Category: Health – Happiness

After a Summer of Disasters, Some Lawmakers See a Chance for Climate Action

After a Summer of Disasters, Some Lawmakers See a Chance for Climate Action

Coral Davenport and Brad Plumer            
A flooded underpass on Queens Boulevard in New York after torrential rains from storms precipitated by Hurricane Ida, Sept. 2, 2021. (Dakota Santiago/The New York Times)
A flooded underpass on Queens Boulevard in New York after torrential rains from storms precipitated by Hurricane Ida, Sept. 2, 2021. (Dakota Santiago/The New York Times)

 

WASHINGTON — As the country reels from the cascade of deaths and devastation wrought by this summer’s record floods, heat waves, droughts and wildfires, President Joe Biden and progressive Democrats are using the moment to push for aggressive climate provisions in a sweeping $3.5 trillion budget bill.

On Thursday, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the majority leader, said that when the Senate returns to Washington on Tuesday to continue work on budget legislation, it would include provisions designed to reduce fossil fuel emissions linked to extreme weather.

Congress is also considering a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that includes money to help communities gird against climate disasters. The Senate passed the bill last month and the House is expected to vote on it by late September.

That legislation includes $47 billion over five years in funding to improve the nation’s flood defenses, limit damage from wildfires, develop new sources of drinking water in areas plagued by drought and relocate some communities away from risky areas. It also contains $27 billion in spending to help harden electric grids against extreme weather events that are causing more frequent blackouts.

Schumer said the infrastructure and budget bills were paramount to prepare communities for more powerful storms, fires, droughts and floods and to stop the pollution that would heat the planet further and lead to even more extreme weather.

“Global warming is upon us, and it’s going to get worse and worse and worse unless we do something about it, and that’s why it’s so imperative to pass the two bills, the infrastructure bill and the budget reconciliation bill,” he said.

Of the two pieces of legislation, the budget bill faces the more perilous path. Republicans are uniformly opposed to it because it also includes a raft of social spending, like funds for universal child care.

Some Democrats are also unhappy with the $3.5 trillion price tag and want to scale it back, although a few who initially balked at the cost now say they may make an exception when it comes to climate provisions.

The budget bill will include a potent tool to cut greenhouse gas emissions — an incentive program designed to replace most of the nation’s coal- and gas-fired power plants over the next decade with wind, solar and nuclear plants. It would be the strongest policy to fight climate change enacted by the United States.

Biden and progressive Democrats say the summer disasters that have shocked the country, from lethal flooding in New York to severe drought in the Midwest to raging wildfires in California, will give them leverage during negotiations on the budget bill. Progressive Democrats also hope to use the budget bill to make polluters pay for those clean power programs — for example, by imposing tariffs on imported goods from countries that don’t regulate greenhouse pollution, and fees on emissions of methane, a planet-warming gas that leaks from oil and gas wells.

It remains far from certain whether those provisions will make it into the budget bill.

Because no Republicans are expected to vote for the final package, Democrats will need every vote in their razor-thin House and Senate majorities to push it through.

But this week, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., called for Congress to “hit a strategic pause” on the bill. In an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal, he wrote, “I have always said if I can’t explain it, I can’t vote for it, and I can’t explain why my Democratic colleagues are rushing to spend $3.5 trillion.”

A spokeswoman for Manchin did not return an email requesting comment.

Manchin, whose coal-rich state could be hurt by climate legislation designed to phase out fossil fuels, has been noncommittal about the program to replace coal- and gas-fired plants with zero-emission energy sources. If he or any other Democrat from a coal, oil or gas state opposed the provision, it could be dropped from the final version.

But Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., chief author of the power plant provision, said she believed the extreme weather that has so recently scorched, deluged and destroyed so many regions of the country would make it harder in the next two weeks for any Democrat to justify cutting it.

“For the last couple of days, this part of the state has been in one of the most extreme droughts that we’ve seen in a generation,” said Smith, who spoke by telephone from Minnesota. “I spent yesterday talking with cattle producers. They are liquidating their herds way earlier than they would have. They don’t have the feed and forage to keep their herds together. And I can’t believe I’m the only senator hearing about this while I’m home, when you think about the reach of extreme weather across the country. And I think that dynamic is shaping the negotiations.”

Meanwhile, in a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, Reps. Stephanie Murphy of Florida and Henry Cuellar of Texas, both moderate Democrats, laid out “overarching principles” they wanted to see as lawmakers write the details of the budget bill. Both members were among the group of moderate and conservative Democrats who had recoiled at passing the initial $3.5 trillion budget before Pelosi issued a series of commitments, including assurances that the measure would be fully financed and would not include any provisions that could not clear the Senate.

But in the letter, first reported by Politico and later obtained by The New York Times, the two Democrats said they were willing to make a possible exception for spending to address climate change because nonpartisan cost estimates “do not adequately account for the future costs associated with inaction on the climate crisis.”

While efforts to reduce emissions remain contentious, there is a broader consensus around the need to prepare communities for the impacts of extreme weather. Few corners of the country have been left unscathed by the string of disasters this summer: overflowing rivers in Tennessee, a hurricane in Louisiana, a deadly heat wave in the Pacific Northwest and floods in New York City.

The infrastructure bill approved by the Senate would mark a large shift in the federal government’s approach to extreme weather events. Rather than simply paying to rebuild communities after disasters, the bill would provide the largest single infusion of federal money ever to prepare states and cities for future climate impacts ahead of time.

