The Minnesota Democrat says the 60-vote threshold should be abolished.
By Hunter Woodall, Star Tribune March 4, 2021
LEILA NAVIDI – STAR TRIBUNE. Sen. Tina Smith
WASHINGTON – Sen. Tina Smith said Thursday she supports abolishing the Senate filibuster amid growing debate over whether Democrats should throw out the 60-vote threshold now that they control the chamber.
“I believe that the filibuster should be abolished in all cases, not just for any particular piece of legislation,” Smith said. “We have already abolished the filibuster for judicial nominations and the Supreme Court, and to me this is a very important step that we need to take in order to make sure that the Senate can function and can do the work that we need to do.”
The Minnesota Democrat, who was elected to a full term in the 2020 election after being appointed to replace former Sen. Al Franken, said the issue was “sort of a theoretical” one when Republicans were in the majority. But with Democrats now holding a razor-thin edge by virtue of Vice President Kamala Harris’ ability to cast a tiebreaking vote, the issue has become more timely, Smith said.
But even with Smith’s support, she conceded that Democrats still lack enough support to eliminate the filibuster.
“To be honest, it’s not clear to me that there is a majority in the Senate right now that is in favor of getting rid of the filibuster,” Smith said.
The filibuster has become a major political flash point in the early days of President Joe Biden’s administration, given the expansive policy changes Democrats hope to make now that they have control of the White House and Congress.
GLEN STUBBE, STAR TRIBUNE. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, shown in 2019.
Because the filibuster allows the GOP minority to try to block most legislation it opposes, Democrats are using the budget reconciliation process to try to pass a $1.9 trillion COVID relief package, meaning the legislation only needs the votes of the 50 Democratic senators and Harris.
On Wednesday night, the Democrat-controlled House passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and soon after, the voting and ethics overhaul Democrats named the For the People Act. But even after passing the House, both need at least some GOP support in the Senate to overcome the 60-vote threshold. That’s unlikely to happen given the steep GOP resistance to the measures.
Minnesota’s GOP House delegation opposed both bills, and former President Donald Trump criticized the House version of the For the People Act as “a disaster” and a “monster,” during his Sunday CPAC speech as he called for the further tightening of voting restrictions.
What’s at stake in the filibuster discussions also hasn’t been lost on Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. She said Thursday night that “something has to change or we’re going to be just in this quagmire of not being able to advance legislation,” and emphasized that she has already supported filibuster reform.
Klobuchar is a leading driver of the For the People Act on the Senate side. Before the House passed its version Wednesday, she had already announced a hearing in the Senate’s Committee on Rules and Administration, which she chairs. The House passed a version of the bill in 2019, months after Democrats won back control of the chamber. But the legislation failed to gain traction in the then-GOP-controlled Senate.
“I’ve acknowledged there’s different ways you could do it,” Klobuchar said of filibuster reform. “You can get rid of it, which I support. You can change the numbers needed, which is something that we had talked about in early days, you know, have less numbers, not to get to 60. You can require what we call a talking filibuster, where you have to actually be there and object and speak the whole time.”
Fears of further inaction in the Senate despite Democratic control have only added to the filibuster debate.
Smith’s stance on what has become a key issue early in the Biden era is playing out against a backdrop of division within her own party over the filibuster.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has maintained his clear resistance to doing away with the filibuster, along with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz.
In an explanation on Facebook of her stance, Smith said when she arrived in the Senate she “started out believing that we should keep the filibuster.”
“I kept thinking about what would happen, what would stop a conservative president and a conservative Congress from doing terrible damage, for example, to women’s health care without the filibuster,” Smith said. “But the more I’ve thought about this, the more I realized that the filibuster has long been the enemy of progress.”
California is bone dry. Will March bring more misery or a miracle?
Paul Duginski March 5, 2021
The most recent U.S. Drought Monitor data released Thursday. (Paul Duginski / Los Angeles Times)
California, and Southern California in particular, is bone dry.
The calendar says spring officially begins with the equinox March 20, but the meteorological winter — consisting of December, January and February — is already in the record books. In other words, the wettest months are over. Let’s take a look at where the Golden State stands.
How dry?
Downtown Los Angeles received 1.84 inches of rain in December, when it normally would get 2.33 inches. Some 2.44 inches of rain fell in January, when L.A. normally expects 3.12 inches. And just a trace (that is, not enough to be measured) fell in February, when 3.80 inches normally falls. January and February are normally the two wettest months in L.A., after which the chances for rain diminish rapidly with the approach of spring and the end of the rainy season.
Disappointing rainfall in downtown Los Angeles reflected a dry winter in Southern California. (Paul Duginski / Los Angeles Times)
Just 4.55 inches of rain fell over Los Angeles as of Thursday, when it normally should have received 11.68 inches to date.
It’s not just Southern California
Los Angeles and Southern California have lots of company in this respect. The state and the West are gripped by persistent drought, including large areas of exceptional drought in the Southwest, where the 2020 monsoon was a no-show, as the most recent U.S. Drought Monitor report shows. Many water agencies are discussing water conservation measures, and the North Marin Water District is considering voluntary and mandatory water conservation orders.
California’s rainfall picture looks bleak as the meteorological winter — the state’s wettest months — comes to a close. (Paul Duginski / Los Angeles Times)
Talk of conservation is likely to spread if the drought persists, as is expected, according to the outlook below.
