OBAMA 2

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broken ? capt 1/17

see reverse BO knee jerk

see main and tag

capt 318

https://www.desmog.com/2023/02/21/oreskes-conway-the-big-myth-free-market-capitalism-climate-change-mont-pelerin-society/

science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, authors of the classic 2010 book :{Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, have released a new book placing that doubt machine into a longer arc of U.S. business and political history.

:{The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: explores an even more ambitious history dating from the dawn of the 20th century to the present day.

The book documents how today’s prevailing anti-regulatory and anti-government postures that deride Big Government and cheer for Big Business did not arise simply from grassroots demands. Instead, they arose from well-funded industry campaigns creating what Oreskes and Conway have called a manufactured consensus “quasi-religious belief” in deregulated markets and an accompanying diehard opposition to governmental solutions to public policy problems.

Fighting Public Utilities, Child Labor Laws

One of the first campaigns in that spirit occurred within the electricity utility industry via an organization which eventually became known as the Edison Electric Institute.

What is now colloquially calledEEI, was launched in 1885 as the National Electric Light Association, or NELA. At the time, it “represented more than five hundred of the largest privately owned electrical utilities, accounting for more than 90 percent of U.S. kilowatt output,” according to the book.

In the 1920s, according to Oreskes and Conway, “electricity industry leaders organized one of the largest propaganda campaigns in the history of the United States.” The campaign aimed to persuade the public thatmunicipal-owned electricity was a bad thing, advocating instead for investor-owned utilities. In the end, though, it resulted in higher rates for homeowners and small businesses and bigger profits for company owners and their bankrollers.

The initially unpopular campaign framed its activities under the guise of freedom and market efficiency. NELA’s influence operation — involving rewriting K-12 and university textbooks, courting and funding industry-friendly professors, utilizing astroturf campaigns, deploying sophisticated lobbying techniques to facilitate regulatory and legislative capture, and other deceptive practices — resembles much of the fossil fuel industry’s political pressure that DeSmog has covered and uncovered week-in and week-out for over a decade and a half.

At the time, it was the first of its kind industrial-scale full-court press, and it provided a roadmap for other corporate hegemons in subsequent decades. And NELA’s goal went far beyond merely winning a PR campaign, Oreskes and Conway conclude; it had much deeper ideological underpinnings.

“[U]nlike conventional PR, the aim was not simply to create a positive impression of a particular business or even of the whole industry,” they write. “Rather, the goal—expressed outright in numerous documents—was to change the way Americans thought about private property, capitalism, and regulation” altogether.

Core to NELA’s campaign, Oreskes and Conway wrote, was the idea “that free-market capitalism was the embodiment of freedom, writ large, and that any restriction on the freedom of any business would put us on a slippery slope to tyranny.”

Private ownership of the electricity industry was, up until then, relatively rare in the United States and even more so throughout the industrializing world. But as of 2017, 72 percentof U.S. electricity customers got their power from investor-owned utilities. NELA’s campaign, in other words, changed history as we know it.

Today, its successor EEI and its member companies continue to wage deceptive PR campaigns to fight renewable energy and bolster the continued consumption of fossil fuels.

The NELA campaign’s legacy, however, goes far beyond its sector alone, according to Oreskes and Conway. “Perhaps most importantly, NELA pioneered a strategy of insisting that these claims were true, regardless of the facts,” they wrote.

Broadening their view beyond the fossil fuel industry, Oreskes and Conway also detail how the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) propelled similar efforts across other industries during the same era. Like EEI, fast-forwarding to the present-day, NAM has served as a key node of climate denialism.

But in its earliest days,NAM maintained a different sinister focus, according to The Big Myth: advocating against child labor laws amid what the authors described as a “pandemic” of workplace deaths both among young workers and the adult workforce.The sheer volume of such deaths served as one of the first major wakeup calls in the need for a more active regulatory state, the book maps out.

In making its case for child labor and against regulations protecting children, NAM espoused “that the federal government had no business interfering in business” and called such a notion “socialistic in its origin, philosophy and associations.”

Libertarian Fringe to (Neo)Liberal Mainstream

While both NELA and NAM laid the groundwork for a paradigm that’s alive and well today, their ideas were not adopted globally until the formation of theMont Pelerin Society,a group created in 1947 that like EEI and NAM has received close scrutiny from DeSmog for years. Oreskes and Conway devote a whole chapter of The Big Myth to Mont Pelerin.

Like NELA and NAM, Mont Pelerin’s roots lay in anti-regulatory and business-funded ideology. But unlike them, Mont Pelerin came out of academia and via professors committed to the now globally pervasive neoliberal ideology they created. Mont Pelerin inspired similar groups that are, like it, still active today, such as the Koch Industries-funded Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University and the University of Chicago’s free market-oriented Economics Department.

Oreskes and Conway point to a legion of like-minded groups arising by the 1970s, riding the momentum of an academic community devoted to neoliberal ideology, and reacting to the gains made in environmental protection and other areas. Formation of these groups accelerated after the metaphorical call-to-arms made in a memo written to theU.S. Chamber of Commerce by the then-tobacco industry attorney and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell.

Known today as the Powell Memo, the 1972 letter called for Big Business to undergo “careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”

The Powell Memo, Oreskes and Conway concluded, spearheaded free market fundamentalist groups such as the Cato Institute, Koch Family Foundations, Scaife Family Foundations, Olin Foundation, Heritage Foundation, and the Federalist Society, among others. All of these entities, and the groups they fund or work alongside in coalitions, remain powerful forces within U.S. and global politics.

The Big Myth further highlights how those think tanks and companies also played a key role in defeating the 2009 and 2010 congressional push, led by then-President Barack Obama, to pass a federal, market-oriented climate bill known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act. Critics would charge that the policy approach taken in the bill, emblematically, embodies the very “market fundamentalist” ethos reigning over U.S. politics for the past 100-plus years.

During the congressional debate over a bill that would haveenshrined the policy lever of cap-and-trade, the Koch-funded Tea Party network also ascended[vid]

previous congressional pushes in the 2000s for what was ultimately a business-friendly climate policy, had enjoyed bipartisan support. But The Big Myth explains how as the Tea Party network took flight, Republican Party support for the climate bill — and broader climate action — eroded to a near-zero level. It has mostly remained there since.

At the same time, the reality of climate change had and has continued to become all the more clear. That reality though, Oreskes and Conway wrote, clashes with the religion of market fundamentalism.

“[H]ad the market fundamentalists spent so much time defending the magic of the market-place that they simply couldn’t accept market failure on a global scale?” the authors asked of the legion of climate-change deniers who helped to kill the bill. “To accept the enormity of what climate change portended for civilization was to accept that capitalism, as practiced, was undermining the very prosperity it was supposed to deliver. And not just in some distant future, but now.”

Although this “quasi-religious belief” in the power of the market holds the greatest sway with conservatives, Oreskes and Conway argue that belief in the “magic of the marketplace” has become an intoxicating ideology withinliberal circles too, including within climate policy debates.

“Even in supposedly liberal enclaves like Cambridge, Massachusetts,” where Oreskes teaches at Harvard, “many people think climate change will be best addressed by technological innovation in the marketplace,” the co-authors surmise, perhaps in alluding to the prototypical industry-friendly policies pushed by former Obama Administration U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz — a professor at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“The rise of right-wing think tanks helped spread the pro-market, antigovernment gospel across the country and insert what had been decidedly niche views into the mainstream,” the authors explained of the ideology’s spread. Other scholars have referred to this as the “force field” effect, moving the gravitational pull of what’s possible within U.S. politics further and further toward right-wing, corporate-created policy solutions.

The ideological roots of anti-democracy, anti-environmental, and anti-regulatory campaigning explored in The Big Myth also serve as the heart and soul of the book :{Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, written by DeSmog co-founders James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore.

If you have learned from DeSmog’s reporting shedding light on the climate change denial machine, you’ll love The Big Myth, an excerpt from which follows below. The book is a must-read for all students of the sordid history of public relations and governmental capture.

Go grab a copy and check out some recent interviews on the book, as well, for further background. A video of Professor Oreskes discussing the book can also be seen below.

Excerpt from The Big Myth

In the 1990s, as capitalism was being declared triumphant in many quarters, scientists had proved that man-made climate change was under way.1 Climate change was textbook market failure. It arose from everyday economic activity— using fossil fuels—but was about to impose a huge external cost, inundating major coastal cities around the globe, making hurricanes and cyclones even more deadly than they already were, and dislocating tens or even hundreds of millions of people. It was also textbook environmental injustice, as poor people would almost certainly bear the brunt of a problem created by the rich.

But it also had a textbook answer: putting a price on carbon. Economists called this solution a “Pigouvian tax”—after the Cambridge economist Arthur Pigou, who in the early twentieth century had helped develop the concept of negative externalities. (Pigou also suggested it would be reasonable for governments to subsidize activities that had “positive externalities,” such as education.) The idea of pricing social and environmental costs of carbon was hardly radical; Pigou was firmly mainstream, a respected scholar at Cambridge University, a leading figure in what came to be known as the Cambridge school of economics.2 The obvious benefit of the Pigouvian approach was that it remedied the market failure directly by embedding information—in this case scientific information—into the price of fossil fuels. Then consumers could decide for themselves whether or not to buy more expensive fossil fuels, and producers of alternatives could compete on a level playing field.

The Clinton administration proposed to address climate change through a Pigouvian tax, the so-called “BTU” tax (referring to the heat content of fuels as measured in British Thermal Units).3 But it was opposed—indeed, ridiculed—by a broad coalition of conservatives, including, the Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, and virtually every right-wing think tank in America.4

The notorious Global Climate Coalition, a network of fossil fuel producers and users that in the 1990s successfully prevented the U.S. Congress from ratifying the Kyoto protocol to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, was originally established as a committee of the National Association of Manufacturers. Even though the idea of putting a price on carbon was a mainstream economic approach to market failure, Republicans framed it as just another example of Democrats’ penchant to “tax and spend.” The Wall Street Journal mocked it as Al Gore’s “favorite tax.”5

In his 1979 paper on nonmarket failure, economist Charles Wolf had slipped into his conclusion the idea that one cause of nonmarket failure was “premature but politically effective demands for government action.”6 In the 1990s, many Republicans picked up on this theme, arguing that it was premature to act on climate change. Even at the time, that was wrong: scientists already had a consensus that man-made climate change was under way and likely to be very costly.7 To act in the 1990s would have been appropriate. It would have been timely. But Clinton was unable to generate congressional support for action; Republican opposition made it clear that any proposal to put a price on carbon would be dead on arrival. In 1999, when Vice President Al Gore ran for president on a platform prioritizing climate change, journalist Gregg Easterbrook (brother of Judge Frank Easterbrook) embarrassed him on the campaign trail with a false story that his mentor—climate champion Roger Revelle—had experienced a deathbed conversion and died thinking climate change was not a serious problem.8 (He had not.)

