Scientists warn that extreme ‘wet bulb temperature’ events are becoming more common with human-caused climate change (Frederic J. BROWN)
Scientists have identified the maximum mix of heat and humidity a human body can survive.
Even a healthy young person will die after enduring six hours of 35-degree Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) warmth when coupled with 100 percent humidity, but new research shows that threshold could be significantly lower.
At this point sweat — the body’s main tool for bringing down its core temperature — no longer evaporates off the skin, eventually leading to heatstroke, organ failure and death.
This critical limit, which occurs at 35 degrees of what is known “wet bulb temperature”, has only been breached around a dozen times, mostly in South Asia and the Persian Gulf, Colin Raymond of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told AFP.
None of those instances lasted more than two hours, meaning there have never been any “mass mortality events” linked to this limit of human survival, said Raymond, who led a major study on the subject.
But extreme heat does not need to be anywhere near that level to kill people, and everyone has a different threshold depending on their age, health and other social and economic factors, experts say.
For example, more than 61,000 people are estimated to have died due to the heat last summer in Europe, where there is rarely enough humidity to create dangerous wet bulb temperatures.
But as global temperatures rise — last month was confirmed on Tuesday as the hottest in recorded history — scientists warn that dangerous wet bulb events will also become more common.
The frequency of such events has at least doubled over the last 40 years, Raymond said, calling the increase a serious hazard of human-caused climate change.
Raymond’s research projected that wet bulb temperatures will “regularly exceed” 35C at several points around the world in the coming decades if the world warms 2.5C degrees above preindustrial levels.
– ‘Really, really dangerous’ –
Though now mostly calculated using heat and humidity readings, wet bulb temperature was originally measured by putting a wet cloth over a thermometer and exposing it to the air.
This allowed it to measure how quickly the water evaporated off the cloth, representing sweat off of skin.
The theorised human survival limit of 35C wet bulb temperature represents 35C of dry heat as well as 100 percent humidity — or 46C at 50 percent humidity.
To test this limit, researchers at Pennsylvania State University in the United States measured the core temperatures of young, healthy people inside a heat chamber.
They found that participants reached their “critical environmental limit” — when their body could not stop their core temperature from continuing to rise — at 30.6C wet bulb temperature, well below the previously theorised 35C.
The team estimated that it would take between five to seven hours before such conditions would reach “really, really dangerous core temperatures,” Daniel Vecellio, who worked on the research, told AFP.
– The most vulnerable –
Joy Monteiro, a researcher in India who last month published a study in Nature looking at wet bulb temperatures in South Asia, said that most deadly heatwaves in the region were well below the 35C wet bulb threshold.
Any such limits on human endurance are “wildly different for different people,” he told AFP.
“We don’t live in a vacuum — especially children,” said Ayesha Kadir, a paediatrician in the UK and health advisor at Save the Children.
Small children are less able to regulate their body temperature, putting them at greater risk, she said.
Older people, who have fewer sweat glands, are the most vulnerable. Nearly 90 percent of the heat-related deaths in Europe last summer were among people aged over 65.
People who have to work outside in soaring temperatures are also more at risk.
Whether or not people can occasionally cool their bodies down — for example in air conditioned spaces — is also a major factor.
Monteiro pointed out that people without access to toilets often drink less water, leading to dehydration.
“Like a lot of impacts of climate change, it is the people who are least able to insulate themselves from these extremes who will be suffering the most,” Raymond said.
His research has shown that El Nino weather phenomena have pushed up wet bulb temperatures in the past. The first El Nino event in four years is expected to peak towards the end of this year.
Wet bulb temperatures are also closely linked to ocean surface temperatures, Raymond said.
The world’s oceans hit an all-time high temperature last month, beating the previous 2016 record, according to the European Union’s climate observatory.
People in Hawaii flee into ocean to escape wildfires that are burning a popular Maui tourist town
Jennifer Sinco Kelleher – August 9, 2023
HONOLULU (AP) — Wildfires in Hawaii fanned by strong winds burned multiple structures in areas including historic Lahaina town, forcing evacuations and closing schools in several communities Wednesday, and rescuers pulled a dozen people escaping smoke and flames from the ocean.
The U.S. Coast Guard responded to areas where people went into the ocean to escape the fire and smoky conditions, the County of Maui said in a statement. The Coast Guard tweeted that a crew rescued 12 people from the water off Lahaina.
The county tweeted that multiple roads in Lahaina were closed with a warning: “Do NOT go to Lahaina town.”
Fire was widespread in Lahaina, including Front Street, an area of the town popular with tourists, County of Maui spokesperson Mahina Martin said in a phone interview early Wednesday. Traffic has been very heavy as people try to evacuate and officials asked people who weren’t in an evacuation area to shelter in place to avoid adding to the traffic, she said.
The National Weather Service said Hurricane Dora, which was passing to the south of the island chain at a safe distance of 500 miles (805 kilometers), was partly to blame for gusts above 60 mph (97 kph) that knocked out power as night fell, rattled homes and grounded firefighting helicopters. Dangerous fire conditions created by strong winds and low humidity were expected to last through Wednesday afternoon, the weather service said.
Acting Gov. Sylvia Luke issued an emergency proclamation on behalf of Gov. Josh Green, who is traveling, and activated the Hawaii National Guard.
Officials were not aware of any deaths and knew of only one injury, a firefighter who was in stable condition at a hospital after experiencing smoke inhalation, Martin said There’s no count available for the number of structures affected by the fires or the number of people affected by evacuations, but Martin said there are four shelters open, with more than 1,000 people at the largest.
“This is so unprecedented,” Martin said, noting that multiple districts were affected. An emergency in the night is terrifying, she said, and the darkness makes it hard to gauge the extent of the damage.
“Right now it is all-hands-on-deck and we are anxious for daybreak,” she said.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency approved a disaster declaration to provide assistance with a fire that threatened about 200 homes in and around Kohala Ranch, a rural community with a population of more than 500 on the Big Island, according to the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency. When the request was made, the fire had burned more than 600 acres (243 hectares) and was uncontained. Much of Hawaii was under a red flag warning that continued Wednesday, and two other uncontrolled fires were burning on the Big Island and Maui, officials said.
Fire crews on Maui were battling multiple blazes concentrated in two areas: the popular tourist destination of West Maui and an inland, mountainous region. In west Maui 911 service was not available and residents were directed to call the police department.
Because of the wind gusts, helicopters weren’t able to dump water on the fires from the sky — or gauge more precise fire sizes — and firefighters were encountering roads blocked by downed trees and power lines as they worked the inland fires, Martin said.
About 14,500 customers in Maui were without power early Wednesday, according to poweroutage.us.
“It’s definitely one of the more challenging days for our island given that it’s multiple fires, multiple evacuations in the different district areas,” Martin said.
Winds were recorded at 80 mph (129 kph) in inland Maui and one fire that was believed to be contained earlier Tuesday flared up hours later with the big winds, she added.
“The fire can be a mile or more from your house, but in a minute or two, it can be at your house,” Fire Assistant Chief Jeff Giesea said.
In the Kula area of Maui, at least two homes were destroyed in a fire that engulfed about 1.7 square miles (4.5 square kilometers), Maui Mayor Richard Bissen said. About 80 people were evacuated from 40 homes, he said.
“We’re trying to protect homes in the community,” Big Island Mayor Mitch Roth said of evacuating about 400 homes in four communities in the northern part of the island. As of Tuesday, the roof of one house caught on fire, he said.
Fires in Hawaii are unlike many of those burning in the U.S. West. They tend to break out in large grasslands on the dry sides of the islands and are generally much smaller than mainland fires.
Fires were rare in Hawaii and on other tropical islands before humans arrived, and native ecosystems evolved without them. This means great environmental damage can occur when fires erupt. For example, fires remove vegetation. When a fire is followed by heavy rainfall, the rain can carry loose soil into the ocean, where it can smother coral reefs.
The island of Oahu, where Honolulu is located, also was dealing with power outages, downed power lines and traffic problems, said Adam Weintraub, communication director for Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.
Associated Press writer Audrey McAvoy contributed to this report.