For instance, the Department of Transportation would get $8.7 billion to help states address future climate risks to their roads and transit systems. Much of the nation’s infrastructure was designed to handle weather conditions of the past, which are becoming increasingly obsolete as the planet warms. This week, New York City’s subway, parts of which were designed a century ago, was paralyzed after a storm poured huge amounts of water into stations and tunnels.

Many of those provisions have drawn support from Republicans, including those who have dismissed the threat of climate change in the past. In an interview with CNBC this week, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., urged his party to rally around the infrastructure bill after Hurricane Ida left a trail of destruction in his state.

“If we are going to make our country more resilient to natural disasters wherever they are, we have to start preparing now,” Cassidy said. “I’m sure hoping that Republicans look around my state, see this damage and say, ‘If there’s money for resiliency, money to harden the grid, money to help sewer and water, then maybe this is something we should be for.’ ”

But while climate experts praised many of the resilience measures in the bill, they cautioned that it quite likely wouldn’t be enough. In 2018, the federal government’s National Climate Assessment estimated that adapting to climate change could ultimately cost “tens to hundreds of billions of dollars per year.”

“If we really want to get ahead of the curve of ever-steepening climate impacts, it’s not enough to do a one-off resilience bill every five years,” said Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We need to start weaving resilience measures into every single dollar that governments spend on infrastructure.”

For now, there seems to be little appetite in Congress for enlarging the adaptation provisions in the infrastructure bill, although some lawmakers have pushed for additional measures in the budget bill. Some progressive Democrats have, for instance, pushed for the creation of the Civilian Climate Corps, modeled after a New Deal program, that would hire young Americans to work on climate resilience projects.

But even if adaptation measures garner wide bipartisan support, some experts warn that they could soon reach their limit unless nations like the United States rapidly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and slow the pace of global warming.

“We’re not even ready for the disasters that are coming at us now,” said Rachel Cleetus, climate policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “And there’s just no way we’re going to be able to get ahead of what’s coming in the future unless we can get our emissions and climate change in check.”

Over 200 medical journals warn climate crisis is the “greatest threat to public health”

Over 200 medical journals warn climate crisis is the “greatest threat to public health”

Rebecca Falconer                      

 

Global warming is affecting people’s health and officials need to urgently address the climate crisis now as it can’t wait until the COVID-19 pandemic is over, editors of over 230 medical journals warned Sunday evening.

Why it matters: This is the first time so many publications have come together to issue such a joint statement to world leaders, underscoring the severity of the situation — with the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet and the British Medical Journal among those issuing the warning.

  • Ahead of this November’s UN general assembly and the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, with the journals warn: “The greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5C and to restore nature.”

Threat level: “Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world,” states the editorial, also run in the New England Journal of Medicine, the International Nursing Review, the Chinese Science Bulletin and Brazil’s Revista de Saude Publica.

  • “Despite the world’s necessary preoccupation with Covid-19, we cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions.”
  • The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said global warming could reach 1.5°C (2.7°F) compared to pre-industrial levels by 2030.

Of note: World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement ahead of the editorial’s publication that the “risks posed by climate change could dwarf those of any single disease.”

  • “We will end the COVID-19 pandemic, but there’s no vaccine for the climate crisis,” Tedros added.

State of play: The editorial reports that heat-related mortality among people older than 65 has risen by over 50% in the past 20 years.

  • Global warming has also impacted on farming production, “hampering efforts to reduce under-nutrition,” the journal editors-in-chief write.

“Higher temperatures have brought increased dehydration and renal function loss, dermatological malignancies, tropical infections, adverse mental health outcomes, pregnancy complications, allergies, and cardiovascular and pulmonary morbidity and mortality.”

The bottom line: “The science is unequivocal: a global increase of 1.5° C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse,” the editorial warns.

Go deeper:

‘You’re poisoning us’: Ida brings fresh hell for Cancer Alley residents already battling pollution

The Guardian

Cancer town Louisana

‘You’re poisoning us’: Ida brings fresh hell for Cancer Alley residents already battling pollution

Hurricane hit heavily industrialized region hard shortly after it was revealed a nearby steel plant pumped sulphur gas in atmosphere for six years

Barbara Washington, a local environmental campaigner, with the Nucor steel plant seen behind her.
Barbara Washington, a local environmental campaigner, with the Nucor steel plant seen behind her. Photograph: Oliver Laughland/The Guardian.

 

As Myrtle Felton’s roof took flight from her home, with Hurricane Ida pounding the walls, she thought about the steel plant next door.

Here in St James parish, in the heart of Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” – a heavily industrialized region between New Orleans and Baton Rouge with some of the most polluted air in America and highest risk rates of cancer – Ida hit hard.

On Felton’s small street in the small town of Romeville, downed trees crushed trailer homes. A felled electrical pylon still blocks entry four days after the hurricane passed. Many people have no generators, and there is no power. The tarmac is lined with electrical cables.

In an adjacent field, less than a mile away, the hulking Nucor steel plant casts an imposing shadow over the landscape. Just a few months ago it was revealed that the plant had been quietly pumping cancer-causing sulphuric acid mist and hydrogen sulphide into the atmosphere for six years without a permit, contributing to an already dangerous cocktail of emissions.

