Category: Veterans – Patriotism

Democratic AGs rush to form line of defense against Trump

The Hill

Democratic AGs rush to form line of defense against Trump

Julia Mueller – November 17, 2024

Democratic attorneys general across the country are readying their legal defenses against the incoming Trump administration, preparing to pounce on potential violations and even take the president-elect to court if he implements controversial policies.

During his first term, state attorneys general brought a wave of lawsuits against the Trump administration as they worked to block moves like his travel ban and family separations at the border. Four years after he left office, as President-elect Trump touts plans for mass deportations and a rollback of environmental regulations, the top prosecutors are on high alert.

They join Democratic governors, some of whom are already in the spotlight as possible 2028 contenders, as a critical line of defense for the party, with the GOP set to take a trifecta of control over the White House and Congress.

“This time, not just with the trifecta, but also a more conservative judiciary, the number of venues for Democrats to advance their policies has shrunk on the federal level,” said Paul Nolette, a Marquette University political scientist and the director of a database on state litigation and attorney general activity.

“Whenever that happens, what we’ve seen is that parties then really use the states as a way to advance their own policy. And when Democrats are still in control of states like California, New York, Illinois … the actions of governors, the actions of state AGs, they really can make a difference not only in their own states, but across the country, on national policy,” he said.

The days since Trump’s win have seen a surge of Democratic attorneys general stepping up to signal they’re ready to counterbalance the GOP when it takes power in Washington next year.

“I don’t wake up every morning dying to sue the president of the United States or his administration,” New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin (D) told The Hill.

“If he’s operating lawfully, we’re not going to challenge it. But when he violates the law, we’re not going to hesitate to protect our residents,” Platkin said.

Trump has said his Day 1 agenda would launch “the largest deportation program in American history,” roll back Biden orders on equity and “drill, baby, drill.”

“It’s not like the Democrats made it up or something,” said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, of the prospective threats posed by a second Trump term. “It comes from the mouth, and social media, of Trump himself.”

The president-elect has also stoked concerns with his picks for Cabinet positions, including Trump ally former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) for U.S. attorney general. Gaetz, who is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee, resigned from Congress after getting the nod.

Platkin blasted the nomination on the social platform X as a sign that Trump “would use the DOJ to punish political opponents and undermine the rule of law.”

Attorneys general from coast to coast have been preparing for months amid the competitive White House race, California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) told The Hill. They’ve monitored comments from Trump and his inner circle and scrutinized Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump term.

The prep is as specific as prewriting briefs so officials “just need to cross the Ts, dot the Is and press print and file it,” Bonta said. California alone reportedly brought more than a hundred lawsuits against Trump in his first term.

“What we learned from the first Trump administration is that he can’t help but break the law. It’s part of his brand. It’s part of what he does,” Bonta said.

During Trump’s first term, Democratic attorneys general led more than 130 multistate lawsuits against the administration, according to Nolette’s database, and boasted an 83 percent win rate. That was more than twice as many as Republican attorneys general led against the Obama administration, with a 63.5 percent win rate. Against President Biden’s administration so far, Republican AGs have seen a win rate of around 76 percent.

The first Trump administration ushered in a “world of heightened AG activism,” Nolette said, making the latest crop of state legal officers “much more proactive in getting ready for challenges that currently don’t even exist.”

The attorneys general are connecting with each other through the Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA), as well as coordinating with their governors, who are also gearing up to resist Republican policies.

“Nothing unites Democrats more than Donald Trump,” said James Tierney, a Harvard Law School lecturer, the director of StateAG.org and a former Democratic attorney general of Maine.

After Trump’s win, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) called a special session of the state legislature to protect progressive policies, vowing the Golden State is “ready to fight.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), who brought a major lawsuit against Trump in 2022, joined with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) to announce their offices would be convening regularly to “coordinate legal actions” and develop responses to the incoming administration, according to a release.

In Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey (D) — herself a former state AG — has promised her state’s law enforcement would “absolutely not” assist if the Trump administration asked for help with mass deportation plans.

Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell (D) said she’s on alert for threats to reproductive health care, gun safety, consumer protections and other issues, and told The Hill that she has “real concerns about the president-elect’s position when it comes to the rule of law.”

“The role of the Democratic AG is the most critical, I think, in this moment in time,” Campbell said, arguing they’re “on the front line.”

Several Democratic governors were in the running for the veepstakes to join Vice President Harris’s 2024 presidential bid, and they’re also making early lists of possible 2028 contenders. Some state AGs, too, may have higher political aspirations, adding a political subtext to their public defense of their party ideals.

“The old joke, of course, is that AGs are ‘aspiring governors.’ And I think at this point we’ve seen, certainly, plenty of evidence that AGs have leveraged their roles to become good candidates for higher office,” Nolette said.

Harris herself is a prime example: She served as California AG before jumping to the Senate and then to the vice presidency. Along the 2024 campaign trail, she touted her work in the role.

Washington state’s Attorney General Bob Ferguson (D) won his gubernatorial bid on Election Day. He told reporters after the results that his office feels “prepared to defend” progressive policies in his state as both the White House and his seat changes hands.

And that defense doesn’t always look like lawsuits, experts noted. State attorneys general often write letters to congressional leaders, participate in the notice-and-comment rule-making stage and speak out about certain policies.

“The wise attorney general understands that they’re more than just a lawsuit machine,” Tierney said.

DAGA president Sean Rankin told The Hill that state AGs will continue their work in the courtroom during a second Trump term, but also work to “do a better job” of explaining the work of attorneys general to the public.

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach (R), the chair of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), argued in a statement to The Hill that the Democratic AGs are “making an empty gesture” with their responses to Trump’s win, “given that regulatory overreach has been a hallmark of the Biden Administration.”

