How we’re holding Republicans responsible for cleaning up the Trump mess

How we’re holding Republicans responsible for cleaning up the Trump mess

Elizabeth Neumann and Olivia Troye            January 28, 2021

 

Now that President Biden and Vice President Harris have been sworn in, it’s time for damage assessments and planning the recovery. We need to clean up the mess Trumpism made.

In his inaugural address, President Biden called for us to “reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured,” to return to the common values that define us as Americans, “Opportunity. Security. Liberty. Dignity. Respect. Honor. And yes, the truth.” His call for unity wasn’t an empty platitude, he acknowledged that “There is truth and there are lies, lies told for power and for profit. And each of us has a duty and responsibility, as citizens, as Americans… to defend the truth and defeat the lies.”

This is why we launched the Republican Accountability Project. We’re pledging to spend $50 million between now and the 2022 midterm elections to hold accountable the congressional Republicans who lied to the American people and voted to vitiate democracy by disrupting the electoral college vote count. And we’re going to protect those who spoke the truth and defended democracy.

Power ultimately resides with the people

Power in our republic ultimately resides with the people, and if the people disapprove of what the government is doing, they have the right and duty to replace those in government — not with riots or assassination plots or violence, but by voting. This elegant system has sustained republics large and small since the time of Socrates, but it has a flaw: What is a republic supposed to do if the leaders abolish free and fair elections?

This is, in essence, what many (but not all!) Republicans in Congress recently voted to do. In total, 139 Republicans in the House of Representatives and 8 Republicans in the Senate voted to throw out Electoral College votes from several states, even though the officials in those states had confirmed the free and fair results of their elections well ahead of the deadline. These supposed representatives of the people voted to nullify millions of their fellow Americans’ votes. (So much for populism.)

U.S. Capitol on Jan. 8, 2021, in Washington, D.C.
U.S. Capitol on Jan. 8, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

 

At the same time, Trump was inciting a violent mob of domestic terrorists to attack the U.S. Capitol with the purpose of stopping the counting of the electoral votes. Some even planned to try to force the Vice President to overturn the election (a power he obviously doesn’t have) with the threat of hanging. The mob partially succeeded — the House and Senate were ransacked, multiple people were killed, and the process of counting the electoral votes was delayed.

When the House impeached trump for trying to use a violent mob to disrupt and overturn the process of a free and fair election — for attempting to short-circuit the system of accountability elections provide — all but 10 House Republicans voted against it. Whatever their petty complaints of imagined procedural irregularities or poor draftsmanship, the message of their votes couldn’t be clearer: “The people’s votes don’t matter. If we don’t like the outcome, we’ll just choose a different one.”

Lincoln must be rolling in his grave.

Unity: Let’s get real. Joe Biden, Democrats and America need results much more than unity.

Republicans leaders are suddenly preaching the importance of unity and healing. The first step toward recovery is repentance and accepting responsibility for their role. There can be no unity without truth and accountability.

The 10 House Republicans who supported impeachment know that their principled, patriotic votes might cost them reelection. Rep. Tom Rice of South Carolina remarked, “If it does, it does.” The Republican Accountability Project will help them ward off primary challengers and secure their reelection. They shouldn’t be punished for upholding their oaths to the Constitution.

Republicans have to decide what side they are on

Those who encouraged and continue to encourage the insurrection against the government must be held accountable for their votes, and we will ensure that they will be in 2022.

Some Senate Republicans have already joined one or the other of these camps, and everyone knows where they stand. Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley clearly value their own power and advancement more than truth and the institutions of the republic.

But most Senate Republicans have yet to choose a side. They still have the opportunity to convict Trump and thereby disqualify him from ever holding office again. This is the only path to begin the process of repairing what they have helped to break. They should know that if they do the right thing, the Republican Accountability Project will help them. And if they don’t, we will find someone who will.

Elizabeth Neumann, former Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Counterterrorism and Threat Reduction, and Olivia Troye, former Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor to Vice President Pence, are directors of the Republican Accountability Project.

How U.S. Crude Oil Exports Are Hastening the Demise of the Oil Industry

DeSmog

How U.S. Crude Oil Exports Are Hastening the Demise of the Oil Industry

 

Oil export shipping tanker

When Congress lifted the export ban on U.S. crude oil in December of 2015 to allow for exports beginning in 2016, the oil industry celebrated. However, looking back at the impact of lifting the 40-year-old ban, it appears the move has helped hasten the financial demise of the U.S. oil industry — while also increasing the industry’s huge contribution to climate change.

In many ways, the U.S. oil and gas industry’s demise is self-inflicted. When historians look back upon its declines, lifting the export ban will likely mark a turning point where the industry made a huge bet on the profitability of fracking for oil in the U.S. — and subsequently began to dig its own grave.

Opening the shale revolution to the world through the export ban lifting helped shift the global oil market psychology from supply scarcity to abundance,” Karim Fawaz, director of research and analysis for energy at IHS Markit, told Bloomberg in early 2021. “It unshackled the U.S. industry to keep growing past its domestic refining limitations.”

Graph: U.S. crude oil exports  Credit: Energy Information Administration

Now, not only is the U.S. shale oil industry failing financially and facing debts it likely can’t repay, but calls are growing for the new Biden administration to reinstate the crude oil export ban — which President Biden could do immediately under a national emergency declaration.

This would effectively put a limit on the U.S. fracking industry — and be a big step in reducing the industry’s contributions to climate change. It would also restrain the industry from simply producing as much oil as fast as possible, something investors have been lobbying for the last several years. That’s because this approach has led to the loss of over $340 billion since 2010. Investors hope imposing fiscal restraint on the U.S. fracking industry will result in companies producing less oil overall but finally producing some profits.

Lifting the crude oil export ban to allow exports beginning in 2016 unleashed the U.S. fracking industry to produce as much oil as possible because it opened access to global markets with a long list of willing buyers of cheap U.S. crude oil.

It was a seismic change for the U.S. oil industry and built on the excitement of what was being called the fracking miracle; investors continued to lend large sums to the industry to produce record amounts of oil, betting on the promise of future profits to pay back the debt.

The profits never materialized despite the record amounts of oil being produced and now it appears that most of the best U.S. shale oil deposits were drained in that effort. The U.S. exported approximately 3.6 billion barrels of crude oil from January 2016 to October 2020. To put that in perspective, that is slightly less than the 4.1 billion barrels that the U.S. is expected to produce in 2021 (estimate based on EIA forecast of 11.1 million barrels per day in 2021).