The ruble has plunged to its lowest level against the dollar since war in Ukraine began as Putin’s economy sputters
Jennifer Sor – August 8, 2023
The ruble has plunged to its lowest level against the dollar since war in Ukraine began as Putin’s economy sputters. REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino
Russia’s currency in recent days has plunged to its lowest level against the greenback since the war in Ukraine began.
The ruble traded around 96 against the US dollar on Tuesday, a 30% decline from January.
Russia’s economy is struggling in the face of western sanctions and war in Ukraine, experts say.
Russia’s currency just plunged to its lowest level against the dollar since the beginning of its war in Ukraine — another sign that the nation’s economy is sputtering as the conflict drags on and its economy is burdened with Western sanctions.
The ruble has traded around 96 against the dollar since last Friday. It’s the cheapest Russia’s currency has been since Putin began his invasion of Ukraine in February last year, which caused the ruble to briefly plummet to 120 against the dollar.
Economists have been sounding the alarms for Russia’s economy for the past year, as the nation has been slammed by sanctions and soaring military spending. Restrictions on oil and natural gas trade led Russia’s energy revenue to tumble 45% in first three months of the year. Meanwhile, government spending surged 34%, leading Russia to post a $29 billion budget deficit over the first quarter– a 107% decline from last year’s $14 billion budget surplus.
Abortion rights won big in Ohio. Here’s why it wasn’t particularly close.
Madison Fernandez, Alice Miranda Ollstein and Zach Montellaro – August 8, 2023
Sholten Singer/The Herald-Dispatch via AP
Ohioans on Tuesday soundly defeated a proposal that would have made it more difficult to alter the state’s Constitution.
The move is a lightning-rod moment for abortion rights, even if the issue wasn’t directly on the ballot. After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last year, the issue motivated voters to storm the polls. But this measure, which didn’t directly take on abortion, was a closely watched measure of if the issue still resonates with voters.
Voters had the answer. They overwhelmingly rejected Issue 1, an amendment that would have raised the threshold to pass a constitutional amendment from a simple majority to 60 percent, as well as complicate the process to bring citizen-initiated ballot measures to voters in the first place. Though it had profound implications for a number of issues, it was widely seen in the state as a way to thwart November’s measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s Constitution.
The measure’s defeat now gives abortion-rights supporters a clearer path to victory.
Opponents of Issue 1 view the victory as the first battle on abortion in the coming cycle, when the issue will be a factor in competitive Senate and House races that could help determine who controls Congress — as well as a number of direct ballot measures in swing states in the works.
But opponents also frame their victory as one that protects the power of the simple majority.
“I think sometimes, a lot of these fights get viewed in a single entity and the state gets viewed in a single moment as its value to the presidential battleground map,” said Ohio Democratic Party Chair Liz Walters. “And I get that, but democracy matters everywhere,” pointing to Arkansas and South Dakota, where voters similarly rejected efforts to implement a supermajority requirement for ballot initiatives.
Here are three takeaways from Tuesday’s election in Ohio:
Abortion still a serious turnout driver
Tuesday’s election proved that the state-by-state battle over abortion rights is still a serious motivator to get voters to the polls — even when abortion isn’t directly on the ballot.
Ohio Republicans moved in January to cancel most August elections because they were low turnout affairs that voters rarely paid attention to. Just over 8 percent of voters turned up in an August 2022 state legislative primary election, for example.
So when the GOP-controlled legislature pulled an about face months later by scheduling Issue 1 on the August ballot, abortion rights supporters cried foul, saying it was an attempt to kneecap them without voters noticing.
But voters turned up in droves anyway. More than 600,000 people voted early — a number that could still rise from late-arriving mail ballots — which outpaced the entirety of the turnout for that 2022 August election. It was also more than twice the number of people who voted early in the May 2022 primaries, which featured competitive Senate or gubernatorial contests.
Both pro-abortion rights groups and anti-abortion activists invested heavily in getting their supporters to show up. And conservatives emphasized supporters voting early as well, as Republicans try to close the gap created, in part, by former President Donald Trump’s relentless attacks on early voting.
Instead of a summer snoozer, turnout was off the charts.
Anti-abortion messaging isn’t evolving, or resonating
Anti-abortion groups that have invested millions in ballot initiative fights have deployed similar messages in each state since the post-Roe contests kicked off last summer — focusing on areas they see as political vulnerabilities, including parental consent, abortions later in pregnancy, and gender-affirming care for minors.
In Ohio this week and in Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan and other states last year, groups poured millions into TV ads arguing that codifying abortion rights in the state constitution would lead to the abolition of any restrictions on the procedure — including requirements that parents be notified when a minor terminates a pregnancy and bans on most abortions after the point of fetal viability.
“I don’t think our messaging will change at all, because we’ve seen positive movement from the messaging,” Mike Hartley, a veteran GOP strategist in Ohio and campaign manager for Protect Women Ohio, the coalition against the abortion-rights measure, said last month. “We’re gonna keep hammering … that it’s not just about abortion.”
Though polling indicates majority support for those restrictions, even among Democrats, the arguments have not swayed voters in these races amid a general surge in support for abortion rights in the year since Roe was overturned.
“Dobbs changed everything. Any polling done prior to then is obsolete,” said Ashley All, who led the successful Kansas campaign to defeat an anti-abortion rights ballot measure last summer and is now advising other states through the group Families United for Freedom. “People now see the real consequences of these bans. They see children having to cross state lines to get care. They see women almost dying in childbirth. So they don’t buy the arguments the other side is making.”
The fight drags on
Abortion in Ohio remains legal for now thanks to a court injunction blocking enforcement of the state’s near-total ban. But Ohio voters have an opportunity to directly weigh in on a constitutional amendment on the November ballot to permanently protect the right to the procedure — making any anti-aboriton legislation obsolete.
With Congress lacking the votes to pass either national abortion restrictions or bring back the protections of Roe, abortion-rights groups see state ballot measures as one of their best tools for maintaining or restoring access in red and purple states.
Similar efforts to put abortion rights to a popular vote are also brewing in Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Nevada and South Dakota. Activists in many of these states are hoping to get the issue before voters in 2024, in which turnout will be especially high due to the presidential election.
Arizonans tried and failed to hold a referendum in 2022, falling short in signature-gathering. On Tuesday, they launched a new push, hoping to scrap the state’s current 15-week ban. A poll released by progressive groups Data for Progress and Indivisible on Tuesday found its presence on the ballot would drive higher turnout among Democrats but not Republicans — potentially shaping the results of the state’s Senate and presidential races.
Americans are pulling money out of their 401(k) plans at an alarming rate
Alicia Wallace, CNN – August 8, 2023
More Americans are tapping their 401(k) accounts because of financial distress, according to Bank of America data released Tuesday.
The number of people who made a hardship withdrawal during the second quarter surged from the first three months of the year to 15,950, an increase of 36% from the second quarter of 2022, according to Bank of America’s analysis of clients’ employee benefits programs, which are comprised of more than 4 million plan participants.
It’s a “pretty troubling” development if more people are resorting to making hardship withdrawals, Matt Schulz, chief credit analyst at LendingTree, told CNN.
“You understand why people do that in the heat of the moment, but the opportunity costs on that are really, really high over time,” he said.
Bank of America’s latest Participant Pulse report also found that a greater percentage of participants borrowed from their workplace plans from the first quarter, and average contributions trailed off as well.
However, overall employee contributions continued to hold steady for the first half of the year, and a greater share of participants upped their contribution rate than decreased it.
“The data from our report tells two stories — one of balance growth, optimism from younger employees and maintaining contributions, contrasted with a trend of increased plan withdrawals,” Lorna Sabbia, head of retirement and personal wealth solutions at Bank of America, said in a statement. “This year, more employees are understandably prioritizing short-term expenses over long-term saving.”
While the labor market remains strong, the economy is growing and consumers are spending, the global pandemic followed by two years of persistently high inflation have taken their toll on household finances.
Since 2019, household debt balances have increased by nearly $3 trillion, according to New York Federal Reserve data through the first quarter of 2023.
Separately on Tuesday, the New York Fed reported that US households’ credit card debt surpassed the $1 trillion mark for the first time ever. The $45 billion increase in credit card debt helped to drive overall household debt levels to $17.06 trillion at the end of the second quarter.
