Russian Leverage Over Trump Is Not Just a Theory. It’s Now Fact.

New York Magazine

Daily Intellegencer / The National Interest

Russian Leverage Over Trump Is Not Just a Theory. It’s Now Fact.

By Jonathan Chait May 8, 2018

No pee tape needed. Photo: Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP/Getty Images

In the waning weeks of 2016, when the intelligence community and many politicians were passing around terrifying reports about Donald Trump’s links to Russia like samizdat, the frightening possibility arose that the sanctity of the United States government might be compromised in a way no living American had experienced. This was just one of the unnerving things about the rise of Trump, and it was one that many well-informed observers doubted. Russia, after all, was poor and weak. To imagine that a country with an economy smaller than Canada’s or Italy’s could leverage a superpower ten times wealthier beggared the imagination. And yet that paranoid, absurd belief seems to be creeping closer to reality than seemed possible even in those dark postelection days.

The New York Times has confirmed the explosive claims made by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels, that Columbus Nova — a New York investment firm whose biggest client is a company controlled by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg — deposited half a million dollars into a secret account set up by attorney Michael Cohen to pay off Trump’s sexual partners. The possible reasons for this arrangement run from brazenly corrupt to far worse. Columbus Nova said the hefty sum was a “consulting fee” paid to Cohen, hardly a benign explanation.

5 of the Most Blatantly Unethical Moves by the Trump Administration

Columbus Nova reportedly retained Cohen’s services after Andrew Intrater, the company’s American chief executive, met him while attending Trump’s inauguration with Vekselberg, who is his cousin. Like all Russian oligarchs, Vekselberg operates in cooperation with the Putin government. The payments gave Russia several sources of possible leverage over Cohen and Trump. First, the money itself could amount to some kind of bribe, in return for which a favor would be expected. Second, Russia had knowledge of the secret payoff, which it could always expose. Third, the possibility (at minimum) exists that Russia knew the account was being used to silence Trump’s mistresses, yet another source of kompromat.

For all the speculation about the existence of the pee tape, the latest revelations prove what is tantamount to the same thing. Russia could leverage the president and his fixer — who, recall, hand-delivered a pro-Russian “peace plan” with Ukraine to Trump’s national-security adviser in January 2017 — by threatening to expose secrets they were desperate to keep hidden. Whether those secrets were limited to legally questionable payments, or included knowledge of sexual affairs, is a question of degree but not of kind.

Perhaps even more alarming has been the response of the political system to this crisis. The House of Representatives has assigned Devin Nunes, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, as its point man to defend Trump against the Mueller investigation. The Department of Justice has a long-standing policy of keeping Congress out of active investigations, for the obvious reason that elected officials have a powerful incentive to interfere. Nunes has demanded the virtually unlimited right to get inside the Mueller probe. Officials in the Department of Justice have come to suspect his goal is to compromise the investigation by handing information from the prosecutors over to Trump.

The Washington Post tonight reports another, and even more fanatical, step in Nunes’s crusade. Last week, Nunes demanded a piece of information that the FBI and other intelligence officials believed would “endanger a top-secret intelligence source.” They prevailed on Trump to support their request to withhold the information which, they argued, would “risk severe consequences including potential loss of human lives.”

Nunes is not only demanding the secret be revealed to him, but threatening to vote to hold Attorney General Jeff Sessions in contempt. And officials who secured Trump’s support may have left out the fact that the source provided information to the Mueller investigation. As a result, “several administration officials said they fear Trump may reverse course and support Nunes’s argument.”

Think for a moment what this report tells us. The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who enjoys the full backing of his party’s leadership, is willing to risk what his own government describes as the betrayal and potential loss of life of an intelligence source. And officials within this government believe the president would do the same, all in order to obstruct an investigation into the president’s secretive ties to a foreign power. They are acting as though Trump is compromised by Russia, or at the very least, that he cannot be trusted to defend his own country’s security against it. The sordid Russia scandal has already brought some version of a very dark nightmare scenario to life.

This post has been updated with additional information about Columbus Nova’s relationship with Michael Cohen.

Trump Destroys the Iran Deal—and a Lot More

The New Yorker – News Desk

Trump Destroys the Iran Deal—and a Lot More

By Robin Wright May 8, 2028

President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal unravels Obama’s signature foreign-policy achievement and puts the U.S. on a collision course with Tehran. Photograph by Evan Vucci / AP

After months of threatening, President Trump withdrew from the historic Iran nuclear deal on Tuesday, unraveling the Obama Administration’s signature foreign-policy achievement and putting the United States on a collision course with allies, as well as with Tehran. “This was a horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made,” the President said. “It didn’t bring calm, it didn’t bring peace, and it never will.” Trump also announced that the United States is re-imposing economic sanctions on Iran and, over time, on companies in other countries that do business with the Islamic Republic.