Lifting the ban increased oil production

In response to the OPEC oil embargo and subsequent gasoline shortage in the U.S. in the early 1970s, the U.S. banned almost all oil exports. Unable to sell U.S. crude oil on world markets before 2016, the U.S. oil industry was limited by how much crude oil could be purchased by U.S. oil refineries. These refineries were running at full capacity and could not process another few million barrels of oil per day that frackers wanted to produce and sell. This very real limit was about to cause producers to have to restrain U.S. oil production rather than simply trying to get as many barrels of oil out of the ground as fast as possible.

To fix that, the oil industry and commodities brokers that trade oil on global markets successfully lobbied the U.S. Congress to lift the ban.

A big part of the argument lobbyists made was that there was such an abundance of oil to be fracked in the U.S. that it made sense to sell it to the rest of the world. In 2015, for example, Harold Hamm, billionaire founder of Continental Resources, presented a slide at the annual Energy Information Administration (EIA) conference projecting that the U.S. could be producing 20 million barrels per day (mmbpd) of crude oil by 2025 due to the energy abundance fracking had opened up. At the time, U.S. crude oil production was less than half that — just under 10 million barrels per day.

Image: Harold Hamm’s U.S. oil production predictions  Credit: DeSmog

By 2016, with the ban lifted and no domestic refining limitations shackling production, U.S. oil volumes exploded in the years that followed. The industry was producing huge amounts of oil as fast as it could — and losing huge sums of money in the process, likely hastening the industry’s currently unfolding financial collapse.

The misinformation behind the export ban’s reversal

The successful lifting of the ban was largely the result of a well-coordinated effort by the U.S. oil and gas industry — along with its partners in academia and various industry-funded think tanks — to mislead the public and government about the industry’s true motivations for lifting the crude oil export ban.

The industry’s campaign was on full display in 2014 at a conference hosted by a new academic energy strategy group, the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP), which was launched in April 2013 at Columbia University. New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke at the launch of CGEP where he advocated for fracking and natural gas.

In November 2014, CGEP hosted a Columbia University Energy Symposium. It featured a fireside chat with Marianne Kah, chief economist for ConocoPhillips, who supported lifting the ban.

Kah repeatedly referred to a study done by energy consulting group IHS — which was instrumental in the public relations efforts to reverse the crude export ban. The IHS study touted the benefits of lifting the ban, focusing on potential economic benefits and downplaying any environmental risks. In 2014 Reuters reported that Daniel Yergin of IHS said that lifting the ban would not hurt the global environment because it would not add to total global oil production — a claim that was quickly proven wrong after the ban was lifted.

As DeSmog reported at the time, the study by IHS was “funded by Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and other industry players.”

Over the course of 2015, Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy played a leading role in pushing to lift the ban. At the time, CGEP didn’t reveal its funding. But, recently the group published a list of some of its “partners,” including Saudi Aramco, Exxon, and Kah’s former employer, ConocoPhillips. (Kah now works at CGEP.)

CGEP’s work helped to support the industry’s misleading arguments that lifting the crude oil export ban would be good for Americans. At the time, CGEP and oil industry leaders like Hamm were making claims that the move would benefit U.S. foreign policy and help meet climate goals while expanding oil production. In addition, in July 2015 Hamm testified before Congress that lifting the ban would not result in U.S. oil being sold to the biggest growth market in the world, China, a concern for national security reasons. Reassurances like his that U.S. oil would only be sold to strategic allies was a big part of the argument for lifting the crude oil export ban.

Another of the main arguments industry consultants were making at the time for lifting the ban was that its removal was unlikely to have much of an impact on U.S. oil production. This claim was meant to deflect arguments from environmental groups such as the Sierra Club that lifting the ban would be bad for the climate (something that has proven to be true, especially when accounting for the U.S. fracking industry’s methane pollution).

In January 2015, Jason Bordoff, head of CGEP, co-authored a report, which stated that lifting the ban would likely only increase U.S. oil production from 0 to 1.2 million barrels per day by 2025.

This projection turned out to be a gross underestimate. Crude exports peaked in 2020 at approximately 4 million barrels per day.

The result, however, highlights the economic consequences of short-term thinking. As DeSmog previously reported, these coordinated misinformation campaigns led to a massive expansion of U.S. fracking. But, despite the much-hyped U.S. “fracking miracle,” the U.S. oil and gas industry is now coming to terms with years of losses and falling asset values, which have dealt the industry a serious financial blow.

Unlimited demand for cheap oil

Lifting the U.S. crude oil export ban effectively gave U.S. oil producers access to unlimited demand for its products. Any oil produced would be purchased by foreign buyers who especially liked the cheap oil prices, prices that were below what it cost the U.S. oil companies to produce the oil — resulting in large losses for oil producers.

In November 2020, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released an analysis of the impact of lifting the crude oil export ban, noting the big increase in U.S. fracked oil production — 3.5 million barrels per day — since the ban was removed.

According to EIA data,” the GAO wrote, “total production of U.S. crude oil rose by roughly one-third, from approximately 9.3 million barrels per day just before the repeal of the ban in December 2015 to about 12.8 million barrels per day in December 2019.”

And nearly all of that additional oil is exported — the increase in production cited by the GAO translated into the export of an average of three million barrels per day of crude oil in 2019.

This rush to produce, however, helped hastened the demise of the U.S. oil industry, a fall which was brought on by the fracking boom. Lifting the ban encouraged shale drillers to produce more and more oil, even when they were losing money on every barrel drilled. This blistering pace of drilling through the best acreage in shale fields quickly revealed that industry promises of abundance were, in fact, hollow — heady projections made to investors were likely based on estimates of oil reserves that simply are not there.

The result is that the industry has now lost $342 billion since 2010, the best oil reserves have been fracked, and even industry insiders are saying the U.S. fracking boom has peaked.

In April 2020, Scott Sheffield, CEO of shale oil producer Pioneer Natural Resources, summed up what the fracking revolution — driven in part by the export ban’s reversal — has done to the U.S. oil and gas industry. “It has been an economic disaster, especially the last 10 years,” Sheffield said in testimony before Texas’s oil regulators. “Nobody wants to give us capital because we have all destroyed capital and created economic waste.”

