Eric Roston at BusinessWeek examines the issue of climate change and the politics behind it all:
The political patter during blizzards has long been predictable. Here's what's interesting these days. As climate science becomes more confident, it may be making the U.S.'s weird strain of climate contrariness less viable. The tide is turning for American conservatives when it comes to climate change, a trend encouraged most vividly by extreme weather events, such as California's relentless drought, the Colorado floods of 2013, or Hurricane Sandy. Or less frequent and more powerful winter storms.
Most moderate Republicans -- 62 percent -- understand that global warming is happening, according to a poll this month from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, which conducts research on American public opinion. An even higher percentage of Republicans said they support carbon dioxide as a climate pollutant. Sixty-two percent of moderate Republicans agreed to strict limits on emissions from coal-fired power plants.
So if the scientists are confident, and rational people (including the world's largest businesses) understand the stakes, then the impediment to productive U.S. public and policy discussion must be, by process of elimination, elected leadership.
David Roberts at Grist explains that tackling climate change isn't cheap or easy, but obviously necessary:
In short, if we want a 100 percent renewables world, with no coal, gas, or nuclear, we’ll need to build more power generation capacity, faster, than at any time in history. [...] Long story short, most decarbonization scenarios are thought experiments, not practical roadmaps. But when they are reported to the public, that distinction is often lost.
More to the point, we are past the time when thought experiments are enough. We need to start thinking in practical terms about how to get the technologies we need ready — as the authors say, “deep energy system decarbonization is likely to require an ambitious, focused agenda of rapid innovation and improvement in every critical technology area, even those commercially available today, as well as substantial ‘demand pull’ efforts and policies to ensure early demonstration, industry maturation, scale-up, and ‘learning by doing.'”
We need to think about the costs and who is going to pay them; even if the benefits outweigh the costs, the costs are going to be enormous. We need to think about the systemic changes required to integrate a large amount of variable renewables into an infrastructure that wasn’t designed for it. And most of all, we need serious, realistic thinking about the social and political buy-in necessary to drive wholesale energy transformation. In the fallen world we live in, such social and political barriers are likely to be more difficult to overcome than technology or modeling challenges.
Much more on the day's top stories below the fold.
Michael Shank and Sabina Dewan at The Week look at India's efforts to combat climate change:
The Modi government has signaled its willingness to improve cooperation on climate change, but its international commitments so far have been modest. Most recently, India supported the agreement from the Lima round of international climate negotiations, setting the stage for the summit in Paris later this year. Additionally, it will double the size of its delegation to the climate negotiations.
In contrast, the government's domestic efforts around renewable energy are far more impressive.
Meanwhile, switching topics, the GOP is back to attacking Social Security again.
Ryan Cooper at The Week explains:
Most recently, there are hints that Republicans may top up the SSDI fund by merely a little bit, similar to what they have done with the debt ceiling. The point is to create a series of manufactured crises, and each time the SSDI program runs short of money, they can use their leverage to ratchet down Social Security as a whole.
The way Republicans spin all this will be critical. Social Security is very popular, so conservatives will have to avoid the perception that they want to cut it, even though they clearly do. Dispelling their squid-ink nonsense will be crucial in protecting the program.
Paul Waldman at CNN:
The current controversy revolves around a rule change Republicans made as soon as the new Congress was sworn in this month. Social Security is actually two separate programs, Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI), and the much smaller Disability Insurance program (DI). The disability program will be facing a funding shortfall next year, and to ensure that disabled people continue to get all their benefits, Congress would have to move some money from OASI into DI. This isn't anything new -- it's been done many times in recent years.
But House Republicans adopted a parliamentary rule barring the House from allowing that transfer unless it was accompanied by benefit cuts or tax increases. If it can't get worked out, people on DI could see their benefits cut substantially.
So why would Republicans insist on this? My guess is that they think forcing a mini-crisis over the Disability Insurance program's finances will allow for a debate on the program that will make it easier to do what they've wanted to do for a long time: cut it back somehow, either by reducing benefits, increasing the retirement age, or even partially privatizing it. The justification is always that the program is "going broke." But that's just not true.
On the issue of income inequality,
Zoe Carpenter at The Nation breaks down the grim numbers:
Middle-class families “are working harder than ever, but they can’t get ahead,” Warren argued in an early January speech. “Opportunity is slipping away. Many feel like the game is rigged against them—and they are right.” The tide may be rising, but it’s failing to lift most of the boats.
A new report from the Economic Policy Institute demonstrates as much. In the vast majority of US states, the top 1 percent of earners captured at least half of the income gains during the first three years of the economic recovery. In seventeen states, the 1 percent raked in all of the income growth. Those at the top of the economic ladder in Nevada, for example, saw their incomes grow by 40 percent between 2009 and 2012; meanwhile, other Nevadans incomes actually declined, by 16 percent.
And, on a final note,
Susan Milligan at US News explains why President Obama has to act unilaterally in the face of Republican opposition:
Obama has so far been an aggressive solo actor in the second half of his second term, freed not only by the fact that he’ll never have to run a campaign again (or be blamed for the losses of those in his party), but by the fact that he actually has a GOP-run Senate to contend with now. With no Democratic Senate majority to protect or share the message with, Obama can do a lot on his own without the same political fallout. The most recent example happened over the weekend when the president declared his intentions to expand the protected areas of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northern Alaska. Only Congress can officially declare the new area protected wilderness (often meaning no roads, let alone oil or gas drilling) but by identifying the area for inclusion, Obama ensures that the region will be protected until and unless Congress or another administration acts.
Ideally, such a decision would have been made in consultation with Congress. But such ideals don’t exist anymore, and never really existed as they have in political mythology.