“Unlike President Biden who lost dozens of times to Republican AGs for promulgating illegal and unconstitutional rules and regulations, President Trump will be focused on reducing excessive overreach,” Kobach said.

A Trump White House 2.0. will also likely have a “more sophisticated approach” both to reverse Biden-era regulations and advance their own policies, Nolette said. And Democrats are set to face new hurdles in the increasingly conservative court system — including at the U.S. Supreme Court level, thanks to Trump’s appointments.

“It’s like the filibuster in the Senate. Both sides use it when it’s to their advantage. Republicans had a huge amount of litigation against the Biden administration in these past four years, and there’s more to come. And so this isn’t specific about Trump,” Nolette said of using litigation to combat the administration.

“It’s something that I think AGs of both parties have realized is a very good strategy to delay and to stop policies that they disagree with,” he said. “This is part of the process that’s now entrenched.”

The Lesson of This Election: We Must Stop Inflation Before It Starts

By Isabella Weber – November 12, 2024

Dr. Weber is an associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Four illustrations, done in an Old World etching style. On the upper left, furniture crowds the streets while nearby gutted buildings burn; on the upper right, a volcano erupts; on the lower left, tornadic waterspouts roil an ocean; and on the lower left, George Washington is smiling and holding a beer aloft.
Credit…Guillem Casasús

Unemployment weakens governments. Inflation kills them. That’s what a government official from Brazil once told me. But in rich countries including the United States, the politically destructive power of inflation had been forgotten. Standard policy tools left us unprepared and the Biden administration was slow to fight back. The re-election of Donald Trump should serve as a warning to democratic governments.

In this age of overlapping emergencies — hurricanes, an Avian flu outbreak, two regional wars — threats to supply chains are becoming commonplace. Each threat brings the risk of inflation and its power to destabilize governments, including our own. With such emergencies being the new normal, if we learned anything from last week’s earthquake election result, it’s that we need new means of protecting our society and democracy.

Among the biggest problems that need fixing: Many business sectors today are dominated by large corporations that can profit from these one-time events.

Using A.I. and natural language processing in an upcoming paper, several co-authors and I analyzed more than 130,000 earnings calls of publicly listed U.S. companies and found that businesses can coordinate price hikes around cost shocks. This enabled companies, by and large, to pass on or amplify the impact of the initial cost increase in response to shocks in the wake of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine.

In other words, the sudden news of cost shocks, like the onset of a pandemic and war, grants companies more freedom to coordinate price hikes across sectors because they realize that their rivals are very likely going to do the same.

Skeptics of this idea often counter that corporate concentration was already high before the pandemic, yet those same powerful businesses kept prices stable for many years, despite close-to-zero interest rates. That’s because under normal circumstances, a company that decides to increase prices without knowing that its competitors would follow suit risks losing business to rivals. This was the world we were living in before the pandemic. Globalization had created the most efficient, just-in-time production networks the world has seen and, for the most part, even giant companies kept prices stable under the pressure of competition.

But when supply bottlenecks occur, the clockwork stops. Every producer is naturally limited in how many products it can produce. This means that even if a company increases prices, competitors cannot easily ramp up their supply to take its business. Plus, everyone in the business sector understands the natural reaction to a shock is to raise prices. Jacking up prices is now a safe choice and has become the rational thing to do for profit-maximizing businesses.

In the wake of Covid, most companies managed to pass on their higher costs to the consumer and defend their margins, while some even increased them. But even if they simply keep their profit margins in response to a cost shock, their profits increase. Think of how the broker’s fee is higher for a more expensive house even if the percentage terms are the same. Corporate leaders know this to be the case. That’s why we found that when cost shocks are large and hit the whole economy, executives sound quite upbeat about them.

Massive shocks can be even better news for the sectors directly hit. Take oil. When demand collapsed overnight because people stayed home during the shutdowns, fossil fuel companies, suddenly faced with an unprecedented collapse in demand, closed some of their highest-cost oil fields and refineries. When demand recovered, the result was a shortage that led to record-high margins. In another forthcoming paper, my co-authors and I estimate that in 2022, U.S. shareholders in publicly listed oil and gas companies had claims on $301 billion in net income, a more than sixfold increase compared to the average of the four years before the pandemic. Oil and gas profits also exceeded the U.S. investments of $267 billion in the low-carbon economy that year.

Oil is inherently a boom-bust sector, but we cannot afford such extraordinary profit spikes in times of emergency. They prop up a sector that needs to be phased out to mitigate climate change. They also exacerbate inequality. As our new research shows, at the peak of the fossil fuel price spike in 2022, the wealthiest 1 percent claimed through shareholdings and private company ownership 51 percent of oil and gas profits. The less affluent faced higher inflation and only got a small slice of the oversized oil and gas profits pie.

Working people suffer through no fault of their own. Even if their wages eventually catch up, they are squeezed and feel cheated in the first place. This is why sellers’ inflation deepens economic inequality and political polarization, which are already threatening democracy.

President Biden mobilized a few unconventional measures to fight inflation, including an antitrust renewal to address outsize corporate power and increasing oil supply by drawing down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. These actions were an important departure from old orthodoxies, but were ad hoc and retroactive. The main policy tool remained increasing interest rates. Sharp rate increases deepened the housing crisis, exacerbated the debt crisis for developing countries and increased the costs of investments urgently needed to address the climate crisis.

Economic stabilization used to be part of the disaster preparedness toolbox. It is time we add it back in. Just as it was recognized that some banks were too big to fail after the global financial crisis, we have to recognize that some other sectors are “too essential to fail.” In essential sectors, we need to move from a pure efficiency logic to strategic redundancies. This requires policy interventions.