As the 1990s became the 2000s—and scientists declared the evidence “unequivocal”—market fundamentalist did not adjust their views. To the contrary, their opposition hardened.9

In 2006, Lord Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank, concluded on behalf of the UK government that, yes, fixing climate change would be expensive—perhaps as much as 1 percent of global GDP per annum—but not fixing it would cost much more: at least 5 percent and perhaps as much as 20 percent.10 Here was a solid argument from a man who could scarcely be accused of being any kind of -ist other than an economist. In response, conservatives dug in deeper. Senator Ted Cruz promoted the canard that global warming had stopped; Senator James Inhofe called it a liberal conspiracy to bring down capitalism.11 No matter what solutions were proposed—market-friendly or not—the right wing found reasons to oppose them. The science wasn’t settled (they claimed). It would be too expensive to fix. We could just adapt. It was all a hoax. Often these claims were couched in libertarian terms, as when in 2011 former House Speaker Newt Gingrich deemed the push to address climate change “the newest excuse to take control of lives.”12

The singular exception to climate denial in Republican Party leadership was Senator John McCain. He and conservative Democrat Joe Lieberman introduced Climate Stewardship acts in 2003, 2005, and 2007 to address the carbon dioxide emissionsthat drive climate change by creating an emissions trading system—a proven mechanism, albeit more complicated than a Pigouvian tax. But when given the chance to use it to address climate change, Republicans refused.13 The 2003 bill failed on mostly party lines, with a few Democrats and nearly all Republicans in opposition. But it was a closer call than many expected, and soon Congress faced intense lobbying pressure against climate legislation, particularly from NAM and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The 2005 version came to a vote and failed 60–38, with only a handful of Republicans voting yea.14 Two years after that, McCain could not even persuade Republican leaders to bring a climate bill to the Senate floor.15

In 2009, Congress tried once more, with the American Clean Energy and Security Act (better known as Waxman-Markey,for its primary sponsors, Massachusetts representative Ed Markey and California representative Henry Waxman). For the fourth time in a decade, Congress had the opportunity to address climate change using a market mechanism, and for the fourth time rejected it. The bill barely passed the Democratic-led House; nearly all Republicans voted against, as did Democrats from fossil-fuel-producing states (and a few Democrats who found the bill too weak). The Senate never brought it to a vote. Democrats concluded they could not overcome the “wall of opposition” they faced from their Republican colleagues, opposition fortified by fierce lobbying.16 One analysis concluded that, in the eighteen months between January 2009 and June 2010, electric utilities, oil and gas companies, trade associations, and think tanks spent at least $500 million against climate change legislation.17 Another study tracing anti-climate lobbying back to 2003 places the figure at closer to $1 billion.18

The fossil fuel industry’s economic interests in preventing climate action have always been obvious; less understood is how it has camouflaged those interests. No one ever said, “I am denying climate change to protect corporate profits.” They said they were protecting jobs, protecting the economy, and protecting free markets from government “encroachment.” They said they were fighting for capitalism and freedom.

But historically, capitalism has never been just one thing: Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century vision of a democratic, distributed marketplace populated by small bankers and businessmen was a far cry from the industrial capitalism that developed in early nineteenth-century England and Germany—with its cruel “Satanic mills”—or the monopolies and managerial capitalism that came to dominate America in the late nineteenth century, much less the globally financed capitalism that emerged at the end of the twentieth century. China has liberalized its markets while continuing to oppress and even murder its ethnic and religious minorities. There are many capitalisms. American market fundamentalists fight for a form of capitalism that is both brutal and ignorant: that brushes aside market failure, anticompetitive practices, and external costs, in part by denying the facts of science, the facts of history, and the necessary role of government in making capitalism work.19

The question is not whether government should set limits that prevent individual autonomy from producing collective harm, the question is where we draw the lines. That is not an economic question, it is a political one. Market fundamentalists have managed to distract from the political aspects of these decisions and frame them as questions of “economic freedom.” Thus, a reasonable response to climate change is rejected as unreasonable “government encroachment.”

All this may make one wonder: was this ever reallyabout capitalism? Or freedom? Or was it all just one long, semi-continuous, shape-shifting defense of the prerogatives of big business? Of freedom for capital and capitalists? Or had the market fundamentalists spent so much time defending the magic of the market- place that they simply couldn’t accept market failure on a global scale? To accept the enormity of what climate change portended for civilization was to accept that capitalism, as practiced, was undermining the very prosperity it was supposed to deliver. And not just in some distant future, butnow.

ref bib...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/world/asia/obama-xi-jinping-china-climate-accord.html

no lnx

Rare Harmony as China and U.S. Commit to Climate Deal

Video

TRANSCRIPT

0:00/2:37

The Times Interviews Obama on Climate Change

President Obama spoke to Julie Hirschfeld Davis of The New York Times about climate change and conservation during a trip to Midway Atoll to expand a protected national monument to create the world’s largest marine preserve.

Video]

[President Obama spoke to Julie Hirschfeld Davis of The New York Times about climate change and conservation during a trip to Midway Atoll to expand a protected national monument to create the world’s largest marine preserve.CreditCredit...A.J. Chavar/The New York Times]

By Mark Landler and Jane Perlez

Sept. 3, 2016

HANGZHOU, China — President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China formally committed the world’s two largest economies to the Paris climate agreement here on Saturday, cementing their partnership on climate change and offering a rare display of harmony in a relationship that has become increasingly discordant.

On multiple fronts, like computer hacking and maritime security, ties between China and the United States have frayed during the seven and a half years of Mr. Obama’s presidency. The friction has worsened since the ascension of Mr. Xi as a powerful nationalist leader in 2013.

Yet the fact that he and Mr. Obama could set aside those tensions to work together yet again on a joint plan to reduce greenhouse gases attests to the pragmatic personal rapport they have built, as well as to the complexity of the broader United States-China relationship, a tangle of competing and congruent interests.

At a ceremony in this picturesque lakefront city, the two leaders hailed the adoption of the Paris agreement as critical to bringing it into force worldwide. Though widely expected as the next step in the legal process, the move could provide a boost to those who want to build momentum for further climate talks by bringing the December accord into effect as soon as possible.

Countries accounting for 55 percent of the world’s emissions must present formal ratification documents for that to happen, and together, China and the United States generate nearly 40 percent of the world’s emissions.

“Despite our differences on other issues, we hope our willingness to work together on this issue will inspire further ambition and further action around the world,” Mr. Obama declared.

Mr. Xi praised the Paris agreement as a milestone, adding, “It was under Chinese leadership that much of this progress was made.”

From the moment he stepped off Air Force One on his final visit to Asia as president, Mr. Obama confronted a resurgent China, undaunted by his efforts to restore America’s presence in the region and poised to capitalize on his troubles in winning congressional passage of his ambitious regional trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Mr. Obama’s chaotic welcome on the tarmac captured the mood on the eve of the G20 summit. There were arguments at the airport between White House aides and Chinese security officials who tried to keep back reporters. Shouting matches also broke out between Mr. Obama’s staff and guards over how many people were allowed into the state guesthouse where he and Mr. Xi later met.

In recent years, the Obama administration has sought to highlight cooperation on climate change, but China’s commitments, first made in 2014, have been less a concession to American pressure than a restatement of its own goals. They include a promise for China’s carbon emissions to reach a plateau or decline “around 2030,” but without any specific target for reductions like those Mr. Obama pledged for the United States (between 26 and 28 percent of 2005 levels by 2025). That means China has plenty of room to continue burning fossil fuels to power its economy.

“The story of the past eight years is not mainly the pivot or the rebalance; it is the very substantial increases in Chinese capacities since 2008,” said Jeffrey A. Bader, who helped formulate Mr. Obama’s Asia strategy as his chief China adviser in the first term.

“How has the U.S. dealt with that?” he added. “How has the U.S. confronted that?”

The Obama administration has experimented with a variety of approaches: pledging to respect China’s “core interests” in 2009; shifting in 2011 to a more assertive stance — verging on containment — as Mr. Obama articulated his pivot to Asia; then resisting China’s proposal in 2012 to embark on a new model of great-power relations.

To some critics, that was an inconsistent strategy — one that alternately cheered or sowed anxiety among American allies, and likewise alienated or emboldened China. Under Mr. Xi’s leadership, China has made aggressive claims to shoals and reefs in the South China Sea, picking fights with neighbors like the Philippines and Vietnam.

“This back and forth has, I think, exacerbated what was already a growing problem with a China that was already more assertive in the context of the financial crisis,” said Michael J. Green, who was the chief Asia adviser on the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration and is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

But the administration’s defenders, like Mr. Bader, argue that Mr. Obama was merely following in the tradition of presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, dating back to Richard M. Nixon. They have tried to manage China’s rise by drawing it into the international system and prodding it to accept rules of the road in trade, navigation and other areas.

However, China has dismissed a recent ruling by an international tribunal in The Hague that rebuked its aggressive reclamation of land on disputed shoals in the South China Sea and invalidated its historical claims to a large swath of those waters.

Mr. Obama was expected to press Mr. Xi to abide by the ruling in a meeting after the climate ceremony, less because he expected the Chinese leader to reverse himself than because the ruling is a vital predicate for undermining the legitimacy of China’s imperial claims.

Still, even after Mr. Obama deployed Navy ships to the Pacific, sent Marines to Australia and paid for greater access to the military bases of an old ally, the Philippines, China now has greater control of the South China Sea than it enjoyed at the start of his presidency.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama’s struggle to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership has stoked doubts about America’s economic staying power. The 12-nation pact, which excludes China, has become the centerpiece of the pivot to Asia. But it has fallen victim to election-year politics at home and now seems unlikely to pass, even in a lame-duck Congress.

Some of the nations that signed on, particularly Japan — America’s most important Asian ally and a nervous neighbor of China — have made political sacrifices by opening markets in order to meet the standards demanded by the United States. Failure to pass the trade pact, Asian diplomats and analysts said, would leave them feeling burned.

“The Japanese, living in an uncertain world, depending on an American nuclear umbrella, will have to say on trade: ‘The Americans could not follow through,’” Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore said during a recent visit to Washington, standing next to Mr. Obama. “If it’s a matter of life and death, whom do I have to depend on?”

Mr. Obama and his chief trade negotiator, Michael B. Froman, understand the stakes. They plan a full-court press to sell the pact on this presidential trip — characterizing its passage as a litmus test of American leadership — in hopes that the message will echo back home.

ImagePresident Obama and President Xi Jinping of China formally committed to the Paris climate agreement on Saturday.]

“We are one vote away from cementing our leadership in Asia or ceding it to China,” Mr. Froman said in an interview in Beijing. “I’m not sure Congress wants to hand the keys to the castle to China.”

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is viewed in Asia as the handiwork of Mr. Obama in particular, especially since the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, who repeatedly backed it when she was Mr. Obama’s secretary of state, has renounced her support. If Congress fails to pass it, Asian diplomats said, China will emerge as a victor.