Persistent drought will continue in the West. (Paul Duginski / Los Angeles Times)
Why is this happening?
California has been plagued by an unusual and persistent upper-level ridge of high pressure in the Pacific off the West Coast. This has been blocking the storm track since last fall, making for a dry pattern that favors Santa Ana winds.
The predominant weather pattern since Oct. 1 has favored dry weather with more Santa Ana winds in Southern California. (Paul Duginski / Los Angeles Times)
This pattern is consistent with La Niña, which is still in effect in the equatorial Pacific. La Niña occurs when the sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific are below average. Easterly winds over that region strengthen, and rainfall usually decreases over the central and eastern tropical Pacific and increases over the western Pacific, Indonesia and the Philippines. This pattern favors warmer, drier conditions across the southern part of the U.S. and cooler, wetter conditions in the northern U.S.
La Niña continues in the equatorial Pacific, indicated here by the blue area of cooler sea surface temperatures. (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Los Angeles Times)
In the big picture, the drought in the West can be seen as a long-term event, interspersed with a few wet years, that has continued over the last two decades. The longer it lasts, the worse it gets, as climatologist Bill Patzert points out. It affects groundwater and the wildfire situation, and the effects build over time. The longer the drought goes, the greater the push for conservation.
Except for a few wet years, the West has been suffering drought for the last two decades. (Paul Duginski / Los Angeles Times)
Not only is the drought stubborn, as the chart above shows, but the dramatic rise in extreme and exceptional drought after 2020, compared with the extremes in other years since 2000, is also notable.
What are the chances of a ‘March miracle’?
The outlook for March isn’t overly encouraging. Cooler-than-average temperatures are forecast in California, and the Southwest either looks drier than average, or has equal chances of being wetter or drier than average. In other words, no “March miracle” appears to be in the offing.
The temperature and precipitation outlooks for March. (Paul Duginski / Los Angeles Times)
“Now that the ides of March are approaching, the snow and rain drama is whether California will have March misery or a miracle,” Patzert said.
Last-minute relief in March and April 2020 brought Southern California up to about normal, but record-breaking heat in the summer and fall intensified the existing widespread drought throughout the West.
Given that the seasonal average for downtown Los Angeles is 14.93 inches, “there is only one March in the historical record that would put downtown L.A. above average. That was the super El Niño year of 1884, the wettest March and rain year in our history,” Patzert said. “That El Niño delivered colossal March rains of 12.36 inches. In the present modest-to-strong La Niña year, that would be the longest of shots. Think of shooting a basket from the Forum to Staples Center.”
The Jan. 6 Capitol Hill rioters had some unseen help. Shady fundraising groups such as Women for America First and Turning Point Action helped organize the gathering and transport people to Washington for the event. Secretive shell companies and nonprofits affiliated with former President Donald Trump’s own campaign committee supported other elements of the rally.
It’s nearly impossible to know who funded such organizations, or what exactly they spent their money on, because the most sordid money in American politics hides—legally—in “dark money” groups that don’t have to report such details publicly. While many of the rioters who committed crimes at the Capitol now face charges, we may never know the names of political financiers who helped make it happen.
The House of Representatives passed new legislation on March 3 that would address this problem and end the ability of political donors to launder their money to avoid connection with unsavory causes. The For the People Act, as it is known, includes a provision that would require all political groups to disclose the names of donors who give more than $10,000, and ban the transfer of money from group to group to hide donor identities. “Dark money comes into the election system without anyone knowing its true source,” says Adav Noti, chief of staff at the Campaign Legal Center, which backs campaign-finance reforms. “This would eliminate dark money contributions that end up in campaign systems.”
Campaign finance in the United States is a complex web of opaque activities that invites abuse. Traditional campaigns and political-action committees must abide by four- or five-figure donation limits and identify donors, except for those giving small amounts. They must also detail what they spend their money on in regular reports to the Federal Election Commission.
In this Jan. 6, 2021 file photo, supporters of President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
So called “super PACs” must identify donors and expenditures as well, but there’s no limit on donations. Since these are “independent expenditure” groups, they’re not allowed to coordinate with the candidate or campaign they’re backing. But they do coordinate informally and some just break the rules. The biggest super PACs raise millions of dollars per election cycle and run many of the ads that blanket the media during campaigns.
Anonymous donors
Dark money groups are different. Many have nonprofit status but don’t have to report anything to the FEC. Some run ads or conduct campaign activities—such as transporting protesters to the Jan. 6 Trump rally. Others raise money from donors able to remain secret, then contribute to super PACs able to accept huge donations. Those PACs must list the dark-money group as a donor, but whoever gave the money in the first place remains anonymous.
A new dark-money twist is a shell company affiliated with a traditional campaign that can spend campaign funds without the normal disclosure requirements. The 2020 Trump campaign used a private company called American Made Media Consultants for nearly half of its $1.3 billion in spending on advertising, direct mail, software and a variety of other things. The Trump campaign had to disclose disbursements to the shell company, but the shell company didn’t have to disclose what it spent the money on. That raises the possibility the firm is a kind of slush fund directing donor money to favored vendors and perhaps even Trump family members getting paid as “consultants.” The Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the FEC, arguing the arrangement is illegal.