Ports and other critical infrastructure should have spare capacity and a well-paid work force large enough to ramp up activity when needed. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a publicly owned buffer stock of oil, should be employed systematically to buy when prices collapse and sell when prices explode to avoid price extremes. It should buy oil on the open market when demand is falling short, thus preventing prices from collapsing, and sell oil when there is a threat of short supply, thus preventing prices from exploding. Such countercyclical purchases and sales by buffer stocks in commodity markets operate on the same logic as central banks’ open market operations in money markets.

It is not enough to release oil when prices spiral upward. As we have learned during the pandemic, a collapse in prices can create a sudden reduction in production capacity that breeds price spikes when demand picks back up.

Another lesson is that where markets are global, it is a good idea to coordinate stabilizing measures internationally — as the International Energy Agency did for its member states. And where futures markets exist, buffer stocks can buy futures when prices fall and sell when they rise for stabilization.

Countercyclical price stabilization through buffer stocks is important beyond oil. We also need it for critical minerals to encourage investments in the green supply chain and for food staples like grains, to avoid violent commodity price fluctuations in the wake of extreme weather events.

In addition to buffering essentials, we need policies that align public and private interests with resilience. As long as corporations see profits go up thanks to threats of shortages in times of disaster, we cannot assume that they prepare for emergencies in the best interest of the public. Price-gouging laws and windfall-profit taxes are relevant policy tools here.

Of course, the main task remains tackling the root causes of the emergencies. But this is a momentous task, especially in our climate change era, and in the interim a systemic set of buffers, regulations and emergency legislation is necessary. Without this economic disaster preparedness, people’s livelihoods and the outcome of elections remain at the whim of the next shock.

Isabella Weber is an associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

More on the economy:

How Inflation Shaped Voting – Nov. 8, 2024 Opinion | Adam Seessel

It’s the Inflation, Stupid: Why the Working Class Wants Trump Back – Oct. 24, 2024

Inflation Is Basically Back to Normal. Why Do Voters Still Feel Blah? – Oct. 31, 2024

A changing climate, a changing world

Card 1 of 4

Climate change around the world: In “Postcards From a World on Fire,” 193 stories from individual countries show how climate change is reshaping reality everywhere, from dying coral reefs in Fiji to disappearing oases in Morocco and far, far beyond.

The role of our leaders: Writing at the end of 2020, Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, found reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency, a feeling perhaps borne out by the passing of major climate legislation. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been criticisms. For example, Charles Harvey and Kurt House argue that subsidies for climate capture technology will ultimately be a waste.

The worst climate risks, mapped: In this feature, select a country, and we’ll break down the climate hazards it faces. In the case of America, our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths.

What people can do: Justin Gillis and Hal Harvey describe the types of local activism that might be needed, while Saul Griffith points to how Australia shows the way on rooftop solar. Meanwhile, small changes at the office might be one good way to cut significant emissions, writes Carlos Gamarra.

Trump’s first Cabinet was rocked by scandal. His second could suffer the same fate.

MSNBC – Maddow Blog

Maddow Blog | Rachel Maddow: Trump’s first Cabinet was rocked by scandal. His second could suffer the same fate.

Rachel Maddow and Allison Detzel – November 12, 2024

This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 11 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”

The last time Donald Trump was president, his Interior secretary was embroiled in a corruption scandal and ended up referred to the Department of Justice for a potential criminal investigation. His Transportation secretary was also embroiled in her own corruption scandal and also was referred to the Justice Department for a potential criminal investigation.

Trump’s Labor secretary resigned in scandal, following a ruling from a federal judge that he had broken the law when he signed a plea deal agreement with Jeffrey Epstein in 2008. Trump’s Energy secretary, head of the Environmental Protection Agency and Health and Human Services secretary all also resigned in corruption and ethics scandals.

It used to be if you had one Cabinet official involved in a big ethics and/or corruption scandal that forced them out of the job or led to them being referred for criminal investigations, that would be enough to brand your whole presidency a disgraced and scandal-ridden mistake.

Just consider Warren G. Harding — what’s remembered about his presidency? Maybe that he died in office? Or that he had an affair? No, it’s the Teapot Dome corruption scandal, which resulted in a Cabinet official being criminally charged. A century later, that one scandal involving one Cabinet official is basically all we remember about Harding’s presidency.

The first Trump term had so many Cabinet officials forced out of office in disgrace and referred to the Justice Department for criminal charges that it’s actually hard to remember them all. However, despite an unprecedented number of Cabinet officials being referred for criminal investigations, the supposedly independent DOJ decided to bring charges against precisely none of them.

One of the more memorable ethical disasters along these lines from the first Trump term was a situation involving his secretary of Veterans Affairs, Robert Wilkie. This might be the most memorable scandal because it happened right at the end of his administration, Dec. 10, 2020 — after Trump lost re-election to Joe Biden but before the Jan. 6 attack.

MaddowBlog’s headline at the time, by Steve Benen, read, “Yet another Trump Cabinet secretary caught up in scandal: As Donald Trump’s presidency comes to an ignominious end, it’s apparently not too late for one more Cabinet controversy.”

Wilkie was accused of having discredited a female veteran who said she had been sexually assaulted at a VA facility. The VA inspector general investigated those allegations against him, found evidence that he seemed to have broken the law and referred him to the Justice Department for investigation. (Wilkie has denied questioning the woman’s credibility.)

The Justice Department didn’t charge Wilkie, just like they didn’t charge any of these guys. But more than 20 different veterans groups rose up in outrage against him. Disparate veterans groups with very different takes on the world banded together — everyone from the American Legion to Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America to the Veterans of Foreign Wars – all demanding that Wilkie resign or be fired.

It was just a disaster, and it was a sign that even right up to the very bitter and ultimately violent end of Trump’s first term, things weren’t merely bad. It’s not normal to have a half-dozen members of the Cabinet referred for investigations into potential crimes committed while they were serving in the Cabinet.