“It will be a political disaster and play into the Chinese narrative that China is a geopolitical fact, whereas the U.S. presence is the consequence of a geopolitical calculation which could change and thus is not reliable,” said Bilahari Kausikan, the ambassador at large for Singapore.

In practical terms, the United States would lose the chance to shape the economic future of the region, allowing China to forge ahead with its “Sino-centric economic order,” which includes a multibillion-dollar project to build a new Silk Road linking Asia to Europe.

Mr. Bader is among several American officials who are guardedly confident that the next presidential administration will find a way to win approval for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, perhaps by adding side agreements on contentious points. But he expressed concern that the South China Sea would be a chronic source of friction.

“The situation hasn’t stabilized,” Mr. Bader said. “Achieving that is beyond the capacity of the U.S. alone.”

China has extended its military reach there by building artificial islands with airfields, facilities that American commanders have said they regard as military bases. Although China appears to be taking stock of the situation since the unfavorable ruling in The Hague, Chinese military officials warn that they will continue with their building program in the waterway.

“China will never stop our construction,” the head of China’s navy, Adm. Wu Shengli, said in July.

Last month, China took delivery of a dredger, one of the biggest in its inventory, from a Dutch shipyard. The vessel would be suitable for dredging at Scarborough Shoal, a disputed reef 150 miles from the Philippines.

China, some academics say, plans to create an extremely large artificial island that would complete a strategic triangle of bases in the sea.

“Obama is seen as reluctant to push back,” said Alan Dupont, a former defense intelligence analyst for the Australian government. “He has allowed China to militarize the islands in the South China Sea. The United States hasn’t put it at the top of its list.”

To reassure its allies, Mr. Dupont said, the United States would have to reinforce its military presence in the Pacific even further than it has under Mr. Obama’s pivot, or rebalance, as it has also been called.

“There has to be a rebalance plus,” he said.

1219

WHERE IS OBAMA?! CANCEL CULTURE? promised anti-gerry w/ eric h, who is not doing much?

waiting for dem primary to shake out?

ch d v

Trump is engaged in a systematic effort to make the United States less powerful and less respected around the world. America is too great a country to be defeated and brought down by an outside power. Such damage can likely only be inflicted from within at the hands of a dangerous president, a feckless political party and their tens of millions of authoritarian followers.

President Barack Obama warned about this threat in his farewell address:

But protecting our way of life, that's not just the job of our military. Democracy can buckle when it gives in to fear. So, just as we, as citizens, must remain vigilant against external aggression, we must guard against a weakening of the values that make us who we are. ... So let's be vigilant, but not afraid. ISIL will try to kill innocent people. But they cannot defeat America unless we betray our Constitution and our principles in the fight. Rivals like Russia or China cannot match our influence around the world -- unless we give up what we stand for and turn ourselves into just another big country that bullies smaller neighbors. Which brings me to my final point: Our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted.

...

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/they-can-just-have-cartoon-new-book-reveals-obamas-real-reaction-trump-election

mcconn evil mfer confirmed:

Rhodes also writes about Obama's farewells to world leaders. German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly told Obama that Trump's victory made her feel a greater obligation to run for a fourth term which she ended up winning. When she left Obama for the last time, she "had a single tear in her eye."

Obama also apparently felt that, despite the criticism he has since received, there was little more he could have done to counter Russian interference in the 2016 election. Calling out the meddling efforts even more than he did would have resulted in Trump saying Obama was rigging the election and Putin working harder to undermine the vote, the president feared.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pointedly refused to issue a bipartisan statement condemning Russia' actions when Obama wanted to take action, limiting his options. Rhodes called this refusal "staggeringly partisan and unpatriotic," but he says Obama was unsurprised...

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/10-right-wing-predictions-about-obama-that-never-came-true/

5) Obama Will Create A Personal Brownshirt Army

Ret. Gen. Jerry Boykin, who now serves as the executive vice president of the Family Research Council, repeatedly predicted that Obama planned to “establish a constabulary force” through the Affordable Care Act that would “control the population in America” much in the same way that Adolf Hitler used the Brownshirts to consolidate power, basing his accusation on a debunked myth about the health care law.

Boykin wasn’t alone in predicting that Obama would create such an army.

Another former military official, Ret. Army Major General Jerry Curry, warned that the Obama administration might “arm illegal immigrants” to begin killing Americans, with a focus on assassinating members of the armed forces.

Then-Republican Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia similarly warned in 2008 that Obama’s proposed expansion of national service programs was “exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany” and “exactly what the Soviet Union did.” Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, claimed in 2013 that Obama’s “secret security force” was already in existence.

Lawrence C. Mackin, a conservative writer, warned that Obama was bent on creating a “private internal army” including “illegal aliens” and Middle Eastern terrorists, and William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC said Obama would give immigrants “a badge and a gun” in order to target the “Christian, heterosexual male” population. Far-right activist Jim Garrow thought Obama would fake contact with aliens in order to justify the creation of his own army.

Convinced that President Obama was set to wage an anti-white race war, radio host Michael Savage said that Obama intended to arm and “deputize” members of the Crips and Bloods gangs and turn them into his “shock troops.” He also claimed that Black Lives Matter supporters would be “Obama’s shock troops” and “secret private army” much like “the Brownshirts that Hitler had.”

no links

10 Right-Wing Predictions About Obama That Never Came True

brian-tashman-4By Brian Tashman | January 18, 2017 2:34 pm

For eight years, right-wing activists have been making dire predictions about what President Obama would do during his time in office. Some have warned that the president will begin seizing guns and arresting critics any day now. More than a few worried that the president would invade Texas or organize his own private army for other nefarious purposes.

Technically, Obama still has a few more hours to fulfill the far-right’s many doomsday prophecies about his presidency, but it appears much more likely that these conservative activists simply lied in order to fuel baseless fears about Obama, who, despite their best efforts, is leaving office with a 60 percent approval rating.

While this is by no means a complete list, we’ve collected ten of the most absurd predictions that Obama’s critics have made about his time in office, which, as January 20 approaches, are looking less and less likely to come true.

1) Obama Will Create Death Panel

One of the most pernicious and persistent lies about Obama’s presidency has been that he used the Affordable Care Act to establish “death panels.”

Many critics of health care reform falsely claimed that the new law would enforce rationing that would discriminate against elderly people, people with prior health issues and people with disabilities. Some Republican politicians, including Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, went a step further in suggesting that an actual government body would be formed to determine whether people lived or died. GOP leaders including former House speakers John Boehner and Newt Gingrich raised the prospect of state-sponsored euthanasia.

Fox News hosts naturally ran with the “death panels” hoax, and the claim’s originator, former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey, eventually became a Fox News personality and later an adviser to Donald Trump.

Even years after the law’s passage, conservatives like Republican Rep. Michael Burgess of Texas and commentator Ben Shapiro kept insisting that the death panels were on their way, even when it became obvious they did not exist

At least one popular conservative website even pushed a fake news article claiming that the death panels had already begun executing elderly people.

2) Obama Will Kill His Critics

WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah, writing just days before the 2012 election, predicted that if “Barack Obama is re-elected Nov. 6 for a second term, he will declare a full-scale war on his domestic opposition.”

“There may not be another free and fair election in America,” Farah wrote. “I would expect due process to go the way of the horse and buggy. I think he will move to shut down and destroy all independent media. In fact, I think his biggest critics will be rounded up in the name of national security.”

Far-right radio host Michael Savage worried in 2015 that Obama would begin executing people, much like in the French Revolution.

Glenn Beck even believed that the riots in cities like Baltimore and Ferguson were simply part of a larger scheme to “set the whole country on fire” and would lead to a wave of killings of Obama critics, such as Beck himself.

3) Obama Will Spread Disease In Order To Imprison Americans

While describing the “looming crises to watch in 2015,” right-wing legal activist Larry Klayman, the founder of Judicial Watch, declared that “Obama’s mission is not only truly treasonous, but also truly evil.”

“He is more dangerous than the terrorists themselves, because he is destroying us from within,” Klayman said of the president. One way Obama may bring harm to Americans, Klayman said, would be by creating the possibility of “a massive epidemic” and “a real and imminent health crisis” by letting Ebola-infected people from West Africa—including “suicide terrorists” who had infected themselves with the virus—into the U.S.

Klayman was far from alone in sharing this fear: During the height of the Ebola epidemic in 2014, conservatives spread widespread panic about the possibility of Obama enabling an outbreak of the disease in the U.S.

Donald Trump, then teasing a presidential run, questioned Obama’s mental health, calling him a “psycho” for not stopping flights from Ebola-stricken countries, and warned that the president would end up bringing “the plague back to U.S.”

Steve Stockman, then a Republican congressman from Texas, wondered whether Obama really wanted to fight the spread of Ebola or if he really intended to “create a greater crisis to use it as a blunt force to say, well in order to solve this crisis we’re going to have to take control of the economy and individuals and so forth.”

Michael Savage, a conservative radio host, said Obama “wants to infect the nation with Ebola” and “might use Ebola as a pretext” to “gain even more power” and justify launching a “Kristallnacht” against conservatives. End Times preacher Rick Wiles similarly posited that the spread of Ebola was part of a “carefully crafted plan” to “round up patriots,” warning that Obama might “contaminate the VA hospitals with the Ebola virus” and send the people infected with the virus to “recovery and reeducation camps.”

One far-right columnist estimated that over 25 million people might die due to an Obama-inflicted health crisis. End Times broadcaster Steve Quayle, discussing the “global Ebola plague, warned that Obama’s reaction to the epidemic could “supersede” the damage done by murderous dictators like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot.

Other far-right pundits warned that Obama might spread Ebola and then use the crisis as an excuse to cancel the 2016 election, implant “a tracker” into people, declare martial law, force people into concentration camps and put the dead in “FEMA coffins.”

Beyond Ebola, Janet Porter, the conservative activist who leads the Religious Right group Faith 2 Action, thought Obama could use swine flu fears to throw people into FEMA camps or create “a food shortage” that would be used to grow government and starve people to death.

4) Obama Will Start A Race War

Many conservative commentators believed that Obama was behind anti-police-brutality demonstrations that turned violent in cities like Baltimore and Ferguson.

Savage, the radio commentator, said the “racist” Obama administration was going to “try to stimulate insurrection in this country in order to declare martial law” since the “entire federal government is geared up to fight a war against white people.” The Department of Homeland Security, he said, was ready to “mow down” armed demonstrators during the Bundy ranch standoff in Nevada because they were predominately white.

Finding it “remarkable that Obama has not renamed the White House ‘the Black House,’” Larry Klayman wrote in WorldNetDaily that the “racist Obama and his henchmen like Eric Holder have succeeded in creating what in effect is a huge racial divide and race war in the nation, pitting black against white and vice versa” and turning white people into second class citizens.

Far-right commentator Stan Solomon even wondered if Obama would establish “a black force” to attack white people.

