No One Advocates The Death Penalty For The Billionaires And Politicians Responsible For Poisoning Our Environment

 

-by Skip Kaltenheuser

You might already know Elliott Negin, whose writings I worked into Dance with the One that Brought You-- BERNIE!, on NPR’s red-baiting of Bernie, and Scott Pruitt’s Doublespeak Clarifies Him, on yet another disastrous industrial strength Trump appointee hellbent on ransacking the environment. If not, it's never too late. You can catch other writings by Elliott at the Union of Concerned Scientists, where Elliott is a senior writer, and at a number of other publications including the Huffington Post

Elliott’s guest post below underscores that corporate behemoth Exon-Mobile, the world’s fourth-largest oil company and largest that is investor-owned, takes top honors among the world’s phonies. While its public relations people now fret about climate change and claim support for the Paris climate agreement, it continues to pour money into outfits that undermine public awareness of man’s role in global warming and that derail efforts to regulate energy and the environment. While claiming to support a carbon tax, it greases climate denying legislators who oppose it. Does Exxon-Mobil have any connections to the Dark Money sloshing about Washington? Who knows, but I’d bet on it. Recall that Exxon’s scientists warned its executives about the critical impacts of man-made climate change over forty years ago and that their scientists have since been cutting edge in climate science, their knowledge just not shared with the public.

No one is short on cynicism these days, but it’s worth considering such corporate phonies now, as Amy Coney Barrett is catapulted onto the Supreme Court with an irrevocable corporate fix. Her father was a lawyer for Shell Oil for decades and a major player in the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying entity for 600 oil and gas corporations. Why focus on a parent? Because when Barrett was asked about climate change her reply, given while swaths of the American West were aflame, was that she had “no firm views” and couldn’t "offer any kind of informed opinion” on the causes of global warming. Most fourth-graders could best that know-nothing answer. So it sounds like Barrett will be another oil and gas tentacle, at a time the API and affiliates, including Shell, have a lot of skin in the game in cases coming before the Supreme Court.

Elliott describes other tentacles below.

Nero Lives by Nancy Ohanian

ExxonMobil Claims Shift on Climate But Continues to Fund Climate Science Deniers
-by Elliott Negin

After decades of public denial, ExxonMobil now acknowledges that “the risk of climate change is real” and says it is “committed to being part of the solution,” at least according to the company’s website and statements. To that end, the largest investor-owned oil company in the world claims it supports a federal carbon tax and the Paris climate agreement.

But the company’s recently released grantmaking report shows that it has not ended its two-decade-long campaign to stymie government efforts to address climate change. By ExxonMobil’s own accounting, it gave $690,000 to eight climate science denier groups in 2019, a 10 percent drop from 2018. In addition, it continued to fund federal lawmakers who oppose a carbon tax, despite its supposed longtime support for the idea. Forty percent of the nearly $1 million it has contributed so far to congressional incumbent campaigns during the 2019-20 election cycle has gone to 115 of the 150 climate science deniers still in office.

Sixty percent of ExxonMobil’s 2019 donations to climate obstructionist groups for “public information and policy research” went to the US Chamber of Commerce, while another 30 percent was split between the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute, which have been receiving annual grants from the company since it began financing climate disinformation 22 years ago. All told, ExxonMobil has spent more than $37 million on climate science denier organizations from 1998 through 2019, more than any individual funder besides Charles Koch and his brother, the late David Koch, the billionaire owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries. Koch-controlled foundations spent more than $145 million on many of the same groups over roughly the same time period.

Did the top three recipients of ExxonMobil grants for climate science denier groups in 2019 toe the company’s publicly stated line on climate? The short answer is no. If actions speak louder than words, the donations call into question ExxonMobil’s commitment to seriously address the climate crisis and deserve a closer look.

The US Chamber still opposes carbon pollution standards

The US Chamber of Commerce has been a major player in blocking action on climate change going back to the 1990s, when the business lobby and Exxon were members of the Global Climate Coalition, a consortium of corporations and trade associations opposed to government policies that would cut carbon emissions.

But in 2009-- the same year ExxonMobil first announced its support for a carbon tax in a cynical attempt to derail cap-and-trade climate legislation-- the Chamber’s united front began to crack. A handful of Fortune 500 companies-- including Apple, Exelon Corporation and Pacific Gas & Electric-- quit the Chamber over its opposition to the cap-and-trade bill while two other high-profile companies-- Nike and Johnson & Johnson-- retained their membership but rebuked the business lobby for the same reason. Since then, at least a dozen Chamber members, including Hewlett-Packard, General Mills, Mars, Nestlé and Unilever, have headed for the exits.

By contrast, ExxonMobil not only retained its Chamber membership, but it also pledged $5 million in annual installments to help pay for the Chamber’s $250-million renovation of its Washington, D.C., headquarters. In 2019, the company donated $400,000 for the building rehabilitation and another $15,000 to the Chamber’s Corporate Citizenship Center, bringing its total contributions since 2014 to $4.8 million.

What does ExxonMobil get for its money? Among other things, the business lobby goes to bat for it in court by filing lawsuits against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and in the court of public opinion by funding misleading climate-related reports. A prime example is the Chamber’s widely debunked 2017 report that grossly exaggerated the cost to the US economy of complying with the Paris climate agreement. President Donald Trump cited that report as his primary rationale for ignoring the US commitment to the accord, and he has vowed to officially pull the United States out in early November.

However, in 2019, the Chamber seemed to take a 180-degree turn, declaring on its website: “Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option.” Although one could quibble with the assertion that human activity is merely contributing to climate change when in fact burning fossil fuels is the main cause, it was a far cry from when the organization maintained in comments submitted to the EPA in 2009 that “a warming of even 3 [degrees Celsius] in the next 100 years would, on balance, be beneficial to humans.”

But the Chamber’s turnabout was not complete. Although it now concedes the reality of human-caused climate change, it is still pushing private-sector innovation as the solution to the climate crisis rather than much-needed government regulation, which historically has driven technological advances.

So, while the Chamber supports government funding for research and development of advanced nuclear reactors, utility-scale batteries, and carbon capture and storage technology, it backed the Trump administration’s rollbacks of the Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan, which would have reduced power plant carbon emissions and its 2015 “Waters of the United States” rule, which would have protected small streams, wetlands and groundwater from toxic chemicals.

More recently, the Chamber supported the Trump administration’s weakening of the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act by limiting public input in the infrastructure project approval process and rescinding a requirement that federal agencies consider a proposed project’s impact on the climate.

Unlike ExxonMobil’s professed support for a carbon tax, the Chamber has no official position, but if carbon tax legislation ever made it to the Senate or House floor, it presumably would oppose it given its dim view of government regulation.

Likewise, the Chamber’s avowed support for US compliance with the Paris climate accord includes a major caveat. Dan Byers, vice president for policy at the Chamber’s Global Energy Institute, told Politico in August 2019 that it is “absolutely important for the US to remain in the Paris climate agreement” but added that the “Obama administration’s pledge was unrealistic, [and] was going to have a negative impact on our economy. And so we’d like to see that revisited.” In other words, the Chamber would like the United States to remain a party to the agreement so that it could lobby to weaken the US commitment to it.