Dark-money groups spent at least $750 million in the 2020 elections, a record. One dark-money group funneled more than $1 million in foreign donations to Trump operations, which is flatly illegal. Author Jane Mayer asserts in her book “Dark Money” that secret funding by billionaires allows plutocrats to control government policy, worsening wealth and income inequality.
The US Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. was breached by thousands of protesters during a “Stop The Steal” rally in support of President Donald Trump during the worldwide coronavirus pandemic. (STAR MAX File Photo: 1/6/21)
The For the People Act wouldn’t ban any donations. It would only illuminate dark money, by requiring disclosure of the donors and the activities their money is spent on. That’s a deliberate effort to survive court challenges, given that the Supreme Court’s “Citizen’s United” decision in 2010 opened the financial floodgates by allowing unlimited corporate donations to super PACs. “The bill has been drafted with great care and with the Supreme Court in mind,” Noti says. “The court has been hostile toward democracy reform laws, but it has been uniformly supportive of disclosure.”
The For the People Act has gotten more attention for controversial changes to voting procedures that are arguably partisan. Democrats say these changes are necessary to prevent Republican-led states from restricting access to the polls, while Republicans argue it represents federal overreach. The bill passed the House with no Republican support, and it’s likely to die in the Senate, because it would take 10 Republicans in addition to all 50 Democrats voting for it to overcome the 60-vote filibuster threshold.
The disclosure measures should be less controversial, since there’s nothing democratic about funding political activity in secret. The Capitol riots should be a further spur for basic reforms. Yet Democrats have pushed to bring dark-money funding into the light for nearly a decade, with consistent opposition from Republicans, and that seems likely to continue. If the overall voting-reform bill dies, Democrats can introduce the disclosure requirements as a standalone measure, and if Republicans still block it, run on the issue in the 2022 and 2024 elections. If political money is vital to democracy, the people who provide it should be happy to say who they are.
Nalleli Cobo: How a nine-year-old fought an oil company and won
Patricia Sulbarán Lovera – BBC Mundo, Los Angeles March 5, 2021
Nalleli Cobo
When a Latino community in Los Angeles began their fight against an oil company they claimed was polluting their neighborhood, a young woman played a central role.
Nalleli Cobo was nine years old when she started suffering from asthma, nosebleeds and headaches.
It was the beginning of a battle against an active oil well site located in front of her house in South Los Angeles.
Nalleli and her mother soon found out that some of their neighbors were also getting sick.
The community, mostly composed of low-income families, protested until the site was temporarily shut down.
Cobo didn’t stop there. Joined by a group of young activists and organizations, they sued the city to demand more regulations in oil extraction. And they won.
A criminal case against the company, Allenco, and its handling of the site, resumes later this month. They declined to comment for this story but have previously stated that they invested capital to comply with regulations.
She has been compared to Greta Thunberg, although her name has been recognized locally for over a decade.
Nalleli Cobo and Greta Thunberg have worked together on environmental campaigns.
Cobo paused her activism activities in early 2020 after being diagnosed with cancer at the age of 19.
Her doctors don’t know what caused her illness.
After three surgeries and medical treatment, she has recently been declared cancer-free.
This is her story.
I grew up in University Park, in South Central Los Angeles, 30ft across the street from an oil well owned by AllenCo from 2009.
I lived with my mom, my three siblings, my grandma, my great grandpa, my great grandma all in one apartment. We were eight people, including me.
My mom is from Mexico and my dad is from Colombia. He was deported when I was two years old and my mom raised me.
It was the year 2010 and I was nine years old. All of the sudden I started having stomach pains, nausea.
I got body spasms so severe I couldn’t walk, my mom would have to carry me because I would freeze up like a vegetable.
I got nosebleeds so severe that I would have to sleep sitting down so I wouldn’t choke on my own blood at night.
Nalleli Cobo started suffering from nosebleeds, body spasms and other symptoms at nine years old
I was being poisoned in my home by a silent killer.
It was crazy to notice not just how my health was affected but everybody else’s in different ways.
My mother got asthma at 40 which is really rare, my grandma got it at 70 which is even more rare. My sister had fibroid problems, my brother had asthma, everybody had some kind of health issue.
But it wasn’t just my family, it was most of our community.
Moms started talking to each other and the word spread that there was there was something wrong.
We could smell it in the air. It smelled like rotten eggs and once it got into your house it wouldn’t go away, even if you close the windows, turned on fans and put air purifiers in the traverses of the windows.
Other times it would smell like guava or chocolate. These were artificial smells.
At the beginning, we started looking into if it was a leak in the building until we found a group of toxicologists to come speak to our community.
They explained that certain chemicals are used for oil extraction and emissions can harm human health if exposed for a long time.
The oil well that AllenCo operated from 2009 is located in a residential area, close to buildings and schools in South Los Angeles.
A pipeline that signals “Warning Petroleum Pipeline” close to Cobo’s childhood home.
That is when we made the connection with the oil well across the street.
So we started organizing in the community and created the campaign People Not Pozos (“pozos” means oil wells in Spanish).
We filed complaints with the South Coast Air Quality Management District and we knocked on doors asking people if they’d be willing to share their stories at a City Hall hearing.
It was so powerful to know that this community, the Spanish-speaking, black and brown immigrant community that nobody cared about was coming over to the City Hall to make our voices heard.
Nalleli Cobo speaking in a public hearing with LA elected officials.