5) Obama Will Create A Personal Brownshirt Army

Boykin wasn’t alone in predicting that Obama would create such an army.

6) Obama Will Seize Guns

Throughout Obama’s time in office, gun groups have made hay over patently false claims that the president was prepared to do away with the Second Amendment and ban guns.

Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, predicted that Obama would “erase the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights and exorcise it from the U.S. Constitution” if he won re-election, insisting that Obama went after gun owners “harder than he attacked ISIS.” Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt similarly suggested that Obama was organizing a Big Government scheme to confiscate guns, and might even use his (nonexistent) private army to seize Americans’ guns.

Back in 2015, Trump said he heard that Obama was going to use an executive order to “take your guns away”:

You know, the president is thinking about signing an executive order where he wants to take your guns away. You hear this one? This is the new. Not gonna happen. That won’t happen. But that’s a tough one, I think that’s a tough one for him to do when you actually have the Second Amendment. That’s tough. Because there’s plenty of executive orders being signed, you know that. And we can’t let that go on. So it’ll all stop … It’ll stop very soon, I think, because people are tired of what’s going on, and they’re tired of what’s happening to our country.

When asked by CNN host Alisyn Camerota about his charge, Trump insisted that he never actually said that Obama wants to confiscate guns, just that he had “heard” from “somebody” that “that’s what he’s thinking about” doing. (He went on to falsely claim that Hillary Clinton “wants to take your guns away” and “abolish” the Second Amendment.)

Rafael Cruz, the father of Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, repeatedly charged that Obama was getting ready to seize all guns in order to become a murderous dictator akin to Stalin.

The baseless conspiracy theory helped set the stage for Sandy Hook truthers, who claimed that the 2012 massacre of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, was an elaborate hoax to justify a gun confiscation scheme.

7) Obama Will Invade Texas

Several Republican politicians, including presidential hopefuls, couldn’t help themselves from seizing on the completely unbelievable conspiracy theory that the Obama administration was planning a federal takeover Texas under the pretext of a 2015 military exercise known as Jade Helm 15.

Knowing that a large number of conservatives believed in the conspiracy theory, these politicians sniffed an opportunity to throw some red meat at the expense of, you know, the truth. The governor of Texas even ordered the Texas State Guard to “monitor Operation Jade Helm 15” to make sure it didn’t infringe on Texans’ civil liberties.

While there wasn’t one standard Jade Helm 15 conspiracy theory, the gist was that Obama was planning to use the military exercise to enforce federal, possibly military, rule over Texas, likely because it is a bastion of conservatism.

As we’ve previously noted, many far-right activists saw Jade Helm 15 as “part of a secret effort to take over conservative states like Texas, impose martial law, confiscate people’s firearms, round up ‘patriotic men,’ force people into cattle cars and lock them up in Wal-Marts that have been converted into FEMA camps.”

Wiles, the religious radio broadcaster, referred to Jade Helm 15 as a “two-month-long Night of the Long Knives” and even warned about a potential government-initiated nuclear electromagnetic pulse attack on Texas. Televangelist Jim Bakker said that he might even go to jail (again) as a result of Jade Helm 15.

After the exercise began, one fake news site fabricated a story that it had resulted in civilian casualties.

Panic about Jade Helm had serious consequences: The FBI arrested a group of people planning to attack soldiers participating in the exercise, and some service members came under fire as the exercise began.

8) Obama Will Ban The Bible

Following the passage of the Shepard-Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which Obama signed in 2009, Republicans warned that the freedom of religion and speech for Christians would soon disappear due to government oppression. Subsequent advances in LGBT equality, especially the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision striking down state-level same-sex marriage bans, only made the persecution rhetoric more panicked.

Anti-LGBT activists predicted after the passage of the hate crimes act that the government would begin prosecuting and imprisoning Christians who criticized homosexuality. The Traditional Values Coalition claimed that “the new Hate Crimes Act that President Obama signed into law makes the Bible illegal ‘Hate Literature.’

Several Republican politicians even claimed that the law granted legal protections to pedophiles.

In 2013, Rick Scarborough, a conservative pastor who once threatened to file a lawsuit against homosexuality, claimed that the Obama administration was “hell-bent on silencing the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” warning that Christians may be “thrown into concentration camps” at some point in the future. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins warned just last year that Obama was using gay rights to “eliminate” Christianity and “punish speech—and belief.”

Far-right fake news sites have similarly predicted that Obama will outlaw Christmas and “criminalize Christianity.”

9) Obama Will Impose Sharia Law

Among the most popular and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories surrounding Obama was the enduring claim that he was just about to impose Sharia law on Americans, if he hadn’t already.

While discussing his book on Obama’s “progressive/Islamic takeover” in 2015, Savage claimed that Obama was bringing in 100,000 Muslims into America every month to help “the Islamism creeping into the country,” which he posited could eventually lead to the government deciding to “ban dogs.”

Sen. Ted Cruz even went so far as to falsely claim that the Obama administration put into place a “ban on anti-Muslim rhetoric.” Then-Rep. Michele Bachmann alleged in 2012 that Obama had enforced “Islamic speech codes here in the United States” as part of his supposed push for Sharia law.

In a WorldNetDaily column posted weeks before the 2008 election, Faith 2 Action’s Janet Porter delivered a “newscast of the future” in which she predicted, among other things, that Obama would personally meet with Osama bin Laden, begin broadcasting the Muslim call to prayer in the capital five times a day and have people face Mecca at a Presidential Prayer Breakfast keynoted by Louis Farrakhan.

Kamal Saleem, who claims to be a former terrorist and is now a conservative speaker, claimed in 2012 that Obama planned on “legalizing terrorism” and predicted that the Obama administration would begin shutting down churches and synagogues in 2013. He claimed that Obama had already set up an Islamic “shadow government” that was using an Obama family babysitter, Roe v. Wade and the military to impose Sharia law.

Right-wing conspiracy theorist Avi Lipkin claimed in 2012 that Obama would receive trillions of dollars in aid from Saudi Arabia and, in return, would begin imposing Sharia law and settling “50 to 100 million” Muslim immigrants on “lands confiscated by Agenda 21.”

10) Obama Will Stay In Office

Conservative radio hosts from Rush Limbaugh to Alex Jones have suggested that Obama may try to remain in office when his second term is over, a conspiracy theory that gained attention throughout the far-right

The fear of an Obama third term gained such attention that Ben Carson, who later became a GOP presidential candidate and is now Trump’s nominee to be the secretary of housing, became worried about a canceled election and an Obama third-term plot.

Few, however, went as far as Rev. Austin Miles, who claimed in 2014 that there was a plan “for Obama to use Executive Order to declare himself, Dictator for Life in 2016,” or End Times preacher Rick Wiles, who said in 2013 that Obama would take a trip to Jerusalem on which he “enters the Temple and declares himself as God.”

Tags: Avi Lipkin Donald Trump Glenn Beck Greg Abbott Janet Porter (née Folger) Jerry Boykin Jim Bakker Joseph Farah Kamal Saleem Larry Klayman Larry Pratt Louie Gohmert Michael Savage Michele Bachmann Rafael Cruz Rick Scarborough Rick Wiles Sarah Palin Stan Solomon Steve Stockman Ted Cruz Tony Perkins Wayne LaPierre

http://wwwwww.alternet.org/environment/one-his-last-environmental-actions-obama-takes-swipe-coal

But other rules were allowed to proceed. Kate Hanni, an advocate from Napa, Calif., for the rights of airline passengers, had tried for years to persuade the government to address a series of incidents in which flight delays left passengers trapped for hours on planes that had already left the gate, often in cabins with stinking toilets, weak air-conditioning and no food. The Bush administration put Ms. Hanni on a task force consisting mostly of airline executives, which concluded in the fall of 2008 — over her forceful and repeated objections — that the public was best served by allowing the airlines to make their own decisions.

Weeks after the task force released its report, Ms. Hanni was invited to Washington in December 2008 to meet with Robert S. Rivkin, the head of Mr. Obama’s transportation transition team. Democrats in Congress had introduced legislation to address the issue, but Mr. Rivkin asked Ms. Hanni if she would support new regulations instead. She would back anything enforceable, Ms. Hanni said...

The Value of Regulation

As the Obama administration turned toward regulation, it sought to strengthen its hand by changing the estimates of what a life is worth. Those estimates allowed the administration to argue that the benefits of many regulations were greater than previously appreciated. This push was particularly important as a justification for stronger environmental protections.

A White House push to pass a sweeping climate change bill in 2009 failed to pass in Congress, but almost from the outset some of Mr. Obama’s aides were working on a Plan B. Mr. Sunstein and Michael Greenstone, the first head of Mr. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, created an internal task force to put a dollar figure on the cost of carbon emissions.

The government does not try to quantify all the benefits of proposed regulations. When it came to environmental regulations, the calculation was particularly limited. Analysts often assigned a dollar figure to just one kind of damage — emissions of “small particles” — and then stacked up the costs of the proposal against the benefits of fewer particles.

Quantifying a second kind of damage, from carbon emissions, would broaden the assessed benefits of new regulations — potentially justifying new and stronger restrictions. In 2010, the administration issued a report that estimated the economic impact of global warming, including agricultural disruptions, increased flooding and health problems. It pegged the cost of carbon emissions at $21 per ton. An updated assessment in 2013 raised the price tag to $33.

When the administration announced stricter standards for automobile fuel efficiency in 2011, it cited the reduction in carbon emissions as a key benefit. Those benefits have since been cited in several dozen new regulations, including the hotly debated 2015 rule seeking to restrict emissions from new power plants.

Regulators also revisited a more fundamental concept: the value of life. Not just a theological or philosophical abstraction, that figure is used to assess how much spending the government should require to prevent death or injury.

The Department of Transportation, for example, increased the estimated value of preventing one death from $6.6 million in 2009 to $9.4 million last year, adjusting for inflation. The department made an even larger adjustment for preventing injuries, for example raising the value of averting a broken arm from $103,000 in 2009 to $442,000 in 2015, also adjusting for inflation. The increases have helped to justify new requirements for stronger roofs and rearview cameras on automobiles and seatbelts on buses.

The new carbon cost estimate, in particular, has drawn fire from industry groups who regard it as an arbitrary assessment intended to further an environmental agenda.

Environmentalists, however, argue that the government is still significantly understating the actual impact. A 2014 analysis by economists at Stanford University, published in the science journal Nature, estimated that the cost of carbon was actually $220 per ton, far above the government’s official estimate.

Mr. Greenstone, in a recent interview, defended the government’s number as a result of a technocratic process that was not influenced by political pressures.

“Our job as faceless bureaucrats sitting in windowless rooms was not to do science but to summarize the frontier of science,” he said. “ And I feel that we were faithful to that.”

