Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit recently added to the string of struck federal executive actions when it overruled an attempt by the Environmental Protection Agency to delay Obama-era methane regulations, rejecting claims by the EPA that the oil and gas industry wasn’t allowed to comment on the rules.
If the revision of CAFE standards serves as an opportunity for the Trump regime to preempt state authorities, the Clean Power Plan (CPP) represents an opportunity to render unto the states what the administration would like them to be responsible for—or perhaps what they don’t want the federal government to bear the responsibility of.
Candidate Trump had promised the auto industry and his supporters that he would get Detroit working again by deregulating the industry. On the Ides of March 2017, The Donald started to make good on that promise. In an executive order, The Donald directed EPA and the Department of Transportation/National Highway Transportation and Safety Agency to re-open the Midterm Evaluation (MTE) completed just prior to President Obama’s leaving office.
Guns, energy, money – each of these factors of power comes to mind in reading the recently released book by John Dower, The Violent American Century: War And Terror Since World War Two. This brief book keeps a tight focus: cataloguing the extent of violence associated with the US role as the world’s dominant superpower.
Leftists are told that we have to be realistic, and I agree. But how realistic is it to expect solutions to human injustices and ecological crises to emerge from the systems that have created the problems? If you want to be realistic, get radical.
With the decision by the Trump administration to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change and reverse many of the prior administration’s climate change policies, it seems that federal action on climate change will be unlikely in the next few years. However, the US system of government gives individual states broad powers to regulate CO2 emissions within their borders, with many states actively moving forward with their own mitigation strategies in absence of federal action.
The We Are Still In coalition is a loose voluntary group of city mayors, state governors, CEOs, investors and university principals who have signed a pledge, on behalf of their communities and organisations, and an open letter to the UN, stating that they are still committed to the Paris Agreement.
Calling themselves Sunrise Movement, this group — founded by a core team of eight organizers, most under the age of 30 — plan to recruit and train a nonviolent volunteer army, hundreds strong, that will shake up the 2018 midterm elections and make 2020 the first presidential election about climate change.
In her new book, “No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need”, Klein reminds us to pay attention not only to the style in which Trump governs (a multi-ring circus so routinely corrupt and corrosive that anti-democratic practices seem normal) but in whose interests he governs (the wealthy, those he believes to be the rightful winners in the capitalist cage match)…
His erasing the nation’s signature from the Paris Accord was nothing more than pandering to his core supporters on the back of an issue The Donald considers inconsequential to his legacy. It was intended to offset growing criticism of his performance to-date.
We’re suffering from the disappointment about the promises of progress and technology, and it’s not much more complicated than that. We have reason to feel that way. In fact I don’t believe in the techno utopia that a lot of people are trying to sell.
Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change has sparked a global uproar. Yet America’s reluctance to reduce its use of fossil fuels is, in fact, logical. Not only because of the U.S. president’s overt denial of man-made climate change, but also and more fundamentally because it reflects America’s historical essence and trajectory.
