic presentation of the way to get there, they could easily choose well. They certainly chose well under FDR, when war raged in Europe and the Imperial Japanese wolf was at the door. It’s at least even odds they would choose as wisely again, when all of nature seems poised to cause their demise.

What Would a City-Level Green New Deal Look Like? Seattle Is About to Find Out

BY: KRISTOFFER TIGUE

The city has a plan and some big ideas for pro-climate policies that also boost equality. And it's talking about ways to pay for them.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/the-dnc-confederacy-of-dunces-is-back-at-it-for-2020-and-the-consequences-could-devastate-the-us-and-the-world/

true dat

DNC confederacy of dunces is back at it for 2020 — and the consequences could devastate the US and the world

Written by John Atcheson / Common Dreams August 8, 2019

The Democratic debates turned into exactly what they should have — a war between the progressives and the neoliberal centrists (aka corporatists).

Guess which side the corporate media, the pundits, the think tanks, foundations, the DNC, and the rest of the Democratic establishment is lining up behind?

You got it. The corporatists. Not surprising when you consider most of the mainstream media is owned by corporations, and corporations fund the rest of the neoliberal institutions supporting the party.

These are the same folks who, back 2016, assured us Hillary would win and that Trump couldn’t. Undaunted by their complete failure to predict Trump’s victory and undaunted by the fact that they have no satisfactory explanation for why they were so wrong, they’re busy dispensing advice and issuing dire warnings against progressivism once again.

The problem is, their advice is likely to result in the same outcome as it did in 2016—a Trump victory.

...

Or consider the Green New Deal (GND). In the face of a climate crisis that is literally an existential threat, the GND calls for laying out a blueprint designed to tackle climate change in a way that makes it an economic opportunity, not an economic burden. Yes, it calls for some fundamental restructuring of our economy, but that’s exactly what’s needed to avoid an ecological Armageddon. And that’s not hyperbole—that’s the scientifically accurate description of the path the “realists” want us to stay on. To the extent the realists have a climate policy, it amounts to trying to jump the Grand Canyon in ten-foot increments. Yeah, that’s “practical.”

So why are centrist Democrats ridiculing the GND? Again, the answer is simple—they are reluctant to take on the fossil fuel industry. In fact, the DNC overturneda party policy not to take campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies. Turns out, it’s more “practical” to keep the corporate spigots open that it is to protect our life support systems.

Or consider trade. While the corporate centrists would like to continue with the business-first strategy that has allowed corporations to export jobs and capital in order to avoid taxes, pay lower wages, avoid environmental laws, and do an end run around worker safety, food safety and product safety laws, progressives are advocating trade agreements that force corporations to consider those things. This would mean fewer jobs going overseas, higher tax revenues, and better lives for both domestic and international workers.

...

Tomgram: Aviva Chomsky, How the Green New Deal Is Changing America

From time to time, to see the world as it truly is, our language needs to be updated. This may prove especially true when it comes to the grim heating of our planet. Few who have lived through this summer so far -- July was the warmest month in history -- haven’t noticed the heat. One of these days, “summer” itself may need to be redefined. In the meantime, my vote for updating goes to the phrase “climate-change denier,” at least when applied to Donald Trump, the former energy-industry employees in his nightmare of an administration, and the other Trump-style politicians who have been elected around the world.

Honestly, is the phrase “climate-change denier” appropriate for Jair Bolsonaro, the Trumpian president of Brazil, who has denied that climate change is anything to worry about. But far more important, in office, he has opened the planet’s “lungs,” the Amazon rainforest, to exploitation and devastation. He’s a man who is essentially giving lung cancer to his country’s former carbon sink. Under his reign, according to the New York Times, the Brazilian Amazon has already lost 1,330 square miles of forest cover. That, of course, is a planetary, not just a Brazilian, catastrophe and the man working so hard to make it so will, as a result, be partially responsible for the future warming of the planet. In other words, he’s not a climate denier but an aider and abettor of the phenomenon.

That, at least, is the phrase I’ve started using for these guys. Maybe “climate change criminals” would be more appropriate. Yes, Donald Trump has “denied” climate change, calling it a “Chinese hoax,” tweet-mocking global warming whenever it snows, and so on. Far more important, though, he and his cronies are working hard in just about every way imaginable to increase U.S. carbon emissions (which are, as of 2018, again on the rise). So *TomDispatch*regular Aviva Chomsky arrives just in the nick of time with a vivid description of how so many of the rest of us, particularly labor and environmental groups, are trying to get ourselves together on a planet where a number of our leaders are increasingly intent on taking us all down. Tom

Jobs, the Environment, and a Planet in Crisis

Unions vs. Environmentalists or Unions and Environmentalists?

By Aviva Chomsky

When it comes to heat, extreme weather, wildfires, and melting glaciers, the planet is now in what the media increasingly refers to as “record” territory, as climate change’s momentum outpaces predictions. In such a situation, in a country whose president and administration seem hell-bent on doing everything they conceivably can to make matters worse, the Green New Deal (GND) seems to offer at least a modest opening to a path forward.

