.. are there a few good elected men or women in the Republican Party who will stand up to the president’s abuse of power as their predecessors did during Watergate?
.. But we already know the answer: No.
The G.O.P. never would have embraced someone like Trump in the first place — an indecent man with a record of multiple bankruptcies, unpaid bills and alleged sexual harassments who lies as he breathes — for the answer to ever be yes.
.. Virtually all the good men and women in this party’s leadership have been purged or silenced; those who are left have either been bought off by lobbies or have cynically decided to take a ride on Trump’s Good Ship Lollipop to exploit it for any number of different agendas.
.. Are there tens of millions of good men and women in America ready to run and vote as Democrats or independents in the 2018 congressional elections and replace the current G.O.P. majority in the House and maybe the Senate?
Nothing else matters — this is now a raw contest of power.
.. they enjoy, exercising raw power against their opponents.
.. Democrats and independents should not be deluded or distracted by marches on Washington, clever tweets or “Saturday Night Live” skits lampooning Trump. They need power.
.. they have power and are not afraid to use it, no matter what the polls say.
.. they will use that power to cut taxes for wealthy people, strip health care from poor people and turn climate policy over to the fossil fuel industry until someone else checks that power
.. The party has lost its moral compass.
.. Just think about that picture of Trump laughing it up with Russia’s foreign minister in the Oval Office, a foreign minister who covered up Syria’s use of poison gas. Trump reportedly shared with him sensitive intelligence on ISIS, and Trump refused to allow any U.S. press in the room. The picture came from Russia’s official photographer. In our White House!
.. it is a threat to the rule of law,
freedom of the press,
ethics in government,
the integrity of our institutions,
the values our kids need to learn from their president and
America’s longstanding role as the respected leader of the free world.
Climate Change Discussion driven by Model-driven debate
Who to believe?
The real question is — why are readers and decision-makers forced to “believe” anything at all? Many claims made during the debate offered no numbers to back them up. Claims with numbers rarely provided context to interpret those numbers. And never — never! — were readers shown the calculations behind any numbers. Readers had to make up their minds on the basis of hand-waving, rhetoric, bombast.
Imagine if Blinder’s proposal in the New York Times were written like this:
Say we allocate $3.0 billion for the following program: Car-owners who trade in an old car that gets less than 17 MPG, and purchase a new car that gets better than 24 MPG, will receive a $3,500 rebate.
We estimate that this will get 828,571 old cars off the road. It will save1,068 million gallons of gas (or 68 hours worth of U.S. gas consumption.) It will avoid 9.97 million tons CO2e, or 0.14% of annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
The abatement cost is $301 per ton CO2e of federal spending, although it’s -$20 per ton CO2e on balance if you account for the money saved by consumers buying less gas.
Donald Trump and the Myth of the COal Revival
To put the miners “back to work,” the President announced, he was lifting the moratorium on coal leases on federal lands. He was also ordering a review of his predecessor’s Clean Power Plan, that “crushing attack on American industry.”
.. his order seems designed to cleanse the E.P.A. of what Senator James Inhofe, Republican, of Oklahoma, recently described as “all the stuff” on the agency’s Web site “that is brainwashing our kids.”
.. The irony of the executive order, as many analysts have already pointed out, is that it denies economic realities, too. The C.P.P., Reilly said, largely locked in “what was going to happen anyway”—namely, a steady decline in the demand for coal caused by Trump’s beloved free market.
.. Repealing the C.P.P., Reilly predicted, “will do little or nothing to help out-of-work coal miners.” Even Robert Murray, the C.E.O. of Murray Energy, the country’s largest private coal company, recently said that coal jobs weren’t going to come back in the multitudes that Trump has promised.
.. Indeed, economists have projected that the cost of implementing the C.P.P. would be recovered in public-health benefits alone, since it would reduce soot-and-smog-forming emissions. This is especially true for communities downwind of coal plants, which have been suffering for decades.
According to the E.P.A.’s own estimates, the C.P.P. would help prevent as many as thirty-six hundred premature deaths, seventeen hundred heart attacks, ninety thousand asthma attacks among children, and three hundred thousand missed workdays and school days every year.
.. Trump’s proposed cuts to the E.P.A. budget would result in the elimination of approximately thirty-two hundred jobs.
One of the most troubling ideas about climate change just found new evidence in its favor
The idea is that climate change doesn’t merely increase the overall likelihood of heat waves, say, or the volume of rainfall — it also changes the flow of weather itself. By altering massive planet-scale air patterns like the jet stream
.. The idea is that climate change doesn’t merely increase the overall likelihood of heat waves, say, or the volume of rainfall — it also changes the flow of weather itself. By altering massive planet-scale air patterns like the jet stream
.. But when the Arctic warms up faster than the equator does — which is part of the fundamental definition of global warming, and which is already happening — the jet stream’s flow can become weakened and elongated. That’s when you can get the resultant weather extremes.
.. What the new study is saying is that in summer, in particular, this can occur... explain how enhanced high-latitude warming trends may trigger remote weather impacts,” he said.