Month: November 2021

The Guardian

How the chemicals industry’s pollution slipped under the radar

XiaoZhi Lim – November 22, 2021

It’s one of the biggest industries in the world, consumes more than 10% of fossil fuels produced globally and emits an estimated 3.3 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions a year, more than India’s annual emissions – yet the chemicals sector has largely slipped under the radar when it comes to climate.

Related: The shipping industry faces a climate crisis reckoning – will it decarbonize?

This sprawling industry produces a huge range of products, many of which support other industries – pesticides for agriculture, acids for mining, lubricants for machinery, ingredients in cleaning agents, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals and plastics.

While the industry has an important role to play in moving to low-carbon economies – providing coatings for solar panels, lightweight plastics to reduce vehicles’ energy consumption and insulating materials for buildings – it’s also hugely carbon intensive and predicted to become more so. Oil companies have been betting on chemicals as a way to remain profitable as the world pledges to turn away from fossil fuel energy. The International Energy Agency predicted that petrochemicals could account for 60% of oil demand in the next decade.

They’ve become a bit of an untouchable sector for many politicians

Jan-Justus Andreas

The chemicals sector is the largest industrial user of oil and gas but it has the third-largest carbon footprint – behind steel and cement – because only about half of the fossil fuels that the industry consumes are burned for their energy. The rest is used as feedstock for products such as plastics with the emissions released only when these products reach the end of their lives, for example, when waste plastic packaging or an old mattress is incinerated.

Lowering the industry’s emissions is possible but technically daunting. Plus this large, complex industry, which supports millions of jobs worldwide, has significant political and economic clout. “They’ve become a bit of an untouchable sector for many politicians,” said Jan-Justus Andreas, who leads industrial policy at the Norwegian environmental non-profit Bellona Europa.

Yet the chemicals industry is finding itself increasingly under scrutiny – both from nations that need to meet ambitious emissions reduction targets and from researchers, scientists and campaigners calling on the industry to cut its polluting products.

Moving away from dirty energy

One way to lower emissions is to focus on chemical plants – improving efficiency and switching to low-carbon energy.

Most of the industry’s direct carbon dioxide emissions come from burning fossil fuels to power chemical transformations, many of which take place at high temperatures and pressures. These emissions could be significantly reduced if the industry moves away from dirtier fuels such as coal.

If renewable wind or solar energy is available, certain chemical processes that are already driven by electricity, such as the production of chlorine used to make other materials such as PVC pipes or solvents like chloroform, could immediately become low carbon. And chemists continue to look for ways to power traditionally heat-driven chemical transformations with electricity instead – such as the process of converting nitrogen to ammonia, mostly used for fertilizer, which requires temperatures of about 500C (932F).

While chemical companies are counting on efficiency improvements and investing in renewable energy to meet their climate goals, many chemical products themselves cannot be decarbonized because they are made of carbon, said Martin Scheringer, an environmental chemist at the public research university ETH Zurich.

Removing fossil fuels from the raw materials used to create carbon-based chemicals and materials is crucial, said Jonatan Kleimark of the non-profit ChemSec. Kleimark likens products made from fossil fuels – such as clothes, toys and paints – to a carbon debt, because the carbon embedded within them will only be emitted in the future. “The longer we wait to change, the larger debt we will build, and that will be very hard to do something about if we don’t start,” Kleimark said.

Related: Are clothes made from recycled materials really more sustainable?

To stop adding to this debt, chemicals and materials could be made with sources of carbon that are already above ground, such as plants. Bioplastics – made with plant materials such as sugar, corn or seaweed – are booming, for example, as companies and scientists try to remove fossil fuels from plastic production.

Another idea is to turn waste products into raw materials for the chemical industry. Chemists have been using agricultural waste or waste plastics – even the ultimate waste material, carbon dioxide – as feedstocks. A Berlin-based startup, Made of Air, is attempting to create plastics from wood waste, while an Icelandic company, Carbon Recycling International, turns captured carbon dioxide emissions into methanol, used in fuels and for making other chemicals such as formaldehyde.

‘Why don’t you deal with someone else first?’

But all these ideas – especially those involving a shift in feedstocks – are very hard to implement.

Technologies to turn agricultural or plastic waste into new chemicals are still unproven on a large scale and using carbon dioxide as a raw material will require vast amounts of zero-carbon energy.

Manufacturers making products with plants rather than fossil fuels need to ensure that they do not create new problems through deforestation, destroying wildlife habitat, raising food prices or increasing the use of water or pesticides. Biomass resources also tend to be more spread out, whereas traditionally, chemical plants stay close to where fossil fuel resources are easily accessible.

“With renewable feedstocks, you will need to reestablish new supply chains,” said Zhanyun Wang, a senior scientists at ETH Zurich. In addition to delivering a steady stream of renewable raw materials to chemical plants, the new supply chains would need to be competitive with well-established ones making products from fossil fuels at low prices, Wang said.

The clean power infrastructure requirements alone are tremendous. Electrifying Europe’s chemicals sector would require 4,900 terawatts of renewable electricity, according to an estimate by the European Chemical Industry Council, almost double the total amount of electricity Europe generated in 2019.

“If you are a lobbyist for the chemical sector, showing those numbers helps you to put your head down again and say, ‘Look, firstly I’m too important and valuable, and secondly, it’s really, really difficult to deal with me, so why don’t you deal with someone else first,’” Andreas said.

Currently, that someone else refers to the cement and steel industries, said Andreas. The internal competition between the three industries to avoid scrutiny is unhelpful, he said, because they could benefit from developing an industrial strategy together.

The exhaust gases from steel and cement plants could serve as valuable feedstocks for chemical plants. All three industries need large-scale renewable electricity or carbon capture facilities, which require significant investment. The financial risks involved in building these new facilities could be mitigated, Andreas said, if the new facilities serve multiple operations instead of a single steel mill or fertilizer plant.

Governments could also help build the necessary infrastructure or help companies gain access to renewable feedstocks, said Rebecca Dell, who directs the industry program at the San Francisco-based ClimateWorks Foundation.

But with less than 30 years to 2050, time is short. If there are no delays, typically, it takes about seven years for companies to get a new process up and running, Dell said. “We have to move a lot faster.”

Simplifying products

One important, but neglected, lever for cutting emissions from the chemical sector is to simply use and produce fewer chemicals. “That would lead very directly to a reduction in CO2 emissions and also reduce the toxification of humans and the environment,” Scheringer said.

The overuse of materials such as plastics, fertilizers and other synthetic chemicals has caused devastating effects on ecosystems and human health. Plastic debris chokes waterways and wildlife, fertilizer-laden runoff from fields can cause algal blooms and create dead zones in coastal areas.

These impacts have led policymakers and consumers to cut back – for instance, many cities and countries now have prohibitions on some single-use plastics. “It’s an attempt to reduce plastic itself as a pollutant in the landscape, more than concerns about greenhouse gases, but we can make simultaneous progress on more than one front,” said Dell.

Studies have also found that being more precise about applying fertilizer could save farmers money and keep greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

It is less straightforward to cut back on some of the chemicals that are used to make consumer products, but Scheringer, Wang and others have proposed a way to start. Alarmed by the dangers of some cancer-causing PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals”, researchers have suggested eliminating PFAS from their “nice-to-have” applications – such as nonstick cookware, long-lasting mascara, or water-repellent surfer shorts that don’t need the level of high performance that “forever chemicals” confer.

Related: ‘Forever chemicals’: the hidden threat from the toxic PFAS on your shelf

The researchers recommend that “forever chemicals” be used only in really important products, such as protective gear or medical devices that save lives. The same philosophy could be applied to identify and eliminate other chemicals that have been unnecessarily formulated in products, such as adding antimicrobials to soaps that can already kill germs.

Simplifying the chemical ingredients in products has an added benefit: they are easier to take apart or recycle when they are no longer useful. Wang points to the example of carbon black, the chemical used as a pigment in food takeout boxes. The pigment serves no technical function other than providing colour and it is used because food looks more appealing set against a black background, Wang said. But the pigment also means the takeout boxes are invisible to devices that use light to sort plastics at sorting facilities, making them impossible to recycle.

The chemical sector is producing more than consumers need, Wang said: “The business model is driven by how many chemicals you sell, it’s not necessarily driven by the added societal value of the chemical.”

But the “enormous demand” for products is also a big driver – and perhaps harder to address, said Kleimark. “We’re standing in front of a really, really big challenge because there we cannot rely on technologies, but on changing the way we do things today.”

The State

An industry’s waste was used to fertilize farm fields in SC. Now wells are polluted

Sammy Fretwell – November 19, 2021

Eleven years after moving to rural Darlington County, Kim Weatherford learned that dangerous chemicals had seeped into the drinking water her family depends on.

She was stunned. How could such a thing occur in a pastoral, out-of-the-way place like that? Weatherford asked

“It just doesn’t seem right that this could have even happened,’’ she said. “I don’t want to get sick.’’

Weatherford is among dozens of eastern South Carolina residents whose wells have been contaminated by an emerging class of chemicals, found in an industrial plant’s sludge that landowners spread on fields for years to fertilize crops.

The contamination is serious enough that state and federal regulators are urging families with highly polluted wells not to drink the water unless they install devices to filter out the contaminants. The contamination is from per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, or PFAs, a growing source of water pollution nationally.

So far, 46 wells in the areahave been found with PFA compounds in the water, even as regulators test more wells to determine the extent of the contamination, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control. Of that, 23 wells have levels that exceed a federally recommended safety limit, agency officials said Thursday night.

Pollution from PFAs is an increasing concern across the country because the chemicals, which few people had heard of 20 years ago, do not break down quickly in the environment and are considered highly toxic. These toxins have had a variety of industrial uses, ranging from inclusion in Teflon to firefighting foam.

PFAs are suspected of causing cancer, kidney problems, development disabilities in children, and other ailments. Those exposed to the chemicals over a period of years are considered most at risk of developing health problems. Problems have popped up in recent years in some South Carolina communities, including at least two mobile home parks with wells suspected of being polluted by Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter County. Among the PFAs of most concern are PFOS and PFOA.

State and federal agencies have tied the source of contamination Weatherford is dealing with to an abandoned industrial plant that used waste sludge to fertilize farm fields in three eastern South Carolina counties: Darlington, Chesterfield and Marlboro.