Cashing in on All of the Above: U.S. Fossil Fuel Production Subsidies under Obama

Shakuntala Makhijani, July 9, 2014

Cashing in on All of the Above: U.S. Fossil Fuel Production Subsidies under Obama

Oil Change International

July 2014

A new report by Oil Change International, Cashing in on All of the Above: U.S. Fossil Fuel Production Subsidies under Obama, demonstrates the huge and growing amount of subsidies going to the fossil fuel industry in the U.S. every year. In 2013, the U.S. federal and state governments gave away $21.6 billion in subsidies for oil, gas, and coal exploration and production.

The value of fossil fuel exploration and production subsidies from the federal government have increased by 45 percent since President Obama took office in 2009 – from $12.7 billion to a current total of $18.5 billion – a side effect of his Administration’s “All of the Above” energy policy that promotes the U.S. oil and gas boom and amounts to nothing less than climate denial. President Obama has repeatedly tried to repeal some of the most egregious of these subsidies, but these attempts have been blocked by a U.S. Congress that has been bought out by campaign finance and lobbying expenditures from the fossil fuel industry.

http://priceofoil.org/2014/07/09/cashing-in-on-all-of-the-above-u-s-fossil-fuel-production-subsidies-under-obama/

3/16

Obama to Limit Arctic, Atlantic Offshore Oil Drilling as Part of New Five-Year Plan

Virtually all of the Arctic and much of the Atlantic coast of the U.S. will become...

exec order but gop congr did not fight?

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/11012016/congress-climate-change-omnibus-budget-bill-flood-standard-obama

President Obama's plan to safeguard the nation from increasing flood risk due to climate change was quietly green-lighted by Congress last month in the 2016 omnibus budget bill.

It marks one of the only actions Congress took on global warming in all of 2015, and it came as a surprise considering the longstanding opposition from Republicans. And it is a critical one, several policy experts said. It will impact billions of dollars of federally funded construction projects across the country, from highways and bridges to hospitals and housing complexes, at a time when flooding in the U.S. is getting worse every year because of climate change.

"The policy illustrates the awareness that we should not build things that are vulnerable to flooding now or in the future," said Rob Moore, a policy analyst and director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Water and Climate Team. "That may not seem like a revolutionary idea, but unfortunately it is. We have a long history of building things that easily get soggy."

Obama's plan, executive order No. 13690, mandates that all federally funded projects located in a floodplain be built higher and stronger than previously required. It is the first update to the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard since the policy was created 38 years ago. It applies to both new construction and rebuilding following a disaster.

Under the old standards, enacted by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, buildings in the floodplain had to be elevated to the 100-year flood level. Under Obama's executive order, buildings must now be elevated 2 or 3 feet above the 100-year flood level (the higher standard is for "critical" infrastructure, like hospitals), or at the 500-year flood level. A third option is for federal agencies to analyze future climate change scenarios and build according to those projections, such as for sea level rise or expected heavier rain events....

BREAKING: Minutes ago, the White House announced a temporary pause to new coal mining leases on public lands, effectively stopping production of at least 3.5 billion tons of coal!

but...

http://www.alternet.org/environment/during-paris-climate-summit-obama-signed-exxon-koch-backed-bill-expediting-pipeline

Despite dozens of failed attempts by one of the most anti-environmental Congresses in history to roll back conservation laws, the Obama administration and lawmakers were able to secure several victories for America’s public lands in 2015. Below are the top 5 biggest wins for conservation:

The creation of six new national monuments

In 2015, President Obama protected more land as national monuments than any year in his presidency -– more than 1 million acres. Using the Antiquities Act, the president this year designated six new national monuments: Basin and Range in Nevada, Berryessa Snow Mountain in California, Waco Mammoth in Texas, Pullman in Chicago, Browns Canyon in Colorado, and Honouliuli in Hawaii. Many national monuments have over the years become some of our most iconic national parks, such as Grand Canyon, Arches, Acadia, and Petrified Forest. Despite efforts by some Republicans to auction off public lands or transfer them to state control, public support for national public lands remains high and President Obama’s efforts to conserve public lands for future generations has been well-received by local communities, sportsmen, conservationists, and business leaders.

An international climate agreement in Paris

The December 12th international climate agreement in Paris is a clear win for the climate, the clean energy industry, and the President’s Clean Power Plan. But it is also a win for America’s public lands, which are affected by both the impacts of climate change and the sprawling footprint of fossil fuel development. The agreement in Paris will help the United States and the rest of the world cut pollution and spur a transition to more renewable fuels.

Saving America’s best parks program and other conservation laws from congressional attack

During their frenetic December negotiations over the year’s must-pass omnibus spending bill, lawmakers were able to reach an agreement that kept dozens of anti-conservation and public lands riders out of the final legislation. As part of this agreement, Congress also managed to prevent America’s best parks program, theLand and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), from disappearing. Though many would have liked to see the LWCF, which is the country’s largest funding source for land, water, and wildlife conservation, fully funded and permanently extended, the bill was given a three-year extension and firm funding for 2016.

Conservation measures for the greater sage grouse

In September, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided that the greater sage grouse — an iconic ground-dwelling bird in the West –- will not need the protection of the Endangered Species Act to survive. The decision to not list the bird as an endangered species reflected the success of partnerships between private landholders and state and federal agencies to implement voluntary conservation measures to protect the species. The federal government, for example, implemented several scientifically-based land use management plans that collectively set aside more than 60 million acres of habitat for the bird.

Sage grouse are not the only wildlife that benefit from the plans; at least 250 other species depend on the sagebrush steppe habitat. “Together, we have shown that voluntary efforts joining the resources of private landowners, federal and state agencies, and partner organizations can help drive landscape-level conservation that is good for sage grouse, ranching operations, and rural communities,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. The plan is regarded as one of the largest and most complex land conservation successes in recent history.

The protection of the Boulder-White Clouds Wilderness

In August, Congress unanimously passed the “Sawtooth National Recreation Area and Jerry Peak Wilderness Additions Act,” which established three new wilderness areas in the Boulder-White Clouds region of Idaho. The new wilderness areas together permanently protect nearly 280,000 acres of public lands.

“This is a remarkable area,” said President Obama when he signed the bill. “It is used by fishermen, hunters, rafters, people taking hikes. It is not only beautiful, but it’s also an important economic engine for the state — attracting tourism, creating jobs.”

The designation — the only major wilderness bill that Congress passed in 2015 — benefits wildlife ranging from bighorn sheep to mule deer and native cutthroat trout by providing undisturbed habitat. The designation also guarantees permanent public access to tens of thousands of acres to hikers, campers, hunters, anglers, and others outdoor enthusiasts.

Jenny Rowland is the Research and Advocacy Associate for the Public Lands Project at Center for American Progress. You can follow her on Twitter @jennyhrowland

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/wave-of-regulation-looms-in-2016/

Obama is preparing to unleash a wave of new regulations in 2016 as he looks to shore up his legacy on public protection issues during his final year in office.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Labor are all expected to finalize major federal rules that critics say are long overdue. The regulations include a final rule from the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law that will force companies to compare the paychecks of their top executives with company performance, final rules for cigars and electronic cigarettes proposed well over a year

Pay for performance

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is expected to finalize its “pay for performance” rule that will require publicly traded corporations to disclose how much their top executives are paid and compare that to the companies’ overall financial performance.

The agency, which first proposed the rule in May, set an October 2016 deadline for the final rule last month. The SEC contends it will allow shareholders to make more informed decisions when electing directors.

Arbitration

Regulatory experts are expecting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to propose new rules in 2016 to protect consumers’ right to file or join a class-action lawsuit against a financial company.

More and more companies are adding arbitration clauses to contracts that prevent consumers from resolving a dispute through the court system. Instead, the language, which can often be found in credit card and cellphone contracts, typically states that disputes about a product can only be resolved by privately appointed individuals or arbitrators.

Dodd-Frank directed the CFPB to do a study of arbitration agreements and issue a report of its findings to Congress. After the agency completed the report in March, it announced plans to proceed with a rulemaking.

E-cigarettes

Industry and health groups may not agree on the rules, but both are exasperated by the delay in first-ever regulations from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for cigars and electronic cigarettes.

Health groups were frantic in the days leading up to the release of the $1.1 trillion government spending deal earlier this month, fearing that industry had successfully lobbied for a change that would have exempted many e-cigarette and cigar products from the restrictions.

Industry groups, however, came up empty-handed and will now wait to see if attempts to lobby the White House for last-minute changes paid off. Those organizations are most concerned about a provision in the proposed rule that would require all products that hit store shelves after Feb. 15, 2007, to apply retroactively for approval, a process that companies say would put them out of business.

The FDA originally said the final rules would be out last summer but changed the deadline to November. The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is reviewing the final rule, was still meeting with industry and health groups last week.

Silica dust

The Department of Labor is in the process of finalizing a years-in-the-making rule to protect workers from silica dust.

Peg Seminario, the AFL-CIO’s safety and health director, said the labor group has been awaiting the rule since 1997. Exposure to silica dust, common at construction worksites and shipyards, can cause an irreversible lung disease known as silicosis.

The Labor Department sent the final rule to the OMB last week for final review, a process that can take up to 90 days.

“I’m sure they will give it a thorough review and it’ll be issued sometime, we hope, in the first quarter of the year,” Seminario said.

Workplace injuries

The DOL is gearing up for a busy year, with plans to also finalize a rule that will require employers to report and keep records of workplace injuries and illnesses. Seminario said the draft of the final rule went to OMB in October. Labor groups are hoping to see a final rule in the first quarter.

Overtime pay

Perhaps the most sweeping action to in the new year will be a final rule to extend overtime pay to nearly 5 millions white-collar workers. The Labor Department proposed the rule in June as a result of an executive order President Obama issued in May. Under the rule, any worker earning up to $50,000 annually would be eligible for overtime.

Department spokesman Jason Surbey said the agency is reviewing the more than 270,000 comments it received.

“We’re on track to issue a final rule by July 2016, with an effective date sometime after that,” he said.

Predatory lending

The CFPB is planning a February rollout of its proposed rules to crack down on predatory payday lenders.

The agency released a framework for the rules in March that considered forcing lenders to ensure a borrower’s ability to repay a loan, limiting short-term credits to 45 days or less and establishing a 60-day “cooling-off” period for borrowers who take out three loans in a row.

Payday lenders have already balked at the rules, calling them unnecessary and damaging for consumers who have nowhere else to turn for their short-term lending needs.

Food safety

The FDA is expected to issue final requirements in March for the sanitary transportation of animal and human food.

The rules, which were are mandated by the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011, establish requirements for shippers, carriers and receivers to use sanitary practices to ensure that that food does not become contaminated when being transported. The final rules were originally expected to be released in April 2015.

Financial advisers

The Labor Department is also expected to issue a final rule in 2016 that would require financial advisers to disclose more information to their clients about the compensation they receive.   In October, under mounting pressure from business groups, Labor Secretary Tom Perez said the department planned to make some changes to the contentious regulations — commonly called the “fiduciary rule” — but would not detail what those changes would be.