They would ask me if I could share my story and I would use my little note cards and talk.
I was always super shy but I always felt comfortable doing public speaking.
The Los Angeles Times wrote a story about us and it captured the attention of former US California Senator Barbara Boxer.
At the press conference, Boxer brought investigators from the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and they went in to do a check up.
They were in there for a few minutes because they started getting sick from the smells.
(After local and federal investigations, AllenCo agreed to shut down the site temporarily).
(The city of Los Angeles sued the company and in 2016 secured a court order that requires AllenCo to follow stringent regulations if it wants to resume drilling).
We were happy when this was announced but it took time. We started organizing in 2010 and it shut down in 2013.
And now we want it to shut down permanently.
Nalleli Cobo became a figure of environmental activism in Los Angeles.
When we started campaigning, we noticed that we weren’t the only community being affected.
There are 580,000 angelenos that live within a quarter of a mile or less to an active oil and gas well.
Whenever I go somewhere to talk about this and I say I’m from Los Angeles, people are like: “Oh! That’s awesome, the Walk of Fame, Hollywood, celebrities…”
Well, LA is home to the largest urban oil field in the country and we don’t talk about it.
Cobo is studying Law and wants to become a civil rights attorney.
I am one of the cofounders of South Central Youth Leadership Coalition and along with other organizations we sued the city of Los Angeles in 2015 for a violation of the California Environmental Quality Act.
We won, and that means that when opening or expanding wells there is a new application process.
Even though I moved out of University Park, I’m campaigning to set up a 2,500 feet health and safety buffer zone between oil wells and schools, hospitals and parks.
At the same time, I am a normal kid. I am obsessed with makeup, I am a dancer, I love travelling and I am in college.
The only thing that makes me different is that I found my passion much earlier.
Cobo’s activism has been praised by Hollywood figures such as Mark Ruffalo and Jane Fonda
I was diagnosed with cancer on January 15 of 2020.
For a while I kept it quiet because it was such a scary word to process. The “C word” is something you never expect to hear at such a young age.
My mom and I were also worried about medical bills because I had to undergo surgery.
But we were fortunate enough to reach our goal through a crowd funding campaign.
Physically and emotionally the hardest thing was getting a radical hysterectomy. It took me 6 weeks to get out of bed.
My mom had to bathe me for six months and I had to take dozens of pills.
My oncologist still doesn’t know why I got cancer; they have been able to know by doing tests that it is not genetic.
I told them where I had grown up and asked if there was an environmental test I could take.
Cobo has recovered from cancer after a year of surgeries and medical treatment.
She said that, until we have new science, I am just a question mark.
I am recently cancer-free as of 18 January and feel really happy and excited about that.
I want to pursue my career as a civil rights attorney and go into politics afterwards.
My definition of environmental justice is the ability to breathe clean air despite my age, my gender, my ethnicity, social economic status or zip code.
It is fighting, it is protecting my community, my home.
Earth’s largest-ever mass extinction is a warning for humanity
Katherine Niemczyk March 4, 2021
Right now our planet is in the midst of what science says is an unprecedented rate of change, unlike anything seen in tens of millions of years. Overconsumption, unsustainable practices and the release of immense amounts of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels are altering our life-sustaining climate at a dangerous pace, oceans are acidifying and losing oxygen, and species are dying off.
But this is not the first time that life on our planet has faced an epic challenge. The worst came a little over 250 million years ago — before dinosaurs walked the earth — in an episode called the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction, or the Great Dying, when 90% of life in the oceans and 70% of life on land vanished.
/ Credit: CBS News
Recently, two groundbreaking studies on the Great Dying reveal that the causes of that mass extinction bear some striking similarities to what’s happening today. In fact, in some ways the pace of change, such as the rate of release of greenhouse gases, is much faster today than it was 250 million years ago.
Scientists say historic episodes like this offer a timely warning to humanity of what can happen when ecosystems change too fast for life to keep up.
In fact, the evidence compiled by scientific research on today’s pace of change is ominous to say the least. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing at a pace 100 times faster than it naturally should. Our planet is warming 10 times faster than it has in 65 million years. Our oceans are acidifying 100 times faster than they have in at least 20 million years, and oxygen dead zones in our oceans have increased tenfold since 1950.
Given the similarities, and what is at stake today, digging into the causes and impacts of the Great Dying can open up a window into a possible dire future for our planet — and also elucidate how urgent action is needed to avoid ecosystem and societal collapse.
What led to the Great Dying?
Digging is exactly what Professor Uwe Brand does for a living. As a geoscientist from Brock University in Canada, his job is to dig deep into Earth’s past by digging into the Earth itself, looking for clues about what the planet was like millions of years ago.
In this capacity, Brand is like a crime scene investigator looking for forensic evidence to help him put together the pieces of the Great Dying puzzle, an event which preceded his existence by hundreds of millions of years. Not an easy task.
For this story, CBS News interviewed Brand to help us understand how this all happened. “I call it the perfect storm,” said Brand, because as he explains, it was not a single game-changing event like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Instead it was a domino effect — a series of events, all related to each other, which eventually put a nail in the coffin.
After decades of uncertainty, two studies published around the same time illuminated how it happened. Brand was co-author of one of these studies, an October 2020 paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience examining the causes of the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction.