Trump said that he was prepared to negotiate a new deal, but it would have to cover several issues beyond Iran’s controversial nuclear program—including Tehran’s ballistic-missile program, its support for extremist groups, and other “malign” activities in the wider Middle East. In a rebuke to Trump, however, the leaders of Britain, France, and Germany expressed “regret” over Trump’s decision and vowed to remain in the pact, which also includes Russia and China. “We urge all sides to remain committed to its full implementation and to act in a spirit of responsibility,” they said. China also indicated that it would adhere to the accord.

In an initial reaction, Iran also appeared to reject new negotiations—and indicated that it might even stick to the original agreement, which curtails significant aspects of its nuclear program. President Hassan Rouhani said that his government would review the prospects of continuing to collaborate with the other five signatories of the pact, formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A.

“If, at end of this short period of time, if we come to the conclusion that with the collaboration of five countries it is feasible to attain what the Iranian people wish, despite the views of the U.S. and Zionist regime and also the impolite remarks by Trump, we should see whether it is possible to just keep up with J.C.P.O.A. and also take steps in line with regional peace and tranquility,” he said. (Iran refers to Israel as “the Zionist regime.”) But Rouhani—who won office in 2013, on a platform of negotiating a nuclear deal with the United States and getting a reprieve from economic sanctions in return—also suggested that Tehran was prepared for “subsequent measures, if needed,” including “starting industrial enrichment without limitations.”

Trump’s decision means that, technically, the United States is the first nation to violate the accord. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the U.N. nuclear watchdog, has issued ten reports that Tehran is in full compliance with its obligations. Iran is under the toughest inspections and verification-inspections regime ever imposed in an arms-control deal. In a rare public comment on Trump’s foreign policy, former President Barack Obama noted that the right to inspections disappears if the agreement ends.

“Every aspect of Iranian behavior that is troubling is far more dangerous if their nuclear program is unconstrained,” Obama said. “Our ability to confront Iran’s destabilizing behavior—and to sustain a unity of purpose with our allies—is strengthened with the J.C.P.O.A., and weakened without it.”

Critics were scathing about the U.S. withdrawal. James Dobbins, a former U.S. Ambassador to the E.U., who negotiated with Iran after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and now works at the rand Corporation, said that the decision “isolates the United States, frees Iran, reneges on an American commitment, adds to the risk of a trade war with America’s allies and to a hot war with Iran and diminishes the prospects of a durable and truly verifiable agreement to eliminate the North Korean nuclear and missile threat.”

Trump’s decision is likely to have far-reaching impact. The premise of diplomatic outreach was to create conditions for eventual coöperation with Iran on other flashpoints in the world’s most volatile region. Instead, danger looms for deepening tensions in hot spots such as Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen—countries where the United States and Iran have rival interests. “By forfeiting American leadership in the one successful multilateral deal in the volatile Middle East, Trump could possibly make a bad situation worse,” Wendy Chamberlin, a former career diplomat who is now the president of the Middle East Institute, in Washington, told me.

Tensions between Israel and Iran have increased recently over Syria, where the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Lebanon’s Hezbollah have established footholds in three dozen military facilities during its seven-year civil war. Israel has launched more than a hundred air strikes on Syria, the majority on Iranian and Hezbollah targets. “Israel and Iran are headed toward a dangerous confrontation,” Chamberlin said.

The withdrawal from the agreement comes days before the U.S. moves its Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, another controversial decision that has inflamed anti-American passions. “Trump is pouring gasoline on a Middle East in flames already, with his Iran and Jerusalem decisions,” Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A., White House, and Pentagon staffer who is now at the Brookings Institution, told me.

Trump’s decision also undermines the transatlantic alliance, crafted after the Second World War, between the United States and Europe. The President defied a determined last-ditch pitch by America’s three most important European allies, made during visits by French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson.

Trump’s decision to nix rather than fix the deal fits his “America First” agenda. “Withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal—alongside withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Paris Accord [on climate]—completes Trump’s reneging on U.S. commitments and undermining of U.S. credibility,” Daniel Kurtzer, a former Ambassador to Israel and Egypt now at Princeton University, told me. “The United States used to be the leader, the convener, and the engine of international diplomacy. Trump’s actions have turned us into an untrustworthy and erratic diplomatic outlier.”

The Europeans are clearly hoping that the deal—the crowning achievement of the E.U.’s diplomacy as a continental body—will survive without the United States.

Re-imposing sanctions on Iran will create the greatest division between Europe and the U.S. since the Iraq War, Mark Fitzpatrick, the executive director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies office in Washington, told me. “Only this time it will be worse, since not a single European state sides with the U.S. on this matter.” Beyond Europe, American credibility worldwide “will go down the tubes,” he said. “Who will ever want to strike a deal with a country that, without cause, pulls out of a deal that everyone else knows has been working well? America will be seen as stupid, arrogant, and bullying. Pity the poor U.S. diplomats who have to explain this illogical decision to their host countries.”

