Editorial: Welcome, Republicans, to the real, warming world
The Times Editorial Board
Oil rig pump jacks work near the town of Maricopa, west of Bakersfield. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
Faced with polls showing not only that most Americans want more done about climate change, but that a majority of Republicans feel the same way, a substantial number of GOP lawmakers are sounding a conciliatory note on the issue.
Sixty House Republicans have now joined a Conservative Climate Caucus, formed by Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah), that is willing at least to acknowledge the problem instead of labeling it a hoax, as President Trump did early on, or pretending that it’s temporary and that human actions haven’t contributed. Among its members are three Californians: Reps. David Valadao of Hanford, Michelle Steel of Seal Beach and Jay Obernolte of Big Bear Lake.
Republicans in both chambers appear ready to start talking — and go a little bit further. The Senate recently voted 92 to 8 for the Growing Climate Solutions Act, which was supported by the Citizens’ Climate Lobby. If it passes the House as expected and is signed by President Biden, it would ease the way for farmers and ranchers to earn and sell credits for reducing or mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s progress, as is the less divisive approach. But in truth, the climate caucus and its somewhat more solutions-oriented tone are far too little, coming this late in the game.
Curtis talks about how he has spent a lot of time trying to understand the science; he and other Republicans needed to be quicker studies because the world is running out of time to avert the worst effects of climate change. Worse, the caucus’ public statements indicate that its members won’t support reining in the use of fossil fuels in serious ways, as climate scientists insist we must do. Instead, the caucus calls those sources of greenhouse gases part of the solution to the need for stable sources of energy.
The caucus’ other areas of interest — safe nuclear energy and carbon sequestration — are more promising, with caveats. If Republicans can somehow come up with a truly safe nuclear path, the nation will be all ears. Right now, however, “safe nuclear” rings a little bit like the oxymoron “clean coal.” And before any thought of expanding nuclear energy can occur, the country would first have to identify a place to store spent fuel rods and then figure out a foolproof way to transport them there.
The most stable forms of energy are the nearly infinite ones, such as solar and wind, not fuels that will eventually be tapped out (and that cause other environmental harms in their extraction). Nor does this country need to rely on foreign sources to maintain a steady supply of the sun.
It will be important for Republicans not to use this as a shield to convince America that they really do care about climate change and the increasingly frequent droughts, wildfires and extreme weather events, when in fact they aren’t willing to take tough steps to soften future blows. Any discussion of environmental reform that excludes a drastic reduction in the use of fossil fuels is just happy talk, not reality.
Nor is it helpful to complain, as Curtis does, that nothing we do will matter much as long as China emits more carbon than the United States. On a per capita basis, this country still produces more greenhouse gas emissions, and China has been making major strides toward clean energy.
For now, incremental change is better than none at all. The reality is that support from both parties will be needed to pass important new climate change laws, and so the help of Republicans is welcome in accomplishing that — as long as they don’t demand concessions on the move to clean, sustainable energy in exchange for supporting tree-planting. With the mounting evidence all around us, the GOP should not have to be dragged kicking and screaming into admitting that there is a climate crisis and that it will require serious and sometimes uncomfortable commitments from the nation.
John Roberts,Dianne Feinstein,Lindsey Graham – Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP
WASHINGTON — In the fall of 1981, a young conservative lawyer named John Roberts, fresh off a Supreme Court clerkship, arrived at the Justice Department at the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Hired as a special assistant to the attorney general, Roberts focused on voting rights, and in particular the battle underway in Congress over the reauthorization of parts of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. That included Section 2 of the law, which gave voters a tool to fight discriminatory voting laws and rules in the states.
As Roberts settled in at DOJ, a coalition of Democrats and Republicans in Congress wanted to reform Section 2. Under their plan, voters could strike down discriminatory voting laws by proving those laws caused discrimination, not that the people who made the laws had set out to discriminate. In other words, intent didn’t matter; outcomes did.
John Roberts helped lead the fight to stop this change. He drafted op-eds, talking points, and memos arguing that the proposed reforms gave the federal government too much power to influence state voting laws and would lead to a quota system for who held elected office.
Roberts and the Reagan DOJ failed. The Voting Rights Act reauthorization passed with bipartisan support in 1982, and the number of lawsuits about discriminatory voting laws brought under Section 2 went from three in 1981 to 175 in 1988, according to the book Give Us the Ballot by the journalist Ari Berman. But Roberts would get his revenge. He claimed the Supreme Court chief justice’s seat once held by his mentor, William Rehnquist, in 2005. In the ensuing years, Roberts has chiseled away, piece by piece, at the nation’s laws for voting rights, campaign spending, and other democracy issues. Today, voting-rights activists and election-law scholars say the Roberts court, having dismantled chunks of the post-Watergate ethics reforms and the Voting Rights Act, is one of the biggest impediments to democratic reform at a time when the country needs those reforms more than ever.
The final two opinions of the most recent Supreme Court term put this phenomenon on full display. In Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, the court’s six conservative justices ruled that California’s requirement that charities disclose their biggest donors to state regulators was unconstitutional. Critics of anonymous political spending say the decision will fuel future challenges to transparency laws and empower anonymous donors at a time when American politics is awash in dark money from Democratic and Republican groups alike. “We are now on a clear path to enshrining a constitutional right to anonymous spending in our democracy, and securing an upper hand for dark-money influence in perpetuity,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in a statement reacting to the decision.
In the second decision, Brnovich v. DNC, the Roberts court knee-capped Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The Brnovich decision, legal experts say, will give greater leeway to state governments when they craft voting rules, and makes it much harder to prove that a voting law is discriminatory. “This is the rewrite of Section 2 that John Roberts couldn’t get in 1981,” Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, tells Rolling Stone. “I think it’s going to be extremely difficult now (to bring Section 2 challenges) except for the most egregious forms of voter discrimination.”