American Enterprise Institute still downplays the climate threat

In 2019, ExxonMobil gave the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) $110,000, bringing its total since 1998 to $4.76 million-- more than any other of its climate science denier grantees. The 82-year-old, free market think tank also receives generous funding from other climate disinformation network supporters, including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation.

What does ExxonMobil get for its money from AEI? A cheerleader for fossil fuels, economist Benjamin Zycher, who-- contrary to the company’s professed climate positions-- argues that a carbon tax would be “ineffective” and has called the Paris agreement an “absurdity.”

In March, Zycher published a report arguing that “any plausible policy” to curb carbon emissions “would yield trivial effects while imposing large costs.” Instead, he recommended the federal government adopt a policy of “watchful waiting, adaptation over time, and ongoing investment in resilience against the future effects of climactic [sic] changes.”

How could Zycher recommend “watchful waiting” given the large costs climate change is already imposing right now? Granted, he published his report before this summer, when heat waves and wildfires burned up the West Coast and hurricanes slammed the Southeast. But last summer was not that different, and climate change-related disasters have been racking up considerable damage over the last few years. From 2017 through 2019, there were 44 unique extreme weather and climate-linked events across the country causing damages of $1 billion or more, collectively costing more than $460 billion.

Nevertheless, Zycher insists fossil fuels are indispensable. “Opposition to fossil fuels implies a reduction in policies-- education, training, health care, and the like-- that add to human capital and so increase incomes and the demand for conventional energy,” he wrote. “Therefore, opposition to fossil fuels is fundamentally antihuman.”

Zycher made the same argument in a May 7 column in the Financial Times, ranting that environmentalists who aim to deprive the world of fossil fuels “hate humanity, and the planet too.”

Putting aside Zycher’s ad hominem attack on the “environmental left,” he deliberately confuses the societal benefits of energy with how it is generated. At several junctures in history, humans switched from wood to coal to natural gas to warm their homes. Likewise, they switched from whale oil to kerosene to incandescents to LEDs to illuminate their homes.

Opposition to coal and kerosene in the past or fossil fuels today is not “fundamentally antihuman” when there are better, cleaner alternatives. And it turns out the alternatives-- solar and wind, specifically-- are now the cheapest sources of electricity, and they could have been more widely available years ago if ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies had not stood in the way.

The Manhattan Institute is still in love with fossil fuels

The Manhattan Institute, a New York City-based libertarian think tank, received $90,000 from ExxonMobil in 2019. Since 1998, the company has given the organization more than $1.4 million.

For the last decade, the institute’s go-to energy expert has been Robert Bryce, who, like AEI’s Zycher, is no fan of a carbon tax, ExxonMobil’s supposed pet climate solution. Before he left the think tank at the end of 2019, Bryce spent much of his time bashing renewable energy and extolling fossil fuels in reports and in the pages of the National Review, New York Post, Wall Street Journal and other publications.

Bryce routinely disparages renewables without providing context. In an August 2019 column on the conservative website RealClearEnergy, for example, he maintained that the wind industry is “facing increasing opposition” at least partly because of what he insists is the major threat it poses to eagles and other birds, an assertion he has been making ad nauseum for years. In fact, the top human-caused threats to birds are climate change, buildings, power lines, misapplied pesticides, communications towers, and oil and gas industry fluid waste pits-- not wind turbines.

As for wind energy’s specific threat to eagles, Dan Ashe, a former director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, debunked Bryce’s fallacious claim in a December 2016 HuffPost column. “Public attention on eagle loss in recent years has focused almost exclusively on wind energy,” Ashe wrote. “In truth, wind turbine collisions comprise a fraction of human-caused eagle losses. Most result from intentional and accidental poisoning and purposeful shooting. The majority of non-intentional loss occurs when eagles collide with cars or ingest lead shot or bullet fragments in remains and gut piles left by hunters. Others collide with or are electrocuted on power lines. Disproportionately and solely focusing on wind energy distorts public perceptions at a time when we desperately need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Cutting carbon pollution is hardly a goal that Bryce or any of his Manhattan Institute colleagues would ever publicly endorse. Doing so would certainly not please their other climate science denier benefactors, which include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Charles Koch Foundation, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer’s Mercer Family Foundation, and Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, a Manhattan Institute trustee. All have donated considerably more money to the think tank than ExxonMobil in recent years and, unlike the oil company, do not pretend to care about the climate crisis.

Maintaining the status quo in Congress

The New York Times recently ran a story pointing out that European and US oil companies are heading in very different directions when it comes to climate change. While BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and other European-based companies are beginning to sell their oil fields and invest in renewable energy, their US counterparts Chevron and ExxonMobil are betting that oil and gas will continue to make up at least 50 percent of the energy market for at least the next 20 years.

Instead of transitioning to solar and wind, the two US oil giants are spending relatively trivial amounts on unproven technologies, such as modular fusion nuclear reactors (Chevron), algae-based biofuel (ExxonMobil), and carbon capture and storage schemes (both), which so far have been costly failures. If those pipe dreams were ever demonstrated to work at the necessary scale, it would still take decades to commercialize them.

The main reason European oil and gas companies are taking baby steps to embrace renewables? Government pressure. The European Union has set a goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, and seven EU countries plan to phase out vehicles powered by gasoline and diesel over the next few decades. Austria, with the most aggressive timetable, will ban internal-combustion-engine vehicle sales after 2020.

Although California recently announced it would ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035 and most diesel-powered trucks by 2045, the Trump administration has taken the opposite tack, gutting landmark Obama-era rules curbing vehicle and power plant carbon emissions, rolling back methane emission and coal ash storage regulations, and lifting bans on oil and gas drilling on public land. Congress, meanwhile, has declined to consider climate bills that have been introduced since the beginning of the 2019-20 session.

The September 21 New York Times story cited unnamed energy analysts who excused Chevron and ExxonMobil for not changing their business models. “US lawmakers,” the analysts told the Times, “have simply not given them enough incentives to make a radical break.”

A major reason Congress has not given the US oil industry enough incentives to change course is because oil and gas companies have been giving a critical mass of US lawmakers enough incentives to do nothing. As mentioned above, $401,198 of the $991,329 ExxonMobil has spent so far on congressional incumbent campaigns during the current election cycle has gone to 115 of the 150 climate science deniers on Capitol Hill. Likewise, Chevron has spent $936,489 on incumbent campaigns so far. A little more than $433,000-- 46 percent-- has gone to 82 climate science deniers.

Besides making campaign contributions, oil companies spend a lot of money to keep tabs on their friends in Washington. So far, the top three oil and gas lobbyists during the 2019-20 cycle are Koch Industries, which has spent $30.72 million; Chevron, which has spent $28.54 million; and ExxonMobil, which has spent $28.36 million.

Why does ExxonMobil still support so many climate science deniers in Congress while contending to be so keen on a carbon tax? After all, just two years ago the company announced it would donate $1 million over two years to Americans for Carbon Dividends, a political action group created to promote a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

Some lawmakers are bullish on a carbon tax, but ExxonMobil largely ignores them. Since January 2019, eight representatives, two Republicans and six Democrats-- and nine senators, all Democrats-- have introduced 10 carbon tax bills and one cap-and-trade bill. But only one of the eight representatives and four of the nine senators received a campaign contribution from ExxonMobil during this election cycle. The total amount the company donated to the five lawmakers was $15,000-- a measly 4 percent of what it gave climate science deniers.

