“What a disgrace.”
That’s how Sen. Bernie Sanders responded on Thursday to acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney telling reporters that next year’s G7 summit, hosted by the United States, will not include the global climate crisis as part of its agenda.
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Sanders, who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination in order to unseat Trump, decried the announcement by Mulvaney who also confirmed that the summit would be held at Trump’s own golf resort in Florida.
“Not only is Trump using the powers of the presidency to enrich himself, which is blatantly unconstitutional,” Sanders said in a tweet. “He is ignoring a massive international crisis that threatens humanity. What a disgrace.”
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As the Trump administration stonewalls House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, with multiple witnesses being blocked from or refusing to testify, President Donald Trump on Monday morning asserted that “there is no reason” for Congress to receive testimony from anyone.
Trump’s comments came after news broke that four White House officials who were scheduled to speak to House committees on Monday will not be appearing on Capitol Hill, and that allies of White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney are reportedly forming a “firewall” against the inquiry.
“What I said on the phone call with the Ukrainian President is ‘perfectly’ stated,” Trump tweeted, referring to the alleged quid pro quo at the center of the impeachment inquiry. “There is no reason to call witnesses to analyze my words and meaning.”
Trump and his Republican allies are denying that the president committed an impeachable offense in July when he suggested in a phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that military aid would be withheld unless Ukraine opened an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden.
The president called the phone call “perfect,” but Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman of the National Security Council testified last week that key portions of the call were left out of the transcript that was released last month.
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The Nation journalist John Nichols jokingly tweeted Monday that the president may have a point about the necessity, or lack thereof, of continuing to call witnesses to testify about the phone call of the president’s conduct in the weeks since. A number of State Department officials have clearly laid out how the president and his allies sought to pressure Ukraine to help Trump in the 2020 election.
“In fairness to Trump, his words and meaning are more than sufficiently devastating to justify impeachment,” Nichols tweeted.
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Amid global demands for immediate and bold climate action, a new economic analysis released Tuesday reveals that the pensions of working-class people are paying the price for continued investments in the same fossil fuel companies that are ruining the planet.
Toronto-based firm Corporate Knights revealed in a new study that three major state pension funds in California and Colorado lost over $19 billion collectively as a result of investments in fossil fuel industries over ten years.
“As long as PERA’s money remains invested in the fossil fuel industry, that investment supports an industry that has willfully denied its role in climate change, accelerating today’s climate crisis in favor of profits.”
—Devon Reynolds, PERA memberCalSTRS and CalPERS, which represent nearly three million retired teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other public employees, lost out on more than $17 billion over a decade. Those losses came as the pension funds invested people’s retirement savings in extractive industries, which are losing jobs and stock value as the renewable energy sector has added jobs in recent years.
The funds’ members lost an average of $5,572 and $6,072 per person, respectively.
Colorado’s pension fund for state retirees would have gained an additional $1.7 billion in value if it hadn’t invested in fossil fuels, Corporate Knights reported, translating to a loss of nearly $3,000 per member.
The global grassroots movement 350.org urged those affected by fossil fuel investments to call for immediate divestment.
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“These findings help show that fossil fuel companies are no longer wise long-term investment choices, and everyday Americans are feeling the sting,” said 350.org in a statement.
For entities which are not moved to halt their investments in climate-warming fossil fuel emissions given the extreme weather, rising sea levels, and heatwaves fossil fuels are linked to, one Colorado public employee said, the news of billions of lost dollars may sway them.
“As long as PERA’s money remains invested in the fossil fuel industry, that investment supports an industry that has willfully denied its role in climate change, accelerating today’s climate crisis in favor of profits. For the sake of drowned Pacific islands, migrants fleeing drought, and future generations’ lives, PERA must divest from fossil fuels,” said Devon Reynolds, a member of PERA. “The Corporate Knights study makes that easier by showing they have billions of dollars to gain as well.”
Under pressure from climate campaigners, institutions including churches, universities, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, and the country of Ireland have divested from the fossil fuel sector in recent years.
Managed assets pledged to divestment increased by 22,000 percent from 2014 to 2019, from $52 billion to $11.5 trillion.
On Wednesday, retired teachers in California plan to attend a CalSTRS meeting to demand answers about why the fund invested their retirement savings in fossil fuels.