Methane

===purposeful leaks when producing and transmitting oil

and gas. The EPA has set a June deadline for the release of this final rule.

obama21216

see main for older

new node 6/14

tag BO 12/15

obama will take on redmap gerrymander

offshore

http://www.ecowatch.com/us-offshore-wind-2003160985.html

...In a weekly address to the nation, Obama said his administration will roll out new measures, including fuel efficiency standards for heavy-duty vehicles and will work towards meeting the goal of 50 percent clean energy across North America by 2025.

Here's the transcript of his weekly address:

Hi, everybody. One of the most urgent challenges of our time is climate change. We know that 2015 surpassed 2014 as the warmest year on record—and 2016 is on pace to be even hotter.

When I took office, I said this was something we couldn't kick down the road any longer—that our children's future depended on our action. So we got to work, and over the past seven-and-a-half years, we've made ambitious investments in clean energy, and ambitious reductions in our carbon emissions. We've multiplied wind power threefold. We've multiplied solar power more than thirtyfold. In parts of America, these clean power sources are finally cheaper than dirtier, conventional power. And carbon pollution from our energy sector is at its lowest level in 25 years, even as we're continuing to grow our economy.

We've invested in energy efficiency, and we're slashing carbon emissions from appliances, homes, and businesses—saving families money on their energy bills. We're reforming how we manage federal coal resources, which supply roughly 40 percent of America's coal. We've set the first-ever national standards limiting the amount of carbon pollution power plants can release into the sky.

We also set standards to increase the distance our cars and light trucks can go on a gallon of gas every year through 2025. And they're working. At a time when we've seen auto sales surge, manufacturers are innovating and bringing new technology to market faster than expected. Over 100 cars, SUVs, and pick-up trucks on the market today already meet our vehicles standards ahead of schedule. And we've seen a boom in the plug-in electric vehicle market—with more models, lower battery costs, and more than 16,000 charging stations.

But we're not done yet. In the weeks and months ahead, we'll release a second round of fuel efficiency standards for heavy-duty vehicles. We'll take steps to meet the goal we set with Canada and Mexico to achieve 50 percent clean power across North America by 2025. And we'll continue to protect our lands and waters so that our kids and grandkids can enjoy our most beautiful spaces for generations.

There's still much more to do. But there's no doubt that America has become a global leader in the fight against climate change. Last year, that leadership helped us bring nearly 200 nations together in Paris around the most ambitious agreement in history to save the one planet we've got. That's not something to tear up—it's something to build upon. And if we keep pushing, and leading the world in the right direction, there's no doubt that, together, we can leave a better, cleaner, safer future for our children.

Thanks, everybody. Have a great weekend.

For a deeper dive:

News: The Hill, IB Times, CBS News, VOA News

Commentary: New York Times, Binyamin Appelbaum & Michael D. Shear analysis

http://www.ecowatch.com/obama-climate-change-1973638586.html

ref

Mr. Obama entered office in January 2009 determined to make his mark by passing bold new laws, not by tinkering with rules. Rahm Emanuel, his first chief of staff, and other top aides mapped out an ambitious two-year agenda that included a health care overhaul, new banking laws, a remake of the federal student loan program, infrastructure spending and stricter limits on pollution.

The new president had a skeptical streak when it came to the value of regulation, influenced by his friend Cass R. Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor who had long argued that the government should more rigorously assess the benefits of new regulations. Mr. Obama liked that idea so much that he named Mr. Sunstein to lead the White House office that oversees rule-making.

“The president is not somebody who is intuitively or inherently a regulator,” said Howard Shelanski, who followed Mr. Sunstein in that role in mid-2013. He said Mr. Obama conveyed a simple message: “‘If we can get a good result without regulating, let’s do that.’”

But after eight years of a Republican administration, many Democrats were eager for the government to lean more forcefully on the levers of regulatory power, and officials within the federal bureaucracy felt emboldened.

The White House did resist some ideas. It shut down efforts by Lisa Jackson, Mr. Obama’s first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, to increase the regulation of ozone, a decision that environmentalists viewed as a betrayal.

Continue reading the main story

The Value of Regulation

The new carbon cost estimate, in particular, has drawn fire from industry groups who regard it as an arbitrary assessment intended to further an environmental agenda.

Mr. Greenstone, in a recent interview, defended the government’s number as a result of a technocratic process that was not influenced by political pressures.

“Our job as faceless bureaucrats sitting in windowless rooms was not to do science but to summarize the frontier of science,” he said. “ And I feel that we were faithful to that.”

Cashing in on All of the Above: U.S. Fossil Fuel Production Subsidies under Obama

Shakuntala Makhijani, July 9, 2014

Cashing in on All of the Above: U.S. Fossil Fuel Production Subsidies under Obama

Oil Change International

July 2014

A new report by Oil Change International, Cashing in on All of the Above: U.S. Fossil Fuel Production Subsidies under Obama, demonstrates the huge and growing amount of subsidies going to the fossil fuel industry in the U.S. every year. In 2013, the U.S. federal and state governments gave away $21.6 billion in subsidies for oil, gas, and coal exploration and production.

http://priceofoil.org/2014/07/09/cashing-in-on-all-of-the-above-u-s-fossil-fuel-production-subsidies-under-obama/

http://wwwwww.alternet.org/environment/one-his-last-environmental-actions-obama-takes-swipe-coal

he U.S. Interior Department finalized a contentious rule to protect rivers, streams and forests from the negative impacts of surface coal mining. The Stream Protection Rule is the first update to the department's regulations in 33 years, and is one of the Obama administration's last major moves to protect the environment. Specifically, the rule was established to "avoid or minimize impacts on surface water, groundwater, fish, wildlife, and other natural resources," according to the DOI.

"The responsible rule released [December 20] represents a modern and balanced approach to meeting the nation’s energy needs," U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said on Monday. "Regulations need to keep pace with modern mining practices, so we worked closely with many stakeholders to craft a plan that protects water quality, supports economic opportunities, safeguards our environment and makes coalfield communities more resilient for a diversified economic future."...

12/3/16?

Obama to Limit Arctic, Atlantic Offshore Oil Drilling as Part of New Five-Year Plan

Virtually all of the Arctic and much of the Atlantic coast of the U.S. will become...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/obama-enacts-offshore-drilling-ban-designed-to-be-trump-proof-w457205

recover no links

exec order but gop congr did not fight?

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/11012016/congress-climate-change-omnibus-budget-bill-flood-standard-obama

President Obama's plan to safeguard the nation from increasing flood risk due to climate change was quietly green-lighted by Congress last month in the 2016 omnibus budget bill.

BREAKING: Minutes ago, the White House announced a temporary pause to new coal mining leases on public lands, effectively stopping production of at least 3.5 billion tons of coal!

but...

http://www.alternet.org/environment/during-paris-climate-summit-obama-signed-exxon-koch-backed-bill-expediting-pipeline

The creation of six new national monuments

An international climate agreement in Paris

Saving America’s best parks program and other conservation laws from congressional attack

Conservation measures for the greater sage grouse

The protection of the Boulder-White Clouds Wilderness

Jenny Rowland is the Research and Advocacy Associate for the Public Lands Project at Center for American Progress. You can follow her on Twitter @jennyhrowland

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/wave-of-regulation-looms-in-2016/

Obama is preparing to unleash a wave of new regulations in 2016 as he looks to shore up his legacy on public protection issues during his final year in office.

ago, and a final regulation to protect constructions workers from deadly silica dust.

Here’s a look at the top regulations expected to come from the administration in 2016.

Pay for performance

Arbitration

E-cigarettes

Silica dust

The Department of Labor is in the process of finalizing a years-in-the-making rule to protect workers from silica dust.

The Labor Department sent the final rule to the OMB last week for final review, a process that can take up to 90 days.

“I’m sure they will give it a thorough review and it’ll be issued sometime, we hope, in the first quarter of the year,” Seminario said.

Workplace injuries

Overtime pay

Department spokesman Jason Surbey said the agency is reviewing the more than 270,000 comments it received.

“We’re on track to issue a final rule by July 2016, with an effective date sometime after that,” he said.

Predatory lending

The CFPB is planning a February rollout of its proposed rules to crack down on predatory payday lenders.

Payday lenders have already balked at the rules, calling them unnecessary and damaging for consumers who have nowhere else to turn for their short-term lending needs.

Food safety

The FDA is expected to issue final requirements in March for the sanitary transportation of animal and human food.

Financial advisers ?

The Labor Department is also expected to issue a final rule in 2016 that would require financial advisers to disclose more information to their clients about the compensation they receive. ??In October, under mounting pressure from business groups, Labor Secretary Tom Perez said the department planned to make some changes to the contentious regulations — commonly called the “fiduciary rule” — but would not detail what those changes would be.

Methane

The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to finalize new rules to limit methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. The rule would require drillers to use new technologies to track and block both accidental and purposeful leaks when producing and transmitting oil and gas. The EPA has set a June deadline for the release of this final rule.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/paul-krugman-how-bad-america-could-get-if-1-loving-republican-won-2016

Krugman now has some official numbers on his side to make the case that having Obama in the White House instead of Mitt Romney has made a serious difference to the country. In Monday's column, Krugman looks at the I.R.S.’s tax tables for 2013, which were released last week, and concludes that elections have real consequences. His argument is directed to people on the left, who are disappointed with what Obama has been able to accomplish and argue that there is no major difference between the two parties—except Bernie Sanders—and that the wealthy will always dominate.

Well, yes, but there has been some measurable progress, Krugman argues.

For one of the important consequences of the 2012 election was that Mr. Obama was able to go through with a significant rise in taxes on high incomes. Partly this was achieved by allowing the upper end of the Bush tax cuts to expire; there were also new taxes on high incomes passed along with the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.

If Mitt Romney had won, we can be sure that Republicans would have found a way to prevent these tax hikes. And we can now see what happened because he didn’t. According to the new tables, the average income tax rate for 99 percent of Americans barely changed from 2012 to 2013, but the tax rate for the top 1 percent rose by more than four percentage points. The tax rise was even bigger for very high incomes: 6.5 percentage points for the top 0.01 percent.

These numbers aren’t enough to give us a full picture of taxes at the top, which requires taking account of other taxes, especially taxes on corporate profits that indirectly affect the income of stockholders. But the available numbers are consistent with Congressional Budget Office projections of the effects of the 2013 tax increases — projections which said that the effective federal tax rate on the 1 percent would rise roughly back to its pre-Reagan level. No, really: for top incomes, Mr. Obama has effectively rolled back not just the Bush tax cuts but Ronald Reagan’s as well.

The point, of course, was not to punish the rich but to raise money for progressive priorities, and while the 2013 tax hike wasn’t gigantic, it was significant. Those higher rates on the 1 percent correspond to about $70 billion a year in revenue. This happens to be in the same ballpark as bothfood stamps and budget office estimates of this year’s net outlays on Obamacare. So we’re not talking about something trivial.