Trump’s decision even benefits America’s adversaries, including Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. “We’re playing into Putin’s hand,” Michael McFaul, a former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, now at Stanford University, said on CNN. “For Putin, it means that the U.S. is on the outside—and Putin is still on the inside. Why are we isolating ourselves when we need other countries to coöperate with on issues like North Korea?”

The U.S. decision will have fallout both economically and politically inside Iran, where foreboding about Trump’s long-threatened decision has already had a psychological impact. The value of Iran’s currency has plummeted by a third since December. The timing intersects with systemic change—and uncertainty—in Iran over dramatic demographic changes, aging leadership, and long-standing structural deficiencies. “The post-revolutionary baby boom is inching toward middle age, with nearly universal access to information and communications technology and after decades of thwarted hopes for economic improvements,” Suzanne Maloney, a former State Department policy-planning staffer now at the Brookings Institution, told me.

“I don’t see a revolution on the horizon, but I think we are witnessing the slow-motion metastasis of the revolutionary system that is echoing through the economy and the establishment,” she said. “I don’t think this is solely or even primarily provoked by the collapse of the deal but, rather, the culmination of a range of internal forces: long-simmering frustrations, the stalemate of two decades of gradualism, demographic pressures, communications technology, and the anticipated imminence of leadership succession.”

As dramatic as Trump’s curt announcement was, the repercussions of his decision—one of the most important of his sixteen months in office—may take months to play out in Iran, among allies, and even among adversaries. At a White House briefing, the new national-security adviser, John Bolton, said that the Administration will continue to talk with allies, starting on Wednesday, about ways forward. But the prospect of healing the policy divide with the world’s other five major powers—much less getting Iran to agree to a new deal—seems remote, at best.

Robin Wright has been a contributing writer to The New Yorker since 1988. She is the author of “Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World.”

Clean Energy Sector Employs More Than 10 Million For The First Time

Forbes

Clean Energy Sector Employs More Than 10 Million For The First Time

Mike Scott, Opinions expressed by contributors are their own. May 8, 2018

A worker installs solar panels atop a house in the Netherlands. (Photo by Yuriko Nakao/Getty Images)

More than half a million jobs around the world were created in the renewable energy sector in 2017 , bringing the total number of people employed in the sector to more than 10 million for the first time.

Figures from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) show that more than 70% of clean energy jobs are in just six countries – China, Brazil, the US, India, Germany and Japan – suggesting the sector has significant scope to continue growing in years to come.

IRENA’s fifth Renewable Energy and Jobs – Annual Review showed that the sector employs 10.3 million workers, with 60% of jobs in Asia. “Although growing numbers of countries are reaping the socio-economic benefits of renewables, the bulk of manufacturing takes place in relatively few countries and domestic markets vary enormously in size,” IRENA said.

“ Renewable energy has become a pillar of low-carbon economic growth for governments all over the world, a fact reflected by the growing number of jobs created in the sector,” said Adnan Z. Amin, director-general of IRENA.

“The data also underscores an increasingly regionalised picture, highlighting that in countries where attractive policies exist, the economic, social and environmental benefits of renewable energy are most evident,” he continued. “Fundamentally, this data supports our analysis that decarbonisation of the global energy system can grow the global economy and create up to 28 million jobs in the sector by 2050.”

The biggest sector is the solar photovoltaics industry, where the number of jobs grew by almost 9% to 3.4 million, two thirds of them in China. The top five countries, which also include Japan, the US, India and Bangladesh, have about 90% of the world’s solar PV employees.

The next biggest sector, wind, has just a third of the workers found in PV at 1.15 million, with 84% of all wind jobs based in China, Europe or North America. The wind industry remains highly concentrated geographically, with half of the 10 countries with the highest installed capacity in Europe. This is in part because the sector originated there, and in part because it has been the first part of the world where wind farms have spread from the land to the seas around its coastlines.

Steven Colbert explores China’s plan to assign its citizens social credit grades

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert posted a new episode.

May 8, 2018

Stephen explores the China’s government-instituted plan to assign its citizens overall social credit grades, and gets one himself.

Watch The Late Show weeknights at 11:35/10:35 c on CBS and CBS All-Access!

Everyone In China Is Getting A “Social Credit Score”

Stephen explores the China’s government-instituted plan to assign its citizens overall social credit grades, and gets one himself.Watch The Late Show weeknights at 11:35/10:35c on CBS and CBS All-Access!

Posted by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Tuesday, May 8, 2018

All About Monarchs: The Royals of the Butterfly World

EcoWatch

All About Monarchs: The Royals of the Butterfly World

By Natural Resources Defense Council – May 3, 2018

UnSplash

The Migration and Importance of Monarchs

Monarch butterflies, which pollinate many different kinds of wildflowers, are among nature’s great wonders. Their annual migration is one of the most awe-inspiring on Earth: Each fall, millions of these striking black-and-orange butterflies take flight on a 3,000-mile journey across the U.S. and Canada to wintering grounds in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains.

