9 Really Horrible Things That Don't Even Include Trump-- And One Really Good One That Will Help Us Get Rid Of Him

GROT by Chip Proser

Yesterday, everyone around the water cooler-- and beyond-- was talking about Politico Magazine's cover story about the 9 disaster's we still aren't ready for. Garrett Graff put together a Politico post-COVID "Domestic Threat Assessment"-- a list of the most significant events that might impact the U.S. over the next 30 to 50 years. Hard to imagine there could be a bigger threat or worse impact on our country than Trump in the White House, but when my friend Helen sent Graff's article to me yesterday she said it was the scariest thing she had ever read and urged me not to show it to Roland. "These are threats that seem rare," wrote Graff, "but that over a given period are almost guaranteed to occur-- events that humans, and therefore political leaders, have a hard time understanding and planning for... Beyond other pandemics, which appear regularly every decade or two, there are eight other major threats (and one wild card) that scientists and national security officials worry about currently that are real, identifiable and stand a chance that is more likely than not of occurring-- at some scale, ranging from mild to catastrophic-- in the next five to 50 years. Here’s what’s coming for us now:

• Globalization of white supremacy
• Attacks on trust and truth

If the 2016 election was the story of our democracy being blindsided by misinformation, disinformation and hack-and-dump cyberattacks, cyber experts are warning that the next new threat online will almost certainly involve attempts by adversaries to manipulate or delete data or otherwise raise public doubts about whether reported reality is real reality. “Trust and truth are the foundations of free and open societies,” says Sue Gordon, a career intelligence officer who served until last summer as the principal deputy director of national intelligence, the top career official in the intelligence community. “Our growing concern about those two things are causing chaos in open societies and leaving room for authoritarian tendencies.”

...[I]nsidious for democracy are the threats that come as the country enters the election season this fall. Security experts have been warning of all manner of data manipulation attacks that could lead to ongoing or permanent questions about the accuracy of election results. While actually altering votes at scale would prove challenging, it could be comparatively easy to alter the reported vote totals on a secretary of state website or a news site, or to post images-- real or fake-- of hacking a single machine.

Experts like Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron have also raised alarms about "deepfakes,” AI-driven doctored audio or video that could literally put words in peoples’ mouths or place them in physical locations where they never were. Simpler “dumbfakes” or “cheap fakes” have proven effective: Trump supporters have circulated both a slowed-down video of Nancy Pelosi, meant to make her appear cognitively impaired, and a sped-up video that made CNN’s Jim Acosta appear to aggressively hit a White House intern. Much more sophisticated techniques already are on public display.

• Biosecurity

Terrorists, mad scientists, lab cccidents and biological warfare.

• Technological disruption

Downed power grids, GPS outages and solar flares

• Nukes

• Climate Change

Global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond. Climate hazards … are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security.

• COVID-19's next level impact

[T]he country’s ongoing, disastrous response to the pandemic-- by almost any measure one of the worst in the developed world-- is sending a clear message to other countries that the U.S. can no longer be counted on to lead global conversations. The U.S. didn’t even show up to a massive international vaccine virtual summit this week.

Um...  Nothing by Chip Proser

The U.S., if current trends continue, might find that it finally beats the virus in a year or two-- but emerges from the pandemic no longer the world leader economically, politically or morally that it’s been for the last 75 years. The world, in turn, may discover in this moment that it doesn’t need the U.S. in the way that it thought it did. That could be even more true if a Covid vaccine emerges first in China or Europe.

• Catastrophic earthquakes

California’s “Big One,” along the San Andreas, gets most of the attention, but there are three other U.S. faults that cause emergency planners perhaps even more heartburn.

First, the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a fault about 700 miles off the Pacific Coast of Oregon and Washington, or what the New Yorker called in 2015, “The Really Big One.” The fault, when it goes, might unleash “only” an earthquake between 8.0 and 8.6 magnitude, which itself would rank as one of the most powerful and destructive quakes to ever hit the United States. But a so-called full margin rupture of the fault would prove truly catastrophic, potentially topping 9.0. Beyond the quake’s damage from the shaking, it could cause a multi-hundred-mile tsunami to inundate the West Coast with just 15 minutes warning. FEMA’s projections show 13,000 initial deaths from the quake and the tsunami, and upward of a million people displaced. These are hardly abstract threats; geologists say there’s a one-in-three chance of an 8.0 earthquake in the region in the next 50 years. “The amount of devastation is going to be unbelievable,” an Oregon geologist Rob Witter said in 2009, after calculating that a full 9.0 quake has a 10 percent to 14 percent chance of occurring in the next half century. “People aren't going to be ready for this.”

Second, the New Madrid Seismic Zone—named for a Missouri town and running from Arkansas up to Illinois—has historically produced the strongest earthquakes in the lower-48 states. In the winter of 1811-1812, a series of three quakes shifted land more than 15 feet, liquified the ground and caused whole islands to disappear. In a 2019 regional exercise, known as “Shaken Fury,” local, state and federal officials drilled on how to respond to a 7.7 magnitude New Madrid earthquake. Daniel Kaniewski, a managing director at Marsh & McLennan who until February served as the No. 2 at FEMA, recalls visiting one major state emergency operations centers and discovering that officials there refused to even simulate a quake of that strength; they’d determined that the local devastation would be so great that emergency planners would have no adequate response, even in a tabletop exercise. “Just the exercise alone could so tax the system that there wouldn't be valuable lessons learned,” he recalls. “That earthquake is one that we as a nation are very vulnerable to.”

...Third, and probably least known of all, is the Wasatch fault zone, stretching across Utah and Idaho, tracing the rough outline of the Salt Lake Valley, and which has been active even just in recent days; in March, it recorded a 5.7 magnitude quake. “The earthquake in Idaho and Utah was a big wake-up call,” Phoenix says. Larger earthquakes in the region might quickly prove devastating. “Wasatch is every bit as concerning as a southern California quake, not simply because of the magnitude potential but because of the vulnerabilities present there,” Kaniewski says. “Much of the building construction in Salt Lake City is unreinforced masonry-- URM-- and it crumbles when a quake happens.”

• Unknown unknowns

COVID-45 by Nancy Ohanian

That was a taste of what Graff has to say. You need to read the whole thing. Meanwhile, I'm sticking to what I said earlier about how it's hard to imagine anything worse for our country than Trump-- and I'm not even voting for Biden!! Speaking of which, last month, Dr. Drew Westen, a psychology and psychiatry professor at Emory University who founded a politics-oriented strategic messaging consulting firm published a piece in Psychology Today about what motivates voters. He's discovered over the years that reasoned beliefs don't determine which candidate most people vote for. Two other factors do: voters' feelings for the candidate's political party (partisanship) and voters' feelings about the candidate himself.