And, of course, Obamacare would have been killed if Romney had won, meaning the 17 million Americans insured since 2012 and rising would remain uninsured.

http://ecowatch.com/2015/12/28/obama-gifts-to-big-oil

whoohoo http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/obama-rejects-keystone-xl-pipeline-victory-environmental-activists

keep fed land ocean assets in gnd

http://ecowatch.com/2015/08/25/obama-climate-legacy/

see epa clean power wins

8/15 http://www.alternet.org/environment/obama-just-created-carbon-cap-and-trade-program

715

least five Republican governors, including two presidential hopefuls — Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana — have indicated they may defy new federal rules that are part of President Obama's climate change agenda. The rules — which are meant to reduce the nation's carbon emissions and speed the transition to renewable energy and a low-carbon economy — require existing power plants to reduce their carbon emissions 30 percent by 2030 (from 2005 levels). This goal is to be achieved by federally-enforceable state plans submitted to the EPA.

The gubernatorial response follows Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell's campaign, launched earlier this year, to get state governors to refuse to carry out the new regulations, which are slated to be finalized this summer.

In a March letter to the nation's governors, Sen. McConnell issued a warning:

[S]ubmitting a plan exposes states to the real danger— allowing the EPA to wrest control of a state’s energy policy if they or any other federal agency becomes dissatisfied with a state’s progress in reaching federal emissions goals. As both the EPA and other environmental groups have noted, a state plan must be “federally enforceable.” The meaning of this language is clear: as the EPA sees it, a state-issued plan would give the agency broad new authority to control that state’s energy future — not to mention the ability to place the blame for future consequences squarely on the state itself.

He also quoted Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, who called the EPA’s plan “constitutionally reckless”, saying it “usurp[s] the prerogatives of the States, Congress and the Federal Courts — all at once.” Tribe, a long venerated legal scholar and Constitutional lawyer who was Barack Obama's mentor, has lately been the target of criticism for his representation of Peabody Energy, a coal company, in its fight against the EPA's carbon emissions rules....

President Obama's climate change action plan is set to be the cornerstone of his climate and environmental legacy. It includes:

Carbon pollution standards
A solar job training program for veterans
Five utility-scale renewables projects on public lands
Partnerships with industry to phase down HFCs
Advancing solar deployment and energy efficiency
Reducing methane emissions

“EPA has an obligation under the Clean Air Act to develop a model federal plan, something that many states have asked EPA to do so it can provide an example for states developing their own plans,” said Thomas Reynolds, a spokesman for the agency. “EPA’s strong preference is to approve state plans, but we know that setting out a federal plan is an important step to ensure that our Clean Air Act requirements are fulfilled.”

On June 24, House Republicans advanced a bill that seeks to allow states to opt out of the EPA rule, requiring states to limit their carbon emission from existing power plants. The bill, introduced by Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY), was passed in a 247-180 vote. It would essentially allow governors to ignore the federal regulation, which is a centerpiece of Obama's climate agenda.

“The EPA’s latest attempt at imposing burdensome regulations represents an unprecedented meddling with Texas in order to push the Obama administration’s liberal climate change agenda,” said Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/gop-governors-line-defy-obamas-new-climate-rules

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/10072015/solar-breakthrough-could-be-way-renters

Solar Breakthrough Could Be on the Way for Renters

Obama administration strategy would funnel $520 million into community or shared solar farms, where renters can buy shares or memberships into projects.

White House Approves EPA's Plan to Regulate Airplane Emissions (The Hill)

Obama Administration Bans Offshore Oil Drilling Along New Stretch of California Coast(San Jose Mercury News)

http://grist.org/climate-energy/obama-climate-change-poses-immediate-risk-to-national-security/

http://www.alternet.org/environment/4-main-arguments-president-obama-tying-climate-change-national-security

U.S. Makes Historic Climate Pledge Ahead of Paris Talks, Joins EU, Mexico, Norway and Switzerland

The U.S. released its plan today, putting it ahead of such major countries as...4/15

“Climate change is an example of the hardest problems to solve,” said Obama. “The hardest thing to do in politics and in government is to make sacrifices now for a long-term payoff.”

He asserted his determination to push in the right direction, given the influence his office offers him.

“I can have as much of an impact on the things that are important to people as anybody on the planet,” said Obama. “If I can change how the country thinks about [climate change] as a serious immediate threat, not some distant vague thing, if I can encourage and gain commitments from the Chinese to put forward a serious plan to start curbing their greenhouse gases, and that allows us to leverage the entire world for the conference that will be taking place later this year in Paris, and if I’m able to double fuel efficiency standards and if I’m able to make appliances more efficient and to double the production of clean energy—if I’m able to do all those things now, when I’m done, we’re still going to have a heck of a problem. But we will have made enough progress that the next President and the next generation can start building on it and you start getting some momentum.”

When Smith brought up Sen. James Inhofe’s recent stunt of throwing a snowball on the floor of the Senate to “prove” climate change isn’t happening, saying “that would be funny if he were’t the chairman of the environment committee,” Obama responded, “That’s disturbing.”

But he said he thinks the upcoming generation will be nurturing fewer Inhofes.

“Here’s what makes me optimistic,” he said. “You take Sasha and Malia—16 and 13 —and the sophistication and awareness that they have about environmental issues, compared to my generation or yours —they’re way ahead of the game.”

That’s reflected in a recent poll taken by Ipsos that found 90 percent of 8th graders believe climate change is real and caused by human activity, while in the Senate close to 50 percent are somewhere on the climate-denier spectrum.

“There’s always going to be resistance to change and some of that is going to be generational,” said Obama. “I guarantee you that the Republican party will have to change its approach to climate change because voters will insist upon it. The challenge on something like climate change is there comes a point of no return and you do have to make sure we get at this thing quick enough and with enough force to be able make a difference. On climate change, 90 percent of Democrats agree with me, and 90 percent of Republicans oppose any action on it and a sizable proportion of their party denies it even exists. It’s not both sides arguing and ceasing gridlock, you’ve got one side that is denying the facts.”

When Smith asked Obama why he believed there was this resistance and this disconnect, Obama pulled no punches.

“In some cases, you have elected officials who are shills for the oil companies or the fossil fuel industry and there’s a lot of money involved,” he said. “Typically in Congress, the committees of jurisdiction are populated by folks from places that pump a lot of oil and pump a lot of gas.”

Obama Signs Executive Order to Cut Government Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 40 Percent

"As part of his commitment to lead by example to curb the emissions that are driving climate change, today President Obama...

http://ecowatch.com/2015/03/19/obama-cut-greenhouse-gas-emissions/

On March 19, President Obama signed a new executive order titled “Planning for Federal Sustainability in the Next Decade,” which will guide federal agencies toward more sustainable government operations. From planning for resiliency in the face of natural disasters and climate change to implementing more stringent stormwater management practices, the order addresses many aspects of landscape architecture and community planning. Consequently, reaching the order’s targets will require federal agencies to collaborate with thought leaders in both professions, as well as state and local governments, to seek out and implement industry best practices.

The prominence the new executive order places on sustainable design and management of federal facilities means the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) — as the civilian government’s primary landlord — has not only great responsibility, but also the great opportunity to increase its role as a government leader insustainability.

GSA has previously proven its appetite for innovation in sustainable building technologies through programs such as The Green Proving Ground, which uses the size and variety of the agency’s real estate portfolio to test nascent technologies for large-scale commercial viability. That same size and variety will be valuable as GSA and other federal agencies tackle challenges, such as the following:

installing green infrastructure on federal properties to manage stormwater and wastewater;
reducing the use of water for irrigation and industrial purposes;
ensuring that a percentage of existing federal buildings and all planned federal buildings achieve energy net-zero and strive for water net-zero;
promoting sustainable commuting through locating federal facilities near public transit; and
incorporating climate change preparedness and resilience into planning for new facilities and renovations of existing facilities, and into facility management practices.

Read the full text of the executive order and GSA Acting Administrator Denise Turner Roth’s response to the order.

cave

The Obama administration has pulled a measure to limit ammunition in assault rifles and handguns under pressure from the gun lobby. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had called for banning the M855 "green tip" ammunition in AR-15s, because it could be used to pierce through police body armor. But the proposal was withdrawn after a campaign by the National Rifle Association and several Republican members of Congress.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/11/12/3591284/us-china-climate-deal

9/14

Just over a month before the United Nations convenes on September 23 in New York City to discuss climate change and activists gather for a week of action, the Obama White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) argued it does not have to offer guidance to federal agencies it coordinates with to consider climate change impacts for energy decisions.

It came just a few weeks before a leaked draft copy of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) latest assessment said climate disruption could cause “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.” CLICK TO READ MORE

Obama Opened Floodgates for Offshore Fracking in Recent Gulf of Mexico Lease

In little-noticed news arising out of a recent Gulf of Mexico offshore oil and gas lease held by the U.S. Department of Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the floodgates have opened for Gulf offshore hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”).

With 21.6 million acres auctioned off by the Obama Administration and 433,822 acres receiving bids, some press accounts have declared BP America a big winner of the auction. CLICK TO READ MORE

He added that the White House had received about 10,000 postcards from UC Irvine students trying to get him to attend.

The president then shifted his focus and started discussing the environment.

Noting that the 18 warmest years on the planet on record have occurred since the graduates were born, Obama said, “The question is not whether we need to act… The question is whether we have the will to act before it’s too late.”

Obama later stated that UC Irvine was at the forefront of the issue, having created the first Department of Earth System Science in the country.

but more to do

“Climate change is no longer a distance threat, but has moved into the present,” Obama said.

The president then challenged the students to act on environmental issues, and discussed the various ways they could put their degrees to use in the field.

“We need scientists to design new fuels. We need farmers to help grow them,” he said. “We need engineers to invent new technologies. We need entrepreneurs to sell those technologies. We need workers to operate assembly lines that hum with high tech, zero carbon components. We need builders to hammer into place the clean energy age.”

Obama added, “We can do this. We can make a difference. You can make a difference. And the sooner you do, the better.”

During the speech, he also announced that a $1 billion competitive fund was being created for communities that were being impacted by severe weather.

Read more: http://ktla.com/2014/06/14/president-obama-in-socal-to-deliver-uc-irvine-commencement-speech-2/#ixzz34pTbJkCQ

main capt 318 no lnx

obama318

lakoff on trump:

Political Correctness

There are at least tens of millions of conservatives in America who share strict father morality and its moral hierarchy. Many of them are poor or middle class and many are white men who see themselves as superior to immigrants, nonwhites, women, non-Christians, gays, and people who rely on public assistance. In other words, they are what liberals would call bigots. For many years, such bigotry has not been publicly acceptable, especially as more immigrants have arrived, as the country has become less white, as more women have become educated and moved into the workplace, and as gays have become more visible and gay marriage acceptable.