Combined, the AFPF and Brnovich decisions continue the Roberts court’s decade-plus track record of undermining the hard-fought voting laws enacted during the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-corruption reforms passed in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. And with a six-vote conservative majority on the Supreme Court in place for years — if not decades — to come, that trend shows no sign of ending soon. “As long as there’s a strong conservative majority on the court, any hope that the courts will do anything to rein campaign spending or states’ efforts to restrict the vote or tilt the playing field is indeed a hollow hope,” says Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America.
In the face of the Roberts court’s agenda, reformers in Congress and in state legislatures as well as election-law scholars say the need for new policies tailored to survive the high court’s scrutiny. Coming at a time when Republican state governments are seeking to restrict access to the ballot box, the Supreme Court’s latest decisions are “yet another affront to Americans’ right to pick their elected officials and know who is working to influence the democratic process,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) tells Rolling Stone. “This further underscores the need for Congress to pass legislation to protect the freedom to vote and ensure that our democracy works for the people, not for special interests and billionaires.”
Before surveying the options under consideration by reformers, it’s worth better understanding how far-reaching and potentially damaging the Supreme Court’s last two decisions were.
In the AFPF case, the court struck down California’s requirement that large donors to charities must be disclosed to the state government so that the state can root out possible fraud related to those donors. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a Koch-backed group, and the Thomas More Law Center challenged that requirement, saying it violated the group’s freedom to associate in private. They also cited the risk of harassment if the private donor information became public (as had happened in the past when some donor information was leaked).
The case harkened back to the influential NAACP v. Alabama decision in 1958, when the Supreme Court ruled that the NAACP didn’t have to disclose members who feared facing retribution in the Jim Crow South. In AFPF, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, ACLU, and other civil-rights groups invoked that earlier case in a friend-of-the-court brief that argued for the right to associate in private and urged the court to reach a narrow decision that would have struck down California’s rule without broader implications for transparency in civic and political life.
Instead, the majority’s opinion, written by Roberts, has broad implications for politics and activism. Before, the Supreme Court had made clear that disclosure was important enough to preserve even if it led to some nastiness or vitriol as a result. In his AFPF opinion, Roberts tossed that out the window. The mere possibility of a chilling effect on association was enough, he wrote in his opinion, to justify getting rid of certain disclosure requirements.
Roberts’ decision does more than wipe out California’s law, experts say. Under this reasoning, it opens the door to future challenges to longstanding laws on the disclosure of campaign donations put in place after Watergate, when untraceable money flooded into American elections and led to corruption. “Today’s analysis marks reporting and disclosure requirements with a bull’s-eye,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent in the AFPF case.
In Brnovich, the voting-rights case, the Roberts court took the opposite stance toward a state’s authority to set the rules. This time, in an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court deferred to the states to set their own voting rules and raised the bar almost impossibly high to challenge those laws for alleged discrimination, voting-rights advocates say. The majority’s opinion makes it so that a state can justify voting changes (cutting early voting, restricting absentee voting, reducing polling places) if it did so in the interest of preventing possible fraud, even if such fraud is vanishingly rare. The majority’s Brnovich ruling also takes as its benchmark the year 1982 — the year when Congress last passed major updates to the Voting Rights Act — for gauging the discriminatory nature (or not) of voting changes.
Rick Hasen, the election-law expert, describes the practical effect of the decision like this. Imagine that a state offered a week of early voting, he says, and there was evidence that a large number of African American voters used the Sunday before the election to do Souls to the Polls drives to get people to vote right after church. Then imagine that, post-Brnovich, the same state got rid of Sunday early voting and the evidence suggested the state did so to blunt African American turnout.
Under the Roberts court majority’s approach, Hasen says, this would likely not run afoul of Section 2. In his opinion, Alito says the benchmark for measuring whether a voting change is discriminatory is how it compares to the voting rules when the VRA was last reauthorized — in 1982. His test also implies that as long as a state can point to other voting opportunities, it can fairly justify cutting something like Sunday early voting. “For one reason, in 1982 there were very few early voting opportunities, so eliminating early voting can’t be a Section 2 violation because that wasn’t the norm in 1982,” Rick Hasen says. “For another thing, you have to look at the election system as a whole, so long as there are other ways to vote, then it’s not discriminatory under this court’s ruling.”
So what can — and what should — Congress do?
Lee Drutman, the New America political-reform expert, says the For the People Act, aka H.R. 1 and S. 1, contains a number of provisions that could repair some of the damage done by the Supreme Court’s two most recent decisions. That bill — which was recently filibustered in the Senate but Democrats have vowed to revive — would increase disclosure of dark-money donations, mandate paper ballots, and give the federal government more latitude to expand access to the ballot box.
But Drutman acknowledges that many of the most popular pieces of the For the People Act — which has a slim change of passing in the first place — will face challenges by conservative and libertarian legal groups. “Republicans are going to litigate the hell out of it,” he says.
As pressure builds inside the American democratic system because of hyper-partisanship, the nationalization of politics, and many other factors, what’s needed are release valves, Drutman says. He supports reforms that might break the “two-party doom loop,” as he puts it. Those include Alaska’s model of a top-four primary election and ranked-choice voting like in New York City but applied to, say, the U.S. Senate. “I think you’d see opportunities for more political parties and new coalitions forming,” he says. “You’d get the release valves.”
