fork 4 climate cops
i was skeptical at 1st but now proved true 10 21 foxBBB
FORK 4 COULD ALSO BE TRUMP PARIS:
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also seth borenstein
wASHINGTON (AP) —Announcing that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord, President Donald Trump misplaced the blame for what ails the coal industry and laid a shaky factual foundation for his decision.A look at some of the claims in a Rose Garden speech and an accompanying fact sheet about the deal to curtail emissions responsible for global warming:
WHITE HOUSE: The Paris climate accord “would effectively decapitate our coal industry, which now supplies about one-third of our electric power.”
THE FACTS: The U.S. coal industry was in decline long before the Paris accord was signed in 2015. The primary cause has been competition from cleaner-burning natural gas, which has been made cheaper and more abundant by hydraulic fracturing. Electric utilities have been replacing coal plants with gas-fired facilities because they are more efficient and less expensive to operate.
TRUMP: Claims “absolutely tremendous economic progress since Election Day,” adding “more than a million private-sector jobs.”
THE FACTS: That’s basically right, but he earns no credit for jobs created in the months before he became president. To rack up that number, the president had to reach back to October. Even then, private-sector job creation from October through April (171,000 private-sector jobs a month) lags just slightly behind the pace of job creation for the previous six months (172,000), entirely under President Barack Obama.
TRUMP: “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
THE FACTS: That may be so, but Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, is not Trump country. It voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in November, favoring her by a margin of 56 percent to Trump’s 40 percent. The city has a climate action plan committing to boost the use of renewable energy. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, a Democrat, has been an outspoken supporter of the Paris accord, and tweeted after Trump’s announcement that “as the Mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy & future.”
WHITE HOUSE: “According to a study by NERA Consulting, meeting the Obama administration’s requirements in the Paris Accord would cost the U.S. economy nearly $3 trillion over the next several decades. By 2040, our economy would lose 6.5 million industrial sector jobs — including 3.1 million manufacturing sector jobs.”
THE FACTS: This study was paid for by two groups that have long opposed environmental regulation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Council for Capital Formation. Both get financial backing from those who profit from the continued burning of fossil fuels. The latter group has received money from foundations controlled by the Koch brothers, whose company owns refineries and more than 4,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines.
The study makes worst-case assumptions that may inflate the cost of meeting U.S. targets under the Paris accord while largely ignoring the economic benefits to U.S. businesses from building and operating renewable energy projects.
Academic studies have found that increased environmental regulation doesn’t actually have much impact on employment. Jobs lost at polluting companies tend to be offset by new jobs in green technology.
WHITE HOUSE, citing a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “If all member nations met their obligations, the impact on the climate would be negligible,” curbing temperature rise by “less than .2 degrees Celsius in 2100.”
:{THE FACTS: The co-founder of the MIT program on climate change says the administration is citing an outdated report, taken out of context. Jake Jacoby said the actual global impact of meeting targets under the Paris accord would be to curb rising temperatures by 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.
“They found a number that made the point they want to make,” Jacoby said. “It’s kind of a debate trick.”
One degree may not sound like much, but Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute in Germany, says, “Every tenth of a degree increases the number of unprecedented extreme weather events considerably.”}:
Annotated White House talking points:[audio]
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150 pp
https://accf.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/170316-NERA-ACCF-Full-Report.pdf
https://www.politifact.com/article/2017/jun/01/fact-checking-donald-trumps-statement-withdrawing-/
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no lnx
Donald Trump announced that the United States will withdraw from the Paris accord on climate change. All but two countries signed the agreement. But Trump said the deal puts the United States at a disadvantage.
"The United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord," Trump said June 1, 2017, "but begin negotiations to re-enter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States."
The Paris accord had several ambitious goals. Signatories agreed to do their part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep the world’s temperature to just 1.5 degrees Celsius above what it was before industrial production took root.
Each country set its own targets, with reductions to begin in 2020. By mid century, the goal would be zero greenhouse gas emissions.
President Barack Obama had pledged to reduce emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
Wealthy nations agreed to provide $100 billion a year to help developing countries move away from fossil fuels and use more renewable power supplies.
