Stephan: Today, as I regularly do, I spent an hour listening to Right-wing media. My first take away was my usual take away: No one with an IQ above 100 could take any of it seriously as fact. It really is Earth 2. The flavor of the month for this lot seems to be that the Red states are being asked to bail out the Blue. You hear it and read it reiterated endlessly on Earth 2.
Anyone who spent five minutes Googling Chart of red state blue statepaid into treasury and what they each take out could easily see that this is an absolute and deliberate lie on the part of Trumper politicians and media, and Trump himself. And yet the people who listen to, or read Right-wing media don't seem to be able to muster the intellect to check any of it.
With a couple of exceptions, like Texas and Florida, Red states have been living off the generosity of Blue states for years. In fact, if the Red states didn't get support from the Blue states many of them would go into economic collapse because they are governed so incompetently.
Here is a simple map from the Washington Post, but you can find a dozen others like it because the data is very clear and unimpeachable and much analyzed. For every dollar the Blue states put into the Federal treasury they take out less than a dollar. For every dollar a Red state puts into the treasury, they take out more than a dollar. For the old confederacy states it is often much more.
Republican Senator and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
Nothing angers Andrew Cuomo more than the notion that taxpayers in “red states” should resent or resist assistance for “blue states” struggling against the coronavirus. Hearing that message from Senate Republicans provoked the Democratic New York governor to remind the nation several times of the gross disparity between what his state remits to the Treasury and what their states reclaim in federal benefits.
Cuomo noted acidly that New York pays $116 billion more than it gets back annually, while lucky Kentucky, the home of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, gets $148 billion more than it pays. By that reckoning, New York has kicked in far more over the past few decades than any of the states whose Republican leaders criticize supposed liberal profligacy.
“Give us our money back, Sen. McConnell,” roared the New Yorker.
If you add up the excess funds coughed up by the Empire State, it’s a lot of money. The enormous disparity between what New York pays and receives is not a new problem. How long has this been going on? […]
Stephan: Anyone who tells you that nuclear energy is the way to replace carbon energy is just telling you they are willfully ignorant. Civilian nuclear power was created to give companies like Westinghouse and General Electric, who were making nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors for ships, a big enough market to. make it worthwhile, and to create enough skilled personnel in nuclear technology to service the military's needs. To make this scary technology seem safe and happy it was sold as the clean energy future for America. It was all crap from start to finish and those in the know knew it.
Admiral Hyman Rickover who created America's nuclear navy, as his last act before retiring asked Representative Edward Hubert, committee chairman of the House Armed Services Committee to ask him to testify one last time before Congress. What did he want to say? Civilian nuclear power was a mistake, and potentially very dangerous, with long term consequences. Go look it up.
The civilian nuclear power industry which thrived during the Cold War and still lingers on, has left the United States with a horrible and grotesquely expensive nuclear waste problem. Here are some real facts.
It’s a place of superlatives. Reporters have called it the most polluted place in the Western Hemisphere. It’s also the location of one of the largest construction projects in the world.
At the Hanford Site in south-central Washington state, 177 giant tanks sit below the sandy soil, brimming with the radioactive remnants of 44 years of nuclear-materials production. From World War II through the Cold War, Hanford churned out plutonium for more than 60,000 nuclear weapons, including the atomic bomb that razed Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945. The sprawling enterprise eventually contaminated the soil and groundwater and left behind 212 million liters of toxic waste—enough to fill 85 Olympic-size swimming pools. Decades after the site stopped producing plutonium, the U.S. government is still grappling with how to clean it all up.
Today the 1,500-square-kilometer site, roughly half the size of Rhode Island, is a quiet expanse of sagebrush and wispy grasses outside Richland, Wash. The underground steel-and-reinforced-concrete tanks are grouped in “farms” beneath a central plateau, while shuttered nuclear reactors stand like sentinels on the periphery. Scientists have identified […]
Stephan: As a country, the United States is being fundamentally, and perhaps irrevocably, altered because media is no longer required to be grounded in facts. In fact, very lucrative and influential operations now dominate much of the news and they explicitly gaslight and propagandize through disinformation the less intelligent members of our society. What this means is spelled out in this well-conducted Gallup Organization survey.