As 350.org wrote, the pension funds have a number of questions in light of Corporate Knights’ findings.
“Retirees and other members of CalPERS, CalSTRS, and Colorado’s PERA might ask: ‘Now that the fund managers know these fossil fuel investments are losing us money, what are they going to do about it?’ said the group.
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Bolivian Senator Jeanine Añez, a leader of the nation’s right-wing opposition party, declared herself interim president of the country Tuesday night despite lacking the constitutionally required number of lawmakers to approve her appointment.
“I assume the presidency immediately and will do everything necessary to pacify the country,” declared Añez, who has a history of racist attacks against indigenous Bolivians.
As CNN reported, members of former President Evo Morales’ leftist party did not attend the session Tuesday, leaving “the legislative chamber short of the legal minimum number of lawmakers required to appoint her.”
Morales, who resigned Sunday under threat from the Bolivian military and police forces, tweeted late Tuesday that “the most crafty and disastrous coup in history has been consummated.”
“A coupist right-wing senator calls herself president of the Senate and then interim president of Bolivia without a legislative quorum, surrounded by a group of accomplices and led by the armed forces and the police that repress the people,” said Morales, who accepted asylum in Mexico.
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According to the New York Times, “the military high command met with Ms. Añez for more than an hour at the government palace Tuesday night in what her aides described as a planning session to keep the peace. At the end of the meeting, pictures were released of the senior officers saluting Ms. Añez.”
Earlier Tuesday, thousands of Morales supporters marched in opposition to the coup:
The Guardian reported that hundreds of Morales backers rallied near the Bolivian assembly building late Tuesday to denounce Añez’s assumption of the presidency as illegitimate.
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“She’s declared herself president without having a quorum in the parliament,” Morales supporter Julio Chipana told The Guardian. “She doesn’t represent us.”
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President Donald Trump late Thursday asked the right-wing Supreme Court to block the Manhattan district attorney’s subpoena for his tax returns, arguing that he is “absolutely immune from all stages of state criminal process while in office.”
“That President Trump is going to the Supreme Court to try to avoid scrutiny of his finances does not exactly inspire confidence in what will be found in his tax returns.”
—Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
Trump’s 179-page petition (pdf) to the Supreme Court represents the final stage in the president’s effort to stop Manhattan prosecutors from obtaining eight years of his personal and business tax records. Mazars USA, Trump’s accounting firm, has said it will hand over the state documents if the Supreme Court declines to hear the case.
Ryan Thomas, spokesperson for progressive advocacy group Stand Up America, said in a statement that the president’s “appeal to block the release of his tax returns is nothing more than a last-ditch effort to stymie a criminal investigation that’s breathing down his neck.”
“No one is above the law, including Donald Trump,” said Thomas. “It’s absolutely shocking the lengths Donald Trump will go to to shield himself from accountability. If Trump has nothing to hide, then he should immediately release his tax returns and give the American people the transparency they deserve.”
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In October, as Common Dreams reported, Judge Victor Marrero of the Federal District Court in Manhattan rejected Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from criminal investigations, calling it “repugnant.”
“This court cannot endorse such a categorical and limitless assertion of presidential immunity from judicial process as being countenanced by the nation’s constitutional plan,” wrote Marrero. “The expansive notion of constitutional immunity invoked here to shield the president from judicial process would constitute an overreach of executive power.”
Trump’s petition to the Supreme Court—which the president has driven further to the right by appointing Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh—came just a day after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined to review an earlier appeals court ruling that rejected Trump’s effort to block a House Oversight and Reform Committee subpoena for eight years of his federal tax returns.
Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s attorneys, quickly signaled Trump would appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.
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“That President Trump is going to the Supreme Court to try to avoid scrutiny of his finances does not exactly inspire confidence in what will be found in his tax returns,” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington tweeted Thursday.
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Former Michigan gubernatorial candidate and progressive activist Dr. Abdul El-Sayed on Thursday endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders for president in 2020, citing the Vermont senator’s commitment to Medicare for All, his willingness to speak out on behalf of the Palestinians, and his “moral integrity.”
