Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47905"><span class="small">Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website</span></a>
Friday, 28 February 2020 13:56
Keillor writes: "If Trump is re-elected, he'll change the rules of spelling and capitalization to make his style the correct one."
Garrison Keillor. (photo: MPR)
In One Word, What America Desperately Needs
By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
28 February 20
merica desperately needs a woman president. I thought that in church Sunday as we sang, “Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you,” a gorgeous hymn with a chorus of Alleluias, and the altos around me sounded like my old aunts, and the teenage acolytes, both girls, stood up so straight and solemn, holding candles, as a woman priest read the Gospel.
Two days before, I sent my friend Heather off with her one-year-old daughter at 6 a.m. and put her into a cab with a stroller, fold-up crib, big suitcase, utility bag, and purse, and strong-minded toddler, to go to the airport and fly home to New York. The night before, she sang at a big jazz club downtown, tossing off Hoagy Carmichael, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Lennon-McCartney, and now she arose cheerfully, packed up, headed out the door, no sweat. It was a glimpse of heroic competence such as few men could manage. Barack Obama, yes. The current guy? Oh my God. Have you ever seen him carrying a child? Can you even imagine it? Him changing a diaper? No way.
Standing at a lectern and hollering about injustice is an act; motherhood requires discipline and commitment. But we Democrats have a 78-year-old Vermont socialist with a bum ticker knocking on the door. We desperately, desperately need a woman president but Liz is too robotic and Amy is too Midwestern. She’s running for president but she sounds like she’s running for county commissioner. She lacks poetry.
I am fond of Bernie, being 77 and retro myself, but I tell you: a man our age belongs in a glass case; he is fighting the battles of yesteryear. He reminds me of the men who picked me up when I was 16, hitch-hiking home, and they wanted someone to listen to them, so I did. They were angry at the government, their bosses, and their wife, and for twenty miles they unloaded. They stopped at my road and I thanked them, but I wouldn’t have elected them president.
Donald J. Trump is the issue, not capitalism. He is a living monument to the impotence of journalism. Every honest writer has beaten on him and the man is fresh as a daisy. He walked away from impeachment as if he’d won the heavyweight championship of the world and he set out to purge the administration of all appointees who don’t kiss his shoes. He pardoned a whole string of big-time chiselers at the behest of pals of his and will likely pardon Stone and Flynn and Manafort, his consiglieri, and if he shot somebody dead on Fifth Avenue, he would pardon himself, and his people wouldn’t blink. If he issued an executive order canceling the 22nd Amendment and declaring himself president for life, the Supreme Court might object but he would simply ignore them. Chief Justice Roberts has no fighter planes or tanks at his command. If Trump renounced Jesus Christ and spat on the New Testament and burned it, the evangelicals would stick with him because, having stuck with him this far, it would destroy their transmission to make a U-turn. So the November election is crucial.
If he’s re-elected, he’ll change the rules of spelling and capitalization to make his style the correct one. Him and me don’t agree about this but he’s the boss and his word goes and this sentence will be perfectly gramitical a year from now, U weight and sea.
I’m too old to fight. If the scholars of the Electoral College want him, then so be it. My ancestor John Crandall was a minister in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 17th century and he preached against the Puritans who cut off the tongues of dissidents, but he lost that argument and had to leave. If Donald the First beats the old socialist and we must flee to Canada, so be it. The second term of Trump, however long it lasts, will be more amusing when viewed from afar.
There is no wall to climb over. There are places in North Dakota where there isn’t even a barbed-wire fence, you just walk down a gravel road. The national anthem is more difficult than ours but we can learn it. The bacon is round, not in strips, but the rules of hockey are the same, and they have modern medicine. Democracy is a long-term problem and, at 77, I’m a short-termer. I just want to have a good time. Good luck to the young. Montreal will suit me fine.