In the study Brand was involved in, the authors employed a technique using the element boron from fossil brachiopod shells, which they found in rocks in modern-day Italy, to derive a record of ocean acidity during the time of the mass extinction. This, combined with carbon isotope data using a sophisticated model, enabled the researchers to reconstruct the likely chain of events that killed almost all life on Earth 252 million years ago.
In another paper that was released at around the same time, researchers discovered a rare molecule called coronene in Italy and China which can only be formed when underground deposits of fossil fuels are super-heated. This was another clue which helped put the pieces together.
Here’s how Brand describes how the events unfolded: Over the course of a million years, extensive volcanic activity in what is now Siberia flowed through cracks and crevices of sedimentary rocks, searing oil and gas deposits as it moved along, producing the coronene scientists recently discovered.
Lava in the Kilauea region near Hilo, Hawaii, in 2018. Scientists believe massive volcanic activity some 250 million years ago led to widespread extinctions. / Credit: DVIDS/Hawaii National Guard
Consequently, massive lava beds were created. “It would cover at least half of the United States and to a thickness of at least several kilometers,” said Brand.
This process gradually released gigantic amounts of heat-trapping carbon gases at levels much higher than today. For comparison, carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations during that time period are estimated to be a few thousand parts per million (ppm), whereas today, our CO2 level, while higher than it’s been in the last 3 million years, is still significantly less, at 415 ppm (but rising fast).
The immense amount of greenhouse gases present back then warmed global atmospheric temperatures to levels 18 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today. Because of the impact this had on ecosystems, it forced land animals to rapidly adapt, move or die. Seventy percent did not make it.
In the ocean, atmospheric carbon dioxide was absorbed, mixing with water and forming sulfuric acid, acidifying the seas. As a result, coral disintegrated and the shells of ocean creatures dissolved.
Back on land, the hotter climate shifted vegetation and ignited fires. That exposed more rocks, and erosion went into overdrive. As a result, an overabundance of nutrients flowed into the oceans, causing at first an explosion of life. But then there was the inevitable death and decomposition, which ate up most of the life-giving oxygen in the ocean. Ninety percent of ocean life died. Brand says existence was getting hit from all angles.
“These are not individual and separate causes, but they all acted together, they acted in concert, and that is why I call it the perfect storm. You got hit on this side with temperature, on this side with acidification and then finally the knock-out punch came from deoxygenation.”
Learning from history
As catastrophic as the Great Dying was, scientists are concerned the Earth could now be headed for another disaster. Right now, the planet is warming abruptly to levels not seen in over 100,000 years, oceans are acidifying and oxygen dead zones are multiplying.
And astonishingly, Brand says that the rate of release of heat-trapping greenhouse gases now is much more radical than it was back then. “Right now our emissions are 10 to 20 times higher than what happened at the end of the Permian mass extinction, which was the largest and biggest mass extinction,” he said.
To save ourselves, he says we must learn from events like the Great Dying. “You know what they say, learn from history, because if you don’t you will repeat it.”
“The way I see it is, it is going to happen if we don’t stop it or don’t mitigate what we are doing,” he said. But Brand stressed that we still have time to turn it around by moving away from the burning of fossil fuels.
Biodegradable plastic production in China outpacing ability to break down waste, says Greenpeace
Marcus Parekh Greenpeace
A man carries a bag of plastic bottles on a roof at a recycling center in Hefei – Jianan Yu /Reuters
China has begun producing biodegradable plastic at such a rate that it can no longer break down the material at the same pace, according to a new report from Greenpeace.
According to the report, companies in China have ramped up production of biodegradable plastic to a capacity of 4.4 million tons per year. That capacity is expected to reach five million tons in the e-commerce sector alone by 2025, when a nationwide ban on non-biodegradable plastics is set to come into effect.
“Switching from one type of plastic to another cannot solve the plastics pollution crisis that we’re facing,” said Dr Molly Zhongnan Jia, a Greenpeace East Asia plastics researcher. “We need to take a cautious look at the effect and potential risks of mainstreaming these materials, and make sure we invest in solutions that actually reduce plastic waste.”
Non-biodegradable plastics take decades to decompose and release microplastics, which contaminates soil, water and the food chain.
People sort plastic bottles for recycling at a reclamation depot on in Qingdao – Hong Wu /Getty Images AsiaPac
By contrast, current forms of biodegradable plastic take up to six months to be broken down, but they require specific industrial treatment at high temperatures and humidity. If the material is left in landfill, the process takes much longer and still releases carbon into the atmosphere.
Most households do not have the ability to properly dispose of biodegradable plastics as they are often not suitable for household recycling and composting.
This results in many forms of biodegradable plastic being thrown away after a single-use, compounding the problem of plastic pollution.
“Reusable packaging systems and a reduction in overall plastic use are much more promising strategies to keep plastic out of landfills and the environment,” said Dr Jia.
I Went Into Anaphylactic Shock After My COVID Vaccine
Rachel Hillestad March 4, 2021
A few days ago, I went into anaphylactic shock while driving after receiving my second COVID vaccine. I couldn’t breathe, and just happened to be at a stop light next to a random ER. Since then, I have been receiving messages asking me if my experience had changed my mind about vaccinations.
The answer is No.