You know, the resolution introduced this February in the House of Representatives by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Edward Markey (D-MA). Unsurprisingly, the proposal has been roundly attacked by the right. But it’s stirred up some controversy on the left as well. You might imagine that labor unions and environmental organizations would be wholeheartedly for a massive federal investment in good jobs and a just transition away from fossil fuels. But does organized labor actually support or oppose the Green New Deal? What about environmental organizations? If you’re not even sure how to answer such questions, you’re not alone.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

~GND no

cars, no planes, no kids burger, AOC cos ate one, __[crawler aoc: "I'm the boss"]

prez of env progress

omg seetucker b/c of quilette ~ wind and solar, unreliable 40% of year

he calims to be on BO team on 1st try of new green deal 2003-7 orig founder, $150 billion on renewables, 10-40% of year

low density of fuel, the bigger envir impact eg lots of land [ "WE"] our friends said what about nuke? how few ppl died in chernbly (no #)

bio-mass kills ppl (wood smoke, he does say ff too) 7 mil/yr (coal? charcoal?) in nuke accident only a tiny am't escapes ?! how much _ escapes?

3 reasons: 1) assoc w/ atomic bomb but 2 diff technol; 60's cheap too much energy --> pop explosion, overconsumption 3) harmonize w/ natural world

early

https://time.com/5613542/green-new-deal-carbon-tax/

JULY 12, 2019

How should we fight climate change? The most progressive Democrats say the answer is something like the Green New Deal, a massive government program aimed at reorienting American society. A more traditionally conservative answer is something like a carbon tax, making greenhouse gases more expensive and letting the market sort it out.

But for some Democrats, either one — or even better, both — will do.

A recent proposal for a carbon tax by Democratic Rep. Ted Deutch of Florida and supported by a group called Citizens’ Climate Lobby has attracted more than 50 co-sponsors, including nearly 30 House Democrats who also back the Green New Deal.

“I’m for anything and everything that moves the ball forward,” says Democratic Rep. Salud Carbajal of California, who supports both the Green New Deal and a carbon tax. “What the carbon pricing legislation does is move forward the only significant bipartisan legislation that seems to be out there."

the Deutch bill would require companies to pay $15 per ton of carbon dioxide they emit, a price that would rise by $10 each year after its been enacted and, according to supporters, reduce emissions by at least 40% in its first 12 years. The federal government would then distribute the revenue money back to American households in monthly payments, an approach known as a “carbon tax and dividend.”

“It’s about as stringent as we’ve seen in terms of a federal carbon tax proposal,” says Noah Kaufman, a researcher at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

Supporters say such an approach could attract appeal across parties. For one thing, a carbon tax is actually a conservative idea and has support from many large corporations as well as economists and influential D.C. think tanks. And some Republican members of Congress have hinted they be willing to come around to the idea.

Importantly, many supporters say the revenue generated by a carbon tax would create a significant lever to attract bipartisan support. Some of the money from a carbon pricing scheme could be used to help fund an industrial transition in communities with economies heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Or the money could help pay down the deficit. “There are lots of ways to spend — our estimate is $2.5 trillion over 10 years,” says Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, who plans to introduce his own carbon pricing legislation.

Still, a carbon tax would face a significant uphill battle to become law under any president. The Senate is likely to remain in Republican hands in the near term, and even with a Democratic majority supporters would need to earn a significant number of GOP votes or rely on legislative maneuvers to pass the Senate.

Carbon tax and Green New Deal supporters alike say they expect the political circumstances surrounding global warming to change in the coming years, opening a door that may not seem conceivable today. Recent polling has shown that the vast majority of Americans understand that climate change is happening and a majority of voters in both parties want the government to take action to address it.

“The political debate in the world changes every single day,” says Democratic Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine, who backs both a carbon tax and the Green New Deal. “The majority of the American public is basically saying, hurry and do something about this.”

Regardless of it chances of passing, members of Congress who support both a carbon tax and the Green New Deal are quick to point out that carbon pricing isn’t a silver bullet no matter what form it takes. Carbon pricing will do little to stop emissions in the transportation sector, which account for nearly a third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and some fear that consumers might end up spending whatever dividend they receive on higher energy costs.

Nonetheless, carbon tax supporters say putting a price on carbon could serve as tool in the toolbox for to reach many of the aspirations of the Green New Deal. In the presidential race, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has embraced that approach. The long-shot contender who has built his entire campaign around climate change has released more than 100 pages of plans to tackle climate change, but he has devoted only a handful of sentences to what he calls a “climate pollution fee.” Others, like South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former Maryland Rep. John Delaney have both embraced a carbon tax as a central piece of climate policy.