The Galey and Lord factory, a textile dying and finishing plant that opened in the mid 1960s, supplied some of the sludge from 1993 to 2013, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. PFAs were commonly used in the textile industry as fabric finishing additives.

“The source of the contamination is suspected of being connected to the land farming of the (wastewater) sludges from the former Galey and Lord textile mills,’’ the EPA said in a document posted on its website.

All told, 304 agricultural fields totaling nearly 10,000 acres received treated sludge from the Galey and Lord plant, the agency said. One area with groundwater contamination is at Journey’s End Road in Darlington County. The fields where the sludge was applied were owned by entities other than Galey and Lord, DHEC said.

The EPA and DHEC are still trying to determine how much of the sludge contained PFAs and related compounds.

The Galey and Lord facility operated for decades, employing thousands of local residents, but shut down in 2016 after pollution was discovered on the property. The company had a 2013 cleanup agreement with DHEC, but didn’t complete the work as required, records show.

Now, the EPA has proposed making the abandoned Galey and Lord location a federal Superfund site for cleanup. Superfund sites are among the most polluted places in the country and often are cleaned up at taxpayer expense because the owners can’t — or won’t — do the work.

Already, the EPA has conducted emergency Superfund work in the area, installing filters in homes with PFA-tainted wells. The efforts have cost the EPA at least $250,000, but that does not include all of the work the agency has done so far, said Bryan Vasser, an EPA official involved in the cleanup effort.

In addition to efforts to protect drinking water, the EPA also removed 2,400 abandoned containers and 100,000 gallons of flammable liquids and other waste last year from the Galey and Lord site in the Society Hill community. In addition, the agency hauled away 53,000 pounds of solid waste, some of it flammable and corrosive, an EPA fact sheet says.

Not only is drinking water tainted, but so are rivers and creeks nearby.

Wetlands along Cedar Creek and the Great Pee Dee River were found to be polluted with two types of PFAs — known as PFOA and PFOS — as well as arsenic, chromium, copper, lead and manganese, all of which are toxic. The same poisonous materials were found in wastewater treatment basins at the industrial site, according to the federal environmental agency.

The Great Pee Dee River and Cedar Creek next to and downstream of the Galey and Lord site “are impacted by the facility, posing human health and ecological risks,’’ the EPA says on its website.

Efforts to locate a representative of Galey and Lord were unsuccessful.

Officials with the non-profit S.C. Environmental Law Project said the PFAs-contamination in drinking water is a particular concern for the state.

South Carolina has no specific statewide limits on PFA-pollution in drinking water. Federal oversight needs strengthening, the law project says.

“It is extremely alarming to me,’’ said Ben Cunningham, an attorney with the law project who is helping Weatherford, the Darlington County property owner. “It’s another example of how flawed the drinking water issue is in South Carolina and how we have a lot of work to do to provide everybody with good drinking water.’’

Dave Hargett, an environmental consultant from Greenville who is familiar with PFAs, said the discovery that waste sludge may have polluted drinking water wells is “a big deal.”

Some people didn’t realize in the past that sludge could produce toxins like PFAs, he said. Sludge from Galey and Lord was applied on farm fields for about a decade, with DHEC’s approval, records show.

Waste sludge “had, to a farmer, beneficial reuse value, with nutrients they could put on their ag fields,’’ Hargett said. “But they didn’t know they were getting all this crap with it.’’

In response to questions from The State, DHEC spokeswoman Laura Renwick said the agency didn’t require testing for PFOAs or PFOS when sludge was applied to the landscape in the past “because these compounds had not yet been identified as compounds of concern..’’

Weatherford, 53, lives across the street from an agricultural field she suspects of using the tainted sludge. It’s a scenic spot that was an attraction when she and her family moved from Clarendon County to Darlington County in 2010 after building their new house..

Weatherford, who lives with her husband and 21-year-old son, said they are now buying bottled water to drink and brush their teeth with.

But Weatherford wonders whether PFAs were in her drinking water long before they were discovered this past summer by DHEC. She worries that it may affect her family’s health. PFAs are known as “forever chemicals’’ because they don’t break down quickly in the environment.

“It is very scary,’’ she said. “I worry about my husband, myself, my mother-in-law. Most of my worry comes for my child.’’

Test results obtained by The State show that DHEC’s water testing found contamination in the Weatherford’s well at 120 parts per trillion. The recommended federal limit is 70 parts per trillion. The water in her in-laws nearby home contained levels of PFAs that were even higher, Weatherford said.

For now, the EPA has offered to put a filter on her well to get rid of the PFAs in the water, but she declined because it will become expensive to operate. And it’s not a long-term solution to the water pollution, she and others say.

The late Sen. Hugh Leatherman, in one of his last official acts before he died this month, asked a local utility to help the Weatherfords.

“Although the Environmental Protection Agency has offered to install a filtration system in the Weatherford home, it is not a long-term solution,’’ Leatherman wrote in an Oct. 14 letter to the Darlington County Water and Sewer Authority. “Ms. Weatherford and her neighbors would greatly prefer to have access’’ to the public water system.

“I would very much appreciate anything that your agency can do to provide safe drinking water for Ms. Weatherford and her neighbors.’’

Weatherford said she and her family will have to deal with the problem they’ve been handed.

She’s angry that tighter controls were not placed on the sludge spread on farm fields in her community. Galey and Lord had a history of polluting the environment, according to a 2013 news story in The State about companies that repeatedly break environmental laws.

Regulators “have known for so long they have been breaking environmental laws,’’ she said. “And here it is 2021, and we are out of luck because the company is out of business. How did they let this go this far?”

AZCentral – The Arizona Republic

15,000 Native American families live without electricity. How can solar power help?

Neetish Basnet, Arizona Republic – November 19, 2021

Their 17-by-65-feet house with a single room is two and a half miles off the roadway. The closest neighbors live 5 miles away. The nearest town, 25 miles.

But the Taylors have plenty to keep them busy.

The husband and wife duo, members of the Hopi tribe, spend their days watching over their 25 cattle that graze the land. A couple of horses also run around the homestead.

They grow crops with dry farming techniques out in the fields and some produce in a small garden. A rain catchment system collects water for drinking. Raised cattle also function as subsistence and business.

“We have really learned how to try to work with what we have,” Catherin Taylor said.

But for long, the couple couldn’t work their way around lighting their home when it got dark or enjoying simple comforts of modern technology like brewing coffee. Their home did not have electricity.

Indigenous people have lived self-sufficient lifestyles for thousands of years. But the United States’ wider public-policy structures often overlooked the people living on Native American reservations and ancestral lands.

“That’s the way it has to be, because they have no other alternatives,” said Walter Haase, general manager of Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, said about the situation of Native tribes. “We’re one of the richest countries in the world. We really need to take care of our own people, especially our first people – the people that were here to begin with.”

Even after years of legislative push, large swaths of Native American localities still lack access to electricity. More than 15,000 Hopi and Navajo households live without electricity, according to officials.

Now, crowdsourced and community-level efforts are leading the way in providing reliable energy sources to native homes.

Light for reading, arts and crafts

Max Taylor grew up without running electricity all through his life. His wife, Catherin, used to drive to Flagstaff, an almost 50-mile journey south, just to iron their clothes.

“People live out in rural communities, real rural, off-the-grid kind of communities,” she said. “People who don’t live in those areas take for granted what they have.”

For the first time this summer, the Taylor household flicked a switch to lighten their house. There’s a TV they can watch now as they wake up to coffee pouring in an electric machine.

Native Renewables, a Flagstaff-based nonprofit, installed and wired their home to a solar energy system. A grant enabled the installation to be free of cost.

“I love to read, and my husband does his own art and crafts,” Catherin Taylor said. “So that has been really great to be able to have bright light to see and do things.”

Native Renewables, with five full-time and six part-time staff, aims to connect 15,000 Navajo and Hopi families with solar power. The Taylors are one of the first Hopi families to receive a solar power system from the nonprofit.

Suzanne Singer, Native Renewables founder and executive director, said the task to power thousands of Native homes is monumental, but not implausible with community support.

“Energy independence to lots of tribal nations and communities, it’s really critical for their sovereignty,” Singer said. “They want to be able to manage their own systems, want to not be reliant on external entities for the individual families.”

Still in its startup phase, Native Renewables have powered 30 families. It replaced batteries in 12 different units. So far the nonprofit has donated 3,000 smaller-capability solar kits, including 1,500 last year alone.

A standalone 7.2-kilowatt capacity solar power system can power up to a refrigerator at the Taylor home.

Public donations are the largest funding source, Singer said. The nonprofit started applying for various federal grants, as well.

Native Renewables was one of the 10 recipients of a recent $1.2 million grant from IGS Energy, an Ohio-based natural gas and electric supplier.

“I’m always advocating for investment in Native communities, and also in Native companies and organizations on the ground,” Singer said. “It’s always amazing when we get funded directly instead of getting funded as a pass through from who knows how many entities it goes through when it comes down to us.”

By the end of the year, Native Renewables expects to install 22 new 2.4 KW systems.

Another new company, Navajo Power, is working on a proposed 750-megawatt photovoltaic solar farm in northern Arizona to supply electricity to Native American families. The solar farm is anticipated to be up and running by 2024.

Connecting more families to power grid

Deep in Navajo Nation, the NTUA is gearing up for the largest grid extension year with the help of volunteers.

The next phase of what started as a pilot project in 2019, Light Up Navajo will connect 300 homes in a 12-week plan starting in April.

About 200 volunteers from across the country are dividing their time and equipment into 48 work weeks. Working an average 12-hours shifts per day, each crew will connect at least two families to the power grid.

“They volunteer their time, and they bring in their own equipment,” NTUA’s Haase said. “So now what happens is, it allows me to just buy material and only spend a smaller amount on equipment, so my dollars can go farther.”

NTUA estimates connecting a single Navajo home to the existing grid can cost more than $40,000. Supplementary infrastructure like power lines and transformers substations to bring electricity to all the powerless Navajo homes has a $350 million price tag, according to NTUA.

“What’s at stake is many of these folks have waited their whole lives to get electricity,” Haase said.

The average monthly electricity bill of a U.S. residence was $115 in 2019, according to data from U.S. Energy Information Administration. That calculates to $1,380 per year.

