Who Is The Worst Democrat In Congress-- And The Best Republican?

Seriously-- would YOU shake hands with Trump without a glove on?

Arizona Blue Dog Kyrsten Sinema is no longer the worst Democrat in the House. Thanks to Chuck Schumer's always screwed-up recruiting agenda, she's now the worst Democrat in the Senate. Actually her crucial vote score (38.46%) is tied with Jo Manchin, so... to be fair, she's tied for worst. But that leaves the important slot in the House open.

Who's the worst Democrat-- at least so far-- in the House? Well, according to ProgressivePunch-- and their explanation of how they arrive at their scores is here-- there is a 3-way tied between 3 especially reactionary Blue Dog freshmen: Joe Cunningham (SC), Ben McAdams (UT) and Jeff Van Drew (NJ). Each scores a 30.0%. Two Republicans-- Justin Amash (MI) and Brian Fitzpatrick (PA)-- are voting more progressively than they are. There's a simple case for breaking the tie and declaring Van Drew the winner (the loser). Cunningham's district has a PVI of R+10 and Trump beat Hillary there 53.5% to 40.4%. McAdam's districts even worse-- R+13 and Hillary only managed to win 32.4%. Van Drew's district, on the other had, isn't deep red, but a normal swing district. The PVI is R+1, the least red of the 5 New Jersey swing districts occupied by Democrats. Obama lost both times he ran in McAdam's district and in Cunningham's district, but Obama won both times in Van Drew's district-- and with slightly over 53% both times. Trump beat Hillary 50.6% to 46.0%, a much less drastic loss than in McAdam's and Cunningham's districts.

In other words, NJ-02 is a place that will vote for someone with a progressive message. Van Drew is going in the opposite direction-- pure GOP-lite. He even votes with Republicans other silly game-playing procedural roll calls meant to do nothing but embarrass Democrats. Van Drew-- a dentist but absolutely not a brain surgeon-- is one of the only freshmen still falling for it.

Late last week, the editorial board of the South Jersey Times took a look at his voting record so far, noting what a kiss up he is to Trump.

The media in New Jersey made a big deal about the lengths to which U.S. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, the freshman South Jersey Democrat, went to make sure that he was seen shaking hands with President Donald Trump at last month’s State of the Union address.

It looked at times as if Van Drew had aced a course in Advanced Photobombing 101. NJTV reported that Van Drew tugged at the president’s coat sleeves three times until he got Trump’s attention.

“I shook his hand going in and coming out,” Van Drew told columnist Paul Mulshine later. “The president of the United States occupies the highest office in the land. It’s traditional to greet him.”

One can argue that a president who seems to disrespect everyone else doesn’t command respect from opposite-party members of Congress. But to Van Drew, who represents the 2nd District, a hand-clasp with Trump is the ultimate symbol of bipartisanship.

Last week, Van Drew noted that he’d been named co-chair of the National Security Task Force of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of conservative Democrats named for their historic origins as a response to “yellow-dog Democrats” who would vote the party line even if its candidate was a yellow dog.

Although another newly elected New Jersey House Democrat, Mikie Sherill of the 11th District, has also joined the Blue Dogs, she hasn’t embraced the designation the way Van Drew has.

Broadly, Van Drew has refused to take any of numerous opportunities to attack Trump’s call for a greatly extended border wall. Congress’ failure to provide the president with $5.7 billion for the wall prompted the recent, but unsuccessful, Trump-engineered government shutdown. Further, Van Drew’s statement about his Blue Dog leadership states that he’s “looking forward to proactively engage on issues that promote a strong and smart national security for the United States.”

Van Drew was the same kind of fake Democrat in the New Jersey state Senate before the DCCC recruited him to run for the open NJ-02 seat. In the legislature, he was considered the worst Democrat, always the one most likely to betray the party and back the GOP. That he was, was the whole reason the DCCC recruited him. Those are always the kinds of Democrats the DC establishment tries to bring into Congress. It's so self-defeating and self-loathing. (It was the same with Schumer's design to recruit Sinema.)