Outside the presidential race, key supporters of the Green New Deal have struck a delicate balance discussing a carbon tax and other methods of carbon pricing. “Instead of simply saying we’re going to cap or put a price on carbon, the Green New Deal says, no, carbon pricing can be a small part of the sort of legislative package,” Sean McElwee of the progressive group Data for Progress told TIME earlier this year. “But we need to do more than that.”

Perhaps the biggest reason why prominent voices on climate change have avoided talking about a carbon tax is a fear that voters simply don’t back the concept — at least not to the same degree that they support other policy ideas. Protests erupted in Paris last year when President Emmanuel Macron tried to impose a gas tax. And with Inslee as governor Washington state twice considered enacting a carbon tax, but voters rejected it on both occasions.

“It’s clear they want a different suite of solutions other than that particular carbon tax,” he told TIME earlier this year.

And Green New Deal supporters point to polling to back up prioritizing spending measures over a carbon tax. Recent polling from Data for Progress found that support among Democrats for “new public investment” to tackle climate change was 15 percentage points higher than support for a carbon tax (though both measures enjoyed majority support among Democrats).

However the rhetoric plays out, supporters of the carbon tax bill say it is just a matter of time before the idea breaks through to the forefront of climate discussions again. Across the globe, from the United Nations’ climate science body to the leaders of the world’s biggest economies, carbon pricing is seen as a fundamental element of the fight against climate change.

“Everyone’s goal is to work to reshape our economy so that we’re not reliant on carbon fuels and the pollution that comes with it,” says Deutch. Carbon pricing “will reemerge when we get down to the finer points of how we’re going to achieve everything that the presidential candidates are rightly talking.”

'Huge Victory' for Grassroots Climate Campaigners as NY Lawmakers Reach Deal on Sweeping Climate Legislation

CLIMATE CHANGE

https://www.ecowatch.com/grassroots-climate-campaign-new-york-2638905712.html

Julia Conley

Grassroots climate campaigners in New York applauded on Monday after state lawmakers reached a deal on sweeping climate legislation, paving the way for the passage of what could be some of the country's most ambitious environmental reforms.

The legislature reached an agreement just before midnight Sunday on the Climate and Communities Protection Act (CCPA), one of several climate bills state lawmakers have pushed in recent months since progressives gained momentum in their push for a federal Green New Deal.

New York's CCPA — like those passed in recent months in California, Hawaii, New Mexico, Nevada and Washington — offers a path forward for the implementation of Green New Deal-like laws at the state level, proponents say.

"This is going to be a huge victory for the environmental justice movement in New York," author Naomi Kleintweeted, adding that some far-reaching parts of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal grew out of state legislation.[n klein twet[

New York's CCPA calls for zero fossil fuel emissions from utilities by 2040.By 2050, 85 percent of all energy in the state will be from renewable sources under the legislation, with the remaining 15 percent being off-set or captured.

"By and large, this is a very big victory," Arielle Swernoff of New York Renews, a coalition that pushed to pass the bill,toldthe Huffington Post. The group counts more than 100 groups in its membership, including national groups like 350.org and Friends of the Earth as well as local organizations like Saratoga Unites and Syracuse United Neighbors....

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/447330-major-union-endorses-green-new-deal

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) on Thursday endorsed the Green New Deal, putting it at odds with other unions that have been critical of the ambitious environmental agenda.

SEIU’s International Executive Board passed a resolution in support of the sweeping environmental proposal at its board meeting in Minneapolis.

“We’ve been inspired by the fearlessness and courage of the climate change activists whose direct action and bold demands for change have put this issue front and center in the national conversation,” said Mary Kay Henry, the international president of SEIU. “The Green New Deal makes unions central to accomplishing the ambitious goal of an environmentally responsible and economically just society.”

SEIU called the Green New Deal vitally important for people of color, saying their communities are most impacted by the environmental issues the proposal is intended to address. The union added that its members support “immediate, bold action” on climate change.

SEIU said it is the first national union to endorse the Green New Deal.

Other union leaders have been skeptical of the environmental proposal introduced earlier this year by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.).

Terry O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America called the Green New Deal “exactly how not to enact a progressive agenda to address our nation’s dangerous income inequality” and “exactly how not to win support for critical measures to curb climate change."

Separately, seven unions told House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) that they had “grave concerns about unrealistic solutions such as those advocated” by the Green New Deal.

txt capt

newgrndeal619

2 lost? 619?

MAIN 9:53 AM 6/9/2019

belated

https://senecastandard.com/climate-guru-im-calling-bullst-on-ocasio-cortez-climate-fakery/30724/

morano gmail catch

biz mkt

Lynn Wilkins on February 17, 2019 at 10:00 pm

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “green dream” plan in Congress has been widely ridiculed, and it

According to the Washington Examiner, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., hasn’t promised it will get time on the floor, and, as of last week, she hadn’t even read the ambitious resolution.

House Rules Committee Chairman Jim McGovern, D-Mass., who helps to determine the floor schedule and debate rules, said leaders are waiting to see how many lawmakers sign on to the bill before deciding whether to bring it to the floor.

