(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Earth Matters: Biden climate tour can boost Dems in '24; Big Oil seeks to kill Calif. setback law [1] ['Daily Kos Staff Emeritus', 'This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments'] Date: 2023-02-09 Harold Meyerson President Biden is attempting to do something that no president has done since Ronald Reagan: fundamentally transform how Americans understand the economy and the role of government in creating economic growth and broad-based prosperity. The agenda Biden is advancing is much more than a collection of policies. His accomplishments represent a reimagining of how America conceives of and executes economic policy. This is far from the first time that the president has planted the flag for middle-out economics. In his 2021 speech to a joint session of Congress, Biden proclaimed, “Trickle-down economics has never worked. It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom up and the middle out.” He’s delivered on that vision, as he made clear in the first 45 minutes of the State of the Union address. Biden signed historic legislation to invest in infrastructure and high-tech manufacturing, fight climate change, increase Americans’ incomes, and lower their costs. Through executive orders and appointments, his administration is reining in the power of corporate monopolies in order to drive innovation, raise wages, and make people’s lives more affordable. [...] Biden has accomplished more to support working and middle-class Americans in his first two years in office than the last six presidents combined. And as he also made clear, there’s much more on his list. Biden’s policies are not just important because of their specific worth; they add up to a new way of looking at economics. As the president said, “And by the way, when we do all of these things, we increase productivity. We increase economic growth.” Tying action on the climate crisis into massive economic opportunity is a generation-old idea. But it couldn’t previously get turned into durable policy. The Obama administration struck a spark in the 2009 stimulus bill, but this was nothing like the proto-industrial policy that Biden and the Democratic Congress have now laid the foundation for. To be fair, that policy and the hundreds of billions of dollars approved under Democratic initiative is a far cry from what activists and progressive lawmakers wanted. See this from the center-left Center for American Progress: In May [2021], 21 labor, progressive, environmental, and environmental justice organizations sent a letter to Congress urging it to pass legislation “that invests at least $4 trillion throughout the economy over this presidential term, bound by high-road labor, equity and climate standards.”6 Such legislation, the letter argues, will “rebuild the economy, reverse growing inequality, confront systemic racism, reduce pollution, guarantee labor rights, and make necessary down payments in tackling the climate crisis.”7 And last month, Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Stephanie Murphy (D-FL), Susan Wild (D-PA), and more than 200 members of Congress wrote, “Congress must ensure that middle class family-sustaining jobs will be created by including strong labor standards on all forms of federal infrastructure investment moving forward.”8 That $4 trillion obviously didn’t come to pass. There were … obstacles—like every Republican and a few GOP-enabling Democrats. What was passed is nevertheless unprecedented. Not enough; indeed, a piddling amount over its 10 years compared with this decade’s defense budget. But, even with its flaws, it will make a huge difference. Hundreds of projects are already at various places in the pipeline. Some long-neglected communities are finally slated for essential funding, like removal of lead-tainted infrastructure that should have been yanked out of service decades ago, something Vice President Kamala Harris has been focused on. Democrats, fractious as we are, made this happen. And it’s obvious we need to talk in public about it more. Because Americans don’t know about these and the party’s other recent accomplishments. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Monday found that 62% of those surveyed think Biden has accomplished “not very much” or “little or nothing.” With rare exceptions, the media has helped keep people uninformed in the matter (and in so many others), focusing 99% more attention on the antics and tantrums of political performance personalities than on the impacts of policies and programs designed to improve the lives of “average, working-class Americans.” Defeating the media’s disinformation by omission obligates us to a full-court press. There’s not a congressional district in the nation that won’t directly benefit from one or more projects that wouldn’t have happened without the IRA, IIJA, and CHIPS acts. For instance, the district represented by Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy is likely to be home to a proposed carbon capture project that would benefit from millions of dollars courtesy of a bill that McCarthy urged members to vote against. Similar projects are headed to other Republican districts. McCarthy won’t lose his seat for hypocrisy. But besides firming up seats Democrats already hold, touting the accomplishments of the climate, jobs, justice legislation over the next two years can persuade at least some voters to abandon Republicans they previously favored in a few swing districts. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that other accomplishments, such as those on prescription drug prices, should be ignored. One thing we rank-and-file Democrats can do to participate in this accomplishments tour is gently persuade local print and other media to cover local people or groups that are benefiting from a specific project or program made possible by the Democratic legislation. That sometimes may require doing much of their legwork for them. And if a local lawmaker or candidate can be tied into the story, so much the better. Only you can decide whether that effort is worthwhile. This is, of course, about far more than the next election. The climate crisis is an existential matter. It will take far more than changes in government policy in the U.S. to mitigate the impacts of the crisis. It means a whole change of mindset, of humans interaction with the rest of the species on the planet, on how we grow what we eat. Technological fixes are crucial but, with 8 billion of us now in every corner of Earth, they are only part of the need. But those are topics for another day. In terms of relatively well-funded national policies to deal with the climate crisis, we’ve just got started with the billions of dollars of that seminal legislation. So much more remains to do. The usual suspects will be the usual obstacles to doing it. A steady barrage of Biden’s and the Democrats’ face-to-face touting of relevant accomplishments can be part of trampling them. WEEKLY GREEN VIDEO x YouTube Video GREEN BRIEFS The U.S. Energy Information Administration, part of the Department of Energy, has long tracked energy production and consumption and made forecasts in its Annual Energy Outlook and its International Energy Outlook. While its tracking of what’s already happened has been uniformly excellent, critics have long noted that EIA forecasts of renewables have been way off the mark. For instance, in 2005, EIA made a 25-year forecast that posited there would be 63 gigawatts of installed wind power in the United States by 2030. We actually passed that mark in 2012. Currently, installed wind power capacity is 132 gigawatts. At Hill Heat, Brad Johnson notes: The latest short-term forecast from the EIA—Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory—shows that those grim forecasts don’t have to become reality: Developers plan to add 54.5 gigawatts (GW) of new utility-scale electric-generating capacity to the U.S. power grid in 2023, according to our Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory. More than half of this capacity will be solar power (54%), followed by battery storage (17%). If that trajectory turns out to be correct and were to continue year after year, 380 gigawatts of installed renewables capacity would be added to the grid by 2030. That is about one-third of existing U.S. generating capacity from all sources. After two failed attempts, last year the California state legislature finally passed a bill—S.B. 1137—prohibiting new oil wells within 3,200 feet of schools, homes, parks, and other sensitive locations. It was still a struggle despite the overwhelming Democratic majority. Without Gov. Gavin Newsom’s intervention, the bill probably would not have passed. Republicans opposed it, of course, but some labor Democrats in the state Senate also did, and it took quite an effort to get enough of them aboard. Unhappily, the law, which was supposed to take effect on Jan. 1, has been slammed into its own setback. The oil industry and its supporters spent nearly $21 million to gather signatures to put a repeal referendum on the ballot in November 2024. California Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber announced Feb. 3 that the proposal had the more than 623,200 valid signatures needed to qualify. In a statement, Newsom said, “Greedy oil companies know that drilling results in more kids getting asthma, more children born with birth defects, and more communities exposed to toxic, dangerous chemicals — but they would rather put our health at risk than sacrifice a single cent of their billions in profits.” Environmental advocates want the governor to establish emergency rules and order state regulators to stop issuing new permits for operations that would violate the suspended setback requirement. But, as Lisa Gross at Inside Climate News reports, the “oil industry still wields considerable power in the halls of state government. Oil companies and their trade groups spent more than $70 million lobbying California politicians and regulators between 2019 and 2022, when two previous bills to restrict neighborhood oil drilling failed.” Other reading: A Q&A with the author of S.B. 1137, state Sen. Lena Gonzalez, who hopes Newsom will step in. looking back Retirement brings with it some benefits to accompany the aches and pains. Among these is time to read more widely, and I’ve been doing a lot of that. Here’s a New York Times piece on climate change written by the newspaper’s Editor of Science and Engineering Waldemar Kaempffert on October 28, 1956: GREEN RESOURCES & action ECOPINION Code Words Hint At Eliminating Jobs & Stifling Renewable Energy Employment. By Carolyn Fortuna at CleanTechnica. The term “just transition” emerged from the 1970s North American labor movement to become a campaign for a planned energy transition. It includes justice and fairness for workers through united future visions about economic and climate action. These days it’s incredibly contentious. Carolyn E. Ramirez, staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Public lands are not neutral. We must grapple with their racist roots. By Carolyn E. Ramirez at Environmental Health News. An analysis of data from the U.S. Forest Service shows that white people make up almost 95% of the visitors to national forests (77% to national parks), despite many forests being located near communities where people of color are the majority. On the managing side of the equation, things are not too different: at almost every meeting or excursion I attend for my job, I am the only Latina person represented and very rarely are there people of color present. The people driving the decisions in the environmental movement, especially around nature conservation, are mostly white and male. As the United States becomes a minority-majority country, federal agencies have started to fear that fewer people will care about public lands because of the