For an extra eye-roll at the Tuesday announcement of the worst energy and environmental decision of a president since Ronald Reagan gutted the renewable energy budgets in the early 1980s, we had Donald Trump cynically using coal miners as props. The occasion was the signing of the long-promised executive order reversing of several Obama era climate actions. Trump touted his pen stroke as bringing back coal. And then he went so far as to tell the miners in that condescending tone of his about the meaning of signing: “You know what this is? You know what it says, right? You’re going back to work.”
Every expert knows that’s bunk. Trump himself probably knows it. But like any scripted performance, political theater thrives on fiction. In fact, coal mining jobs have been declining for 65 years, mostly due to automation and, more recently, cheap natural gas. The future is in renewables, and while there will probably always be some use of coal—steel-making, for example—coal for power generation is destined to be an ever smaller market globally. Neither the coal barons nor Donald Trump are going to succeed at turning back the clock on that.
A wise and serious leader would be telling miners (and all fossil fuel workers) the truth, simultaneously promoting policies to ease the negative social and employment impacts associated with the overdue transformation of our energy system. But, given the latest news that Trump’s Department of Energy has banned the terms “climate change” and “emissions reduction” from memos and other communications, it’s clear the squatter in the White House is as about as far from wise and serious as it’s possible for an adult to be.
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The Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times concludes Despite Trump's bluster, rolling back Obama-era environmental regulations is not a done deal:
Trump’s biggest target is the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, under which states must sharply curtail carbon emissions from power plants. The goal is a 32% percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, but the regulations have been stalled over legal challenges. For Trump to undo those regulations, though, he would have submit new ones for public review and comment, and, in the face of promised legal actions by backers of the Obama regulations, prove to the courts that the rollbacks are in the nation’s best interest and are not arbitrary. So, Trump’s bluster aside, undoing the Obama regulations is not a fait accompli. [...]
Regardless of what Trump does, the future lies in renewable energy sources. If he really wants to add jobs to the U.S. economy, he’d embrace policies that would make the U.S. the undisputed leader in global renewable innovation and production, rather than clinging to the past, and to a dangerous reliance on fossil fuels.
Vaclac Smil at The Washington Post writes—Trump’s coal policy will likely do just what Obama’s did:
At the beginning of the 21st century, global coal use was largely limited to two big remaining markets: generating electricity and using high-quality coal to produce metallurgical coke to produce iron (which is then turned into steel). In 2000, the United States derived half of its electricity from coal — a substantial share of it produced in aging plants built during the 1950s and 1960s (the decades of rising electricity demand). At this point, natural gas generated only 16 percent of electricity, and its stagnating domestic production seemed to make future large-scale imports of natural gas inevitable. Then came the rapid advances of hydraulic fracturing (shale gas and oil), and by 2009, the United States once again became the world’s largest producer of natural gas.
The economics became irresistible. Burning clean natural gas in highly efficient gas turbines (which can convert 60 percent of fuel’s energy, compared with 40 percent in the best coal-fired stations) became the most obvious choice. Secondarily, falling costs of wind turbines and solar panels made these new renewables more affordable in windy and sunny locations.
The result has been dramatic: In 2016, 30 percent of U.S. electricity came from coal (a reduction of more than 40 percent in 15 years), 34 percent originated from natural gas, and more than 6 percent came from wind and solar. Coal might not have fallen so quickly had electricity demand kept growing, but since 2010, consumption has been either flat or slightly declining.
Kathleen Parker at The Washington Post writes—Republicans would rather have a king than a president:
Monarchical tendencies abound in the person of The Don, and the willing hordes find his splashy displays of ego and overabundance not just tolerable but, apparently, admirable. Desire for drama and pageantry — the commission paid to peasants for their complicity in the master-servant duet — is on full display, whether The Don is entertaining world leaders at his Mar-a-Lago palace or working deals over golf at one of his eponymous resorts.
Meanwhile, the king installs his family in the people’s palace, rationing offices for commerce, diplomacy and foreign policy. Blood runs thick in royal clans. Daughter Ivanka, the ravishing offspring of Wife No. 1, is the only one Trump seems to really trust. He keeps her and husband Jared Kushner (the favored son?) close, while sending the eldest Trump boys on quests for fresh greens to conquer.
Never mind that the little people are paying millions for the protection of all these Trumplings as they cross continents or sidewalks. The king’s Secret Service begged an extra $27 million for next year — to protect Trump Tower and keep Melania’s tresses from public reach — plus $33 million for various travel expenses for Trump and others.