"Neuroimaging studies," he wrote, "confirmed no signs of intelligent life when people were purportedly reasoning about unflattering information regarding a preferred political candidate. Neural circuits typically active in reasoning tasks never turned on. What did light up were circuits that traffic in negative emotions and Houdini-like efforts to escape-- until they came up with a satisfying rationalization that eliminated the problem. Then something totally unexpected happened. Their brains actually gave them a little emotional pat on the back for their efforts. There was a flurry of dopamine activity in reward circuits. I came to understand that it is hard to change the partisan brain because we get rewarded for lying to ourselves... It’s not that rational thinking is irrelevant when we pull that voting lever, but that we think for a reason, and the reasons are always emotional in nature. The only things we reason about are the things that we care about. Our feelings are our guide to action. Reason provides a map of where we want to go, but first we have to want to go there. In politics as in the rest of life, we think because we feel." That led to this conclusion"

"Politics, then, is less a marketplace of ideas than a marketplace of emotions. To be successful, a candidate needs to reach voters in ways that penetrate the heart at least as much as the head. That makes political messaging critical-- and perhaps about to determine the course of American history." Westen wrote that In 2007 he had "watched one Democratic presidential candidate after another go down in flames... and wrote a book titled The Political Brain. It dissected how candidates might talk with voters if they started with an understanding of the way our minds actually work."

As was readily apparent from their campaigns over decades, Democrats and Republicans have had two very different implicit visions of the mind of the voter. Republicans talked about their values, such as faith, family, and limited government. Their think tanks are feel tanks and fuel tanks, generating and testing what the brilliant wordsmith on the right, Frank Luntz, called “words that work.”

Democrats, in contrast, talked about their policy prescriptions, bewitched by the dictum that “a campaign is a debate on the issues.” Their think tanks brought in fellows to work out policies based on the best available science. Perhaps blinded by their indifference to emotion, they left to chance the selling of those policies to the public.

...Survey data across decades of elections show that success or failure at the ballot box tends to reflect, first and foremost, voters’ feelings toward the parties, the candidates, and the economy, in that order. Then come feelings toward candidates’ specific attributes, such as competence or empathy. Feelings on any given issue come in a distant fifth in predicting election outcomes. Voters’ beliefs about the issues barely register. And except for political junkies, most voters are neither interested in detailed policy prescriptions nor competent to assess them.

What voters want to know are the answers to two questions: Does this person, and does this party, share my values? And do they understand and care about people like me? Those turn out to be pretty rational questions. No one can predict a black swan or coronavirus pandemic, but you’re likely to feel comfortable with the decisions of leaders who share your values and care about people like you... Studying voters’ responses over the last several years has allowed me to distill three basic principles central to effective political messaging, all rooted in the way our minds and brains work.

Principle #1:

Know what networks you’re activating. Our brains are vast networks of neurons, which combine in millions of ways into circuits that not only maintain our lives but create all of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Of most significance to persuasive messaging are networks of associations, sets of thoughts, feelings, images, memories, and values that become interconnected over time. These networks are primarily unconscious, always whirring in the background, directing our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

Nothing could be more important in political communication than knowing which neural wires we are inadvertently tripping, which networks we want to activate or connect, and which ones we want to deactivate.

Consider this phrase: the unemployed. What’s wrong with that? Just about everything, because it trips some inadvertent wires.

For starters, it takes real people with pain-lined faces and turns them into nameless, faceless abstractions. If you want people to feel something for the unemployed, you need to do just the opposite. It also turns a group of people that likely includes someone you know and care about yourself-- and among whose ranks you have likely been at some point-- into a them. And then there’s the just-world hypothesis-- our tendency to rationalize away bad things that happen to good people. Speaking of the unemployed cries out for just-world sentiments such as, “I wonder what they did to lose their jobs?” or “Perhaps they are just lazy.”

All of this happens unconsciously and in the flicker of an instant, so that by the time you’ve gotten half a sentence out, you’ve already taken two steps backward, and none forward. The alternative is simple and humanizing, rather than abstract and dehumanizing: People who’ve lost their jobs. You can literally feel the difference from the unemployed. And to inoculate against the just-world hypothesis, try People who’ve lost their job through no fault of their own.

Abstractions activate a thin strip of cortex-- the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex-- that plays a central role in neural circuits involved in reasoning and conscious thought. But those aren’t the circuits that move levers in the voting booth.

If you care about policies that help people who are unemployed, then you want to evoke empathy for those people. The brain has circuits that evolved specifically to create empathy toward others. These neural circuits, the ventromedial and orbital areas of the prefrontal cortex, are also just a stone’s throw away from circuits involved in emotional processing. And our language captures something important about emotions: They move us.

How about Medicaid recipients? What image comes to mind when you think of a recipient? If you’re like most white people, it is outstretched hands, which are looking for a handout-- a phrase that evolved from the gesture. Recipients are also passive. The term does not connote people actively seeking work or trying to help themselves. That is why referring to people on Medicaid is equally destructive: It suggests they are on the dole-- back to outstretched hands.

Making matters worse, although the majority of people who rely on Medicaid for their health are white, the phrase tends to activate unconscious or implicit prejudice, as most white people who hear Medicaid recipient picture poor people of color, with all the conscious and unconscious bias it entails.

The alternative, once again, is to turn people into people: People who rely on Medicaid for their health care. They are not recipients. They are not on anything.

And there is a way to turn Medicaid recipient into something powerful. No anti-Medicaid message I have ever tested can block the 20-point boost in favorability delivered by a message that begins with these words: Chances are, if you have a parent or grandparent in a nursing home, Medicaid is paying for their care. People in nursing homes are often disabled-- cognitively, physically, or both-- but we love and care about them, either because they are our beloved relatives or someone else’s, and they deserve dignity in later life or care for their illness. And the hero of the story is Medicaid, which is actively and benevolently paying for their care.

There’s still room to up the ante and make the statement even stronger-- 10 favorability points stronger. Just precede it with one clause: Whether you’re white, black, or brown, chances are, if you have a parent or grandparent in a nursing home... Why does that improve the message? First, it deactivates the implicit stereotype among white people of Medicaid recipients and the negative emotion activated by that stereotype. Second, the them becomes us. The phrasing is inclusive in a way that doesn’t feel like pandering or indulging in identity politics. It is about all of us, and it doesn’t matter what color we are.

Which brings us to DREAMers. Like the unemployed and Medicaid recipients, it’s an appeal to empathy without the appeal. And it adds an element of unintelligibility to the average voter. Why are they called DREAMers? What are they dreaming about? What’s the story with the capital DREAM? (It’s an acronym for a piece of legislation with a name no one knows.) And perhaps most important, why do the children of undocumented immigrants get to have the American Dream when, for the first time in history, three-quarters of Americans do not believe that their own children will be better off than their parents-- the core of the American Dream?

So who are DREAMers? Try this: children who have never pledged allegiance to any flag other than ours.

