Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The new guard has created an opening for movements on a range of issues to dust off our biggest demands and translate them into a platform that can be stumped on, debated and popularized in the coming years. We are no longer in an era where we have to settle for what the establishment says is winnable.
To stop what the majority of Americans are convinced is a cataclysmic event just waiting to happen, combatants must become colleagues. To paraphrase President Reagan–Republicans and Democrats tear down your walls!
This is a tale about the negative environmental and health effects of coal and obtaining justice for America’s coal miners. It is also a tale of how large contributors to the campaigns of both Trump and McConnell can appear to have been given dispensation to duck out of their obligations.
Since Day 1 of the Trump presidency, the auto industry had been hoping to re-negotiate the deal it struck with the Obama administration on auto and light truck fuel efficiency standards (CAFE).
British oil major BP successfully lobbied the Trump administration to roll back key climate regulations preventing the release of methane into the atmosphere, despite claiming to support the Paris agreement to limit global warming to well below 2C.
This week’s episode is co-hosted by Rhiana Gunn-Wright, one of the lead policy writers of the Green New Deal. She joins Mary & Maeve in the studio to discuss public opinion on climate change in the United States, where it’s crucial that citizens and politicians take a role in environmental action.
I would even venture that climate change is becoming one of the topics most talked about—or like religion and politics not to be talked about—around dinner tables. I credit the rising tide of youth activism for this rather sudden reversal of fortune.
We must hold ourselves accountable for our actions before it is too late to prevent catastrophic collapse. When the water runs out we have no one to blame but ourselves.
We’re up against the huge power of the fossil fuel industry; the extraordinary ideological opposition to the federal government doing anything important; money going into disinformation campaigns that people readily bought into. And it’s still going on.
Whatever one thinks of the GND, it has succeeded in making climate change a hot topic of discussion throughout much of the nation. Given climate is on the agenda of every Democratic presidential contender and a popular topic of derision by many conservative politicians and cable pundits, the climate discussion will not be going away anytime soon.
Under ordinary circumstances, a prudent president—one loyal to the rule of law and accepting of science—would not likely want to find himself challenged in court. Trump, of course, is no ordinary president and values chaos and delay almost as much as he does himself.
The challenge lies in organizing against the growth of far-right and authoritarian politics while simultaneously highlighting the continuities they share with the political center — the overlap between the “exception” and the “norm.”