Perhaps no two groups have gained from the export of America’s shale boom more than producers of U.S. oil and the giant commodities merchants who trade it,” Bloomberg reported in January.

While it is true that commodity merchants have been one of the main beneficiaries of the ban’s lifting, it isn’t quite accurate to say that producers of U.S. oil have gained as well; the executives of those companies reaped the benefits while the companies themselves actually lost money. In October 2020, the Wall Street Journal highlighted this reality with an article headlined, “Shale Companies Had Lousy Returns. Their CEOs Got Paid Anyway.”

And contrary to industry promises, China was the biggest buyer of U.S. oil for much of 2020, and the group that now manages the most exports of U.S. oil is Trafigura — a Singapore-based company currently accused of bribery aimed at influencing the global oil trading market. Trafigura has a partnership to export U.S. oil with Kah’s old employer ConocoPhillips.

The time is right to reinstate the export ban

In recent years, investors have been begging the shale industry to curb oil production itself, now that U.S. crude oil can be exported to the world. Investors hope that by limiting production, U.S. oil producers will focus instead on profitability instead of simply producing the most oil possible.

However, it took a global pandemic and U.S. oil prices going negative in 2020 to slow industry production. Meanwhile, despite all of that, exports have remained strong throughout the pandemic, only dropping in early 2021. One reason is that analysts at JP Morgan have recently downgraded forecasts for Chinese oil consumption with expectations that the pandemic will depress oil demand in China for longer than initially expected.

Reinstating the crude oil export ban would be bad for China and other countries that want access to as much cheap U.S. crude as possible. But it would be very good for the climate — a top priority of the Biden administration. While campaigning for president in 2020, Biden even made a qualified statement about banning fossil fuel exports.

The Biden administration also has directed the government to pause new drilling leases on federal lands, which, unsurprisingly, has provoked strong reactions, along with inflated job loss numbers, from the U.S. oil and gas industry. Similarly, should the administration propose reinstating the crude oil export ban, industry groups undoubtedly would make even more predictions of catastrophe.

While such a move would likely mean the U.S. would never again see the record levels of crude oil production that led to exporting 4 million barrels of oil a day, it also would likely force the U.S. fracking industry to learn how to produce oil at a profit — something it has not done in the past decade.

The energy world has changed dramatically since 2014 when the U.S. oil industry began lobbying to lift the crude oil export ban. The arguments made back then no longer apply — and most didn’t make sense even at the time.

While there are many reasons that the U.S. should be discussing banning exports of U.S. crude oil, the most immediate positive impact would be to address greenhouse gas emissions and tackle the climate emergency. As UN scientists have pointed out, the world doesn’t have any extra time to spare.

Main Image: VLCC Kyrakatingo seen alongside Tranmere North Oil Jetty having just been made fully fast after arrival from Houston, Texas with a part cargo of light crude oil.  Credit: Darren Hillman, CC BYND 2.0

A Letter to My Conservative Friends

New York Times – Opinion

Hold us accountable, but please do the same for the charlatans who deceive you, use you and cheat you.

By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist                  January 27, 2021

 
Credit…Emily Elconin/Reuters

 

YAMHILL, Ore. — This is an open letter to some of my old friends and neighbors who believe that Donald Trump won re-election, who think that face masks are for wimps and who fear that Democrats are plotting to seize their freedom.

Dear friends and neighbors,

Relax! We liberals aren’t plotting to round you up in “re-education camps.”

I was horrified when a couple of old friends here asked if they were in danger for having supported Donald Trump. I gently told them that they were in no peril — and I was stung that they felt greatly relieved to hear it.

Yes, I know that Fox News is peddling nonsense about Democrats setting up re-education camps, and that a Wall Street Journal column asked, “If you were an enthusiastic Donald Trump supporter, are you ready to enter a re-education program?”

Folks, you’re being played. Again.

These are some of the same charlatans who argued last year that, as Fox News put it, the coronavirus is “just like the flu” and that mask mandates are a step toward “tyranny.” More than 400,000 coronavirus deaths later, some people are dead because they believed that drivel.

Then there’s the rubbish about the election. This month, just days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, a childhood friend told me confidently that Trump would swoop in to serve a second term. When I told him he was wrong, he was astonished that I could be so poorly informed, and he helpfully advised, “Don’t pay attention to those liars in the mainstream media.”

You’ve been hoodwinked, exploited and manipulated by con artists waving flags, casting lies and monetizing bigotry. Steve Bannon, who suggested beheading Dr. Anthony Fauci, defrauded Trump supporters into donating to build a border wall and then used some of the money for himself, according to a federal indictment.

Here on our family farm, we received a direct mail appeal warning about “Islam in Yamhill Schools” and pleading for donations to protect Christianity. No, that isn’t about conservative values, but about spreading hate and hysteria while grabbing at your wallet.

So let’s give America a chance to heal. And, as I told my worried friends, don’t hesitate to stand up for your conservative values. We need Republicans! America benefits from a loyal opposition.

For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week called for trying harder to keep schools open. On that issue, Republicans have been more right than many Democrats.

But half a century ago we didn’t need the racist George Wallace wing of the Democratic Party, and today we don’t need the wing of the Republican Party that embraces conspiracy theories and winks at violence.

The grand question: Without that wing of today’s G.O.P., what’s left?

One glimpse of the conundrum: The G.O.P. representation in Congress is losing Rob Portman, a widely respected senator who announced he will step down, and just gained Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, an extremist who in 2019 endorsed the idea of shooting Nancy Pelosi in the head. When a party loses a statesman and gains a kook, that’s a bad omen.

Meanwhile, the Hawaii G.O.P. this week recommended the “high quality” commentary … of a Holocaust denier. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned on Fox News that Democrats are trying to “exterminate the Republicans.” Sure, Democrats sometimes say and do dumb things, too, but there’s no symmetry.

As I see it, the last, best hope is twofold. First, Republican leaders must learn that extremism is a losing strategy. Only one G.O.P. candidate for president has won the popular vote in the last three decades, and the loony Arizona Republican Party has lost about 10,000 members since the riot in the U.S. Capitol and its censure of party elders like Cindy McCain. If Trump is further discredited through prosecutions or scandals, it is possible (though far from certain) that his malign influence on the party will diminish.

Second, to dampen that extremism, advertisers should stop supporting networks that spread lies and hatred, and cable companies should drop channels that persist in doing so. As a start, don’t force people to subsidize Fox News by including it in basic packages.