If NTUA had to self-fund the grid connection project without help from volunteers, it would have had to charge the families an average of $6,000 a year, Haase said.

Native Americans’ median household income of $40,315 is 35% less than the national average, according to 2017 American Community Survey estimates.

“There is no way that these folks can afford to do this on their own. And they shouldn’t really have to. They’ve suffered a lot of other problems, you know, from us being here and other things,” Haase said. “It’s the least we can do – provide them with the basic essential services that the rest of America has and has had for the last 40 or 50 years.”

Federal money on the way

As part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, U.S. Congress in 1936 passed the Rural Electrification Act, which provided federal loans to deploy electrical systems in rural areas across the country. However, the measure bypassed many tribal nations.

A Department of Energy analysis estimated 14.2% of Native American families on reservations have no access to electricity, compared to 1.4% of all U.S. households.

The Tohono O’odham Nation was one of the first Native communities to receive funding from the Rural Electrification Administration. A $2.5 million loan to the Tohono O’odham Utility Authority, established in 1970, funded the development and expansion of the electric system on the reservation.

The Tribal Power Act, introduced by Rep. Tom O’Halleran, D-Sedona, and passed last year, gives the Department of Energy’s Indian Energy Education Planning and Management Assistance Program $30 million annually until 2025. The legislation also makes it easier for Native tribes to seek grants and financial support to improve access to reliable electricity.

The bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill passed in early November also has funding to address needs in tribal lands. About $3 billion will go toward broadband connectivity programs and infrastructure development.

NTUA connected 510 homes to the grid last year after receiving $14.5 million as part of the federal CARES Act.

The plan for next year is to power at least 1,000 homes.

“If you can give us the resources, we can find the material and the labor to get it installed,” Haass said. “Let’s just keep working on getting this problem under control and getting the numbers lower and lower.”

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Climate change in Wisconsin: How it is affecting our state and what is being done to address it.

Laura Schulte, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – November 19, 2021

Climate change has risen to the forefront of policy and the minds of millions as governments across the world work to curb the warming of Earth’s atmosphere.

But on a small scale, states across the U.S. are also feeling the effect of climate change — hotter summers and colder winters, rising water levels and severe droughts. Wisconsin hasn’t been spared, and advocates and officials are now examining the effects and trying to implement solutions — in addition to those recently proposed at the global COP26 summit — to slow the effects to the residents of the state.

Here’s a look at the ways climate change is affecting Wisconsin, and the state’s plans to address the issue.

Climate change is causing more storms, floods, droughts

In the coming years, Wisconsin will face a host of effects from climate change, aside from warmer summers and colder winters.

Already visible is the increased number of storms during the summer, such as those that pummeled the state in August, knocking out power for days for some residents. In the coming years, Wisconsin could see more frequent severe storms, dropping more rain in shorter periods of time, as well as causing more tornadoes.

With the increase in the number of storms and more frequent heavy rains, flooding is more likely to be a problem for the state, too. Wisconsin’s average annual precipitation has increased between 5% and 20% since 1950, depending on the region of the state. And because the rain events are dropping more water, severe flooding is causing problems such as sewer overflows in Milwaukee or wet basements in Madison.

There are effects on either end of the extremes. Climate change is also exacerbating droughts for some areas, such as northern Minnesota and southern Wisconsin. This year’s wildfire season stretched into the early summer, despite usually ending in the spring with the annual spring rains. Some areas of the state saw below-average rainfall, leading to fires that scorched parts of the state up until mid-June this year.

Even this fall, all of Wisconsin remains at moderate risk for wildfires, according to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Water levels in Mississippi River, Lake Michigan drop

Thanks to dry weather in northern Minnesota this year, the upper portion of the Mississippi River faced a drop in water levels. In Wacouta, south of Minneapolis, where the river goes from narrow to very wide, the lower water levels have caused issues for transport, with only one barge able to pass through the main channel at a time. In some places, barges could run aground on unexpected sandbars, causing problems for travel and shipping in the area.

The low levels are a reversal after nearly a decade of high water levels, with extreme flooding in 2019. But it’s likely the low water seems more extreme than it actually was, because people were used to seeing such a high flow.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the state, water levels in Lake Michigan have also dropped, revealing a few extra inches of beachfront this summer. But the drop in the water level doesn’t mean that the lake level is low. Lake Michigan was still about 22 inches above its average level in May, while Lake Superior to the north was about eight inches above average.

‘Natural’ solutions could help curb carbon in Earth’s atmosphere

Wisconsin is looking to combat climate change.

One such effort is Gov. Tony Evers’ plan to plant 75 million trees by Dec. 31, 2030, in addition to conserving 125,000 acres across the state. By conserving land, and either maintaining or reforesting that land, Wisconsin can greatly increase its ability to absorb carbon and restore areas that could even help prevent flooding.

When all 75 million trees are planted, they’ll be able to store 28.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide over the next 50 years, according to 1t.org, which is managed by the World Economic Forum and American Forests. That’s equivalent to the amount of carbon dioxide produced by 6 million passenger vehicles in a year.

In general, forests, farms and grasslands capture about 25% of global carbon emissions and even after trees die they can transfer carbon to the soil, keeping it out of the air for up to 70,000 years.

Restoring wetlands could mean less flooding

Many cities and towns in Wisconsin are also looking at natural mitigation for flooding events by restoring natural wetlands and floodplains.

In Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District has been working to combat floods for the last 20 years through various means, looking at the entire land area that channels rainwater and snowmelt to the creeks, streams and rivers, called a watershed.

In some areas, MMSD has restored rivers and creeks to their previous states, removing concrete that funneled excess water too quickly during storms, creating flooding conditions at the end of their run.

Restoring naturally occurring wetlands has been a priority, too. Wetlands can hold thousands of gallons of excess rainwater or snowmelt, releasing it slowly into the watershed over time.

The sewerage district has also purchased land running along the rivers that flow into Milwaukee, restoring the natural floodplains, and moving homes out of the danger zone when it comes to flooding — a project that the district has dubbed “Greenseams.”

Ashland County in far northern Wisconsin is taking part in a pilot program aimed at establishing guidelines for repairing historical wetlands and restoring tributaries to major rivers in the area, preventing waterways from creating massive flood conditions.

In Dane County, about $5 million was invested in dredging channels between the lakes that surround the city of Madison, removing sediment and helping the water move in the manner it’s supposed to during heavy storms, instead of flooding the banks of lakes and rivers and flowing into homes and businesses.

In the southwestern Wisconsin community of Darlington, where flooding of the Pecatonica River has plagued the city for decades, the city filled in basements, knocked down buildings, and moved homes and businesses out of the way of floodwaters. The wastewater treatment plant was moved out of the water’s reaches and all utilities were raised as much as 8 feet off the ground. A park and campground were created to help mitigate the floods by provide space to absorb the water.

Energy provider pledges to go coal-free

In early November, WEC Energy Group, the parent company of utility We Energies, also based in Milwaukee, and Wisconsin Public Service based in Green Bay, pledged that it would look toward other sources of power in a bid to be coal-free by 2035.

The company, which also owns utilities in Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan, plans to invest $5.4 billion in renewable energy between 2022 and 2026, reducing its release of harmful greenhouse gases created by the burning of coal to generate energy.

The company’s move away from coal demonstrates just how quickly the energy industry overall is shifting away from fossil fuels, said Tom Content, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board of Wisconsin, a consumer watchdog group that monitors energy rates in the state.

Task force suggested other ways to combat climate change

In addition to actions already being taken, Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes’ Climate Change Task Force has also put forth other suggestions for the state to address the issue. The task force included lawmakers, environmental advocates, farmers, business representatives and others who issued a report in December identifying strategies in nine areas, including energy, agriculture and education.

Evers included almost all of the policies suggested by the task force, but most were removed by the Republican-led Legislature earlier this year before the budget was finalized, saying they were part of a “liberal wish list.”

A few items connected to the goals in the report were retained by Republicans and made it into the final version of the state’s two-year budget.

One task force strategy was raising the cap on grants to farmer-led groups that help prevent runoff that causes non-point pollution. Republicans agreed to provide $250,000 more per year for two years to the now $1 million program, while Evers wanted that extra amount every year.

Republicans also approved funding and bonding authority for Department of Natural Resources water quality and flood control programs. They approved part of what Evers wanted for county conservation staff grants but rejected funding that would provide grants for staff that would focus on climate change.

Legislative Democrats introduced a new package of 22 bills in recent days that also face little chance of advancing.

Federal programs will aid Wisconsin efforts

In addition to efforts within Wisconsin, federal dollars will soon flow to the state to help address some climate change-related issues.

In the recently passed infrastructure bill — worth $1.2 trillion — Wisconsin stands to receive over $500 million to improve public transport, nearly $80 million to expand the state’s electric vehicle charging network and an additional $2.5 billion in grant funding dedicated to EV charging.

In President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill, which is still being debated in Congress, billions would be provided to expand tax credits for utility and residential clean energy, clean energy vehicles and clean energy manufacturing. The bill also includes billions of dollars for “resilience” programs to ward off and prepare for extreme weather such as wildfires and hurricanes, which are made worse by climate change.

About this feature

This is a weekly feature for online and Sunday print readers delving into an issue in the news and explaining the actions of policymakers. Email suggestions for future topics to jsmetro@jrn.com.

Politico

Judge faults Trump for Jan. 6 attack

Kyle Cheney – November 19, 2021

A federal judge on Friday squarely placed the blame for the Jan. 6 Capitol attack on Donald Trump, suggesting that the former president’s role in seeding lies about the 2020 election — and the effect it had on his followers — has been an underappreciated part of the entire episode.

Judge Amit Mehta issued his commentary as he delivered a 14-day jail sentence to Jan. 6 rioter John Lolos — a sentence Mehta said he shortened in part to reflect the fact that Lolos was responding to Trump’s call.

“He didn’t purposely come to Washington, D.C., to storm the Capitol,” said Mehta. “The fact remains that he and others were called to Washington, D.C., by an elected official, prompted to walk to the Capitol by an elected official.”

“People like Mr. Lolos were told lies, told falsehoods, told our election was stolen when it clearly was not,” Mehta continued, adding that the defendants were paying for conduct that was largely enabled by Trump and his allies. “We’re here today deciding whether Mr. Lolos should spend 30 days in jail when those who created the conditions that led to Mr. Lolos’ conduct, led to the events of Jan. 6 [haven’t been] held to account for their actions and their word.”