To be sure, ExxonMobil’s spending on climate disinformation has shrunk dramatically in recent years. The company’s 2019 outlay was less than half of what it spent in 2017 and the lowest amount since 1999, when Exxon was going through its merger with Mobil. Likewise, its campaign contributions to climate science deniers in Congress dropped from $1.1 million during the 2017-18 election cycle to only $400,000, this cycle.

But the fact remains that, while the company is saying all the right things publicly about the need to address climate change, it is continuing to fund think tanks and lawmakers who dispute the science and oppose government action. That suggests that its professed support for a carbon tax is no more than a disingenuous public relations ploy to delay government action.

The tobacco industry used the very same tactic to hold off regulations for decades, and it worked well until it didn’t, when the industry lost in court and agreed to pay $246 billion in fines to states over 25 years.

Author’s note: Besides the US Chamber of Commerce ($415,000), American Enterprise Institute ($110,000) and Manhattan Institute ($90,000), ExxonMobil gave grants in 2019 to five other climate science denier groups: Center for American and International Law ($5,000), Federalist Society ($10,000), Hoover Institution ($15,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000). For an overview of ExxonMobil’s grants from 1998 through 2019, click here.

Oil Can Harry by Nancy Ohanian

This article, which was originally published by Truthout, was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute

There Are People In Congress Working On Sustainable Energy And Environmental Justice-- But We Need More Of Them

In its mission statement, Congress' Sustainable Energy & Environment Coalition lays out two overarching goals:

• Advance policies that promote clean energy innovation and domestic manufacturing, develop renewable energy resources, and create good green jobs across the economy and the country.
• Advance polices to address climate change, protect our nation’s clean air, water and natural environment, and promote environmental justice.

There are 67 members-- all Democrats-- who have joined the Caucus. This week, Blue America has been working with their SEEC PAC to help raise last minute campaign contributions for congressional candidates who have been endorsed by both groups, the men and women who will be helping to lead the group's future.

One member, Ted Lieu, was a California state Senator when I first got to know him. At a discussion, someone asked him whey he would want to move away from his life in balmy California to go to the DC snakepit. He immediately focused on what turns out to be the SEEC mission statement. It was all about leaving his two young children a livable world. Yesterday, now-Congressman and now-SEEC member Ted Lieu reminded us that "One of the main reasons I ran for Congress was to work on legislation to address climate change on the national level. But in order to make any meaningful progress, we need to elect more Members of Congress who want to expand sustainable energy and address our climate crisis. That is why I am so grateful that Blue America is partnering with SEEC PAC to help these great candidates."

SEEC was founded in 2009 by now-Governor Jay Inslee (D-WA) at the start of the 111th Congress and is now a key green voice in the Congress. Last Congress, the coalition introduced its Sustainable Infrastructure Proposal and has continued to call for an infrastructure bill that takes bold steps to address climate change. Through its advocacy efforts, SEEC has seen increased funding for clean energy programs at the Department of Energy and the inclusion of water sustainability policy in the Fiscal Year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It also successfully opposed anti-environmental riders in the 2018 Farm Bill and focused early attention on the dangerous health consequences of Trump’s Clean Power Plan replacement. Another California SEEC member, Katie Porter told us today that "The climate crisis demands an all-hands-on-deck approach, and that includes strengthening our research in and use of green technology. We need allies in Congress who will fight for a more sustainable future and invest in the innovative clean energy we need to protect our planet."

Please consider helping elect new members of Congress who have prioritized the SEEC agenda in their campaigns and will be the kinds of allies Porter is talking about. Click on the thermometer on the right for the whole list-- and to contribute to the carefully and doubled-- vetted candidates, like Jon Hoadley, who is taking on Trump enabler and friend of polluters Fred Upton in southwest Michigan. Hoadley noted that "Michigan is the Great Lakes state, but we're still facing a drinking water crisis as a result of corporate pollution. We need to put an end to the large-scale contamination of our water and air we've seen from fossil fuel companies, and take bold action to preserve our climate for future generations."

Electing Kara Eastman to replace Trump puppet Donald Bacon in Omaha is a top priority for both SEEC PAC and Blue America. This morning she told us that "It's incredibly important to have the support of SEEC and Blue America because climate change is the number one national security threat to our country now, and it's the number one moral crisis facing America going forward. In Nebraska, we've fought against the Keystone XL Pipeline and successfully pushed our public power district to move to a carbon neutral plan. Let's turn up the heat on climate change together."

Mike Siegel's campaign has been almost an embodiment of the SEEC mission statement-- cleaning up the environment, ameliorating climate change and working with unions to guarantee good green jobs in the new economy. "I'm honored to have the support of SEEC and Blue America as we build a broad national coalition to combat climate change and build the renewable economy we need," he said this week. "As a Democrat running for Congress in the heart of Texas, I know how important it is that we take bold, courageous steps to address climate change and environmental degradation, even when those steps require difficult conversations with workers and businesses that depend on fossil fuel revenue. The Texas 10th Congressional District is already suffering from the impact of our fossil fuel economy. We have a coal plant in Fayette County that has been polluting the air and water for 40 years; we have widespread fracking operations that release chemicals into our groundwater and methane into our air; we have a Houston region that has suffered five 500-year flood events in five years; and we have Bastrop county, which was devastated by a massive wildfire nine years ago. These natural and unnatural disasters can all be traced to fossil fuel emissions. Even though Texas is built on a fossil fuel economy, we can't put our heads in the sand and pretend that change is not needed. I'm running for Congress to build an unparalleled coalition of unions, environmentalists, ranchers and farmers, progressives and activists of all types, to fight climate change, to create jobs in a renewable economy, and to address the legacy of pollution and environmental injustice. Thank you, SEEC and Blue America for your belief and support, and I look forward to joining with you in the days, months and years ahead, for the good of our planet, and for the good of our nation."

Audrey Denney is taking on Trumpist do-nothing Doug LaMalfa again in the northeast corner of California. She told us she's "honored to have the support of Congress' Sustainable Energy & Environment Coalition! Human induced climate change is already here and we are living through the consequences. We can’t grow cherries in Butte county because there aren’t enough chill hours. Fire season is almost year round and our fires are burning hotter than ever before. In some cases creating their own weather. Through our horrific fires of the last two years my district became the face of this crisis. As evidenced by politicians on both sides of the aisle using our devastation for photo ops. But this district can become the face of the solution. I’m talking about restoring our forests to health so they become carbon sinks not sources. We’re talking about ag policy that equips and trains farmers to use practices that sequester carbon-- that actually turn the dial back on climate change. I cannot wait to get to Congress and work with the members of the SEEC to push this policy agenda forward!