Now, as the nation marked Veteran’s Day, a day to honor and celebrate our veterans, we learned Trump has decided to bring Wilkie back, tapping him to lead the transition efforts for the entire Defense Department. At a time when the country is looking to the U.S. military for assurances that they won’t deploy against American civilians the way Trump has threatened, the guy charged with staffing up the Defense Department leadership for the military is same guy who left office last time while his “possible criminal conduct” was under investigation by federal prosecutors.

Wilkie is not the only one who’s been tapped for the second Trump administration in recent days. NBC News has learned Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who once memorably cast aspersions on the size of Trump’s genitals in a presidential debate, is expected to be the president-elect’s choice for secretary of state.

Trump has also chosen Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida to be his national security adviser. Walz helped in the effort to try to overthrow the government and keep Trump in power after he lost re-election in 2020. Waltz has distinguished himself by claiming that Trump was not responsible for Jan. 6 and that Dulles Airport should be renamed the “Donald J. Trump International Airport.” So clearly, he’s checked all the boxes he needs to be national security adviser.

We learned Tom Homan, the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term, will be his administration’s “border czar.” Remember when Republicans used to maintain with a straight face that it was a huge scandal and evidence of communism to call anyone the czar of anything?

Well, Homan will now be Trump’s “border czar.” He’s one of the architects of the policy that had the U.S. government deliberately and systematically separating kids from their parents at the border. He’s also spent this interregnum period while Trump has been out of office barnstorming the country bragging about how he’s going to be the man mercilessly coming after immigrants if Trump gets back in power.

Trump has put the other architect of family separation, Stephen Miller, in charge of all policy planning for the transition. A source tells NBC News that Miller will also serve as deputy chief of staff for policy in the second Trump White House.

So anyone telling you that a second Trump administration is going to be at all moderate or normal in terms of what they’re going to do, that person is living on a nice planet that I’d like to visit sometime, but it’s not our planet.

Any expectation that the most extreme things Trump talked about were just talk and that normal people would come into his administration to do normal things, well, that wishful thinking hasn’t survived one week after the election.

Rachel Maddow Says Trump 2.0 Cabinet Picks Will Continue His Reputation as ‘One of the Worst Presidents’

The Wrap

Rachel Maddow Says Trump 2.0 Cabinet Picks Will Continue His Reputation as ‘One of the Worst Presidents’

Benjamin Lindsay – November 12, 2024

Rachel Maddow skewered President-elect Donald Trump’s still-developing list of cabinet appointments Monday, first breaking down the litany of controversies and federal investigations surrounding his first term’s picks — before deciding the new crop could also continue his reputation as “one of the worst presidents in the history of the United States.”

The “Rachel Maddow Show” segment on MSNBC served as a Veteran’s Day explainer to the Trump 2.0 administration leaders, including incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Walz and Trump’s so-called “border czar,” Tom Homan.

“The first Donald Trump presidential term had so many cabinet officials forced out of office in disgrace and referred to the Justice Department to face criminal charges, it’s actually hard to remember them all,” Maddow said at the top of the segment.

“And of course, just one of the scandals of the Trump administration is that despite an unprecedented number of cabinet officials being referred to the Justice Department for potential prosecution, the supposedly independent Department of Justice under Donald Trump decided to actually bring criminal charges against precisely none of them — which is yet another of the Trump scandals from his first time, but still.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XNgNRLa182Q%3Fsi%3DIcT0AsL5dmK5gJ60

After going through a murderer’s row of half a dozen cabinet officials — including Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao and Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta — Maddow determined that Trump’s first four years in office “were just bad.”

“It was a bad presidential term. It is not normal to have a half dozen members of the cabinet referred for potential criminal prosecution for crimes they allegedly committed while they were serving in the cabinet. It’s not normal,” she said. “I mean, that’s the kind of thing that gets you listed repeatedly as the worst, or among the worst, presidents in U.S. history when presidential historians and scholars are surveyed about these things, right? This is why Trump is considered by experts in the field to be if not the worst, then certainly one of the worst presidents in the history of the United States — I’m sorry, Warren G. Harding. It just wasn’t good!”

And if Trump’s newly appointed Secretary of Veteran Affairs looks familiar, it’s because he previously served in the first Trump administration before his mishandling of a sexual assault report derailed his political career.

“The guy who’s in charge with staffing up the defense department leadership for the military, making sure we’ve got all the best, most ethical people there, it’s the guy who left office last time under Trump while his ‘possible criminal conduct’ was under investigation by federal prosecutors,” Maddow said, incredulously. “Good times.”

For the other three new appointees in Maddow’s crosshairs, the MSNBC host explained that Republican senator of Florida Rubio “once memorably cast dispersions on the size of Donald Trump’s genitals while in a presidential debate,” Florida Congressman Walz has argued that Trump is not responsible for the Jan. 6 insurrection on the Capitol and Homan is making the media rounds promising “the biggest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”

Watch her full “Rachel Maddow Show” segment in the video above.

Rachel Maddow Exposes Trump’s Hypocritical, ‘Absurd’ Demand Of Dems: ‘It’s Nuts, Right?’

Rachel Maddow Exposes Trump’s Hypocritical, ‘Absurd’ Demand Of Dems: ‘It’s Nuts, Right?’

Lee Moran – November 12, 2024

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Monday hammered Donald Trump’s hypocrisy when it comes to one particular demand the president-elect has made of his successor-turned-predecessor, outgoing President Joe Biden.

Trump insisted in a post on his Truth Social platform that “no Judges should be approved” until he’s back in the Oval Office “because the Democrats are looking to ram through their Judges as the Republicans fight over Leadership.”