“In a sense, Mr. Lolos, I think you were a pawn,” Mehta continued. “You were a pawn in a game directed and played by people who should know better. I think that mitigates your conduct.”

Mehta’s commentary is among the most notable yet in Capitol riot cases. Aside from the Lolos case, Mehta is also presiding over the conspiracy case against 20 members of the Oath Keepers, charged with planning to stop Congress’ certification of the 2020 election. That case is widely seen as one of the most pivotal of the entire Jan. 6 investigation.

In his remarks on Friday, Mehta said other judges on the federal court in Washington, D.C., hadn’t fully emphasized the fact that many of the participants in the Jan. 6 mob had been fed a relentless diet of lies about the election.

“Once you hear people who should know better tell you that an election was stolen and they say it loudly enough, frequently enough,” he said, “it’s not surprising that people will believe it.”

Mehta’s commentary on Trump comes as the Jan. 6 select committee in the House has worked to home in on the former president’s role in efforts to overturn the election results and sow disinformation about his defeat. The panel has subpoenaed Trump’s top aides and was buoyed last week by the Justice Department’s decision to indict Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress after he defied a committee subpoena.

Although Mehta blamed Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 riot, the judge faulted Lolos for refusing to take responsibility for his actions and attempting to justify his conduct repeatedly in remarks at his sentencing hearing. Mehta said he believed the 14-day sentence would be sufficient to deter Lolos from seeking to commit future politically motivated crimes.

Even after the sentence was imposed, Lolos continued making his case, speaking over the judge. Lolos could be heard defending his conduct towards the police on Jan. 6 and saying that videos from the day will vindicate him.

Eventually, Lolos’ own attorney, Edward McMahon, urged him to stop.

“Mr. Lolos, the hearing is over,” MacMahon said just before reporters were disconnected from the audio line.

Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.

MSNBC – MadowBlog

John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, is no longer holding back

Steve Benen November 17, 2021

It says a lot about the former president that the man who served at his side for a year and a half seems to hold him in barely contained contempt.

John Kelly served as Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff for 17 months, and after parting ways with the Republican president, the retired Marine general said very little about his former boss and place of employment.

His reticence did not last. Business Insider reported:

John Kelly, Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, did not mince words about his ex-boss as rioters violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, according to a new book. “If he was a real man, he would go down to the Capitol and tell them to stop,” Kelly said of Trump to ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl during a phone call as the insurrection was taking place.

According to Karl’s new book, “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” Kelly said the Jan. 6 riot was so serious, and the then-president’s handling of the crisis was so indefensible, that the cabinet would’ve been justified in trying to remove Trump from office.

“If I was still there, I would call the cabinet and start talking about the Twenty-Fifth Amendment,” Kelly told Karl. (Then-Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin also reportedly broached the subject with other cabinet members about this in January.)

What strikes me as notable about this is that Kelly got to know Trump very well. The retired general first joined the then-president’s cabinet as the Homeland Security secretary, and then ran Trump’s White House for a year and a half — longer than any other of Trump’s chiefs of staff. If anyone got a first-hand look at how Trump works, thinks, acts, and processes information, it’s Kelly.

And Kelly concluded that Trump is not a “real man” — but he was a man who should’ve been removed from office before the end of his tenure.

It took a while for Kelly to reach this point, though he’d taken some prior steps in this direction. Last year, for example, former Defense Secretary James Mattis, wrote a rather extraordinary rebuke of Trump, condemning the then-president for being divisive, immature, and cavalier about abusing his powers. Soon after, Kelly publicly endorsed Mattis’ criticisms.

Kelly added at the time, “I think we need to look harder at who we elect. I think we should look at people that are running for office and put them through the filter: What is their character like? What are their ethics?”

By January, Kelly saw far less need for subtlety, accusing Trump of “poisoning” people’s minds. Kelly added that Trump is “a very, very flawed man … who has got some serious character issues.”

It says a lot about the former president that the man who served at his side seems to hold him in barely contained contempt.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics.”

Los Angeles Times

Letters to the Editor: The Brownshirts are back, and they include Paul Gosar and the extremist GOP

November 18, 2021

To the editor: House Republicans’ overwhelming refusal to censure Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) is reprehensible. It compares with the German parliament’s behavior in the 1930s.

With Hitler in power, antisemitic statements and actions were tolerated, leading to multiple instances of violence and ultimately Kristallnacht in 1938, before World War II. German acceptance of Kristallnacht set the stage for the horrors of the Holocaust.

The Republican Party is proceeding down a dangerous path with Donald Trump as its absolute leader. All GOP political actions are designed to restore him and the party to power.

The moral judgment of our leaders combined with our Constitution’s checks and balances are the keystone of American democracy. To congressional Republicans, they are irrelevant. Now more than ever, we need an energetic press.

Sidney Weissman, Highland Park, Ill.

..

To the editor: Gosar needs to be investigated for fomenting violent overthrow of the government, in violation of federal law. When he distributed a video on Twitter showing him killing his Democratic colleague, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, and attacking President Biden, he was arguably encouraging the assassination of elected officials, which is prohibited by law.

Article 18, Section 2385 of the U.S. Code states, in part: “Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States … by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.”

Social media is a powerful way of disseminating ideas and coordinating action, as was evidenced prior to the Jan. 6 attack. Violent imagery against government officers must be discouraged, because some people take this stuff literally and seriously.

Sheila Alpers, Palm Springs

..

To the editor: The unforgettable quote by Joseph Welch in the McCarthy hearings of 1954 circles my brain: “Have you no sense of decency?”

It seems easy for these members to rage against pornography and promote book banning and the sanctity of life for the unborn, but here, right now on our doorstep, we hear not a peep from the sheep as death is promulgated for a member of Congress by one of their own.

Their silence is deafening.

Roz Levine, Los Angeles

..

To the editor: The Republican Party has descended into a cult beholden not to the American people or traditional conservatism, but to their leader Trump.

Last week, the Wyoming GOP voted to disavow Rep. Liz Cheney, a rock-solid Republican. Her only sin was that she voted to impeach the former president for his central role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

More recently, only two Republicans voted to censure Gosar. If one of my grandchildren had posted a video depicting violence against one of their classmates, they would almost certainly be suspended or expelled from school, and I would be in full support of that action. Yet nearly half of the members of the House of Representatives apparently find no fault with Gosar’s despicable action.

May the Grand Old Party rest in peace. It is dead.

Gary Vogt, Menifee

The Atlantic

The Bad Guys Are Winning

If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.

By Anne Applebaum November 15, 2021

 Illustrations by Michael Houtz

The future of democracy may well be decided in a drab office building on the outskirts of Vilnius, alongside a highway crammed with impatient drivers heading out of town.

I met Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya there this spring, in a room that held a conference table, a whiteboard, and not much else. Her team—more than a dozen young journalists, bloggers, vloggers, and activists—was in the process of changing offices. But that wasn’t the only reason the space felt stale and perfunctory. None of them, especially not Tsikhanouskaya, really wanted to be in this ugly building, or in the Lithuanian capital at all. She is there because she probably won the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, and because the Belarusian dictator she probably defeated, Alexander Lukashenko, forced her out of the country immediately afterward. Lithuania offered her asylum. Her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, remains imprisoned in Belarus.

Here is the first thing she said to me: “My story is a little bit different from other people.” This is what she tells everyone—that hers was not the typical life of a dissident or budding politician. Before the spring of 2020, she didn’t have much time for television or newspapers. She has two children, one of whom was born deaf. On an ordinary day, she would take them to kindergarten, to the doctor, to the park.

Then her husband bought a house and ran into the concrete wall of Belarusian bureaucracy and corruption. Exasperated, he started making videos about his experiences, and those of others. These videos yielded a YouTube channel; the channel attracted thousands of followers. He went around the country, recording the frustrations of his fellow citizens, driving a car with the phrase “Real News” plastered on the side. Siarhei Tsikhanouski held up a mirror to his society. People saw themselves in that mirror and responded with the kind of enthusiasm that opposition politicians had found hard to create in Belarus.

“At the beginning it was really difficult because people were afraid,” Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya told me. “But step-by-step, slowly, they realized that Siarhei isn’t afraid.” He wasn’t afraid to speak the truth as he saw it; his absence of fear inspired others. He decided to run for president. The regime, recognizing the power of Siarhei’s mirror, would not allow him to register his candidacy, just as it had not allowed him to register the ownership of his house. It ended his campaign and arrested him.

Tsikhanouskaya ran in his place, with no motive other than “to show my love for him.” The police and bureaucrats let her. Because what harm could she do, this simple housewife, this woman with no political experience? And so, in July 2020, she registered as a candidate. Unlike her husband, she was afraid. She woke up “so scared” every morning, she told me, and sometimes she stayed scared all day long. But she kept going. Which was, though she doesn’t say so, incredibly brave. “You feel this responsibility, you wake up with this pain for those people who are in jail, you go to bed with the same feeling.”

Read: When women lead protest movements

Unexpectedly, Tsikhanouskaya was a success—not despite her inexperience, but because of it. Her campaign became a campaign about ordinary people standing up to the regime. Two other prominent opposition politicians endorsed her after their own campaigns were blocked, and when the wife of one of them and the female campaign manager of the other were photographed alongside Tsikhanouskaya, her campaign became something more: a campaign about ordinary women—women who had been neglected, women who had no voice, even just women who loved their husbands. In return, the regime targeted all three of these women. Tsikhanouskaya received an anonymous threat: Her children would be “sent to an orphanage.” She dispatched them with her mother abroad, to Vilnius, and kept campaigning.Democratic revolutions are contagious. If you can stamp them out in one country, you might prevent them from starting in others.

On August 9, election officials announced that Lukashenko had won 80 percent of the vote, a number nobody believed. The internet was cut off, and Tsikhanouskaya was detained by police and then forced out of the country. Mass demonstrations unfolded across Belarus. These were both a spontaneous outburst of feeling—a popular response to the stolen election—and a carefully coordinated project run by young people, some based in Warsaw, who had been experimenting with social media and new forms of communication for several years. For a brief, tantalizing moment, it looked like this democratic uprising might prevail. Belarusians shared a sense of national unity they had never felt before. The regime immediately pushed back, with real brutality. Yet the mood at the protests was generally happy, optimistic; people literally danced in the streets. In a country of fewer than 10 million, up to 1.5 million people would come out in a single day, among them pensioners, villagers, factory workers, and even, in a few places, members of the police and the security services, some of whom removed insignia from their uniforms or threw them in the garbage.