It has occurred to me that people could use my experience as a reason not to vaccinate, or an anecdotal story supporting their previously held view. I wanted to rectify that. Everyone knows I believe that Vaccines Cause Adults. (It’s my favorite shirt. I love to wear it to Whole Foods and Children’s Mercy, for very opposite reasons.) I have dear friends whose children cannot be vaccinated due to terrible allergic reactions requiring things like life flights and extended stays in the hospital due to other mitigating factors. You friends know I love you dearly, and I see you! Make the best choice for your family.
Rachel Hillestad/Facebook
That said, I would absolutely get the vaccine again. When it’s available for my children, they will get it, too. I’ve got a blood clotting disorder passed down from both my parents (heterozygous? homozygous? not sure — I always forget) and there is emerging research that those whose blood is prone to clot with this particular disorder can have a higher incidence of blood clots that settle in the lungs due to COVID infection. I also have a daughter who can’t get COVID and end up in the hospital again with infectious disease physicians shrugging their shoulders at her. No thanks.
While I was sitting at the corner of College and Metcalf about 300 feet from the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen, a building with ER emblazoned brightly on the side, I thought, “This would be the most ironic and dumbest way to die.” I considered running the light. (OK, truth time. I ran the light.)
Rachel Hillestad/Facebook
A friend whose husband is a doctor said that this kind of severe reaction happens in 1 of 5,000 individuals vaccinated. When boosters are available, I’ll have to take one that isn’t RNA. Yes. I’m so scientific!
After my daughter Phoebe was born and I nearly bled to death, a blood transfusion replaced half the blood in my body. The rate of occurrence for this type of thing happening to women who are having babies is 1 in 10,000. Does this mean I’d tell everyone to stop having babies? That would be silly. Everything we do involves a risk.
Anyway, I’d never had even a hint of an allergy before my blood transfusion. A few months after, I became allergic to a million different things and have undergone allergy immunotherapy in the form of weekly shots for the last two years. There’s emerging research that allergies can be passed from the donor to the recipient.
My anecdotal theory is that the adoration of coffee can also be passed along via blood transfusion. My sample size for the purposes of this study is exactly “one.” Before the transfusion, I would gag at the sight or smell of coffee. A few days after, it’s all I could think about, and I crave it now. I also developed a terrible penchant for binge-eating bananas, which I also found absolutely disgusting beforehand. On the other hand, maybe my body was just telling me I needed more potassium.
Rachel Hillestad/Facebook
I’m feeling better today; still swollen and achy.
If you have the chance to get the vaccine, please get it. My parents drove two hours to a random CVS in Missouri in order to get their first dose. My friend Krista tells me stories about watching African children with polio dragging themselves to the water well because their legs are completely nonfunctional. Whenever Doctors Without Borders arrive, parents will wait for HOURS or even DAYS to get their children the opportunity to be vaccinated. We are so privileged.
Don’t think I didn’t have the thought, “Of course I would be the person to die right next to an open ER in one of the most medically advanced countries in the world,” as I considered running the light to turn into the parking lot.
When you get the vaccine, stay the whole 15 minutes after that you are recommended to stay. I’ll be reporting my reaction to the manufacturer.
That’s my Fred talk. We’ll reserve the Ted talks for the actual medical professionals.
Arizona GOP lawyer tells Supreme Court the party needs certain voting restrictions to compete with Democrats
Tim O’Donnell March 2, 2021
The Supreme Court on Tuesday heard oral arguments by Arizona Republicans in defense of two voting restrictions they are looking to keep intact. At one point, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked Michael Carvin, a lawyer representing the Arizona GOP, what the party’s interest in maintaining the policy of discarding ballots cast at the wrong precinct was. Carvin answered, without hesitation, that removing the rule would prevent Republicans from competing in the state.
“It puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats,” he told Barrett. “Politics is a zero sum game. Every extra vote that they get through unlawful interpretations of Section 2 hurts us. It’s the difference between winning an election 50-49 and losing an election.”
Critics argued Carvin was essentially admitting some Republicans believe “it is okay to manipulate elections to gain partisan advantage.”
Per Reuters, part of the reason voting rights activists have targeted the precinct rule is that voters sometimes inadvertently cast their ballots at the wrong polling station because their assigned location is not always the closest one to their homes. However, Reuters reports the high court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, is likely to uphold the restriction, as well as another that makes it a crime to hand over someone else’s ballot to election officials during early voting.
However, a Right to Work bill continues forward in New Hampshire
By Brian Young March 02, 2021
Photo By: KPAX
Montana and Colorado have both stopped attempts to pass Right to Work laws and will continue to be free bargaining states.
In Montana, Republicans have control over the entire state government, a first in over 16 years. Yet, over the past month, union members and employers have successfully pushed legislators to vote against Right to Work. On Tuesday, with union members filling the gallery and lining the hallways, legislators voted down the bill by a vote of 38 in favor to 62 opposed. In a show of bipartisanship, 29 Republicans joined with 33 Democrats in opposing the bill.
In speaking in opposition to the bill Rep. Derek Harvey, a Democrat from Butte spoke about the role that unions played in his city producing the copper that fueled the industrial revolution, electrified the nation, and supplied ammunition during both World Wars.
“I know my past. I know my town’s past. I also know the history of a man named Frank. Frank (Little) was standing up for his fellow workers when one night he was drug out of his boarding house and beat nearly to death and drug behind a car through the center of my district,” Harvey said before going on to list the Anaconda Road massacre and labor strikes of 1914 that led to martial law in his district. “This is an outrageous bill, and it’s an outrage that it’s made it (this far) through the process.”