See the post here:

<span class="copyright">Truth Social</span>
Truth Social

“As an assertion, that’s nuts, right?” asked Maddow.

“You’re not president now, my guy, and Republicans don’t control the Senate right now. So you and Republicans have no control,” she continued. “You have no say over whether or not Biden and the Democrats choose to pass more confirmations before you take power. You don’t get a say in that. You’re not in power yet.”

Republicans confirmed “at least 32 people” after Trump lost the 2020 election to Biden and Biden became the president, Maddow noted.

“The idea that it would be somehow improper now for the Democrats to do the same thing, for the Democrats to spend this next two and a half months confirming Biden nominees including judges, to say that there is something wrong with that […] it’s just an absurd suggestion,” she said.

It’s “absurd bluster from Trump, where he is trying to pretend he’s already in power,” Maddow added.

Watch Maddow’s analysis here:https://www.youtube.com/embed/a84zxaLwaWY?rel=0

Related…

Scientists warn that a key Atlantic current could collapse, among other climate tipping points

NBC News

Scientists warn that a key Atlantic current could collapse, among other climate tipping points

Evan Bush – November 12, 2024

The Greenland Ice Sheet, Facing Intensifying Global Warming, Is Melting (Sean Gallup / Getty Images)
Icebergs drift by in Disko Bay at Ilulissat, Greenland, on July 16.
The Summary
  • A new report describes the dire state of Earth’s snow and ice.
  • Among other findings, it warns that several key climate tipping points appear more likely to be reached than previously thought.
  • They include ice melt that could cause severe sea-level rise and the collapse of a crucial ocean current that governs how heat cycles in the Atlantic Ocean.

Venezuela lost its final glacier this year. The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing, on average, 30 million tons of ice per hour. Ice loss from the Thwaites Glacier, also known as the “Doomsday” glacier because its collapse could precipitate rapid Antarctic ice loss, may be unstoppable.

These are just a few of the stark findings from more than 50 leading snow and ice scientists, which are detailed in a new report from the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative.

The report summarizes the state of snow and ice in 2024: In short, experts agree, it’s been a horrible year for the frozen parts of Earth, an expected result of global warming. What’s more, top cryosphere scientists are growing increasingly worried that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a key ocean current that governs how heat cycles in the Atlantic Ocean, is on a path toward collapse.

A rapid halt to the current would cause rapid cooling in the North Atlantic, warming in the Southern Hemisphere and extreme changes in precipitation. If that happens, the new report suggests, northern Europe could cool by about 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit in a decade.

The report highlights a shift in consensus: Scientists once thought tipping points — like the collapse of AMOC — were distant or remote possibilities. Now, some of those thresholds are appearing more likely to be crossed, and with less runway to turn the situation around.

“The latest science is not telling us that things are any different to what we knew before, necessarily, but it’s telling us with more confidence and more certainty that these things are more likely to happen,” said Helen Findlay, an author of the report and a professor and biological oceanographer at Plymouth Marine Laboratory in England. “The longer we record these things, and the longer we’re able to observe them and start to understand and monitor them, there’s more certainty in the system and we start to really understand how these tipping points are working.”

Thwaites glacier seen by Copernicus Sentinel-2 (ESA / Eyevine/ Redux)
The Thwaites glacier seen by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite.

Last month, 44 leading scientists wrote in an open letter to leaders of Nordic countries that the collapse of AMOC remained “highly uncertain” but that evidence in favor of such a collapse was mounting, and risks have been underestimated. Dramatic changes to the AMOC, they warned, would “likely lead to unprecedented extreme weather” and “potentially threaten the viability of agriculture in northwestern Europe.”

The new report similarly draws attention to the risk of AMOC collapse.

Additionally, it projects that roughly two-thirds of glacier ice in the European Alps will be lost by 2050 if global greenhouse gas emissions keep their pace. Already, an estimated 10 million people are at risk of glacial outburst floods in Iceland, Alaska and Asia — a phenomenon already occurring as meltwater collapses ice dams and rapidly floods downstream. If high emissions continue, the report adds, models suggest that sea level could rise by roughly 10 feet in the 2100s, imperiling parts of many coastal cities.

The report was released as world leaders gathered Monday in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, for the United Nations’ COP29 climate conference.

“Timing is everything,” said Julie Brigham-Grette, a geosciences professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an author of the new report.

She said the group hopes to rattle world leaders to attention: “The sense of urgency couldn’t be higher. We’ve been talking about urgency for a decade. It almost starts to feel like a useless word. What’s more than ‘urgent?’ ‘Catastrophic?’ We’ve run out of ways to describe it.”

To date, the report says, world governments are falling short on the pledges they made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Paris Agreement.

Even if they were on track, those commitments are insufficient to reach global climate goals, the authors say. On paper, the world’s pledges would limit the rise in global temperatures to about 2.3 degrees Celsius (4.1 degrees Fahrenheit) this century. That’s well short of the goal to cap warming at 1.5 degrees C.

Global temperatures are currently on pace to rise more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), on average.

The Greenland Ice Sheet, Facing Global Warming, Is Melting (Sean Gallup / Getty Images)
Melting icebergs crowd the Ilulissat Icefjord near Ilulissat, Greenland, on July 16.

“I feel quite frustrated,” Findlay said. “I don’t really understand how they’re missing the severity of the issue.”

In Baku on Monday, world leaders did agree to new rules for a global market to trade carbon credits. In a news release, COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev, who has been Azerbaijan’s minister of ecology and natural resources since 2018, said the agreement was a “game-changing” tool to direct climate financing to the developing world.

But he also acknowledged, in a speech to delegates, that the world is “on a road to ruin” under current climate policies.