We reviewed a number of claims Trump made during his White House speech. (We’ll be updating this article.)
Trump: The Paris Agreement would result in "lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories and vastly diminished economic production."
Trump cited a number of negative statistics about the predicted economic impact from the climate deal, including a $3 trillion drop in gross domestic product, 6.5 million industrial sector jobs lost and 86 percent reduction in coal production, all by 2040.
Take these statistics with a grain of salt.
All of these statistics come from a March 2017 study, prepared by NERA Economic Consulting, that estimates the potential impact of hypothetical regulatory actions necessary to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. The study makes assumptions that gave several economics and environmental professors pause when reacting to the NERA study for ClimateFeedback.org.
Yale professor Kenneth Gillingham said the NERA model tends to result in higher costs than other economic models. The study assumes certain hypothetical regulations, but "one could easily model other actions with much lower costs," and it also ignores the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, like avoiding the negative effects of climate change.
Additional professors pointed out that the study assumes:
• that other countries don’t make emission reductions in line with the Paris Agreement, therefore leading American companies to relocate;
• that industries are static and don’t change to adapt to the regulations, and;
• that there would be no increase in clean electricity generation compared to the baseline scenario.
In other words, the NERA model makes assumptions that generate an extreme result.
"The NERA model provides useful information, but it is important for it to be taken in context of model results from other models and not cherry-picked as was done here," Gillingham said.
The Paris Agreement would result in "lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories and vastly diminished economic production."
In a speech – Thursday, June 1, 2017
Trump: "China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So, we can't build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement."
Under the Paris agreement, each country publicly declares how much it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and what it will do to get there. So in that sense, the agreement doesn’t allow or disallow specific actions, like building plants.
Regardless, China has actually taken steps to stop building coal plants. In January, China stopped construction of 103 new coal-fired plants. The move sidelined scores of projects where work had already begun and put 120 gigawatts of capacity on hold.
Between the effects of an economic slowdown and an effort to move toward less-polluting sources, China has cut its use of coal three years in a row.
The key benchmark under the Paris agreement is the overall reduction in emissions. Climate Action Tracker, a project of three research groups, reported in May that "China’s carbon dioxide emissions appear to have peaked more than a decade ahead of its Paris Agreement commitment."
China has promised that by 2030, it would reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 60–65 percent below 2005 levels, and increase the share of non-fossil energy to around 20 percent.
Still, the Climate Action Tracker assessment comes with a warning.
Researchers said that China’s goals are "not ambitious enough to limit warming to below 2°C, let alone the 1.5°C limit in the Paris Agreement, unless other countries make much deeper reductions and comparably greater effort than China."
Donald Trump
President
"China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So, we can't build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement."
In a speech – Thursday, June 1, 2017
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Trump: "Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree -- think of that; this much -- Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount."
Trump’s statement about the amount of temperature reduction expected under the treaty is broadly accurate but needs some additional context.
According to John Reilly, who co-directs the Joint Program on Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT, the Paris agreement would reduce global temperature by two-tenths of one degree Celsius compared with earlier climate treaties.
The Paris deal was expected to reduce global temperatures by building on the earlier 2009 Copenhagen Accord, imposing deeper carbon emission cuts on signatories and bringing new countries like China into an international climate pact.
Yet as the Paris Agreement was under negotiation, Reilly co-authored an MIT report that criticized the deal for not making steep enough cuts in emissions to reach the Paris agreement’s ambitious goal of capping this century’s temperature increases at 2 degrees Celsius.
"Those pledges shave 0.2 C of warming if they’re maintained through 2100, compared with what we assessed would have been the case by extending existing measures (due to expire in 2020) based on earlier international agreements in Copenhagen and Cancun," Reilly said in October 2015, when the MIT study was published. "We are making progress, but if 2 C stabilization is our goal, it’s not nearly enough."
However, Reilly said that tackling climate problems depends on taking a series of incremental steps to reduce carbon emissions, and noted that pulling out of the Paris agreement would require even bigger reductions in the future.
Donald Trump
President
"Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree -- think of that; this much -- Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount."