 


UPDATE: Nate McMurray (NY-27)

"Receiving the support from SEEC and Blue America is not just important for my campaign but also for the people of the NY-27. Climate change is the most pressing environmental challenge facing our planet and communities in the U.S. and around the globe are already experiencing its impacts. We feel the impact of increasingly extreme weather quite dramatically in Western New York, the NY-27, where we live alongside not one, but two of the Great Lakes-- Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. So Western New Yorkers see every day, in every season that effects of decades of bad environmental policies. And finally people see that we have an obligation to ourselves, our children, and the states and our neighbor to the north, to take immediate action to address climate change’s threats to our economy, health, and environment. In Congress the NY-27 and I as their representative, will have great partners in SEEC and Blue America in the fight for the region's environmental priorities, like supporting 100% transition to clean energy by 2050, access to clean air and water as well as regionally funded initiatives such as the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, Lake Ontario-St. Lawrence River Plan 2014, more conservation-focused planning by the Great Lakes' International Joint Commission, and improved Farming and Conservation initiatives. I cannot thank SEEC and Blue America enough for their support and belief in my campaign. We are on the cusp of victory and making a Democratic supermajority in Congress a reality in 2020!"

Why Can't The Conservative Brain Grapple With Science-- And Will The Climate Crisis Destroy Us All Because Of That Flaw?

 

Audrey Denney is running for Congress in the northeast corner of California (CA-01), where the state meets Oregon and Nevada. It's a largely rural district with the most exposure to Climate Change-induced wildfires anywhere in the state. She told me yesterday that the Trumpist incumbent, Doug LaMalfa "does not believe in human induced climate change. He has recently called climate change policies 'radical.' He either has been bought and paid for by the oil and gas industry (as his FEC reports show)-- or he doesn’t have the capacity to wrap his mind around science. He has also been quoted as saying abortions cause breast cancer-- so I am leaning toward both."

Denney, whose campaign leans heavily on talking with voters about the Climate Crisis said that "Climate change is not a threat in the distant future. It is taking the lives, homes, and livelihoods of people who live in my district today. We lost 93 lives in 2018 in the Carr and Camp Fires and we lost at least 15 lives last week in the North Complex fire. In 2018 the Carr fire and Camp Fire alone emitted nine times as much CO2 as the state of California was able to reduce our emissions by that year.  Our federal forests are MASSIVE carbon sources-- but have the potential to be carbon sinks-- actually helping us turn the dial back on climate change. Forty-one percent of my district-- and fifty seven percent of the state of California-- is federal forests. And the vast majority of them are in desperate need of vegetation management work and forest restoration work to bring them back to a state of health. This is the only way we will reduce our fire risk and be able to mitigate climate change. If you do not think this work is critically important than you are not paying attention. Or perhaps live in one of the few places that is not shrouded in smoke from the West’s fires... Only by restoring our forests to health by doing the critical thinning, selective logging, and fuels-reduction work, will we be able to lessen our wildfire risk and mitigate the dangerous result of climate change. We can create economic incentives to find new industry utilization for the woody biomass removed from our forests. This will look like manufacturing sustainable building materials like cross laminated timber (CLT) and processing woody biomass into low carbon transportation fuels. We can set policies in place to support the career and technical education programs and apprenticeship programs that will be necessary to build the required local workforce. All of these opportunities mean high paying jobs and more economic opportunity for the real people of California’s first district."

Yesterday, Ron Brownstein's Atlantic column asks a simple question millions of Americans probably have asked themselves at one time or another, Why is it that Republican officials still don’t care about Climate Change?. He begins by introducing us to Mary Nichols, who's been "part of the struggle to prevent catastrophic climate change for about as long as anyone in American life. For years, she’s directed California’s pathbreaking efforts to reduce carbon emissions as the chair of the California Air Resources Board-- a position she held first in the 1970s before taking it up again in 2007. Nichols has also served at the federal level, working as the chief regulator for air pollution at the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. And yet even Nichols has never seen anything that crystallizes the dangers of climate change more clearly than the historic outbreak of wildfires scorching California and other western states this year. 'Yes, absolutely,' she told me earlier this week, when I asked her whether this year’s fires are the most tangible danger to California that she’s seen from climate change. 'It’s not suddenly going to reverse itself … to years when there’s no fire season, or it’s not going to happen until October. The changes are going to be real, and they are going to be long-lasting.'"

Then he introduced us to Carol Browner who served as the EPA administrator for both of Clinton’s presidential terms and later worked as Obama’s first White House adviser on climate. "When she looks at the confluence of extreme-weather events battering the United States in recent years-- not only the wildfires, but also the Gulf Coast hurricanes, Midwest flooding, and the Southwest’s extreme heat-- Browner likewise sees stark evidence that climate change is disrupting American life earlier and more powerfully than almost anyone expected when the debate over these issues seriously began about three decades ago. 'What we have now is the absolute environmental demonstration or evidence of just how dramatic the impact of climate change is going to be. This is not going to stop,' Browner told me. 'There is going to be something next year, and the year after, if we don’t get on it.'"

Environmental scientists and policy experts around the country agree that the massive wildfires are just the latest indicator that climate change has thrust the U.S., and the world, into a dangerous new era. But it’s far from certain that the growing recognition of that threat can break the stalemate over climate policy in Washington. The accumulating evidence about climate change’s destructive power represents an irresistible force for action. But it’s colliding with an immovable object: the unbreakable resistance to any response among both Republican voters and elected officials.

Polling shows that, overall, a growing share of Americans believe climate change is happening, that human activities are driving it, and that the threat is manifesting right now. But as on many issues, the gap on all of these questions is widening between voters in the Republican coalition and other Americans. Annual polls by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication show that although the numbers have increased markedly for Democrats, Republican partisans are no more likely than in 2008 to believe that human activity is causing climate change, and they express even less concern about its impact now than they did then. (Belief in human causation has declined somewhat among independents, but concern about the effects of climate change has increased substantially.)

These attitudes within the GOP coalition both reflect and reinforce Republican officials’ rejection of any effort to reduce carbon emissions. [The Donald], echoed by many prominent conservative commentators and congressional Republicans, continues to dismiss the evidence that climate change is even contributing to the spike in extreme-weather events. With Joe Biden offering the most aggressive climate-change agenda of any Democratic presidential nominee in history, the conditions for the long-stalled debate over the issue in Washington are becoming as combustible as the dried forest floors of California.

Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale climate program, says that in the past, even those Americans concerned about climate change tended to see it as a remote problem. “It was distant in time, [in] that the impacts won’t be felt for a generation or more,” he told me. And it was “distant in space”-- “this is about polar bears and maybe some developing countries, but not the United States … not my friends, not my family, not me.”

Seen through that lens, he said, climate “just blended in the background with 1,000 other issues out there... so we can deal with it later. That’s where more of the country was in 2007 and 2008. Now we skip forward to today, that’s not true anymore because of the [weather] events we’ve been talking about.”

In Yale’s polling, the share of Americans who say that climate change is affecting weather at least somewhat reached nearly three-fifths in 2020, up from about half in early 2013. But Leiserowitz said more disruptive weather events aren’t the only things moving attitudes on climate. Another important factor is the broad, diverse chorus of voices expressing worry about it. Ten years ago, he noted, Americans might have heard concern about the climate only from “environmentalists and liberal politicians like Al Gore”; now it’s much more common to hear concerns raised by public-health professionals, business executives, and even faith leaders, such as Pope Francis.