Americans’ news consumption habits are deeply polarized. Liberals tend to use a certain set of news sources; conservatives, another set. A recent series of Gallup/Knight Foundation surveys, including interviews with more than 13,500 U.S. adults, finds that polarized news media habits seem to have an independent effect on the way Americans view the news media.
News consumption diet — the top news sources people use — is strongly related to opinions about the news media. Only 3% of Americans with a conservative news diet have a “very favorable” or “favorable” opinion of the media, compared with 56% of those with a liberal news diet and 34% with a mixed news diet. For more information on how Gallup categorizes news diets, see the online appendix (PDF download).
A similar relationship exists between news diet and trust in national news organizations, suggesting that favorability of the news media and trust in national news organizations measure the same underlying attitudes. Meanwhile, 27% of those with a conservative news diet express “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in […]
Lauri Myllyvirta, - Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air
Stephan: Because of the self-isolation policies that have been adopted all over the world, one of the good things to come out of this pandemic is that it has shown us unequivocally that decreased petroleum and gas usage results in a much nicer, and healthier environment, and far fewer air pollution deaths. How much clearer does it need to get that we exiting the carbon energy era will be a boon to all?
The measures to combat the coronavirus have led to an approximately 40% reduction in average level of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution and 10% reduction in average level of particulate matter pollution over the past 30 days, resulting in 11,000 avoided deaths from air pollution (95% confidence interval: 7,000 – 21,000). This effect comes as power generation from coal has fallen 37% and oil consumption by an estimated 1/3. Coal and oil burning are the main sources of NO2 pollution and key sources of particulate matter pollution across Europe.
These findings are based on a new CREA assessment of the air quality and health impacts of reduced fossil fuel consumption during the epidemic.
Other avoided health impacts include 1.3 million fewer days of work absence, 6,000 fewer new cases of asthma in children, 1,900 avoided emergency room visits due to asthma attacks and 600 fewer preterm births. Most of these health impacts are linked to chronic air pollution exposure and will be realized over coming months and years.
The health impact analysis also highlights how, regardless of improved air […]
Stephan: There are so many things that I find despicable about Trump and the people with whom he associates and has brought into government. But nothing quite matches the rape of America's public lands. And of course, as I have been saying repeatedly, these people are using the pandemic to further that process. Here is the story -- in a British newspaper.
Dead Horse Point state park in Utah features an overlook of the Colorado River and Canyonlands national park. A proposed land sale could see energy extraction within a half-mile of Canyonlands. Credit: Alamy
The Trump administration has ratcheted up its efforts amid the coronavirus pandemic to overhaul and overturn Obama-era environmental regulations and increase industry access to public lands.
The secretary of the interior, David Bernhardt, has sped efforts to drill, mine and cut timber on fragile western landscapes. Meanwhile, the EPA, headed by the former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, has weakened critical environmental laws and announced in March that it would cease oversight of the nation’s polluters during the Covid-19 crisis.
The rollbacks appear to follow a playbook put forth by influential conservative thinktanks, urging the White House to use the pandemic as justification for curtailing, or eliminating, environmental rules and oversight. President Trump should have “the ability to suspend costly regulations without extensive process”, according to a recent report by the Heritage Foundation.
Critics, such as Melyssa Watson, executive director of the Wilderness Society, accuse the administration of using the pandemic […]
Today, as I regularly do, I spent an hour listening to Right-wing media. My first take away was my usual take away: No one with an IQ above 100 could take any of it seriously as fact. It really is Earth 2. The flavor of the month for this lot seems to be that the Red states are being asked to bail out the Blue. You hear it and read it reiterated endlessly on Earth 2.
Anyone who spent five minutes Googling Chart of red state blue state paid into treasury and what they each take out could easily see that this is an absolute and deliberate lie on the part of Trumper politicians and media, and Trump himself. And yet the people who listen to, or read Right-wing media don't seem to be able to muster the intellect to check any of it.
With a couple of exceptions, like Texas and Florida, Red states have been living off the generosity of Blue states for years. In fact, if the Red states didn't get support from the Blue states many of them would go into economic collapse because they are governed so incompetently.
Here is a simple map from the Washington Post, but you can find a dozen others like it because the data is very clear and unimpeachable and much analyzed. For every dollar the Blue states put into the Federal treasury they take out less than a dollar. For every dollar a Red state puts into the treasury, they take out more than a dollar. For the old confederacy states it is often much more. 