In a speech – Thursday, June 1, 2017
Trump: China "can do whatever they want for 13 years. Not us."
Trump claimed that under the agreement, China — the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases — can increase emissions for more than a decade but prevented the United States from doing so.
"They can do whatever they want for 13 years. Not us," Trump said.
This doesn’t accurately describe the agreement. All parties to the Paris Agreement communicate what’s known as their Intended Nationally Determined Contribution toward the goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations.
China’s intentions include maxing out carbon dioxide emissions around 2030, if not sooner, and to increase to about 20 percent its proportion of non-fossil fuels, such as renewables. The United States’ intentions include reducing emissions by 26 to 28 percent below its 2005 level in 2025.
These intentions draw from a November 2014 China-U.S. agreement on climate change, before the Paris deal came into effect.
Back in 2014, now Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., claimed that the bilateral deal left China off the hook for 16 years. That wasn’t accurate, either.
The agreement outlined intentions, it was not binding, and China was already planning to cut down on its emissions. Experts then told us that while theoretically China could meet its emissions target simply by shutting down major plants on Dec. 31, 2029, it would be risky to wait that long rather than slowly working toward the goal. China also pledged a 20 percent increase in non-fossil-fuel use, and that’s something that would take years to carry out, experts said. We rated McConnell’s claim Mostly False.
Trump: "At 1 percent growth, renewable sources of energy can meet some of our domestic demand. But at 3 or 4 percent growth, which I expect, we need all forms of available American energy, or our country will be at grave risk of brownouts and blackouts."
Trump has consistently argued that the United States economy can grow at 3 percent or 4 percent a year, but that’s not a realistic expectation.
While that level of growth was common between 1948 and 2005, it hasn’t happened since -- and economists we checked with recently were skeptical that it could happen with any consistency in the near future.
So that makes Trump’s concerns about growth-related brownouts and blackouts seem unwarranted.
Economic growth, economists say, stems from two major factors: population growth and improvements in productivity. But neither of these factors are well positioned to drive 3 percent or 4 percent growth, they say.
The working-age population isn’t growing as fast as it used to due to lower birth rates. And Trump himself wants to curb the other way population can grow -- through immigration.
Meanwhile, productivity growth is equally out of reach of policymakers. "You can create bubbles to prop up GDP growth for a few years, such as the 2005 to 2008 housing bubble, but to boost productivity growth materially and durably, you need to make important changes over long numbers of years," said Chris Lafakis, a senior economist at Moody’s. "You also need transformative technological innovation, which is not predictable."
Trump: "India will be allowed to double its coal production by 2020. Think of it. India can double their coal production. We're supposed to get rid of ours."
India does have plans to nearly double its coal production, and the agreement does not prevent that. But the Paris Agreement does not even mention the word coal, nor does it do anything to put a global moratorium on coal.
Each signatory has set its own goals and has to report on its progress.
A 2015 report by the Economic Times, a financial daily from India, discussed a plan of Coal India Limited, a state-owned coal mining company, to double its coal production by 2020.
The story goes on to give the caveat that the doubling of production is subject to land acquisition and environment clearance, all of which is yet to happen.
Coal India produces around 84 percent of India's overall coal production, and its decision to double coal production would technically mean India is planning to almost double its coal production.
"The environment is non-negotiable and we are extremely careful about it," Anil Swarup, the top bureaucrat in the coal ministry, told Reuters in 2015. "(But) our dependence on coal will continue. There are no other alternatives available."
But is India allowed to double coal production by 2020?
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change says the Paris Agreement requires all parties to put forward their best efforts through "nationally determined contributions" (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the years ahead.
This means all parties will have to regularly report on their emissions and implementation efforts.
India, in ratifying the agreement on October 2, 2016, said it would follow a path of low carbon commitment in tandem with its national laws and development agenda, including eradication of poverty. India also committed to reduce emissions 33 to 35 percent of 2005 levels by 2030.
What it effectively means is that the agreement allows the nations who signed the Paris Agreement to set their own reduction targets to help achieve the overall target of reducing the rise in global warming below 2 degree Celsius.
Trump: "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris. I promised I would exit or renegotiate any deal which fails to serve America's interests."
