Water is destiny. That doesn’t seem to me to be very complicated. Yet the Republicans of Idaho can’t seem to figure that out. This is an update on what is happening to the Colorado River and it is happening through conscious choice after deliberations. But water is just a part of it. It has another equally important implication. Idaho is illustrating just how damaging to social and individual wellbeing Republican goals and values are. It has a city with no obstetrical care in its only hospital. It has a really cruel and stupid abortion ban, and it is being abandoned by physicians and nurses. The Republicans cruelty against trans folk is truly nasty. And, then this, they don’t really think climate change is real, and are still promoting petroleum. Even at the cost of water. Historians will study what is going on in Idaho for years, it is so self-destructive.
The White River in Northeastern Utah emerges from the Colorado mountains into the Uinta Basin. Credit: Russel Albert Daniels
The GPS coordinates weren’t especially helpful last May as we drove across the remote Tavaputs Plateau in Utah’s Uinta Basin. Cell service was spotty in the vast expanse of land crosshatched with unpaved roads identified on the map only as “Well Road 4304735551” or “Chevron Pipeline Road.” Photographer Russel Albert Daniels and I had set off that morning from Vernal (population 10,241), in search of a 15-square-mile plot of undeveloped land purchased in 2011 by the Estonian-government-owned energy company Enefit.
On that land, the Estonians had hoped to create the first commercial-scale oil shale mining and processing facility in the United States, with a 320-acre industrial plant that would process 28 million tons of strip-mined shale and turn it into 50,000 barrels of oil every day for 30 years. Rich with traditional oil and gas reserves, the Uinta Basin also sits atop the largest oil shale reserve in the world, a 6 million-year-old geologic formation where Utah officials estimate a […]
Amanda Marcotte raises what I consider a very disturbing trend I have noticed but have not seen anyone else comment on: the Republican attempt to make jury decisions against them nothing more than political snark. I see this as part of the Republican attempt to control the judiciary to serve their purposes.
Donald Trump Credit: Frederic J. Brown / AFP / Getty
“That jury’s a joke,” huffed Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., or as Trump called him during the 2016 primary, “Little Marco”. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., echoed the same claim, grousing about “a New York jury,” as if it’s preposterous to try a case in the same jurisdiction where the crime actually happened. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., also took a swipe about the “New York jury.”
As Carroll’s attorney pointed out repeatedly, of the 9 jurors, 6 were men and only 2 even lived in […]
Here is yet another aspect of the Republican trend to corrupt America’s judiciary, this aspect directly about the Supreme Court and the manipulation of the court’s procedures by the christofascist majority. One of the things that made America great was that it had a fair an just judiciary. This isn’t the first time the Republicans have tried to corrupt the court. They did it prior to the Civil War, and again during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. But it has never before been as blatant and dangerous to our legal system.
Credit: Politico
As the Supreme Court begins to release its written opinions from its most recent term, much of the public’s attention is focused on high-profile cases on affirmative action, election law and environmental regulation. But according to Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas Law School, this narrow focus on the most headline-grabbing decisions overlooks a more troubling change in the High Court’s behavior: The justices are conducting more and more of the court’s most important business out of the public eye, through a procedural mechanism known as “the shadow docket.”
Quantitatively speaking, cases arising from the shadow docket — which include everything apart from the court’s annual average of 60 to 70 signed decisions — have long made up a majority of the justices’ work. But as Vladeck documents in his new book, The Shadow Docket, published this week, the court’s use of the shadow docket changed dramatically during the Trump years, when the court’s conservative majority used a flurry of emergency […]
What I find so remarkable is not only how corrupt Clarence Thomas has been proven to be, but also, and mainly, how little response his corruption has produced. Lots of commentary from the media to be sure, but actual action by his fellow justices or the Congress? Nothing. He continues to vote on the defining legal cases of the nation, as if nothing has happened. It is destroying the respect for the court, and poisoning the America judiciary.
Credit: Damon Winter / The New York Times
For Republicans, the investigations into Clarence Thomas and his friendship with Harlan Crow, a Texas billionaire, are just pretexts for an attack on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.
“This assault on Justice Thomas is well beyond ethics,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week on Supreme Court ethics reform. “It’s about trying to delegitimize a conservative court that was appointed through the traditional process.”
“This is an unseemly effort by the Democratic left to destroy the legitimacy of the Roberts court,” he went on to say. “It’s put people at risk. It’s put their personal safety at risk.”
Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa accused Democrats and their “allies in the liberal media” of waging “a crusade to threaten to pack and smear the courts.” And Senator Mike Lee of Utah described the questions about Thomas’s conduct as “attacks” that are “undermining the rule of law, endangering the security of the justices and their […]
As this report from the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group lays out in detail we are going to see the coastal cities of the world experience massive migrations out of those cities as a result of sea rise, and the submergence of large sections of the cities. Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia gives us an example of what is coming. Already so much of the city is underwater that a new Jakarta is being built from scratch further inland, and the population disruption is creating a massive crisis. Miami, Florida is going to experience something similar very soon, yet DeSantis, the governor of Florida, is focused on controlling women, indoctrinating rather than educating children, tormenting immigrants, and making the lives of LGBTQ people miserable.
To read the entire report go to: https://www.c40.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/C40-Good-Practice-Guide-Climate-Change-Adaptation-in-Delta-Cities.pdf
A tsunami of human-made troubles in Jakarta the Indonesian capital as it submerges, posing an imminent threat to the city’s survival. Credit: Josh Haner
More than two-‐thirds of the world’s largest cities are coastal delta cities. These cities are vulnerable to rising sea levels as a result of climate change, while millions of people are already being exposed to the risk of extreme storms and flooding events. By the middle of this century, the majority of the world’s population will live in cities in or near deltas, estuaries or coastal zones, increasing the number of people facing these impacts globally. Such socio-‐economic trends further amplify the possible consequences of extreme climate change related events and the vulnerability of delta cities is expected to increase in the decades to come.
Any strategy for the sustainable development and growth of delta cities must integrate adaptation planning in order to reduce vulnerabilities to climate change risks and impacts. This Good Practice Guide identifies a number of Good Practice Approaches for climate change planning and implementation in delta cities:
The C40 Connecting Delta Cities (CDC) Network was established to support […]