The result has been an undeniable, though not overwhelming, shift in public opinion. In Yale’s latest national survey this spring, slightly more than three-fifths of Americans said human activities are causing the climate to change, a new high. The share of Americans who say they are very worried about climate change’s impact is relatively modest, at 27 percent. But it’s nearly double the level it was in 2008; overall, about two-thirds of respondents are now either very or somewhat worried.

Americans’ attitudes about the imminence of the danger have changed more drastically: 45 percent in the latest survey described climate change as a threat to Americans now, a big increase from 33 percent in 2008. The share who say climate change won’t be a problem for 25 years or more is at 42 percent, down 10 points compared with 2008.

Yet, on all of these fronts, the movement has not been symmetrical. Democrats are expressing much more concern than they were a decade ago, and most independents slightly more. Republicans, meanwhile, are either no more or even less concerned. (Rigid GOP attitudes largely explain why the overall shift in public opinion on many questions hasn’t been more dramatic, despite the quickening pace of weather disruption.) Since 2008, for instance, the share of Democrats who say human activity is causing climate change has spiked from 70 percent to 85 percent; among Republicans, it’s virtually unchanged, at just 37 percent. And although nearly half of Democrats now say they are very worried about climate change (almost double the level in 2008), only about one in 14 Republicans is equally concerned. That share is essentially unchanged from 12 years ago.

This pattern of public attitudes looks very similar to opinions on racial-equity issues: Compared with a decade ago, substantially more Democrats of all races accept that systemic racism against Black Americans is a serious problem; however, many Republicans are even less likely to agree it exists compared with 10 years ago. The divergence between the parties on climate, as on race, reflects the larger resorting of the electorate along lines of culture rather than class. (Republicans, as I’ve written, increasingly rely on a coalition of older, non-college-educated, evangelical, and rural white voters, while Democrats depend heavily on young people, people of color, and college-educated white Americans.)

Just as many Republican voters have cheered GOP attacks on public-health experts during the coronavirus crisis, portraying them as “elites” who look down on and want to control ordinary people, they have embraced similar accusations against climate scientists. “Climate change is an issue... where most people don’t know that much... and in those circumstances-- especially for an abstract, seemingly far away, invisible problem like climate change-- they look to their leaders to help guide them through that incredibly complicated landscape,” Leiserowitz told me. “Republicans who began talking about climate change as if it was a ‘hoax’ had an incredible impact on other Republicans.”

Many environmentalists have hoped that more and more exposure to the furious effects of weather disruption might soften resistance among Republican voters and leaders to acting on climate change. But in dramatic polling last year from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Washington Post even Republican voters who acknowledge that their communities are facing more extreme weather overwhelmingly reject the notion that climate change is significantly contributing to those events.

Detailed results provided to me by Kaiser underscore an astonishing gap between the parties. Among people who agree that their communities are experiencing either more hot days, more floods, or more droughts, at least three-fourths of Democrats say climate change is a “major factor” in those events; but at least seven in 10 Republicans in each case say it is only a minor factor, or does not contribute at all. Slightly more than seven in 10 Democrats living in places experiencing more wildfires consider climate change a major factor in causing them; three-fourths of Republicans see climate as little or none of the cause. Even after this summer’s searing events, an Economist/YouGov poll released yesterday found that although three-fourths of Biden supporters said “the severity of recent hurricanes and Western wildfires is most likely the result of global climate change,” fewer than one in five Trump voters agreed.

Those contrasts offer very little reason for optimism that even if Biden wins, any meaningful numbers of congressional or state-level Republicans will feel pressure to support measures to reduce carbon emissions. Among other reasons for pessimism: In both presidential and Senate elections, Republicans are more and more reliant on the states that produce the most fossil fuels, which tend to be the same states with large populations of non-college-educated, Christian, and rural white voters drawn to Trump’s message of racial and cultural backlash.

Across the 20 states that emit the most carbon per dollar of economic output-- a good proxy for states’ integration into the fossil-fuel economy-- Republicans now hold 35 of their 40 Senate seats. That’s nearly enough senators to sustain a GOP filibuster against climate action on its own. The final brick in the wall of GOP opposition is that fossil-fuel producers, once an important source of campaign funding for southern Democrats such as Lyndon B. Johnson, are all-in on bolstering Republican power. Over the past 30 years, oil and gas producers have directed more than 80 percent of their massive $711 million in total federal campaign contributions toward Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Gene Karpinski, the longtime president of the League of Conservation Voters, the environmental movement’s principal electoral arm, sees little prospect for GOP participation on climate even if Trump loses. “Because of the fossil-fuel influence on the Republican Party and the leader of the party still calling climate change a ‘hoax,’” GOP skepticism about “climate change is out of step with the rest of the country,” he says.

But others see some cracks in the resistance. Kenneth Medlock, the director of the Center for Energy Studies at the Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston, says the terms of daily discussion in Texas and in neighboring states have changed since Houston was deluged with historic floods during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. “Even in the Gulf Coast, the conversation around extreme-weather events and the like is more the norm than it was five years ago,” he told me. “Up until Harvey happened, nobody really wanted to address the elephant in the room, which is that the climate is changing and this is a real risk.”

Even with that evolving dialogue, Medlock doesn’t expect big changes among Republican elected officials in Texas. He predicts that, to the extent that they acknowledge climate change, they would be more likely to talk about fortifying communities against its effects (an issue he considers important too) than to talk about reducing carbon emissions. But Medlock anticipates that position will become more and more untenable for Republicans over time-- not because their voters necessarily demand more action, but because the business community and institutional investors will keep moving ahead without them to cut carbon.

The dialogue among elected Republicans, he told me, “has kind of quietly shifted.” He explained that the Baker Institute, which is based at Rice University, is involved in several initiatives aimed at reducing net-carbon emissions in the region. “What’s really interesting about [those] efforts is that when we talk to state lawmakers and federal lawmakers [including Republicans], there’s no resistance,” he continued. “You open the conversation with, ‘The world is changing; consumers and investors are demanding lower carbon footprints; this is an economic opportunity for Texas...’ and immediately the conversation becomes very lively. So, in some ways, it’s about how you approach the conversation.”

Sean McElwee, the Data for Progress pollster who analyzes progressive causes, sees a similar opening. Although most Republican voters still recoil from measures presented as addressing climate change, more are open to promoting clean-energy sources, he says. (Yale’s polling has found that too.) “When we do testing … clean energies are very popular among Republican voters, and people are really interested in the jobs framework,” he told me. Just as important: Relatively few Republican voters intuitively embrace arguments from Trump and others that defending oil, gas, and coal is a culture-war statement against “elitists” promoting solar and wind energies. “I don’t think voters have an allegiance to coal and oil the way Republican politicians have,” he said.

Browner, the former EPA head, is also a voice of relative optimism. “If Biden wins and they start moving forward” with a climate agenda, she told me, “there will be Republicans calling. Maybe I’m a minority on this, but when they see you are serious and you want to do something, they want a seat at the table.”