Invoking the city of Pittsburgh, Pa., has a certain irony, because the city voted overwhelmingly for Trump's rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Clinton won almost 60 percent of the vote in Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh. The percentage was even higher in many precincts within the city of Pittsburgh itself. (Allegheny County includes a range of suburbs in addition to the city.)
That said, the picture changes if you look at the surrounding counties, particularly Beaver, Fayette, Greene, Washington and Westmoreland counties. These areas -- which are heavily blue-collar, disproportionately rural, especially reliant on energy extraction, and historically Democratic -- went particularly strongly for Trump in 2016. Hillary Clinton managed to win only about 30 to 40 percent of the vote there.
Trump's success in counties like these helped him flip Pennsylvania to the Republican column and win the presidency. But across the country, cities such as Pittsburgh with a more urban, educated population went heavily for Clinton.
A final note on Manila
Trump opened his speech saying his team was tracking the terrorist attack in Manila, the capital city of the Philippines. The most recent reports say that the gun fire that took place at a resort came from a lone man aiming to rob gamblers.
Our Sources
Linked in the story.
origin? GCC EBH ruder finn astroturf hired wise use agenda 21 wacko henry lamb
also deniers/hacks jumped on covid vaxxers?
hot air bus tour about the same time as anti-obamacare town hall TP organizing, both anti-gubmint? // now on school board swarm (scripts/talking pt/tactics Koch $ ~ mask vax?! // Bannon school bd takeover?
mma 10 21
Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, which is largely represented in the Democrat’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, would materially benefit millions of Americans through unprecedented investments in our social safety net and efforts to combat climate change. Polling suggests that the spending bill is popular among the American people. Expectedly, Fox News has characterized the package as a “socialist wish list” and picked off a litany of minor ticket items to rally outrage and opposition on the right.
Former Trump aide Stephen Miller’s description of the bill on the October 16 edition of the Fox News show *Watters’ World* is representative of how the network is using its tried-and-true dog whistles to poison and stoke fear about the bill:
STEPHEN MILLER (GUEST): It's basically the Green New Deal, combined with critical race theory, combined with massive amnesty and open borders, combined with the complete destruction of the American economy.
Among the provisions Fox has characterized as the Green New Deal and mocked or grossly misrepresented are: the Civilian Climate Corps; an initiative referred to as Tree Equity; and a program intended to redress historic inequities and environmental injustices associated with zoning decisions and highway placement, which Fox has referred to as fixing “racists roads.”
Fox’s coverage of these programs has not attempted to describe what they entail or what they would accomplish for hundreds of communities. Rather, they have been used as punchlines or set up for cheap shots that reflect Fox’s racist ethos and climate denial — all under the guise of informing Fox’s audience about the policies contained in the reconciliation package.
Fox has grossly misrepresented the Civilian Climate Corps -- “climate cops” is not a thing KOCH FORK 4]
The reconciliation bill includes $8 billion earmarked for the Civilian Climate Corps -- modeled after the depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps -- which would establish a government jobs program that would put Americans to “work conserving our public lands and waters, bolstering community resilience, and advancing environmental justice.” The current funding for this program represents .4% of the $3.5 trillion spending in the bill.
On October 12, the Republican Study Committee chaired by Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) released a memo on policies contained in the reconciliation package, claiming that while the bill is polling favorably, support would tank if the American people understood what was in it. It lists among the “policies to wreck America” the Climate Civilian Corps, which the memo characterizes as “a cabal of federally funded climate police … who will conduct progressive activism on taxpayers’ dime.”
There isn’t even a grain of truth in how the committee characterized the program: “Climate police” is to the reconciliation bill what “cow farts” was to the Green New Deal. But that won’t stop conservative media from running with it.
The Republican Study Committee wasn’t the first to characterize the program this way -- during the early stages of drafting the bill, climate denier Marc Morano suggested on Fox & Friends Firstthat participants could resemble “climate cops” -- but the memo certainly reinvigorated the idea on Fox.