“Bernie has CREATED the political conversation we’re having now. Medicare for All, Green New Deal, Free College, no corporate money—all because of Bernie,” El-Sayed wrote in a series of tweets. “We’re not just fighting to beat Trump, but to build the after-Trump. Bernie understands that those teachers, nurses, and line workers are the ones who will do it. And they have made it clear that Bernie’s is the movement they trust to do it.”
El-Sayed is the former director of the Detroit Health Department and an outspoken supporter of Medicare for All. Sanders endorsed and campaigned for El-Sayed in his 2018 Michigan gubernatorial primary race against now-Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
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“Bernie’s Medicare for All plan is the most honest,” El-Sayed wrote Thursday. “It trusts the American people to understand that we get what we pay for AND that we can do better than the insurance corporations that are dragging us for their profits.”
In a video explaining his endorsement, El-Sayed said he’s proud to back Sanders because the senator has “been a leader on Medicare for All for a long time.”
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“I went to medical school to learn how to heal people, realized that the system is making them sick,” said El-Sayed. “Medicare for All is the solution that we need right now to be able to solve the clear inequities that we have in healthcare, the fact that too many people are going bankrupt, because we have unaffordable healthcare, and the fact that our healthcare system is ineffective.”
“I think every time—whether it comes to healthcare, whether it comes to housing, whether it comes to a job that pays a living wage—Bernie Sanders is the answer,” El-Sayed added.
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In yet another signal to global governments that greater ambition is needed to combat the climate crisis, an annual United Nations report released Monday revealed that levels of long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached record highs last year.
“We face a stark choice: set in motion the radical transformations we need now, or face the consequences of a planet radically altered by climate change.”
—Inger Andersen, UNEP
The latest World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Greenhouse Gas Bulletin (pdf) provided figures for globally averaged concentrations of three key climate-heating gases in 2018:
“These values represent, respectively, 147%, 259%, and 123% of pre-industrial (before 1750) levels,” the bulletin noted. In terms of contributions to warming the climate, “carbon dioxide is the single most important anthropogenic GHG in the atmosphere” among all long-lived greenhouse gases, the primary focus of the report.
Both methane and nitrious oxide are emitted by natural sources, but about 60 percent of CH4 emitted into the atmosphere comes from human activities such as biomass burning, cattle farming, fossil fuel exploitation, landfills, and rice agriculture, according to the bulletin. About 40 percent of N2O comes from human sources, including fertilizer use and various industrial processes.
From 2017 to 2018, concentrations of all three gases surged by higher amounts than the yearly increases documented over the past decade.
“Since 1990, there has been a 43% increase in total radiative forcing—the warming effect on the climate—by long-lived greenhouse gases,” the WMO said in a statement announcing the new bulletin.
The U.N. agency warned that “this continuing long-term trend means that future generations will be confronted with increasingly severe impacts of climate change, including rising temperatures, more extreme weather, water stress, sea level rise, and disruption to marine and land ecosystems.”
The bulletin was released a week before the next U.N. Climate Change Conference, COP 25, is scheduled to start. Representatives from across the globe will meet at the conference in Madrid to discuss governments’ commitments to tackling the human-caused climate emergency, including obligations under the 2015 Paris accord.
WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas, in the agency’s statement, tied the bulletin’s findings to the necessity of bolder climate action on a global scale.
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“There is no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline, in greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere despite all the commitments under the Paris agreement on climate change,” Taalas said. “We need to translate the commitments into action and increase the level of ambition for the sake of the future welfare of… mankind.”
“It is worth recalling that the last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5 million years ago,” he added. “Back then, the temperature was 2-3°C warmer, sea level was 10-20 meters higher than now.”
Inger Andersen, executive director of the U.N . Environment Program—which last week released a report detailing how projections for fossil fuel production by 2030 are “dangerously out of step” with global climate goals—connected the bulletin to UNEP’s next annual Emission Gap Report, set to be published Tuesday.
“The findings of WMO’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin and UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report point us in a clear direction—in this critical period, the world must deliver concrete, stepped-up action on emissions,” Andersen said. “We face a stark choice: set in motion the radical transformations we need now, or face the consequences of a planet radically altered by climate change.”
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres shared the WMO’s bulletin on Twitter Monday and wrote, “another record that shows we are not doing enough to address the climate emergency.”