Tsikhanouskaya says she and many others naively believed that under this pressure, the dictator would just give up. “We thought he would understand that we are against him,” she told me. “That people don’t want to live under his dictatorship, that he lost the elections.” They had no other plan.

At first, Lukashenko seemed to have no plan either. But his neighbors did. On August 18, a plane belonging to the FSB, the Russian security services, flew from Moscow to Minsk. Soon after that, Lukashenko’s tactics underwent a dramatic change. Stephen Biegun, who was the U.S. deputy secretary of state at the time, describes the change as a shift to “more sophisticated, more controlled ways to repress the population.” Belarus became a textbook example of what the journalist William J. Dobson has called “the dictator’s learning curve”: Techniques that had been used successfully in the past to repress crowds in Russia were seamlessly transferred to Belarus, along with personnel who understood how to deploy them. Russian television journalists arrived to replace the Belarusian journalists who had gone on strike, and immediately stepped up the campaign to portray the demonstrations as the work of Americans and other foreign “enemies.” Russian police appear to have supplemented their Belarusian colleagues, or at least given them advice, and a policy of selective arrests began. As Vladimir Putin figured out a long time ago, mass arrests are unnecessary if you can jail, torture, or possibly murder just a few key people. The rest will be frightened into staying home. Eventually they will become apathetic, because they believe nothing can change.

The Lukashenko rescue package, reminiscent of the one Putin had designed for Bashar al-Assad in Syria six years earlier, contained economic elements too. Russian companies offered markets for Belarusian products that had been banned by the democratic West—for example, smuggling Belarusian cigarettes into the European Union. Some of this was possible because the two countries share a language. (Though roughly a third to half of the country speaks Belarusian, most public business in Belarus is conducted in Russian.) But this close cooperation was also possible because Lukashenko and Putin, though they famously dislike each other, share a common way of seeing the world. Both believe that their personal survival is more important than the well-being of their people. Both believe that a change of regime would result in their death, imprisonment, or exile.

Both also learned lessons from the Arab Spring, as well as from the more distant memory of 1989, when Communist dictatorships fell like dominoes: Democratic revolutions are contagious. If you can stamp them out in one country, you might prevent them from starting in others. The anti-corruption, prodemocracy demonstrations of 2014 in Ukraine, which resulted in the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych’s government, reinforced this fear of democratic contagion. Putin was enraged by those protests, not least because of the precedent they set. After all, if Ukrainians could get rid of their corrupt dictator, why wouldn’t Russians want to do the same?

Lukashenko gladly accepted Russian help, turned against his people, and transformed himself from an autocratic, patriarchal grandfather—a kind of national collective-farm boss—into a tyrant who revels in cruelty. Reassured by Putin’s support, he began breaking new ground. Not just selective arrests—a year later, human-rights activists say that more than 800 political prisoners remain in jail—but torture. Not just torture but rape. Not just torture and rape but kidnapping and, quite possibly, murder.

Lukashenko’s sneering defiance of the rule of law—he issues stony-faced denials of the existence of political repression in his country—and of anything resembling decency spread beyond his borders. In May 2021, Belarusian air traffic control forced an Irish-owned Ryanair passenger plane to land in Minsk so that one of the passengers, Roman Protasevich, a young dissident living in exile, could be arrested; he later made public confessions on television that appeared to be coerced. In August, another young dissident living in exile, Vitaly Shishov, was found hanged in a Kyiv park. At about the same time, Lukashenko’s regime set out to destabilize its EU neighbors by forcing streams of refugees across their borders: Belarus lured Afghan and Iraqi refugees to Minsk with a proffer of tourist visas, then escorted them to the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland and forced them at gunpoint to cross, illegally.

Lukashenko began to act, in other words, as if he were untouchable, both at home and abroad. He began breaking not only the laws and customs of his own country, but also the laws and customs of other countries, and of the international community—laws regarding air traffic control, homicide, borders. Exiles flowed out of the country; Tsikhanouskaya’s team scrambled to book hotel rooms or Airbnbs in Vilnius, to find means of support, to learn new languages. Tsikhanouskaya herself had to make another, even more difficult transition—from people’s-choice candidate to sophisticated diplomat. This time her inexperience initially worked against her. At first, she thought that if she could just speak with Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron, one of them could fix the problem. “I was sure they are so powerful that they can call Lukashenko and say, ‘Stop! How dare you?’ ” she told me. But they could not.

So she tried to talk as foreign leaders did, to speak in sophisticated political language. That didn’t work either. The experience was demoralizing: “It’s very difficult sometimes to talk about your people, about their sufferings, and see the emptiness in the eyes of those you are talking to.” She began using the plain English that she had learned in school, in order to convey plain things. “I started to tell stories that would touch their hearts. I tried to make them feel just a little of the pain that Belarusians feel.” Now she tells anyone who will listen exactly what she told me: I am an ordinary person, a housewife, a mother of two children, and I am in politics because other ordinary people are being beaten naked in prison cells. What she wants is sanctions, democratic unity, pressure on the regime—anything that will raise the cost for Lukashenko to stay in power, for Russia to keep him in power. Anything that might induce the business and security elites in Belarus to abandon him. Anything that might persuade China and Iran to keep out.

To her surprise, Tsikhanouskaya became, for the second time, a runaway success. She charmed Merkel and Macron, and the diplomats of multiple countries. In July, she met President Joe Biden, who subsequently broadened American sanctions on Belarus to include major companies in several industries (tobacco, potash, construction) and their executives. The EU had already banned a range of people, companies, and technologies from Belarus; after the Ryanair kidnapping, the EU and the U.K. banned the Belarusian national airline as well. What was once a booming trade between Belarus and Europe has been reduced to a trickle. Tsikhanouskaya inspires people to make sacrifices of their own. The Lithuanian foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, told me that his country was proud to host her, even if it meant trouble on the border. “If we’re not free to invite other free people into our country because it’s somehow not safe, then the question is, can we consider ourselves free?”

Tsikhanouskaya has acquired many other supporters and admirers. She has not only the talented young activists in Vilnius, but colleagues in Poland and Ukraine as well. She promotes values that unite millions of her compatriots, including pensioners like Nina Bahinskaya, a great-grandmother who has been filmed shouting at the police, and ordinary working people like Siarhei Hardziyevich, a 50-year-old journalist from a provincial town, Drahichyn, who was convicted of “insulting the president.” On her side she also has the friends and relatives of the hundreds of political prisoners who, like her own husband, are paying a high price just because they want to live in a country with free elections.

Most of all, though, Tsikhanouskaya has on her side the combined narrative power of what we used to call the free world. She has the language of human rights, democracy, and justice. She has the NGOs and human-rights organizations that work inside the United Nations and other international institutions to put pressure on autocratic regimes. She has the support of people around the world who still fervently believe that politics can be made more civilized, more rational, more humane, who can see in her an authentic representative of that cause.

But will that be enough? A lot depends on the answer.

All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote the propaganda of another—and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.

This is not to say that there is some supersecret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. Nor does the new autocratic alliance have a unifying ideology. Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, nationalists, and theocrats. No one country leads this group. Washington likes to talk about Chinese influence, but what really bonds the members of this club is a common desire to preserve and enhance their personal power and wealth. Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, the members of this group don’t operate like a bloc, but rather like an agglomeration of companies—call it Autocracy Inc. Their links are cemented not by ideals but by deals—deals designed to take the edge off Western economic boycotts, or to make them personally rich—which is why they can operate across geographical and historical lines.

Thus in theory, Belarus is an international pariah—Belarusian planes cannot land in Europe, many Belarusian goods cannot be sold in the U.S., Belarus’s shocking brutality has been criticized by many international institutions. But in practice, the country remains a respected member of Autocracy Inc. Despite Lukashenko’s flagrant flouting of international norms, despite his reaching across borders to break laws, Belarus remains the site of one of China’s largest overseas development projects. Iran has expanded its relationship with Belarus over the past year. Cuban officials have expressed their solidarity with Lukashenko at the UN, calling for an end to “foreign interference” in the country’s affairs.

In theory, Venezuela, too, is an international pariah. Since 2008, the U.S. has repeatedly added more Venezuelans to personal-sanctions lists; since 2019, U.S. citizens and companies have been forbidden to do any business there. Canada, the EU, and many of Venezuela’s South American neighbors maintain sanctions on the country. And yet Nicolás Maduro’s regime receives loans as well as oil investment from Russia and China. Turkey facilitates the illicit Venezuelan gold trade. Cuba has long provided security advisers, as well as security technology, to the country’s rulers. The international narcotics trade keeps individual members of the regime well supplied with designer shoes and handbags. Leopoldo López, a onetime star of the opposition now living in exile in Spain, has observed that although Maduro’s opponents have received some foreign assistance, it’s “nothing comparable with what Maduro has received.”

Like the Belarusian opposition, the Venezuelan opposition has charismatic leaders and dedicated grassroots activists who have persuaded millions of people to go out into the streets and protest. If their only enemy was the corrupt, bankrupt Venezuelan regime, they might win. But Lopez and his fellow dissidents are in fact fighting multiple autocrats, in multiple countries. Like so many other ordinary people propelled into politics by the experience of injustice—like Sviatlana and Siarhei Tsikhanouski in Belarus, like the leaders of the extraordinary Hong Kong protest movement, like the Cubans and the Iranians and the Burmese pushing for democracy in their countries—they are fighting against people who control state companies and can make investment decisions worth billions of dollars for purely political reasons. They are fighting against people who can buy sophisticated surveillance technology from China or bots from St. Petersburg. Above all, they are fighting against people who have inured themselves to the feelings and opinions of their countrymen, as well as the feelings and opinions of everybody else. Because Autocracy Inc. grants its members not only money and security, but also something less tangible and yet just as important: impunity.How have modern autocrats achieved such impunity? In part by persuading so many other people in so many other countries to play along.

The leaders of the Soviet Union, the most powerful autocracy in the second half of the 20th century, cared deeply about how they were perceived around the world. They vigorously promoted the superiority of their political system and they objected when it was criticized. When the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously brandished his shoe at a meeting of the UN General Assembly in 1960, it was because a Filipino delegate had expressed sympathy for “the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights.”