“There’s only so much hard debt that people can handle before delinquencies really spike,” Schulz said. “Ultimately, you just have a lot of people who are doing OK now, but it wouldn’t take a whole lot for them to find themselves in a pretty sticky situation financially, whether that is a medical emergency, job loss, or even just student loan payments restarting.”
Federal student loan payments are set to resume in October following a more than three-year pause due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the Biden Administration’s push to forgive debt.
Clarence Thomas’s $267,230 R.V. and the Friend Who Financed It
By Jo Becker and Julie Tate – August 5, 2023
The vehicle is a key part of the justice’s just-folks persona. It’s also a luxury motor coach that was funded by someone else’s money.
Justice Clarence Thomas, circa 2000, with his great-nephew and his Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon motor coach.
Justice Clarence Thomas met the recreational vehicle of his dreams in Phoenix, on a November Friday in 1999.
With some time to kill before an event that night, he headed to a dealership just west of the airport. There sat a used Prevost Le Mirage XL Marathon, eight years old and 40 feet long, with orange flames licking down the sides. In the words of one of his biographers, “he kicked the tires and climbed aboard,” then quickly negotiated a handshake deal. A few weeks later, Justice Thomas drove his new motor coach off the lot and into his everyman, up-by-the-bootstraps self-mythology.
There he is behind the wheel during a rare 2007 interview with “60 Minutes,” talking about how the steel-clad converted bus allows him to escape the “meanness that you see in Washington.” He regularly slips into his speeches his love of driving it through the American heartland — “the part we fly over.” And in a documentary financed by conservative admirers, Justice Thomas, who was born into poverty in Georgia, waxes rhapsodic about the familiarity of spending time with the regular folks he meets along the way in R.V. parks and Walmart parking lots.
“I don’t have any problem with going to Europe, but I prefer the United States, and I prefer seeing the regular parts of the United States,” he told the filmmakers, adding: “There’s something normal to me about it. I come from regular stock, and I prefer being around that.”
But there is an untold, and far more complex, back story to Justice Thomas’s R.V. — one that not only undercuts the mythology but also leaves unanswered a host of questions about whether the justice received, and failed to disclose, a lavish gift from a wealthy friend.
His Prevost Marathon cost $267,230, according to title history records obtained by The New York Times. And Justice Thomas, who in the ensuing years would tell friends how he had scrimped and saved to afford the motor coach, did not buy it on his own. In fact, the purchase was underwritten, at least in part, by Anthony Welters, a close friend who made his fortune in the health care industry.
A circa 1991 advertisement for Marathon coaches. Credit…Marathon
He provided Justice Thomas with financing that experts said a bank would have been unlikely to extend — not only because Justice Thomas was already carrying a lot of debt, but because the Marathon brand’s high level of customization makes its used motor coaches difficult to value.
In an email to The Times, Mr. Welters wrote: “Here is what I can share. Twenty-five years ago, I loaned a friend money, as I have other friends and family. We’ve all been on one side or the other of that equation. He used it to buy a recreational vehicle, which is a passion of his.” Roughly nine years later, “the loan was satisfied,” Mr. Welters added. He subsequently sent The Times a photograph of the original title bearing his signature and a handwritten “lien release” date of Nov. 22, 2008.
But despite repeated requests over nearly two weeks, Mr. Welters did not answer further questions essential to understanding his arrangement with Justice Thomas.
He would not say how much he had lent Justice Thomas, how much the justice had repaid and whether any of the debt had been forgiven or otherwise discharged. He declined to provide The Times with a copy of a loan agreement — or even say if one existed. Nor would he share the basic terms of the loan, such as what, if any, interest rate had been charged or whether Justice Thomas had adhered to an agreed-upon repayment schedule. And when asked to elaborate on what he had meant when he said the loan had been “satisfied,” he did not respond.
“‘Satisfied’ doesn’t necessarily mean someone paid the loan back,” said Michael Hamersley, a tax lawyer and expert who has testified before Congress. “‘Satisfied’ could also mean the lender formally forgave the debt, or otherwise just stopped pursuing repayment.”
Justice Thomas, for his part, did not respond to detailed questions about the loan, sent to him through the Supreme Court’s spokeswoman.
The two men’s silence serves to obscure whether Justice Thomas had an obligation to report the arrangement under a federal ethics law that requires justices to disclose certain gifts, liabilities and other financial dealings that could pose conflicts of interest.
Vehicle loans are generally exempt from those reporting requirements, as long as they are secured by the vehicle and the loan amount doesn’t exceed its purchase price. But private loans like the one between Mr. Welters and Justice Thomas can be deemed gifts or income to the borrower under the federal tax code if they don’t hew to certain criteria: Essentially, experts said, the loan must have well-documented, commercially reasonable terms along the lines of what a bank would offer, and the borrower must adhere to those terms and pay back the principal and interest in full.
Richard W. Painter, a White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, said that when it comes to questions of disclosure, the ethics treatment of gifts and income often parallels the tax treatment. But those intricacies aside, he said, “justices just should not be accepting private loans from wealthy individuals outside their family.” If they do, he added, “you have to ask, why is a justice going to this private individual and not to a commercial lender, unless the justice is getting something he or she otherwise could not get.”
The Times’s unearthing of the loan arrangement is the latest in a series of revelations showing how wealthy benefactors have bestowed an array of benefits on Justice Thomas and his wife, Virginia Thomas: helping to pay for his great-nephew’s tuition, steering business to Mrs. Thomas’s consulting firm, buying and renovating the house where his mother lives and inviting the Thomases on trips both domestic and foreign that included travel aboard private jets and a yacht.
Ethical Issues Inside the Supreme Court
A Crisis of Ethics: A debate over ethical standards for Supreme Court justices has intensified after a series of revelations about lavish gifts and financial largess. Our reporter explains the allegations of misconduct and the growing calls for tighter rules.
Scalia Law: George Mason University’s law school cultivated ties to some of the court’s conservative justices with generous pay and unusual perks. In turn, the school gained prestige, donations and influence.
Justice Thomas has pointed to interpretations of the disclosure rules to defend his failure to report much of the largess he has received. He has said he was advised that the trips fell under an exemption for gifts involving “personal hospitality” from close friends, for instance, and a lawyer close to the Thomases contended in a statement that the justice did not need to disclose the tuition because it was a gift to his great-nephew, over whom he had legal custody, rather than to him.
The Thomases’ known benefactors include wealthy men like the Dallas real estate developer Harlan Crow, the conservative judicial kingmaker Leonard Leo and several members of the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, which honors people who succeed despite adversity. Among them: the longtime Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga, who flew the justice around on his jet.
Mr. Welters, while also a Horatio Alger member, stands apart. For one thing, the two men’s friendship predates Justice Thomas’s time on the federal bench. They met around 1980, when both were members of a small, informal club of Black congressional aides to Republican lawmakers — Mr. Welters worked for Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York and Justice Thomas for Senator John C. Danforth of Missouri.
Anthony Welters, shown with his wife Beatrice in 2016, was a close friend of Justice Thomas’s from their time working as congressional aides. Credit…Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for NYU Langone Medical Center
“It wasn’t exactly fashionable to be a Black person working for a Republican, and it was comforting to meet others in the same boat,” the justice wrote in his autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son.”
They had much in common. Like Justice Thomas, Mr. Welters was raised in poverty, sharing a cramped tenement in Harlem with his parents and three brothers and, after his mother’s death when he was 8, shining shoes under an elevated subway to help make ends meet.
As both men climbed the ladder as political appointees in the Reagan administration, their friendship grew. They stayed close after Justice Thomas joined the federal appeals court in Washington in 1990 and Mr. Welters left government to found AmeriChoice, a Medicaid services provider that he sold to UnitedHealthcare for $530 million in stock in 2002 and continued to lead until retiring in 2016. Mr. Welters and his wife, Beatrice, named Justice Thomas the godfather of one of their two boys, according to The Village Voice.
When Justice Thomas’s 1991 Supreme Court nomination ran into trouble after a former subordinate, Anita Hill, accused him of sexual harassment, Mr. Welters stood by his friend, providing behind-the-scenes advice, according to a book on the hearings written by Mr. Danforth.