Bravo, Bernie, for Skipping AIPAC. It's a Platform for Anti-Muslim Bigotry
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53477"><span class="small">Joel Swanson, Forward</span></a>
Friday, 28 February 2020 13:56
Swanson writes: "Sanders announced his decision to skip this year's AIPAC conference on Sunday, in a fiery statement denouncing 'the platform AIPAC provides for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights.'"
Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks at an outdoor campaign rally in Austin on Feb. 23. (photo: Mike Segar/Reuters)
Bravo, Bernie, for Skipping AIPAC. It's a Platform for Anti-Muslim Bigotry
By Joel Swanson, Forward
28 February 20
here was a very Jewish moment at last night’s Democratic debate in South Carolina. Moderator Major Garrett asked Senator Bernie Sanders to defend his decision not to attend the AIPAC 2020 conference, and to reassure American Jews who might feel nervous or insulted.
In response, Sanders reminded the audience of his Jewish identity and of the historical nature of his candidacy, and also took the opportunity to repeat his previous description of Netanyahu as a racist. “I am very proud of being Jewish. I actually lived in Israel for some months,” Sanders declared at the debate. “But what I happen to believe is that, right now, sadly, tragically, in Israel, through Bibi Netanyahu you have a reactionary racist who is running that country.”
The audience erupted in applause – which is just one reason why Sanders is making the right decision.
Sanders announced his decision to skip this year’s AIPAC conference on Sunday, in a fiery statement denouncing “the platform AIPAC provides for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights.”
The Israeli people have the right to live in peace and security. So do the Palestinian people. I remain concerned about the platform AIPAC provides for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic Palestinian rights. For that reason I will not attend their conference. 1/2
AIPAC shot back with a statement calling Sanders’s decision “an odious attack on this mainstream, bipartisan American political event.”
But the truth is, AIPAC hasn’t been bipartisan in a long time.
As early as the 2016 election, AIPAC apologized for the fact that its own supporters applauded then-candidate Donald Trump’s partisan attacks on President Obama, four years after they had to remind their delegates not to boo Obama himself.
And just weeks before insisting on their bipartisan bona fides, AIPAC likewise had to apologize for a partisan attack ad calling Democrats “radicals,” the sort of statement they have never made about Republicans. (This even though a strong majority of American Jews identify as Democrats.)
Even former AIPAC staffers were outraged. Furthermore, AIPAC helped to fund a super PAC running attack ads against Sanders himself in Nevada.
It takes some chutzpah to finance attack ads against a leading presidential candidate, then accuse that presidential candidate of being the one who started the feud when he refuses to speak to you.
If AIPAC is going to define itself as an increasingly partisan organization, with some of their leaders going so far as to bankroll attack ads against the Democratic frontrunner, they should not be shocked when Democrats respond in kind and skip AIPAC. After all, no one has ever criticized Republicans for skipping the J Street National Conference.
But there’s an even bigger argument against attending the AIPAC conference, and it has to do with which views we as a community are willing to legitimize by sharing a stage with them.
When Bernie Sanders says AIPAC hosts speakers “who express bigotry,” he is undeniably correct. Here are some people who will be speaking at the AIPAC 2020 annual conference next week:
Sebastian Kurz, the chancellor of Austria, who brought an Austrian political party founded by a literal former Nazi into the Austrian government, the first time since the end of World War II that a political party with Nazi origins became part of a European governing coalition — a party that only recently proposed requiring Jews to obtain permits to purchase kosher meat.
Also sharing the stage will be Péter Sztáray, Hungarian State Secretary for Security Policy and Multilateral Diplomacy, who will come as the official representative of a Hungarian prime minister who has called George Soros “an enemy that… speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world.”
Then there’s Aleksandar Vu?i?, president of Serbia, who gave a speech just days after the July 1995 Srebrenica genocide of 8,000 Bosniak Muslims, the deadliest act of ethnic violence on European soil since the end of World War II, in which he declared, “You kill one Serb and we will kill 100 Muslims.” (Never again, indeed.)