Today, the most brutal members of Autocracy  Inc. don’t much care if their countries are criticized, or by whom. The leaders of Myanmar don’t really have any ideology beyond nationalism, self-enrichment, and the desire to remain in power. The leaders of Iran confidently discount the views of Western infidels. The leaders of Cuba and Venezuela dismiss the statements of foreigners on the grounds that they are “imperialists.” The leaders of China have spent a decade disputing the human-rights language long used by international institutions, successfully convincing many people around the world that these “Western” concepts don’t apply to them. Russia has gone beyond merely ignoring foreign criticism to outright mocking it. After the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was arrested earlier this year, Amnesty International designated him a “prisoner of conscience,” a venerable term that the human-rights organization has been using since the 1960s. Russian social-media trolls immediately mounted a campaign designed to draw Amnesty’s attention to 15-year-old statements by Navalny that seemed to break the group’s rules on offensive language. Amnesty took the bait and removed the title. Then, when Amnesty officials realized they’d been manipulated by trolls, they restored it. Russian state media cackled derisively. It was not a good moment for the human-rights movement.

Impervious to international criticism, modern autocrats are using aggressive tactics to push back against mass protest and widespread discontent. Putin was unembarrassed to stage “elections” earlier this year in which some 9 million people were barred from being candidates, the progovernment party received five times more television coverage than all the other parties put together, television clips of officials stealing votes circulated online, and vote counts were mysteriously altered. The Burmese junta is unashamed to have murdered hundreds of protesters, including young teenagers, on the streets of Yangon. The Chinese government boasts about its destruction of the popular democracy movement in Hong Kong.

At the extremes, this kind of contempt can devolve into what the international democracy activist Srdja Popovic calls the “Maduro model” of governance, which may be what Lukashenko is preparing for in Belarus. Autocrats who adopt it are “willing to pay the price of becoming a totally failed country, to see their country enter the category of failed states,” accepting economic collapse, isolation, and mass poverty if that’s what it takes to stay in power. Assad has applied the Maduro model in Syria. And it seems to be what the Taliban leadership had in mind this summer when they occupied Kabul and immediately began arresting and murdering Afghan officials and civilians. Financial collapse was looming, but they didn’t care. As one Western official working in the region told the Financial Times, “They assume that any money that the west doesn’t give them will be replaced by China, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia.” And if the money doesn’t come, so what? Their goal is not a flourishing, prosperous Afghanistan, but an Afghanistan where they are in charge.

The widespread adoption of the Maduro model helps explain why Western statements at the time of Kabul’s fall sounded so pathetic. The EU’s foreign-policy chief expressed “deep concern about reports of serious human rights violations” and called for “meaningful negotiations based on democracy, the rule of law and constitutional rule”—as if the Taliban was interested in any of that. Whether it was “deep concern,” “sincere concern,” or “profound concern,” whether it was expressed on behalf of Europe or the Holy See, none of it mattered: Statements like that mean nothing to the Taliban, the Cuban security services, or the Russian FSB. Their goals are money and personal power. They are not concerned—deeply, sincerely, profoundly, or otherwise—about the happiness or well-being of their fellow citizens, let alone the views of anyone else.

How have modern autocrats achieved such impunity? In part by persuading so many other people in so many other countries to play along. Some of those people, and some of those countries, might surprise you.

If the stories told by the young dissidents in Vilnius make you angry, the stories told by the Uyghurs of Istanbul will haunt your dreams.

A few months ago, in a hot, airless apartment over a dress shop, I met Kalbinur Tursun. She was dressed in a dark-green gown with ruffled sleeves. Her face, framed by a tightly drawn headscarf, resembled that of a saint in a medieval triptych. Her small daughter, in Mickey Mouse leggings, played with an electronic tablet while we spoke.

Tursun is a Uyghur, a member of China’s predominantly Muslim Chinese minority, born in the territory that the Chinese call Xinjiang and that many Uyghurs know as East Turkestan. Tursun had six children—too many in a country where there are strict rules limiting births. Also, she wanted to raise them as Muslims; that, too, was a problem in China. When she became pregnant again, she feared being harassed by police, as women with more than two children often are. She and her husband decided to move to Turkey. They got passports for themselves and for their youngest child, but were told the other passports would take longer. Because of her pregnancy, the three of them came to Istanbul anyway; after she and her daughter were settled, her husband returned for the rest of the family. Then he disappeared.

Read: One by one, my friends were sent to the camps

That was five years ago. Tursun has not spoken with her husband since. In July 2017, she spoke with her sister, who promised to take care of her remaining children. Then they lost contact. A year after that, Tursun came across a video being passed around on WhatsApp. Shot at what appeared to be a Chinese orphanage, it showed Uyghur children, heads shaved and all dressed alike, learning to speak Chinese. One of the children was her daughter Ayshe.

Tursun showed me the video of her daughter. She also showed me a picture of her husband standing in an Istanbul mosque. She cannot speak to either one of them, or to any of the rest of her children in China. She has no way to know what they are thinking. They might not know she has searched for them. They might believe she has abandoned them on purpose. They might have forgotten she exists. Meanwhile, time is passing. The child in the Mickey Mouse leggings, who sang to herself while we talked, is the one born in Turkey. She has never met her father, or her brothers and sisters in China. But she knows something is very wrong; when Tursun fell silent for a moment, overcome with emotion, the girl put down her tablet and put her arms around her mother’s neck.

Sinister though it sounds, Tursun’s story is not unique. The translator for my conversation with Tursun was Nursiman Abdureshid. She is also a Uyghur, also from Xinjiang, also married, also with a daughter, also now living in Istanbul. Abdureshid came to Turkey as a student, convinced that she had the backing of the Chinese state. A graduate of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, she had studied business administration, learned excellent Turkish and English, made ethnic-Chinese friends. She had never thought of herself as a rebel or a dissident. Why would she have? She was a Chinese success story.

Abdureshid’s break with her old life came in June 2017, when, after an ordinary conversation with her family back in China, they stopped answering her calls. She texted and got no response. Weeks passed. After many months, she contacted the consulate in Istanbul—she asked a Turkish friend to call for her—and officials there finally told her the truth: Her father, mother, and younger brother were in prison camps, each for “preparing to commit terrorist activities.”

A similar charge was thrown at Jevlan Shirmemet, another Uyghur student in Istanbul. Like Abdureshid, he realized something was wrong when his mother and other relatives stopped responding to texts. Then they blocked him on WeChat, the Chinese messaging app. Nearly two years later, he learned that they were in prison camps. Chinese diplomats accused him of having “anti-Chinese” contacts in Egypt, as well. Shirmemet told them he had never been to Egypt. Prove it, they responded, then added: Cooperate with us, tell us who all of your friends are, list every place you have ever been, become an informer. He refused and—though not temperamentally inclined to be a dissident either—decided to speak out on social media instead. “I had remained silent, but my silence didn’t protect my family,” he told me.

Turkey is home to some 50,000 exiled Uyghurs, and there are dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of such stories there. İlyas Doğan, a Turkish lawyer who has represented some of the Uyghurs, told me that, until 2017, very few of them were politically active. But after friends and relatives began disappearing into “reeducation camps”—concentration camps, in fact—set up by the Chinese state, the situation changed.

Tursun and a group of other women who had lost children staged a protest walk from Istanbul to Ankara, a distance of more than 270 miles, and then stood in front of a UN building, demanding to be heard. Abdureshid spoke at the conference of one of the Turkish opposition parties. “I haven’t heard my mother’s voice for four years,” she told the audience. A video of the speech went viral; when we had lunch at a restaurant in a Uyghur neighborhood, a waiter recognized her and thanked her for it.

In another era—in a world with a different geopolitical configuration, at a time when the language of human rights had not been so comprehensively undermined—these dissidents would have plenty of official sympathy in Turkey, a nation that is singularly linked to the Uyghur community by ties of religion, ethnicity, and language. In 2009, even before the concentration camps were opened, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was then the Turkish prime minister, called the Chinese repression of the Uyghurs a “genocide.” In 2012, he brought businessmen with him to Xinjiang and promised to invest in Uyghur businesses there. He did this because it was popular. To the extent that ordinary Turks know what is happening to their Uyghur cousins, they sympathize.

Yet since then, Erdoğan—who became president in 2014—has himself turned against the rule of law, independent media, and independent courts at home. As he has become openly hostile to former European and NATO allies, and as he has arrested and jailed his own dissidents, Erdoğan’s interest in Chinese friendship, investment, and technology has increased, along with his willingness to echo Chinese propaganda. On the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, his party’s flagship newspaper published a long, solemn article—which was in fact sponsored content—beneath the headline “The Chinese Communist Party’s 100 Years of Glorious History and the Secrets to Its Success.” Alongside these changes, government policy toward the Uyghurs has shifted too.

In recent years, the Turkish government has surveilled and detained Uyghurs on bogus terrorism charges, and deported some, including four who were sent to Tajikistan and then immediately turned over to China in 2019. In Istanbul, I met one Uyghur—he preferred to remain anonymous—who had spent time in a Turkish detention center, along with some of his family, following what he said were bogus charges of “terrorism.” The presence of pro-Chinese forces in Turkish media, politics, and business has been growing, and lately they are keen to belittle the Uyghurs. Curiously, Abdureshid’s speech was cut from the public-television broadcast of the opposition-party conference she attended. After it started circulating on social media, she was publicly attacked by a Turkish politician, Doğu Perinçek, a former Maoist who is pro-Chinese, anti-Western, and quite influential. After Perinçek described her as a “terrorist” on television, a wave of online attacks followed.

The atmosphere worsened in late 2020, when a delayed Chinese shipment of COVID-19 vaccines coincided with Beijing’s pressure on Turkey to sign an extradition treaty that would have made deportation of Uyghurs even easier. After opposition parties objected, both the Turkish and Chinese governments denied that delivery of the vaccine shipment was in any way conditioned on deporting Uyghurs, but the timing remains suspicious. Several Uyghurs in Istanbul told me that corrupt elements in the Turkish police work directly with the Chinese already. They have no proof, and Doğan, the Turkish lawyer, told me that he doubts this is the case; still, he thinks that, despite all of the old cultural ties, the Turkish government might not mind if the Uyghurs stopped protesting or quietly moved elsewhere.