And in 1998, the year before the motor coach purchase, Justice Thomas returned the favor. That is when Mr. Welters and his wife, through their foundation, started the AnBryce scholarship program, which gives underprivileged students a full ride to New York University’s law school, along with networking opportunities and career support. Justice Thomas lent his considerable imprimatur to the program, interviewing applicants in his Supreme Court chambers, mentoring scholars and later hiring one graduate as a clerk.
By that point, the justice had become fixated on owning an R.V., and not just any R.V., but the Rolls-Royce of motor coaches: a custom Prevost Marathon, or as he once put it, a “condo on wheels.”
A Toy for the Rich
Justice Thomas was turned on to the luxury brand by Bernie Little, a fellow Horatio Alger member and the flamboyantly wealthy owner of the Miss Budweiser hydroplane racing boat. Mr. Little had owned 20 to 25 custom motor coaches over the years, Mr. Thomas told C-SPAN in 2001.
Back in those days, a basic Prevost Marathon sold for about a million dollars, and could fetch far more depending on the bells and whistles. It was a rich man’s toy, and the company marketed it that way.
“You drive through a neighborhood in South Florida and you see these $10 million homes,” Bob Phebus, Marathon’s vice president, told The South Florida Business Journal in 2006. “You condense that down, put it on wheels and that’s what we have. It’s the same guy that will have a 100-foot yacht and a private aircraft. They’re accustomed to the finer things in life.”Got a news tip about the courts?If you have information to share about the Supreme Court or other federal courts, please send us a secure tip at nytimes.com/tips.
At the time, the Thomases’ primary source of income was the justice’s salary, then $167,900. He had yet to sell his autobiography, and property and other records show that the couple had significant debt: They had purchased their house in 1992 for $552,000 with 5 percent down, then refinanced it two years later, taking out a 15-year mortgage of $496,000. Plus, they had at least one line of credit of between $15,000 and $50,000.
So, in Justice Thomas’s telling, he began searching for a used Prevost at Mr. Little’s suggestion, one with enough miles on it to depreciate the value. “The depreciation curve — it’s very steep,” he made a point of saying in the 2001 C-SPAN interview.
All these years later, he still hasn’t told some of his closest friends how he was really able to swing the purchase.
“He told me he saved up all his money to buy it,” said Armstrong Williams, a longtime friend who worked closely with Justice Thomas in the Reagan administration.
The title history documents reviewed by The Times show that when the motor coach was sold for $267,230 to the Thomases in 1999, it had only 93,618 miles on it, relatively few for a vehicle that experts say can easily log a million miles in its lifetime. It came equipped with plush leather seating, a kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom in the back. In addition to its orange flame motif, it had a large Pegasus painted on the back, according to Jason Mang, the step-grandson of the previous owner, Bonnie Owenby.
“It was superluxury, really bougie,” he recalled.
On Nov. 19, 1999, after spotting the motor coach on the lot of Desert West Coach in Phoenix and putting a hold on it, Justice Thomas attended a dinner at the conservative Goldwater Institute. In a speech that night, he said he had never yearned to be a federal judge. “Pure and simple, I wanted to be rich,” he said.
Wayne Mullis, the owner of the now-defunct Desert West, said in an interview that Justice Thomas never discussed obtaining traditional financing with him, and that “as far as I know, he paid for it.”
Indeed, Justice Thomas would have been hard-pressed to get a loan from a traditional lender. Banks, and even finance companies that specialize in R.V. loans, are particularly reluctant to lend money on used Prevost Marathons because the customized features are hard to value, according to three leading industry executives interviewed by The Times.
“As a rule, the majority of buyers are cash buyers — they don’t finance the Prevost, generally,” said Chad Stevens, owner of an Arizona-based dealership specializing in high-end motor coaches, whose clients include celebrities and politicians. “In 1999, you would need a very strong down payment and a strong financial portfolio to finance one. It is a luxury item.”
While the terms of Mr. Welters’s loan to Justice Thomas are unclear, rules governing loans of more than $10,000 between friends and family are not.
Loans can be reclassified as gifts or income to the borrower, either of which would have to be reported by the justice under court disclosure rules, if any portion of the debt is forgiven or discharged as uncollectable. But even if a lender does not take those steps, a loan can still be considered a reportable gift or income if it doesn’t meet certain standards.
Loan terms should be spelled out in a written agreement, with a clearly defined, regular repayment schedule, tax experts said. Lenders must charge at least the applicable federal interest rate, which was a little over 6 percent in December 1999, when the deal to buy the motor coach closed. And if a borrower is in arrears, lenders must make a good-faith effort to collect, even to the point of going to court.
“Absent that, it’s more of a gift,” said Rich Lahijani, tax director of Edelman Financial Engines, an independent wealth planning and investment advisory firm.
The title history records held by the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles do not contain detailed information about the loan itself. What they show is that when the Thomases drove their motor coach back home to Virginia, they registered it in Prince William County, which does not charge personal property tax on R.V.s stored there, unlike Fairfax County, where they live.
Mr. Welters said he released the lien on the vehicle in 2008, and provided this photo of the original title to The Times as evidence. (Addresses and vehicle identification number have been redacted.) Credit…via Anthony Welters
And as of late last month, when The Times reviewed the records, they still listed Mr. Welters as the lien holder, notwithstanding the signed release he said he gave Justice Thomas in 2008 so he could obtain a new, clear title.
Mr. Welters said he could not explain why he was still listed as the holder of the lien. After he gave Justice Thomas the paperwork, he said, “I don’t know what process the borrower should have followed.” (To clear the title, the paperwork should have been brought to the D.M.V., where the lien release would have been recorded and a replacement title issued.) As for Justice Thomas, that was among the matters he declined to discuss with The Times.
‘A Warm, Safe Place’
As details about Justice and Mrs. Thomas’s subsidized trips to vacation homes and resorts have become public in recent months, his professed preference for traveling by motor coach has become something of a “yeah, right” punchline.
But by all accounts, he loves the anonymity, the freedom and the community it affords. He has hosted at least one event at the Supreme Court for a Marathon owners’ club.
Members of the Marathon Coach Club International on the steps of the Supreme Court.Credit…via Marathon Coach
When he hits the road, he often goes unrecognized, which at times has allowed him to travel without a U.S. Marshals’ security detail. Chris Weaver, who worked at Desert West Coach, said the justice had frequently gotten his motor coach serviced there before it closed. “Nine out of 10 times, he was just wearing sweats and a T-shirt,” he said.
Traveling largely through red-state America has also meant that when he is recognized, more often than not it is by fans. Juan Williams, a Fox News commentator who has known Justice Thomas since the Reagan administration, said the motor coach was both the fulfillment of a boyish fantasy and a metaphorical “womb.”
“He talked about the R.V. a lot,” he said. “It was a warm, safe place where he didn’t have to be attacked by liberals and Blacks on the left. What he liked about it was not being pilloried.”
In a 2007 interview, Justice Thomas told Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes” that the motor coach enabled him to escape the “meanness that you see in Washington.” Credit…CBS News
In a 2019 Q. and A. at the court, Justice Thomas said he had made it to nearly two dozen states, and declared himself the proud owner of a KOA campground discount card.
But the Thomases’ road trips have hardly been limited to sleeping at campsites and Walmart parking lots.
In a 2009 call-in to a morning radio talk show, for instance, Mrs. Thomas said they were driving their motor coach through the Adirondacks, on their way to “meet some families from Texas.” ProPublica has reported that the Thomases have spent part of nearly every summer for the past two decades in the Adirondacks as a guest of Mr. Crow, who owns a lakeside resort there with more than 25 fireplaces, three boathouses and a painting of the justice, his host and other guests smoking cigars.
The boathouse at Harlan Crow’s Adirondack resort, where Justice Thomas and his wife have vacationed. Credit…Nancie Battaglia for The New York Times
When the Thomases aren’t houseguests, they have stayed at upscale Marathon-endorsed destinations like the Mountain Falls Luxury Motorcoach Resort in Lake Toxaway, N.C.
There, the justice met Larry Fields, who owns a motor-coach-cleaning business. Mr. Fields said that for several days he had had no idea who Justice Thomas was, telling him he would have to wait in line to have his Prevost washed, which he patiently did.