But a whole new level of opposition just appeared, with a guru of the environmental movement calling the plan “climate fakery.”

“I am calling bulls–t not just on AOC but on her progressive enablers in the news media who are giving her a pass on the most crucial test of moral and political leadership of our time when it comes to climate change: a person’s stance on nuclear power,” said

He’s a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and a “high priest” of the atomic humanist movement.

Shellenburger has helped save nuclear reactors around the world, from Illinois and New York to South Korea and Taiwan, preventing pollution that would be the equivalent of having 24 million cars on the world’s roads.

He’s been profiled in the New York Times, National Review, NPR and other news outlets.

by Marc Morano of Climate Depot.

“Now that more details about the ‘Green New Deal’ from New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been released, a major figure in the environmental community, Michael Shellenberger, is calling ‘bulls–t’ on her plan for failing to support nuclear energy,” Morano wrote.

He noted Shellenberger also labeled Ocasio-Cortez a “climate fraud,” and he is “outraged by the fawning uncritical mainstream media coverage the ‘Green New Deal.‘”

Shellenberger said: “I am calling bulls–t on climate fakery. Anyone who is calling for phasing out nuclear is a climate fraud perpetuating precisely the gigantic ‘hoax’ that [Oklahoma Republican] Sen. James Inhofe famously accused environmentalists of perpetuating.”

He wrote on Twitter that if you “want to be a self-respecting progressive or journalist who is fairly considering or covering the climate issue, please stop giving Ocasio-Cortex and other supposedly climate-concerned greens a pass.”

“THEY ARE INCREASING EMISSIONS,” he wrote.

February 7, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced a Green New Deal resolution. The resolution outlines what they plan to include in formal legislation down the line.

Over the following five days, primetime cable news coverage of the Green New Deal was dominated by Fox News. Fox News aired a total of 34 segments on the resolution, more than three times the combined total of MSNBC (8 segments) and CNN (3 segments).

Obviously, the Fox News coverage of the legislation was terrible. Many segments did not even mention climate change.

This is not the only example of cable news discussion of a policy issue being dominated by the right. In the weeks leading up to the State of the Union, Fox News aired nearly seven hours of coverage of state abortion measures, while CNN and MSNBC covered the same stories for less than 15 minutes combined.

Fox News dominating policy discussions of progressive initiatives has real consequences: They are immediately caricatured, with outright lies getting a massive head start. A large number of people get their first impressions through this distorted coverage, including many in the media.

When one of these issues does eventually jump to mainstream media, myths and lies often make the jump alongside. At minimum, the mainstream debate is partially about debunking the lies that have already happened.

Sunday shows fail again: America is in desperate need of an adult conversation about how to address climate change. Instead of that, the Sunday shows talked about climate change and the Green New Deal only through the narrow lens of the political horse race. Maybe we can prioritize fending off a massive destabilizing rise in sea level instead of worrying about whose poll numbers go up or down as a result of endorsing a resolution.

Meanwhile: Right-wing media are somehow worse than useless on the Green New Deal, as they've repeatedly invoked murderous dictators to complain about the initiative. Michael Savage, who has partied with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, even said of Ocasio-Cortez, "“This is a Stalinist in a skirt; this is a Hitler in high heels.”

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06022019/house-climate-change-hearings-democrats-green-new-deal-infrastructure-bill

With Democrats now in charge, two key committees in the U.S. House of Representatives used their first hearings of the year on Wednesday to press for more vigorous action on climate change, despite the political and practical hurdles.

Democrats and their witnesses, including governors, policy experts and scientists, argued that time is alarmingly short. But it became clear over the hours that if the stakes are high, the odds are long.

In the simultaneous hearings, the minority Republicans seized the moment to bash the so-called Green New Deal, a legislative platform that has been embraced by brash new Congress members as well as seasoned climate hawks. It seeks a rapid, wholesale transformation to a zero-carbon economy that would also be prosperous and equitable.

One hearing, held by a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, was the first in several years by that panel to consider prospective legislation on climate change. The House Natural Resources Committee said its hearing was the start of a month-long series by the full committee and its subcommittees.

Lawmakers noted that President Donald Trump made no mention of the climate crisis during his State of the Union address the night before and that he instead boasted of oil and gas production. They also mentioned that NOAA and NASA, home to much of the government's climate science expertise, had just officially pronounced 2018 the fourth-hottest year on record, reinforcing the evidence that the problems of global warming are worsening steadily.

Governors: Climate Change Is an Economic Risk

For Democrats, the emphasis was on urgency.

Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, opened the hearing with a story from a woman who had narrowly survived a wildfire in California last year, saying his committee would be guided by science and the experiences of Americans like her.

"Climate change is an urgent problem," he said. "It demands urgent action and a sense of purpose from Congress. This committee will offer both."

His committee heard a bipartisan message from Republican Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, about the high costs of climate change on communities in those states and the economic opportunities of building a new energy economy.