That warning and the new report both come amid fears the U.S. will backslide on its climate commitments and pull out of the Paris Agreement after Donald Trump takes office in January. Trump wants to remove the U.S. from the international treaty, and he began that process during his first presidential administration. President Joe Biden reversed the move in 2021.

Peter Neff, a glaciologist and climate scientist at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the new report, said its authors clearly communicated the scientific consensus.

“It’s nothing surprising for a glaciologist. Across the board, there’s not good news with respect to ice on Earth. It’s all, for the most part, going in one direction,” Neff said.

But he added that he still found the report’s findings to be staggering: “These documents can hit you like a ton of bricks, and that’s intentional.”

What does a second Trump presidency mean for climate change?

What does a second Trump presidency mean for climate change?
By Amber Phillips – November 12, 2024

The planet is at a “can’t-miss” moment to stop climate change, world leaders at an international climate summit warned this week.

Meanwhile, the United States has just elected a president who has described climate change as a “hoax,” and some of his allies have suggested doing away with entire federal agencies that deal with climate.

“You’ll have more oceanfront property,” Trump said during the campaign, as 2024 is on track to be the world’s hottest year on record.

Here’s what a second Trump presidency could mean for a rapidly warming planet and extreme weather.

The government may stop trying to reduce emissions:

Many scientists expect Trump to redo many of his first presidency’s antagonistic actions toward climate change, such as when he yanked the United States out of the Paris agreement, an international pact to lower emissions by a certain date.

That would create a vacuum that may not be filled by another world leader, climate analysts say. The Earth is already behind on its modest goals to prevent the worst ravages of climate change.“You can see the global difference with U.S. leadership and the U.S. leaning in, saying, ‘This is where we want to go,’” said Heather Reams, president of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, a right-of-center climate nonprofit that has endorsed Republican candidates. “It will be incumbent on other countries to lead now, but they may not have the same leverage as the U.S.”

The U.S. will increase drilling for oil:

“Drill, baby drill!” was literally in Republicans’ official policy platform. Trump argues that this will make oil prices cheaper and help the United States become less reliable on foreign oil. But that’s not where the world is heading, say climate experts. 

“Doubling down on fossil fuels is absurd,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said at the world climate summit Tuesday. “The clean-energy revolution is here.”But ironically, Trump’s emphasis on drilling could boost investments in clean energy, too, Ream said.

There’s bipartisan support in Congress for permitting reform, which would make it easier for all energy companies — oil, solar, wind — to get permits to produce more energy.“Republicans are laser-focused on energy dominance and reducing energy prices,” Reams said. “And that could benefit an all-of-the-above approach.”

The government may even get out of weather forecasting:

Project 2025, a blueprint for a future Republican administration that was written by many of the president-elect’s allies, calls for taking a hatchet to the government’s role in forecasting not only climate change but extreme weather. Trump distanced himself from the plan during the campaign, but much of it aligns with his priorities.

Project 2025 wants to scrub mentions of climate change in nearly every corner of the federal government, including eliminating departments — and even entire agencies — that deal with it. That would mean dramatically downsizing or getting rid of the United States’ hurricane forecasting agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and even the National Weather Service. Meanwhile, the plan calls for putting people who question the science of climate change into positions of leadership.

This week, Trump named Republican former congressman Lee Zeldin, a Trump loyalist without much experience in environmental policy, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates polluters.

Also this week, the Biden administration began requiring oil companies to pay a fee for emitting methane. But Trump could pretty easily roll that back, reports The Washington Post’s Maxine Joselow.“It’s kind of like ‘stick your head in the sand and the problem will go away,’” said Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara and co-host of the climate podcast “A Matter of Degrees.” “But that isn’t how physics and climate change work. Even if you don’t think it’s real, it’s real. Even if you don’t talk about it, it’s still happening.”

Conservatives may prioritize clean-energy investments, despite large-scale Republican inaction on climate change, there is a growing conservative movement interested in addressing the problem, Reams noted, including a roughly 80-member Conservative Climate Caucus in the House of Representatives.

And Trump has a billionaire clean-energy tycoon in his inner circle, Elon Musk, who has said climate change is real and a threat.

The first test of whether Republicans in Congress are willing to move forward on clean energy will be whether they repeal President Joe Biden’s energy efficiency tax credits, to pay for broader tax cuts Trump is pushing. The clean-energy tax credits have become more popular than expected across the country. Americans who make climate-friendly upgrades to their homes are eligible for the credits, and by some estimates, three-quarters of investments go to Republican communities to help manufacture clean-energy products. This summer, 18 Republicans sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), asking him to keep the incentives.

Expect a major fight among Republicans about this, Reams predicted.

AMBER’S PICKS ANALYSIS
The best and worst candidates of 2024, By Aaron Blake 

Tracking Trump’s picks for his Cabinet and administration, By Washington Post staff 

The counties that picked the winning president every year since 2000, By Dan Keating 

No immunity decision in Trump’s hush money case as prosecutors weigh how to proceed, By Shayna Jacobs 

Scientists may have figured out why a potent greenhouse gas is rising. The answer is scary. By Shannon Osaka 

Biden races to Trump-proof his climate legacy, By Maxine Joselow 

Judge blocks Louisiana from requiring schools to display Ten Commandments, By Kim Bellware

Democratic warnings about Trump were not simply campaign rhetoric, By Philip Bump 

In Trump’s second term, evidence suggests corruption will be worse, not better

MSNBC – Maddow Blog

In Trump’s second term, evidence suggests corruption will be worse, not better

Steve Benen – November 11, 2024

Then-President Donald Trump addresses the nation from the Oval Office in 2020.

One of the forgotten stories of Donald Trump’s first term came around this time five years ago, when the then-president tried to arrange for a G7 summit to be held at one of his struggling businesses. Even by his standards, it was quite brazen.