“He was a great guy,” Mr. Fields recalled. “I think we talked about how great Reagan was. He was low-key. It was just him and his wife and a dog.”
Justice and Mrs. Thomas have traveled to Mountain Falls, a luxury motor coach resort in North Carolina. Credit…Greg Eastman
Upkeep on a motor coach like the justice’s is an expensive constant, and other friends have chipped in to help. While he did not disclose Mr. Welters’s assistance in buying the motor coach, he did report that some former clerks got together and bought him deep-cycle batteries for $1,200 the year after he acquired it. He also reported that in 2002, Greg Werner, who ran a large, family-owned, Nebraska-based trucking company, gave him tires worth $1,200.
And over time, Justice Thomas made the motor coach his own. In a photo The Times obtained that appears to date back to the early 2000s, picturing his great-nephew as a child, the motor coach no longer sported the sizzling orange flames and Pegasus logo. Instead, it was painted in an elegant black-and-gold geometric pattern.
But if the custom coach changed, the justice’s friendship with Mr. Welters endured.
While Mr. Welters was an executive at UnitedHealthcare, Justice Thomas twice recused himself from cases involving the company, in 2003 and 2005. As is the general custom of the court, he did not explain why.
In 2010, Justice Thomas traveled to the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, Port of Spain, at the invitation of the Welterses. By then, the couple had become major Democratic fund-raisers and President Obama had named Ms. Welters ambassador to the island nation. Local newspapers captured the justice and Mr. Welters talking to students at a school.
Justice Thomas at a school in Trinidad and Tobago in 2010 with Mr. Welters, left, whose wife was the ambassador. Flight records show that the Welterses’ private plane flew to and from Dulles Airport on the days Justice Thomas traveled. Credit…U.S. Embassy Trinidad and Tobago
In disclosures, Justice Thomas wrote that the “U.S. Embassy Port of Spain” had paid for his flight. But flight records obtained through the plane-tracking services of MyRadar show that the Welterses’ private Gulfstream G-6 flew from Washington Dulles International Airport and back on the days that Justice Thomas arrived on and departed the Caribbean island.
And Matthew Cassetta, a retired embassy official who helped arrange the visit, said Ms. Welters customarily “offered the plane to people who came down,” always at her own expense to save the taxpayers money.
(Ms. Welters declined to comment on the flights or the loan, except to say, “I just want to tell you that friendships come and go, and that’s what I want to say.”)
The same year, in a speech accepting an award from the Horatio Alger Association, Justice Thomas singled out Mr. Welters as one of his “friends for the whole journey.”
“And for Tony, a special thank you, who understood relationships and who was always there as a friend in the worst times of my life,” he said. “It is a friendship I will treasure forever.”
Reporting was contributed by Steve Eder, Riley Mellen, Robin Stein and Abbie VanSickle.
Jo Becker is a reporter in the investigative unit and a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. She is the author of “Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality.” More about Jo Becker
There’s a very distinct possibility we could trigger our own extinction or, at the very least, greatly reduce our population while completely altering the way we currently live. Little things like going outside during daylight hours or growing food in the dirt could become relics of the past, along with birds, insects, whales and many other species. War, famine, pestilence and death — that dreaded equine quartet — threaten to topple our dominance on this planet. We are destroying our own home, sawing off the very branch we rest on.
Those who refute this reality, or climate change deniers, misinterpret the same sets of data showing a clear anthropological cause as being part of the “natural” cycle of the planet. Things are warming, they argue, and that is normal. Only, it really isn’t normal.
Climatologists and scientists have been sounding the alarm for decades: Global temperatures and planetary homeostasis are spiraling out of control, and we’re to blame. The climate crisis is no longer a hypothetical future. It’s the tangible present, and the evidence is clear in every grueling heatwave, not-so-uncommon “freak” storm and raging wildfire.
On the opposite extreme is a vocal minority, the accelerationists and nihilists who accept that humanity is overwhelmingly destructive to nature, but argue our extinction would be a welcome relief. I received many such comments on social media after interviewing Peter Ward, a paleontologist and professor at the University of Washington, about his “Medea hypothesis,” a theory that life is not a benevolent force and often causes its own extermination. Many species in Earth’s history became so successful that they wiped themselves out — and we could do the same.
In response to that article, many readers said something such as, “Humans are a virus and should be eradicated.” Obviously, inducing human extinction is an outcome for which only a very cynical personality would advocate. But what about the first part of that statement? Are humans really like a virus, a pathogen, a cancer?
Dr. Warren Hern, a Colorado-based physician and author of the new book “Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth,” argues that human civilization indeed has many similarities with cancer. This isn’t a metaphor, but rather a literal diagnosis — and it can be addressed in the same way that an actual cancer diagnosis can be the first step to treatment.
Salon recently spoke with Hern about his new book, which acts partially as a memoir, textbook, dire diagnosis and poetic ode to a disintegrating planet, discussing the implications for such an urgent prognosis, a new name for the human species that reflects our true nature and how we can still fix this crisis.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
My opinion is that humans are part of nature — we are not separate from it. After I came across your book, I began asking myself, “Are humans really a cancer on the planet?” I thought, “Aren’t we part of this whole ecosystem?” I initially set out to disprove what you’re saying, but the argument you make is so extremely convincing. I know from your writing that when you were first conceptualizing the notion that humans are a cancer on the planet, it was very unpopular. But now it seems like this idea has earned some mainstream acceptance. Is that true?
This is a fundamental scientific and philosophical question. And, first of all, I agree with you that we are part of nature. We evolved in a natural ecosystem, and we have obviously very intimate close ties with other species, other animals. Humans are unique in that they have culture, although we’re learning that other animals have certain levels of culture also, like whales. So, we are really not unique in that sense, but we have a different and higher level of culture that allows us to dominate other species and ecosystems.
These are cultural adaptations that allow us to survive, but they have become malignant maladaptations because they are now threatening our survival and millions of other species. We have essentially made a decision at this point as a species to go extinct. That’s what we’re doing — we’re eliminating our biosphere and our planetary support system. Consciously or not, and I think mostly unconsciously.
When I first came onto this in the late ’60s, I was horrified. It’s not an analogy; nobody ever died from an analogy. It’s a diagnosis, and that’s different. The diagnosis is the same as the hypothesis. The guy comes into the emergency room with a sore belly, and he has right lower quadrant pain. Your diagnosis is appendicitis until proven otherwise. But that’s a hypothesis because he might have some other disease, or if it’s a woman, they might have an ovarian cyst.
I work with the idea from Karl Popper that science is not advanced by proving anything, but by disproving false hypotheses. The purpose of a hypothesis is to explain reality and predict events. This hypothesis [humans as a cancer] explains what we see going on in reality around us — and has for a long time — and it predicts what is going to happen. And that means the prognosis, in medical terms, for cancer is death. The cancer continues until the host organism dies.
The difference between us and a cancer — the only difference — is we can think, and we can decide not to be a cancer. If the diagnosis is correct, things will continue until we are extinct. The biosphere can’t go extinct; it can’t die, but we can alter it to the point that we can no longer survive. And that will take out millions of other organisms. Clearly, plenty of organisms are going to survive that process. They might even be more intelligent than us. I don’t know.
That’s sort of the general picture. And whether people accept this or want to even listen to it is another thing. For example, in the book, I talk about the guy who took over the anthropology section at AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] back in the early ’90s. He didn’t like this idea, and he wanted them to drop it from the schedule because his wife had cancer and he was very offended by it. I told him, “Well, I’m really sorry that your wife has cancer, and I certainly hope she recovers. This doesn’t have anything to do with your wife’s cancer.”
I hope people can see that because it’s such a good diagnosis. I mean, it really does fit the bill. You look at maps of cities and tumors, and you can see how they kind of grow similarly. But the similarities don’t end there.
The basic premise is that humans have the capacity of developing culture, and that has millions of manifestations, everything from language and speech and mathematics to constructing shelters, building weapons and having medical care to keep us alive. These adaptations have allowed us to go from a few separate species of skinny primates wandering around in Africa a couple of million years ago to being the dominant ecological force on the planet to the point we’re changing the entire global ecosystem.