Principle #2:

Speak to voters’ values and emotions. Our emotions and values are not arbitrary. We have them for a reason. Positive emotions draw us toward things, people, and ideas we believe are good for ourselves and the people we care about; negative emotions lead us to avoid or fight them. In politics, messages that tap into hope, satisfaction, pride, and enthusiasm, on the one hand, and fear, anxiety, anger, and disgust on the other, move people, first of all to vote, then to vote for one party or candidate versus another.

What all human beings find compelling is rooted in the structure and evolution of our brains, and it is expressed in our values as well as in our emotions. Family is a value that matters to people across the political spectrum. Natural selection, at its core, is about survival, reproduction, and alliances with people who help us survive, reproduce, and care for our kin.

For years, the political left ceded family values to the right, which tested that term 40 years ago, saw a winner, and spent hundreds of millions of dollars branding it as theirs. For more than a generation, that effort essentially tied the hands of Democrats in speaking about perhaps the most important value to our species and the source of the most powerful of emotions.

Principle #3:

Tell a coherent, memorable story. Our brains are wired to understand, to be drawn to and into, and to remember and pass along to others information presented in a particular form: narrative. As a species, we survived for about 200,000 years before the emergence of literacy, requiring some mechanism for transmitting knowledge and values across generations. All known human societies have myths and legends in the form of stories.

Issues are not narratives. Nor are 10-point plans. Narratives have protagonists and antagonists. At least in the West, narratives tend to have a particular story structure, or grammar, recognizable even to preschool children. It includes, among other elements, an initial situation, a problem, a battle to be fought or hill to be climbed, and a resolution. Stories also tend to have a moral. The particular values embedded in that moral are central to the difference between the right and the left.

Perhaps the most important lesson I have learned from testing hundreds of thousands of narratives on the most important issues of our time, from contraception and abortion to climate change and economics, is that virtually every successful political narrative has a structure derivative of this grammar. Except for attack ads, which diverge only partly from this structure, effective messages begin with a statement of values that transcends political divides (to establish a connection between speaker and listener), then raise concerns in vivid ways that activate emotions, particularly moral emotions, such as fairness or indignation. Finally, after briefly describing a solution, but skipping details, they end with a sense of hope.

In 2020, high-quality affordable healthcare for all Americans is one of the top priorities for voters, as it has been for three decades. Illness doesn’t come in red or blue. Lack of insurance harms people on both sides of the aisle.

When Barack Obama first ran for president 12 years ago, several organizations that had been working on the issue hired me to develop pro-reform messages and test them against potential attacks. Public support for expanding healthcare coverage proved so widespread that the issue was bulletproof-- but only with effective messaging. If any of the messages began with, I believe in universal healthcare, the percentage who supported reform roughly equaled the percentage opposing it, given a tough narrative from the right about “socialized medicine” or “a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor.” But if the same message began with, I believe in a doctor for every family, support exceeded opposition 70 percent to 30 percent. Universal healthcare is abstract, cold, and sterile-- just like the name of the bill that succeeded in at least partly expanding coverage, the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The name does not capture many of the most important values that move voters on healthcare: the choice to retain the close personal connection they may already have with their doctor and the ability to choose a plan they believe is best for their family.

Universal healthcare also unconsciously activates neural networks that evoke both prejudice and legitimate concerns about quality, as white voters picture images of clinics with long lines, packed with people of color getting the kind of inferior care many people of color currently receive. Had the bill instead been named A Family Doctor for Every Family-- parallel to George W. Bush’s signature legislation on education, No Child Left Behind-- it would have activated entirely different neural networks, connoting a personal connection with their doctor, high-quality care they have chosen, and coverage for everyone.

Within the first hundred days of the Obama administration, the House of Representatives passed a healthcare bill that captured what the American public wanted. The Democrats said it was about making sure everyone has good, affordable care. It took the Senate over a year to pass a watered-down version that dropped key provisions-- a Medicare-like option to compete with private insurance and the power of the government to negotiate drug prices. By the time the bill passed, the Republicans had captured the narrative, turning a once-popular reform bill into “socialized medicine.”

Since then, Republicans have pushed to curtail the law and refused to amend it in ways that could improve care for millions more people. The ACA covers 20 million people who didn’t have coverage before, including all children, and permits coverage of people with pre-existing conditions. But it’s still possible to get stuck with a $10,000 deductible, and medical expenses remain the leading cause of bankruptcy.

Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act, deficient as it is, cost it control of the House in the 2018 midterm election. The Democrats enter the 2020 race with the challenge of selling to voters a broken program and the promise of fixing it.

To start with, what do they even call it? Most voters do not know what the Affordable Care Act is. Many speak negatively about Obamacare, not realizing they use and like it. Research shows that the two worst things to call either extending the ACA or taking a different path to healthcare are the names Democrats are currently using: Obamacare and Medicare for All. It was Republicans who coined the name Obamacare in an attempt to kill it. Any program named after a president will have the lasting enmity of the voters of the other party.

Medicare for All, although assuring that everyone would be covered, scares tens of millions of voters who fear it would create lowest-common-denominator care. A defining feature of U.S. culture is individualism; for all does not resonate with the political center.

  ...Voters want a solution to healthcare issues that addresses their values, interests, and concerns. They want high-quality, affordable care, with freedom to choose among plans, freedom from worries about problems like pre-existing conditions, and coverage for everyone. At the same time, they do not want to lose their current plan or doctor, they worry about any program that will create long lines and poor-quality care, and they worry about the cost of the program. Many swing voters are also leery of “socialized medicine.”

The evidence points to fixing the program begun by Obama. How to talk about it? Incorporating the principles of messaging, a winning campaign might sound like this:

It’s time to finish the job we started on healthcare, not tear it down. Democrats built a high, rock-solid floor on what insurance companies had to cover in every plan on the market, including pre-existing conditions, procedures your doctor orders, and life-saving preventive medicine, like breast cancer screening. Since the healthcare industry couldn’t lower the floor, they sent premiums, deductibles, and copays through the roof. So now it’s time to build the ceiling. That means limiting the amount insurance companies can raise fees every year. It means letting the most powerful union in the world that is supposed to represent the interests of working people-- the United States government-- negotiate drug prices with the pharmaceutical industry, or we’ll buy our drugs where they’re less expensive. And it means giving insurance companies some healthy competition by letting people of any age choose Medicare if they prefer it. Let’s finish the job so no Americans will ever again have to choose between taking their child to the doctor and putting food on the table for their family.

That would leave only the question of what to call it. Democrats might do well with “A Family Doctor for Every Family.” That’s a clinic Americans would be happy to visit.

What People Think

Networks of associations are always active.

Because so much is at stake in political messages, it’s important for candidates to capitalize on the associative power of words and phrases. Here is a glimpse into the minds of people when they hear the words healthcare reform.

Party Of Death by Chip Proser

What Happened To Trump's Promises About Massive Infrastructure Spending?