Trump, in no uncertain terms, told some of the world’s most powerful leaders that if they wished to participate in an international gathering, they would have to spend quite a bit of money at one of the venues he owns that was short on customers. The Republican had already earned a reputation for welcoming money from foreign governments, but this represented an escalation: Trump was insisting upon money from foreign governments.

To be sure, he ultimately backed off, but the effort was part of an ugly pattern. As The American Prospect’s David Dayen recently explained in an op-ed for The New York Times, “Mr. Trump’s entire term in office was marked by profit-taking schemes and uses of public funds for personal benefit.”

Unfortunately, we can keep going down the same road: Trump also issued corrupt pardons to those who engaged in corruption. Members of his Cabinet faced so many corruption allegations that it was difficult to keep track of them all. For all intents and purposes, the result was effectively the first modern pro-corruption administration.

It’s nevertheless a safe bet that his second term in the White House will be considerably worse.

Indeed, less than a week after Election Day, there’s already some unsettling evidence coming to the fore. The New York Times reported, for example, that the president-elect “has not yet submitted a legally required ethics pledge stating that he will avoid conflicts of interest and other ethical concerns while in office.”

Mr. Trump’s transition team was required to submit the ethics plan by Oct. 1, according to the Presidential Transition Act. While the transition team’s leadership has privately drafted an ethics code and a conflict-of-interest statement governing its staff, those documents do not include language, required under the law, that explains how Mr. Trump himself will address conflicts of interest during his presidency.

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, noted that Trump’s transition team was supposed to sign an agreement with the General Services Administration by Sept. 1. That didn’t happen.

Why does that matter? Because, while that would’ve released millions of dollars in funding to cover transition costs, it also, as the Times’ report noted, would impose a $5,000 cap on donations to the transition team and require the public disclosure of all its donors.

“By refusing to sign that agreement, Mr. Trump effectively faces no limit on contributions and does not need to name his donors publicly,” the article added. “Money raised by the transition is not regulated by any other government agency.”

Those looking to bribe the president-elect, in other words, wouldn’t have to place orders for overpriced wristwatches.

But wait, there’s more. The New York Times also reported on Howard Lutnick, the CEO of a financial services firm called Cantor Fitzgerald, whose influential new role is raising eyebrows.

As co-chair of the transition team, Mr. Lutnick is in charge of identifying 4,000 new hires to fill the second Trump administration, including antitrust officials, securities lawyers and national security advisers who have global expertise. But Mr. Lutnick has not stepped away from running financial firms that serve corporate clients, traders, cryptocurrency platforms and real estate ventures around the world — all of which are regulated by the same agencies whose appointees he is helping to find.

Given Lutnick’s vast business interests, the Times added, it’s unclear how he might “keep from violating the transition’s own code of ethics.”

Looking ahead, there’s little reason for optimism. Indeed, The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently highlighted a broader context, noting that if Trump moves forward with plans to purge much of the federal workforce, replacing career civil servants with loyalists, Americans might soon see a dynamic in which independent officials “muzzle themselves, both in terms of putting out good government data that contradicts the Trump propaganda line, and in terms of not letting people know, blowing the whistle, when higher-ups, MAGA loyalists types, corrupt the agency.”

I suspect that if a pollster were to ask Americans whether they’re comfortable with government corruption, the vast majority would say no. And yet, we’re about to experience a brutal elections-have-consequences moment when it comes to the corrupting of the executive branch of the federal government.

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What Do Trump Voters Know About the Future He Has Planned for Them?

By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist – November 9, 2024

A group of people outdoors watching something out of frame.
People watch as election results come in, Times Square, New York, Nov. 5, 2024.Credit…Tanyth Berkeley for The New York Times

On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the Electoral College.

The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.”

What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.

The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.

But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.

And then there is the rest of the agenda. Do Trump voters know that they voted for a Food and Drug Administration that might try to restrict birth control and effectively ban abortion? Do they know that they voted for a Justice Department that would effectively stop enforcement of civil and voting rights laws? Do they know they voted for a National Labor Relations Board that would side with employers or an Environmental Protection Agency that would turn a blind eye to pollution and environmental degradation? Do they know they voted to gut or repeal the Affordable Care Act? Do they know that they voted for cuts to Medicaid, and possible cuts Medicare and Social Security if Trump cuts taxes down to the bone?

Do they know that they voted for a Supreme Court that would side with the powerful at every opportunity against their needs and interests?

I’m going to guess that they don’t know. But they’ll find out soon enough.

I wrote about the stakes of the 2024 presidential election. We’ll see if I was right; I hope I had it wrong.

Should the United States take this path on Election Day, then we can expect the America we have to fade into the past, to be supplanted by an American Republic that is far more exclusive — and far more resistant to change. A majority of Americans may not want it, and they may not even expect it, but they’ll be on the way to living in a United States that treats the rights revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, to say nothing of the New Deal, as a legal and political mistake.

A Cold, Hard Look Into Our Trumpian Future

The New Republic

A Cold, Hard Look Into Our Trumpian Future

Jason Linkins – November 9, 2024

Let’s begin with the simplest and most obvious observation: A majority of Americans prefer what Donald Trump has been selling over Kamala Harris. It’s hard to stomach, because this election offered a pretty clear choice between a cheerful and humane future and a rapturously brutish one. But the latter won out. More Americans wanted the 1939 German-American Bund–style hate rally at Madison Square Garden than the big-tent party with high ideals about the American constitutional order. And we can no longer reassure ourselves, as we did in 2016, that Trump voters didn’t precisely know what they were getting or that much of what he promised to do was not to be taken seriously. We know what he’s about now, and a majority of voters clearly want it.

The country is set to change in stark ways, as Project 2025 jumps from the pages of a far-right dream journal into our lives. There will be big rollbacks in the civil rights many of us have come to enjoy, causing disproportionate pain to women and members of the LGBTQ community. I feel terribly for all the people who voted to protect reproductive freedoms in their states because the effort may be all for naught. As we have relentlessly explained on TNR’s pages, Trump’s Department of Justice can create a national abortion ban by enforcing the Comstock Act, thus bypassing the legislative process and the will of voters entirely. Wherever reproductive rights have managed to secure a haven in a state constitution, those rights will be fought over in inhospitable venues, like the Supreme Court.

Trump’s signature policy proposal is a mass deportation scheme that will target legal citizens for “remigration” alongside the undocumented. The regulatory state will be transformed into something that serves corporations instead of the public. The civil service, as I have mentioned before, will be reconfigured into something that, at best, may look like the “spoils system” of yesteryear; more likely it will exist to dole out punishments to Trump’s political opponents. Imagine a world in which blue states don’t receive disaster relief; where Democrats don’t get their Social Security checks.

Part of Trump’s second-term agenda includes a plan to crush left-liberal organizing. The movement to end the war in Gaza, which was highly effective in shifting public opinion on Israel’s ongoing military assault, will feel this hammer blow first. Trump has been lately dogged by generals who opposed his fascist inclinations; his future generals will be much less reluctant. Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito will retire and be replaced by younger versions of themselves. Probably worst of all, the timeline on permanent climate catastrophe has moved up—it’s not unfair to say that we may soon arrive at a point of no return (though my strong suspicion is that we have reached it already).

At the moment, I can’t exactly figure out what kind of Democratic Party emerges from the wreckage of this election. Harris ran a distinctly centrist style of politics, for which influential members of the punditocracy and the party’s most entrenched elites had long agitated. This approach flopped, badly. This brand of politics makes complete sense on paper to a lot of people who now need to contend with the fact that the voters that Democrats need the most to win presidential elections are rejecting it in substantial numbers.

But these failures are not the biggest problem Democrats face. The real crisis is that all the roads ahead are fraught with peril. The country has clearly tacked to the right in substantial ways. It’s going to make sense to a lot of Democrats to keep chasing the electorate in that direction. But a party that, in 2024, was only really defending a narrow portfolio of traditionally Democratic principles ceases to be the Democratic Party in any meaningful sense if they abandon those few battlements which they’ve retained the courage to defend. Tacking right might be a path to power, but we should dispense with the delusion that a Democratic Party choosing this path would continue to be a liberal party. Rather, it would come to reside in the same ideological province of the pre-Trump Republican Party—and remember, that’s a movement that Trumpism dispatched far more rapidly and soundly than the Democrats.

At the same time, organizing the party around a bolder, leftward direction is difficult to fathom. A more leftist set of domestic policy prescriptions requires its proponents to run the sort of piping-hot, high-spending economy that Biden attempted—and probably to a greater extent than Biden was willing to go. The failure of Bidenomics to impress the very voters it strove so mightily to help will make politicians extremely skittish about taking that approach again anytime soon. But even if Democrats were brave enough to let it rip, bolder policies also require a functioning administrative state to administer them. Right now, the Supreme Court is not committed to the administrative state’s survival and is more likely to keep dismantling it. So a Democratic Party that shifts in this direction is destined to make a ton of near-term promises that it can’t fulfill and risk making voters more cynical about government, which helps strongmen like Trump stay in power.

All that said, Trump might very well run up against the problem of unfulfillable promises a lot sooner than the Democrats. Trumpism has always been a slow march into the thickets of its own policy paradoxes, and this will only grow more pronounced as all the reins and fetters that impeded Trump’s first-term ambitions come off in the second. Here, the laws of gravity snap back with a vengeance. Trump cannot deport millions of people without sending the economy into a doom spiral. He can’t create a more efficient government by asking a noodlehead failure like Elon Musk to manage it. He can’t put a quack like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of public health without people getting a lot sicker. You can’t make America great again while destroying the regulatory regime that keeps a staggering range of everyday harms at bay: coal ash spills and E. coli and shoddy building construction and, lest we forget, pandemics. And, no, you can’t arrest climate change by pretending it’s not happening.

The problem, of course, is that the rug-pull always arrives too late for the conned to prevent. While we are waiting for these bills to come due, however, Trump will probably manage to keep two of his promises: He will duck accountability for the malfeasances for which he’s already facing judgment in various legal fora (and likely extend this privilege to a grip of bad actors, beginning with the January 6 rioters), and he will hurt the people he deems to be his enemy. Those supporters who are inclined to dole out punishments of their own will feel a freer hand to do so. This is going to be an immediately more dangerous country to reside in for lots of Americans.

This has, unfortunately, been the cauldron in which recent Democratic electoral successes have been conjured: The collapsed reality and widespread destruction wrought from GOP misrule provokes a backlash that drives up enough public support for a change. This is how we got Barack Obama and Joe Biden to the White House. This is also the widening gyre in which we’re now trapped: Republican failures, and the intense period of crisis management that follows, have made it harder for Democrats to build anything of their own that’s truly enduring, which in turn gives them little to run on. I’m left with the strong impression that the only thing most people know about Democrats is that they didn’t want Trump to be president.

As Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall noted on election night, “Incumbent parties have been losing in basically every industrial democracy since the pandemic.” Perhaps this outcome was predetermined. But it wasn’t our fate to end up with, as Marshall described, “Trump, with his degenerate, autocratic ways” as the alternative. That a cruel president is returning to office on the promise of doubling down on the cruelty speaks to something really unpleasant about ourselves. There was a notion, once, that Obama’s election indicated that the United States was closer than ever to becoming the nation we were always destined to be. With Trump’s reelection, we should reckon with the dreadful possibility that New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie is correct when he says, “Most of us will probably die living in the political order that will emerge out of this election.”