Even if Republicans remain obdurate, unified Democratic control of Congress and the White House is more likely to produce climate action than the last Democratic trifecta in 2009 and 2010, most experts I spoke with said. At that point, the House Democratic Caucus still contained a large number of southern and rural “blue dog” members who resisted cap-and-trade climate legislation the chamber passed in 2009. (Forty-four Democrats voted no.) Now the House Democratic Caucus is overwhelmingly centered on urban and suburban districts where acting on climate is popular. As Karpinski said: “If you look at 2018, the key reason why Nancy Pelosi is now the speaker [is because] it’s mostly suburban and some of the semi-urban districts. It’s a combination of young people, communities of color, and suburban women. They are the most supportive of this issue and want action.”

If Biden wins and Democrats gain the Senate majority, he could drive a big part of his climate agenda through a coronavirus-relief stimulus package; his plan includes massive spending to promote renewable power, electric cars, and energy-efficiency upgrades for homes and businesses. Obama did the same thing in the stimulus package he signed to counter the Great Recession, tucking in huge investments in clean energy (that Biden as vice president was assigned to oversee).

But to secure Senate approval for measures that directly limit carbon emissions, Democrats would almost certainly have to end the filibuster, which empowers what I’ve called the “brown blockade” of Senate Republicans who represent the fossil-fuel-producing states. (Unable to overcome a filibuster, the Senate never considered the cap-and-trade climate bill the House passed in 2009.) And even if Democrats do end the filibuster, serious climate legislation could face a tight squeeze to reach a simple majority, with Joe Manchin, from coal-producing West Virginia, and possibly other Democratic senators having to take a very tough vote.

All of those outcomes are impossible to predict. But what’s clear is that the tension will grow between a sluggish political system locked in a partisan standoff and a climate system that is poised to generate disruption at an accelerating pace. “This is not some ‘new normal’ that we can plan around … it’s a system that continues to spiral out of control,” says Vijay Limaye, an environmental epidemiologist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There definitely is a signal in these record-setting months that … we are heading into a new era when we will see records set, and they will fall just as quickly … It’s hard for people to wrap their heads around now, but as bad as things have been this year, unquestionably, they will get worse.”

Nichols, the veteran climate regulator, is just as stark in her warning: Even today’s extreme weather may soon seem like the (relative) calm before the storm. “The rate of change is accelerating, so it is absolutely possible that we’ll see more visible signs of bigger storms,” as well as higher temperatures and sea-level rise, she said. “All of those things could happen much faster.”





She explained that the famous apocalyptic scene from the movie The Day After Tomorrow still isn’t likely to happen, where big waves wash over the skyscrapers of New York City. “But bigger storms and more damage and loss of property and loss of life as a result absolutely is likely going to continue-- not just in a gradual slope, but at a rate of acceleration that is greater than was predicted before,” she said.

The biggest message of the California wildfires may be that not only the terms but the tense of the climate debate is changing. Climate change has evolved from something that will threaten America to something that is doing so today. “The people who used to talk about how they were trying to save the world for their grandchildren need to start thinking about their children and even themselves,” Nichols said.

Kara Eastman is the Democratic candidate running for the Omaha-based congressional seat (NE-02) occupied by Trumpist stooge, Donald Bacon. The Climate crisis is a big issue she talks with Nebraska voters about constantly promising to help lead the battle when she replaces-nothing-Bacon in Congress:

Climate change-- appropriately called climate chaos by many-- is clearly the result of human activity. The wildfires on the West Coast bring this reality into dramatic relief. In order to reverse this trend we need immediate action from policy-makers from the entire political spectrum. In the past, there was an environmental consensus. Major environmental legislation from the Clean Water Act through the Montreal Protocol Treaty were passed by huge majorities on both sides of the aisle. Unfortunately, due to the extremist takeover of the Republican party, led by Donald Trump and Don Bacon, the GOP is no longer the party of the environment. On the contrary, they continue to give voice to the fringe belief that the massive climate upheavals we are witnessing in real-time today are part of some "normal" weather cycle, moreover, that these events we can see with our eyes and choke on in our lungs aren't really even happening.

Don Bacon wants to have it both ways. In front of a Republican audience, he says the the science is "uncertain" on climate, but on the other hand he claims membership to the bipartisan but largely ineffectual climate solutions caucus when he's confronted by local voters. Meanwhile, in Nebraska's Second Congressional District, we suffered from one of the hottest and driest summers on record, a year after central Nebraska suffered from devastating floods.

When I am in Congress, I will join my colleagues in putting climate front and center of the agenda. Nebraskans will be able to count on me to push a climate agenda, not simply push greenwashed window dressing. It's no longer some distant future crisis. It's here and now and we need to get to work.

Beth Doglio is in a D v D congressional general election in Washington. She's a progressive, endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus and her opponent is a ConservaDem endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce and the Wall Street owned and operated New Dems. There is no issue more important in her campaign than Climate. And Beth has a stellar record while her opponent's record is putrid and, basically, Republican. Yesterday Beth told me that "As the wildfires rage on the West Coast, lives are being lost, towns are burning to the ground, and millions of acres of land are now charred deserts. This is climate change. The stakes have never been higher and the consequences of failing to act have never been more clear. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that we have just one decade, one last chance to act, before it’s too late." She continued:

The United States must step up and must act with the urgency this moment demands. And the reality is that beyond its dangers, climate change actually presents us with a great opportunity. We can build a clean energy economy, strengthen our middle-class, and create millions of good union jobs. But we need leaders with expertise to get us there. Leaders who have stood up to the fossil fuel industry and won. Leaders who have actually passed policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and grow jobs.

As a climate advocate, I led the effort to stop the development of 7 coal export terminals dead in their tracks, while my opponent as mayor was busy working to site the world’s largest Methanol plant in her town. While she points in part to her support for community gardens as her track record on climate issues, I point to playing a pivotal role in passing legislation that significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions-- like the nation’s best 100% Clean Electricity Bill that integrates equity and labor standards with hard deadlines to remove fossils fuels from our electric sector and grow clean energy jobs. Or my first of its kind Green Buildings Law that makes our buildings more healthy and efficient at the same time it creates jobs. I’m calling for a sector-by-sector decarbonization of our economy. I am serious about and experienced in pushing for and passing emission reduction policies that will leave a safe planet for my kids.

You can ask anyone-- I love gardening and, in fact, I helped build a robust garden program at my children's elementary school-- but gardening is not what is going to get us out of this! This issue can no longer take a backseat, play second fiddle, remain an afterthought. We must have a plan, it must be ambitious, it must go far enough. I am calling for Washington, D.C. to follow Washington state’s lead and get serious about passing legislation to address the issue at scale.

Biden Is Better Than Trump On Climate And The Environment

In his Climate speech yesterday, Biden tore into Trump with two well-written questions: "If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze? If you give a climate denier four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised when more of America is underwater?" Nice! And Trump earned it!

Before he spoke, 170 environmental leaders, generally part of the Democratic Party establishment coalition urged their supporters to vote for Biden... rather than Howie Hawkins of the Green Party, someone who has no chance but who provides an alternative to backing the candidates of the two corrupt establishment parties-- one which has re-nominated a dangerous and criminal fascist and one which has nominated an unfit conservative, not as bad as Trump, of course, but still bad... and years behind your average Democrat on Climate policy.