These cultural adaptations have now become maladaptive. They do not have survival value. And they are, in fact, malignant maladaptations because they’re increasing in a way that cancer increases. So, this means that the human species now has all of the major characteristics of a malignant process. When I was in medical school, we had four of them that were identified: rapid, uncontrolled growth; invasion and destruction of adjacent normal tissues — in this case, ecosystems; metastasis, which means distant colonization; and dedifferentiation, which you see very well in the patterns of cities.
That’s only one example. We now have 10 or 15 other new characteristics of cancer, and the human species fits all of them. And so the disturbing thing about this? If you have any two of the first four characteristics of cancer, it’s cancer until proven otherwise. And cancer does not stop until the host organism has ceased to function, which for our purposes is the biosphere.
Now, I have given the book the name “Homo Ecophagus.” That is my new name for the human species, which currently has the scientific name of Homo sapiens sapiens, or wise, wise man, which makes us the most misnamed species on the planet. Homo ecophagus means the man who devours the ecosystem — and that’s what we are doing.
We are in the process of converting all plant, animal, organic and inorganic material on the planet into human biomass and its adaptive adjuncts or support systems. The evidence for that is all around us.
So, that’s the basic idea in a nutshell, and then the rest of the book is simply manifestations of this malignancy and an explanation of the analysis. And so, the next question is: Can we do anything about this? Should we do something about this? It’s very hard under the circumstances, for example, to think about Vladimir Putin sitting down with Zelensky if they can fix the ecosystem in Ukraine.
Right, it’s a very, very difficult problem. It’s the biggest problem our society faces right now. Literally, nothing else matters if we don’t address this problem.
That’s the point: It’s an existential crisis. Yes.
I have to say that it seems like we’re not going to solve this problem. I don’t want to be negative and despair that we’re all simply going to die from climate change. I recently made a move across the country from California to Illinois. Everywhere you go, you get that dedifferentiation that you speak of, where everything looks the same. Every freeway has the same strip malls. You see all these people in these giant pickup and semi trucks and all this overconsumption. I just don’t see people giving it up. I just don’t see it happening. Not fast enough, at least.
This is what I call the “ecophasic imperative.” Robert Ardrey, a brilliant anthropologist, about 40 or 50 years ago wrote a number of outstanding books. One is called “The Territorial Imperative,” which is about how humans have an imperative need to have and expand their territories.
One of the most lurid manifestations of what we have right now is Donald Trump. Another one is Putin and the war on Ukraine, but humans have been doing this forever. And now our malignant melanoma patients have been put in a position where we are devouring the Earth. We are devouring the ecosystem. We have an imperative to do that. Look at the open pit mines that we have of various kinds. The whole alternative energy programs depend on destroying certain ecosystems to get the rare metals that we need to do that stuff.
I do not want to be negative, either. I’m basically an optimistic and positive person. I’ve been my whole life. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives us a list of horribles, and it gets more horrible every year. But what’s the underlying dynamic? I say this is a malignant process going on for hundreds of thousands of years.
This is not new. When the Australian Aborigines arrived on the continent of Australia, they started changing the ecosystem in very dramatic ways, and a lot of species went extinct. My colleague here at the University of Colorado, Giff Miller, has been one of the people showing that it happened in North America. It happened in the Pacific Islands. It happens every place. Humans have made other species extinct wherever they show up.
Of course, it takes individual actions. The obvious side to that is people can make changes in their lives. I’m in Boulder, Colo, for example, where they have a lot of recycling going on, and people are very conscious of that. But, at the same time, you have China putting in a coal-fired power generation plant every week. So, it’s very hard to see how all these individual actions can really have that effect that we want.
Do you have hope for the future, or maybe feel despair about everything? I often get a little bit paralyzed and feel like there’s no point to anything, like we’re all just going to go off the cliff. I’m hoping something will change, that something will shift on a major level, that we’ll all kind of come together on this issue. But I feel like I’ve been waiting for that moment for years.
It’s hard to know how to answer your question when you ask me, “Is there hope?” One of my main answers — which is true — is that young people like you give me hope, people who are looking at this stuff and thinking about it and figuring out what to do. When I look at the current political scene in the United States, it’s very hard to be optimistic because we have a violent fascist movement that occupies the attention of at least a third, if not more, of the population, supporting a man who is a sociopathic criminal.
I think that we make the decisions about these situations — the environment and our survival — through our political process. I want to be optimistic. Let me just share a little example of something with you. A week ago, I went to New Mexico to attend a special memorial service for Dave Foreman.
The meeting was held in a campground outside of Los Alamos, and we were a scruffy-looking bunch of backpackers and tree huggers. I felt right at home with these wonderful people, who were some of the hardcore environmentalists of this country, and people who really, really were dedicated, spent their lives working on protecting the environment. We’ve been talking about people with advanced degrees, with PhDs in ecology and biology, wolf conservation, I don’t know what else.
They were an impressive bunch of people. I enjoyed meeting them, and I participated in this meeting. I admire Dave, who was a friend of mine. And I have his books, and they’re worth reading. OK, this is a highly energetic, wonderful, dedicated, altruistic group in this country. What’s been happening since they started Earth First!? Things are a lot worse than they were.
And it’s very hard to see how that has really influenced the broad scale of things, even though they’ve had a lot of very specific local victories. More people need to understand that we are in an impending extinction crisis for ourselves and for the rest of the ecosystem and other species. We are destroying the planet as we speak — as rapidly as possible — and that must stop. We must find ways to do things differently, and that’s going to make big changes in our lives.
Ahead of Ohio abortion vote, Republicans try to change the rules
Holly Honderich – in Washington – August 5, 2023
An upcoming referendum in Ohio has become a proxy fight for abortion
A pro-abortion referendum looked poised to win in the conservative state of Ohio this November. Now, Republican state legislators are accused of moving the goalposts.
Last summer, just like every summer for the past 22 years, Michael Curtin spent his days on the assorted baseball fields of central Ohio, acting as umpire for high school and college games.
Mr Curtin, retired after a 38-year career in journalism and another four in state politics, loves the game. But this summer, Mr Curtin’s umpire equipment has been neglected, shoved somewhere in the basement of his Columbus home so he could focus on the rules of Ohio politics instead.
“I’m not doing one game,” he said. “And I miss it. But this fight’s too important to lose.”
The fight in question is over Issue 1, a deceivingly dull and procedural-sounding referendum on the minimum threshold required to pass constitutional amendments.
The premise is simple: voters will decide on 8 August whether that threshold should remain at 50% plus one, or be raised to 60%.
But Ohio’s vote has become a proxy war over abortion, one of the many state-wide battles that have broken out since the US Supreme Court rescinded the nationwide right to abortion last June.
That’s because Issue 1 is not the only referendum looming. In November, Ohioans will vote on another constitutional amendment, one that would protect abortion access up until foetal viability, around 24 weeks of pregnancy.
The proponents of issue 1 claim that Tuesday’s vote is simply to protect the state’s constitution from outside influence.
But its opponents – a diverse coalition featuring political wonks like Mr Curtin, a retired Supreme Court judge and all of Ohio’s past living governors – have called foul. They claim Issue 1 is a backhanded attempt to change the rules mid-game, raising the voter threshold just in time to thwart the abortion vote.
“Look, everybody knows what’s going on here. Everybody knows,” Mr Curtin said. “This was just bad faith.”
Issue 1 has been championed by Ohio’s secretary of state Frank LaRose
Since Roe v Wade was overturned last June, the country’s abortion fight has increasingly played out in state ballot initiatives. There have been six so far, each one a win for abortion rights.
If Ohio’s vote is passed, it will be the most sweeping affirmation of reproductive rights in a state controlled by a firm Republican majority, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis and a leading authority on the US abortion debate. “It will confirm that there’s some sort of consensus around abortion rights, even in conservative states.”
But if Issue 1 is passed first, and the threshold is raised to 60%, the abortion rights amendment may be finished.
“They [anti-abortion campaigners] very clearly looked at this and said: we cannot win if we don’t change the rules,” said Kellie Copeland, executive director of Pro-Choice Ohio.