primarily white-led stewardship and use of public lands now. A lot of this racial and ethnic gap in federal land usage is blamed on indifference or lack of interest from people of color and people of other minority identities, but this viewpoint ignores critical context of how a person’s identities shape their relationship to public lands. California’s Extreme Weather Is the Future of Climate Change. By Rebecca Gordon at The Nation. After years of thirst, the state has been drowning, and the poorest people have been among those hardest hit. The woman I moved to San Francisco for (whom I’ve known since I was a young teen in the 1960s) spent her college years at the University of California–Berkeley. I remember her telling me, in the summer of 1969, that she and a number of friends had spent the previous spring semester celebrating the coming end of the world as they knew it. Apparently, some scientists had then predicted that a giant earthquake would cause the San Francisco Bay Area to collapse into the Pacific Ocean. Facing such a possible catastrophe, a lot of young folks decided that they might as well have a good party. There was smoking and drinking and dancing to welcome the approaching apocalypse. (When a Big One did hit 20 years later, the city didn’t exactly fall into the ocean, but a big chunk of the San Francisco Bay Bridge did go down.) Over the last months, we Californians have experienced both historic drought and historic rainfall. The world as we knew it really is ending faster than some of us ever expected. Now that we’re facing an imminent catastrophe, one already killing people around the globe and even in my state, it’s hard to know how to respond. Somehow, I don’t feel like partying though. I think it’s time to fight. Getting electric school buses in the hands of school districts. A video interview with Duncan McIntyre of Highland Electric Fleets. By David Roberts at Volts. Here’s the introduction: One of my very favorite things in the world to talk about — second perhaps only to electric postal vehicles — is electric school buses. It's difficult to think of a more righteous cause than reducing air and noise pollution in direct proximity to the country's most sensitive lungs and ears. Currently, however, electric school buses still cost two to three times what their diesel competitors cost, which can be daunting for school districts with tight budgets. Electric buses pay themselves off over time through dramatically lower fuel and maintenance costs, but the upfront costs of the transition are steep enough to scare away many administrators. My guest today runs a company called Highland Electric Fleets that is attempting to overcome that challenge by offering a new business model. Rather than purchase and maintain the buses themselves, school districts pay Highland a subscription fee, locked in for a 15-year contract, which covers the buses, a depot, charging infrastructure, scheduling, training, and ongoing maintenance and replacement of buses when required. ECO-QUOTE “Young people, indeed, all people, need to understand that they cannot solve the energy and climate problem without addressing the special interest problem in Washington.”—James Hansen, the climatologist whose 1988 congressional testimony put the public sspotlight on global warming HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO) Oil giants slow down their energy transition talk. By Dan Primack at Axios. For years, Big Oil has vowed to push the energy transition, investing in everything from renewable projects to climate tech startups. Now, however, some of them sound more like speed bumps. For instance, BP plans to "dial back" some of the company's renewable energy initiatives, due to disappointment over return on investment, reports the WSJ. Rival Shell said it will keep renewable energy investments at 2022 levels, despite titanic profits. And Exxon CEO Darren Woods argued that energy transition "is not a game for startups." There's justifiable skepticism that oil majors have a sincere interest in energy transition, given that they continue to earn billions of dollars by burning dinosaurs the old-fashioned way. A grizzly bear climbs out of Pelican Creek in Yellowstone National Park. Feds mull dropping grizzly bear protections. By Michael Doyle at Greenwire. Since 1975, when protections for grizzly bears were added under the Endangered Species Act, delisting grizzlies has found its way into the courts several times without success. Now, with 1,100 of the iconic creatures estimated to roam the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem and Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the pressure is on to delist the grizzly in those ranges. Said Republican Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, who has a 9% rating from the League of Conservation Voters, “The science is clear. It’s time to delist the grizzly bear.” In response to petitions from state governments in Wyoming and Montana, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced February 3 that it will conduct comprehensive 12-month assessments of the grizzlies’ status after 90-day reviews found delisting “may be warranted.” FWS said that the petitions presented “substantial information that the population size and trends have improved and that threats have been reduced” in the two ecosystems. Many environmental advocacy groups say delisting is not warranted. Andrea Zaccardi, carnivore conservation legal director for the Center for Biological Diversity, told Greenwire that the group is “disappointed but not overly surprised” by the decision and said “the grizzly bear shouldn’t be delisted.” In comments filed by an environmental coalition on Feb. 1, the draft grizzly management program already put together by Montana officials “very transparently views grizzly bear delisting as a speed bump on the way to trophy hunting of grizzly bears and systematic population reductions.” Geothermal Drinks Gas’s