The Population Plummet

The monarch population, which is determined by measuring the number of hectares the butterflies occupy in their Mexico habitat, has declined to 2.48 hectares—almost 30 percent less than last year’s population. The population has been in steady decline for the past 20 years—reaching a high of more than 20 hectares in 1997 and plunging to 0.67 hectares in 2014. Two decades ago, nearly one billion wintering monarchs blanketed the mountain forests of Mexico. Today, that number has dropped by more than 80 percent.

Herbicides and Milkweed

Heavy use of an herbicide called glyphosate (marketed by Monsanto as Roundup) has greatly diminished milkweed, a native wildflower that is the sole food source for monarch caterpillars and the only plant on which adult monarchs lay their eggs. As milkweed disappears, monarch populations have also plummeted, and the annual migration of monarchs to Mexico is in danger of collapse. And yet the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently reapproved the registration for Dow’s Enlist Duo, a combination herbicide designed to kill milkweed.

Solutions?

Much effort has gone into planting milkweed throughout the continental U.S. in the past several years in an attempt to make up for the milkweed that has been lost through agricultural practices. Planting milkweed is a great way to help other pollinators, too, as it provides nectar to a diverse suite of bees and butterflies.

But this year’s monarch butterfly population demonstrates that we need to do much, much more if we are going to be successful at building its population back up again to secure numbers. We also need to curb the use of pesticides that are eliminating milkweed in the first place and come up with sustainable solutions—not just for butterflies, but for farmers and our public health.

How NRDC Is Helping Secure a Healthy Future for Monarchs

NRDC envisions a future where monarch populations across North America are healthy and resilient. To achieve this, we’re working at the federal, state, and international levels to secure limits on the use of toxic herbicides and create new milkweed habitat.

We’re taking legal action against the EPA to win restrictions on toxic herbicides, such as glyphosate, that are killing off native milkweed. And we’re calling on agribusiness companies to withdraw their toxic products. At the state level, we’re working with officials to plant new milkweed habitat along the monarchs’ migration route. Internationally, we’re leveraging pressure by petitioning UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee to upgrade its protection of monarch wintering habitat in Mexico.

Recent NRDC Milestones in the Fight to Save Monarchs

We mobilized more than 113,000 of our members and activists to sign a petition demanding Dow AgroSciences remove Enlist Duo from the market. Not only that, we generated an outcry against Enlist Duo in Congress that included signatures from 32 lawmakers calling on the EPA to take a closer look at the devastating health and environmental impacts of this herbicide.

On the global arena, we ramped up international pressure, including 50,000 petitions from NRDC members and activists, on the UNESCO World Heritage Committee to declare the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico in danger due to the destruction of monarch habitat in the U.S. and Canada by glyphosate. In response, UNESCO launched a formal evaluation of the request.

NRDC and Monarch Watch Planting Milkweed

Monarch Watch is a nonprofit educational outreach program based at the University of Kansas that focuses on the monarch butterfly, its habitat, and its spectacular fall migration. NRDC partners with Monarch Watch to plant milkweed at schools, churches and garden clubs to help save North American monarch butterflies.

Since 2016, Monarch Watch has been distributing milkweed plants, featured in this Monarchs for Moms campaign, for planting on tribal lands and other locations along the monarchs’ migration route.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Help Rebuild Monarch Butterfly Populations By Planting Monarch

Monarch Butterfly Migration Could Collapse, Scientists Warn

Climate Change and Invasive Milkweed Could Make Toxic Cocktail

Dicamba Drift Could Put 60 Million Acres of Monarch Habitat at Risk

Investors Want Green Solutions Even if Trump Doesn’t

Bloomberg

Investors Want Green Solutions Even if Trump Doesn’t

Mathew Carr May 8, 2018

Ulsan, South Korea – March 16: The power plant of SK Corporation oil refiner on March 16, 2006 in Ulsan, South Korea. The SK Corporation is Asia’s leading energy and petrochemical company and South Korea’s leading refiner, the fourth largest refiner in Asia and is also the World’s second largest single complex oil refinery. Founded in 1962 as South Korea’s first oil refiner. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images) Photographer: Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images AsiaPac

Donald Trump may think climate change is a hoax, but investors managing some $30 trillion of assets are increasingly prodding the world’s biggest polluters to come up with stronger green strategies.

HSBC Global Asset Management and Legal & General Group Plc are among the 250 wealth managers in a group known as the Climate Action 100+ that are asking the companies they own to bring their investment programs in step with the Paris Agreement on limiting global warming.

“Companies with business models that are robust within the Paris framework are going to find it easier to access capital than those who aren’t,” said Stephanie Maier, a director of responsible investment at HSBC Global Asset Management, which helped develop Climate Action 100+.