Rick Hasen says lawmakers should focus for now on the most immediate threat to American democracy: election subversion. He says the country narrowly avoided such a disaster in the 2020 election despite Trump’s attempts to pressure state and local election officials, like when he asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,870 votes to give him the victory in Georgia. But with the Trumpist wing of the GOP in full control, and Republican state legislatures moving to pass laws that empower partisans to dictate how elections are run and counted, subversion remains a threat, whether it’s the prospect of a state legislature selecting a rival slate of electors, a president pressuring election workers to change the count, or members of Congress disrupting the certification process in Washington, D.C.
Hasen says the universal use of paper ballots, tougher penalties for anyone who interferes with the election-counting process, and reform of the antiquated Electoral Count Act could all help prevent a future attempt to overturn or change an election outcome. It’s also a more narrowly tailored solution that, he says, could win over 10 Senate Republicans.
“We may not know until January 2025, when Congress has counted the Electoral College votes of the states, whether those who support election integrity and the rule of law succeeded in preventing election subversion,” Hasen wrote this spring. “That may seem far away, but the time to act to prevent a democratic crisis is now.”
Editorial: Trumpification complete: The mess in Ohio is a terrible sign for America
New York Daily News, New York Daily News
After losing the presidency and the Senate thanks to Donald Trump’s disastrous management of COVID, Republicans look determined to try to ascend again in Washington by parroting his stolen election lies. If you can’t snap out of a slumber, it seems, the second best thing is to dive back into the delusions of your dream.
Consider Ohio, where a recent two-term Republican governor named John Kasich spoke up with intelligence and strength against Trump, and where the current Republican governor, Mike DeWine, correctly diagnosed the Jan. 6 insurrection, saying that the ex-president ”has started a fire that has threatened to burn down our democracy.”
The Kasich-DeWine GOP is nowhere to be found among the current crop of Republicans vying to replace the retiring Sen. Rob Portman next year.
Jane Timken, former state GOP chair, has boasted of turning the party into “a well-oiled, pro-Trump machine.” Another Senate candidate, former state Treasurer Josh Mandel, called Rep. Anthony Gonzalez a “traitor,” the likes of whom should be “eradicated from the Republican Party,” after Gonzalez voted to impeach Trump.
Then there’s J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy.” The Republican golden boy who grew up poor in Appalachia, went to Iraq, then graduated from Yale Law School and became a venture capitalist is in the midst of a bout of self-flagellation for telling the truth about Trump in 2016. Back then, he tweeted that Trump was “reprehensible” for his views on “immigrants, Muslims, etc.” and told NPR, “I can’t stomach Trump.” In his desperate bid to get on the right side of the monster, Vance has deleted the offending tweets, saying “I regret being wrong about the guy.”
If the Republican Party in not-long-ago-swing-state Ohio has been swallowed whole by Trump, even as his free-fall dive off the deep end continues, even as he and his confidantes, buying into a clinically insane conspiracy theory, seem to think his return to the Oval Office could come as soon as August, what hope does the national GOP have?
Opinion: Think Los Angeles is a desert? You need to see it from the San Gabriel Mountains
Paul Thornton
Low clouds drift into the mountains and valleys of the San Gabriels in 2020. (Los Angeles Times)
There are a few things wrong with the libelous statement “Los Angeles is in a desert.” First, it is factually inaccurate (but maybe not for much longer), as explained by The Times Editorial Board recently. Second, even if it were true, it wouldn’t explain the whole story. A trip into our local mountains can help explain why.
From sea level or thereabouts, much of Los Angeles feels flat and dry — like a desert. But take a steep hike to one of the looming peaks in the San Gabriel Mountains, and you’re rewarded with views that are both visually stunning and educational. Perched a mile above the city, you see vast alluvial fans and washes emanating from the mountains that are graded, dammed up and otherwise “controlled” in ways that shunt water to the ocean and make urbanization possible. Prior to the area’s buildup, this water was left to find its own way to the sea or fan out over the basins that would eventually be paved over and turned into tidy street grids. Even if precipitation over what would become Los Angeles wasn’t plentiful, the water that flowed from the San Gabriels and San Bernardinos was much more so, percolating into the aquifers beneath us and creating a wetter, vastly more complex landscape than we can imagine today. There’s a reason one of our major streets is called “La Cienega.”
The letters here were written in response to the previously mentioned editorial. As we discuss yet another water emergency in California and climate change’s role in it, perhaps it’s worth remembering how our alteration of the landscape to make the area “habitable” may have made it less so.
To the editor: Every time I read an article about how we don’t have enough water and all the ways we should preserve what we have, I think about the thousands of new houses and apartments we are building in and around Los Angeles without sufficiently considering how that affects our water use.
Why is it that water usage is not considered more thoroughly when building all these new units? It should be the first consideration. I also rarely read about how much traffic density will change with all this unlimited growth in Southern California.
When I look at the photos that The Times has been running of Lake Mead, I think of the phenomenal growth of Las Vegas and am not surprised that the reservoir, the largest in the United States, is running out of water.
We have to look at the whole picture when we decide to build, build, build. That is not happening now.
Marie Gamboa, Los Angeles
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To the editor: Once again, kudos to The Times for its unwavering persistence in keeping at the forefront the very real and threatening effects of climate change to those of us right here, right now in California.
Unlike those past civilizations that were not able to adapt to the reduction in water resources, I’d like to think many of us want to answer the call and support whatever measures are deemed necessary to meet the current challenges.
So, L.A. Times, please write another editorial outlining how we can support or demand from our water resource officials the historic actions necessary to meet the moment.
In the interim, can we all agree a monumental next step would be for all of us to demand passage of pending legislation in Congress to attach a fee to carbon production and fossil fuels? This would reduce carbon emissions and provide funding for the kind of necessary innovation mentioned above.