We'll look at the mess the Trump Regime has made of infrastructure in a moment. First though, I want to highlight one crucial part of that in my part of the country. The Republican-led Congress and the Trump Regime are screwing with California, Oregon and Washington over the earthquake early warning system-- enough time for people to take cover or pull their cars over-- the federal government was committed to, something NPR highlighted this week. An early warning system along the West Coast from the Canadian border to the Mexican border has been in the works for over a decade and is in beta testing now. NPR reported that Thomas Heaton, an engineering seismologist at the California Institute of Technology, has worked on this idea since 1985. 

“It's running right here in my office, and it has been running in my office for about 10 years, and I run it in my home,” Heaton said.

The sample earthquake scenario he pulled up on his computer showed a map of California with seismic waves radiating from the epicenter of a quake. Alarms rang, and an electronic voice called out a verbal warning, “Earthquake. Earthquake. Moderate shaking expected in six seconds.”

How such alerts would be sent to the public still needs to be ironed out, with some hoping warnings could be sent to mobile phones located in soon-to-be affected areas.

Heaton said a full rollout along the West Coast would take about 1,200 sensors. So far, there are 800 installed, half of which are in Southern California. Limited public rollout of the warning alert system has been planned for next year, but that depends on continued federal funding. The roughly $10 million the U.S. Geological Survey gets for the program would be wiped out under Trump’s proposed budget.

“If it goes through, there will not be an early warning system,” Heaton said. “I'm pretty confident about that.”

Los Angeles has already spent millions of dollars on its own to install its warning system sensors.

“We’re going to raise our own money and try to get this done, even if the federal government doesn’t help,” said Jeff Gorell, the city’s deputy mayor for public safety.

But L.A. can’t fund the full estimated cost, $16 million a year, to cover California and the whole Pacific Northwest. Lucy Jones, scientist emerita at USGS, where she helped get the early warning system going, said earthquake warnings need to come from the federal government, because research centers don’t want to own the system.

“The universities have uniformly said 'We don't want the liability of releasing these messages,'” Jones said.

The proposed federal cuts are getting pushback from Congress. A House subcommittee voted last week to keep funding at current levels. The funding proposal has more votes ahead in the House and Senate. What actually shakes out of the budget approval process is anyone’s guess, but California Rep. Ken Calvert, a Republican from Corona who chairs the subcommittee, said it has wide support.

Calvert, a Trump rubber-stamp says he has "bipartisan agreement [and] "We’re moving ahead"-- at least on the Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on Interior and Environment. He's the only Californian on the subcommittee, although Oklahoma Republican Tom Cole is a member and fracking-related earthquakes are shaking up his constituents lately.

Ted Lieu, who represents the west side of L.A. is concerned about Trump's decision to end the funding. This afternoon he said, "To borrow the President's phrase, not funding earthquake early warning systems would be 'dumb as a rock.' Such systems will save countless lives. The President's lack of an infrastructure plan shows the continued chaos at the White House. Cutting infrastructure funding with no plan will harm the American people. That's why Congress needs to pass the 21st Century New Deal for Jobs Act that I wrote, which will provide 2 trillion dollars of much needed infrastructure funding and create millions of jobs."

The Trump Regime's entire attitude towards infrastructure in basically the same-- stop spending money on anything and everything. Tom Scheck reported the story for NPR's Marketplace last week-- and who gets hurt the most? Folks in the rural areas who backed Trump most strongly in the election: Trump's desire for private infrastructure money will narrow his choices to mostly urban projects. The ignoramus in the White House insists that "business-- not government-- can deliver better services to Americans," which has sent officials in states, cities and counties scurrying for private money for public infrastructure projects like roads and bridges. They looked at 46 transportation and water-related projects in 23 states where private money-- "investment opportunities"-- is what the Trump Regime is pushing for.

We asked two Orange County candidates whose districts are plagued with infrastructure problems. Kia Hamadanchy is running for the seat held by Trump rubber stamp Mimi Walters do doesn't live in the district and isn't really aware about what people in CA-45 face. He told us that "This country-- and Orange County in particular-- needs immediate and dramatic investment in our infrastructure. Our roads and bridges are in an incredible state of disrepair and every dollar we fail to spend today is going to lead to an even higher cost down the road. Donald Trump promised time and time during his campaign he would invest in and fix infrastructure and more then six months into his administration we have yet to see a plan to do so. What we need is the right kind of investment that actually addresses the problems we have in this country and the answer certainly isn't more privatization and the selling off of our public assets. The solution must be driven by the federal government, working in concert with state and local governments."

And Sam Jammal, the progressive running against Ed Royce in CA-39 told us that "Every voter-- no matter whether they lean right or left-- has the basic expectation that government will invest in infrastructure. Unfortunately, we are years behind in these investments thank to a Republican Congress that has ignored the basics. Trump made his promise knowing full well that voters expect roads without potholes, safe bridges and the deployment of new infrastructure to modernize our economy. But, like so much else, his rhetoric doesn't meet reality. We need a real investment in infrastructure that moves us towards 2030, not backwards. To me, this means making sure we have our bridges modernized, roads paved and investments in clean energy infrastructure that promotes electric vehicles and renewable energy. This will create jobs and ensure economic growth. We lead when we invest in our country and right now, we aren't doing that. Just take a ride on any of our freeways in Orange County and its clear we aren't investing in the basics. Voters rightfully expect more and infrastructure must be a priority."

Trump may love it but "privately financed projects have proven unpopular in at least two states after citizens learned they had to pay higher fees and tolls to private investors. And a federal loan program Trump is pushing to broaden has lost money on three projects that featured private investment." On top of this, most of the projects private capital is willing too invest in "serve high population, urban centers. That means rural voters, who helped elect Trump, could be left out of the potential infrastructure boom unless he either directs a significant amount of taxpayer money to rural projects or convinces investors to steer money there."

Forty of the 46 projects on the list are transportation related. The remaining six are water projects. Eight of the projects are entirely private enterprises with limited or no government involvement.

The others rely on a financing mechanism known as a public-private partnership, which can include a variety of models. The most common is a government receiving upfront financing to build or fix a project in exchange for either payments to the investors or rights to the investors allowing them to earn money on the project from, say, charging tolls on a highway.

...13 of the 46 projects on the list collected by the White House since November are road and bridge projects. That's more than half the total number of highways-- 21-- that relied on private financing between 1989 and 2012, according to a 2012 report by the Congressional Budget Office.

Trump has not released specifics about what he calls his $1 trillion infrastructure plan or the timing, but he has emphatically embraced public-private partnerships as a solution to a problem that he's identified as critical to America and what most political observers say could deliver a badly needed political win.

The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation's infrastructure poor marks in a report card released earlier this year. The group said it will cost $4.6 trillion to address the nation's roads, bridges, ports and water systems.

The White House budget plan clearly indicates that private investment will be a strategy. "Providing more federal funding, on its own, is not the solution to our infrastructure challenges," the document said.