Is this a slippery slope? Yes, and it makes me queasy. But we all recognize that there are red lines: Neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan grand wizards have First Amendment rights, but we shouldn’t pay to give them microphones, nor should commentators on the left or the right get megaphones to promote violence. Extremists enjoy free speech but shouldn’t be buttressed by advertisers or our cable fees.

So, conservative friends, fear not: We’re not plotting to lock you up in detention camps. We need you to keep us honest. But you’ve been scammed in ways that have hurt the country we all love. Hold us accountable, but please do the same for the charlatans who deceive you, use you and cheat you.

NICHOLAS KRISTOF’S NEWSLETTER: Get a behind-the-scenes look at Nick’s gritty journalism as he travels around the United States and the world.

Republicans Greeted Joe Manchin’s Bipartisan Happy Talk By Demonstrating They Are Insane

Republicans Greeted Joe Manchin’s Bipartisan Happy Talk By Demonstrating They Are Insane

Jack Holmes                          January 26, 2021
Photo credit: Greg Nash - Getty Images
From Esquire: Greg Nash – Getty Images

 

We’ll get to the diversified and wide-ranging insanity erupting from the hellspout of the Republican Party in just a tick, but first, here’s a completely nutso statement from a putative Democrat. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia said Monday there is no scenario “whatsoever” in which he will vote to get rid of the filibuster, an anti-democratic procedural gambit that has been used by Mitch McConnell over the last dozen years or so to pursue scorched-earth obstructionism in the Senate. Manchin has adopted this position based on the following belief about the current Republican Party: “They know we all have to work together,” he told Sahil Kapur of NBC News. “You just can’t basically be objectionable to everything just because you’re in the minority now.” Ah yes, the Republican Party we know and love, the one that is committed to constructive governance in the public interest over its own narrow political prerogatives.

Conveniently, some members of the Republican Senate minority provided evidence of this spirit of bipartisan cooperation the very same day. Here’s a statement from Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas explaining why he was one of 15 Republicans to vote against confirming Janet Yellen as Joe Biden’s Secretary of the Treasury, despite the fact that Yellen, as a former Federal Reserve chair who lies well within the mainstream of modern economics, is manifestly qualified. Cotton did not even really dispute Yellen’s fitness for the job.

Joe Biden pledged unity, but his top priority for our economy is to rig the system so that people are treated differently on the basis of race. The woke commissars who run the government call this ‘equity,’ but separating people into buckets based on their skin color will always be immoral. Janet Yellen has served the public for many years, but I will not support nominees who’ve indicated they will advance Joe Biden’s divisive economic vision for our country

So Tom Cotton will not support any nominee for Treasury Secretary who will advance Joe Biden’s economic vision? This is the same as saying he will not support Joe Biden having a Treasury Secretary at all. (It was broadly expected, by the way, that if Republicans had retained control of the Senate they would have ritually blocked Biden’s Cabinet nominees.) And of course the statement would not be complete without a bad-faith clause about Unity. It seems that the Republican Party now considers Joe Biden governing the country according to the vision he articulated in his successful campaign for president—the one where he got 7 million more votes from American citizens than his opponent—is an assault on National Unity. The only way to have Unity is to do what Republicans want all the time. Everything else is divisive. But Joe Manchin tells us he can work with these people.

Photo credit: KEVIN DIETSCH - Getty Images
Photo credit: KEVIN DIETSCH – Getty Images

This attitude even extends to the mythical Republican moderates, like the inexplicably re-elected Susan Collins of Maine, who had some thoughts this week on that 2020 contest: “What this campaign taught me about Chuck Schumer,” she told CNN, “is that he will say or do anything in order to win.” Sounds like the start of a beautiful friendship. They should be Coming Together to pass an immigration-reform bill any day now! We’re at the point where theoretically persuadable Republicans like Collins seem to have outright animus towards Democratic leadership. And that’s before you get into just how theoretical Collins is as a swing vote. The evidence is scant that she’ll break with McConnell unless he doesn’t need her vote. While she did help kill the Repeal and Go Fuck Yourself healthcare bill, it’s hardly representative of her tenure.

The sad fact of the matter is that the Republican Party’s membership ranges from the completely batshit people trying to smuggle firearms onto the House floor to the slightly more savvy actors operating in perpetual bad faith. The consensus position, now that Republican members of Congress have had a few weeks to marinate in the bullshit emanating from conservative media, is that the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump for inciting an insurrection against the government of the United States is somehow unconstitutional or, worse, it violates the Unity principle. The only way to have Unity, after all, is to allow Republicans to spin insane fairy tales about how the election—nay, the country—was stolen from them and their supporters until some section of the base erupts in political violence, and then grant impunity to those responsible in the aftermath.

And then there’s Florida Man Marco Rubio.

And Florida Man Rick Scott:

Hilarious. Presumably, these people think they are going to be president in four years. (Nikki Haley, another 2024 wannabe, is now saying the following of the ex-president who tried to overturn an election and seize power through a putsch: “Give the man a break.”) Mr. Scott would not be mistaken for a comedian, but he does have some first-hand knowledge of the weak points in our Medicare billing system. Maybe he’ll put that to use going forward.

But in the shameless stakes, few can hope to match the big kahuna, Mitch McConnell, who took to the Senate floor on Tuesday to declare victory in his fight to stop the upper chamber from functioning as an actual legislative body. In short, McConnell fought to keep the filibuster in place by, you guessed it, obstructing the basic organizing resolution of the Senate, whereby the new Democratic 50+1 majority would take their seats as chairs of the various committees. Up until today, would-be committee chairs like Joe Manchin (Energy and Natural Resources) were prevented from taking up their jobs by McConnell’s scorched-earth tactics. But somehow, this was all proof to Manchin that McConnell will soon enough be Reaching Across the Aisle to do anything other than tell Chuck Schumer to stop hitting himself.

Anyway, here’s McConnell’s line, via Mike DeBonis of the Washington Post: “This victory will let us move forward with a 50-50 power sharing agreement,” McConnell said, after Democrats ran on and won both Georgia Senate seats on the notion it would give them a majority, which it has. That majority represents 40 million more people than the Republican minority, thanks to the Senate’s inherent anti-democratic features.

“McConnell delivers a warning,” DeBonis added by way of play-by-play: “If Dems touch the filibuster, GOP will pull out of power sharing agreement and cause ‘immediate chaos’ on the floor. ‘Destroying the filibuster would drain comity & consent from this body to a degree that would be unparalleled in living memory.'”