Issue 1 has had the full-throated support of Ohio’s chief election official, secretary of state Frank LaRose.
“To allow a bare majority of 50% plus one to change the very ground rules that the state operates on is just not good public policy,” he told the BBC.
Issue 1’s opponents include all four of the state’s living former governors
Mr LaRose, 44, is a veteran of the US Special Forces and now an enthusiastic envoy for the Republican Party, crisscrossing the state for more than 65 pro-Issue 1 events. He is charming, conservative and politically ambitious. In November – at the same time the abortion referendum is held – Mr LaRose will be on the ballot for the US Senate.
In public, Mr LaRose has kept the focus squarely on the constitution. But at a fundraising dinner in May, Mr LaRose made explicit the importance of Issue 1 for the anti-abortion movement.
“I’m pro-life. I think many of you are as well,” Mr LaRose said, in a video recorded by Scanner Media. “This is 100% about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution. The left wants to jam it in there this coming November.”
In an interview with the BBC, Mr LaRose acknowledged that the “looming abortion amendment” helped bring the Issue 1 vote forward. “But that’s not the only reason,” he said.
To his opponents, Mr LaRose had been caught saying the quiet part out loud.
“There’s an old standard that our grandparents taught us that bears repeating: if you want any credibility in life… never deny the obvious,” Mr Curtin said. “Here is Mr LaRose denying the obvious.”
There have been other accusations of hypocrisy. Earlier this year, Republicans passed a law eliminating nearly all August elections, citing their high cost and low turnout. Then, in an apparent u-turn, they put Issue 1 on the calendar for 8 August.
Even some of Mr LaRose’s fellow Republicans have spoken out against Issue 1.
“You’re talking about changing a part of the Ohio constitution that has been in effect for well over 100 years,” said former Ohio Governor Bob Taft, a Republican. “And it’s worked, it’s worked well, the system is not broken.”
In the 111 years since Ohio first granted voters the power to introduce citizen-led amendments, just 19 of 71 proposed measures have passed. Ohio’s current policy requiring a simple majority is in line with most of the 17 US states that allow citizen-initiated amendments. And in 2015, Ohioans added a new restriction, passing an amendment that prohibited anyone from changing the constitution for their own financial benefit.
“This is an elaborate scheme to suppress the vote of Ohioans… It’s unconscionable,” said former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, also a Republican.
Whatever Mr LaRose’s motivations, Issue 1 has been embraced by Ohio’s anti-abortion lobby. Mike Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life, said he “led efforts” to get signatures from state politicians to put the measure on the ballot.
“In speaking with Frank LaRose I said ‘now’s our time to do this’,” he told the BBC.
Mr Gonidakis, like Mr LaRose, rejected criticism that Issue 1 was underhanded. “It’s not changing the goalposts if Ohioans weigh in and vote on it,” he said.
Experts said they see Ohio’s Issue 1 as part of a broader tactic employed by anti-abortion advocates to circumvent public opinion in service of their ultimate goal, outlawing abortion entirely – a goal that is unsupported by most Americans.
“They think if voters had a straight up and down decision on abortion it wouldn’t go their way, so they’re trying to do what they can to prevent that from happening,” said the University of California’s Ms Ziegler.
As a result, anti-abortion leaders and their Republican allies have found paths around popular support – either relying on the court system or on politicians willing to promote abortion policy regardless of voters’ wishes.
These manoeuvres are possible, Ms Ziegler said, because in so many cases Republican politicians fear the anti-abortion lobby more than their own constituents.
And the strategy suits the movement’s internal logic, in which banning abortion is seen as the worthiest cause.
“There’s a sense in which winning is more important than democracy,” she said.
Democrats are drastically over-performing in 2023’s special elections. Is it a clue for Biden vs. Trump?
Tal Axelrod – August 5, 2023
Trump mounted $40 million in legal fees: Sources
ABC News’ senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott reports on what some Republicans are saying about the new charges against former President Donald Trump.
But Democrats also say that based on 2023 so far, they see plenty of reason for optimism about their chances with voters.
An analysis from FiveThirtyEight found that in 38 special elections held so far this year, Democrats have outperformed the partisan lean — or the relative liberal or conservative history — of the areas where the races were held by an average of 10%, both romping in parts of the country that typically support the party while cutting down on GOP margins in red cities and counties, too.
For instance, the Democratic candidate in a Wisconsin State Assembly special election last month lost by just 7 points in an area where Republicans have a 22-point edge and where Trump beat Biden by almost 17 points in 2020.
In a New Hampshire special election in May for a state House seat, the Democrat won by 43 points, far beyond the party’s estimated 23-point edge in the district.
The data from FiveThirtyEight does not include regularly scheduled off-year elections, including the Wisconsin Supreme Court race earlier this year in which the liberal candidate, now-Justice Janet Protasiewicz, won by 11 points — in a state famous for its wafer-thin election margins.
“I think when you when you look at things like this, one special election doesn’t mean much on its own. But when you start to see real consistency, it can certainly become predictive of the next election cycle,” said Ben Nuckels, a Wisconsin Democratic strategist who consulted on Protasiewicz’s campaign.
For comparison, according to FiveThirtyEight, Democrats outperformed the weighted partisan lean by about 4% in special elections held between the 2018 midterms and the 2020 elections, when Biden won the White House by 4.5% but Democrats underperformed in House races.
Conversations with eight Democratic and Republican operatives in swing states show some repeated explanations for this success: the public’s general support for abortion access after the Supreme Court reversed the national guarantee for the procedure last year along with angst and anger over Trump’s comeback bid, given how divisive he remains — two factors which might even overcompensate for Biden’s sagging approval ratings.
“Republicans have not had a good election night since before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And, honestly, it seems like post-Roe Republicans couldn’t find their groove even if a DJ played their favorite song on repeat,” Nuckels said. “So I think Democrats are in a very good position here going forward.”
PHOTO: In this undated file photo, the US Capitol building is shown in Washington, D.C. (STOCK IMAGE/Getty Images)
Special and off-year elections are not perfect predictors of major election cycles. Now-Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, earned a surprise victory in 2021 — before Democrats’ surprisingly strong performance in the 2022 midterms.
However, similar elections held in 2017 and 2019 did precede Democratic successes in 2018 and 2020.
“I think what we’re seeing is that the Dobbs decision has fundamentally rewired our politics, and almost every other measure than actual votes cast has yet to figure out how to bake that in. And so, whether you’re talking about traditional approval ratings, whether you’re talking about polling, the ground has shifted,” said Wisconsin Democratic strategist Joe Zepecki.
“Almost all of these elections keep ending up different than what you would have expected — in the same direction. And so, that, to me, suggests that there’s some stickiness to this,” he added. “And the only thing that might change it is clarity on this issue, something like a federal codification of [abortion rights]. And you and I both know we’re not going to see that between now and next November.”
Republican operatives also sounded some alarm, telling ABC News the trend cannot be ignored.
“If you’re looking at this plus-22 [pro-GOP] seat and you want to know why this guy won by a lot smaller percentage than what you would have thought … it’s because this issue is still there. Republicans still have to figure out how to address the abortion issue,” said Wisconsin GOP strategist Brandon Scholz.
“I think you have to be very concerned.”
Other Republicans pointed to the current lack of party unity over Trump — amid the 2024 primary — to help explain the special election results.
“You could probably make a connection a little bit to the presidential race, that there’s a lot of candidates in right now. There’s the Trump folks and folks that are backing somebody else, and the party’s not united nationally around one candidate right now, or at least not completely. Sometimes that affects turnout and funding and stuff like that,” said GOP consultant Josh Novotney, who is based in Pennsylvania, where Democrats flipped the state House in special elections earlier this year.
Other conservatives cautioned against taking too much away from how the 2023 results could predict who wins next year.
PHOTO: FILE – Pro-abortion and anti-abortion demonstrators protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, May 3, 2022. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters, FILE)
Special elections are notorious for funky turnouts, sometimes relying on only the most motivated groups and with other voters at times even unaware they’re happening at all, especially in an odd-numbered year. On top of that, less money is often spent on special elections rather than regularly scheduled races, impacting the outreach campaigns can do to win over voters.