Wayne Bass, Mission Viejo
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To the editor: Right — we are not yet living in a desert, but the California landscape is a charred husk as fire crews put out yet more blazes up and down the state. And it’s almost beside the point to bolster water infrastructure without addressing the imperative to sharply reduce emissions and sequester carbon.
We will have more fires, more drought, more lake and reservoir loss and more sea level rise until we face this climate Armageddon.
Elizabeth Fenner, Los Angeles
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To the editor: Your editorial was a well-written piece about the state of the local area and the western United States as a whole with respect to our water supply.
In listening to all the discussion of President Biden’s infrastructure plan, why do I hear no mention of desalination plants for the western United States? Global warming is making oceans rise, so there is abundant supply.
This truly would be an infrastructure project and would help alleviate the Achilles’ heel of living in an arid climate.
Frank Perri, Claremont
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To the editor: Part of the solution — which would help solve two problems — is covering the surface-level aqueducts that bring water to urban areas with solar panels.
A great deal of water is lost to evaporation. Covering these aqueducts would reduce that as well as provide vast amounts of electricity while not putting open land at risk of destruction.
‘We live in a desert. We have to act like it’: Las Vegas faces reality of drought
Oliver Milman
Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images
Investigator Perry Kaye jammed the brakes of his government-issued vehicle to survey the offense. “Uh oh this doesn’t look too good. Let’s take a peek,” he said, exiting the car to handle what has become one of the most existential violations in drought-stricken Las Vegas – a faulty sprinkler.
Kaye is one of nearly 50 water waste investigators deployed by the local water authority to crack down on even the smallest misuse of a liquid perilously scarce in the US west, desiccated by two decades of drought. The situation in Las Vegas, which went a record 240 consecutive days without rain last year, is increasingly severe.
Lake Mead, the vast reservoir that supplies Las Vegas with 90% of its water, has now plummeted to a historic low, meaning Nevada faces the first ever mandatory reduction in its water supply next year. This looming cutback is forcing restrictions upon the city that has somehow managed to thrive as a gaudy oasis in the baking Mojave desert.
“The lake isn’t getting any fuller at this time so we need to conserve every single drop,” said Kaye, an energetic former US air force serviceman who wears a hi-vis vest and brandishes a badge as he does his rounds searching for violators. He starts his shift at 4am. “A lot of people think because we are government workers we are not out there at that time but we are out 24/7, every day of the year,” he said.
Kaye regularly hands out fines – they start at $80 and then double for each further offense – for the sort of rule-breaking he has spotted in Summerlin, a wealthy Las Vegas enclave where landscapers tend manicured grounds in the soaring heat. Water sprayed on to lawns and plants isn’t allowed to flow off the property, but that day a damaged sprinkler had caused water to cascade into the gutter, where the precious resource is lost.
“Look, we’ve got a little creek or stream here,” said Kaye, as he used his phone to video the water snaking on to the road. “If everyone did this, quite a bit of water would be wasted.”
It’s so hot in Vegas – this July day’s temperature will breach 40C (104F) – that the errant water will evaporate within five minutes. Kaye planted a yellow flag next to the leak as a warning to the homeowners but a few taps on the computer mounted in his cruiser shows this property has a previous warning, so an $80 fine will be on its way.
There’s a growing realization, however, that such rules – no watering between 11am and 7pm, none at all on Sundays – won’t be sufficient as Nevada is squeezed by a drought that has escalated dangerously in 2021. In June, the state passed a law to rip up “non-functional” public turf in Las Vegas, such as grass planted beside roads or on roundabouts, over the next five years to save around 10% of city water use.
“That is just wasteful – the only person who walks on that is the person who cuts it,” said Kaye, jabbing a finger at a nearby grass verge median. “Some people just want to recreate home, where they grew up with grass.” The new law, along with a financial incentive given to homeowners to replace thirsty grass with more hardy desert plants and rocks, is an acknowledgment that climate change won’t easily allow the imposition of a verdant green oasis upon a bone-dry desert basin.
A city that contains a huge replica of the Eiffel tower, sprawling golf courses and a simulacrum of Venetian canals complete with gondolas can never be said to fit in with its surroundings. But Las Vegas, called “The Meadows” in Spanish due to its natural springs that were pumped dry by the 1960s, is at least aware of its setting in a place so arid that only a few small creosote bushes and tumbleweeds can survive here naturally.
“We live in the desert. We are the driest city in the United States, in the driest state in the United States,” said Colby Pellegrino, deputy manager of resources for the Southern Nevada Water Authority. “We have to act like it.”
Pellegrino said the recent escalation of the drought has been “very scary” for some Vegas residents, although she insists the water authority has planned for this moment. Lake Mead’s level dropped under 1,075ft in June, barely a third full, triggering what will be the first ever cutbacks under a seven-state agreement on sharing the water from the Colorado River, which is harnessed by the Hoover dam to create the reservoir.
Different states get different water allocations and Nevada is a victim of its depopulated history, getting just 300,000 acre-feet of water a year (by comparison California gets 4.4m acre-feet) under an agreement struck before the Hoover dam was completed in the 1930s. “The joke is that Nevada’s representative was drunk,” said Pellegrino, who was born in 1983, when the state’s population was barely 900,000. It’s now more than 3m and receives tens of millions of tourists a year.
Houses, trees and swimming pools spring from the desert in Henderson, Nevada.Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images
This small water allocation will shrink by 21,000 acre-feet with the new cuts, although Nevada has made impressive strides in keeping below its low cap, slashing its water use despite the population nearly doubling since the early 2000s. Pellegrino is confident that further savings can be made and scrutiny is being placed upon the water used in Vegas casinos’ ubiquitous cooling systems.
