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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
Stephan: This is an absolutely horrifying dose of facts. I will let it speak for itself.
A man shovels coal at a mine in Shanxi, China, in 2016. China has pledged carbon neutrality by 2060, but its new coalspree is the latest sign it’s putting off the immediate actions needed to meet that goal. Credit: Qilai Shen/In Pictures/Getty
The world is still barreling in the wrong direction on coal power plant construction, and China — despite its pledges to scale down fossil fuels to avert climate catastrophe — continues to drive that trend.
China built the majority of the coal plants completed in 2020, and also accounted for 85 percent of the world’s new coal plant proposals, according to a report out Monday by Global Energy Monitor, an environmental research and advocacy group. That means instead of transitioning away from coal power — the source of nearly 40 percent of China’s carbon emissions — it is doubling down.
And due in large part to China, global coal power capacity under development increased for the first time since 2015.
At the same time, the EU and US are retiring coal plants rapidly as renewables, natural gas, and climate regulations […]
Stephan: I think America's foreign policy in relation to Cuba since the 1960s has been governed more by emotion than good sense. Cuba's healthcare system is a model of how a small poor country can nonetheless provide better social outcome data than the illness profit system of its great northern neighbor.
Since last year, approximately 440 Cubans have died from COVID-19, giving Cuba one of the lowest death rates per capita in the world. Cuba is also developing five COVID-19 vaccines, including two which have entered stage 3 trials. Cuba has heavily invested in its medical and pharmaceutical system for decades, in part because of the six-decade U.S. embargo that has made it harder for Cuba to import equipment and raw materials from other countries. That investment, coupled with the country’s free, universal healthcare system, has helped Cuba keep the virus under control and quickly develop vaccines against it, says Dr. Rolando Pérez Rodríguez, the director of science and innovation at BioCubaFarma, which oversees Cuba’s medicine development. “We have long experience with these kinds of technologies,” he says. We also speak with Reed Lindsay, journalist and founder of the independent, Cuba-focused media organization Belly of the Beast, who says U.S. sanctions on Cuba continue to cripple the country. “Cuba is going through an unbelievable economic crisis, and the sanctions have been absolutely devastating,” says Lindsay.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: As the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 tops 560,000 and Brazil records over 4,200 […]
Stephan: I have lived most of my life on coastlines on both the Eastern and Western coasts. I live on an island. And I particularly like living near wilderness, because I have spent some of my most memorable time in the woods, or under the water. I like living outside of small towns that have some character. As the climate change increases and I have looked at the submergence maps, and projected climate data I have grown ever more concerned that most of these places, and even much larger communities, are not adequately preparing for what they will face. Here is a good assessment of that.
If you are located in one of these places I urge you to get involved with your local government structure. Collective citizen intention -- it is the 8 Laws again -- are what it will take to get things up to speed where you live. Pay attention to the data as it is made available.
The Foxconn factory promises jobs and investment in Wisconsin, but for neighboring Illinois it’s a potential flooding risk. Credit: Mark Hertzberg/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service/Getty
When then-Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) announced plans in 2017 for a sprawling Foxconn electronics plant, he touted the 13,000 promised jobs and $10 billion investment spread across 1,000 acres, much of it farmland. Downstream across the border in Lake County, Ill., officials focused on a more sinister byproduct: water.
Earlier that summer, more than seven inches of rain drenched the county, setting off flash flooding. Six days later, swollen rivers flowing south from Wisconsin crested at record heights. Families evacuated. More than 3,000 structures flooded. Damage exceeded $12 million.
Where Wisconsin saw jobs and tax revenue, Illinois saw a rising threat. “We realized there were significant storm-water concerns,” said Kurt Woolford, the interim executive director of the Lake County Stormwater Management Commission. “Water doesn’t follow political boundaries, it doesn’t follow state boundaries.”Advertisement
But rainfall estimates used to design storm-water desigsystems do. As they analyzed whether the plans for Foxconn could handle […]
Stephan: I am becoming increasingly concerned that the Republicans, having no clear policy agenda, and faced with a successful president, are devolving into a culture war cult. This has very detrimental implications for kids, particularly, because of the christofascist sex obsession, with LGBTQ kids. You can see this play out in all the legislation suddenly popping up in Republican-controlled state legislatures all over the country.
Middle school studentsCredit: Getty
Republicans, having lost their decade-long fight to prevent same-sex couples from getting married, are now targeting an even more vulnerable population for the next round of culture war hysterics: Trans children.
The GOP is clearly convinced that the way to win the 2022 elections is by stirring people up with lurid, false tales of predatory trans people. They’ve recently passed a slew of state-level bills attacking trans rights, especially in public schools. The victims are some of the people least able to protect themselves: Minor children, many who are already struggling with difficulties stemming from being trans, queer, or otherwise gender nonconforming — a category so broad that it could capture most kids, depending on the interpretation.
