This tells us two things. First, just what this article describes. But, second, and equally important this story is telling us that because in America the primary social priority is profit, we are simply not making the choices necessary to prepare for where climate change is taking us. As a consequence the amount of social disruption, misery, and death we are going to face as a country is going to be much greater than it needed to be. Also, the cost is going to be much greater than if we had made a national decision to promote wellbeing and exit the carbon power era as quickly as possible.
Electric vehicle drivers in Texas have started to get some bad news in the mail.
Starting in September, they’ll have to pay the state an extra $200 each year to register their climate-friendly cars and trucks. And if they want to buy a new EV, that will cost $400 upfront.
State lawmakers imposed the new fee on EVs this spring to replace gasoline taxes lost to the switch to battery-powered vehicles. Supporters say it ensures every driver pays their fair share. But the fee is nearly double what an average driver would pay in taxes at the pump, according to consumer advocates.
Those moves have some EV advocates fuming — and will create new barriers to one of President Joe Biden’s signature climate policies.
Unchanged since 1991, Texas’ gas tax is one of the cheapest in the country. Now, its new EV fees are among the most expensive. That’s no accident, experts and advocates say. A growing number of mostly Republican-led states are adding speed bumps to electric vehicles — from new taxes on drivers using charging […]
Here is yet another failure of the Biden administration’s regulatory agencies, this time it is the FDA. Killiing wolves to benefit cattle ranchers. Supposedly. What is particularly disgusting about this report is that not only is it a blatant capitulation to monied interests, it also can be scientifically proven to be the wrong decision. As this report states, referencing well respected studies in doing so, “A 2014 report in the journal PLOS One found that livestock mortality actually increased as wolves were killed, possibly because the killings spurred surviving wolves to mate more often. A 2016 literature review found that non-lethal methods of reducing wolf/livestock conflicts were more effective than lethal ones, while a study in 2018 found that killing wolves in one area simply encouraged the animals to attack livestock in neighboring places.” What I find particularly discouraging about the Biden administration’s oversight of its regulatory agencies is that this is the third such action I have found and published just this last week.
Wildlife Services is tasked with mitigating conflicts between humans and wild animals. In Minnesota, the agency’s staffers answer complaints from ranchers who lose cattle and other livestock to wolf predation. The agency documents and verifies those complaints, and looks for non-lethal ways to protect threatened livestock, like wolf-proof fencing.
If those options don’t work, the agency traps and kills wolves deemed responsible for the loss. USDA officers kill more […]
Allison Morrow, Senior Business Writer - CNN Business
Stephan:
Here is some very interesting news showing what is happening in the global economy with market fluctuations.
Global median wealth actually rose 3% in 2022, as the uber-rich took losses on financial assets. Credit: Abdullah Durmaz /iStockphoto / Getty
NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Last year, as interest rates rose and inflation stayed stubbornly high, total household wealth declined for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis.
That might sound like bad news, but the numbers tell a more optimistic story.
Here’s the deal: The grand total of all the private wealth in the world fell 2.4% to $454.4 trillion, according to the annual Credit Suisse and UBS global wealth report. Much of that was due to losses in stock and bond markets, which disproportionately affect wealthier people.
Meanwhile, global median wealth, a more meaningful indicator of how the typical person is faring, actually rose 3% in 2022.
In short, the average Joe got a bit of a boost and a bunch of millionaires and billionairestook a bath — a phenomenon some refer to as a “rich-cession.”
(For the record: The report defines net worth or “wealth” as the value of a household’s financial assets […]
Nicholas Kristof, Pultizer Prize Winning Columnist - The New York Times
Stephan:
I see this, in its own perverse way, as good news. It is a terrible story, but the fact that it is appearing in the New York Times, means to me that other voices like Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof have reached the same conclusions you have been reading about in SR. Perhaps, as a culture, we are slowly awakening and something can actually be done to end America’s illness profit system and turn it into a real healthcare system.
It’s not just that life expectancy in Mississippi (71.9) now appears to be a hair shorter than in Bangladesh (72.4). Nor that an infant is some 70 percent more likely to die in the United States than in other wealthy countries.
Nor even that for the first time in probably a century, the likelihood that an American child will live to the age of 20 has dropped.
All that is tragic and infuriating, but to me the most heart-rending symbol of America’s failure in health care is the avoidable amputations that result from poorly managed diabetes.
A medical setting cannot hide the violence of a saw cutting through a leg or muffle the grating noise it makes as it hacks through the tibia or disguise the distinctive charred odor of cauterized blood vessels. That noise of a saw on bone is a rebuke to an American health care system that, as Walter Cronkite reportedly observed, is neither healthy, caring […]
This is another disgusting story about how financial corporations profit by funding MAGAt hate, racism, and gender hysteria. At the head of the piece I have published the financial entities that trade in hate, racism, and gender hysteria, and the charities that benefit from being funded to support this nastiness. If you have a financial relationship in any way with any of these organizations please do a good deed and end your connection with any of them.
The last few years have seen a wave of anti-trans Republican legislation introduced across the country, and much of it has become law. To name just a few examples: In 2016, North Carolina and South Dakota banned transgender kids from using public bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity. Over two years ago, Idaho banned transgender women students from competing on sports teams that align with their gender identity. And last year, Alabama became the second state to ban gender-affirming care for minors and the first to criminalize doctors who provide it, threatening them with up to 10 years in prison.
The same organization was behindtheselaws: Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal powerhouse that drafts, lobbies for, and defends anti-LGBTQ legislation and policies. This year alone, 500 bills have already been introduced around the country. And ADF’s power is only growing: The nonprofit organization’s annual gross receipts doubled from $52 million in the 2016 fiscal […]