On the October 12 edition of *The Ingraham Angle*, Banks said the bill would “create a climate police department. This was a wacky idea that AOC came out with a couple of years ago. We all laughed at it because we thought it would never happen and now it’s on the brink of happening.” The following day, at least four programs described the program this way. On October 14, Banks appeared on both *Kudlow* on the Fox Business Network and Fox News' Faulkner Focus, claiming that the bill contains billions to create a “climate police department or a militia to go out and enforce Green New Deal policies."
[vid
October 14, 2021, episode of Fox News' Faulkner Focus]
Fox mocked and belittled provisions to address environmental injustices
Notably, during the Faulkner Focus segment Banks also referred to a program to fix “racist roads.” In fact, what he’s referring to is a $4 billion fund intended to address historic inequities and environmental injustices associated with zoning decisions and highway placement, which in some cases have divided once-thriving communities of color. The fund represents about .1% of the spending in the reconciliation bill.
Biden’s original infrastructure plan called for a $20 billion fund to “reconnect” neighborhoods cut off by old transportation projects. This would benefit communities like one in New Orleans whose residents have lived under the Claiborne Expressway for decades and remember how vibrant their community was before “The Monster” was built. After construction began on the highway in the 1960s, the once-thriving Tremé community, a center of Black cultural and commercial life, was divided and diminished. When the program was first introduced as part of the infrastructure plan, Fox’s Tucker Carlson suggested, in a blatantly racist rant, that the program was a form of reparations. This plan was cut in the bipartisan infrastructure bill negotiations, and a drastically reduced version is funded by the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. Also among the litany of “controversial” items in the bill, often cited by Fox News hosts and anchors, is an initiative to plant trees, particularly in urban areas with less canopy cover to reduce the effects of extreme heat.
For example, during the October 13 edition of *The Ingraham Angle*, host Laura Ingraham fearmongered that the bill will “bankrupt the next generation, steal the next generation” before listing the “priorities” embedded in the legislation:
Eight billion bucks for a Civilian Climate Corps. It’s going to act basically as ataxpayer-funded leftist police force.$4 billion for equity — I love that word — in electric vehicle charging and tree planting.$643 million would go toward procuring culturally appropriate foods — I kid you not — for school lunches. Forget chicken tenders and Friday pizza, I guess.Free community college for illegals, of course. They’ll be eligible for child tax credits as well.My personal favorite, though — this is a drop in the bucket for the federal government. $15 million for national resource centers focused on providing services for older individuals who are underserved due to their sexual orientation or gender identity.
The tree equity initiative Ingraham refers to is a commonsense solution to addressing the heat island effect, which disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities across the US. Communities without sufficient canopy cover can reach temperatures up to 10 degrees higher than those that do, and one proven solution is to plant more trees in those neighborhoods.
On September 27, the day the reconciliation package was revealed, America’s Newsroomincluded the tree equity plan as one of the “doozies” that was buried in the bill while the Faulkner Focus also referred to it as one of the bill’s “hidden goodies” and mocked that there was “$3 billion for tree planting and so-called tree equity. Important that the trees feel equal to one another.”
In fact, there has been no shortage of “equity” jokes -- Greg Gutfeld on the September 29 edition of his late-night show Gutfeld! suggested that the program was meant to address “foilage privilege” (he meant “foliage”). And on the October 2 edition of *Fox & Friends Saturday*, in response to the program, Pete Hegseth quipped, “The oak trees feel like they have been too dominant for too long.” But for all the punchlines, there has been little attempt to understand what the program is or explain the issue it is proven to address.
Predictably, Fox has not scratched the surface of what the reconciliation bill means for climate mitigation
While the climate and environmental justice provisions that Fox has featured in its reconciliation bill coverage represent just a fraction of its spending, they are not an insignificant part of the Biden administration’s larger climate agenda, of which addressing environmental injustices and creating green union jobs are core pillars. They should be reported on. But Fox has framed the reconciliation bill as a radical-socialist wish list of trivial programs -- in fact, it represents, from a climate perspective, possibly the last chance to enact meaningful U.S. policies for the foreseeable future, which could make or break the global response to the climate crisis. But as long as Fox keeps its viewers revved up over “cow farts” and “climate cops” its base will never see the burning forest for the equitable trees.