This is rich coming from the guy who called himself the Grim Reaper, refusing to grant a vote to any legislation his donors frowned upon regardless of what support it might have in the chamber. Democrats passed a COVID relief bill in May, but McConnell blocked it for basically the rest of the calendar year as millions of Americans were plunged into poverty by factors beyond their control. He tried to prevent Barack Obama filling any judicial vacancies at all despite the president’s constitutional prerogative to do so. There has been very little comity or consent in the Senate for years, largely by McConnell’s design.

Photo credit: Samuel Corum - Getty Images
Photo credit: Samuel Corum – Getty Images

 

But he still has the brass balls to say this stuff because Joe Manchin—and Kyrsten Sinema, the next-most conservative Senate Democrat—have assured him up front that there will be no consequences for his appalling behavior. He can block measures that have majority support—a majority that, again, represents tens of millions more people than McConnell’s Republican caucus does—by abusing a procedural mechanism the sanctified Founders made no mention of in the Constitution. The Senate was designed as an elitist body more removed from popular whims than the House, but it was not designed for the minority to have veto power over anything that gets less than 60 votes on top of that. Republicans already exercise hugely outsized—and anti-democratic—influence without the filibuster. Add that on top, and you’ve got a genuine crisis of democracy. But you’ve also got McConnell hamstringing a Democratic government with one eye on the midterms.

None of which seems to much matter to Ol’ Joe Manchin. One curious question for the West Virginia Democrat, however, is why exactly he ran for office. What does he hope to accomplish? What does he want to do for his constituents? And what’s the Venn diagram-overlap with “things that will get 60 votes”? As it stands, his is not a policy that actually translates to governing in the real world.

Between Democrats And ‘Dumpster Fire’ GOP

HuffPost

Between Democrats And ‘Dumpster Fire’ GOP

Lee Moran, Reporter, HuffPost                         

 

Rachel Maddow on Tuesday ripped the GOP as a “dumpster fire,” accusing the Republican Party of being gripped by post-Trump turmoil and unable to contribute to governing the country.

“We are now quite suddenly and clearly at this place where the two parties have totally different tasks at hand,” said the host of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

“On the Republican side, it is some scary and kind of unnerving stuff about whether or not they are a party that endorses violence and whether they are a party that still believes that democracy and elections are the way that we decide things as a country,” she said.

Democrats, meanwhile, are “just trying to govern,” Maddow continued. “They’re trying to figure out how to get something done without having to deal with that dumpster fire on the other side.”

“Because how can that be your governing partner?” she added.

“The Democrats have to prove they can do this or they’re going to have to contend with the dumpster fire over there again in terms of what the people of the United States have to choose from between the two options available to them,” Maddow concluded. “Just an incredible situation that we are in.”

Watch Maddow’s monologue here:

US companies using pandemic as a tool to break unions, workers claim

The Guardian

US companies using pandemic as a tool to break unions, workers claim

Michael Sainato in Florida                        

 

<span>Photograph: Anthony Vazquez/AP</span>
Photograph: Anthony Vazquez/AP

 

Dalroy Connell has worked as a stagehand for the Portland Trailblazers since 1995 when the basketball team began playing games at the Rose Garden Arena. When the pandemic hit the US in March 2020, public events were shut down and NBA games were briefly suspended before the season moved to a “bubble” in Orlando, Florida, and the season recommenced without fans in July 2020.

Connell and his colleagues have been on unemployment ever since, but when the 2020-2021 NBA season began in December 2020, instead of bringing back several of these workers, the Portland Trailblazers replaced most of the unionized crew who work their games with non-union workers, even as their jobs running the sound and lighting equipment are required whether or not fans are in attendance.

Like many workers around the US Connell believes he has been locked out from his job by a company that has used the coronavirus pandemic as a tool to break unions.

“It’s a blatant slap in the face,” said Connell. “They’re using positions in the house, people who already work there to do things we normally do.”

The workers’ union, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) Local 28, has filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board and held protests outside of Portland Trailblazers home games.

Connell alleged management at the Portland Trailblazers has frequently fought the union over the past several years, with the latest refusal to recall union workers an extension of this trend.

“Here we are wasting a ton of money on legal fees just to give a few guys some work. It’s a five-hour job. It’s so easy to work this out,” he added.

The Portland Trailblazers and Rip City Management did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Lockouts are work stoppages initiated by the employer in a labor dispute where the employer uses replacement workers.

Earlier in the pandemic, some employers resorted to conducting mass layoffs of workers after union organizing drives surfaced, such as at Augie’s Coffee Shop in California and Cort Furniture in New Jersey. Several workers have claimed they had been fired in retaliation due to worker organizing efforts by employers such as Amazon, Trader Joe’s and most recently Instacart. Now some employers are beginning to use lockouts as a tactic to seemingly suppress organizing efforts.

“Lockouts are an economic weapon employers use to take the initiative in collective bargaining,” said Alex Colvin, dean of the school of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University. “During the pandemic, lockouts pose a greater threat to unions due to the high unemployment rate and greater availability of replacement workers.”

According to an analysis by Bloomberg Law, no employer lockouts were conducted in 2020 during the first several months of the pandemic, but after previous economic recessions in the US, lockouts rebounded as disputes over wages and benefits became more intense.

“The intent of many lockouts is to actually try to break the workers’ unions by showing that the union’s position has led to the loss of work, and the only way to restore work is through unconditional surrender,” said Moshe Z Marvit, a labor and employment lawyer and fellow at the Century Foundation.

In Los Angeles, California, dozens of workers at Valley Fruit and Produce represented by Teamsters Local 630 went on strike in May 2020 in protest of intimidation of union members and efforts to decertify the union during new contract negotiations.

Amid negotiations to end the strike and bring back workers, Valley Fruit and Produce replaced several workers with non-union members, while the union alleges workers who did return to work were coerced into signing declarations against the union.

The union is currently pursuing unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board for the produce distribution company circumventing the union to directly negotiate with workers, in addition to several allegations of intimidation and harassment.

“Through their union buster lawyer, Valley Fruit talked to foremen to call workers on the picket line, using intimidation and scare tactics to get them back to work., When workers went back inside, they were forced to sign documents to say they didn’t want to be a part of the union any more,” said Carlos Santamaria, divisional representative for Teamsters Local 630.