The Nucor steel plant is seen in Romeville in 2019.
The Nucor steel plant is seen in Romeville in 2019. Photograph: Bryan Tarnowski/The Guardian

 

Felton, 67, had always attributed the rotten-smelling air to the plant, along with the black, sticky speckles on her car and the corrosion on her home. But the recent revelations left her incredulous.

As Ida blew away her already weakened metal roof, leaving brown water seeping in through the seams of her ceiling, she thought to herself: “Well, it needed replacing anyway.”

Black women like Myrtle Felton have been on the frontlines of the climate justice fight in south Louisiana for years. And now many of them find themselves bearing the brunt of a natural disaster the intensity of which is linked to the climate crisis. Down here, it’s a battle on many fronts.

“I’m in the middle of everything by myself,” said Felton. “Nobody comes, nobody calls. Nobody do anything. Whatever you get, you get it on your own.”

Three days after the storm, representatives from Nucor, a $33.7bn company that announced record profits this July, arrived offering Felton some aid: 15 small bottles of water and a pack of Gatorade.

“I’m so frustrated I can hardly talk,” Felton said.

Her neighbour, Barbara Washington, a 70-year-old local environmental campaigner put it bluntly: “Sure, give me my water, give me some Gatorade, but you’re already poisoning us.”

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Nucor said the corporation was offering two food handouts, one on Friday and one next Wednesday and that it was “actively donating supplies and support to help the community”.

The company did not respond to questions over its plant’s emissions or if the facility sustained damage during the storm.

St James parish has yet to provide any residents in Romeville with tarps, Felton and Washington said, an account confirmed by local councilman Mason Bland, who said he had been distributing water but was waiting for federal assistance for tarps.

Bland, the councilman for St James’ district four, estimated that 95% of residents in his jurisdiction had sustained serious damage.

Advocates working with community members in St James pointed to even longer-term concerns. District four of the parish, populated with 64% Black residents and with a child poverty rate of 47%, was marked in a controversial 2014 local land plan as a “residential/future industrial” zone.

The designation, also given to the parish’s fifth district, which is majority Black as well, gives industry greater planning flexibility to expand and, advocates argue, signals the local government’s intent to push the residents out as industry proliferates.

“I worry about elected officials exploiting the disaster to further reduce the populations,” said Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. She argued that the lack of disaster resources in the district was indicative of the parish’s longer-term disinvestment.

“The way it’s characterized is that those are dying districts, ignoring the active role that the parish plays in killing them,” Rolfes said.

Washington, who traces her lineage in Romeville back to emancipation, charted the area’s population decline over decades. Gas stations, restaurants, a post office and a school all have left over the years, along with many younger residents who have uprooted to other locations.

“It’s almost like a ghost town now,” she said, the trauma of the storm still obvious as she spoke. Her home too sustained major damage, and she was living without power until Thursday when the Bucket Brigade provided her with a generator.

Myrtle Felton and Barbara Washington stand in front of damage caused by Hurricane Ida.
Myrtle Felton and Barbara Washington stand in front of damage caused by Hurricane Ida. Photograph: Oliver Laughland/The Guardian.

 

She prayed as the storm hit: “If everything else is gone, just spare our lives,” she remembered saying.

Now, the lack of these basic local resources will make recovering from Ida even harder. The drive for gas is longer. The quest for food and water more arduous.

Some of the trailer homes in Romeville appear damaged beyond repair, with many people evacuating and concerns some may not return.

Bland, the councilman, declined to comment on allegations that the parish is trying to force residents out in favor of industry.

“I can’t tie the two together right,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s not something I’m willing to make a statement on.”

But Felton and Washington made clear Ida’s destruction only strengthened their resolve to stay put.

“You come here and try to run us out,” Washington said. “But we’ve been here for generations. There’s a legacy. I was born and raised here. I could move, but I’m still here for the fight, because someone has to do it.”

What part of the US is safest from climate change?

What part of the US is safest from climate change?

By Camille Squires, Cities reporter              September 5, 2021

 

A man in a red coat skis down a snowy mountain, with forest and mountain range in the background
REUTERS/MIKE SEGAR

Today’s skiing paradise could be tomorrow’s climate oasis? Cities have to accommodate more people, lessen their environmental footprint, and become more equitable.
The storms, floods, heat, and fires that have ravaged the US in 2021 have made the ongoing climate crisis feel especially acute for citizens across the country.  And the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report indicates the escalating risks the world faces as the climate warms. In such a grim future scenario, where will be as safe and habitable as today?

 

Researchers looked at multiple factors from sea level rise to heat to assess the least risky place to live in the US as the climate warms. Nowhere will escape climate change unscathed. Yet one region emerged well ahead of the rest: the northeastern US.

Of the 10 lowest risk counties, seven were located in Vermont, and most of the remaining were in northeastern states like Maine and New York, according to a study by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine. Data on relative risk for US counties threatened by climate change was compiled from data collected by the Rhodium Group, an independent data-analytics firm, as well as several academic studies.