Justin Amash is an odd duck. He's a popular Grand Rapids libertarian who tends to vote with the GOP less than any of his GOP colleagues. Until he passed away last month, Walter Jones (R-NC) sometimes beat Amash voting more progressively and these days, super-vulnerable swing district Pennsylvanian Brian Fitzpatrick sometimes votes more progressively. But, generally speaking... well, let's put it like this: if I could trade Van Drew for any Republican, it would be Amash... hands down.



In 2012, the Democrats once ran some shithead, Steve Pestka, against him from the right! An anti-Choice homophobic piece of crap "Democrat"... and I enjoyed watching Amash wipe the floor with him. Yesterday, CNN dubbed Amash the loneliest Republican in Congress, after an interview with Jake Tapper. Haley Byrd wrote that Amash's "firm libertarian stances on foreign policy, surveillance and federal spending put him in an awkward position with many in his own party. And two years into Donald Trump's presidency, Amash appears lonelier than ever. His closest allies-- conservatives who routinely sparred with the GOP establishment in the past-- have coalesced behind Trump even as his political and legal woes have mounted, with Republican lawmakers now marching in lock-step behind the President even on issues they historically haven't supported, like shutting down the government. But that's not Amash's style."

Some have suggested Amash run for president in 2020 as a Libertarian. He told Tapper he "would never rule anything out" but it's not on his radar. I don't see him doing anything like that. He's important in Congress and he knows it.

The divide was clearer than ever during a February oversight hearing with former Trump attorney Michael Cohen. While most Republicans on the panel stuck to Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan's strategy of attacking Cohen's character and playing defense for the President, Amash asked sharp questions designed to draw out information.

..."From the time the President was elected, I was urging them to remain independent and to be willing to push back against the President where they thought he was wrong," said Amash. "They've decided to stick with the President time and again, even where they disagree with him privately."

Amash was the sole member of the caucus to vote against Trump's use of emergency powers to seize funds for his long-desired wall along the southern border, even though the Freedom Caucus was known for lambasting President Barack Obama's executive maneuvering to get around Congress.

"In some sense you've delegitimized objections to the President," Amash said of his peers. "You've built up such credibility for him that you just can't challenge him anymore."

Asked if he'd thought about leaving the Freedom Caucus in recent months, the congressman admitted he has been "disenchanted" enough to consider it at times. But he said having close partners to work with on issues he cares about has kept him from calling it quits.

Still, the relationship has evolved.

Leading up to the 2018 election, Amash started to feel like the group wasn't going to turn around. Since then, he hasn't been attending all of the meetings like he used to, going only "infrequently," he told CNN.

"I came to a meeting and really gave them a dramatic speech about what my concerns were and what we needed to do as a group and how we were losing sight of our purpose and our principles," Amash recalled. "And that was sort of it."

Tension built as Amash regularly argued for the group to return to a focus on opening up the legislative process. In recent years, it has become harder and harder for rank-and-file members to have a say in lawmaking. Leaders in both parties opt for a top-down approach, rejecting the idea of allowing a robust amendments process. When the Senate was debating the GOP health care bill, only a small handful of senators actually knew what would be included in the bill-- even up until the final hours before the vote. And the House recently experienced its most closed session in history under now-retired House Speaker Paul Ryan.

The question of whether to prioritize process or policy has plagued the Freedom Caucus since its inception, and divisions have only heightened in the Trump age. It hasn't helped that Amash has lost key allies like Raul Labrador, the Idaho lawmaker who left Congress last year to run unsuccessfully for governor of his state, and Mark Sanford, who lost his South Carolina primary to a more Trump-friendly opponent in 2018.

Yet Amash reiterated his Freedom Caucus colleagues remain some of his closest friends in Congress.

"They are good, kind people," he said. "I may have my disagreements with some of the current approach, but I'd still take them over pretty much anyone in Congress."

And members who differ with Amash's stance say he still brings a helpful perspective.

"Justin, like all of us, is just looking for a way to be the most effective and efficient he can be," Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs said. "When we're debating, he engages in debate and offers a ton of valuable comments and I think that's invaluable for all of us."

Amash has the rhetorical style of someone who really enjoys arguing for the sake of arguing but also benefits from fiercely believing what he says. He also has a wry sense of humor.

Soon after inauguration day in early 2017, Trump signed a travel ban targeting six majority Muslim countries. Amash-- whose mother is a Syrian immigrant and whose father came to America as a Palestinian refugee in 1956-- opposed the executive order. In the immediate aftermath of the ban, protestors flocked to airports, where travelers were stranded.

At the height of the outcry, Amash excused his lateness to a Freedom Caucus meeting one night with a joke at the administration's expense, according to one attendee who told CNN about the incident at the time. "Hey guys. Sorry I'm late," he said. "The travel ban got me held up at the airport-- they're screening all the Syrians."

Half of the room was amused by the quip. The other half-- not so much. It was memorable enough that a lawmaker who also attended the meeting still recalled the episode more than two years later.

To his closest friends in Congress, Amash's ability to call out his own side is part of his charm.

"Justin Amash is probably one of the most, if not the most consistent and honorable members of Congress that I met in the eight years I was there," Labrador, the former Idaho representative, said. "He always outlined what he believes in, why he believes in the things that he does and why he makes the decisions that he makes."

It's not clear what's next for Amash, whether another term in the House or something new. He admits he's thought about everything from breaking away from the GOP to launching a presidential bid.

"I never stop thinking about these sorts of things," he told CNN. "It's not because I have any immediate plans or anything like that, but I never stop thinking about those things because there is a big problem with the current two-party system we have, and someone has to shake it up."

"Now, is it possible for anyone to shake it up and make a difference?" he added. "I don't know."

Let Fredo Trump Serve As A Warning To Mankind: This Shit's Getting More Serious Than Putin-Gate-- 3 Songs

We have't talked about kakistocracies in a while. The simple definition of a word from the 1600s describes a state run by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous citizens. Paul Krugman was one of many commentators to apply the word to the Trump Regime, writing in mid-January of this year that "[Trump is] surrounding himself with people who share his contempt for everything that is best in America. What we're looking at, all too obviously, is an American kakistocracy-- rule by the worst." The current Putin-Gate scandal's encroachment on poor Fredo Trump has brought the word to the front of many peoples' minds again.

And the next step, instead of wondering when the Trump family will start being indicted and tried, should be about how America is going to go back to serious governance. Over the weekend, New York Magazine published a piece by David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth that ought to, but probably won't, wake up Trump die-hards to what they're risking by enabling this degenerate and his regime. Wallace-Wells starts with a nightmare scenario for the direction a misfit like Trump and, beyond him, the Republican Party in general, in bringing the country: "It is," he wrote, "I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas-- and the cities they will drown-- have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough. Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century."

That sounds pretty kakistocratic! "[N]o matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called 'scientific reticence' in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings; the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past; our uncertainty about uncertainty, which the climate writer Naomi Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing as though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible; the way we assume climate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere; the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers; the discomfort of considering a problem that is very difficult, if not impossible, to solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear. But aversion arising from fear is a form of denial, too." The last thing mankind needs no is Donald Trump and his miscreant-studded regime running the show and calling the shots based on personal opportunities for enrichment.

The present tense of climate change-- the destruction we’ve already baked into our future-- is horrifying enough. Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade. Two degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold of catastrophe: tens of millions of climate refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues serial reports, often called the “gold standard” of climate research; the most recent one projects us to hit four degrees of warming by the beginning of the next century, should we stay the present course. But that’s just a median projection. The upper end of the probability curve runs as high as eight degrees-- and the authors still haven’t figured out how to deal with that permafrost melt. The IPCC reports also don’t fully account for the albedo effect (less ice means less reflected and more absorbed sunlight, hence more warming); more cloud cover (which traps heat); or the dieback of forests and other flora (which extract carbon from the atmosphere). Each of these promises to accelerate warming, and the geological record shows that temperature can shift as much as ten degrees or more in a single decade. The last time the planet was even four degrees warmer, Peter Brannen points out in The Ends of the World, his new history of the planet’s major extinction events, the oceans were hundreds of feet higher.

The Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating. This is what Stephen Hawking had in mind when he said, this spring, that the species needs to colonize other planets in the next century to survive, and what drove Elon Musk, last month, to unveil his plans to build a Mars habitat in 40 to 100 years. These are nonspecialists, of course, and probably as inclined to irrational panic as you or I. But the many sober-minded scientists I interviewed over the past several months-- the most credentialed and tenured in the field, few of them inclined to alarmism and many advisers to the IPCC who nevertheless criticize its conservatism-- have quietly reached an apocalyptic conclusion, too: No plausible program of emissions reductions alone can prevent climate disaster...

Heat Death

Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having to continually cool off, like panting dogs. For that, the temperature needs to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing heat off the skin so the engine can keep pumping. At seven degrees of warming, that would become impossible for large portions of the planet’s equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem; in the jungles of Costa Rica, for instance, where humidity routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when it’s over 105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal. And the effect would be fast: Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out.

...[T]he climate window that has allowed for human life is very narrow, even by the standards of planetary history. At 11 or 12 degrees of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat. Things almost certainly won’t get that hot this century, though models of unabated emissions do bring us that far eventually... Actually, we’re about there already. Since 1980, the planet has experienced a 50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or extreme heat; a bigger increase is to come. The five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002, and soon, the IPCC warns, simply being outdoors that time of year will be unhealthy for much of the globe. Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today. As Joseph Romm has put it in his authoritative primer Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain “would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.” The high-end IPCC estimate, remember, is two degrees warmer still. By the end of the century, the World Bank has estimated, the coolest months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th century. Air-conditioning can help but will ultimately only add to the carbon problem; plus, the climate-controlled malls of the Arab emirates aside, it is not remotely plausible to wholesale air-condition all the hottest parts of the world, many of them also the poorest. And indeed, the crisis will be most dramatic across the Middle East and Persian Gulf, where in 2015 the heat index registered temperatures as high as 163 degrees Fahrenheit. As soon as several decades from now, the hajj will become physically impossible for the 2 million Muslims who make the pilgrimage each year...

The End of Food

Climates differ and plants vary, but the basic rule for staple cereal crops grown at optimal temperature is that for every degree of warming, yields decline by 10 percent. Some estimates run as high as 15 or even 17 percent. Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, we may have as many as 50 percent more people to feed and 50 percent less grain to give them. And proteins are worse: It takes 16 calories of grain to produce just a single calorie of hamburger meat, butchered from a cow that spent its life polluting the climate with methane farts...[T]heoretically, a warmer climate will make it easier to grow corn in Greenland. But as the pathbreaking work by Rosamond Naylor and David Battisti has shown, the tropics are already too hot to efficiently grow grain, and those places where grain is produced today are already at optimal growing temperature-- which means even a small warming will push them down the slope of declining productivity. And you can’t easily move croplands north a few hundred miles, because yields in places like remote Canada and Russia are limited by the quality of soil there; it takes many centuries for the planet to produce optimally fertile dirt.

Drought might be an even bigger problem than heat, with some of the world’s most arable land turning quickly to desert. Precipitation is notoriously hard to model, yet predictions for later this century are basically unanimous: unprecedented droughts nearly everywhere food is today produced. By 2080, without dramatic reductions in emissions, southern Europe will be in permanent extreme drought, much worse than the American dust bowl ever was. The same will be true in Iraq and Syria and much of the rest of the Middle East; some of the most densely populated parts of Australia, Africa, and South America; and the breadbasket regions of China. None of these places, which today supply much of the world’s food, will be reliable sources of any. As for the original dust bowl: The droughts in the American plains and Southwest would not just be worse than in the 1930s, a 2015 NASA study predicted, but worse than any droughts in a thousand years-- and that includes those that struck between 1100 and 1300, which “dried up all the rivers East of the Sierra Nevada mountains” and may have been responsible for the death of the Anasazi civilization.

Remember, we do not live in a world without hunger as it is. Far from it: Most estimates put the number of undernourished at 800 million globally. In case you haven’t heard, this spring has already brought an unprecedented quadruple famine to Africa and the Middle East; the U.N. has warned that separate starvation events in Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Yemen could kill 20 million this year alone.

Climate Plagues

...There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years-- in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice.

The Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In Alaska, already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu that infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million-- about 5 percent of the world’s population and almost six times as many as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of gruesome capstone. As the BBC reported in May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in Siberian ice, too-- an abridged history of devastating human sickness, left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun... [L]ast year, a boy was killed and 20 others infected by anthrax released when retreating permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the bacteria at least 75 years earlier; 2,000 present-day reindeer were infected, too, carrying and spreading the disease beyond the tundra.

What concerns epidemiologists more than ancient diseases are existing scourges relocated, rewired, or even re-evolved by warming. The first effect is geographical. Before the early-modern period, when adventuring sailboats accelerated the mixing of peoples and their bugs, human provinciality was a guard against pandemic. Today, even with globalization and the enormous intermingling of human populations, our ecosystems are mostly stable, and this functions as another limit, but global warming will scramble those ecosystems and help disease trespass those limits as surely as Cortés did. You don’t worry much about dengue or malaria if you are living in Maine or France. But as the tropics creep northward and mosquitoes migrate with them, you will. You didn’t much worry about Zika a couple of years ago, either...

Unbreathable Air

Our lungs need oxygen, but that is only a fraction of what we breathe. The fraction of carbon dioxide is growing: It just crossed 400 parts per million, and high-end estimates extrapolating from current trends suggest it will hit 1,000 ppm by 2100. At that concentration, compared to the air we breathe now, human cognitive ability declines by 21 percent.

Other stuff in the hotter air is even scarier, with small increases in pollution capable of shortening life spans by ten years. The warmer the planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by mid-century, Americans will likely suffer a 70 percent increase in unhealthy ozone smog, the National Center for Atmospheric Research has projected. By 2090, as many as 2 billion people globally will be breathing air above the WHO “safe” level; one paper last month showed that, among other effects, a pregnant mother’s exposure to ozone raises the child’s risk of autism (as much as tenfold, combined with other environmental factors). Which does make you think again about the autism epidemic in West Hollywood.

Already, more than 10,000 people die each day from the small particles emitted from fossil-fuel burning; each year, 339,000 people die from wildfire smoke, in part because climate change has extended forest-fire season (in the U.S., it’s increased by 78 days since 1970). By 2050, according to the U.S. Forest Service, wildfires will be twice as destructive as they are today; in some places, the area burned could grow fivefold. What worries people even more is the effect that would have on emissions, especially when the fires ravage forests arising out of peat. Peatland fires in Indonesia in 1997, for instance, added to the global CO2 release by up to 40 percent, and more burning only means more warming only means more burning. There is also the terrifying possibility that rain forests like the Amazon, which in 2010 suffered its second “hundred-year drought” in the space of five years, could dry out enough to become vulnerable to these kinds of devastating, rolling forest fires-- which would not only expel enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere but also shrink the size of the forest. That is especially bad because the Amazon alone provides 20 percent of our oxygen...

Perpetual War

Climatologists are very careful when talking about Syria. They want you to know that while climate change did produce a drought that contributed to civil war, it is not exactly fair to say that the conflict is the result of warming; next door, for instance, Lebanon suffered the same crop failures. But researchers like Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang have managed to quantify some of the non-obvious relationships between temperature and violence: For every half-degree of warming, they say, societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the likelihood of armed conflict. In climate science, nothing is simple, but the arithmetic is harrowing: A planet five degrees warmer would have at least half again as many wars as we do today. Overall, social conflict could more than double this century.

This is one reason that, as nearly every climate scientist I spoke to pointed out, the U.S. military is obsessed with climate change: The drowning of all American Navy bases by sea-level rise is trouble enough, but being the world’s policeman is quite a bit harder when the crime rate doubles. Of course, it’s not just Syria where climate has contributed to conflict. Some speculate that the elevated level of strife across the Middle East over the past generation reflects the pressures of global warming-- a hypothesis all the more cruel considering that warming began accelerating when the industrialized world extracted and then burned the region’s oil.

What accounts for the relationship between climate and conflict? Some of it comes down to agriculture and economics; a lot has to do with forced migration, already at a record high, with at least 65 million displaced people wandering the planet right now. But there is also the simple fact of individual irritability. Heat increases municipal crime rates, and swearing on social media, and the likelihood that a major-league pitcher, coming to the mound after his teammate has been hit by a pitch, will hit an opposing batter in retaliation. And the arrival of air-conditioning in the developed world, in the middle of the past century, did little to solve the problem of the summer crime wave.

Permanent Economic Collapse

The murmuring mantra of global neoliberalism, which prevailed between the end of the Cold War and the onset of the Great Recession, is that economic growth would save us from anything and everything.

But in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, a growing number of historians studying what they call “fossil capitalism” have begun to suggest that the entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly in the 18th century, is not the result of innovation or trade or the dynamics of global capitalism but simply our discovery of fossil fuels and all their raw power-- a onetime injection of new “value” into a system that had previously been characterized by global subsistence living. Before fossil fuels, nobody lived better than their parents or grandparents or ancestors from 500 years before, except in the immediate aftermath of a great plague like the Black Death, which allowed the lucky survivors to gobble up the resources liberated by mass graves. After we’ve burned all the fossil fuels, these scholars suggest, perhaps we will return to a “steady state” global economy. Of course, that onetime injection has a devastating long-term cost: climate change.

The most exciting research on the economics of warming has also come from Hsiang and his colleagues, who are not historians of fossil capitalism but who offer some very bleak analysis of their own: Every degree Celsius of warming costs, on average, 1.2 percent of GDP (an enormous number, considering we count growth in the low single digits as “strong”). This is the sterling work in the field, and their median projection is for a 23 percent loss in per capita earning globally by the end of this century (resulting from changes in agriculture, crime, storms, energy, mortality, and labor). Tracing the shape of the probability curve is even scarier: There is a 12 percent chance that climate change will reduce global output by more than 50 percent by 2100, they say, and a 51 percent chance that it lowers per capita GDP by 20 percent or more by then, unless emissions decline. By comparison, the Great Recession lowered global GDP by about 6 percent, in a onetime shock; Hsiang and his colleagues estimate a one-in-eight chance of an ongoing and irreversible effect by the end of the century that is eight times worse.

The scale of that economic devastation is hard to comprehend, but you can start by imagining what the world would look like today with an economy half as big, which would produce only half as much value, generating only half as much to offer the workers of the world. It makes the grounding of flights out of heat-stricken Phoenix last month seem like pathetically small economic potatoes. And, among other things, it makes the idea of postponing government action on reducing emissions and relying solely on growth and technology to solve the problem an absurd business calculation.

Every round-trip ticket on flights from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.

Poisoned Oceans

That the sea will become a killer is a given. Barring a radical reduction of emissions, we will see at least four feet of sea-level rise and possibly ten by the end of the century. A third of the world’s major cities are on the coast, not to mention its power plants, ports, navy bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshlands, and rice-paddy empires, and even those above ten feet will flood much more easily, and much more regularly, if the water gets that high. At least 600 million people live within ten meters of sea level today.

But the drowning of those homelands is just the start. At present, more than a third of the world’s carbon is sucked up by the oceans-- thank God, or else we’d have that much more warming already. But the result is what’s called “ocean acidification,” which, on its own, may add a half a degree to warming this century. It is also already burning through the planet’s water basins-- you may remember these as the place where life arose in the first place. You have probably heard of “coral bleaching”-- that is, coral dying-- which is very bad news, because reefs support as much as a quarter of all marine life and supply food for half a billion people. Ocean acidification will fry fish populations directly, too, though scientists aren’t yet sure how to predict the effects on the stuff we haul out of the ocean to eat; they do know that in acid waters, oysters and mussels will struggle to grow their shells, and that when the pH of human blood drops as much as the oceans’ pH has over the past generation, it induces seizures, comas, and sudden death.

That isn’t all that ocean acidification can do. Carbon absorption can initiate a feedback loop in which underoxygenated waters breed different kinds of microbes that turn the water still more “anoxic,” first in deep ocean “dead zones,” then gradually up toward the surface. There, the small fish die out, unable to breathe, which means oxygen-eating bacteria thrive, and the feedback loop doubles back. This process, in which dead zones grow like cancers, choking off marine life and wiping out fisheries, is already quite advanced in parts of the Gulf of Mexico and just off Namibia, where hydrogen sulfide is bubbling out of the sea along a thousand-mile stretch of land known as the “Skeleton Coast.” The name originally referred to the detritus of the whaling industry, but today it’s more apt than ever. Hydrogen sulfide is so toxic that evolution has trained us to recognize the tiniest, safest traces of it, which is why our noses are so exquisitely skilled at registering flatulence. Hydrogen sulfide is also the thing that finally did us in that time 97 percent of all life on Earth died, once all the feedback loops had been triggered and the circulating jet streams of a warmed ocean ground to a halt-- it’s the planet’s preferred gas for a natural holocaust. Gradually, the ocean’s dead zones spread, killing off marine species that had dominated the oceans for hundreds of millions of years, and the gas the inert waters gave off into the atmosphere poisoned everything on land. Plants, too. It was millions of years before the oceans recovered.

The Great Filter



So why can’t we see it? In his recent book-length essay The Great Derangement, the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh wonders why global warming and natural disaster haven’t become major subjects of contemporary fiction-- why we don’t seem able to imagine climate catastrophe, and why we haven’t yet had a spate of novels in the genre he basically imagines into half-existence and names “the environmental uncanny.” “Consider, for example, the stories that congeal around questions like, ‘Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?’ or ‘Where were you on 9/11?’ ” he writes. “Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, ‘Where were you at 400 ppm?’ or ‘Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?’ ” His answer: Probably not, because the dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, especially in novels, which tend to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the poisonous miasma of social fate.

Surely this blindness will not last-- the world we are about to inhabit will not permit it. In a six-degree-warmer world, the Earth’s ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters that we will just start calling them “weather”: a constant swarm of out-of-control typhoons and tornadoes and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly with climate events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations. The strongest hurricanes will come more often, and we’ll have to invent new categories with which to describe them; tornadoes will grow longer and wider and strike much more frequently, and hail rocks will quadruple in size. Humans used to watch the weather to prophesy the future; going forward, we will see in its wrath the vengeance of the past. Early naturalists talked often about “deep time”-- the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. What lies in store for us is more like what the Victorian anthropologists identified as “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience, described by Aboriginal Australians, of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea-- a feeling of history happening all at once.

It is. Many people perceive climate change as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries-- a helpful perspective, in a way, since it is the carbon-burning processes that began in 18th-century England that lit the fuse of everything that followed. But more than half of the carbon humanity has exhaled into the atmosphere in its entire history has been emitted in just the past three decades; since the end of World War II, the figure is 85 percent. Which means that, in the length of a single generation, global warming has brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe, and that the story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is also the story of a single lifetime. My father’s, for instance: born in 1938, among his first memories the news of Pearl Harbor and the mythic Air Force of the propaganda films that followed, films that doubled as advertisements for imperial-American industrial might; and among his last memories the coverage of the desperate signing of the Paris climate accords on cable news, ten weeks before he died of lung cancer last July. Or my mother’s: born in 1945, to German Jews fleeing the smokestacks through which their relatives were incinerated, now enjoying her 72nd year in an American commodity paradise, a paradise supported by the supply chains of an industrialized developing world. She has been smoking for 57 of those years, unfiltered.

Or the scientists’. Some of the men who first identified a changing climate (and given the generation, those who became famous were men) are still alive; a few are even still working. Wally Broecker is 84 years old and drives to work at the Lamont-Doherty observatory across the Hudson every day from the Upper West Side. Like most of those who first raised the alarm, he believes that no amount of emissions reduction alone can meaningfully help avoid disaster. Instead, he puts his faith in carbon capture-- untested technology to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which Broecker estimates will cost at least several trillion dollars-- and various forms of “geoengineering,” the catchall name for a variety of moon-shot technologies far-fetched enough that many climate scientists prefer to regard them as dreams, or nightmares, from science fiction. He is especially focused on what’s called the aerosol approach-- dispersing so much sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere that when it converts to sulfuric acid, it will cloud a fifth of the horizon and reflect back 2 percent of the sun’s rays, buying the planet at least a little wiggle room, heat-wise. “Of course, that would make our sunsets very red, would bleach the sky, would make more acid rain,” he says. “But you have to look at the magnitude of the problem. You got to watch that you don’t say the giant problem shouldn’t be solved because the solution causes some smaller problems.” He won’t be around to see that, he told me. “But in your lifetime …”

Upstate New York Voters Just Elected A Dead Trumpist To The State Legislature

Friday, WYSL hate talk radio host/wing-nut Assemblyman Bill Nojay, a loud and early Trumpanzee backer, was due in court on fraud charges after embezzling money from a trust fund he had handled as an attorney. Instead, he decided to shoot himself a few feet from his family's burial plot at Riverside Cemetery. Longtime DWT readers may recall Nojay from 2012 when we looked into his deranged incitement of racial hatred against Japanese-American progressive congressional candidate Nate Shinagawa.

We don't celebrate anyone's suicide at DWT, not even a deplorable piece of crap like Nojay, who had the worst voting record of any member of the New York Assembly. After all, he had a wife and 3 children and both his parents are still alive. The world is, however, much better off without him, not just because of his racism and vicious right-wing politics, but because of his typically Republican crooked business practices.

Nojay has been at the middle of various controversies recently. He was a silent partner in a company that won a tentative contract to oversee the second phase of the $1.3 billion Rochester schools modernization project. And he was one of four defendants in a fraud trial in Cambodia, where Nojay and three other men formed a company to process and export rice. The four were accused of obtaining a $1 million investment from a wealthy Cambodian, then shutting the company down.

While multiple media outlets Friday linked Nojay's criminal charge to either the school modernization or the Cambodia project, the Cambodian case had nothing to do with it. And while agents reportedly found the alleged fraud as an offshoot of an investigation into the modernization program, the criminal charge had nothing to do with that matter either.

Instead, Nojay was to be criminally charged in connection with the alleged disappearance of funds from an account he managed for a longtime client and friend, architect Carlton "Bud" DeWolff, sources said.

DeWolff said Friday afternoon that the FBI had informed him several weeks ago that $1.8 million from the escrow account had been traced to Nojay, who had access to the money as DeWolff's lawyer. At first the FBI thought DeWolff was involved in diverting the funds but DeWolff said he convinced them that he had not been.

It's unclear how much of the money Nojay was accused of embezzling.

The funds originated from a major project for which DeWolff provided architectural services-- the King Hussein Center for Biotechnology and Cancer, a large medical complex near Amman, Jordan. The funds in the escrow account were intended to pay for DeWolff's services.

DeWolff said Friday that in recent weeks Nojay had returned much of the money that had been taken from the escrow account.

Yesterday, the NY Times reported that voters in his very Republican district-- which stretches from Pittsford southeast of Rochester down through Honeoye Falls, Geneseo, Mount Morris, Nunda and Dansville to just south of Hornell (all of Livingston County, southern Monroe County and northwestern Steuben County) were urged by the GOP "to cast their ballots for a dead man. Three men in a room are preparing to pick his political heir. The funeral has yet to be held, but the struggle to replace him is already on... Republican party leaders in the three counties that fall partly or fully within the 133rd Assembly District-- Livingston, Monroe and Steuben-- will choose someone to run as the general-election Republican candidate in his place. They have until 10 days after his death to do so, or about a week" from today.

The choice of a successor for Mr. Nojay lies with the chairmen of the Republican parties in each of the three counties, whose votes will be weighted according to the percentage of votes cast in each county the last time Mr. Nojay was elected. Given the district’s deep Republican bent, whoever ends up with the nomination will most likely go on to Albany next year to join the Republican minority in the Assembly.

Lowell Conrad, the chairman of the Livingston County GOP, who will have the biggest say in who gets the nomination now, said he wants to replace Nojay with someone "as close to him as possible, philosophically." Presumably he's talking about the racism and Trumpism and all that crap that Nojay espoused in public, not Nojay's private penchant for stealing whatever wasn't nailed down and super-glued.

So what happened? Counting finished at 11:30 PM (ET) and with all the votes now counted, Nojay won. There are 34,432 registered Republicans eligible to vote in the 103 precincts that make up the 133rd Assembly District. The corrupt, dead wing-nut beat the live Republican mayor of Honeoye Falls, Richard Milne, 2,736 (60.25%) to 1,763 (38.82%).