Cooper listed a string of weather disasters that have hit his state in recent years, including two so-called 500-year floods that caused mudslides and damaged infrastructure in the mountains and inundated coastal communities. He noted that extreme heat has damaged crops and killed livestock, and said that the federal government needed to do more than simply help the state rebuild.

"We need consistent federal action that meets the urgency of our global climate problem," he said. "Our communities, our economy and our future depend on it."

Baker stressed the steps his state has taken to reduce emissions and energy use while continuing economic growth. He said the expansion of an offshore wind industry presents an enormous opportunity for the state's economy.

Republicans Attack 'Green New Deal'

At Energy and Commerce, there was a lot of talk of bipartisanship. The committee has a long history of working that way, not totally eclipsed even in recent years.

"I implore you, now is the time to join us," said Rep. Paul Tonko of New York, head of the environment and climate change subcommittee. "We want to work together, but inaction is no longer an option."

"We will not be deterred," he added.

Again and again, Republicans on that committee said they, too, recognized the problem and wanted bipartisan solutions. But at both hearings, they spoke harshly of the prospects for a Green New Deal.

Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois, Tonko's predecessor as chairman and now the subcommittee's ranking Republican, called it "radical." He denounced "top down government requirements to rapidly decarbonize" as little more than "wealth transfer schemes." Republican Rep. David McKinley of West Virginia called it "delusional." Rep. Bill Flores of Texas denounced a "chaotic headlong rush into decarbonization." Rep. Billy Long of Missouri called it "a very worthy goal if it was anywhere near possible in the time they want to do it in."

Republicans also repeatedly warned against a heavy-handed approach driven by the federal government to reduce emissions.

Occasionally, Democrats referred obliquely to the possibility of a carbon tax; several of their invited witnesses urged that as part of any effective solution.

At the Natural Resources Committee hearing, Republican Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana told Gov. Baker that it is one thing to decarbonize the economy in Massachusetts, and quite another in Louisiana, an oil and gas center.

Republicans also focused on the risk of driving up energy costs. But Democrats argued that the costs of clean alternative fuels continue to come down.

Climate Solutions in an Infrastructure Bill?

But the hearings were less significant for what the witnesses said than as a way to compare the ebullience of the Democrats for action with the disposition of many Republicans, which tended between phlegmatic and choleric.

With the Senate and the White House held by Republicans, what House Democrats can achieve is less likely to be a law ushering in a new era than a platform for the next election.

The most plausible exception is the possibility that climate policy could inform a big bill on infrastructure, which might include upgrades to the electrical grid or other features that everyone can accept.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

REGULATION CLEAN ENERGY EXTREME WEATHER POLITICS

CLIMATE CHANGE

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07022019/green-new-deal-alexanria-ocasio-cortez-ed-markey-climate-change

The backers of a Green New Deal introduced a resolution in Congress on Wednesday to launch an all-out, decade-long mobilization aimed at transforming the economy to carbon-free energy.

They said their radically ambitious goal would restore America's global leadership on climate change, build national prosperity and protect the most vulnerable.

The non-binding joint resolution, initially sponsored by Democratic House newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Democratic Senate veteran Edward Markey of Massachusetts, has already become an instant political sensation.

Embraced by a coalition of environmental and social justice activists, the idea is also questioned by many in the energy and climate policy establishment. Scorned by influential Republicans and powerful industry lobbyists, it has been endorsed by several early Democratic presidential candidates, including co-sponsors Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren(D-Mass.). Ocasio-Cortez's political mentor, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has not yet announced whether he will make another presidential run, also is a co-sponsor.

"This is an incredible moment," said Markey at a news conference. "Never have the interests of all Americans been as united on a single issue. From the air we breathe, to the jobs that employ us, to the neighborhoods we live in, to the economy we operate in, climate change defines our existence."

In an era when global warming and financial inequality are both setting records, Markey said the Green New Deal was an effort to address not only "the erosion of our coastlines," but also "the erosion of the earning power of workers."

Ocasio-Cortez seemed to respond to critics who have called the plan unworkable or unrealistic. "Climate change and our environmental challenges are one of the biggest existential threats to our way of life—not just as a nation, but as a world. In order for us to combat that threat, we have to be as ambitious and innovative as possible," she said.

'The Green Dream'

Ocasio-Cortez seized on the Green New Deal while campaigning last year. Days after her election, she participated in a sit-in during the lame duck session of Congress, when she joined activists who crowded the office of Nancy Pelosi, then still the minority leader.

On Monday, House Speaker Pelosi appointed Democratic members to a new climate advisory committee, and said this resolution is just one among many ideas the committee might ponder.

"The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is but they're for it, right?" she said in an interview with Politico.

At a press conference, the sponsors shrugged that off. "I think it is a green dream," said Ocasio-Cortez with a smile. Markey said there was "no bigger champion" on climate than Pelosi, who helped him pass a landmark bill in 2009. (It died in the Senate.)