  • Lamoille County, Vermont
  • Franklin County, Vermont
  • Orange County, Vermont
  • Essex County, Vermont
  • Piscataquis County, Maine
  • Summit County, Colorado
  • Grand County, Colorado
  • Orleans County, Vermont
  • Hamilton County, New York
  • Franklin County, Maine

The study accounted for how six factors—heat, wet bulb temperatures, sea level rise, crop yield, fires, and economic damage—combined to impact people and economies. These safest areas were expected to have the lowest combined impacts by mid-century. Temperatures, fires, and sea-level rise will drive much of the damage. Rising temperatures mean searing heat and humidity will shift the zone of moderate climate and farmable land to the north. Places like Arizona and Texas are expected to sizzle under combined heat and humidity, known as “wet bulb” temperatures, which make it nearly impossible for the human body to cool itself for part of the year.  Sea level rise on the coasts and fires in the US West, mean inland states in the Northeast become prime locations.

Vermont’s natural advantages

Overall, Vermont counties were predicted to have relatively little damage to local economies as a result of climate change. Because of its geographic location, Vermont’s long cold winters and mild summers mean it faces some of the lowest risks from dangerous temperatures and humidity. In fact, colder, wealthier economies like those in Vermont stand to benefit from warming, according to Hannah Hess, who led the Rhodium Group research that this report draws from.

Annual temperatures in the state currently range between 33ºF (0.5º C) and 55ºF (13º C). As the climate warms, fewer cold days in winter can improve health and infrastructure, and lower energy costs, creating a net positive effect on the economy, Hess says. Vermont’s geography also means the state, which is 75% forested (pdf),  is at low risk of wildfire and declining crop yields. While agricultural yields are likely to drop precipitously in the southern US, Vermont is experiencing warmer summers and longer growing seasons benefiting some crops (although some like maple syrup are declining as temperatures rise).

Local leaders are taking action now to adapt to the future

State and local leaders in Vermont are also taking action now to ensure the state can withstand the myriad challenges of climate change. The most immediate threat are extreme weather events. The remnants of Tropical Storm Irene  (downgraded from a hurricane) in 2011 caused massive flooding, six deaths, and $700 million in damages to roads, bridges, and infrastructure.

In response, the state government has take action to make the built environment more resilient by adjusting it to changing climate conditions.  The government has created new construction standards for floodplains, and restored natural wetlands to serve as a natural barrier for overflowing rivers.

“Coming out of the storm really changed our perspective on the importance of resilient infrastructure,” said Julie Moore, the state secretary of natural resources. “The goal is to avoid future conflicts [between people and the river].”

Work is being done in the agriculture sector,  to prepare farmers for “a full range of conditions” Moore says. This has research to help farmers improve soil health and its ability to hold water, and also an initiative to study the potential impacts of soil carbon sequestration. Local groups are also working to fortify the state’s maple sugaring industry against climate change by encouraging producers to protect forest diversity.

Like many other states and localities, Vermont has developed a climate action plan, which includes efforts to reduce carbon emissions and change energy sources away from fossil fuels. The plan also includes these adaptive measures like wetland restoration and informing residents about tick-borne illness to ready residents for climactic changes that are already here.

“There will always be a bigger flood, there will always be a more intense storm, so none of these solutions are perfect,” Moore says. “But we’re trying to take advantage of opportunities to limit future damage.”

Taliban special forces bring abrupt end to women’s protest

Taliban special forces bring abrupt end to women’s protest

Kathy Gannon                   

Afghanistan Women Fighting On     1-6

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Taliban special forces in camouflage fired their weapons into the air Saturday, bringing an abrupt and frightening end to the latest protest march in the capital by Afghan women demanding equal rights from the new rulers.

Also on Saturday, the chief of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, which has an outsized influence on the Taliban, made a surprise visit to Kabul.

Taliban fighters quickly captured most of Afghanistan last month and celebrated the departure of the last U.S. forces after 20 years of war. The insurgent group must now govern a war-ravaged country that is heavily reliant on international aid.

The women’s march — the second in as many days in Kabul — began peacefully. Demonstrators laid a wreath outside Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry to honor Afghan soldiers who died fighting the Taliban before marching on to the presidential palace.

“We are here to gain human rights in Afghanistan,” said 20-year-old protester Maryam Naiby. “I love my country. I will always be here.”

As the protesters’ shouts grew louder, several Taliban officials waded into the crowd to ask what they wanted to say.

Flanked by fellow demonstrators, Sudaba Kabiri, a 24-year-old university student, told her Taliban interlocutor that Islam’s Prophet gave women rights and they wanted theirs. The Taliban official promised women would be given their rights but the women, all in their early 20s, were skeptical.

As the demonstrators reached the presidential palace, a dozen Taliban special forces ran into the crowd, firing in the air and sending demonstrators fleeing. Kabiri, who spoke to The Associated Press, said they also fired tear gas.

The Taliban have promised an inclusive government and a more moderate form of Islamic rule than when they last ruled the country from 1996 to 2001. But many Afghans, especially women, are deeply skeptical and fear a roll back of rights gained over the last two decades.

For much of the past two weeks, Taliban officials have been holding meetings among themselves, amid reports of differences among them emerging. Early on Saturday, neighboring Pakistan’s powerful intelligence chief Gen. Faiez Hameed made a surprise visit to Kabul. It wasn’t immediately clear what he had to say to the Taliban leadership but the Pakistani intelligence service has a strong influence on the Taliban.

The Taliban leadership had its headquarters in Pakistan and were often said to be in direct contact with the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Although Pakistan routinely denied providing the Taliban military aid, the accusation was often made by the Afghan government and Washington.

Faiez’ visit comes as the world waits to see what kind of government the Taliban will eventually announce, seeking one that is inclusive and ensures protection of women’s rights and the country’s minorities.