Kate Aronoff at The Guardian writes—Don't just defend Obama's legacy against Trump: fight for radical climate action:
The fossil fuel industry is rejoicing. Donald Trump issued an executive order on Tuesday that would tear up many of the so-called burdensome climate protections – those regulating things like power plant emissions and leasing to coal companies – put in place by the Obama administration. Horrified by this move, many have vowed to jump to their defense.
That’s not enough. [...]
Mustering anywhere near the political will necessary to enact changes as ambitious as the ones science demands means giving working people a stake in the climate fight and the policies it’s pushing for.
Technocratic jargon won’t cut it, but the silver lining of the climate crisis careening toward us is that the solutions to it lend themselves to populist times. In addition to taking on a fossil-fueled 1%, curbing greenhouse gas emissions also means fueling job creation in everything from clean energy to insulation to grid electrification to already low-carbon parts of our economy, such as nursing and healthcare. [...]
A livable planet is no less of a right than healthcare, and climate policy should treat it as such. So defend the clean power plan from Trump’s attacks, because God knows we need it. But don’t forget to demand the changes we really need along the way.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Trump threatens to drown out the voices of despair:
What ever happened to the interests of the working class? Weren’t they supposed to be front and center in the Trump administration?
Here’s one clue: When a policy that helps some corporate sector can be repackaged to make it look like a pro-worker move, President Trump will always hide his real purpose behind a phalanx of workers. Thus did he surround himself with coal miners on Tuesday when he signed a shamefully shortsighted executive order nullifying President Barack Obama’s climate-change efforts.
Mark Hertsgaard at The Nation writes—Why Trump’s Climate-Wrecking Agenda Could Fail:
While Team Trump continues to insist that the world is flat, gravity is not real, and climate change is unproven, major government and corporate players around the world are leaving coal behind, hedging their bets on oil and gas, and racing to embrace clean energy sources—solar, wind, batteries, efficiency—that are plummeting in price, gobbling up market share, and widely regarded as the kingmaking technologies of the 21st-century economy.
Sweet irony: Perhaps no one is racing faster than China, the economic and climate superpower whose gargantuan coal consumption has long been the favorite bogeyman of US climate deniers, who didn’t want to take action in the first place. Why, they disingenuously asked, should the United States cut emissions when China is building a new coal plant every week? Well, not anymore, China isn’t. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang announced to the annual National People’s Congress on March 5 that China was canceling 50 gigawatts—roughly equivalent to 50 large power plants—of coal-fired electricity production. This followed an additional cancellation, in 2016, of 120 gigawatts’ worth of existing or planned coal plants. These two transformational decisions, taken in the aftermath of the 2015 Paris climate summit that Trump loves to denigrate, mean that fully “one sixth of all China’s coal-fired power capacity…may be either shut down, or in the case of planned capacity, not get built,” according to Zhang Chun, a senior researcher at the independent publication chinadialogue.
Money and power—two things Trump plainly craves—are driving China’s about-face. China’s economic planners, like their counterparts elsewhere, recognize that electricity demand is declining as efficiency technologies shrink the amount of power needed to run computers, refrigerators, and other equipment.
Zoë Carpenter at The Nation writes—Trump’s Climate Order May Make it Harder to Prepare for Natural Disasters:
The order also rescinds two Obama administration directives that serve as the backbone of the government’s climate adaptation work. Those orders did not impose new regulations on industry; instead, they were based on the idea that it makes good fiscal sense and is morally imperative to prepare for the effects of global warming, even while trying to limit it. One of the orders rolled back by Trump was issued in 2013 after Hurricane Sandy tore up the east coast, leaving in its wake $60 billion in damages. That order requires federal agencies to identify how climate change will affect their mission and programs, and to work with states and local communities to help them prepare.
It “was designed to address what we’re seeing now—extended droughts, extreme flooding, rapid sea level rise, deadly heat waves,” said Alice Hill, who served as the senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council under President Obama. It was intended to protect federal assets—for instance, to make sure that buildings built with taxpayer money weren’t sited in areas facing heightened flood risk—and to protect local communities, by boosting their capacity and sharing information. [...]
The other order rescinded by Trump directed the Department of Defense and other agencies to consider climate change impacts when developing national security plans. Among other things, that meant preparing military bases for rising sea levels, leveraging renewable energy, and studying the security risks posed by changing weather patterns with the potential to destabilize foreign governments and heighten cross-border conflicts.
Bill McKibben at The Guardian writes—America's deportation squads want to expel our neighbours. We are saying no:
Vermont, where I live, has the second-smallest population of any state. It’s also among the most rural parts of America, and taken together those two facts produce an iron law: if you see someone with their car stuck in a snowbank, you don’t drive by. You stop and help push. Because if you don’t, nobody else may come by for an hour.