The Portland Trail Blazers meet the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2020 NBA playoffs in Orlando, Florida, in August after the pandemic forced games to be relocated.
The Portland Trail Blazers meet the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2020 NBA playoffs in Orlando, Florida, in August after the pandemic forced games to be relocated. Photograph: Kim Klement/USA Today Sports

 

“I’m disappointed in what Valley has done to all the workers,” said Rene Gomez, who worked at Valley Fruit and Produce for 21 years and has been locked out of his job since last year. “My family and I are having a hard time economically because of everything going on. We’ve gone to food banks. We’ve been stressed because we don’t know how we’re going to keep paying rent at the end of the month.”

Roberto Juarez, who has worked for Valley Fruit and Produce for six years before getting locked out of his job, argued the company has attempted to “destroy the union in the workplace”, through negotiating in bad faith by pushing for reduction in benefits, wage freezes, hiring union avoidance attorneys, while receiving between $2m and $5m in paycheck protection program loans from the federal government.

“When the pandemic started and hit hard, we never stopped working and we were working a lot of hours. We were exposing ourselves, coming to work, exposing our families, and they didn’t really care,” said Juarez.

Valley Fruit and Produce did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Earlier this month in Chicago, Illinois, the Chicago public schools district began locking out dozens of teachers who are being ordered to return in-person to schools, which have been conducting virtual learning since the pandemic hit the US in March 2020.

Kirstin Roberts, a preschool teacher at Brentano elementary math and science academy in Chicago, refused to return to in-person teaching due to unsafe working conditions, even as all of her students had opted to continue remote learning.

The city of Chicago remains under a stay-at-home advisory with travel restrictions in place to try to mitigate the spread of coronavirus. Chicago public schools threatened to declare teachers ordered to work in school buildings who do not show up as “absent without leave”, and docking their pay.

Teachers across Chicago and the Chicago Teachers Union held a virtual teach-in protest of a return to in-person teaching outside of the board of education president’s home on 13 January.

Roberts attended the protest and taught on Facebook live because she was locked out of her Chicago public schools Google account, banning her access to continue teaching her students remotely and shutting her out of her work email account.

“They’ve been trying to impose conditions on the workforce without input from the union,” said Roberts. “Even though we’re in the middle of a pandemic, Chicago public schools is willing to use our students, hurt our students, and deny students things they need like access to their teachers in a game to one-up the Chicago Teachers Union and that’s ridiculous.”

According to Chicago public schools, 87 teachers and staff are currently considered absent without leave, with an attendance rate of about 76% of school district employees in attendance who were expected to return to work in-person, not including employees who had an approved accommodation.

“We are grateful to the teachers and school-based staff who have returned to their classrooms, and we are continuing to meet regularly with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU),” said a spokesperson for Chicago public schools in an email.

Final ‘Fact-Checker’ Numbers Show Just How Nuts Trump’s Last Year Really Was

Final ‘Fact-Checker’ Numbers Show Just How Nuts Trump’s Last Year Really Was

Ed Mazza, Overnight Editor, HuffPost                 January 25, 2021

Former President Donald Trump made steady news during his presidency for the sheer and often overwhelming number of lies he told daily. But a Washington Post analysis shows just how much worse his final year in office was compared to all the others.

According to the Post, Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his four years in office, with nearly half of them coming during his final year.

Glenn Kessler, who pens the newspaper’s Fact Checker column, wrote that Trump averaged six false claims a day during his first year in office, 16 a day during his second, 22 a day during his third and 39 a day during his last year.

“Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and another 14 months to reach 20,000,” Kessler wrote. “He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.”

Some of Trump’s most infamous moments include his declaration last year that the coronavirus would disappear “like a miracle” as well as his lies about the election, culminating in the rally in which the president’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol during a deadly insurrection.

The persistent lies have taken a toll, not just on the office but on the public.

“As a result of Trump’s constant lying through the presidential megaphone, more Americans are skeptical of genuine facts than ever before,” presidential historian Michael Beschloss told the newspaper.

Read the full analysis here.

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale wrote on Twitter that the constant lies made it almost impossible to keep a careful count:

Goodbye, gas heat? Proposals in Washington state seek to phase out fossil fuel heating in buildings

OPB – Science & Environment

Goodbye, gas heat? Proposals in Washington state seek to phase out fossil fuel heating in buildings

By Tom Banse (Northwest News Network)       January 26, 2021

 

A long goodbye to natural gas furnaces and water heating — and possibly other gas appliances — could begin with action by the Washington Legislature this winter. Separately, the Seattle City Council this week begins consideration of a similar proposal to eliminate fossil fuel-based heating in new commercial buildings.

“Buildings are one of our state’s most significant and fastest growing sources of carbon pollution. We must do better — and we can do better,” testified Michael Furze, head of the state energy office, on behalf of Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee.

Natural gas utilities and major business associations spoke against the state legislative proposal during an initial public hearing on Friday. The opponents said they want to preserve consumer choice and questioned whether the Pacific Northwest electric grid could handle a big increase in winter heating load.

In December, Inslee unveiled a package of measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including this proposal to phase out natural gas for space and water heating. As initially conceived, Washington state would have forbidden use of fossil fuels for heating and hot water in new buildings by 2030. The plan sought to convert existing buildings to electric heat by 2050.

The scope of the measure was revised earlier this month when Inslee’s allies in the state legislature introduced identical proposals in the House and Senate to amend the state energy code. The 2030 date to ban heating with fossil fuels in new construction remains. There is no mandate to convert existing buildings from gas to electric heat, but an expectation that utilities will offer incentives for conversions.

Buildings account for the second biggest share of carbon pollution in Washington, after transportation, largely due to gas furnaces and water heaters such as these.
Buildings account for the second biggest share of carbon pollution in Washington, after transportation, largely due to gas furnaces and water heaters such as these. Tom Banse / NW News Network

“If we don’t start with clean new buildings, we’re going to be bailing water out of a boat while we’re still drilling holes in the bottom of it,” said state Rep. Alex Ramel (D-Bellingham), the prime sponsor in the House. “That’s why we need to accelerate and strengthen our state’s energy code.”

The legislation is silent about use of natural gas for cooking and clothes dryers. In an interview, Ramel said lawmakers want to transition those appliances to clean energy as well. However, the details may be worked out later between natural gas utilities and regulators at the state utilities commission.