The Taliban have promised a broad-based government and have held talks with former president Hamid Karzai and the former government’s negotiation chief Abdullah Abdullah. But the makeup of the new government is uncertain and it was unclear whether hard-line ideologues among the Taliban will win the day — and whether the rollbacks feared by the demonstrating women will occur.

Taliban members whitewashed murals Saturday that promoted health care, warned of the dangers of HIV and even paid homage to some of Afghanistan’s iconic foreign contributors, like anthropologist Nancy Dupree, who singlehandedly chronicled Afghanistan’s rich cultural legacy. It was a worrying sign of attempts to erase reminders of the past 20 years.

The murals were replaced with slogans congratulating Afghans on their victory.

A Taliban cultural commission spokesman, Ahmadullah Muttaqi, tweeted that the murals were painted over “because they are against our values. They were spoiling the minds of the mujahedeen and instead we wrote slogans that will be useful to everyone.”

Meanwhile, the young women demonstrators said they have had to defy worried families to press ahead with their protests, even sneaking out of their homes to take their demands for equal rights to the new rulers.

Farhat Popalzai, another 24-year-old university student, said she wanted to be the voice of Afghanistan’s voiceless women, those too afraid to come out on the street.

“I am the voice of the women who are unable to speak.” she said. “They think this is a man’s country but it is not, it is a woman’s country too.”

Popalzai and her fellow demonstrators are too young to remember the Taliban rule that ended in 2001 with the U.S.-led invasion. The say their fear is based on the stories they have heard of women not being allowed to go to school and work.

Naiby, the 20-year-old, has already operated a women’s organization and is a spokesperson for Afghanistan’s Paralympics. She reflected on the tens of thousands of Afghans who rushed to Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport to escape Afghanistan after the Taliban overran the capital on Aug. 15.

“They were afraid,” but for her she said, the fight is in Afghanistan.

Climate change is not going to wait for America to get its act together

Climate change is not going to wait for America to get its act together

Ryan Cooper, National correspondent              
An hourglass.
An hourglass. Illustrated | iStock

 

There has been a recent change in verb tense with respect to climate change: What was once the future is now the present. Louisiana just got hammered by a hurricane that — in what is becoming a signature characteristic of a warming climate — strengthened very rapidly thanks to super-hot temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, giving residents barely enough time to evacuate. The remnants of that hurricane then caused flooding all the way from Louisiana to Maine. Philadelphia saw the worst flooding since 1869. The National Weather Service issued the first flash flood warning for New York City in its history. At time of writing, at least 45 people were confirmed dead across the Northeast.

I find it hard to grapple with this reality. Following the science, I have been predicting this kind of thing for many years. But now that climate change is truly undeniably here, and highly unusual if not totally unprecedented weather disasters are hitting on a weekly basis, it is still somehow shocking. I suppose arid scientific predictions will always feel a lot different than one’s own city being heavily flooded. It’s a reaction that Americans — in particular Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), who recently launched a broadside against Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, which contains a great deal of climate policy — need to get over soon.

It is tempting to read some kind of cosmic justice into these events. America spewed forth greenhouse gas emissions with reckless abandon for two centuries, 50 years of which were after the basics of climate science were well-understood and widely publicized, and now a vengeful nature is inflicting retribution.

The truth, of course, is even scarier. An angry nature god would imply that something powerful cared about humanity enough to punish us. In reality every human being could die tomorrow and the world would go on spinning without interruption in an inconceivable vast universe. It would be a drop of water in the Atlantic Ocean. In the colossal expanse of cosmic time, humanity’s entire lifespan is barely an eyeblink.

Our only significant accomplishment is how rapidly we are changing the climate, which is in the same league as a major asteroid strike or continent-scale volcanic eruptions. But even that is nothing new. Planet Earth has seen worse than us before and it’ll see worse after we are gone. Nobody is coming to teach us lessons about our hubris, and there is no appealing the laws of physics.

Some form of denial must be part of the reason why Manchin is now raising questions about the reconciliation bill, not to mention the giant corporate lobbying campaign that undoubtedly explains his sudden change of heart. The reconciliation bill would — in large part because Manchin himself insisted that it can’t raise the deficit — raise taxes on corporations, people making high incomes, and especially wealthy heirs. Obviously corporate interests and the oligarch class don’t want that, because no amount of money is ever enough for them.

Very few people are so evil that they can willfully consign their own society to catastrophe for the sake of avoiding a fairly modest tax increase. It’s just the common behavior of ultra-privileged humans: When faced with a situation requiring any sacrifice, they make up excuses why it shouldn’t have to happen. And they’ll keep denying they could be hit by disaster — like a wildly unusual tornado ripping up a wealthy New Jersey suburb — until the rising seas close over their heads.

That said, Manchin’s op-ed is still blatantly dishonest. He complains about inflation that is happening almost entirely because of temporary bottlenecks in a handful of industries. He complains about deficits that a.) are not a problem and b.) will not increase anyway because of the tax increases. He complains that “I can’t explain why my Democratic colleagues are rushing to spend $3.5 trillion,” regarding a bill that has been discussed in minute detail for months in negotiations that have revolved around him personally.