...It isn't certain, though, how many projects will get financed with private money.

Investors may balk at a proposal because there isn't a revenue guarantee. Government officials may also decide that it's more cost effective to use traditional borrowing rather than private financing.

What's clear is that investors are eagerly moving to put more money into infrastructure. It's considered a safer and steadier investment than the stock market, yet has higher returns than bonds.

Wall Street is already lining up. Global Infrastructure Partners closed on a $15.8 billion fund in the first quarter of 2017, according to the data analysis firm Preqin.

The fund was the largest infrastructure fund at the time but was soon surpassed in May when Saudi Arabia announced it would invest $20 billion in a $40 billion infrastructure fund run by Blackstone Group, a private equity firm.

Other fund managers, state and national pension funds and foreign governments are also looking to profit. Preqin found $71 billion ready for infrastructure spending in North America even before the Saudi pledge.

"There has been reasonable investment within infrastructure in the U.S., so it's more of whether we're going to see a real explosion going forward," said Tom Carr, a Preqin analyst.

But private financing comes with risks and drawbacks:

• Last month, Texas-- an early adopter of privatizing transportation projects-- rejected efforts to authorize additional private investment.
• Private investors in road projects in South Carolina, Texas, California and Indiana have declared bankruptcy. In some instances, the bankruptcies resulted in a financial loss for the federal government.
• A 2015 Congressional Budget Office study found that private financing will speed up the construction of a road but doesn't reduce overall costs or increase with other transportation spending.
• Rural communities may lose out since they don't have the population willing to finance projects that can cost billions.

And critics of privatization warn against selling rights to what has long been considered a public asset. They also say private backers are looking for investment returns that could make the projects more expensive to the taxpayer.

Donald Cohen, executive director of the anti-privatization group In the Public Interest, called Trump's vision an attempt to "sell off America" to Wall Street investors. He said private investors will collect their returns by creating toll roads, increasing fees or finding other sources of revenue to get a return on their investment. "There may be lots of folks who actually want to rebuild America but their top job is to generate returns, and they're going to do pretty well under Trump's plan," Cohen said.

Despite the risks, the Trump Administration continues to push for increased private investment. "The private sector can provide valuable benefits for the delivery of infrastructure, through better procurement methods, market discipline, and a long-term focus on maintaining assets," a White House budget document said.

It's unclear, though, when the president will roll out the specifics of his plan or how it will fit into a congressional agenda bogged down by a stalled health care bill, a desire to overhaul the tax code, a measure to lift the debt ceiling and a budget plan that includes infrastructure spending cuts.

Kathrin Heitmann, an infrastructure analyst with Moody's, said that's why she doesn't expect an impact from Trump's plan in the short-term. "We are very cautious that the $1 trillion infrastructure investment can be realized," she said.

Heitmann also pointed that it will take a long time for projects to get started even if Trump's plan becomes law later this year. The lag between funding approval and project completion could mean that nothing substantial happens until the end of Trump's term in 2020. "It looks like that some of this funding will only peak at the end of the current administration's term," she said.

Adding to the uncertainty, public records show Trump's top infrastructure adviser is pushing states to finance construction projects without any help from the federal government, a quiet shift in rhetoric that reflects the president's onerous budget realities. That could be a blow to local governments since many have historically relied on federal funding to complete infrastructure projects.

...Larger population centers are the primary focus for private investment. Of the 46 projects that could rely on private investment, just two are located in and would serve rural America. Both are in Alaska.

Eight projects are located in rural communities but primarily serve urban population centers, including two privately financed projects that would allow companies to ship water from rural parts of California and New Mexico to urban areas.

The lack of financing opportunities for rural America is a bipartisan concern in Congress. Lawmakers worry that private money will chase the highest return, typically found in higher population centers instead of financing the neediest projects.

"There are thousands of miles of highway and tens of thousands of bridges that need work that can't make money," said U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore. "No private sector person is going to buy them and repair them, because there isn't enough volume."

...Meanwhile, the nation's largest metropolitan areas are receiving unsolicited bids from private funds.

In November, voters in Los Angeles County approved a new half-cent sales tax and extended an existing half-cent sales tax. The increase is projected to raise $120 billion over 40 years. Even before the measure passed, private investors submitted unsolicited proposals to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Authority.

California Gov. Jerry Brown asked the Trump Administration to include three Los Angeles County transit projects in its infrastructure plan. They are a 9-mile extension of an existing transit line, a connector to the airport and a bus rapid-transit line.

Experts say financing projects like those in Los Angeles County are perfect for investors looking to capitalize on long-term projects. The city is the second largest in the country, and county voters just approved a long-term funding stream that's attractive to private investors.

...Private financing is becoming a more attractive option as cities, counties and states grapple with tight budgets, a transportation system that is costly to maintain and a desire to build new projects that serve a growing population. The financing mechanism also allows state officials to finance projects without raising gas taxes.

"States are becoming more enamored of this because they're able to deliver projects sooner," said Shailen Bhatt, executive director of the Colorado Department of Transportation. "It allows you to advance a project without necessarily, say, raising your gas tax."

But Bhatt says there are only so many projects that can be financed with private money. And he said federal and state officials should not ignore a gas tax increase as an option. Since Colorado is an early adopter in public-private partnerships, Bhatt would prefer Trump focus his plan on directly funding projects.

"If the president's plan was just more financing opportunities, well, we're already moving on that path on our own," he said.

The trade group for the national construction industry is also directing most of its efforts on states when it comes to public-private partnerships and infrastructure investment.

Ben Brubeck, an executive with Associated Builders and Contractors, said his organization has been pushing for an infrastructure package on the federal level but said the states are where he sees the most action. "If you look at the deal flow here in the United States, it's happening at the state level and not really happening at the federal level," he said.

Since President Trump was elected, anticipation has grown that the real estate billionaire would deliver on his promise to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure. He's met with union leaders, state and local officials and private business leaders trying to build support.

He's also assembled an infrastructure team led by New York real estate investors Richard LeFrak and Steven Roth. LeFrak has personal ties to the president, and Roth and Trump have a business relationship.

In May, the White House released Trump's budget proposal, which included spending $200 billion in "federal outlays to the infrastructure initiative," but didn't specify how the money will be spent.

And from some departments, Trump cut infrastructure funding.

He proposed a 13 percent reduction to the U.S. Department of Transportation general fund budget, eliminating funds for new transit projects and gutting a $499 million grant program that has paid for road, bridge and transit projects. The plan also eliminates a $500 million water and wastewater loan and grant program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but boosts funding for water and wastewater infrastructure at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Since then, there have been few other details. In June, during a week devoted to promoting his ideas about infrastructure, Trump pledged $25 billion to rural projects and $15 billion to spur what he called "transformative" projects. An accompanying document didn't elaborate on the spending or say whether the funds are included in his $200 billion request.