Action by investors contrasts with Trump’s vow to remove the U.S. from the Paris deal, which was agreed with more than 190 nations in the French capital in 2015. Envoys from those nations including the U.S. are in Bonn, Germany, this week to discuss ways to take the deal forward, with the fund managers playing a supporting role.

Watch a video about how the world will fight climate change without the U.S. by clicking here.

Investors will favor companies that recognize the world needs to shift toward cleaner forms of energy, according to Nick Stansbury, a fund manager and energy specialist at Legal & General investment unit, which manages about 983 billion pounds ($1.3 trillion).

The fossil-fuel industry could “completely screw itself up” by fighting for market share with each other once oil demand starts to fall, said Stansbury. Investors may favor fossil fuel companies prepared to buy back shares instead of competing fiercely against renewables, he said. He expects oil demand to peak within two decades, “upending oil markets in a dramatic way.”

The Climate Action 100+ group formed in September is asking companies to outline in greater detail how they will cope with tightening environmental rules suggested by the Paris deal. It’s using a range of tools to apply pressure, including:

Meetings with directors and management to prod companies to align their business plan with the emission-reduction targets

Resolutions at annual shareholder meetings to encourage cleaner business

Votes against directors unwilling to embrace the energy transition, cleaner operation

Some of the investors are divesting from fossil-fuel related stocks and voting against directors who resist change.

Read: HSBC Pledges to Stop Financing New Coal and Dirtiest Oil and Gas

Read: More Shell shareholders sign on to support climate resolution

The talks in Bonn may set out additional signals that governments are making an effort to clean up the environment.

Stansbury said he’d like to see wider adoption of carbon markets and a price of about $60 a ton by 2030 — four times the current cost of emissions certificates in Europe. Higher carbon prices would help renewables at the expense of coal, oil and natural gas.

The envoys in Bonn will work on specific rules to apply the Paris deal, which would help give investors certainty which industries will prosper as governments tighten environmental protections.

Here’s how Paris will help investors make choices:

It requires nations to set emissions targets and gradually tighten them

It asks countries to justify why their targets are adequate

It makes countries measure their emissions

It’s seeking to install rigorous standards to prove compliance with targets, including rules for countries wanting to collaborate or trade emission credits

Maier said the priority for companies and governments is to back the UN’s overreaching goal of limiting temperature increases “to ensure that we stay within the 2 degrees, because that’s what ultimately what we want to see,” Maier said.

4 inventions that give us hope for the planet this year.

EcoWatch shared We Need This‘s episode.

May 7, 2018

We Need This posted a new episode.

4 inventions that give us hope for the planet this year.

Inventions for the Planet

4 inventions that give us hope for the planet this year.

Posted by We Need This on Monday, April 30, 2018

Conaway facing uphill battle on farm bill as conservatives bash it

Politico

Conaway facing uphill battle on farm bill as conservatives bash it

By John Lauinger May 7, 2018

The hard-line conservative faction of just under three dozen members has been noncommittal and uncharacteristically quiet since Mike Conaway released his legislation last month. | AP Photo

Conservative groups are piling on against the House farm bill, underscoring the challenges confronting House Agriculture Chairman Mike Conaway as he seeks the GOP backing he needs to get it to the floor in May.

While Conaway’s team used last week’s congressional recess to whip the bill, H.R. 2 (115), groups including Heritage Action and Americans for Prosperity made the case to reporters and lawmakers that the bill fails to reform farm subsidies and benefits wealthy farmers and agribusiness over taxpayers.

Though farm bills have a history of being bipartisan, Democrats are vehemently opposed to Conaway’s version because it would impose new work requirements on between 5 million and 7 million low-income people enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and invest billions of dollars to expand capacity in state-run SNAP employment and training programs.

Without Democratic backing, Conaway will need to get the support of some conservative House Freedom Caucus members to pass the bill, which he hopes to bring to the floor the week of May 14. But the hard-line conservative faction of just under three dozen members has been noncommittal and uncharacteristically quiet since Conaway released his legislation last month. And the increasingly vocal opposition from outside groups isn’t helping the chairman’s cause.

“There’s not a whole lot of excitement around this bill,” among GOP conservatives, Dan Holler, vice president of Heritage Action, said last week at a briefing for reporters.

The pile-on began on Tuesday at the briefing by the Heritage Foundation, where the group’s political arm, Heritage Action, formally came out against the bill. On Wednesday the group joined about a dozen other right-leaning, free-market organizations in writing to Congress to denounce the legislation. And on Thursday, two conservative groups linked to the influential Koch brothers — Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners — penned a letter to Congress that said the bill moves the system farther away from free-market principles.

The groups took aim at some of the bill’s SNAP provisions, but their opposition is rooted in the farm policy side of the bill and, specifically, its lack of cutbacks to subsidy programs.