Which is why, I think, many of us have spent part of the past couple weeks trying to win the freedom of three of our neighbors – Kike Balcazar, Zully Palacios and Alex Carrillo. They are undocumented immigrants, who came here to work on our farms, and were detained by the (aptly named) Ice, or Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, in New Hampshire, awaiting deportation. [...]
The arrest of these three was clearly punitive and retaliatory. They weren’t just farmworkers – they were leaders of the community, who had come out into the open to try to win some rights for their brethren. Two were picked up after they left the office of Migrant Justice, the local campaign that tries to improve conditions for the undocumented. The third was on the way to the local courthouse, where state prosecutors were waiting to dismiss an old DUI arrest. It’s the type of Trumpish political repression we need to push back at whenever it happens.
Graham Vyse at the New Republic writes—Why Are Democrats Fighting Over Free College?
Both New York’s Andrew Cuomo and Rhode Island’s Gina Raimondo are vying to be the governor who made free college happen—and both their plans are running into resistance from their own party’s lawmakers. Some of the controversy was to be expected: It’s no surprise that fiscal conservatives think it’s another costly social program with uncertain returns. Other legislators and educators worry about how it will affect enrollment at state schools.
The surface simplicity of free college is one of its great calling cards. But Democrats are finding it’s not so simple.
But for liberals, the legislative battles have exposed a series of tricky policy trade-offs that cut to the heart of a larger national debate: What kind of “progress” should Democrats be fighting for? Should a new social program benefit everyone equally, like Social Security, or help low-income families the most? And how valuable is tuition relief, really, if the state doesn’t help students with other college expenses, like room and board and books?
The surface simplicity of the whole idea is one of its great calling cards: Free college. How complicated could that be? The debates in New York and Rhode Island have sometimes been acrimonious and divisive. But that’s far from a bad thing: Democrats will ultimately have to hash through some complicated questions to forge a viable free-college model for the country. Why not start in New York and Rhode Island?
Alex Carp at New York Magazine writes—Can the Democrats Still Count on a Demographic Advantage?
Fifteen years ago, political demographer Ruy Teixeira offered the Democratic Party a blueprint for how to win elections for a generation or more. In The Emerging Democratic Majority, the hugely influential book he co-wrote with John Judis in 2002, the duo argued, based on data-heavy analyses, that the Democratic Party could thrive by cultivating a voter base of women, racial and ethnic minorities, and postindustrial professionals. “A new progressive era” was not only possible but likely, if liberals focused on surfing the wave of demographic trends, which were slowly eroding the electoral power of working- and middle-class whites.
The strategy seemed vindicated when a coalition of exactly these groups brought Barack Obama to the White House in 2008. In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory last November — precisely the sort of thing an emerging Democratic majority was supposed to prevent — party strategists and commentators have begun to revisit that faith in the political power of demographic change, and in the argument that Teixeira and Judis presented.
Dave Johnson at the Campaign for America’s Future writes—Trump Nominates ‘Alligator’ Clayton To Run SEC:
Saying on the campaign trail that Wall Street banks and hedge funds are "getting away with murder," President Trump promised voters he would "drain the swamp" and "reduce the corrupting influence of special interests on our politics." [...]
That was then, this is now.
Instead of following up on his promises, Trump has brought so many swamp creatures into his administration that it has become a cliché to say that Trump is filling the swamp with alligators.
Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), appears to be one more alligator.
How do we know this? Well, for starters Clayton was, literally, the “Goldman Sachs bailout lawyer.” He represented Goldman and other Wall Street firms during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. So there’s that. [...]
Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown describes Clayton as “an attorney who’s spent his career helping Wall Street beat the rap.”
Morgan Jerkins at The New York Times writes—How America Fails Black Girls:
The journalist Gwen Ifill called the lack of attention to such disappearances “missing white woman syndrome.” Missing white, upper middle-class women and girls receive a disproportionate amount of press coverage compared to women and girls of color, poor people and men. In 2016, according to the National Crime Information Center, African-Americans, who make up only 13.3 percent of the United States population, represented 33.8 percent of the missing. Cmdr. Chanel Dickerson of the district’s police department has said that a large percentage of missing teenagers are leaving home voluntarily. [...]
The narrative around missing black girls is only part of the problem. Mainstream feminism has historically ignored the issues facing runaway and other missing black girls as well as most other issues regarding women and children of color. So far, nonblack women have been unwilling to get involved in something that doesn’t directly affect them. [...]
It is exhausting to see black people, particularly black women, always having to do the work to change society. Queer black women began the Black Lives Matter movement and put their lives on the line to stand up against police brutality. Black women overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton even when she was more of the patron saint of mainstream feminism than of issues regarding women of color. Today it is black women who are forcing others to see what’s happening with missing black girls. Now is the time to come through for us. We have always come through for you.