And despite pleas by White House officials that journalists cover the president's policy agenda instead of allegations of Russian interference in last year's election, they didn't return repeated requests for comment about Trump's infrastructure plan.

The lack of specifics regarding infrastructure-- and a budget that weakens infrastructure-related programs-- have left state and local government officials wondering when a plan will be released and whether it will benefit them.

Documents show White House officials were still working to craft a policy in March despite a campaign rollout in October, a two-month presidential transition that focused on assembling wish lists from states and multiple meetings since the inauguration to discuss policy.

During a conference call with state leaders on March 23, D.J. Gribbin, the president's infrastructure policy adviser, was reluctant to embrace any plan and emphasized that he was only speaking for himself, not for Trump or other White House officials, according to a readout of the call.

And adding to the uncertainty, notes from the call-- captured in an email from Adam Zarrin, a policy adviser to Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper-- show that Gribbin wants states to build projects without federal help. "They really are most excited ‘about projects [states] are paying for' and not the federal government. Want states to help themselves," read Zarrin's email.

Gribbin did not respond to an interview request.

The White House has aggressively courted states on infrastructure. In December, Trump's transition team requested a list of "shovel-ready" projects from governors. The White House also met in June with a group of county officials, mayors and Native American leaders to discuss infrastructure needs. The vast majority of those in attendance were Republicans.

Through the National Governor's Association, governors submitted a list of projects to the White House. Union officials, infrastructure consultants and campaign aides also submitted requests. It isn't certain whether White House officials are relying on those lists as it crafts its policy.

Others say they weren't approached to submit a list of projects. Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett, who served as president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors through June, said his organization wasn't solicited. He's skeptical that any plan relying solely on private investment will work.

"I wouldn't get overly optimistic that the private sector is going to come to the rescue for America's infrastructure projects," Cornett said. "I don't think that's likely. And if that's the hope and dream, then we're probably going to be waiting a long, long time."

Cornett said that it's often cheaper for government officials to finance projects through government borrowing. He says cities, counties and states with a solid credit rating will likely get a cheaper rate than the private sector.

...Texas State Highway 130 offers a vivid example of how Trump's vision for infrastructure could spark projects. It also shows how some Texans have revolted against toll roads that have been privately financed.

In 2012, Gov. Rick Perry appeared at the grand opening of the highway. His speech focused on how the 41-mile stretch of road between San Antonio and Austin would reduce congestion on another busy freeway, Interstate 35. Perry, who now serves as Energy Secretary in the Trump Administration, also targeted critics of privatization.

"When we debated this concept back in 2003, there was no shortage of individuals both inside and outside the Capitol that said it wouldn't work," Perry said at the time. "Today's proof that the concept is complete, and it can be seen in concrete and asphalt."

His vision focused on the financing of public and private toll roads to spur road construction. The record shows Perry was successful.

A state report last year showed 53 toll roads spanning 671 miles in Texas. Many were built in the past two decades. Some, like State Highway 130, are privately operated. Others are managed by local governments or the state.

State officials claim that 10 public-private partnerships established since 2003 have generated $17 billion in construction. And Marc Williams, deputy executive director of the state's transportation department, said public-private financing was critical to speedy completion.

But swift, private construction and tolling doesn't guarantee a healthy return on investment. In 2016, the SH 130 Concession Company, which built the highway, declared bankruptcy. The firm-- owned by Cintra, a Spanish company, and a consortium of Australian entities-- cited less traffic than projected, according to bankruptcy records.

The combination hasn't proven politically popular, either.

Critics say the financial failure should be a warning to the Trump Administration about the unpopularity of toll roads in Texas. "If you want to lose a voter, the fastest way you do it is to take $300 or $400 out of their pocket every month," said Terri Hall, who runs Texans for Toll-Free Highways.

Hall, a Republican who says she voted for Trump, intends to lobby against increased private investment in transportation. She said Trump and others who back privatization will have a political problem on their hands. "They're going to have a rude awakening if they think that this is going to be something acceptable to the average Joe," she said.

Hall's lobbying appears to have been successful in Texas. Gov. Gregg Abbott opposes more toll roads, and the Texas House of Representatives defeated a bill in May that would have allowed communities to negotiate private financing for 10 projects.

No matter; Texas communities seem undaunted and state transportation officials are still lobbying the Trump Administration to include an expansion of I-635 in its infrastructure plans.

Douglas Athas, mayor of Garland, Texas, said private investors are interested in expanding the highway from 10 lanes to 15 lanes. He said the $1.6 billion proposal would ensure the project is finished more quickly. The program relied on allowing the investors to collect tolls on a few of the managed lanes that run near existing lanes.

Like the federal government, Texas has not raised the gas tax since the early 1990s, which has slowed new road construction that's led to congestion as the state's population soars.

"Politicians are scrambling to solve a problem," said David Ellis, a research scientist at the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, and manager of the Infrastructure Investment Analysis Program. He said some toll roads, specifically in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, have been effective. After all, said Ellis, while no one likes paying a toll, the alternative is waiting in traffic.

Drivers along SH130 say they've been forced to weigh those options.

D.J. Shaw, a daily commuter on that Texas highway, said he hates paying $15 a day in tolls to drive from Seguin to Del Valle. But he said it's better than spending an extra 30 minutes on I-35. "It costs so much money and there's no other way to go," he said. "Nobody likes sitting on I-35 so they kind of got you cornered."

Williams, the state transportation official, said the legislative action means it's unlikely that any new toll roads will be financed over the next two years. But he's confident his department will secure federal funding when Trump's infrastructure plan is introduced. Williams also said Texas will spend as much as $3 billion a year more on transportation projects after voters approved a ballot measure dedicating general fund money to projects.

...[C]ritics and even some supporters of public-private partnerships warn that the public loses control over infrastructure assets when a deal is done. A citizen upset with a road project or a new toll, for example, can't complain to an elected official and get relief.

"When you enter into the P3, you now have a third party that is now in the process," said Aubrey Layne, Jr., Virginia's Secretary of Transportation.

Unwinding a deal, he says, no longer means taking a vote in the Legislature or at a city council meeting. Instead, private investors want something in return if a government reopens a contract.

Layne said governments going into P3 agreements need contractual precision and an amount of prescience because deals could last decades.

Moreover, attorneys and financial consultants are critical to protect the public's interest, he said, because private investors are typically armed with savvy financial analysts, lawyers and contractors who have negotiated these complex deals in the past.

Cities and counties, particularly those with smaller population centers, may not have the same experience or budget to retain a high level of expertise to protect their interests. "These are some of the most sophisticated investors in the world you're going to be negotiating with," Layne said, cautioning that naivete will result in a bad deal for the public.

Cohen from In the Public Interest analyzes the choice more cynically, saying that too many policy leaders look for private investment instead of making the difficult choice of raising taxes. He said there's little worry because the policy leaders often leave office before there's blowback from an increase in fees or tolls. "They don't have to answer the question in eight years about what happened to the tolls when they're tripled," Cohen said.