And at least one major AIPAC donor has trafficked in traditional far-right anti-Semitism, sharing a classically anti-Semitic image of George Soros as a tentacled monster dominating the globe.
How can we ask our leaders to share a stage with such people?
Jewish groups have denounced the leadership of the Women’s March, in large part because founding leader Tamika Mallory attended an event with Louis Farrakhan.
But if attending an event with Louis Farrakhan means endorsing all of his anti-Semitism, then what does attending an event at which an advocate of genocide is invited to speak mean?
How can we ask the world to say “Never again” to the genocide of our people, then attend conferences alongside advocates for the genocide of others? How can we ask other communities to condemn anti-Semitism, then turn a blind eye to Islamophobia?
Of course, some will say that sharing a stage with someone does not mean endorsing their views. But Jewish groups such as the World Jewish Congress refuse to extend that latitude to those who shared a stage with Farrakhan.
Moreover, AIPAC themselves have portrayed the decision to go speak to them at all as a political position, a form of “support for the US-Israel relationship.” According to AIPAC’s own statement, simply attending the conference means supporting their politics, at least to an extent. This renders demands that Bernie Sanders go to AIPAC in order to express dissent ring hollow.
Senator Sanders has never attended our conference and that is evident from his outrageous comment.
It’s hard to effectively express dissent when your very presence at an organization would be portrayed as an endorsement of their positions.
The fact is, we’re at a critical moment in the history of the US-Israel relationship. As Israel contemplates full annexation of the West Bank without extending voting rights to the Palestinian people living there, making the apartheid comparisons impossible to ignore, AIPAC continues to blend anodyne calls for “bipartisanship” with support for far-right plans for the region.
And as Israel moves increasingly toward illiberal policies, it is no wonder that support for Israel is increasingly coming from other illiberal regimes. That’s how we get AIPAC hosting a genocide advocate and an Austrian chancellor who allied with a party founded by actual Nazis.
FOCUS: The Democratic Establishment Is Freaking Out About Bernie. It Should Calm Down.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51635"><span class="small">Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog</span></a>
Friday, 28 February 2020 12:54
Reich writes: "Instead of the Democratic establishment worrying that Sanders is unelectable, maybe it should worry that a so-called 'moderate' Democrat might be nominated instead."
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)
The Democratic Establishment Is Freaking Out About Bernie. It Should Calm Down.
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
28 February 20
he day after Bernie Sanders’s big win in Nevada, Joe Lockhart, Bill Clinton’s former press secretary, expressed the fear gripping the Democratic establishment: “I don’t believe the country is prepared to support a Democratic socialist, and I agree with the theory that Sanders would lose in a matchup against Trump.”
Lockart, like the rest of the Democratic establishment, is viewing American politics through obsolete lenses of left versus right, with Bernie on the extreme left and Trump on the far right. “Moderates” like Bloomberg and Buttigieg supposedly occupy the center, appealing to a broader swath of the electorate.
This may have been the correct frame for politics decades ago when America still had a growing middle class, but it’s obsolete today. As wealth and power have moved to the top and the middle class has shrunk, more Americans feel politically dis-empowered and economically insecure. Today’s main divide isn’t right versus left. It’s establishment versus anti-establishment.
Some background. In the fall of 2015 I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina, researching the changing nature of work. I spoke with many of the same people I had met twenty years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as some of their grown children. I asked them about their jobs and their views about the economy. I was most interested in their sense of the system as a whole and how they were faring in it.
What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, most said they’d been working hard and were frustrated they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – at their employers, the government, and Wall Street; angry that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirement, and that their children weren’t doing any better than they did. Several had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession. By the time I spoke with them, most were employed but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before.
I heard the term “rigged system” so often I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.” These came from self-identified Republicans, Democrats, and Independents; white, black, and Latino; union households and non-union. Their only common characteristic was they were middle class and below.