The only national Climate group I trust is the Sunrise Movement. Their leaders aren't interested in being invited to Democratic Party cocktail parties or being buddies with Schumer or Pelosi. They're only interested in fixing the Climate Crisis. This is how they explain their strategy:

1- We support candidates who, if elected, would represent a significant break with the status quo.

2- We support politicians who will represent us, not the fossil fuel industry.

3- We have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies.

So different from the corrupted elites in the old fashioned environmental movement! Sunrise endorsed Bernie and I have no idea if they plan to endorse the lesser evil for November. I hope not; it will tarnish their brand. Their 16 current endorsements for House seats include 15 endorsed by Blue America:

• Audrey Denney (CA-01)
• Marie Newman (IL-03)
• Cori Bush (MO-01)
• Ilhan Omar (MN-05)
• Rashida Tlaib (MI-13)
• Mike Siegel (TX-10)
• Jamaal Bowman (NY-16)
• Julie Oliver (TX-25)
• Beth Doglio (WA-10)
• Cathy Kunkel (WV-02)
• Jon Hoadley (MI-06)
• Qasim Rashid (VA-01)
• AOC (NY-14)
• Mondaire Jones (NY-17)
• Ayanna Pressely (MA-07)

And their 3 Senate candidates-- Marquita Bradshaw (TN), Paul Jean Swearengin (WV) and Ed Markey (MA)-- are also Blue America's Senate candidates. I could care less who Sierra Club or League of Conservative Voters endorses; at this point, it's like caring who the DSCC or DCCC endorses.

Biden has emphasized that Trump "has no interest in meeting this moment. He’s already said he wanted to withhold aid to California, to punish the people of California. Because they didn’t vote for him. This is another crisis. Another crisis he won’t take responsibility for. The west is literally on fire." He also said that, as a nation, "We stand with families who have lost everything. The firefighters. The first responders, risking everything to save others... People are not just worried about raging fires. They’re worried about the air they breath, the damage to their lungs... this year alone nearly 5m acres have burned across 10 states. More acreage than the entire state of Connecticut... We have a choice. We can invest in our infrastructure, make it stronger, more resilient, improving the health of Americans and creating millions of good-paying jobs while at the same time tackling the root causes of climate change. Or we can continue down the path Donald Trump has us on. The path of indifference, costing tens of billions of dollars to rebuild, where the human cost, the lives, the livelihoods the homes and the communities destroyed are immeasurable... With every bout of nature’s fury caused by our own inaction on climate change, more Americans see and feel the devastation. Whether they’re in big cities, small towns, coastlines or farm towns. It’s happening everywhere. It’s happening now. It affects us all."

Audrey Denney, the progressive Democrat running for the northeast California congressional seat (CA-01) that Trump enabler Doug LaMalfa currently holds, told us this morning that "CAL-FIRE, natural resource managers, and fire scientists all agree. Climate change along with vegetation management issues are making our wildfires worse. We will continue to lose lives and property in our part of the world until we have leadership that believes in science and has the political courage to take action." And that's not either Trump nor LaMalfa.

Julie Oliver, enthusiastically endorsed by both Blue America and the Sunrise Movement, laid out an aggressive plan for dealing with Climate Change which Biden should adopt for the country. But he won't.

• Transition the United States to carbon-free, 100% renewable energy by 2035.
• Eliminate emissions from the power sector in the 10-15 year time frame we have left to address the climate crisis.
• Supercharge the economy through major investments in American industries and manufacturing, modernizing our infrastructure, skilled labor, and innovation in clean technology.
• Provide workforce development and training, labor protections, livable wages, and collective bargaining rights for all jobs in the transition away from fossil fuels.
• Create millions of good-paying new jobs through low-carbon emission generation technologies, solar and wind technologies, energy efficient goods manufacturing and installation, building construction and retrofits, environmental remediation, forestry, and agriculture.
• Ensure a just transition.
• Invest in renewable energy, efficiency, smart grid, energy storage, electric vehicles and other clean energy technologies and green infrastructure to reach our decarbonization goals.
• Democratize the clean energy economy by increasing community ownership of energy generation through more distributed systems and public cooperatives.
• Stop fossil fuel extraction on public lands.
• Hold big business civilly or criminally accountable for their current or historical pollution.
• Innovate and expand energy efficiency through new building, power, and industrial standards, technology, and retrofits.
• Remove lead service water lines and fix water infrastructure problems in America, and protect our watersheds and waterways.
• Restore the American landscape through reforestation, wetlands restoration, and expanded sustainable farming and soil practices.
• Work with front-line, indigenous, and low-income communities and communities of color to build resilience and ensure pollution-free communities and economic opportunity.
• Modernize mass transportation by scaling up charging infrastructure for zero emission passenger vehicles and transition away from fossil fuels in heavy duty vehicles, aviation, and rail, while innovating and scaling up the next generation of carbon-neutral fuels and biofuels.
• Support and pass HR 763, the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act.
• Ban offshore drilling in the Arctic and the ANWR, and prevent Kinder Morgan from seizing Hill Country land through eminent domain.
• Create incentives and standards to promote soil health for better food, water quality, and carbon storage.

Scientific American started publishing on August 28, 1845. That's 175 years ago, even before Biden was in the Senate. Today was the first time they ever endorsed a political candidate. "This year," wrote the editors, "we are compelled to do so. We do not do this lightly."

The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people-- because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September. He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges. That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden, who is offering fact-based plans to protect our health, our economy and the environment. These and other proposals he has put forth can set the country back on course for a safer, more prosperous and more equitable future.

The pandemic would strain any nation and system, but Trump's rejection of evidence and public health measures have been catastrophic in the U.S. He was warned many times in January and February about the onrushing disease, yet he did not develop a national strategy to provide protective equipment, coronavirus testing or clear health guidelines. Testing people for the virus, and tracing those they may have infected, is how countries in Europe and Asia have gained control over their outbreaks, saved lives, and successfully reopened businesses and schools. But in the U.S., Trump claimed, falsely, that “anybody that wants a test can get a test.” That was untrue in March and remained untrue through the summer. Trump opposed $25 billion for increased testing and tracing that was in a pandemic relief bill as late as July. These lapses accelerated the spread of disease through the country-- particularly in highly vulnerable communities that include people of color, where deaths climbed disproportionately to those in the rest of the population.

It wasn't just a testing problem: if almost everyone in the U.S. wore masks in public, it could save about 66,000 lives by the beginning of December, according to projections from the University of Washington School of Medicine. Such a strategy would hurt no one. It would close no business. It would cost next to nothing. But Trump and his vice president flouted local mask rules, making it a point not to wear masks themselves in public appearances. Trump has openly supported people who ignored governors in Michigan and California and elsewhere as they tried to impose social distancing and restrict public activities to control the virus. He encouraged governors in Florida, Arizona and Texas who resisted these public health measures, saying in April-- again, falsely-- that “the worst days of the pandemic are behind us” and ignoring infectious disease experts who warned at the time of a dangerous rebound if safety measures were loosened.