In one sense, Pelosi was right: The new resolution's teeth aren't yet visible.

But that hasn't stopped the Green New Deal from grabbing headlines.

Its real power is as an organizing mechanism around debates and elections yet to come.

As written, it would have Congress declare that it is the "duty" of the federal government "to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers."

The latest science, as the resolution notes, establishes that to stay within a safe carbon budget, the whole world needs to cut emissions roughly in half in about a dozen years and eliminate them by about mid-century. The United States, the resolution asserts, ought to move even faster.

If total decarbonization sounds impossible, backers say, think of the Apollo moon shot or the mobilization of World War II.

If success seems prohibitively expensive, think of the costs of failure, they urge.

Their selling points include creating jobs, meeting infrastructure needs, improving health, redressing injustice—and yes, heading off a climate calamity under laissez-faire capitalism.

A Set of Principles, Not Prescriptions

The Green New Deal has been pushed by a wide array of activists, including the youthful Sunrise Movement and the well-established 350.org network.

Jesse Meisenhelter, a Sunrise Movement activist from Oregon, has been visiting offices of members of Congress for more than a year to call for climate action. Last summer, when she last visited the office of Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley, there were 40 wildfires underway in their home state. Watching him appear as a co-sponsor on Monday, she called the resolution the most important thing she had seen political leaders do in her lifetime.

"Where I live, people are riding bikes and doing all sorts of things to lower their carbon footprints," she said, as she gathered with activists on the lawn outside the Capitol to watch the announcement. "But this is something where more than individual action is needed. We need political action."

Some heavy-hitters among the green groups, such as the Environmental Defense Fund, offered more cautious praise. "The Green New Deal points to the need for boldness and ambition at a time when they are sorely required—and it is generating thoughtful ideas and building real political momentum," said Elizabeth Gore, the group's political vice president. Her statement endorsed a 2050 deadline for decarbonization, and called for using "all available tools," including carbon pricing and technology incentives.

Leaders of the Citizens Climate Lobby, which favors a carbon fee and dividend approach and enlists both Democrats and Republicans, said that "we need to take steps that can generate bipartisan support." They praised the "passion and commitment" of the Green New Dealers and pledged to work for "many of the goals in the resolution."

The resolution doesn't mention a carbon tax. While sponsors don't rule one out, they consider the approach too weak to stand alone. It's also silent on the role of nuclear power and the carbon capture of emissions from fossil fuel plants, though the backers generally call these technologies unnecessary.

When asked about that, Markey said the resolution deliberately was written without mentioning any technology or approach—it was a set of principles, not prescriptions, he said. But he elicited cheers from the crowd of activists, who gathered behind the sponsors of the bill, when he spoke about renewable energy. "Our energy future will not be found in the dark of a mine, but in the light of the sun," he said.

The top coal-state Senate Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, sees things differently. He spoke out against the Green New Deal on Monday morning as buzz of the impending Ocasio-Cortez/Markey announcement reverberated around a Senate energy hearing.

"In a perfect world, this is an ideological belief," said Manchin, who, to the dismay of climate activists, recently became the ranking minority member on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. "But in the real world we're living in, are we able to get there? And in what time frame, and how much are we going to have to invest, and is the rest of the world going to come with us?"

Green New Deal Legislation Next?

Markey and Ocasio-Cortez insisted that in addition to the non-binding resolution, they were pushing forward with an effort to write and pass Green New Deal legislation in this Congress, even though it would likely face insurmountable opposition in the Republican-held Senate.

If the ultimate objective is to enact laws carrying out the Green New Deal after the 2020 election, that political strategy is not without risk. The Green New Deal platform is well-suited for candidates who call themselves progressives, and these ideas served many winners in the midterms. But some in the Democratic Party may fear that trying to advance a sweeping new government-driven climate program will paint a target on the back of the whole party, thwarting its aspirations of ascendancy.

Ultimately, the central legislative challenge will likely come down to a pair of practical questions: How much will this cost, and who will pay for it?

Nobody can guess the cost. That's one reason that this broad approach is presented as a "sense of the Congress" resolution, which doesn't need a budget scorecard.

A fact sheet from Ocasio-Cortez's office posted by National Public Radio before the announcement addressed the "who will pay" question.

"The same way we paid for the New Deal, the 2008 bank bailout and extended quantitative easing programs," it said. "The same way we paid for World War II and all our current wars."

"At the end of the day, this is an investment in our economy that should grow our wealth as a nation," the document said, "so the question isn't how will we pay for it, but what will we do with our new shared prosperity."

PUBLISHED UNDER:

POLITICS

GREEN NEW DEAL

https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/07/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-plan

no lnx many

Green New Deal: Ocasio-Cortez unveils bold plan to fight climate change

Blueprint for a carbon-neutral economy has been embraced by prominent Democrats and evokes FDR’s famous legacy

Emily Holden and Lauren Gambino in Washington

Thu 7 Feb 2019 07.18 EST Last modified on Fri 8 Feb 2019 04.45 EST

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the Women’s March in January as activists call for a Green New Deal.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is releasing a broad outline of a vision for the Green New Deal, a plan to battle economic and racial injustice while also fighting climate change.