With the 2016 primaries looming, I asked which candidates they found most attractive. At the time, party leaders favored Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. But the people I spoke with repeatedly mentioned Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. They said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up,” “make the system work again,” “stop the corruption,” or “end the rigging.”
In the following year, Sanders – a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and wasn’t even a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primary – came within a whisker of beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, garnered over 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses.
Trump, a 69-year-old ego-maniacal billionaire reality TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party, and lied compulsively about almost everything – won the Republican primaries and then went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America (granted, he didn’t win the popular vote, and had some help from the Kremlin).
Something very big happened, and it wasn’t because of Sanders’s magnetism or Trump’s likeability. It was a rebellion against the establishment. Clinton and Bush had all the advantages –funders, political advisors, name recognition – but neither could credibly convince voters they weren’t part of the system.
A direct line connected four decades of stagnant wages, the financial crisis of 2008, the bailout of Wall Street, the rise of the Tea Party and the “Occupy” movement, and the emergence of Sanders and Trump in 2016. The people I spoke with no longer felt they had a fair chance to make it. National polls told much the same story. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who felt most people could get ahead through hard work dropped by 13 points between 2000 and 2015. In 2006, 59 percent of Americans thought government corruption was widespread; by 2013, 79 percent did.
Trump galvanized millions of blue-collar voters living in places that never recovered from the tidal wave of factory closings. He promised to bring back jobs, revive manufacturing, and get tough on trade and immigration. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing,” he roared. “In five, ten years from now, you’re going to have a workers’ party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in eighteen years, that are angry.” He blasted politicians and financiers who had betrayed Americans by “taking away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families.”
Trump’s pose as an anti-establishment populist was one of the biggest cons in American political history. Since elected he’s given the denizens of C-suites and the Street everything they’ve wanted and hasn’t markedly improved the lives of his working-class supporters, even if his politically-incorrect, damn-the-torpedo’s politics continues to make them feel as if he’s taking on the system.
The frustrations today are larger than they were four years ago. Even though corporate profits and executive pay have soared, the typical worker’s pay has barely risen, jobs are less secure, and health care less affordable.
The best way for Democrats to defeat Trump’s fake anti-establishment populism is with the real thing, coupled with an agenda of systemic reform. This is what Bernie Sanders offers. For the same reason, he has the best chance of generating energy and enthusiasm to flip at least three senate seats to the Democratic Party (the minimum needed to recapture the Senate, using the vice president as tie-breaker).
He’ll need a coalition of young voters, people of color, and the working class. He seems on his way. So far in the primaries he leads among white voters, has a massive edge among Latinos, dominates with both women and men, and has done best among both college and non-college graduates. And he’s narrowing Biden’s edge with older voters and African Americans. [Add line about South Carolina from today’s primary.]
The “socialism” moniker doesn’t seem to have bruised him, although it hasn’t been tested outside a Democratic primary or caucus. Perhaps voters won’t care, just as they many don’t care about Trump’s chronic lies.
Worries about a McGovern-like blowout in 2020 appear far-fetched. In 1972 the American middle class was expanding, not contracting. Besides, every national and swing state poll now shows Sanders tied with or beating Trump. A Quinnipiac Poll last week shows Sanders beating Trump in Michigan and Pennsylvania. A CBS News/YouGov poll has Sanders beating Trump nationally. A Texas Lyceum poll has Sanders doing better against Trump in Texas than any Democrat, losing by just three points.
Instead of the Democratic establishment worrying that Sanders is unelectable, maybe it should worry that a so-called “moderate” Democrat might be nominated instead.
FOCUS: Bernie Sanders Can Beat Trump. Here's the Math.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53476"><span class="small">Steve Phillips, The New York Times</span></a>
Friday, 28 February 2020 12:18
Excerpt: "Most available evidence points in the direction of a popular vote and Electoral College victory."