But global heating’s impact upon the west’s snowpack and rivers is unrelenting and the city’s water savings will only go so far. Las Vegas only has a supporting role in its own fate. Three-quarters of allocated Colorado River water is used to irrigate thirsty agriculture, and the overall water supply is more dependent upon the amount of snow melting hundreds of miles away in the Rocky Mountains than some extra marginal savings made in the suburbs.
“Vegas has done great things such as ripping out the grass, but we’ve lost 20% of the flow of the Colorado River since 2000 and another 10% loss by 2050 is completely possible,” said Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University whose research has focused on the stresses facing the river.
“I worry it could be even more than that, and that should frighten everyone.”
Back in Summerlin, Perry Kaye is also relentless. A house opposite the first offender has broken sprinklers splurging water into puddles on the grass and road. Kaye bangs on the ornate door to inform the homeowner, but no one is in.
“These sprinklers haven’t popped up properly, they are just oozing everywhere,” muttered Kaye. He has been policing water waste for the past 16 years, issuing countless fines in that time. “I had hoped I would’ve worked myself out of a job by now. But it looks like I will retire first.”
Texas man who waited seven hours at polls is charged with voting illegally
Sam Levine in New York
Photograph: Callaghan O’Hare/Reuters
A Texas man who became a national hero after he waited seven hours in line to vote in last year’s presidential primary has been arrested and charged with voting illegally.
Hervis Rogers, who is Black, became a symbol of a determination to have one’s voice heard.
“I wanted to get my vote in, voice my opinion,” he told a local ABC affiliate after his long wait to cast his ballot in the 2020 election. “I wasn’t going to let anything stop me, so I waited it out.”
The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, is reportedly bringing charges that allege Rogers voted while on parole for a 1995 conviction for burglary and intent to commit theft.
In Texas, it is illegal for anyone convicted of a felony to vote until they complete their sentence, including probation and parole. Rogers’ parole began in 2004 and was set to expire in June 2020. The Texas primaries were held in March.
Rogers cannot afford $100,000 bail and is being held in jail, said Thomas Buser-Clancy, an attorney with the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is helping represent Rogers.
“The arrest and prosecution of Mr. Rogers should alarm all Texans. He waited in line for over six hours to vote to fulfill what he believed to be his civic duty, and is now locked up on a bail amount that most people could not afford,” said Andre Segura, the legal director of the Texas ACLU, in a statement. “He faces potentially decades in jail. Our laws should not intimidate people from voting by increasing the risk of prosecution for, at worst, innocent mistakes.”
Christopher Downey, a criminal defense attorney, told KPRC 2 Rogers’ two felony convictions meant he could face a more severe prison sentence on the illegal voting charges – potentially 25 years to life on each count.
Few prosecutors have pursued election-related crimes more than Paxton, a Republican himself under FBI investigation regarding allegations of bribery, which he denies, and who filed a long-shot lawsuit at the US supreme court trying to overturn Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020.
Even as Paxton publicly has touted the number of cases his office has been involved in, a 2019 HuffPost review found that most involved relatively minor infractions.
His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Rogers case.
Rachel Hooper, a Republican precinct chair in Harris county, filed a formal complaint in March last year, saying Harris was ineligible to vote.
She obtained a copy of his voter registration application through a public records request and noted he had signed a statement indicating he had completed all punishment for a felony. The form only contains the warning in small print at the bottom of the application.
In an email to the Guardian last year, Hooper wrote: “As a former prosecutor, I want to give them the opportunity to investigate and take action. As a voter, I just felt a sense of obligation to file this complaint after learning that Mr Rogers was in violation of Texas election law.”
Hooper provided a copy of Rogers’ certificate of parole, from May 2004. The document contains a lengthy description of instructions for people on parole but does not say they cannot vote.
An estimated 5.2 million people cannot vote in the US because of felony convictions, according to an estimate by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit.
Each US state has its own rules. Maine, Vermont and the District of Columbia allow people convicted of felonies to vote while they are in prison. Several other states allow people convicted of felonies to vote once they are released. Others, like Texas, require people with felonies to complete their entire sentence before they can vote.
Such a mix of systems makes it extremely confusing and difficult for anyone who has a felony to figure out if they are eligible to vote.
In 2017, a Texas prosecutor made headlines for bringing criminal charges against Crystal Mason, a Black woman in Fort Worth who cast a provisional ballot in 2016 while she was on supervised release for a federal tax fraud felony.
Mason was convicted of illegal voting and sentenced to five years in prison, a sentence many saw as overly harsh. Probation officials conceded they had never told Mason she couldn’t vote. Her provisional ballot ultimately went uncounted. The case is pending before Texas’s highest criminal appellate court.
Republicans in Texas and elsewhere have moved aggressively to implement new laws that make it harder to vote. The Texas legislature started a special session on Thursday in which it is expected to impose new requirements on mail-in voting and empower partisan poll watchers, among other measures.
Along St. Petersburg’s waterfront, the park is quiet but the smell is strong
Gabe Stern, Tampa Bay Times
ST. PETERSBURG — The 9 a.m. bayside air reeked of dead fish.
Megan McDonald smelled it as she approached the park with her friend’s two dogs, and walked up to the concrete seawall and looked down at the water. There were thousands of tarpon and snook floating sideways.
“I didn’t expect it to be like this,” said McDonald, 27.
The six volleyball courts, usually full, had only two in use.
“Where is everybody?” a passerby asked between points.
“Red Tide,” replied a player.
Normally packed on a Saturday morning in July, the stench was strong and the scene was quiet at Vinoy Park as thousands of dead fish lined the seawall, spread out into the bay and turned St. Petersburg’s bayside into one of the state’s epicenters for Red Tide.
