Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
For those who actually care about the survival of the human race, the key questions now should be obvious: is there any reason to hope that we will retreat from “drill baby drill” and enact a sane set of climate policies? Or is our country – and, by extension, our species – just going to give up?
Here is as good as any spot to ask the question asked in the first two articles in the series. What does an appreciation of “inside the beltway” political maneuverings have to do with federal climate policy?
The most contentious and expensive midterm election in US history is almost over. When the dust finally settles it will have ended pretty much as predicted. The incoming 116th Congress will open for business— divided.
The fact that climate change is mostly caused by the rich and yet the poorest, who have done least to cause it and have the least resources to respond, will be hit most seriously by the damaging impacts – is uncomfortable. But it is important.
Climate advocates across the country are refusing to back down after a historic carbon fee proposal failed at the ballot in Washington state on Tuesday. Despite disappointment, a number of states are already preparing for their own attempts at putting a price on carbon emissions — and it could come as early as next year.
I don’t think there is a duty to vote, and I wouldn’t support compulsory voting, even if that was a political possibility in this country. I do think voting is responsibility though.
Democrats campaigning on climate action and clean energy did very well around the country election night. It’s clearly a winning issue, as the polls have long said. But two key results of the election are bad news for the climate — and together they pose a very difficult challenge to the kind of near-term climate action that’s needed to avoid catastrophic climate change.
In the 158th year of the American civil war, also known as 2018, the Confederacy continues its recent resurgence. Its victims include black people, of course, but also immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Latinos, trans people, gay people and women who want to exercise jurisdiction over their bodies.
The 2018 midterm elections will be memorialized as among the most contentious in modern history. Charges and counter-charges of racism, lies, corruption, and sexual predation are not all the lead up to November’s balloting will be remembered for, however. The 2018 elections are also proving to be the most expensive midterms to date.
Late this afternoon the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) released a brief 3-page order denying the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss the Juliana case in advance of trial. The allowance to proceed comes as something of a surprise as it follows Chief Justice Roberts’ stay of the trial just days before it was scheduled to begin in an Oregon federal district court.
Whatever the Supreme Court decides in the case of 21 young plaintiffs seeking to protect themselves and the nation from the worst ravages of Earth’s warming climate, they and their attorneys have created a record in which the Trump administration has admitted the truth about the causes and harms of global climate change.
Driven by zero-sum thinking, the rigid, inflexible, ideological thinking and obsessive need of our collective human ego to be absolutely and imperatively “right”, is rapidly driving our Nation and our American democracy toward collapse.