“Quite simply, respect for farmers doesn’t mean tolerance for wasting taxpayer money on handouts,” read the letter signed by Heritage Action and 13 other groups. “Our organizations are taking farm subsidy reform very seriously in the upcoming farm bill debate.”

Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners noted recent big-ticket spending bills the 115th Congress has passed, writing that the “reckless budget deal and the irresponsible omnibus bill” have made it increasingly important for farm and nutrition programs to be reassessed and put on a “fiscally responsible path.”

Instead, the groups wrote, the farm policy side of the House bill is “rife with corporate welfare” and includes provisions to expand access to subsidies for members of a family-owned farm, allowing cousins, nieces and nephews to qualify to collect government payments without having to live or work on a farm.

“These lavish programs already vastly exceed a reasonable safety net, yet this bill expands them further,” they wrote.

Their letter, like the one from Heritage Action and the 13 other conservative groups, faulted the House bill for ignoring subsidies reforms called for by the White House.

A spokeswoman for the House Agriculture Committee did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

When the committee marked up the bill last month, Conaway opened the session by outlining what’s at stake for the nation’s producers: “We’ve seen a 52 percent drop in net farm income over the last five years. Chapter 12 bankruptcies are up 33 percent over the last two years alone. And not long ago two key universities informed us that two-thirds of the representative farms that they use to model economic conditions in agriculture are currently in marginal or poor financial condition.”

The markup, like the entirety of the farm bill reauthorization cycle up until that point, was dominated by Democratic sniping over the bill’s proposals for SNAP.

Last week, the Congressional Budget Office released an analysis of cost estimates for the House measure. It found that placing stricter work requirements on able-bodied adults receiving SNAP benefits would save $9.2 billion over a decade as people lose eligibility. But government spending costs would grow by $7.7 billion due to costs from state employment and training programs and administrative expenses. Overall, CBO projects the nutrition title would cost taxpayers about the same over the next decade under the bill, even with the projected drop in participation.

Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners highlighted the proposals to strengthen SNAP work requirements as “positive elements” of the bill, but questioned the call to redirect expected savings from those reforms into a ramp-up of SNAP Employment and Training programs, noting that those programs have “a poor track record for delivering results.”

According to the CBO, expanding SNAP job training could take more than 10 years, but states would be given just two years to complete build-outs. CBO estimated that “by the end of 2028, about 80 percent of the beneficiaries who are subject to the work requirement would be offered such services through a state program.”

Nan Swift, director of federal affairs for the National Taxpayers Union, a conservative fiscal watchdog, argued in a blog post on Thursday that there’s “little reason” to assume that a major expansion of SNAP Employment and Training programs would lead to more SNAP beneficiaries entering the workforce.

“Legislators should think twice before creating a new opportunity to exacerbate our entitlement spending crisis,” Swift wrote.

On the other side of the political spectrum, House Agriculture ranking member Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) also criticized the call to build out SNAP E&T. “I think that people should work; I agree with that,” he said during a radio interview on Wednesday. “What I don’t agree with is this huge amount of money that’s being spent on a bureaucracy that is not going to accomplish anything. It’s not enough money to actually train anybody.”

The Minnesota Democrat, in a statement to POLITICO, cited “the gaggle of conservative groups lined up in opposition to this bill” as evidence that “the clear and present danger to the farm bill comes from Republicans, not from Democrats.” He also pointed to the fiscal 2019 budget blueprint that the 154-member conservative Republican Study Committee released recently that called for deep cuts to farm bill programs.

“I’ve suggested to my colleagues that we don’t offer any amendments,” Peterson added, referring to House Democrats. “We’re ready to take a step back, sit down and do this the right way, but the Republicans clearly have some deeper divisions to contend with.”

Helena Bottemiller Evich and Maya Parthasarathy contributed to this report.

A View From the Air: Carbon Sequestration, Midwestern Farms and Biodiversity.

Resilience

A View From the Air: Carbon Sequestration, Midwestern Farms and Biodiversity.

Adrian Ayres Fisher, orig. pub by Ecological Gardening May 2, 2018

One afternoon in early March I flew from Boston to Chicago, returning home from an Ecological Landscape Alliance conference. Cloud cover, white and lumpy as a rumpled hotel duvet, obscured the view, until over western Pennsylvania the plane crossed the edge of the weather system. Our country’s heartland unfurled below. The gently rolling terrain flattened as the plane headed west, divided by roads delineating a grid, with fields, towns, and even woodlots squared into the design.

This tidy, Grant Woods-esque arrangement is the relic of late 18th century surveying expeditions sent out to divide the Northwest Territory into 6-mile square townships, the better to sell off, settle and tame the nearly, at the time, unfathomable expanse. As they worked, the surveyors made detailed maps, including of vegetation; they used boulders, piles of rock or even notable trees as corner markers and confirmed corner placement with nearby “witness trees.” Today, restorationists use these maps to help figure out what kinds of ecosystems they should be restoring to, when embarking on conservation or rewilding projects.