The scattered blooms of the organism that causes Red Tide, Karenia brevis, is concentrated near St. Petersburg’s beaches and parks. Of the 15 tons of dead fish the city has collected in the past 10 days, city officials believe nine were blown in by Tropical Storm Elsa, St. Petersburg Emergency Manager Amber Boulding said at a Friday news conference.
Crews stood on the edge of the seawall, scooping fish in their nets, adding to the nine tons of fish they collected in the previous 24 hours. The volleyball nets soon emptied. A biker sped along the sidewalk, one hand on the handlebar and the other on her nose.
One couple walked over to see the damage. Morgan Janssen had told Freddy Hensley about the strong stench and closed businesses that Red Tide blooms from 2017 to 2019 had caused along the Gulf Coast. Hensley visited to see a widespread outbreak for the first time.
“I wanted to show him this morning because I was like, ‘No, you have to believe me. There’s fish everywhere,’” Janssen said as Hensley scooped at the fish with a tree branch.
Others continued their normal routines. Along his favorite breezy spot at the park, Al Nixon sat on his bench, resting his arm on its back and greeting passersby like always.
He visits Vinoy Park every day, a friendly face to some and a confidant to others, but lately, he’s seen less foot traffic than normal. He noticed people “just trying to get through the walk” because of the smell. For some people who stopped to chat, the conversation often led to the stench of the water.
“It doesn’t change my mood. I’m just a play-it-by-ear, why-be-sad type of person,” he said. “It’s somewhat disappointing because you don’t see the people that you normally see and have normal chats with.”
Pinellas County helped city efforts in cleaning up waterways and beaches in St. Petersburg, Mayor Rick Kriseman said in a Saturday morning Facebook post. The city called on a debris removal contractor that usually helps with storms to clean the debris. It also sought assistance from the state.
Dead fish are also popping up in Treasure Island, scattered mostly one-by-one instead of in groups, several people who lead beach cleanups said. The Bay Side Yacht Club, a cleanup group from a cul-de-sac on Bay Plaza, met for free eggs and bacon at Caddy’s before starting their monthly beach cleanup.
City crews picked up the dead fish, but what bothered Richard Harris the most was what had caused one of the more pervasive problems from storms: the cigarette butts that Elsa had pushed to the high tide line.
“Last month, during the month of June, when I did the cleanup, I picked up 271 (cigarette butts),” he said just after 10 a.m. “Today, I’m up to 535.” (He ended the morning with 821).
As noon approached in Vinoy Park, Daniel Larouche sat in his hammock, next to a candle he lit to keep the flies away. He sleeps in the hammock most nights by a lake, then walks 30 minutes each morning to the edge of the park, where there’s a bathroom he can use and cold water fountains. He grew up in St. Petersburg, working various jobs, but ended up homeless. Vinoy Park is his go-to spot.
“A lot of people you see walking, they’re in air conditioning most of their lives. So they come out here for 20 minutes or 30 minutes to walk,” he said. “And they don’t really feel that smell. You just get used to it.”
He set up at the edge of the park, far enough where if the air is still, coffee and cigarettes can help dull the smell of the water. It was “kind of, sort of” less crowded than normal away from the main sidewalk, he said.
Fitness classes came and went. It would clear out more as the afternoon heat approaches. Crews would continue to net the fish. Eventually, the smell would return to normal.
But not on Saturday.
“There’s only so much (the city) can do,” Larouche said.
Red Tide resources
There are several online resources that can help residents stay informed and share information about Red Tide:
Florida Poison Control Centers have a toll-free 24/7 hotline to report illnesses, including from exposure to Red Tide: 1-800-222-1222
To report fish kills in St. Petersburg, call the Mayor’s Action Center at 727-893-7111 or use St. Petersburg’s seeclickfix website.
Visit St. Pete/Clearwater, the county’s tourism wing, runs an online beach dashboard at www.beachesupdate.com.
The agency asks business owners to email reports of Red Tide issues to pr@visitspc.com.
Beachgoers should avoid swimming around dead fish.
Those with chronic respiratory problems should be particularly careful and “consider staying away” from places with a Red Tide bloom.
People should not harvest or eat mollusks or distressed and dead fish from the area. Fillets of healthy fish should be rinsed with clean water, and the guts thrown out.
Pet owners should keep their animals away from the water and from dead fish.
Residents living near the beach should close their windows and run air conditioners with proper filters.
Visitors to the beach can wear paper masks, especially if the wind is blowing in.
Source: Florida Department of Health in Pinellas County
St. Petersburg cleans up 9 tons of dead fish in 24 hours due to Red Tide, Elsa
Matt Cohen, Tampa Bay Times
ST. PETERSBURG — The city’s shoreline was besieged by dead fish and Red Tide blooms.
The sidewalk along the shore at North Shore Park reeked of death Friday. Just off into the water, crews in yellow jumpsuits and tall rubber boots scooped dead fish off the top of the water with pool skimmers, put them into trash bags and loaded them into a dump truck. Hundreds of dead fish were still out there, floating just a few feet from shore.
Crews picked up 9 tons of dead fish in 24 hours — and they weren’t even done.
The fish were killed by toxic Red Tide blooms and then pushed ashore by Tropical Storm Elsa, said St. Petersburg Emergency Manager Amber Boulding at a Friday news conference. The city has collected 15 tons of dead fish in the past 10 days, she believes the 9 tons that recently washed ashore was blown in by the storm’s winds.
“You look at Elsa and that push of water from the wind seems to have definitely pushed in more of the fish kill,” Boulding said.
The conclusion to Justin Bloom, a board member for the environmental groups Tampa Bay and Suncoast Waterkeeper, is inescapable:
“Tampa Bay is really sick right now, really extraordinarily bad. Conditions that we haven’t seen in decades.”