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Stephen Lam/Getty)
Bernie Sanders Can Beat Trump. Here's the Math.
By Steve Phillips, The New York Times
28 February 20
Most available evidence points in the direction of a popular vote and Electoral College victory.
hatever you think about Bernie Sanders as a potential president, it is wrong to dismiss his chances of winning the office. Not only does most of the available empirical evidence show Mr. Sanders defeating President Trump in the national popular vote and in the critical Midwestern states that tipped the Electoral College in 2016, but his specific electoral strengths align with changes in the composition of the country’s population in ways that could actually make him a formidable foe for the president.
Almost all of the current polling data shows Mr. Sanders winning the national popular vote. In the most recent national polls testing Democratic candidates against Mr. Trump, Mr. Sanders beat him in every single one, with margins varying from 2 percent to 6 percent. This has been the case for nearly a year now, with Mr. Sanders outpolling the president in 67 of 72 head-to-head polls since March.
As 2016 proved when Hillary Clinton defeated Mr. Trump in the popular vote by nearly three million votes, however, the Electoral College is what matters most. There, Mr. Sanders also does well, outperforming Mr. Trump in polls of the pivotal battleground states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In the one poll showing significant Trump strength in Wisconsin (Quinnipiac), Mr. Sanders still fares the best of the Democratic contenders.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35861"><span class="small">Bill McKibben, The New Yorker</span></a>
Friday, 28 February 2020 09:17
McKibben writes: "We're eight weeks into the new decade, and, so far, we've had the warmest January ever recorded. We've seen the highest temperature ever measured on the Antarctic continent, and also record swarms of locusts descending on the Horn of Africa, a plague which scientists assure us will 'become more frequent and severe under climate change.'"
A swarm of locusts north of Nairobi, Kenya, in January. The U.N. described an outbreak of desert locusts as a threat to food security. (photo: Tony Karumba/AFP)
Welcome to the Climate Crisis Newsletter
By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
28 February 20
e’re eight weeks into the new decade, and, so far, we’ve had the warmest January ever recorded. (Indeed, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that 2020 is more than ninety-eight per cent likely to be one of the five warmest years ever measured, with a nearly forty-nine-per-cent chance to set a new annual record.) We’ve seen the highest temperature ever measured on the Antarctic continent, and also record swarms of locusts descending on the Horn of Africa, a plague which scientists assure us will “become more frequent and severe under climate change.”
I’m calling this new newsletter—and welcome aboard—The Climate Crisis because this is what a crisis looks like. I’ve been at this beat for so long that when I first started writing for The New Yorker on this topic, in the nineteen-eighties, we called it the “greenhouse effect.” “Global warming,” “climate change”—those are fine, too. But they don’t capture where we are right now: not facing some distant or prospective threat but licked by the flames. Thousands of people huddled on Australian beaches this year, ready to wade into the ocean as their only protection from the firestorms raging on the shore. This is not only a crisis—it is the most thorough and complete crisis our species and our civilizations have ever faced, one there is no guarantee that we will survive intact. Does that sound extreme? Consider the conclusions of a team of economists from the world’s largest bank, in a report to high-end clients which leaked to the British press, last Friday: “Something will have to change at some point if the human race is going to survive.”
But the name of this newsletter is also a nod to W. E. B. Du Bois, and the magazine that he founded a hundred and ten years ago, at the start of the N.A.A.C.P. The Crisis was, and is, a crucial journal in the analysis of the race hatred that mars and shames and undermines our collective life to this day; it linked readers to news from around the world, so that they could examine the currents roiling their lives. I’ll do the same in a section we’re calling Climate School—perhaps, if only by long exposure, I have some sense of how emerging science, economics, and politics fit into the larger picture. I mostly won’t be doing original reporting. (Check out Emily Atkin’s excellent daily newsletter, Heated, for that.) And I won’t shy away from talking about the activism and organizing that many people—myself included—are now engaged in. Du Bois’s The Crisis was an organ of action, constantly suggesting ways that its readers could move forward. “Is a toothache a good thing?” Du Bois asked, in the first issue. “No. Is it therefore useless? No. It is supremely useful, for it tells the body of decay, dyspepsia and death.” A toothache, he declared, “is agitation,” and agitation is necessary “in order that Remedy may be found.” Since I am an agitator as well as a journalist, I’ll include many suggestions about where a push might help us make progress.