Members from around the state came to the Capitol to pressure lawmakers into voting against the bill.
“These are not partisan members,” said Al Eklbad, Executive Secretary of the AFL-CIO, who was among those in the hallway. “These are people who believe in their collective bargaining rights. They vote for a lot of different issues but the bottom line is our membership will stand for its right to collectively bargain.”
In Colorado, a similar Right to Work bill was rejected. By an 8-5 party-line vote, the House Business Affairs and Labor Committee voted down the bill. “What we didn’t hear today was any examples of people saying that they had bad impacts from a union,” committee chair Dylan Roberts said. “What we did hear a lot of evidence of was the benefit of a union for workers across the state from all different types of professions. We certainly need to take more steps, whether government or non-governmental, to improve our economy but I don’t think that this is one of those things.”
Mark Thompson, a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America testified against the bill saying “This is union-busting legislation — it always has been, always will be. This is strictly to weaken unions.”
With Montana and Colorado blocking Right to Work bills, New Hampshire is the only other state currently considering a Right to Work bill. That bill passed the State Senate by 13-11, with only one Republican voting against the bill. The Right to Work bill now heads to the State House.
A Texas city had a bold new climate plan – until a gas company got involved
Emily Holden for Floodlight, Amal Ahmed for the Texas Observer and Brendan Gibbons for San Antonio Report March 1, 2021
Photograph: Montinique Monroe/Getty Images
When the city of Austin drafted a plan to shift away from fossil fuels, the local gas company was fast on the scene to try to scale back the ambition of the effort.
Like many cities across the US, the rapidly expanding and gentrifying Texas city is looking to shrink its climate footprint. So its initial plan was to virtually eliminate gas use in new buildings by 2030 and existing ones by 2040. Homes and businesses would have to run on electricity and stop using gas for heat, hot water and stoves.
The proposal, an existential threat to the gas industry, quickly caught the attention of Texas Gas Service. The company drafted line-by-line revisions to weaken the plan, asked customers to oppose it and escalated its concerns to top city officials.
In its suggested edits, the company struck references to “electrification”, and replaced them with “decarbonization”– a policy that wouldn’t rule out gas. It replaced “electric vehicles” with “alternative fuel vehicles”, which could run on compressed natural gas. It offered to help the city to plant more trees to absorb climate pollution and to explore technologies to pull carbon dioxide out of the air – both of which might help it to keep burning gas.
Those proposed revisions were shared with Floodlight, the Texas Observer and San Antonio Report, by the Climate Investigations Center, which obtained them through public records of communications between city officials and the company.
The moves have so far proven a success for Texas Gas. The most recently published draft of the climate plan gives the company much more time to sell gas to existing customers, and it allows it to offset climate emissions instead of eliminating them. The city, however, is revisiting the plan after a backlash to the industry-secured changes.
The lobbying in Austin is not unique. It echoes how an electricity and gas company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars scaling back San Antonio’s climate ambitions by funding the city’s plan-writing process, replacing academics with its preferred consultants and writing its own “Flexible Path” that would let it keep polluting.
The American Gas Association in a statement for this story said it “will absolutely oppose any effort to ban natural gas or sideline our infrastructure anywhere the effort materializes, state house or city steps”. But it argued that position is “not counter to environmental goals we all share”, and said “natural gas is key to achieving the cleaner energy future we all want”.
Texas’s reliance on gas was on display in mid-February when more than 4m households lost power for days after a freak winter storm battered the state. Gas power plants dominate the Texas grid, providing 47% of the state’s electricity. Many of those plants and the natural gas pipelines leading to them failed in the cold conditions.
More than a third of Texas households also rely on gas for heat. Competition for gas-fueled power and heat forced prices to surge as high as 16,000%, one power company said. Utilities now face massive bills from their gas suppliers – and many are passing the costs on to customers in the form of sky-high bills.
The CEO of Comstock Resources, a gas company owned by the billionaire Dallas Cowboys owner, Jerry Jones, described the gas industry windfall as “hitting the jackpot” in an earnings call.
A nationwide fight goes local
The gas industry is battling climate change reforms in cities around the US – with support from Republican politicians.
In Texas, lawmakers have introduced two bills that would prohibit local governments from banning gas connections. “There hasn’t been a city necessarily that has banned natural gas yet, but we have whispers from the Austin city council, the city of Houston, even smaller cities,” said Jeff Carlson, the chief of staff for Representative Cody Harris, who introduced one of the bills.
Four other state legislatures passed similar laws last year, and 12 more have seen proposals for them in 2021. The gas lobby, the American Gas Association, has said it isn’t actively coordinating support or lobbying for state laws to prohibit gas bans, but its internal records indicate a different story.
“We are increasingly active in the States,” the association’s president, Karen Harbert, said in a November letter to members explaining how the organization spent membership dues in 2020. She said the association is participating in several “Pro Natural Gas Coalitions” to bring allies together.
“Over the course of the year, legislation preserving energy choice for customers passed in Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee,” Harbert said.
Another internal association email in February 2020 shows the senior director of state affairs, Daniel Lapato, asking a publicly-owned gas utility to back the Tennessee bill that ultimately passed.