Several high concentrations of Karenia brevis, the microorganism that causes Red Tide blooms, also dot St. Petersburg’s shore. They were detected in water samples taken off Vinoy Park, Bayboro Harbor, Big Bayou and Coquina Key, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s Red Tide map.
The result, Boulding said, is that St. Petersburg is seeing a greater number of fish kills than the massive 2017-19 Red Tide outbreak that crushed the county’s tourism industry and led to more than 1,800 tons of dead marine life to wash up onto the Pinellas beaches. But that outbreak afflicted the Gulf of Mexico side of the Pinellas coast, while the current outbreak is on the Tampa Bay side, which affects St. Petersburg the most.
“It’s very serious,” Boulding said.
Bloom believes the April Piney Point disaster helped fuel strong, harmful Red Tide blooms. The owner of the Manatee County fertilizer plant released 215 million gallons of polluted wastewater into Tampa Bay. Scientists are studying whether the release fueled the algal blooms.
The most impacted areas, according to St. Petersburg officials, were along the east and southeast coast from Tierra Verde to Gandy Boulevard.
Boulding said aerial footage of Tampa Bay has shown there is a lot more dead fish in the water waiting that will need to be cleaned after it comes ashore. While she assured residents and tourists that crews are working as fast as they can, she said this isn’t a problem that will be resolved quickly.
The city’s efforts are “at the mercy” of the winds and tides pushing Red Tide blooms and dead fish piles around the bay, she said.
Boulding said residents and visitors can see the dead fish on their morning runs and smell them the moment they step outside. Officials don’t know when the current situation will get better. Pinellas County officials say that, including St. Petersburg, the county has collected 427 tons of dead marine life and debris.
“What makes our city so wonderful is all of our waterfront,” Boulding said. “And that also is what makes it so tough when it comes to tackling Red Tide.”
Crews of about 120 people from across city departments are on clean-up duty. The effort started last week but paused as workers helped distribute sandbags in advance of Elsa. When the storm passed by, she said, they went back out cleaning fish.
The focus on the clean-up has delayed other city services like roadway mowing, tree trimming and pot hole repairs.
Boulding asks anyone who sees dead fish on land or in the water to report it by calling the Mayor’s Action Center at 727-893-7111 or through St. Petersburg’s seeclickfix website.
Red Tide resources
There are several online resources that can help residents stay informed and share information about Red Tide:
Florida Poison Control Centers have a toll-free 24/7 hotline to report illnesses, including from exposure to Red Tide: 1-800-222-1222
Visit St. Pete/Clearwater, the county’s tourism wing, runs an online beach dashboard at www.beachesupdate.com.
The agency asks business owners to email reports of Red Tide issues to pr@visitspc.com.
Beachgoers should avoid swimming around dead fish.
Those with chronic respiratory problems should be particularly careful and “consider staying away” from places with a Red Tide bloom.
People should not harvest or eat mollusks or distressed and dead fish from the area. Fillets of healthy fish should be rinsed with clean water, and the guts thrown out.
Pet owners should keep their animals away from the water and from dead fish.
Residents living near the beach should close their windows and run air conditioners with proper filters.
Visitors to the beach can wear paper masks, especially if the wind is blowing in.
Source: Florida Department of Health in Pinellas County
Yellowstone Is Losing Its Snow, with Repercussions for Everyone Downstream
A climate assessment found that snowfall is declining in Greater Yellowstone — and likely to keep declining. The problems trickle down to impact everyone from trout to grizzly bears to people.
Bryan Shuman July 7, 2021
Bison walk the prairie beneath Electric Peak in Yellowstone National Park. PHOTO BY JACOB W. FRANK / NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
When you picture Yellowstone National Park and its neighbor, Grand Teton, the snowcapped peaks and Old Faithful Geyser almost certainly come to mind. Climate change threatens all of these iconic scenes, and its impact reaches far beyond the parks’ borders.
A new assessment of climate change in the two national parks and surrounding forests and ranchland warns of the potential for significant changes as the region continues to heat up.
Since 1950, average temperatures in the Greater Yellowstone Area have risen 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit (1.3 C), and potentially more importantly, the region has lost a quarter of its annual snowfall. With the region projected to warm 5 – 6 F by 2061 – 2080, compared with the average from 1986 – 2005, and by as much as 10 – 11 F by the end of the century, the high country around Yellowstone is poised to lose its snow altogether.
The loss of snow there has repercussions for a vast range of ecosystems and wildlife, as well as cities and farms downstream that rely on rivers that start in these mountains.
Broad impact on wildlife and ecosystems
The Greater Yellowstone Area comprises 22 million acres in northwest Wyoming and portions of Montana and Idaho. In addition to geysers and hot springs, it’s home to the southernmost range of grizzly bear populations in North America and some of the longest intact wildlife migrations, including the seasonal traverses of elk, pronghorn, mule deer and bison.
The Greater Yellowstone Area includes both Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, as well as surrounding national forests and federal land. MAP COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
The area also represents the one point where the three major river basins of the western U.S. converge. The rivers of the Snake-Columbia basin, Green-Colorado basin, and Missouri River Basin all begin as snow on the Continental Divide as it weaves across Yellowstone’s peaks and plateaus.
How climate change alters the Greater Yellowstone Area is, therefore, a question with implications far beyond the impact on Yellowstone’s declining cutthroat trout population and disruptions to the food supplies critical for the region’s recovering grizzly population. By altering the water supply, it also shapes the fate of major Western reservoirs and their dependent cities and farms hundreds of miles downstream.