My sense is that we’ve reached a place where many people are eager to help. National polling released this month, in a study by researchers at Yale and George Mason Universities, found that one in five Americans said that they would “personally engage in non-violent civil disobedience” against “corporate or government activities that make global warming worse” if a person they liked and respected asked them to. If that’s anywhere close to true, then it’s possible to imagine a movement big enough to make a difference—a movement one can see already emerging with the school climate strikers, the extinction rebels, and the Green New Dealers. I hope to introduce you to many of these people, and to the scientists, entrepreneurs, and policy wonks whose work undergirds their activism—people I’ve met in my years as a journalist and a volunteer at 350.org, the global climate campaign. Most weeks, I’ll include a short interview that lets them address you directly.
I wouldn’t bother doing any of this if I didn’t think that we could still make a real difference in the outcome. But I can’t offer you any guarantee that we’ll win—the short time that science gives us to make sweeping changes is daunting. When an iceberg twice the size of Washington, D.C., crashes into the Southern Ocean, or when the South is experiencing historic winter flooding, it’s a reminder that we’re a long way back in this race. The only guarantee I’ve got is that the fight is under way. Thank you for being a part of it.
Climate School
An as-yet-unpublished study from researchers at Brown University shows that a fourth or more of the climate chatter on Twitter is produced by automated bots, which are more likely to be on the side of climate denial. This is good to know: in real life, as opposed to social-media combat, polling shows that more and more people understand the reality of climate change.
The New Yorker has published luminous climate coverage over the years: few writers match the penetrating authority of Elizabeth Kolbert, and younger writers such as Carolyn Kormann are doing superb reporting. This recent piece, by Robin Wright, is excellent both for its evocation of the Antarctic Peninsula (the place on Earth, I think, that most feels like another planet) and its reminder that this is a war that we can’t afford to lose, because the effects will last essentially forever. And Bernard Avishai’s account of the vanishing solar-tax credit is a reminder of just how much quiet damage the Trump Administration is doing.
A new study in the journal Nature implies that the total methane emissions—the most significant global-warming gas after CO2—from man-made fossil sources (coal, natural gas, and oil) are higher than previous estimates. That means that they underestimated how much comes from oil, gas, and coal—which, in a twisted way, is kind of good news. Because, if we wanted to, we could turn off that source—say, by replacing gas with solar and wind power. The invaluable Hiroko Tabuchi provided a particularly good account in the Times, under the always-useful headline “Oil and Gas May Be a Far Bigger Climate Threat Than We Knew”; a key point for understanding our current energy debate is that natural gas is a bridge fuel to a dramatically hotter planet.
Passing the Mic
Without Christiana Figueres, there would have been no Paris climate accord—the Costa Rican-born former executive secretary of the U.N.’s climate-change convention worked tirelessly to create an opening where the Kyoto and Copenhagen processes had run aground. Her new book, co-written with Tom Rivett-Carnac, is called “The Future We Choose.”
Your book paints two remarkable pictures of where we will go if we don’t act on the climate, and where we can go if we do. Can you give the gist of those two worlds, in a few sentences?