It’s obvious what is happening here. Manchin is throwing up chaff to try to trim down the bill, if not destroy it completely. It is a duplicitous public relations campaign to protect the bottom lines of his rich friends. It’s of a piece with ex-senators Heidi Heitkamp and Max Baucus’s maudlin lies that ending the stepped-up basis loophole — which allows ultra-wealthy people to collect inheritance tax-free — will exterminate America’s family farms and ranches.

More blinkered, self-defeating selfishness would be hard to imagine. As the dire flooding across the eastern U.S. showed this week, American infrastructure is already desperately in need of upgrades just to deal with the weather disasters happening now, let alone those that will happen if we continue to procrastinate.

And as Greg Sargent argues at The Washington Post, Manchin would not only core out most of Biden’s climate policy, but also risk blowing up global climate negotiations, which are set to resume soon. If the worst historical emitter can’t show that it is at least making some effort, other nations could easily conclude that doing their part would be pointless.

The wealthy aristocrats of Ancien Régime France behaved as Manchin and his rich friends are doing now — furiously preventing reforms that would preserve society because they would require the rich to make small sacrifices. Faced with this despicable betrayal of President Biden and the Democratic Party, it is therefore critical for the party left in the House and Senate to continue to demand that there be no bipartisan infrastructure bill unless reconciliation gets through as well. Even the climate policy in there is seriously inadequate compared to the scale of the problem — and this package is very likely the only reform that is getting passed until 2030 at the earliest.

If it’s blocked, Washington should consider what usually happens when political elites are unable to fix disintegrating conditions around them: revolution.

‘Human toll was tremendous’: Ida’s death count rises while 600,000 still lack power

‘Human toll was tremendous’: Ida’s death count rises while 600,000 still lack power

Barbara Goldberg                  

Remnants of Ida are seen in New York

 

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Hurricane Ida’s death toll continued to rise on Sunday, with many in the U.S. Northeast holding out hope for people missing in the floodwaters, while nearly 600,000 customers in Louisiana still lacked power a week after the storm made landfall.

Ida slammed into Louisiana on Aug. 29 as a powerful Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 150 miles per hour (240 kph). The latest death toll there rose to at least 13 people on Sunday.

The storm weakened as it moved north but still unleashed flash flooding on the East Coast that killed at least 50 more people, according to updated numbers on Sunday.

Ida’s record-breaking rainfall of 3.1 inches (7.8 cm) per hour on Wednesday, recorded in New York City’s Central Park, sent walls of water cascading through businesses, public transportation systems and 1,200 homes, causing more than $50 million in damage, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said.

“The human toll was tremendous,” said Hochul, recounting a trip to East Elmhurst in the New York City borough of Queens to assess the devastation.

“One woman wept in my arms, an 89-year-old woman. She had nothing left after living in that home for over 40 years,” Hochul said.

The governor previously secured an emergency disaster declaration from President Joe Biden and signed paperwork on Sunday to request related federal money to cover the costs of temporary housing as well as rebuilding homes, possibly in less flood-prone locations.

New York had 17 confirmed deaths, four in suburban Westchester County and the rest in New York City, where nearly all the victims were trapped in illegal basement apartments that are among the last remaining affordable options for low-income residents in the area, the governor’s spokesperson said.

In New Jersey, there were 27 confirmed storm deaths and four people still missing, said a spokesperson for Governor Phil Murphy.

Among the missing were two college students last seen in Passaic, New Jersey, on Wednesday as Ida’s historic deluge was reported to have swept them away in the raging Passaic River.

ROUND-THE-CLOCK OPERATIONS

Twelve boats searched the river on Sunday as part of round-the-clock operations, and rescue teams were anticipating specialized high-resolution sonar to aid their search on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Passaic fire department said.

A Mass was celebrated on Sunday at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, for Nidhi Rana, a first-year commuter student from Passaic who was last seen with her friend Ayush Rana, a Montclair State University student, as the water rushed around his car.

“Join me in keeping Nidhi and Ayush in your prayers for their safe return,” Seton Hall President Joseph Nyre said in a letter to students.

Other storm deaths were reported in Connecticut with at least one dead, Pennsylvania with at least four dead and Maryland with at least one dead.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards increased the number of storm deaths in his Gulf Coast state to 13.

At least four of those people died in Louisiana of carbon monoxide poisoning from power generators, officials said.

Amid stifling heat and humidity, more than 591,000 homes and businesses in the state lacked electricity as of Sunday, according to PowerOutage.com. Some 1.2 million had originally lost power.

Ida also paralyzed U.S. Gulf of Mexico oil production, and 88% of crude oil output and 83% of natural gas production remained suspended as of Sunday.

The Grand Classica, a cruise ship that will house 1,500 workers trying to restore power, departed from the Port of Palm Beach, Florida, on Saturday and is due to arrive in New Orleans on Tuesday under a charter agreement with Entergy Corp, the Bahamas Paradise Cruise Line said.

A massive oil slick has emerged near the oil hub of Port Fourchon, Louisiana, with satellite images showing a miles-long brownish-black slick spreading in the coastal waters. A private dive team was attempting to locate the source.

(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg in New York; Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal in Washington and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, Calif.; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall and Peter Cooney)

I Know Firsthand How Ugly a Wartime Evacuation Really Is

I Know Firsthand How Ugly a Wartime Evacuation Really Is

Elizabeth Shackelford               

 

Desperate crowds scrambling after planes on the verge of liftoff; sobbing mothers handing their babies over fences to soldiers; and finally, a gruesome terrorist attack that killed nearly 200 people, including 13 U.S. service members. It’s no surprise that the public thinks President Joe Biden botched the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan, even as polling shows Americans still largely approve of the decision to withdraw.