A group of scientists led by Cathy Whitlock from Montana State University, Steve Hostetler of the U.S. Geological Survey and myself at the University of Wyoming partnered with local organizations, including the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, to launch the climate assessment.
We wanted to create a common baseline for discussion among the region’s many voices, from the Indigenous nations who have lived in these landscapes for over 10,000 years to the federal agencies mandated to care for the region’s public lands. What information would ranchers and outfitters, skiers and energy producers need to know to begin planning for the future?
Less water in rivers can harm cutthroat trout, which grizzly bears and other wildlife rely on for food. Climate change also threatens white bark pines, high-elevation trees that historically provided an important food source for Yellowstone grizzlies. PHOTO BY KAREN BLEIER/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Shifting from snow to rain
Standing at the University of Wyoming-National Park Service Research Station and looking up at the snow on the Grand Teton, over 13,000 feet above sea level, I cannot help but think that the transition away from snow is the most striking outcome that the assessment anticipates – and the most dire.
Today the average winter snowline – the level where almost all winter precipitation falls as snow – is at an elevation of about 6,000 feet. By the end of the century, warming is forecast to raise it to at least 10,000 feet, the top of Jackson Hole’s famous ski areas.
The climate assessment uses projections of future climates based on a scenario that assumes countries substantially reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. When we looked at scenarios in which global emissions continue at a high rate instead, the differences by the end of century compared with today became stark. Not even the highest peaks would regularly receive snow.
In interviews with people across the region, nearly everyone agreed that the challenge ahead is directly connected to water. As a member of one of the regional tribes noted, “Water is a big concern for everybody.”
Precipitation may increase slightly as the region warms, but less of it will fall as snow. More of it will fall in spring and autumn, while summers will become drier than they have been, our assessment found.
The timing of the spring runoff, when winter snow melts and feeds into streams and rivers, has already shifted ahead by about eight days since 1950. The shift means a longer, drier late summer when drought can turn the landscape brown – or black as the wildfire season becomes longer and hotter.
The outcomes will affect wildlife migrations dependent on the “green wave” of new leaves that rises up the mountain slopes each spring. Low stream flow and warm water in late summer will threaten the survival of coldwater fisheries, like the Yellowstone cutthroat trout, and Yellowstone’s unique species like the western glacier stonefly, which depends on the meltwater from mountain glaciers.
Preparing for a warming future
These outcomes will vary somewhat from location to location, but no area will be untouched.
We hope the climate assessment will help communities anticipate the complex impacts ahead and start planning for the future.
As the report indicates, that future will depend on choices made now and in the coming years. Federal and state policy choices will determine whether the world will see optimistic scenarios or scenarios where adaption becomes more difficult. The Yellowstone region, one of the coldest parts of the U.S., will face changes, but actions now can help avoid the worst. High-elevation mountain towns like Jackson, Wyoming, which today rarely experience 90 F, may face a couple of weeks of such heat by the end of the century – or they may face two months of it, depending in large part on those decisions.
The assessment underscores the need for discussion. What choices do we want to make?
Bryan Shuman is professor of paleoclimatology and paleoecology at the University of Wyoming.
The sun sets behind power-generating turbines of a local wind farm in Crimea
China led a record increase in wind and solar power during 2020 – even as the emerging superpower continued to build new fossil-fuel burning coal plants.
Capacity of wind and solar power grew by 238GW globally last year, about 50pc larger than any previous expansion, according to the latest annual review of world energy by BP.
The jump in renewable output amounts to about seven times the total installed capacity in the UK, and came in a year marked by a slump in energy use as the pandemic triggered a slowdown in global travel.
China accounted for over half of the growth in wind and solar capacity. Some of the increase was driven by changes to the Chinese subsidy regime, which pulled projects forward, but BP said there was a significant increase even accounting for this.
Wind, solar and other renewable sources are on the rise as countries and companies pledge to slash their carbon emissions in line with the Paris agreements to cut global warming. Last year China said it would cut its emissions to net zero by 2060.
The share of renewable power, including wind and solar, in the global power mix also rose from 10.3pc to 11.7pc.
In Europe, that share reached 23.8pc, making it the first region where renewables are the main source of fuel, BP said.
The figures appear to allay concerns at the start of the pandemic that low oil prices and distracted politicians might slow down the push towards cleaner power.
Meanwhile the share of coal in power generation fell 1.3 percentage points to 35.1pc.
This is a record low share, although coal-fired generation overall is relatively flat compared to 2015.
Coal consumption among countries in the OECD club of developed nations fell to the lowest level recorded in BP’s annual review, which stretches back to 1965. However, coal consumption rose in China and Malaysia.
Despite its push on renewables, China approved 13GW of coal-fired plants, a 45pc increase on 2019 levels, last year, according to a report in June by the International Energy Agency.
Officials lowered restrictions on new plants to help the country recover from the pandemic.
Bernard Looney, chief executive of BP, said: “The relative immunity of renewable energy to the events of last year is encouraging.
“The challenge is to achieve sustained, comparable year-on-year reductions in emissions without massive disruption to our livelihoods and our everyday lives.”
The collapse in demand for energy, and particularly oil, during the pandemic led to a 6pc fall in carbon emissions from energy use, the largest decline since 1945, BP said.
However, this came at considerable cost, with GDP falling globally by more than 3.5pc.
Spencer Dale, BP’s chief economist, said: “Despite the turmoil, despite the collapse in world GDP, wind and solar just continue to grow.
“The increase in installed capacity last year is 50pc bigger than any time in history.”
BP is among several major companies pledging to slash their carbon emissions, and is investing more in renewables while cutting back on oil and gas production.
The Greater Yellowstone Area includes both Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, as well as surrounding national forests and federal land. 