As liberal anti-bigotry organizations have loudly pointed out and made a public issue of the un-American nature of such bigotry, those conservatives have felt more and more oppressed by what they call “political correctness” — public pressure against their views and against what they see as “free speech.” This has become exaggerated since 9/11, when anti-Muslim feelings became strong. The election of President Barack Obama created outrage among those conservatives, and they refused to see him as a legitimate American (as in the birther movement), much less as a legitimate authority, especially as his liberal views contradicted almost everything else they believe as conservatives.

Donald Trump expresses out loud everything they feel, with force, aggression, anger, and no shame. All they have to do is support and vote for Trump and they don’t even have to express their "politically incorrect:" views, since he does it for them and his victories make those views respectable. He is their champion. He gives them a sense of self-respect, authority and the possibility of power.

Whenever you hear the words “political correctness” remember this.

400 students arrested at WH ~ XL

Obama Urged Not to Abandon 'Social Cost of Carbon' Tool

The tool helps lawmakers decide how much economic sense it makes to impose carbon emissions controls and has been used in more than 40 regulatory actions.

By John H. Cushman Jr., InsideClimate News

Feb 27, 201

http://insideclimatenews.org/content/obama-urged-not-abandon-social-cost-carbon-tool

President Barack Obama visited California's Central Valley farming region on Friday to announce disaster relief for the drought-ravagedstate. And, while he was there, he announced his vision for $1 billion in climate-adaptation spending.

THIS STORY CONTINUES

Obama to Propose $1 Billion Climate Resilience Fund (Politico)

http://insideclimatenews.org/todaysnews/20140214/obama-propose-1-billion-climate-resilience-fund

huffpo : But changes have been brewing at Ex-Im. During his big climate speech in June, President Barack Obama promised that the U.S. would stop funding coal projects abroad. A few weeks later, Ex-Im declined to fund a massive coal-fired power plant in Vietnam. And in October, the Treasury Department announced that it would no longer fund most coal plants though multilateral development banks.

Other major investment banks around the world have followed suit. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development announced earlier this week that it toowill no longer fund coal.

Remember the war over czars? No, that’s not an obscure episode in Russian history. It was the outrage manufactured by conservative media figures in 2009 over the proliferation of policy “czars” in the Obama administration. Never mind, of course, that President George W. Bush had 35 czars compared to Obama’s 32.

One of the new czarships Obama actually did create was the “climate czar,” a post to which he appointed former EPA Administrator Carol Browner. (Her formal title was director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy.) Glenn Beck, chief propagandist for the czar meme, was especially concerned by the creation of a “socialist” climate czar post.

Browner’s deputy, Heather Zichal, took over her responsibilities after Browner stepped down in 2011. But, as part of the April 2011 deal to avert a government shutdown, funding for the climate czar position was eliminated, so Zichal got no titular promotion. After almost five years in the White House, Zichal announced in October that she was leaving the administration. She’s been replaced by her White House colleague Dan Utech.

The Obama administration has often delighted, and often disappointed, environmentalists. So how did Zichal herself perform?

According to the nation’s top environmental lobbyists, she did an exemplary job. She worked as an internal advocate, convincing President Obama to move forward on climate change, over the objections of more cautious, corporatist advisors such as former chiefs of staff Rahm Emanuel and Bill Daley. She helped bring the administration’s attention back to climate after it turned to other matters following failure of cap-and-trade in Congress. “From what I could tell, Heather had developed a close working relationship with the president,” says David Goldston, director of government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Environmentalists credit Zichal with playing an instrumental role in the administration’s following four achievements:

The heavy investments in renewable energy in the 2009 stimulus package. “Wind and solar doubled in their deployment in Obama’s first term,” says Sierra Club lobbyist Melinda Pierce, crediting the billions of dollars in the Recovery Act for making that possible.

Raising auto fuel-economy standards. Under Browner, Zichal worked to craft the higher average fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks that the Obama administration introduced in 2009. Says Pierce, “Heather was literally burning the midnight oil” when working on this issue, “which is part of why she’s probably ready to go.”

EPA limits on mercury from new power plants. Zichal worked with then-EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to promulgate the regulations that will both limit a dangerous toxin and make it that much harder to open a new coal-burning plant and force the social costs onto the rest of society.

The Obama administration’s June release of its Climate Action Plan. “The greatest achievement was her work getting the administration and president to release a definitive climate plan,” says Goldston. “Our sense is that she was an advocate for that. There were other high-level people who were very reluctant to see the administration move on climate policy. She was willing to continue to push in the face of that.”

The most important component of that plan is the EPA’s forthcomingregulations on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Zichal is credited with advocating for those internally. Activists say she was also the central player in crafting the various lower-profile components of the inter-agency plan to reduce emissions. “No one really talks about other pieces of plan,” says Pierce. “There are new standards from HUD for new federally funded buildings, the Department of Defense is making sure it’s a leader in efficiency and renewable fuels. It was [Zichal] in the White House sort of at the center of negotiations across government. Obama says, ‘Everybody bring me your best ideas,’ and it’s Heather and her team who had to bring that to fruition.”

There are, of course, disappointments in Obama’s record on climate change. Most significantly, the Senate failed to pass the House’s cap-and-trade bill. That isn’t under the president’s control, but according to a deeply reported New Yorker piece by Ryan Lizza, Obama undermined the Senate negotiations by using an executive order to give away the treat — increased offshore oil drilling permitting — that was supposed to wash down the emissions cap for wavering senators. Cap-and-trade might also have had a better chance of passing if it had been pursued before health-care reform and financial reform. And Obama has generally been overly fond of oil and gas drilling. During the 2012 campaign, he boasted of having increased U.S. oil and gas output and pledged to “continue to open up new areas for drilling.”

But those decisions were made above Zichal’s pay grade.

Going forward, Utech will have his work cut out for him if he hopes to persuade Obama to scale back the dirty energy production. There are enormous open questions as to what the administration will decide on the Keystone XL pipeline, the strength of EPA regulations on power plants, and the strength of Bureau of Land Management rules for fracking on federal land.

Environmentalists say they are impressed with Utech, but there were no shortcomings in Zichal’s performance they are looking to improve upon. Says Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president for government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, “We’re big fans of hers and are going to miss her a lot.”

Ben Adler covers climate change policy for Grist. When he isn't contemplating the world's end, he writes about cities, politics, architecture, and media. You can follow him on Twitter.

New Executive Order Will Help Communities Prepare for Extreme Weather

By Katie Valentine /Climate Progress

November 1, 2013 |

President Obama signed an executive order this morning aimed at making it easier for states and communities to prepare for climate change and the droughts, floods and extreme storms that are likely to come with it.

The order [3], which is part of the president’s climate action plan [4], will encourage local planners to take the future effects of climate change into account when spending federal money to build infrastructure. The order will also set up [5] the Council on Climate Preparedness and Resilience, a task force of city and state leaders that will advise the federal government on how they can better support climate resiliency. Eight governors have joined the task force, along with 16 mayors and commissioners and two tribal leaders. Most of the task force are Democrats, but the Republican governor of Guam and three Republican mayors [6] have also signed on.

“We really do need to hear directly from the communities and from those who are sort of on the front lines of dealing with the impacts of climate change,” Nancy Sutley, Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, told the New York Times [6].

The order plans to: identify and remove barriers to climate resilience, such as policies that encourage states and communities to rebuild to previous standards after a disaster, instead of adopting stronger standards; evaluate how to better use and protect natural storm barriers such as wetlands and dunes; make scientific data and tools for climate preparedness readily available to states and cities; and build on the climate adaptation plans for federal agencies that were released earlier this year.

This month, the Center for American Progress released a report with five recommendations [7] for the climate resilience task force, including determining the annual cost of federal disaster relief by state and finding sources of funding for federal investments in resilience. The report notes that, according toresearch [8] prepared for FEMA, every $1 spent on community resilience reduces disaster costs by $4. From fiscal year 2011 to 2013, American taxpayers spent nearly $6 in disaster cleanup and recovery for every $1 spent in community resilience.

Cities and states have been ramping up climate preparation efforts in the wake of Superstorm Sandy and other extreme weather events. Boston is considering [9]making it mandatory for developers to fill out a climate resilience checklist before they construct large new buildings, and New York City, Houston and Los Angeles are also implementing [10] climate resiliency plans. With the president’s new executive order, the hope is that more cities and states will begin taking climate preparation seriously.

See more stories tagged with:

climate change [11],

extreme weather [12]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/environment/new-executive-order-will-help-communities-prepare-extreme-weather

Links:

[1] http://climateprogress.org/

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/katie-valentine

[3] http://www.officialwire.com/pr/executive-order-preparing-the-united-states-for-the-impacts-of-climate-change/

[4] http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/image/president27sclimateactionplan.pdf

[5] http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/188970-obama-order-seeks-to-bolster-climate-change-defenses

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/01/science/earth/white-house-will-focus-on-climate-shifts-while-trying-to-cut-greenhouse-gases.html

[7] http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2013/10/21/76253/5-assignments-for-the-task-force-on-climate-preparedness/

[8] http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.nibs.org/resource/resmgr/MMC/hms_vol2_ch1-7.pdf

[9] http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/10/31/2862001/boston-climate-resilience/

[10] http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/10/23/2819541/5-cities-climate-resilient/

[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/climate-change

[12] http://www.alternet.org/tags/extreme-weather

[13] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

You might never have heard the name Heather Zichal (then again, being a Grist reader, you might very well have).

Zichal is the White House official who has done much of the president’s heavy lifting on climate policy. Which, despite promises made by Obama during the 2008 election campaign, had not been a particularly admirable amount. But then June 2013 rolled around, and Obama unveiled a far-reaching climate plan that had been crafted by Zichal — who by then had risen to become his senior climate and energy adviser. Zichal was also instrumental in developing new federal standards for the fuel efficiency of cars.

Sounds like preeminent, high-profile work, right? Wrong. Despite the headiness of the role, Zichal was never given the authority, profile, or resources that such important work deserves. Al Gore made a veiled reference to her post in June, complaining that Obama had just “one person” working on climate change “who hasn’t been given that much authority.”

And now, after five years, it’s splitsville for Zichal and the president. It’s not quite clear just yet what gig Zichal has lined up — butReuters is reporting that it will be “non-government” work.

The Washington Post reports that the White House wanted Zichal to stay, but that it didn’t do enough to convince her to stick around:

In an effort to keep Zichal on board, White House officials raised the possibility of her chairing the Council on Environmental Quality in the event that its chair, Nancy Sutley, would leave, according to people familiar with the decision who demanded anonymity in order to discuss sensitive personnel issues.

Sutley’s departure has not been announced, but the people familiar with the situation said she would step down before the end the year.

In a statement, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough praised Zichal’s work.

“Heather is one of the president’s most trusted policy advisers,” McDonough said.

Environmental Protection Agency administrator Gina McCarthy said Zichal was “tremendously influential,” but that her departure will not affect how the administration’s climate action plan moves forward.

Obama has become adept at losing top environmental officials. Zichal joins former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, and former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in parting ways with Obama during his second term.

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