But from my own personal experience running an evacuation in a war zone, I can attest that it was never going to look good. Ultimately, there was little the U.S. government or military could have done in recent weeks to significantly change the outcome on the ground. These evacuations are always ugly. There is no graceful way to flee a country at war.

I saw this firsthand in December 2013 in Juba, South Sudan. As the U.S. Embassy’s sole consular officer, I led a small interagency team to run evacuation operations at the airport after civil war erupted and violence consumed the capital city and much of the countryside.

The scale was far smaller than what our government just undertook in Kabul. Take the numbers from Afghanistan and knock off two zeroes, and you can approximate the scale in South Sudan. While the U.S. government evacuated about 120,000 people from Kabul, we evacuated around 1,200 from Juba. Even at this smaller scale though, it was an urgent operation, and about a half dozen of us ran 19 evacuation flights in 19 days during South Sudan’s civil war.

The risk profile in Juba differed significantly from Kabul too, but many realities on the ground were similar, and the U.S. government could do little in either case to change them much. Here’s why.

The hardest part of fleeing a war zone is reaching the exit — in these cases, the airport. Because the U.S. government didn’t control Kabul, it had few options to help, all of which put U.S. personnel at greater risk. In South Sudan, we faced this issue too. We fielded hundreds of calls from Americans and others too afraid to cross the city alone amid the violence. We had limited success moving small numbers to the airport, but we didn’t have the resources to do it safely on a large scale.

The challenge was even greater for those outside Juba. I spent days on the phone with Americans sheltering up country, their compounds under fire with battles just outside. As they ran out of food and water, I felt helpless, but we simply weren’t safely able to get them out then.

We learned just how risky those efforts could be when military and State Department colleagues attempted an evacuation flight into the town of Bor. It was aborted when the aircraft came under fire, leaving U.S. service members seriously wounded. Deciding when and how much to put our people at risk is perhaps the hardest question we faced.

Once people reached the airport, someone must decide who gets in. In South Sudan, we didn’t contend with crowds at the gate. The airport had no secure perimeter at all, so the only issue was who we put on planes.

In Kabul, U.S. officials had two decision points and far bigger crowds to deal with. The military decided who could enter the airport, and once inside, consular officers decided who could leave.

But Americans and our Afghan allies — those whose lives were at risk for work on America’s behalf — weren’t the only ones trying to flee in this case. Scores of people were trying to stream in. And without having any law enforcement authority, the U.S. military couldn’t impose greater control outside the gates. That decision point over who to let enter wasn’t only difficult but deadly. Expanding the perimeter would have only pushed the same problem out further.

For every person who made it to and into the airport, hundreds or thousands didn’t, and U.S. officials were responsible for each decision made.

These life-and-death calls were made by real people, about real people, with imperfect information, based on vague and, at times, contradictory guidance from Washington. Who counts as a family member? How do you prove that they are? How do you prioritize among hundreds when no one’s documents are complete? After all, many don’t grab their passport or other documentation when fleeing for their lives.

Answers to these questions are subjective and answering them at volume is hard. In Juba, we couldn’t investigate doubts or verify documents because we were always racing against a clock, usually the airport’s closure at dark. In Kabul, they faced these limitations and more.

I remember these decisions well. I told myself we had limited resources and seats to offer and could only help so many on any given day. But every decision I made to turn someone away still stung.

It’s reasonable to ask why so many people were still left to evacuate after Kabul fell. If more Americans and allies had left sooner, we would have had fewer to get out in the end. The U.S. government had control over one of these categories but not the other.

The government warned American citizens for years not to travel to Afghanistan and repeatedly urged Americans to leave for the past five months. For those who chose to wait, the U.S. government’s hands were tied. And many chose to wait.

I saw this in South Sudan, too. I had urged Americans to leave at their first opportunity, but many didn’t. Americans don’t live in places like South Sudan or Afghanistan casually. They are there for a reason — family, business opportunities or conflict-related work. Most want to be on the last flight out possible and hope things won’t take a turn for the worse. They all had good reasons, but we never know when the last flight out will be; it won’t likely be safe, and it has only so many seats.

Where we could and should have done far better is getting our Afghan allies out sooner. Ramping up evacuations a few weeks earlier might have helped, at least modestly, though there were also reasonable fears the move would destabilize the Afghan government (at the time, we didn’t know how quickly it would fall anyway).

But we never should have been in this situation when Kabul fell. The real culprit is the dysfunctional Special Immigrant Visa program which should have been fixed years ago. The SIV program provides U.S. visas to Afghans whose work for the U.S. government puts them at risk, but its 14-step process is rife with unnecessary, difficult bureaucratic steps. It can take up to three-and-a-half years to complete, and many applicants are unjustly denied. The Trump administration intentionally clogged the SIV program, but it had been broken for years. If this system had worked as intended, many thousands of Afghan allies would already be living in the United States today.

In the final weeks though, most of the challenges on the ground were inevitable. Some things could have gone better, but they also could have gone much worse.

What I hope Americans understand is that our military and civilian officers on the ground were charged with thousands of life-and-death decisions in dangerous circumstances, doing the best they could with limited information and resources. They deserve immense gratitude, but they will live with the weight of these choices forever, and with what their decisions meant for the ones they didn’t choose.