During the well-attended virtual public hearing before the state House Environment and Energy Committee, Cascade Natural Gas, Puget Sound Energy and the utility trade group Northwest Gas Association raised objections.

“[This bill] would jeopardize energy reliability, drive up costs to customers and put gas industry employees across Washington out of work,” said Alyn Spector, energy efficiency policy manager for Cascade Natural Gas. “This is not the time to eliminate good paying jobs.”

Business lobbying groups, including the influential Association of Washington Business and the home builders’ Building Industry Association of Washington, also voiced their opposition.

“As we saw this summer in California, we cannot take a healthy grid for granted and losses from even short-lived interruption of power supply can run into the billions,” said Peter Godlewski with AWB. “Shifting consumers and businesses away from natural gas to electricity puts severe pressure on the electric grid as a time when we’re retiring more generating capacity than ever.”

At this juncture it is hard to gauge the prospects for the gas heat phaseout proposal. Inslee, who made combating climate change a central plank of his brief run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, has the benefit of large, supportive Democratic majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. But the capacity of lawmakers to get much done beyond the basics of passing new state budgets and dealing with the coronavirus pandemic while conducting most business virtually remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, an assortment of West Coast cities are tackling carbon pollution from buildings independently. Around 40 climate-conscious California cities and counties have already passed laws or codes to require new buildings to be all-electric.

Later this week, the Seattle City Council begins consideration of an ordinance to ban the use of fossil fuels for heating in new commercial and large apartment buildings. The proposed policy change does not apply to single family homes and duplexes because the city’s energy code that is open for amendment pertains only to commercial buildings. The effective date of Jan. 1, 2022, is much sooner than the state legislature’s proposal in the same vein.

“In Seattle, 35 percent of carbon emissions are from the building sector and they are rising,” Seattle Office of Sustainability and Environment Director Jessica Finn Coven told state legislators in testimony Friday. “Constructing homes and buildings right the first time reduces the likelihood of costly retrofits in the future.”

The Bellingham City Council has also teed up electrification of buildings as part of a broader climate action package. In an email, Bellingham City Council member Michael Lilliquist said the pandemic had slowed down the work, but it is proceeding. He said city staff were running all of the proposed climate measures through a rigorous, multi-step evaluation process.

“We are not yet at the stage to offer specifics that can be incorporated into an ordinance or program,” Lilliquist said.

In Rural Montana, a Hope That Biden Will Reopen the Rails

New York Times

January  24, 2021

 

A former train station on Amtrak’s North Coast Hiawatha route, in Deer Lodge, Mont.
Credit…Tailyr Irvine for The New York Times. The North Coast Hiawatha hasn’t run through Montana since 1979. Now cities like Billings, Bozeman, Helena and Missoula are hoping that “Amtrak Joe” will help fund new rail service.

 

DEER LODGE, Mont. — For nearly a century, passenger trains rumbled three times weekly through this broad, grass-rich mountain valley in central Montana, home to more cattle than people, until Amtrak pulled the plug on the North Coast Hiawatha in 1979.

But with a new president known as “Amtrak Joe” and Democratic control of both houses of Congress, a dozen counties across the sparsely populated state are hoping that a return to passenger train service through the cities of Billings, Bozeman, Helena and Missoula, and whistle stops like Deer Lodge in between, is closer than it has been in four decades.

“Residents of the very rural parts of the state have to travel 175 miles to get on a plane or to seek medical services,” said David Strohmaier, a Missoula County commissioner who is one of those behind the newly formed Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority to raise money and lobby for a return to passenger rail in southern Montana. “Rural communities see it as an economic development opportunity but also as a social lifeline for residents who might not have any other means to travel long distances for necessities.”

Making the journey between Chicago and Seattle, the Hiawatha served the largest cities in Montana. Its absence left a gap in a state where cities and services are widely scattered and public transportation is poor to nonexistent, especially for low-income residents.

The Olympian Hiawatha, operated by the Milwaukee Road and a predecessor to the North Coast Hiawatha, cruising through a Montana valley in 1961.
Credit…Courtesy the Milwaukee Road

 

The Empire Builder, a daily Amtrak train reduced to three times a week during the coronavirus pandemic, travels from Chicago to Seattle and Portland, Ore., through northern Montana, serving only small towns in one of the most remote parts of the state.

Defending the current funding for Amtrak’s routes is a constant battle, so the notion of adding new ones is seen as a long shot. It is less so now, some say, because of the new president and Democratic control of both chambers.

President Biden’s infrastructure plan, for example, promises to “spark the second great railroad revolution.”

“Passenger rail is a vital component to America’s transportation network,” the incoming transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, said in a statement to The New York Times. “I believe that the department should promote, help to develop, and fund passenger rail in order to bring America’s railroads into the 21st century.”

Expanding service to new cities “is a tough leap for a lot of people,” said Sean Jeans-Gail, vice president for policy and government affairs for the Rail Passengers Association. “At the same time it feels like the stars are starting to align. We might get an honest-to-God infrastructure bill and that could mean money for expansion.”

The North Coast Hiawatha in Butte, Mont., in 1977. Amtrak canceled the line two years later.
Credit…Frank Florianz

 

Amtrak officials said they were “supporting” the efforts of local officials to expand service. “There are many places around the country that could benefit from restoration of service or new service,” said Marc Magliari, a spokesman for the company.

There has been encouraging news for passenger rail recently, including the recently remodeled Moynihan Train Hall next to Penn Station in New York and the new, next generation of Acela trains due to enter service this year in the Northeast Corridor.

The pandemic, though, has caused financial havoc for Amtrak, as it has for other forms of transportation. Ridership has been down 80 percent. The railroad received $1 billion from the 2020 stimulus.

And the once ambitious plans for high-speed rail in California have been considerably downsized amid soaring cost overruns, which may hurt the cause for expanded rail.

New long-distance service in Montana, if it happened, would not be high speed. Amtrak’s long-distance trains have a top speed of 79 miles per hour, though sections of some routes have requisite safety equipment in place to reach top speeds of 90 miles per hour.

Small communities across the country see economic hope in an Amtrak connection. Northern Montana still has the Empire Builder, which a recent analysis said contributes up to $40 million a year to the small communities it serves. It is the busiest of Amtrak’s long-distance routes and last year carried some 433,000 passengers.