And of course, the rebound came, with cases across the nation rising by 46 percent and deaths increasing by 21 percent in June. The states that followed Trump's misguidance posted new daily highs and higher percentages of positive tests than those that did not. By early July several hospitals in Texas were full of COVID-19 patients. States had to close up again, at tremendous economic cost. About 31 percent of workers were laid off a second time, following the giant wave of unemployment-- more than 30 million people and countless shuttered businesses-- that had already decimated the country. At every stage, Trump has rejected the unmistakable lesson that controlling the disease, not downplaying it, is the path to economic reopening and recovery.

Trump repeatedly lied to the public about the deadly threat of the disease, saying it was not a serious concern and “this is like a flu” when he knew it was more lethal and highly transmissible, according to his taped statements to journalist Bob Woodward. His lies encouraged people to engage in risky behavior, spreading the virus further, and have driven wedges between Americans who take the threat seriously and those who believe Trump's falsehoods. The White House even produced a memo attacking the expertise of the nation's leading infectious disease physician, Anthony Fauci, in a despicable attempt to sow further distrust.

Trump's reaction to America's worst public health crisis in a century has been to say “I don't take responsibility at all.” Instead he blamed other countries and his White House predecessor, who left office three years before the pandemic began.

But Trump's refusal to look at the evidence and act accordingly extends beyond the virus. He has repeatedly tried to get rid of the Affordable Care Act while offering no alternative; comprehensive medical insurance is essential to reduce illness. Trump has proposed billion-dollar cuts to the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agencies that increase our scientific knowledge and strengthen us for future challenges. Congress has countermanded his reductions. Yet he keeps trying, slashing programs that would ready us for future pandemics and withdrawing from the World Health Organization. These and other actions increase the risk that new diseases will surprise and devastate us again.

...Biden is getting advice on these public health issues from a group that includes David Kessler, epidemiologist, pediatrician and former U.S. Food and Drug Administration chief; Rebecca Katz, immunologist and global health security specialist at Georgetown University; and Ezekiel Emanuel, bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. It does not include physicians who believe in aliens and debunked virus therapies, one of whom Trump has called “very respected” and “spectacular.”

Biden has a family and caregiving initiative, recognizing this as key to a sustained public health and economic recovery. His plans include increased salaries for child care workers and construction of new facilities for children because the inability to afford quality care keeps workers out of the economy and places enormous strains on families.

On the environment and climate change, Biden wants to spend $2 trillion on an emissions-free power sector by 2035, build energy-efficient structures and vehicles, push solar and wind power, establish research agencies to develop safe nuclear power and carbon capture technologies, and more. The investment will produce two million jobs for U.S. workers, his campaign claims, and the climate plan will be partly paid by eliminating Trump's corporate tax cuts. Historically disadvantaged communities in the U.S. will receive 40 percent of these energy and infrastructure benefits.

It is not certain how many of these and his other ambitions Biden will be able to accomplish; much depends on laws to be written and passed by Congress. But he is acutely aware that we must heed the abundant research showing ways to recover from our present crises and successfully cope with future challenges.

Although Trump and his allies have tried to create obstacles that prevent people from casting ballots safely in November, either by mail or in person, it is crucial that we surmount them and vote. It's time to move Trump out and elect Biden, who has a record of following the data and being guided by science.

And, yes, Albert Einstein used to write for the magazine.

Trump Didn't Set The Wildfires, But...

Another non-partisan Patagonia ad

Trump won support from just 31.6% of Californians, but that still came to 4,483,810 votes-- more than anywhere else but Texas (4,685,047) and Florida (4,617,886). Almost four and a half million Californians voted for him and, disproportionately, they're in parts of the state that are on fire. Also 1,221,747 Washingtonians and 782,403 Oregonians voted for him. But he's offering no help or solace to anyone on the West Coast and feels put upon but this over demonstration of Climate Change or, as he puts it, the "Chinese hoax."

One hard hit fire area is the Butte/Tehama/Glenn Lightning Complex, 3 counties that are as red as you can imagine. Trump won Butte with 48%, Glenn with 61.7% and Tehama gave him 65.5%. But because the West Coast's 74 electoral votes went to Hillary and will go to Biden... Trump doesn't care about anyone in California, Oregon or Washington. NPR reported over the weekend that annual catastrophic wildfires "are the latest signal that we shouldn't necessarily even be rebuilding or encouraging more development in places we know will burn. In the libertarian-leaning West, loose building codes and other factors have been attributed to an explosion in development in wild lands that are prone to fire. Yet therein lies one of the biggest and thorniest issues facing the West, and many other parts of the country in this era of climate change. Many people are living in high fire risk areas in California and Oregon in particular because it's the only place they can afford to."

Robert Reich's read on the wildfires is similar-- Trump doesn't care if wildfires destroy the west-- it didn't vote for him. He wrote that the air quality outside of his window is yellow, although it was orange the day before. And the Air Quality Index where he is is over 200-- and has been for several days. The EPA defines numbers that high as a "health alert" in which "everyone may experience more serious health effects if they are exposed for 24 hours." Today it will have been 96 hours. "The west is burning," he wrote. "Wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington are incinerating homes, killing scores of people, sickening many others, causing hundreds of thousands to evacuate, burning entire towns to the ground, consuming millions of acres, and blanketing the western third of the United States with thick, acrid and dangerous smoke. Yet the president has said and done almost nothing. A month ago, Trump wanted to protect lives in Oregon and California from 'rioters and looters.' He sent federal forces into the streets of Portland and threatened to send them to Oakland and Los Angeles. Today, Portland is in danger of being burned and Oakland and Los Angeles are under health alerts. Trump will visit California on Monday, but he has said little. One reason: these states voted against him in 2016 and he still bears a grudge. He came close to rejecting California’s request for emergency funding. 'He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him,' said former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor."

Another explanation for Trump’s silence is that the wildfires are tied to human-caused climate change, which Trump has done everything humanly possible to worsen.

Extreme weather disasters are rampaging across America. On Wednesday, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration released its latest State of the Climate report, finding that just in August the US was hit by four billion-dollar calamities. In addition to wildfires, there were two enormous hurricanes and an extraordinary Midwest derecho.

These are inconvenient facts for a president who has spent much of his presidency dismantling every major climate and environmental policy he can lay his hands on.

Starting with his unilateral decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, Trump has been the most anti-environmental president in history.

He has called climate change a “hoax.” He has claimed, with no evidence, that windmills cause cancer. He has weakened Obama-era limits on planet-warming carbon dioxide from power plants and from cars and trucks. He has rolled back rules governing clean air, water and toxic chemicals. He has opened more public land to oil and gas drilling.

He has targeted California in particular, revoking the state’s authority to set tougher car emission standards than those required by the federal government.

In all, the Trump administration has reversed, repealed, or otherwise rolled back nearly 70 environmental rules and regulations. More than 30 rollbacks are still in progress.

Trump may be a ring-leader couldn't do this alone. In California, Climate Change-denying conservatives are complicit. I asked some of the California candidates being opposed by conservatives why more isn't being done about Climate in a state that should be much tougher in protecting the people here.