We flew on. Farm building roofs shone in the sun among the fields; only the occasional meandering river gave a hint of how the land had looked in the early 19th century. Though there’d been snow out east, here everything was shades of brown: leafless woodlot trees and tens of millions of acres of empty fields, a mid to dark brown sea of bare earth.

Bare fields full of potential
For me that landscape was a palimpsest of loss, prosperity and the potential to help mitigate climate change. The ghosts of past cultures—the Adena, the Hopewell, more recently displaced nations such as the Potawatomi and Miami, and a later thriving network of small American family farms—lay below. These successive groups inhabited a now phantom post-glacial landscape comprised of Eastern deciduous forest punctuated by areas of savanna, prairie and wetland that, as a traveler journeyed west, expanded until the prairie dominated.

Today this landscape, tended by a very few farmers utilizing all that technology has on offer, signify an evanescent prosperity precariously balanced on an extremely limited number of commodity crops. This flourishing economy could be upended tomorrow not only by ill-conceived trade wars, or weather catastrophes such as drought, but also by the mounting environmental problems, including but not exclusive to climate change, that are nearly all of our culture’s own devising.

Years ago I might have seen those fields as completely normal, even desirable. But no longer. Because I’m a regenerative gardener and natural landscape manager, when I see a piece of land, no matter the size, I see an opportunity to nurture what biodiversity is there. To me, improving a parcel of land means working with it in such a way as to increase its ecosystem functionality. I highly respect the work conventional farmers do to wrest a living from the soil; I believe that industrial farming methods are not only outmoded, but also actively dangerous.

Those Midwestern fields are losing their fertility along with their world-class topsoil; many now lack the organic matter and important microbial life that not only maintain good soil structure and health but also allow water to percolate properly. Conventional farming practices, such as leaving the earth bare from harvest until planting season, can actively harm the living soil. Fertilizer run-off pollutes waterways and overuse of herbicides, fungicides and insecticides inflict far-reaching collateral damage on living organisms from bumblebees and monarch butterflies to birds to humans, while habitat destruction imperils them further.

But what could that landscape teach about climate change mitigation and environmental renewal? It’s become evident that to hold average planetary temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), global emissions should peak by 2020, and then decline by 10% or greater each year in order to reach zero emissions by 2050. Thereafter, the downward trend then must continue into negative emissions territory. Clearly, technology-based solutions such as ramping up renewable energy while leaving fossil fuels in the ground are fundamental to mitigation. Emissions reductions and increased energy efficiency are essential in every arena, from the global to the personal. For example, if the global top 10% of individual carbon emitters reduced their carbon footprints to that of the average European, greenhouse gas emissions would decline 30%. (This, of course, includes nearly all US residents.)

However, going further means figuring out how to actively remove carbon from the air. Most schemes are in the research stage; existing mechanical carbon capture and sequestration (CSS) is expensive and difficult and only halts emissions at industrial sites. So far, only seventeen facilities, including an ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois, use the technology to achieve neutral production emissions. Proposed biomass-based CSS systems such as BECCS (Bio-mass carbon capture and storage), with their emphasis on monocultures, have the potential to further damage ecosystems.

Solving global warming requires increasing biodiversity
Global warming, with its effects of climate weirding, is just one element—a deadly symptom, if you will—of the ongoing, global crisis of ecological destruction that also includes extinction, water scarcity, pollution and desertification. Averting this human-inflicted catastrophe will require multiple, diverse strategies and it has become increasingly clear we cannot accomplish anything without the aid of our planet’s complex natural systems. Solving the greenhouse gas puzzle requires working to help biodiversity increase worldwide and helping the currently disrupted biogeochemical cycles stabilize and recover so that all life might thrive on our beautiful blue and green planet.

This is where large-scale regenerative land management comes into play: it is the most effective tool for carbon sequestration that presently exists. Carbon sequestration through natural means includes not only vitally important conservation and restoration, but necessitates incorporation into all landscape management, from regenerative organic farming and intensively managed holistic grazing to, on the one hand, backyard landscaping with native plants and on the other, toxic chemical cleanup. Managing land along principles that foster soil health and biodiversity not only can sequester carbon on a potentially massive scale (4-12 GtCO2e or even more), but can also help regulate local water cycles, thereby helping avoid both desertification and excessive flooding. It also reduces toxic chemical use and nutrient run-off, all the while promoting biodiversity in plant and animal life, from the microbes in the soil, to pollinators, birds and other animals, to charismatic megafauna and apex predators such as ourselves.