Stephan: Since its beginnings with William F. Buckley, I have found the National Review, self-congratulatory, pretentious, and smug. Over those decades it has also proven itself to be intellectually unsound in its reasoning if your criteria are social outcome data. But it is an influential force amongst the right. I take this as a datapoint telling us something important about the emerging anti-democratic White nationalist christofascist movement that has taken over the Republican Party. They do not like democracy, and are going to do everything they can to rig it.
In the last week-plus, the nominally intellectual right-wing publication National Review has run threeseparatearticles arguing that voting shouldn’t be easier to do, because if it is, stupid, ill-informed people will do too much of it. What?
Roughly speaking, we got to this moment like so:
1. Donald Trump lost a presidential election, in which Georgia was one of the states that he lost by a very narrow margin.
2. Trump and his allies in the Republican Party claimed his losses in Georgia and elsewhere were the result of fraud—a centralized plot, carried out in predominately Black areas and coordinated with foreign governments, to rig voting machines and submit fake ballots. This culminated on Jan. 6 when Trump supporters, many of whom were members of white-nationalist groups, stormed the grounds of the Capitol.
3. Republican-controlled state legislatures and statehouses in Georgia and elsewhere passed laws rolling back automatic voter registration, mail-in voting, and early in-person voting, on the grounds that such restrictions are needed to restore public trust in the electoral system. Historically, these methods have been disproportionately used by Black […]
Stephan: I just love stories like this. What was formerly nothing but waste and a problem, turned into a healing asset. Good news.
Before and after images of the land upon which the coffee waste was dumped. Credit: assets.rebelmouse
One of the biggest problems with coffee production is that it generates an incredible amount of waste. Once coffee beans are separated from cherries, about 45% of the entire biomass is discarded.
So for every pound of roasted coffee we enjoy, an equivalent amount of coffee pulp is discarded into massive landfills across the globe. That means that approximately 10 million tons of coffee pulp is discarded into the environment every year.
When disposed of improperly, the waste can cause serious damage soil and water sources.
However, a new study published in the British Ecological Society journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence has found that coffee pulp isn’t just a nuisance to be discarded. It can have an incredibly positive impact on regrowing deforested areas of the planet.
In 2018, researchers from ETH-Zurich and the University of Hawaii spread 30 dump trucks worth of coffee pulp over a roughly 100′ x 130′ area of degraded land in Costa Rica. The experiment took place on a […]
Dan Diamond, Health Policy Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan: "The death of one man: this is a catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of deaths: that is a statistic!" Although the quote is usually attributed to Stalin, the real source is the 1930s German journalist, satirist, and pacifist Kurt Tucholsky. The point though is the death of large numbers of people is almost incomprehensible except as a statistic. And that is where America finds itself when trying to comprehend the catastrophic and deliberate failure of the Trump administration to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. And they knew what they were doing, as this article by Dan Diamond lays out.
It is my opinion that Trump and his orcs should be indicted and tried for crimes against humanity and mass murder. will it happen? Probably not. It seems to be Trump's karma to skate through all the evil he has done in his life. He is the Nero of the modern world.
Former Trump administration official Michael Caputo, left, in 2018. Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Trump appointees in the Department of Health and Human Services last year privately touted their efforts to block or alter scientists’ reports on the coronavirus to more closely align with President Donald Trump’s more optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to newly released documents from congressional investigators.
The documents provide further insight into how senior Trump officials approached last year’s explosion of coronavirus cases in the United States. Even as career government scientists worked to combat the virus, a cadre of Trump appointees was attempting to blunt the scientists’ messages, edit their findings and equip the president with an alternate set of talking points.
Science adviser Paul Alexander wrote to HHS public affairs chief Michael Caputo on Sept. 9, touting two examples of where he said officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had bowed to his pressure and changed language in their reports, according to an email obtained by the House’s select subcommittee on the coronavirus outbreak.
Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate Economist and Professor - Columbia University - The New York Times
Stephan: Once again, Paul Krugman gives us the unvarnished truth, and lays out the failure, incompetence, and sheer nastiness of the Trump and Republican tax cut for the rich.
Nobel Laureate Economist Paul Krugman Credit: Businessweek
Today’s column is about the Biden administration’s proposal for corporate tax reform — a term I use advisedly. For this isn’t just about raising the tax rate, although that’s part of it. It’s also an attempt to crack down on tax avoidance, in particular the strategies multinational corporations use to shift reported profits to low-tax jurisdictions.
Will this happen? Probably, although it will be tricky keeping the Democratic caucus in line (there won’t be any Republican votes). But it wouldn’t be happening if the 2017 Trump tax cut for corporations hadn’t been such a complete flop, hadn’t failed so completely to deliver the promised surge in business investment.
So what I want to talk about here is why even many critics, myself included, thought the Trump tax cut was less bad than the usual Republican tax plan, followed by three reasons we were, it turned out, too kind.
The least bad idea?
Republican tax cuts are usually concentrated on high-income individuals, and are justified with the claim that cutting marginal tax rates will lead to an explosion in individual effort, entrepreneurship, and so on.