In fact, a key selling point of public-private partnerships has been the financial protection of taxpayers. The private sector typically assumes most of the risk in the deal. When the private backers of the Indiana toll road filed for bankruptcy in 2014, for example, taxpayers there didn't see a loss.

However, that's not always the case.

At least three times in the past seven years taxpayers have been on the hook for business failures, each stemming from a federal loan program-- called the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA)-- which President Trump wants to grow.

The program helps finance transportation projects through direct loans, loan guarantees and lines of credit. In budget documents, the Trump Administration claims TIFIA is a success.

"One dollar of TIFIA subsidy leverages roughly $40 in project value. If the amount of TIFIA subsidy was increased to $1 billion annually for 10 years, that could leverage up to $140 billion in credit assistance, and approximately $424 billion in total investment," the document states.

But TIFIA loans have put taxpayers at risk:

• In 2010, the private investors of the South Bay Expressway in California declared bankruptcy. When the investors emerged from bankruptcy in 2011, the U.S. Department of Transportation took a $47 million loss on a $140 million loan that helped finance the road.

• In 2014, the U.S. Department of Transportation sold a federal loan it held on the Pocahontas Parkway in Virginia to private investors at a 59 percent loss. Anthony Foxx, who was the Transportation secretary, said he chose to sell the loan after private investors signaled they were losing money on the nearly 9-mile toll road near Richmond.

• And the bankrupt Texas highway-- State Highway 130-- was initially financed with a $430 million federal loan. It emerged from bankruptcy in June with new ownership and $260 million in new financing. The federal government received $16 million for the loan.

The Texas agreement also brings an ironic twist: The investors who insisted the private sector could manage transportation projects better than the public sector will now answer to a new owner: the federal government, which now has a 34 percent stake in the toll road.

"I think you only need to look at Texas to get an idea of what Trump’s infrastructure plan will look like down the road," said Tom Wakely, an economic populist who is running for Texas governor on a progressive platform. "Texas infrastructure, roads, bridges and damns, is to be kind in shambles but if we are telling the truth it is nothing short of FUBAR. Decades of failed Republican policies that emphasized private infrastructure money back by government guarantees over sound fiscal public infrastructure investment have left Texans sitting in traffic for hours.

Tom Wakely 

"A perfect example of this is Texas Toll Road 130. It was by built 130 Concession Co., a joint venture between Cintra, a Spanish developer and Zachry Construction Co., a San Antonio based company. It was build with a half-billion dollars in federal loans and another billion or so in private loans but it is nothing more than a 41 mile highway of broken concrete and promises. It was built by Republican Governor Rick Perry, now Trump’s Energy Secretary. The highway connects San Antonio and Austin but only if you drive a hell out of your way to get there. It causes flooding in nearby towns. It is nothing more than a public albatross and private get rich quick scheme.

"Another example of an infrastructure project here in Texas that is surely headed for bankruptcy is the flawed Vista Ridge pipeline. It is a $3.4 billion water project requiring the construction of a 142 mile pipeline from San Antonio north to rural Burleson County. This transfer of water will be the biggest in Texas history and has been described by financial advisers as one of the U.S.’ largest public-private partnerships in the water sector. To put it bluntly, it is morally wrong to grow a city like San Antonio by taking water from a distant ecosystem which will eventually need that water."

If Fracking Causes Earthquakes And Politicians Take Bribes To Approve Fracking In Earthquake Zones.. What Then?

The map above is from National Geographic and it shows the likelihood of human-induced earthquakes for 2016. That's not a way of tracking a team of obese volleyball players. It's all about fracking. Anyone even tangentially involved with allowing fracking in California should be subject to the... severe punishment, especially if they've accepted money from Oil and Gas interests, in return for their acquiescence, the way Governor Jerry Brown and oily state Senators Ricardo Lara and Isadore Hall have. Oklahoma is getting the most attention-- who ever heard of earthquakes in Oklahoma?-- but it's California where a real catastrophe could be triggered-- and all for the greed of criminal politicians. Yesterday, Sarah Gilman writing for the National Geographic reported that "the U.S. Geological Survey unveiled an earthquake hazard forecast for the central and eastern parts of the country that for the first time includes human-caused quakes, referred to in technical parlance as “induced seismicity.” The report suggests that seven million people in parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Arkansas face increased risks from human-induced earthquakes in the next year... In Oklahoma, injected water helped produce the state’s largest ever recorded earthquake-- a magnitude 5.6 in Prague in 2011 that toppled chimneys and inspired at least one lawsuit against industry to cover injuries and property damage. Theoretically, injection or smaller induced earthquakes themselves could trigger even larger quakes, USGS scientists said, since the state has a fault that, prehistorically, has produced a magnitude 7 temblor."

The risks appear most widespread and significant in north-central Oklahoma and a tiny sliver of southern Kansas, where a large area has a 5 to 12 percent chance per year of an earthquake that can cause buildings to crack and, in rare cases, collapse. That’s comparable to risks in parts of more seismically famous California, USGS scientists said at a press conference on Monday.

The USGS decided to include induced seismicity in the new map because of a well-documented and sharp increase in the number and severity of human-made earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S. starting in 2009, largely tied to the energy industry.

“We want to help people understand how much concern they should have with these earthquakes,” said lead author Mark Petersen, chief of the agency’s National Seismic Hazard Mapping Project.

  The oil industry recently boomed in Oklahoma and elsewhere due to advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing-- also known as fracking-- a controversial practice that involves firing a slurry of water, sand, and chemicals into the ground to release trapped hydrocarbons. Along with the fracking fluids, the oil or gas that rises to the surface tends to come with copious amounts of brackish groundwater, which energy companies dispose of by reinjecting into the earth.

In parts of Oklahoma, this wastewater injection has increased five to tenfold. At the same time, earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 and greater spiked from fewer than 100 between 1970 and 2009 to almost 600 in 2014, and a whopping 907 in 2015.

Most of the water is going into a layer of rock called the Arbuckle Formation, which may transfer water pressure to the still deeper basement rock layer, where the earthquakes are triggered. As water input has increased, so has the pore pressure in already stressed faults there, allowing their sides-- usually clamped tightly together-- to slip more easily past each other.

...These seismic maps are mostly used to develop emergency plans, building safety standards, and insurance rates. That means the new projection of induced earthquake risk could see citizens and communities in affected areas shouldering more of the financial burden for drilling’s ripple effects, Johnson Bridgwater, director of the Sierra Club’s Oklahoma Chapter, told National Geographic.

The percent of homeowners holding earthquake insurance policies in Oklahoma has risen in recent years to around 10 percent-- similar to California. Considering that Oklahoma wasn't much of a seismic risk until the fracking boom, some citizens and nonprofits are trying to hold energy companies accountable.