For the moment, the Uyghurs in Turkey are still protected by what remains of democracy there: the opposition parties, some of the media, public opinion. A government that faces democratic elections, even skewed ones, must still take these things into account. In countries where opposition, media, and public opinion matter less, the balance is different. You can see this even in Muslim countries, which might be expected to object to the oppression of other Muslims. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has stated baldly that “we accept the Chinese version” of the Chinese-Uyghur dispute. The Saudis, the Emiratis, and the Egyptians have all allegedly arrested, detained, and deported Uyghurs without much discussion. Not coincidentally, these are all countries that seek good economic relations with China, and that have purchased Chinese surveillance technology. For autocrats and would-be autocrats around the world, the Chinese offer a package that looks something like this: Agree to follow China’s lead on Hong Kong, Tibet, the Uyghurs, and human rights more broadly. Buy Chinese surveillance equipment. Accept massive Chinese investment (preferably into companies you personally control, or that at least pay you kickbacks). Then sit back and relax, knowing that however bad your image becomes in the eyes of the international human-rights community, you and your friends will remain in power.

And how different are we? We Americans? We Europeans? Are we so sure that our institutions, our political parties, our media could never be manipulated in the same way? In the spring of 2016, I helped publish a report on the Russian use of disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe—the now familiar Russian efforts to manipulate political conversations in other countries using social media, fake websites, funding for extremist parties, hacked private communications, and more. My colleague Edward Lucas, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, and I took it to Capitol Hill, to the State Department, and to anyone in Washington who would listen. The response was polite interest, nothing more. We are very sorry that Slovakia and Slovenia are having these problems, but it can’t happen here.

A few months later, it did happen here. Russian trolls operating from St. Petersburg sought to shift the outcome of an American election in much the same way they had done in Central Europe, using fake Facebook pages (sometimes impersonating anti-immigration groups, sometimes impersonating Black activists), fake Twitter accounts, and attempts to infiltrate groups like the National Rifle Association, as well as weaponizing hacked material from the Democratic National Committee. Some Americans actively welcomed this intervention, and even sought to take advantage of what they imagined might be broader Russian technical capabilities. “If it’s what you say I love it,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote to an intermediary for a Russian lawyer who he believed had access to damaging information about Hillary Clinton. In 2008, Trump Jr. had told a business conference that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” and in 2016, Russia’s long-term investment in the Trump business empire paid off. In the Trump family, the Kremlin had something better than spies: cynical, nihilistic, indebted, long-term allies.The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to autocratic regimes is very long.

Despite the raucous national debate on Russian election interference, we don’t seem to have learned much from it, if our thinking about Chinese influence operations is any indication. The United Front is the Chinese Communist Party’s influence project, subtler and more strategic than the Russian version, designed not to upend democratic politics but to shape the nature of conversations about China around the world. Among other endeavors, the United Front creates educational and exchange programs, tries to mold the atmosphere within Chinese exile communities, and courts anyone willing to be a de facto spokesperson for China. But in 2019, when Peter Mattis, a China expert and democracy promoter, tried to discuss the United Front program with a CIA analyst, he got the same kind of polite dismissal that Lucas and I had heard a few years earlier. “This is not Australia,” the CIA analyst told him, according to testimony Mattis gave to Congress, referring to a series of scandals involving Chinese and Chinese Australian businesspeople allegedly attempting to buy political influence in Canberra. We are very sorry that Australia is having these problems, but it can’t happen here.

Can’t it? Controversy has already engulfed many of the Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes set up at American universities, some of whose faculty, under the guise of offering benign Chinese-language and calligraphy courses, got involved in efforts to shape academic debate in China’s favor—a classic United Front enterprise. The long arm of the Chinese state has reached Chinese dissidents in the U.S. as well. The Washington, D.C., and Maryland offices of the Wei Jingsheng Foundation, a group named after one of China’s most famous democracy activists, have been broken into more than a dozen times in the past two decades. Ciping Huang, the foundation’s executive director, told me that old computers have disappeared, phone lines have been cut, and mail has been thrown in the toilet. The main objective seems to be to let the activists know that someone was there. Chinese democracy activists living in the U.S. have, like the Uyghurs in Istanbul, been visited by Chinese agents who try to persuade them, or blackmail them, to return home. Still others have had strange car accidents—mishaps regularly happen while people are on their way to attend an annual ceremony held in New York on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Chinese influence, like authoritarian influence more broadly, can take even subtler forms, using carrots rather than sticks. If you go along with the official line, if you don’t criticize China’s human-rights record, opportunities will emerge for you. In 2018, McKinsey held a tone-deaf corporate retreat in Kashgar, just a few miles away from a Uyghur internment camp—the same kind of camp where the husbands, parents, and siblings of Tursun, Shirmemet, and Abdureshid have been imprisoned. McKinsey had good reasons not to talk about human rights at the retreat: According to The New York Times, the consulting giant at the time of that event advised 22 of the 100 largest Chinese-state companies, including one that had helped construct the artificial islands in the South China Sea that have so alarmed the U.S. military.

But perhaps it’s unfair to pick on McKinsey. The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to China, Russia, and other autocracies is very long. During the heavily manipulated and deliberately confusing Russian elections in September 2021, both Apple and Google removed apps that had been designed to help Russian voters decide which opposition candidates to select, after Russian authorities threatened to prosecute the companies’ local employees. The apps had been created by Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption movement, the most viable opposition movement in the country, which was itself not allowed to participate in the election campaign. Navalny, who remains in prison on ludicrous charges, made a statement via Twitter excoriating American democracy’s most famous corporate moguls:

It’s one thing when the Internet monopolists are ruled by cute freedom-loving nerds with solid life principles. It is completely different when the people in charge of them are both cowardly and greedy … Standing in front of the huge screens, they tell us about “making the world a better place,” but on the inside they are liars and hypocrites.

The list of other industries that might be similarly described as “cowardly and greedy” is also very long, extending even to Hollywood, pop music, and sports. When distributors became nervous about a possible Chinese backlash to a 2012 MGM remake of a Cold War–era movie that recast the Soviet invaders as Chinese, the studio had the film digitally altered to make the bad guys North Korean instead. In 2019, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, along with a number of basketball stars, expressed remorse to China after the general manager of the Houston Rockets tweeted support for the democrats of Hong Kong. Even more abject was Qazaq: History of the Golden Man, a fawning eight-hour documentary about the life of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the brutal longtime ruler of Kazakhstan, produced in 2021 by the Hollywood director Oliver Stone. Or consider what the rapper Nicki Minaj did in 2015, when she was criticized for giving a concert in Angola, hosted by a company co-owned by the daughter of that country’s dictator, José Eduardo dos Santos. Minaj posted two photos of herself on Instagram, one in which she’s draped in the Angolan flag and another alongside the dictator’s daughter, captioned with these immortal words: “Oh no big deal … she’s just the 8th richest woman in the world. (At least that’s what I was told by someone b4 we took this photo) Lol. Yikes!!!!! GIRL POWER!!!!! This motivates me soooooooooo much!!!!”

If the autocrats and the kleptocrats feel no shame, why should American celebrities who profit from their largesse? Why should their fans? Why should their sponsors?

If the 20th century was the story of a slow, uneven struggle, ending with the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse. Freedom House, which has published an annual “Freedom in the World” report for nearly 50 years, called its 2021 edition “Democracy Under Siege.” The Stanford scholar Larry Diamond calls this an era of “democratic regression.” Not everyone is equally gloomy—Srdja Popovic, the democracy activist, argues that confrontations between autocrats and their populations are growing harsher precisely because democratic movements are becoming more articulate and better organized. But just about everyone who thinks hard about this subject agrees that the old diplomatic toolbox once used to support democrats around the world is rusty and out of date.

The tactics that used to work no longer do. Certainly sanctions, especially when hastily applied in the aftermath of some outrage, do not have the impact they once did. They can sometimes seem, as Stephen Biegun, the former deputy secretary of state, puts it, “an exercise in self-gratification,” on par with “sternly worded condemnations of the latest farcical election.” That doesn’t mean they have no impact at all. But although personal sanctions on corrupt Russian officials might make it impossible for some Russians to visit their homes in Cap Ferrat, say, or their children at the London School of Economics, they haven’t persuaded Putin to stop invading other countries, interfering in European and American politics, or poisoning his own dissidents. Neither have decades of U.S. sanctions changed the behavior of the Iranian regime or the Venezuelan regime, despite their indisputable economic impact. Too often, sanctions are allowed to deteriorate over time; just as often, autocracies now help one another get around them.The centrality of democracy in American foreign policy has been declining for many years.

America does still spend money on projects that might loosely be called “democracy assistance,” but the amounts are very low compared with what the authoritarian world is prepared to put up. The National Endowment for Democracy, a unique institution that has an independent board (of which I am a member), received $300 million of congressional funding in 2020 to support civic organizations, non-state media, and educational projects in about 100 autocracies and weak democracies around the world. American foreign-language broadcasters, having survived the Trump administration’s still inexplicable attempt to destroy them, also continue to serve as independent sources of information in some closed societies. But while Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty spends just over $22 million on Russian-language broadcasting (to take one example) every year, and Voice of America just over $8 million more, the Russian government spends billions on the Russian-language state media that are seen and heard all over Eastern Europe, from Germany to Moldova to Kazakhstan. The $33 million that Radio Free Asia spends to broadcast in Burmese, Cantonese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mandarin, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Vietnamese pales beside the billions that China spends on media and communications both inside its borders and around the world.

Our efforts are even smaller than they look, because traditional media are only a part of how modern autocracies promote themselves. We don’t yet have a real answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which offers infrastructure deals to countries around the globe, often enabling local leaders to skim kickbacks and garnering positive China-subsidized media coverage in return. We don’t have the equivalent of a United Front, or any other strategy for shaping debate within and about China. We don’t run online influence campaigns inside Russia. We don’t have an answer to the disinformation, injected by troll farms abroad, that circulates on Facebook inside the U.S., let alone a plan for countering the disinformation that circulates inside autocracies.

President Biden is well aware of this imbalance and says he wants to reinvigorate the democratic alliance and America’s leading role within it. To that end, the president is convening an online summit on December 9 and 10 to “galvanize commitments and initiatives” in aid of three themes: “defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights.”