The gas burned in buildings causes about 12% of US climate pollution, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Cities are trying to shrink those heat-trapping emissions with building codes and mandates to switch from gas to electric appliances.
In Texas, they could have a significant impact. Texas burns far more gas than any other state, 14.9% of the US total.
Gas is cheap, and affordability is a major concern in Austin, where families and people of color continue to get priced out of the fast-growing city.
But even so, Austinites don’t necessarily want gas, said Chelsea Gomez, a community ambassador who consulted on the city plan. “When you talk to people, they don’t want natural gas as a middle man to a sustainable future – they want solar panels to be affordable for them,” said Gomez. “People want better [options].”
The fossil fuel also has clear climate impacts. In Texas, the number of days that are 100F or hotter has more than doubled over the past 40 years and could double again by 2036, according to a study from the Texas state climatologist. Extreme rainfall and urban flooding are increasing, hurricanes are getting more intense and the Gulf of Mexico is rising. Droughts and wildfires are becoming more severe.
Those effects were what Austin was trying to help to limit when Texas Gas Service got involved.
‘Crashing the party’
After one early meeting in June with the city’s climate program manager, Texas Gas’ regulatory affairs manager, Larry Graham, said in an email to Austin’s climate program manager, Zach Baumer, that the proposal for all-electric new construction had “gotten the attention of people at the highest level of our company”. The city released the internal emails, along with the draft versions of the plan, in response to a request for public records.
By July, employees of the company’s parent corporation, One Gas, were weighing in on the proposals from their headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
It was a level of involvement that raised red flags among city employees.
Baumer later emailed Graham that his company was “kind of crashing a party” when it attended meeting after meeting.
Still, the city officials listened to Texas Gas’ feedback. The climate plan originally called for completely eliminating natural gas use in all buildings by 2040. A few months after the gas company’s lobbying efforts, the city moved the goalposts: Only 25 percent of existing buildings would need to transition off gas by 2030, although all new buildings would have to be off gas by then too.
Texas Gas would be allowed to offset its pollution, by purchasing credits for climate work elsewhere in the country, upgrading leaky pipes and using “renewable” gas from a wastewater treatment plant – efforts which environmental advocates said weren’t enough.
An aerial view of homes, buildings and electrical lines running through an Austin neighborhood on 19 February.Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The steering committee was incensed, according to a handful of participants interviewed. The members were selected from the community to focus on equity and write an ambitious plan, but the industry was already thwarting them.
Baumer said he quickly realized his mistake.
“Everybody was pissed at me. I had to call and apologize to people because we sort of gave into what Texas Gas wanted,” Baumer said. “I thought I was making a compromise position. The people who were part of the plan didn’t think that.”
Shane Johnson, the co-chair of the steering committee who works for the Sierra Club, called Texas Gas’ influence “unnerving”.
After environmental advocates balked at the revisions, the city agreed to revert back to the original, more aggressive goals.
Texas Gas, when asked for comment, said it was “invited to participate in the revisions to the Austin Climate Equity Plan and [has] remained an engaged partner ever since”. The company said it has participated in Austin climate initiatives since 2014 and shares the aspiration of reducing carbon emissions.
“We believe that by working together we can improve our community and create effective, long-term strategies that reach the city’s sustainability goals in an equitable and affordable manner for all residents,” Texas Gas said.
In September, when the company seemed to be losing the fight over the proposal, it sent an email to customers claiming it would “severely” drive up costs and “threatens to take away the rights of people to choose their source of energy”.
San Antonio
In San Antonio, local business interests – from the city’s utility company to car dealerships – were even more successful in scrubbing language that called for a full transition away from fossil fuels.
CPS Energy, the city-owned utility that supplies power and gas to San Antonio, spent $650,000 to fund the climate planning process and helped put its preferred consulting firm in charge instead of faculty at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
As committees were meeting in 2018, CPS Energy leaders announced they had already developed their own plan for the coming decades, called the “Flexible Path”. It called for CPS Energy to get half its energy from wind and solar sources by 2040, while also continuing to operate its coal plant into the 2060s.
A draft plan in 2019 refused that approach, but the utility kept pushing back. In April 2019, CPS CEO Paula Gold-Williams called for an “in-depth cost analysis”. In a letter to San Antonio’s chief sustainability officer Doug Melnick, she suggested the draft would be too costly for customers and might jeopardize grid reliability. She won. The next draft in August 2019 adopted CPS’s “Flexible Path”. It didn’t attempt to address one serious flaw: the “Flexible Path” wouldn’t get San Antonio to its goal of being carbon neutral by 2050.
CPS did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.
In response to the lobbying, the city’s final plan watered down key emission goals, replacing specific strategies to cut emissions with vague and sometimes misleading platitudes.
The climate activists did have some successes. They got the city to include interim goals – to cut climate pollution 41% by 2030 and 71% by 2040 as checkpoints on the path to carbon neutrality by 2050.
Greg Harman, a clean energy advocate with the Sierra Club who served on one of the climate plan committees, said Texas’s reputation as hostile to climate action is both earned and imposed on the state by the energy industry. Like the rest of the US, surveys show a majority of Texans believe that climate change is real and a cause for concern.
“We’re a complex and interesting state, we just happen to have a lot of energy resources,” Harman said. “But the cynics are right to be cynical.”
LEILA NAVIDI – STAR TRIBUNE. Sen. Tina Smith