“I am someone who, over the years, has always cautioned about reading too much into specials, regardless of whether they help your cause or hurt your cause,” said veteran Pennsylvania GOP strategist Chris Nicholas.
However, whether or not this year’s special elections are forecasts of next year’s results, strategists on both sides of the aisle expected the Democratic drumbeat over abortion and Trump to continue.
“They thought it could juice their turnout, and they were they were successful in that regard. And they weren’t subtle about it at all. They’re just like, ‘We know this is a hot-button issue for us, and we’re gonna keep milking it till it runs dry.’ I think you’ll see that a lot in the fall and next year as well,” Nicholas said, referencing one special election in Pennsylvania earlier this year.
Democrats who spoke to ABC News were torn over whether the trend is strong enough to last until November 2024, with some pumping the brakes and others appearing more bullish.
“I think it’s less of a tea leaf and maybe an inspiration, that if Democrats are able to control the narrative in these races, where they’re able to talk to voters about the stakes around abortion and then also contrast the Republicans’ focus on the culture war with the real kitchen table issues that a lot of these Democratic candidates are also focusing on — that there’s a path to be able to both motivate more Democrats to turn out and win the swing voters,” said Pennsylvania Democratic strategist J.J. Abbott.
Zepecki, another Democrat, said that “the rules have been rewritten, we don’t know what they are.”
“We’re using old benchmarks to try to forecast going forward. And I think what we need to look at is less of the noise and more of signal,” he said. “Right now, the noise is [what] you see on cable news, and it’s people tweeting all day. The signal, what we should be looking for, are election results. That’s what ultimately is telling the story.”
Outside of 2023’s special elections, Democrats still face a range of high-profile regular races this year that are expected to be competitive — including for Virginia’s entire state Legislature and governorships in Kentucky and Louisiana.
Susan Stancill, the chair of the Democratic Party in Washington County, Va., said she has “a lot” of confidence after this year’s special election results, including in rural counties like hers where Democrats aren’t winning but are cutting down Republicans’ margins.
“We have five constitutional and party candidates on our ballot, and then an additional four school board candidates, and I’m optimistic we’re gonna run the table,” she said. “And you might tell me I’m crazy. But ask me in November.”
And as concerning as these developments are, scientists have long worried about even more dramatic, looming and irreversible changes to the planet that could happen quickly. Even in the past year, there’s evidence some of these scenarios are becoming more likely.
A paper in the journal Science in 2022 looked at several climate “tipping points” – conditions beyond which changes become self-perpetuating and difficult or impossible to undo. While the concept raised the hackles of some scientists, who suggested it was overly simplistic, the paper suggested even the possibility of such no-going-back points provided compelling reasons to limit warming as much as possible.
But the news isn’t all bad: There’s some good news in the Amazon. And scientists continue to say that if humanity takes climate threats seriously and quickly moves to end carbon emissions, the scenarios below become less likely or at least less extreme.
Here are five tipping points scientists say could start to teeter sooner rather than later:
A July 2022 photo of melting summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean near Greenland.
As of July 18, Antarctic sea ice was more than 1 million square miles below the 1981-2010 average. That’s an area larger than the seven southwestern states, including Utah and Texas, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. It is also more than half a million square miles lower than last year, which had also been the previous record low.
In Greenland, temperatures over the country’s central-north ice sheet between 2001 and 2011 were the warmest in the past 1,000 years, said Maria Hörhold, a glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany and author of a study published this year.
Critical Atlantic ocean currents could stall, reshape climate in US and Europe
What could happen: Massive ocean currents that move hot and cold water around could grind to a halt. Some studies have called it an “irreversible transition.”
When could it happen: New research suggests it could occur this century.
What would the effect on Earth be: Scientists aren’t sure, but some say a stoppage could trigger rapid weather and climate changes in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. It could bring about an ice age in Europe and sea-level rise in cities such as Boston and New York, as well as more potent storms and hurricanes along the East Coast.
What changed since last year? Recent analysis shows the current appears to be weakening or slowing down.
It’s far from certain and many scientists say there’s not enough data yet to tell if there’s a trend that could mean a sudden collapse is in the offing.
FILE – Smoke rises from a fire near a logging area in the Transamazonica highway region, in the municipality of Humaita, Amazonas state, Brazil, Sept. 17, 2022. Brazil has a major role to play in addressing climate change as home to the world’s largest rainforest, but after the Sunday, Oct. 2, election, the subject is less likely to come up than ever. (AP Photo/Edmar Barros, File) ORG XMIT: CLI301More
What could the effect on Earth be? The Amazon’s 2.5 million square mile rainforest, sometimes called “the lungs of the plant,” is so vast it creates half of its own rainfall and is home to 10% of the world’s species. It also stores a substantial amount of the world’s carbon.
As temperatures rise and droughts become more common, the ability of the forest to grow back after fires or logging is of concern. That’s especially a problem in the Amazon where the trees themselves capture water through their roots and then release moisture back through their leaves. It’s estimated a single tree can emit 265 gallons of water a day.
If drought or logging kills trees there may not be enough left to bring water to the area, meaning what grows back in their place would instead be grassland.
July 2, 2023 : Flames from the Donnie Creek wildfire burn along a ridge top north of Fort St. John, British Columbia.
Wildfires could reshape Alaska and Canada, turning forests into grassland
What could happen: Massive wildfires could mean North America’s vast northern forests – sometimes called “snow forests” – could face a future as mostly treeless grasslands.
What would the effect on Earth be: These cold-weather forests run across Alaska and Canada and are estimated to store more than 30% of all forest carbon on the planet. Without them, huge amounts of greenhouse gases would be released into the atmosphere, worsening global warming.
Forests have always burned but what’s happening now is on a different scale, in every part of the country, said Marc-André Parisien, a research scientist with the Canadian Forest Service.
This summer has been a historically bad fire season in Canada. As of August 4, a remarkable 1,054 active fires were burning, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre.
While boreal forests are highly adapted to wildfires, the climate in the forested areas is now hotter and windier than before, making it harder for the seedlings to reestablish themselves. The concern is that in some areas what grows back after these megafires might not be today’s endless forests but instead grassland and shrubland, interspersed with smaller areas of trees.
“The climate in the northern forests has always been changing since the end of the Ice Age,” Parisien said. “But just the sheer speed at which things are happening now is surprising.”
Underwater photo of coral bleaching and hard coral Acropora sp turns white due to high sea surface temperature and climate change
World’s coral reefs could be cooked by the ocean
What could happen: Rising ocean temperatures are literally cooking coral to death. If localized die-offs happened across the world’s oceans, it would fundamentally change and diminish undersea life.
When could it happen: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that 1.5°C of global warming would result in between 70 and 90% of the world’s coral reefs disappearing – which could happen in the early 2030s.
What would the effect on Earth be: Corals are vital to the health of the oceans. Although they cover only 0.2% of the ocean floor, they are home to at least a quarter of all marine species. They provide safety for juvenile fish and are home to small organisms and fish that provide food for larger fish. A report released last year showed that almost 15% of the planet’s reefs have vanished since 2009.
Coral reefs can survive within only a relatively narrow temperature band. The coral that build the reefs get much of their food from algae living in their tissues. When the seawater is too warm, the coral’s stress response is to expel algae, causing the coral to turn white. The process is called coral bleaching, and if it lasts too long, the coral can starve – turning a thriving ecosystem into a cemetery of dead, white shells.
The Coral Restoration Foundation, a group centered around restoring and protecting Florida’s coral reefs, said it visited the Sombrero Reef off the Florida Keys on July 20 and found “100% coral mortality.” The discovery means all corals on the Sombrero Reef, a popular snorkeling area, have died and the reef will not recover on its own without active restoration, the foundation said.
Students from the Urban Homeschoolers in Atwater Village march through the neighborhood chanting and carrying signs on their way to the Los Angeles River and then an overpass on Interstate-5. Photo by Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY staff
Action, not despair
Even though it appears humanity is on track to miss the United Nations’ hoped-for limit of a temperature rise of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, giving up is not the answer, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
No specific number signifies that all hope is lost. Instead, it’s a call for action.
“It’s not like we fall off the edge of the world,” he said. “We can still make a big difference and every single tenth of a degree is enormously important.”