That sounds nice, but unless it heralds deep changes in our own behavior it means very little. “Fighting corruption” is not just a foreign-policy issue, after all. If we in the democratic world are serious about it, then we can no longer allow Kazakhs and Venezuelans to purchase property anonymously in London or Miami, or the rulers of Angola and Myanmar to hide money in Delaware or Nevada. We need, in other words, to make changes to our own system, and that may require overcoming fierce domestic resistance from the business groups that benefit from it. We need to shut down tax havens, enforce money-laundering laws, stop selling security and surveillance technology to autocracies, and divest from the most vicious regimes altogether. “We” here will need to include Europe, especially the U.K., as well as partners elsewhere—and that will require a lot of vigorous diplomacy.

The same is true of the fight for human rights. Statements made at a diplomatic summit won’t achieve much if politicians, citizens, and businesses don’t act as if they matter. To effect real change, the Biden administration will have to ask hard questions and make big decisions. How can we force Apple and Google to respect the rights of Russian democrats? How can we ensure that Western manufacturers have excluded from their supply chains anything produced in a Uyghur concentration camp? We need a major investment in independent media around the world, a strategy for reaching people inside autocracies, new international institutions to replace the defunct human-rights bodies at the UN. We need a way to coordinate democratic nations’ response when autocracies commit crimes outside their borders—whether that’s the Russian state murdering people in Berlin or Salisbury, England; the Belarusian dictator hijacking a commercial flight; or Chinese operatives harassing exiles in Washington, D.C. As of now, we have no transnational strategy designed to confront this transnational problem.

This absence of strategy reflects more than negligence. The centrality of democracy to American foreign policy has been declining for many years—at about the same pace, perhaps not coincidentally, as the decline of respect for democracy in America itself. The Trump presidency was a four-year display of contempt not just for the American political process, but for America’s historic democratic allies, whom he singled out for abuse. The president described the British and German leaders as “losers” and the Canadian prime minister as “dishonest” and “weak,” while he cozied up to autocrats—the Turkish president, the Russian president, the Saudi ruling family, and the North Korean dictator, among them—with whom he felt more comfortable, and no wonder: He has shared their ethos of no-questions-asked investments for many years. In 2008, the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev paid Trump $95 million—more than twice what Trump had paid just four years earlier—for a house in Palm Beach no one else seemed to want; in 2012, Trump put his name on a building in Baku, Azerbaijan, owned by a company with apparent links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. Trump feels perfectly at home in Autocracy Inc., and he accelerated the erosion of the rules and norms that has allowed it to take root in America.

At the same time, a part of the American left has abandoned the idea that “democracy” belongs at the heart of U.S. foreign policy—not out of greed and cynicism but out of a loss of faith in democracy at home. Convinced that the history of America is the history of genocide, slavery, exploitation, and not much else, they don’t see the value of making common cause with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Nursiman Abdureshid, or any of the other ordinary people around the world forced into politics by their experience of profound injustice. Focused on America’s own bitter problems, they no longer believe America has anything to offer the rest of the world: Although the Hong Kong prodemocracy protesters waving American flags believe many of the same things we believe, their requests for American support in 2019 did not elicit a significant wave of youthful activism in the United States, not even something comparable to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s.

Incorrectly identifying the promotion of democracy around the world with “forever wars,” they fail to understand the brutality of the zero-sum competition now unfolding in front of us. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does geopolitics. If America removes the promotion of democracy from its foreign policy, if America ceases to interest itself in the fate of other democracies and democratic movements, then autocracies will quickly take our place as sources of influence, funding, and ideas. If Americans, together with our allies, fail to fight the habits and practices of autocracy abroad, we will encounter them at home; indeed, they are already here. If Americans don’t help to hold murderous regimes to account, those regimes will retain their sense of impunity. They will continue to steal, blackmail, torture, and intimidate, inside their countries—and inside ours.

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*Source images (left to right): Sven Creutzmann / Mambo Photo / Getty; Andrea Verdelli / Getty; Mikhail Svetlov / Getty; TPG / Getty; Mikhail Svetlov / Getty

This article appears in the December 2021 print edition with the headline “The Autocrats Are Winning.”Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.

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Robert Reich

The Week Ahead: Who is responsible for political violence?

What links Kyle Rittenhouse, Stephen Bannon, and Paul Gosar: their attempts to avoid accountability

Robert Reich – November 15, 2021

Behind today’s closing argument in Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial lies much the same question that lurks behind Stephen Bannon’s expected surrender to federal authorities, also today: when is someone accountable for deadly violence?

Rittenhouse argues that he killed two people in “self-defense.” But self-defense could become an ever-expanding justification for political violence within a society of soaring gun ownership, mounting political extremism, increasingly violent political threats, and growing vigilantism.

Bannon argues he shouldn’t have to respond to the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection because of “executive privilege.”  But executive privilege could justify almost any degree of political violence under a chief executive who excuses the insurrection as a mere “protest” and even describes the rioter’s “hang Mike Pence” chant as “common sense.”

This week will also reveal whether the House of Representatives does anything about Representative Paul Gosar’s tweet and Instagram post last week of a photoshopped animated cartoon in which he assassinates Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and attacks President Joe Biden. Gosar defends his post by saying it “symbolizes the battle for the soul of America” when Congress takes up the president’s economic package, which he said includes immigration provisions he opposes.

Gosar represents Arizona’s 4th congressional district. Here I want to spend a few moments discussing a courageous woman who until 2012 represented Arizona’s 8th congressional district, Gabrielle Giffords. I’ll explain the logical connection in a moment.

I got to know Gabby Giffords shortly before she entered politics as a member of the Arizona state House of Representatives in 2001. I frequently visited her over the next decade, often during her election campaigns. I have known few politicians with more energy, intelligence, humor, and devotion to the people of her state and nation.

Gabby became the youngest woman ever elected to the Arizona senate and then, in 2006, the third woman in history to be elected to represent Arizona in the U.S. House of Representatives. Her many accomplishments included expanded access to healthcare, measures to fight climate change, improve education, and provide immigrants a path to citizenship. I remember thinking she would become president one day. (I was proud to preside at her wedding to Mark Kelly, then an astronaut and now an Arizona senator.)

On January 8, 2011, during one of her “Congress on Your Corner” public gatherings outside a Safeway grocery store in Casa Adobes, Arizona, Gabby was shot in the head by a man firing a 9mm pistol with a 33-round magazine. He hit 19 people and killed six, among them federal judge John Roll and 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green. The shooter, Jared Lee Loughner, was detained by bystanders until he was taken into police custody. Eventually, after facing more than 50 federal criminal charges, Loughner pleaded guilty to 19 of them to avoid a death sentence.  

Gabby was evacuated to the University Medical Center of Tucson in critical condition. Doctors performed emergency surgery to extract skull fragments and a small amount of necrotic tissue from her brain. Her damaged eye socket was surgically repaired. Additional reconstructive surgery followed. By the time I was able to see her the following week, Gabby could say a few words. But even now, a decade later – after the most intense and courageous personal effort at rehabilitation I have ever witnessed – she continues to struggle with language and has lost half her vision in both eyes. Gabby resigned from Congress in 2012.

I have no end of admiration for Gabby’s courage and determination. What happened to her is simply heartbreaking.

Why did Louchner try to assassinate her? No one will ever know for sure. Authorities found in his safe an envelope that bore the handwritten words “Giffords,” “My assassination” and “I planned ahead.” By all accounts, including his own, he was growing increasingly delusional. He had amplified on his social media accounts several extremist right-wing tropes.

Ten months before, in March 2010, former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin had posted a map of 20 Congressional districts she and John McCain won in 2008 but whose representatives in Congress had voted in favor of the Affordable Care Act. The map marked each targeted district with a set of crosshairs. Palin promoted the map by tweeting “Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD.” One of those crosshairs targeted Gabby. Although no direct connection was ever established between Palin’s map and Gabby’s shooting, surely Palin’s violent rhetoric contributed to a climate of political violence in America in which a delusional man would mark Gabby for assassination. Gabby herself had expressed concern about Palin’s map.

Just as surely, Palin’s inflammatory post was a step toward increasingly violent political rhetoric on the way to Donald Trump and the insurrection of January 6, 2021.

Why am I telling you this? Because last Friday a group of House Democrats introduced a resolution to censure Representative Paul Gosar for posting his cartoon video depicting him assassinating Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The motion was introduced by Representative Jackie Speier, co-chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, and nine other lawmakers. “For that Member to post such a video on his official Instagram account and use his official congressional resources in the House of Representatives to further violence against elected officials goes beyond the pale,” the group said. “As the events of January 6th have shown, such vicious and vulgar messaging can and does foment actual violence.”

Censure is the second harshest form of punishment in the House short of expulsion, and requires a simple majority in a floor vote to pass. Twenty-three lawmakers have been censured by the House since 1832. It would require Gosar to stand in the center of the House chamber as the resolution condemning his conduct is read aloud. 

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has so far been silent on Gosar’s video. The group of House Democrats who introduced the resolution condemned McCarthy’s silence, calling it “tacit approval and just as dangerous.”

My friends, I don’t need to tell you we are living in a time of increasingly virulent politics and violent political threats, perpetrated largely in and by the Republican Party. The New York Times reports that at a conservative rally in western Idaho last month, a young man stepped up to a microphone to ask when he could start killing Democrats. “When do we get to use the guns?” he said as the audience applauded. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” The local state representative, a Republican, later called it a “fair” question.

According to the Times, violent threats against lawmakers are on track to double this year. Republicans who break party ranks and defy Trump have come to expect death threats — often fueled by their own colleagues who have denounced them as traitors.

Unless those at the highest levels of government who foment or encourage violence — or remain conspicuously silent as others do — are held accountable, no one in political life will be safe.

A few days ago on CNN, Jennifer Gosar called her brother “a sociopath” with escalating dangerous behavior that no one holds accountable: “It’s definitely getting worse because no one holds him accountable,” she said. “Not Kevin McCarthy, not Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, not Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, not Speaker Nancy Pelosi, not Attorney General Merrick Garland. No one holds him accountable. And this is something that I have to openly wonder, does he have to act on it himself before we have to believe that he is an absolute, he’s a sociopath.”

Your thoughts?