The bulletin elicted renewed demands from activists for both governments and the private sector to ramp up efforts to drive down greenhouse gases, particularly by phasing out fossil fuels.
“The record rise in greenhouse gas concentrations is a cruel reminder that for all the real progress in clean technology, we have yet to even stop global emissions increases,” Nick Mabey, chief executive of global think tank E3G, told The Guardian. “The climate system cannot be negotiated with. Until we stop new investment in fossil fuels and massively scale up green power the risks from catastrophic climate change will continue to rise.”
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Interior Secretary David Bernhardt was condemned Monday for a proposed policy shift on offshore drilling panned as a “sweetheart giveaway” for a former client.
The new extraction-encouraging proposal was announced last month in a report (pdf) by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), two agencies within the Interior Department and occurred, according to transparency group Western Values Project, “under the cloud of impeachment.”
“Since day one, Secretary Bernhardt has operated as though Interior was his own personal lobby shop by doling out favors for his former clients with impunity. This offshore royalty rate reduction deal is short selling our shared resources and ripping off taxpayers.” —Jayson O’Neill, Western Values Project.
Bernhardt’s announcement followed longstanding fears that the former lobbyist would use his position in the federal government to serve the interests of the fossil fuel lobby above those of the American people and public lands. The recommendations laid out in the report pertain to royalties for offshore leasing and drilling.
“Federal officials,” as Louisiana’s Houma Today reported, “are offering oil and gas companies a discount on the fees they pay the government to drill in the Gulf of Mexico’s shallow waters.”
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If enacted, the policy to “ensure maximum resource recovery” would benefit the oil and gas industry National Ocean Industries Association (NOIA), on whose behalf Bernhardt previously lobbied, said Western Values Project.
Also noteworthy, said the advocacy group, is that the report was co-authored by BSEE Director Scott Angelle, who also has ties to the fossil fuel industry. Western Values Project said that, during the government shutdown, Angelle—who has NOIA’s stamp of approval for his current position—green-lit 53 permits for offshore drilling for companies that sit on the board of directors for NOIA.
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“Since day one, Secretary Bernhardt has operated as though Interior was his own personal lobby shop by doling out favors for his former clients with impunity. This offshore royalty rate reduction deal is short selling our shared resources and ripping off taxpayers,” said Jayson O’Neill, deputy director of Western Values Project.
“With Trump’s own corruption dominating headlines,” he continued, “Bernhardt probably thought this sweetheart giveaway to his former oil and gas client would slip by unnoticed.”
Oil giants like Chevron and Shell are already taking advantage of a loophole in federal law to avoid paying at least $18 billion in royalties on oil and gas drilled in the Gulf since 1996, the New York Times reported in October, citing a report from the Government Accountability Office.
The possible policy shift sparked environmental worries from New Orleans-based advocacy group Healthy Gulf, which called the proposal “a recipe for disaster” in a tweet last month.
“This administration wants to lease areas of the Gulf for ‘high-risk, small-upside opportunities’ to smaller oil companies who don’t have the resources to handle spills,” the group said. “This proposal is as illogical as it is dangerous.”
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If you want a candidate committed to banning fracking in the United States immediately, find another candidate than Joe Biden.
That’s the advice of Biden himself, given to an activist from the Sunrise Movement in a video posted online Thursday after the two discussed the former vice president’s adviser Heather Zichal and Biden’s plans for the future of fracking.
In the video of the interaction posted on Twitter by Sunrise Thursday afternoon, Biden appears confused about Zichal’s connections to the natural gas industry, protesting that the adviser “worked for us in the administration.”
“No, no, I know,” the Sunrise activist patiently explains as Biden grabs him by the shoulders. “But she also worked—”
“If you look at my record,” Biden begins, “look at my record. Just look at my record.”
The two discuss fracking as well. Biden tells the activist that “you can’t ban fracking right now” because “you gotta transition away from it.”
“You’re gonna ban fracking all across America, right now, right?” Biden asks the Sunrise activist.
“I would love to,” the activist replies.
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“I’d love to, too,” says Biden. “I’d love to make sure we can’t use any oil or gas, period. Now, now, is it possible?”
“Yes,” replies the Sunrise activist.
“Well, you oughta vote for someone else,” says Biden, releasing the young man and moving on.