As COVID Surges, We’re Not in the Endgame, We’re Mired in Uncertainty

Mother Jones – Coronavirus Updates

As COVID Surges, We’re Not in the Endgame, We’re Mired in Uncertainty

“People are pretty burned out 18 months into this thing.”
Edwin Rios, Reporter               September 5, 2021

Medical staff move COVID-19 patient who died onto a gurney to hand off to a funeral home van, at the Willis-Knighton Medical Center in Shreveport, La., Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021. Gerald Herbert/AP

Just three months ago, the United States averaged fewer than 25,000 COVID infections a day, with an average of 627 COVID deaths over a seven-day period. It was the end of May and it seemed as if the light at the end of the proverbial COVID tunnel was near just as the “hot vax summer” was about to begin.

Then, as more and more Americans became vaccinated, too many—to the tune of 47 percent of Americans as of Sunday—have refused. And among that group of people, the more transmissible Delta variant spread like wildfire. Now, at summer’s end, as the nation averages more than 160,000 infections per day, more than 100,000 daily hospitalizations, and more than 1,500 deaths, the highest rates since March, epidemiologists, public health officials, and, frankly, many Americans are asking: When will this end?

In places where vaccinations are low, the wave of infections has pushed hospitals to the brink of a crisis. In Mississippi, just 38 percent of residents are fully vaccinated, and the surge in cases and hospitalizations, particularly among children, have strained hospitals. At the University of Mississippi Medical Center, the state’s only level one trauma center, the emergency room and ICU are beyond capacity, with exhausted hospital workers treating patients in a “logjam” of beds scattered in the hallways and in triage rooms. During a recent news conference, Dr. LouAnn Woodward, the head of that medical center, said, “We, as a state, as a collective, have failed to respond in a unified way to a common threat.”

In Florida, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has been aggressively antagonistic toward mask mandates and measures that would curtail COVID’s spread, the state is seeing its deadliest period in the pandemic, averaging 244 deaths per day, higher than its peak last summer. Just 44 percent of residents are vaccinated in nearby South Carolina where the state is averaging 5,400 new COVID cases per day, the highest infection rate in the country. Steve Benjamin, Democratic mayor of Columbia, the state’s capital, announced he planned essentially to defy the Republican governor’s ban of mask mandates by imposing a local state of emergency and order students to wear masks if COVID cases keep rising.

What’s more, the CDC recently found that unvaccinated people are 29 times more likely to be hospitalized from COVID than those who are vaccinated, further burdening hospital resources. Part of the issue, of course, is that only kids 12 years and older can currently get vaccinated, and the reopening of schools for in-person learning has amplified concerns over the spread among children, teachers, and their families. CDC research found that between mid-June and late August, COVID hospitalizations rose fivefold among children and teenagers.

But the story of unvaccinated versus vaccinated children could be considered a microcosm of the unfolding of the pandemic generally. Even though children under age 12 cannot be vaccinated, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, recently said that they likely won’t begin to be until “hopefully by the mid, late fall and early winter.” But for those who can get vaccinated, it’s clear that the shots work to curtail hospitalizations. The rate of COVID hospitalizations was 10 times higher among unvaccinated children compared to vaccinated ones. And tellingly, pediatric hospitalizations were roughly four times higher in states with the lowest vaccination rates than in those with the highest, further showing that vaccines curtail severe disease even among children.

What does this all mean? It means we’re in the midst of yet another period of uncertainty that’s likely to continue if we fail to vaccinate enough people and take actions such as mask mandates to curb the virus spread. A Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that 52 percent of Americans supported vaccine mandates from businesses and two-thirds of those polled supported school districts requiring mask wearing for students, teachers, and staff. Even so, that same poll found that even though they are more concerned than in June, more than 60 percent of unvaccinated Americans saw “low” to “no” risk of contracting COVID.

“People are pretty burned out 18 months into this thing,” Ezekiel Emanuel, professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Washington Post. “And the exhaustion has been made worse by the rapid seesaw we’re having—take your masks off, put them back on. It’s all very confusing, but we have to be honest: We don’t know when, we don’t know how. We don’t know.”

MSNBC’s Joy Reid Busts A Big Myth Republicans Tell Themselves About Their Party

MSNBC’s Joy Reid Busts A Big Myth Republicans Tell Themselves About Their Party

Lee Moran                    

 

MSNBC’s Joy Reid dedicated her “Absolute Worst” segment on Friday to explaining why the GOP is anything but the pro-life party, despite its claims.

“The ReidOut” anchor referenced Texas’ extreme new anti-abortion law, Republican opposition to COVID-19 mask mandates, GOP voter resistance to receiving the coronavirus vaccine, and the party’s anti-environment policies to make her point.

“You can’t call yourself a pro-life party if your policy goals are to allow the maximum number of people to die of COVID, including children, by banning mask mandates in businesses and schools and raising doubts about vaccines,” she said.

“You can’t call yourself the pro-life, pro-family party if your policy goals are to put bounties on pregnant women and to force teenage girls to give birth after getting pregnant as a result of incest and rape,” Reid added.

“The Republican Party is a lot of things; anti-democracy, anti-voting, anti-history, anti-facts, deeply opposed to anti-racism. What they are not is pro-life,” she concluded, saying it’s now “loudly and proudly the pro-death party.”

Watch Reid’s monologue here: