Jonathan Watts, Environment Editor - Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: The IPCC set the goal for temperature increase at no more than 1.5 to 2°C (2.7° to 3.6°F) to avoid catastrophic change. The truth is we're not going to make it. Here is the latest data.
China, Russia and Canada’s current climate policies would drive the world above a catastrophic 5C of warming by the end of the century, according to a study that ranks the climate goals of different countries.
The US and Australia are only slightly behind with both pushing the global temperature rise dangerously over 4C above pre-industrial levels says the paper, while even the EU, which is usually seen as a climate leader, is on course to more than double the 1.5C that scientists say is a moderately safelevel of heating.
The aim of the paper is to inform climate negotiators as they begin a two-year process of ratcheting up climate commitments, which currently fall far short of the 1.5-to-2C goal set in France three years ago.
Stephan: Good news. This is the latest in a good trend. As the Republicans have lost power, as measured by the just completed elections, men and women with less stupidity and greed and more interest in social wellbeing are replacing them in both the House and at the state level. As a result, as this report lays out, Blue value states are beginning to come to grips with climate change.
Solar wing installation
The shift in the political balance at the state level following the midterm elections will produce far more benefits for the renewable energy industry — at least in the next few years — than the Democratic takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives, according to clean energy experts.
Voters in several states elected Democratic governors in previously Republican-controlled states, shakeups that could lead to a more rapid advancement of clean energy policies. The Democratic Party also seized control of seven state legislatures, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures, a shift that could make it easier to pass laws favorable to renewable energy.
Speaking Friday at a clean energy forum in Washington, D.C., Gregory Wetstone, president and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), a nonprofit trade group that advocates for the growth of renewable energy, referred to the results of the November 6 elections as a “seismic shift” in the political landscape.
But it’s primarily at the state level, according to Wetstone, that […]
Joshua Kurlantzick, Senior Fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations - Washington Post
Stephan: This is a cautionary tale based on historical facts that should be required reading. It lays out how when the citizens of a nation degrade their democracy beyond a certain point it is very hard if not impossible to restore it. Americans will never be able to say they were not warned.
Illustration by Tomasz Walenta for The Washington Post
In April, aided by massive gerrymandering, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s ruling coalition crushed opposition in Hungary’s national elections, claiminga supermajority in the parliament. The prime minister — who had used two prior terms in office to dominate media outlets, alter electoral rules so that urban areas were massively underrepresented and seize control of the top courts — moved to further consolidate his power. He is pushing Central European University, a leading academic institution backed by George Soros, whom Orban has demonized, out of Hungary. He also might further alter the country’s constitution.
Autocratic populists like Orban — leaders who win democratic elections and then undermine democratic institutions and norms without becoming outright dictators — have gained control of Brazil, the Philippines, Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela and Poland, among other nations, in recent years. While these leaders continually pit “the people” against supposedly corrupt elites, they often still hold free (if not always fair) elections. But in office, they act autocratically […]
Stephan: Sam Brownback is either not very bright, or so deeply ideological that even as he was trashing Kansas he learned nothing and just kept going. Or maybe he was not very bright, and a fanatic. Either way, all you people in Kansas who voted for him, you got what you voted for; he was very clear what he was going to do. You can’t say you weren’t warned. Are you happy with the social outcomes? Enjoying the misery?
Republicans cannot govern because they place ideology, greed, and profit about social wellbeing. Voting Republican is voting to trash your life, and that is a factual, not a polemic statement.
TOPEKA, KANSAS — The clouds are dark and muscular over the sweep of pastureland and over the state capitol here, and you realize that it’s really the only place to be as we finally stagger toward whatever’s going to happen on Tuesday. Certainly, there are shiny stories elsewhere but, if Tuesday really is going to be a verdict, one way or the other, not only on Trumpism, but also on all the conservative policy poison that made Trumpism possible—voter suppression, supply-side economics, deregulation, abandonment of the idea of political commonwealth, weaponized splinter Christianity—then Kansas got there on all of those things ahead of the rest of the country, and long before the current president* decided he wasn’t a Democrat any more.
Kansas was the lab rat, even more than Wisconsin was. Its departed governor, Sam Brownback, a religious and economic fanatic, got elected and then re-elected despite the fact that his policies pretty much had murdered the state’s economy, decimated the state’s institutions of higher learning, and generally transformed the state into a political wasteland. From Forbes:
Since Kansas enacted tax and spending cuts in 2012 and 2013, Brownback and his allies have argued that this […]
Stephan: Well, the election is over and White Republican men are back to work trying to make sure that uppity women don't forget their subordinate place in Ohio.
This report describes a bill specifically designed to make abortion functionally impossible for an Ohio woman to obtain, and incoming governor Mike DeWine has already said he will sign the bill. Ostensibly this legislation is designed to protect the unborn but, of course, that is a lie. Ohio has a miserable social safety network to protect infants and young children.
This is entirely about controlling women, and please let's not invoke Jesus and the Bible, which doesn't even contain the word abortion. This is about the need of a certain group of White men, and a small group of their submissive women, to control females and keep them second class. All I can say is: People of Ohio you have no one to blame but yourselves for the misery that is coming. If I were a woman I wouldn't live in Ohio.
Ohio Capitol
The Ohio House of Representatives this week passed one of the most restrictive abortion bills in the country — one that would penalize doctors for performing an abortion when a fetal heartbeat can be detected and pose a potential challenge to Roe v. Wade.
A fetal heartbeat can be detected by an ultrasound as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, a time during which most women are unaware they are pregnant.
Under the bill, approved Thursday by a vote of 60 to 35, performing an abortion on a fetus with a heartbeat would result in a fifth-degree felony, which is punishable in Ohio by up to one year in prison and a $2,500 fine. The bill now heads to the Ohio Senate.
The measure includes no exceptions for rape or incest. Doctors may, however, make an exception during a medical emergency or if an abortion would save a woman’s […]
China, Russia and Canada’s current climate policies would drive the world above a catastrophic 5C of warming by the end of the century, according to a study that ranks the climate goals of different countries.