The decade we have just started is the most consequential decade humanity has ever faced. If we are not able to cut our current global greenhouse-gas emissions by fifty per cent over the next ten years, we will be poised to enter into a world of constant destruction of infrastructure, congested and polluted cities, rampant diseases, increasing burning and flooding, mass migrations due to extensive droughts, heat or land loss leading to the abandonment of uninhabitable areas, and political turmoil as people fight for food, water, and land. At the current level of emissions, that is the world that we are heading for. If, on the other hand, we set our minds and determination to the necessary transformation, reducing our global greenhouse gases [by] half over the next ten years, we would have actually co-created a path toward a very different world: a reforested planet with regenerated agriculture, clean and efficient transport, enjoyable cities, clean air, and ubiquitous cheap energy for everyone.
Your endless optimism and hard work midwifed the Paris climate accords. Describe what it felt like the day you heard President Trump withdraw the U.S. from the agreement.
I remember I was travelling. I sat in front of the TV in my hotel with a sheet of paper and a pen in my hand, ready to write down every sentence that was correct. The speech finished and my paper was untouched. Not one sentence had been correct. The whole speech was based on incorrect information and a thorough misunderstanding of the Paris agreement. I was aghast.
You’ve worked especially hard to get governments onboard, but what’s your message for, say, bankers right now?
The financial industry has moved slowly but is picking up speed. The divestment movement has grown to over twelve trillion dollars of capital that is moving from high-carbon to low- or no-carbon assets. The recently launched Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance, a group of large institutional investors holding a portfolio [valued at nearly four] trillion dollars, is already shifting investment portfolios to net-zero emissions by 2050. Larry Fink, the C.E.O. of BlackRock, which manages [more than] seven trillion dollars in assets, in his latest annual letter announced he is getting out of [thermal] coal and warns all asset managers about the risk of climate-exposed portfolios. We are beginning to see serious engagement of the financial sector. But more needs to happen in order to accelerate the transformation.
Scoreboard
Some major wins to report this week in the battle to keep fossil fuels in the ground:
The Teck company pulled its application for a vast new tar-sands mine in Alberta, after sustained campaigning led by, among others, some of Canada’s indigenous groups.
The Equinor company announced that it would not proceed with plans for offshore drilling in the Great Australian Bight, after sustained campaigning led by, among others, indigenous groups.
Chase Bank announced that it would no longer fund efforts to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, after sustained campaigning led by, among others, the Gwich’in tribe in northern Alaska and Canada.
In Brazil, a campaign led by indigenous communities convinced courts to end plans for what would have been Latin America’s largest open-pit coal mine.
(Perhaps you see a theme emerging.)
Oh, and the University of Michigan, pressured by students, announced that it would freeze all new investments in fossil fuels while it decides whether to join others in purging its portfolio of fossil-fuel stocks. As Mark Bernstein, a member of the university’s Board of Regents, put it, “We have a responsibility to do everything we can to disrupt the flow of carbon into the atmosphere. This requires disrupting the flow of money to the fossil-fuel industry.”
On the very sad side of the ledger, researchers announced that the bushfires in Australia had burned more than twenty per cent of the continent’s forests, up from less than two per cent in a normal year.
Warming Up
There are mornings when I have a hard time joining the fight, and so sometimes I listen to the bell-clear voice of Kelly Hogan, singing “Sleeper Awake.” Send me your list of motivators—and anything else you think I should know about—at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
. I’m glad we’re doing this together.
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merica desperately needs a woman president. I thought that in church Sunday as we sang, “Seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you,” a gorgeous hymn with a chorus of Alleluias, and the altos around me sounded like my old aunts, and the teenage acolytes, both girls, stood up so straight and solemn, holding candles, as a woman priest read the Gospel.
here was a very Jewish moment at last night’s Democratic debate in South Carolina. Moderator 
hatever you think about Bernie Sanders as a potential president, it is wrong to dismiss his chances of winning the office. Not only does most of the available empirical evidence show Mr. Sanders defeating President Trump in the national popular vote and in the critical Midwestern states that tipped the Electoral College in 2016, but his specific electoral strengths align with changes in the composition of the country’s population in ways that could actually make him a formidable foe for the president.