As Sludge reported in May, adviser Zichal “recently occupied a lucrative seat on the board of the Texas-based liquified natural gas (LNG) company Cheniere Energy.” Cheniere is a frequent donor to Republican politicians.
CounterPunch editor Jeffrey St. Clair referred to Biden’s “No Malarkey” bus tour in a tweet about the interaction.
“Here’s some choice malarkey from Biden on his climate advisor, Heather Zichal, who pulled down more than a cool (or hot, I guess) million on the board of Cheniere Energy, a Texas-based liquified natural gas company whose execs she’d gotten cozy with while working for Obama,” tweeted St. Clair.
The interaction caught the attention of Briahna Joy Gray, campaign press secretary for Bernie Sanders, who earlier this year added a federal fracking ban to his 2020 campaign platform.
“Biden says ‘you ought to vote for somebody else’ if you want us to ban fracking and transition away from fossil fuels now,” tweeted Gray. “Might I recommend Bernie Sanders: the climate candidate.”
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On the heels of new research showing that the world’s oceans are rapidly warming, scientists revealed Wednesday that a huge patch of hot water in the northeast Pacific Ocean dubbed “the blob” was to blame for killing about one million seabirds.
The peer-reviewed study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, was conducted by a team of researchers at federal and state agencies, conservation groups, and universities. They tied the mass die-off to “the blob,” a marine heatwave that began forming in 2013 and grew more intense in 2015 because of the weather phenomenon known as El Niño.
“About 62,000 dead or dying common murres (Uria aalge), the trophically dominant fish-eating seabird of the North Pacific, washed ashore between summer 2015 and spring 2016 on beaches from California to Alaska,” the study says. “Most birds were severely emaciated and, so far, no evidence for anything other than starvation was found to explain this mass mortality. Three-quarters of murres were found in the Gulf of Alaska and the remainder along the West Coast.”
Given that previous studies have shown “that only a fraction of birds that die at sea typically wash ashore,” the researchers put the death toll closer to a million.
“The magnitude and scale of this failure has no precedent,” lead author John Piatt, a research biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center and an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, said in a statement. “It was astonishing and alarming, and a red-flag warning about the tremendous impact sustained ocean warming can have on the marine ecosystem.”
Piatt and study co-author and University of Washington professor Julia Parrish explained that the team believes the blob—which spanned hundreds of miles—limited food supply in the region, leading the birds to starve.
“Think of it as a run on the grocery stores at the same time that the delivery trucks to the stores stopped coming so often,” Parrish said. “We believe that the smoking gun for common murres—beyond the marine heatwave itself—was an ecosystem squeeze: fewer forage fish and smaller prey in general, at the same time that competition from big fish predators like walleye, pollock, and Pacific cod greatly increased.”
Piatt added that “food demands of large commercial groundfish like cod, pollock, halibut, and hake were predicted to increase dramatically with the level of warming observed with the blob, and since they eat many of the same prey as murres, this competition likely compounded the food supply problem for murres, leading to mass mortality events from starvation.”
According to CNN, which reported on the study Thursday:
Thomas Frölicher, a climate scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland who was not involved in the new study, discussed the blob’s connection to the human-caused planetary emergency with InsideClimate News.
“It was the biggest marine heatwave so far on record,” said Frölicher, who noted that such events have doubled in frequency over the past few decades. “Usually, we are used to heatwaves over land. They are much smaller in size, and they do not last as long. In the ocean, this heatwave lasted two or three years.”
Frölicher warned that “if we follow a high-greenhouse-gas-emissions scenario, these heatwaves will become 50 times more frequent than preindustrial times” by 2100. He said that even if the international community achieves a low-emissions scenario in line with the Paris climate agreement, marine heatwaves would still be 20 times more frequent.
“What that means is that in some regions, they will become permanent heatwaves,” he added. “This gives us some insight into the future.”
The study—which its authors expect to inform research on other mortality events related to marine heatwaves—was published just weeks after University of Washington scientists found what some have called “the blob 2.0” forming in the Pacific. That discovery came as “quite a surprise” to those researchers.
University climatologist Nick Bond told local media that “the original blob was so unusual, and stood above the usually kind of variations in the climate and ocean temperatures, that we thought ‘wow, this is going to be something we won’t see for quite a while.'”
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