Milkshake. By Lee Harris at Based, a newsletter of The American Prospect. Long-dormant geothermal energy is having a moment in the sun. Recent technological advancements have transformed the potential of hot rocks as a renewable-energy resource, and now, a stream of federal and state incentives have put geothermal on the cusp of breakout success. Hot rocks near the Earth’s surface contain immense quantities of energy. In some places, that subsurface heat breaks through in geysers, hot springs, and steam vents near volcanic activity. Humans long ago identified the potential of this energy as a resource. Way back in 1892, Boise, Idaho, created the United States’ first district heating system , piping hot water into buildings from nearby hot springs. Today, the bulk of U.S. geothermal is concentrated in California and Nevada, which have relatively shallow geothermal resources . Until the past decade, it was expensive and technically challenging to dig deeper. But those obstacles have been rapidly cleared, setting off a volley of deep geothermal exploration projects. The up-front cost is high, but district systems pay dividends in lower long-term bills for heating and cooling. Some of the captive birds of the Northern California Condot Restoration Program. Newest Flock of Wild California Condors Faces an Old Threat: Lead Poisoning. By Juliet Grable at The Revelator. Biologists of the Yurok Tribe and Redwood National and State Parks released four captive-bred California condors into the wild last May. It had been more than a century since condors had flown over the coast redwood trees in Northern California. Says Tiana Williams-Claussen, wildlife department director for the Yuroks, “It makes you happy, but there’s still a niggling worry as they start to spread their wings.” One of the greatest dangers the big scavengers face is lead poisoning. The eat only carrion and when they consume the remains of animals killed by lead ammunition. It takes a gram or less—about 1% of a typical rifle bullet—to sicken or kill the birds, and It’s an agonizingly slow death. Last fall, Grable reports, the remains of three poached elk were discovered in areas the condors are known to frequent. X-rays revealed lead fragments in the neck of one of the carcasses — enough to kill several condors. At least four condors were just a 10-minute flight away from the carcasses, which were recovered before the birds discovered them. The Yurok have tried with some success explaining to hunters the problem with lead ammo. Four years ago, California banned hunting wildlife with lead ammunition, although it still allows sales for other purposes. Since the law went into effect, lead poisoning deaths have gone up, not down. At least some of that is because lead-free ammo only makes up 10% of the market, and it can be hard to come by. Why the threat to food supplies — and industrial agriculture’s role in global warming — is central to the discourse on climate change. By Mark Schapiro at Capital and Main. Accelerating climate volatility is shining a harsh light on the frailty of our industrial food system. One key aspect is the warming of winter. This is particularly troublesome for fruit crops like peaches, cherries that need nighttime temperatures to drop to slow their metabolism. The big underlying story behind the vulnerability of U.S. agriculture to climate extremes is the dramatic consolidation of control within U.S. agriculture. Just four chemical companies—only one of them American—control more than half of all commercially traded seeds planted globally. Those companies include Corteva, which was spun off from the formerly merged Dow and DuPont; Monsanto, owned by the German pharma and chemical giant Bayer; Syngenta, owned by one of China’s biggest chemical companies, ChemChina; and BASF, another German agrichemical giant. All sell seeds that are bred to be dependent for their survival on the chemicals produced by the mother company; the companies profit from both ends of that deal (as Schapiro reported in his book Seeds of Resistance: The Fight for Food Diversity on Our Climate-Ravaged Planet. Those seeds, born addicted to agrichemicals, are largely unable to adapt to changing conditions. Antarctic sea ice reachers its lowest level for January from Copernicus Climate Change Service. January 2023 sea ice: Antarctic sea ice extent reached its lowest value for January in the satellite record, at 31% below average, beating the previous record of January 2017. Below-average sea ice concentrations prevailed throughout the Southern Ocean. Arctic sea ice extent was 4% below average, ranking third lowest for January in the satellite record. Arctic sea ice concentrations were most below-average in the Barents Sea and Svalbard region. Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of CCCS, said, "Many of us have witnessed the exceptionally warm temperatures around the turn of the year. While January 2023 is exceptional, these extreme temperatures remain a tangible indication of the effects of a changing climate for many regions and can be understood as an additional warning of future extreme events. It is imperative for global and regional stakeholders to take swift action to mitigate the rise in global temperatures." GREEN LINKS • Dark Money Is Fueling Climate Denial and Delaying Action, Watchdogs Warn • In polluted cities, reducing air pollution could lower cancer rates as much as eliminating smoking would • Census: Disasters displaced more than 3M Americans in 2022 • Climate denial campaign goes retro with new textbook • Transit agencies’ zero-emission bus adoption increased in 2022 • New French law will blanket parking lots with solar panels • Ukrainian ecologists say nature will suffer no matter war’s result [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/9/2151685/-Earth-Matters-Biden-climate-tour-can-boost-Dems-in-24-Big-Oil-seeks-to-kill-Calif-setback-law Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/