Two significant temblors that shook Oklahoma City and Edmonds over the 2015 holidays resulted in lawsuits from homeowners. And the Sierra Club's state chapter recently filed another earthquake suit against energy companies after a magnitude 5.1 quake struck near the Kansas border in February.

  “Oklahoma citizens are now having to open their own pocketbooks for insurance protection,” Bridgwater said. “And they’re obviously upset and think industry should have to cover that.”

Also, while previous maps looked at natural risk over longer timeframes, induced seismicity can vary rapidly along with shifts in policy or the market, so the USGS adjusted the timescale of the new map to just one year. USGS’s Petersen noted that some parts of the country where induced quakes were more common for a time are now forecast to have far less seismic risk.

“Something is going right in Ohio,” he said, which shows that regulatory changes like reducing injections can mitigate the potential quake hazards.

Conditions are already changing in Oklahoma. Boak says the collapse of oil prices has led to steep declines in wastewater injection in the 25-county area that has been most impacted. He expects new calls by the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, a state regulatory agency, to further curtail underground disposal and keep those numbers down.

Though there have been more than 200 quakes in Oklahoma so far in 2016, Boak said he is “guardedly optimistic” that there will be an overall reduction by the end of the year.

Back to California for a moment. The fracking forces are doing all they can to elect Sacramento's most corrupt legislator, Isadore Hall, Big Oil's mainstay in the state Senate. His primary opponent, progressive environmental advocate, is Nanette Barragán. This morning she told us that she's been worried about the existential dangers of fracking as well. "From creating earthquakes to polluting our drinking water, fracking puts public health in danger. I am committed to protecting our communities from irresponsible fracking by working with my colleagues in Congress to  promote safe, clean energy for our future." Blue America has endorsed Nanette for the open congressional seat in L.A.'s South Bay, an area where 71% of the residents are Latino but Latinos never get any support from the California Democratic Party, let alone from the DCCC or the corrupted and rotted out Washington Establishment. You can contribute to Barragán's campaign here.

UPDATE: Worse Yet?

This week, Bill McKibben may have shaken up the fracking world on a non-earthquake front-- a feature for The Nation about fracking's role in Global Warming. "[I]t appears," he wrote, "the United States may have gotten the chemistry wrong. Really wrong." It's not the CO2 but "the nasty little brother, methane (CH4).

In February, Harvard researchers published an explosive paper in Geophysical Research Letters. Using satellite data and ground observations, they concluded that the nation as a whole is leaking methane in massive quantities. Between 2002 and 2014, the data showed that US methane emissions increased by more than 30 percent, accounting for 30 to 60 percent of an enormous spike in methane in the entire planet’s atmosphere... Because burning natural gas releases significantly less carbon dioxide than burning coal, CO2 emissions have begun to trend slowly downward, allowing politicians to take a bow. But this new Harvard data, which comes on the heels of other aerial surveys showing big methane leakage, suggests that our new natural-gas infrastructure has been bleeding methane into the atmosphere in record quantities. And molecule for molecule, this unburned methane is much, much more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.

...[H]ere’s the unhappy fact about methane: Though it produces only half as much carbon as coal when you burn it, if you don’t-- if it escapes into the air before it can be captured in a pipeline, or anywhere else along its route to a power plant or your stove-- then it traps heat in the atmosphere much more efficiently than CO2... [E]ven a small percentage of the methane leaked-- maybe as little as 3 percent-- then fracked gas would do more climate damage than coal. And their preliminary data showed that leak rates could be at least that high: that somewhere between 3.6 and 7.9 percent of methane gas from shale-drilling operations actually escapes into the atmosphere.

...And if we didn’t frack, what would we do instead? Ten years ago, the realistic choice was between natural gas and coal. But that choice is no longer germane: Over the same 10 years, the price of a solar panel has dropped at least 80 percent. New inventions have come online, such as air-source heat pumps, which use the latent heat in the air to warm and cool houses, and electric storage batteries. We’ve reached the point where Denmark can generate 42 percent of its power from the wind, and where Bangladesh is planning to solarize every village in the country within the next five years. We’ve reached the point, that is, where the idea of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to a renewable future is a marketing slogan, not a realistic claim (even if that’s precisely the phrase that Hillary Clinton used to defend fracking in a debate earlier this month).

One of the nastiest side effects of the fracking boom, in fact, is that the expansion of natural gas has undercut the market for renewables, keeping us from putting up windmills and solar panels at the necessary pace. Joe Romm, a climate analyst at the Center for American Progress, has been tracking the various economic studies more closely than anyone else. Even if you could cut the methane-leakage rates to zero, Romm says, fracked gas (which, remember, still produces 50 percent of the CO2 level emitted by coal when you burn it) would do little to cut the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions because it would displace so much truly clean power. A Stanford forum in 2014 assembled more than a dozen expert teams, and their models showed what a drag on a sustainable future cheap, abundant gas would be. “Cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by burning natural gas is like dieting by eating reduced-fat cookies,” the principal investigator of the Stanford forum explained. “If you really want to lose weight, you probably need to avoid cookies altogether.”

There are a few promising signs. Clinton has at least tempered her enthusiasm for fracking some in recent debates, listing a series of preconditions she’d insist on before new projects were approved; Bernie Sanders, by contrast, has called for a moratorium on new fracking. But Clinton continues to conflate and confuse the chemistry: Natural gas, she said in a recent position paper, has helped US carbon emissions “reach their lowest level in 20 years.” It appears that many in power would like to carry on the fracking revolution, albeit a tad more carefully.

Indeed, just last month, Cheniere Energy shipped the first load of American gas overseas from its new export terminal at Sabine Pass in Louisiana. As the ship sailed, Cheniere’s vice president of marketing, Meg Gentle, told industry and government officials that natural gas should be rebranded as renewable energy. “I’d challenge everyone here to reframe the debate and make sure natural gas is part of the category of clean energy, not a fossil-fuel category, which is viewed as dirty and not part of the solution,” she said. A few days later, Exxon’s PR chief, writing in the Los Angeles Times, boasted that the company had been “instrumental in America’s shale gas revolution,” and that as a result, “America’s greenhouse gas emissions have declined to levels not seen since the 1990s.”

The new data prove them entirely wrong. The global-warming fight can’t just be about carbon dioxide any longer. Those local environmentalists, from New York State to Tasmania, who have managed to enforce fracking bans are doing as much for the climate as they are for their own clean water. That’s because fossil fuels are the problem in global warming-- and fossil fuels don’t come in good and bad flavors. Coal and oil and natural gas have to be left in the ground. All of them.

No wonder Clinton is afraid to do any more debates with Bernie. And this isn't something where she disagrees with anyone might have to debate in a general election situation. Trump, Cruz, Kasich and Ryan are all-- as in all things-- "worse than Hillary." That won't save the planet, but it will make some Democrats feel better about themselves when they vote for global catastrophe.