The new congresswoman’s blueprint, co-introduced by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, aims to develop a carbon-neutral economy in 10 years, which would require huge strides in reducing the US’s reliance on oil, gas and coal. It does not set a date for ending the use of fossil fuels.

Specifically, the resolution says it is the duty of the federal government to craft a Green New Deal “to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions”. That includes getting all power from “clean, renewable and zero-emission energy sources”.

Green New Deal: what is the progressive plan, and is it technically possible?

The document also endorses universal healthcare, a jobs guarantee and free higher education – a huge shift in messaging from nearly a decade ago, when Democrats were advocating for a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gases by allotting industry permits for pollution.

Sixty members of the House and nine senators are co-sponsoring the resolution, including several presidential candidates, according to a fact sheet from congressional aides that did not include a list of supporters. However, any legislation would be dead-on-arrival with Republicans in control of the Senate and the White House, and would be difficult for Democrats to implement even if they controlled government. In supporting documents staffer acknowledge the investment required would be “massive”.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said a select committee on climate change, which she has announced the members of, will not be tasked with writing a specific bill and called the Green New Deal a “suggestion”.

“It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” Pelosi said in an interview with Politico. “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it right?”

Discussions on what shape the plan would take also involved major environment, justice and labor organizations, as well as the youth-run Sunrise Movement. Backers hope the six-page resolution will push Democrats vying for the White House in 2020 not just to sign on to the general idea, but to lay out specific legislative goals.

Some environmental groups, including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, said they were encouraged by the movement on climate change but that the resolution does not do enough to confront fossil fuels. The Sierra Club, however, welcomed the document.

Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist from New York who has been in Congress for just over a month, centered her campaign on climate change and a Green New Deal.

But the resolution itself focuses on the tenets of a progressive policy platform as much as it does on climate change.

It is both a framework for a cleaner-energy future and a plan for a large-scale mobilization that would rival in scale and scope the progressive New Deal policies ushered in under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression.

One of its goals is “to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth”.

Students in Belgium demonstrate against climate change inaction.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Students in Belgium demonstrate against climate change inaction. Photograph: Alexandros Michailidis/Alamy

The resolution says significant portions of the American population are suffering from declining life expectancy, exposure to pollution, and lacking access to healthy food, healthcare, housing, transportation and education. It spotlights wage stagnation, lacking socio-economic mobility, income inequality, a racial wealth divide, a gender pay gap and weakened bargaining power for workers.

The resolution text comes as Donald Trump frequently questions the science that shows humans burning fossil fuels are causing temperatures to rise and exacerbate extreme weather. He did not mention climate change in his annual address to Congress this week, despite increasing warnings from scientists.

Democrats, who hold a majority in the House, are trying to raise awareness of climate change as an impending crisis, with two committees holding hearings this week and a third to follow next week. But Republican lawmakers remain resistant to any legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

House Democrats hold hearings to increase pressure on climate change

Republicans in dual climate change hearings called by House Democrats yesterday attacked the as-yet unwritten Green New Deal, charging that it would be far too expensive and would worsen poverty. Ocasio-Cortez and her supporters say the strategy is designed to do the opposite – to create jobs in a green economy.

Meanwhile, Trump’s agencies continue to roll back climate regulations enacted by the Obama administration. US carbon emissions increased last year, according to analysis by the economic firm Rhodium Group.

Ocasio-Cortez elevated the Green New Deal when she joined activists at a protest outside the then minority leader Nancy Pelosi’s office last year. The activists are planning to protest at Democratic debates in an effort to ensure the proposal, which was until now largely a liberal rallying cry for action on climate change, is a prominent issue for the 2020 election.

Before the text was released, several presidential candidates had already embraced the notion of a Green New Deal, including senators Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand. The former San Antonio mayor Julián Castro committed to the plan during his campaign announcement.

The Democratic congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, who is the co-chair of the House progressive caucus and a sponsor of the legislation, said the resolution defined the scale and scope of what must be done to combat global warming.

“We really need an urgent and comprehensive approach,” said Jayapal.

Such legislation has little chance of becoming law as long as Republicans control the Senate and Trump is president. But Jayapal said Democrats would continue to lay the groundwork for a Green New Deal while pushing more incremental legislation.

“This is a moment for us to push a comprehensive view of the challenge before us,” she said, “and therefore to offer the solution that we need to address that challenge.”

Supporters of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal rally in Washington in December.

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Supporters of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal rally in Washington in December. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

The world has already warmed about 1C since the industrialization in the 19th century and is barreling toward exceeding a 1.5C increase, which climate scientists say will significantly worsen the risks of extreme heat, drought, floods and poverty.