Agriculturalists and other land managers throughout the world are already changing their practices, though it’s been slow to take hold in the Midwest. Regenerative agriculture networks such as ReGenerate IL have sprung up; farmers and scientists have formed partnerships to explore and measure the soil health and carbon sequestration potential of agricultural practices both ancient and cutting edge; farmers are beginning to try methods such as cover crops and waterway buffer zones planted with native plants. In all this, the most innovative practices combine agriculture with landscape management for biodiversity. There’s even an economic case to be made. In this era of falling commodity prices, rising costs of materials and supplies, and potential economic woes, many conventional farmers are already struggling to make ends meet. Farmers are discovering that, while it requires more, different kinds of knowledge and work, regenerative farming can actually be more profitable owing to reduced production costs and higher selling prices. More might go the way of the Nebraska farmer I heard interviewed on the radio recently, who said he is considering moving at least part of his farm out of soy, corn and hogs, and into diversified organics.

A possible future landscape
What might air travelers traversing the Midwest see ten years in the future? Farms, of course. We can’t return the Midwest to the matrix of woods, prairie and savanna it was 150 years ago. But what if all that land was managed not only for food production but also for soil health, water management, biodiversity and carbon sequestration? There’d be very little bare soil. Instead, there’d be extensive cover crops blanketing fields whose crop production included diverse, multi-year rotations; wide bands of prairie and woods featuring native grasses, flowers, shrubs and trees bordering fields, waterways and roads; areas of intensively managed grazing; alley cropping, silvopasturing and other forms of agroecology; and even expanded natural areas: in short, carbon sequestering, diversified, fertile farmland that would be healthier for farmers as well as the planet.

On the western edge of Indiana, the land changed again. As we descended towards Midway airport, subdivisions, logistics terminals, golf courses and parks replaced fields. Remarkably, amidst the development reposed large, wild areas featuring irregular woods along creeks and streams and the shaggy tan carpet of dormant prairie grasses. We’d entered Cook County: home to the 5.25 million people of the Chicago metro area and the most biodiverse county in Illinois, thanks in part to the nearly seventy thousand acres of carbon-sequestering forest preserve land managed through a unique partnership of professionals and volunteers.

I fastened my seatbelt. I thought about Aldo Leopold, the Midwesterner who both worked with farmers to save and restore their land during the Great Depression and helped invent the art and science of ecological restoration. Leopold might not have known about global warming—very few at the time did—but he had a thorough understanding of the harm unthinking human activities can wreak. He wrote that most modern technologies and practices, “do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.” That has become our greatest, most significant challenge in the Midwest and worldwide. Are we up for it? Can we solve the puzzle?

References:

Ecological Landscape Alliance: https://www.ecolandscaping.org/

(4-12 GtCO2e or even more): “There’s a huge gap between the Paris climate change goals and reality Current pledges are about a third of what’s needed.”
By David Roberts@drvoxdavid@vox.com Updated Nov 6, 2017, 10:56am EST https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/10/31/16579844/climate-gap-unep-2017

“Decatur plant at forefront of push to pipe carbon emissions underground, but costs raise questions.”
By Tony Briscoe/ Chicago Tribune /November 23,

Oil bursts above $70, threatens economy

USA Today

Oil bursts above $70, threatens economy

Douglas A. McIntyre, May 7, 2018

U.S. oil and natural gas is on the verge of transforming the world’s energy markets for a second time, further undercutting Saudi Arabia and Russia Time

(Photo: JoyceMarrero / iStock)

The price of crude oil has not been above $70 a barrel since 2014. It reached that point today. The availability of Iran’s crude was among the most important reasons as the U.S. government decides the fate of sanctions related to a deal that prevents Iran from advancing its nuclear capability. Oil above $70 affects the price of gas, oil and petrochemical products, making a rapid rise a challenge to an American economy, which is growing less than 2.5%.

For several months, U.S. and Canadian shale oil have offset supplies from other nations. This has even been true as OPEC has indicated it would like to raise prices to enrich the treasuries of its members. And the disintegration of Venezuela’s economy also has been a concern. The country has the largest proven oil reserves in the world.

Among the most evident effect of oil prices is the price of gasoline. The average price of a gallon of regular gas is $2.81, according to the AAA. This is up from $2.35 a year ago. As the heavy summer driving period approaches, prices almost certainly will be higher from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Tens of millions of Americans will be on the road, pushing demand even higher.

Among the worries is that lower- and middle-income families with members who must commute to work or drive long distances for other reasons will see their discretionary income shaved. Since the primary driver of gross domestic product is consumer spending, high gas prices mean people have fewer financial resources, which are taken up primarily by housing, clothing and food. The prices of heating oil can also harm consumer spending, although the end of the coldest part of the year should make that unimportant for the next several months.

The profits of a number of industries rely on low oil prices. Airlines, which consume a tremendous amount of jet fuel, are high on the list. It is not unusual for high oil prices to erode profits, or even cause financial losses.

Finally, there are products made from oil derivatives. This includes a broad list that runs from asphalt to lubricants.

Oil has risen above $70 a barrel. How long it is there will partially determine the fate of the U.S. economy.

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