The Empire Builder, a daily Amtrak train reduced to three times a week during the pandemic, travels through northern Montana, serving small towns in a remote part of the state.
Credit…George Rose/Getty Images

 

A ballpark figure for the start-up cost of reinstituting new service along Montana’s southern route, Mr. Jeans-Gail said, is $50 million for better signaling, upgrading track and station improvement.

Nostalgia is no small part of the support for train travel. The history of the last 150 years in the West has been entwined with the railroads, the first mode of transportation to bridge the long distances in trips that took days, rather than weeks or months. They brought a radically different world to a wild and remote land — for good and for ill. Homesteaders, miners, buffalo hunters and others came to develop and plunder a rich landscape and occupy the land.

The railroads were also instrumental in the creation of the national parks and park infrastructure, which their originators saw as destinations for passengers.

The town of Deer Lodge was integral in the early days of railroading in Montana and is steeped in rail history. The Northern Pacific came in the 1880s, and in 1907 the now defunct Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, known as the Milwaukee Road, located its Rocky Mountain division headquarters here.

“Both of my grandfathers and my father were locomotive engineers on the Milwaukee Road,” said Terry Jennings, who lives in Deer Lodge and is on the board of the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority. “When the Milwaukee Road pulled out it busted the back of this town financially.”

Terry Jennings and the Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority want to see rail service return to the region.
Credit…Tailyr Irvine for The New York Times

 

Since then the town’s population has dwindled, from nearly 5,000 to less than 3,000, and there is a yearning to recapture some of its railroad past and buttress its tourist economy. Deer Lodge is home to the state prison, and the imposing, castle-like stone territorial prison, retired in 1979, is a tourist attraction. The Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site on the edge of town operates as a cattle ranch did in the 19th century.

Even if rail service returns to the southern route, Deer Lodge might not get service right away, though the train would likely stop nearby. If the railroad does make it here, it would need new infrastructure. The town’s two wood-frame, track-side train stations are now the Depot Church and the Powell County Senior Center.

While some cities in Montana have boomed in recent years, many small towns are in an existential battle. The long distances and sparse population of parts of Montana, sometimes called the Big Empty, make travel difficult and expensive.

Flying from Missoula to Billings, for example, requires flying first to Salt Lake City or Seattle and connecting back; a round-trip flight can cost $500 or more. Bus service is spotty. Spending hours behind a steering wheel is often the only alternative.

New train service would open up secluded parts of the vast state. “There’s a big part of Montana that is virtually untouched, that can only be seen from the railroad,” Mr. Jennings said.

Freight trains now run on the tracks between Missoula and Deer Lodge.
Credit…Tailyr Irvine for The New York Times

 

And with an aging population for whom long-distance driving is becoming more difficult, train service looks increasingly attractive. “My husband’s family lives in Terry, 400 miles east,” said Deer Lodge’s mayor, Diana Solle. “We are in our 70s and it’s a long drive.”

Montana is only one of many places working toward new long-distance train service. There is research and planning underway to provide Amtrak service along Colorado’s Front Range; new service between Mobile, Ala., and New Orleans; and additional service between Chicago and St. Paul, Minn. Virginia is adding tracks to expand high-speed train service between Richmond and Washington, connecting to the Northeast Corridor.

Mr. Strohmaier said Montana officials would like to open new rail service to connect to places like Salt Lake City and Denver, especially for people who cannot afford to fly.

“There are economic and social disparities” in travel, he said. “This is the definition of transportation equity. It would provide a more affordable means of transportation for a larger slice of the public than is currently served.”

The historic train station in Missoula, which could benefit from a re-established commuter line.
Credit…Tailyr Irvine for The New York Times

Scientists Launch ‘Four Steps for Earth’ to Protect Biodiversity

Scientists Launch ‘Four Steps for Earth’ to Protect Biodiversity

Scientists Launch ‘Four Steps for Earth’ to Protect Biodiversity
A dugong, also called a sea cow, swims with golden pilot jacks near Marsa Alam, Egypt, Red Sea. Alexis Rosenfeld / Getty Images.

 

In 2010, world leaders agreed to 20 targets to protect Earth’s biodiversity over the next decade. By 2020, none of them had been met. Now, the question is whether the world can do any better once new targets are set during the meeting of the UN Convention on Biodiversity in Kunming, China later this year.

To help turn the tide, a group of 22 research institutions have come together to develop four steps to protect life on Earth, the Environment Journal reported.

“The upcoming Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting, and adoption of the new Global Biodiversity Framework, represent an opportunity to transform humanity’s relationship with nature,” the researchers wrote in One Earth Friday. “Restoring nature while meeting human needs requires a bold vision, including mainstreaming biodiversity conservation in society.”

By mainstreaming biodiversity, the researchers mean that biodiversity should be considered by everyone who makes decisions about the use of natural resources, not just specialized conservation organizations.

To help with this goal, the researchers, led by the University of Oxford’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Conservation Science, developed a framework they are calling the “4Rs,” according to a University of Oxford press release. The point of the 4Rs is that they can be used by any group or individual, from the national to the local level, that needs to make a decision that will impact species and ecosystems.

The 4Rs are:

  1. Refrain: Avoiding negative impacts on nature.
  2. Reduce: Minimizing the harm caused by any unavoidable impacts.
  3. Restore: Acting to quickly counteract any harm caused to nature.
  4. Renew: Working to improve damaged ecosystems.

“This paper represents a real team effort, with authors from academia, business and government,” lead author and Oxford professor E.J. Milner-Gulland said of the goals in the press release. “We’re excited to launch this idea and hope that it will be useful to many different groups as they work to realise the vision of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. It’s a huge challenge, with many different facets, and we hope that Four Steps for the Earth will provide an intuitive and flexible framework for tying all the threads together.”

In the paper, the researchers provided examples of how the framework has been used by groups ranging from the city of London to Indigenous communities. In one example, a fishery in Peru used it to reduce the accidental catching of sea turtles. Goals were set for limiting the number of different species of sea turtle accidentally caught at the local level, and this was connected to regional conservation efforts for the animals.

The researchers also explained how different institutions could use their framework to guide their actions in the future.

“This framework will, hopefully, present a turning point in the way institutions such as Oxford think about their biodiversity impact,” Oxford project coordinator Henry Grub said in the press release. “Our impacts cannot be overlooked because of the positive research we do – rather we hope the ‘4Rs’ will transform efforts to tackle the environmental impacts of the food we eat in canteens, the paper we put in printers, the land we build on, and much more.”