Already, the process for drafting the brief documents has outlined the fights ahead, even among progressives who want climate action.

A background summary prepared by staffers said the plan “sets a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, at the end of this 10-year plan because we aren’t sure that we will be able to fully get rid of, for example, emissions from cows or air travel before then”.

But climate justice advocates who represent the communities seeing the worst of environmental damages and pollution already want to quickly phase out all fossil fuels. Many also oppose nuclear power that uses mined uranium but represents a huge portion of the US’s zero-carbon energy.

Angela Adrar, the executive director of the Climate Justice Alliance, a coalition of communities dealing with environmental problems, said her group supported the vision of the Green New Deal, even though members were concerned about what they saw as loopholes to allow some fossil fuels use.

https://www.ecowatch.com/green-new-deal-farm-food-2624402917.html

https://www.dataforprogress.org/green-new-deal/

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-green-new-deal-advocates-should-address-militarism

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https://www.ecowatch.com/new-green-deal-ocasio-cortez-2621867003.html

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Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal Proposal Now Backed by 15 House Democrats

Calls for a Green New Deal are gaining traction in the two short weeks after the young climate activists of the Sunrise Movement and Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stormed Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi's Capitol Hill office.

Fifteen members of Congress have now backed Ocasio-Cortez's proposal to establish a "select committee" in the House of Representatives to develop a plan to—basically—reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to transition the U.S. to 100 percent renewable energy sources within 10 years of passing the Green New Deal legislation.

Supporters in the House include John Lewis, the civil rights leader and Democratic congressman from Georgia, and trailblazers Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first two Muslim women ever elected to Congress.

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As ThinkProgress reported, Democratic congresswoman Chellie Pingree of Maine joined the growing list of backers on Tuesday.

"We don't need another report to tell us climate change is a threat to our health, environment and economy," she said in a statement on her website. "We must take urgent action to end our nation's reliance on fossil fuels and stop the damage greenhouse gases have done to our way of life."

Pingree, an organic farmer and member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and the Environment, said the effects of climate change have greatly impacted her state.

"Look no further than Maine's lobster industry to see the looming economic crisis facing our state due to rapidly warming waters," she said. "Meanwhile rates of asthma and tick-borne illness in Maine have dramatically spiked because of fossil fuel emissions and rising temperatures. I see the crisis of climate change every day in my state and believe a new committee dedicated exclusively to this crisis can support the long-standing work of other House committees and help to fast-track solutions."

Here are the 15 House Democrats supporting the measure:

Jared Huffman (CA-02)

Ro Khanna (CA-17)

Ted Lieu (CA-33)

John Lewis (GA-05)

Joe Neguse (CO-02)

Chellie Pingree (ME-01)

Jamie Raskin (MD-08)

Ayanna Pressley (MA-07)

Rashida Tlaib (MI-13)

Ilhan Omar (MN-05)

Deb Halland (NM-01)

Carolyn Maloney (NY-12)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14)

José E. Serrano (NY-15)

Earl Blumenauer (OR-03)

The proposal also has the support of nearly 100 environmental, economic and social justice organizations, according to the Sunrise Movement.

To build momentum, the youth climate group is organizing another mass action at the Capitol on Dec. 10, right before Congress breaks for the holidays, "to make sure Ocasio's Select Committee on a Green New Deal makes it on the agenda for 2019," Sunrise Movement founder Varshini Prakash said in an emailed press release.

The group launched the effort only yesterday and 230 people have already signed up to participate. (You can also join the action in DC, or if you're on the West Coast, you can sign up for the action in Nancy Pelosi's office in San Francisco.)

Last week, the National Climate Assessment report—compiled by 13 federal agencies and more than 300 scientists—warned that climate change could kill thousands of Americans each year and slash the GDP by more than 10 percent by 2100.

President Donald Trump, who is fixated on fossil fuels, dismissed his own government's report by saying "I don't believe it."

"People are going to die if we don't start addressing climate change ASAP. It's not enough to think it's 'important.' We must make it urgent," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted after the report's release. "That's why we need a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, & why fossil fuel-funded officials shouldn't be writing climate change policy."

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Fox networks downplayed climate change and accused Biden of politicizing Hurricane Ida to push a climate agenda

Update:

‘Radical socialism’ and ‘cow farts’: Green New Deal opponents lash out as resolution gains momentum

Why COVID-19 will force us to rethink many assumptions about the Green New DealMarshall Auerback / Independent Media Institute

57 climate scientists object after Biden falsely claims ‘not a single solitary scientist’ thinks Sanders’ Green New Deal can work

Virginia Democrats campaigned on their Green New Deal and fighting climate change. And won. 1119 vox

'Huge Victory' for Grassroots Climate Campaigners as NY Lawmakers Reach Deal on Sweeping Climate Legislation

Why COVID-19 will force us to rethink many assumptions about the Green New Deal Marshall Auerback / Independent Media Institute