Politics

FOCUS: Could Beto Be the Next Obama?

Sunday, 02 September 2018 10:36

Hamby writes: "Texas is Texas, after all. But the hype emerging from the Democrat's campaign points to something rather obvious: O'Rourke is good at this, way better than most of the Democrats sniffing around the next presidential race from the boring hallways of Capitol Hill."

Beto O'Rourke in San Saba, Texas, April 6, 2018. (photo: Sergio Flores/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Could Beto Be the Next Obama?

By Peter Hamby, Vanity Fair

02 September 18

O�Rourke offers not just a path to victory in Texas but an antidote to the entire stupid artifice of American politics in the Trump era. He�s authentic, full of energy, and stripped of consultant-driven sterility. On what planet is Beto O�Rourke not a presidential contender, even if he loses?

y now you�ve probably heard a lot about Beto O�Rourke and his surprisingly durable challenge against Ted Cruz in bright red Texas. You�ve heard about how he�s visited all 254 Texas counties in his Toyota Tundra. You�ve seen videos of him sweating through a button-down shirt at one of his jam-packed town halls. You�ve watched the rangy 45-year-old congressman skateboard through a Whataburger parking lot in Brownsville. And if you�re following the 2018 midterms, you know that O�Rourke only trails Cruz by a single digit while running an unabashedly progressive campaign, making Democrats around the country salivate at the prospect of a blue wave crashing everywhere from Galveston to El Paso.

That�s still a long shot. Texas is Texas, after all. But the hype emerging from the Democrat�s campaign points to something rather obvious: O�Rourke is good at this, way better than most of the Democrats sniffing around the next presidential race from the boring hallways of Capitol Hill. Whether he wins or loses his race�and yes, even if he loses�O�Rourke should be included in every conversation about the 2020 Democratic primary. That�s because, unlike most of the paint-by-numbers politicians in his party, O�Rourke actually understands how politics should be conducted in the Donald Trump era: authentic, full of energy, stripped of consultant-driven sterility, and waged at all times with a social-media-primed video screen in mind. O�Rourke is making a bet that running on his gut and giving voters a clear choice against Cruz, rather than just a mushy alternative, offers not just a path to victory in Texas but an antidote to the entire stupid artifice of American politics in the Trump era.

The most appealing thing about O�Rourke is both delightfully uncomplicated and extremely powerful: he talks about politics like you and your friends do. �I am so sick of the stuff that�s been made safe for politics,� O�Rourke told me earlier this month as we drove in his truck through South Texas, between a pair of town halls in Beeville and Corpus Christi. �It�s so bad. It has no impact. It doesn�t register. It doesn�t excite me. I want to do what excites me. That�s my goal at least.�

�Democrats in Texas have been losing statewide elections for Senate for 30 years,� he said. �So you can keep doing the same things, talk to the same consultants, run the same polls, focus-group drive the message. Or you can run like you�ve got nothing to lose. That�s what my wife, Amy, and I decided at the outset. What do we have to lose? Let�s do this the right way, the way that feels good to us. We don�t have a pollster. Let�s talk about the things that are important to us, regardless of how they poll. Let�s not even know how they poll.�

I was following O�Rourke and Cruz around Texas for an episode of Good Luck America, Snapchat�s political documentary series. Cruz, too, is working hard and not taking the race for granted. He�s accessible to the media and packing in supporters at meat �n� threes across the state. Cruz�s theory of the race is that Texas is fundamentally red, that there simply aren�t enough Democrats in the state for him to lose. �There are many more conservatives than liberals, and many more common-sense Texans,� he told me. And he has a point: in modern times, no Democratic candidate has hit more than 42 percent in a statewide election. But O�Rourke�s theory is that he can yank new voters out of the woodwork, and when we arrived in Corpus Christi after our drive, on a muggy Wednesday afternoon, there were some 4,000 people waiting for him in a bingo hall on the outskirts of town. For a midterm candidate. In August.

O�Rourke riffed on climate change, background checks, teacher pay, health care for veterans, cost-of-living adjustments for public-sector retirees, and the importance of a free press. He lashed the idea of a border wall and the Trump administration�s policy of separating migrant children from their parents. And unlike Washington consultants who say that Democrats should only be talking about health care this election season, and not the scandals swirling around Trump, O�Rourke seems to understand that it isn�t really that hard to do both. Because Democrats want to hear about both, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. He blasted Trump�s obsequious press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. �He actively, on a stage in another country, defends the interests of another country against the interests of the United States of America,� O�Rourke said. �The collusion in action taking place right in front of our eyes.� It was the second-biggest applause line of the night, after his boast about refusing to take corporate campaign donations.

�I would like Texas to be the example, to be the bridge over the small stuff, the partisanship, the bickering, the pettiness, the meanness, the name-calling, the bigotry, the racism, the hatred, the anxiety, and the paranoia that dominates so much of the national conversation today,� he implored them, catching his breath. �I would love for us to be the big, bold, confident, ambitious, big-hearted, aspirational answer to all that small, weak crap that dominates the national news every single night that has kept us from who we are supposed to be as a country.�

His communications director, Chris Evans, live-streamed shaky, grainy video of the whole event, as he does with every town hall, as the crowd rose with applause. There were college kids and veterans and old women standing up out of their wheelchairs to catch a glimpse of him. One woman cried at the touch of his hand. Afterward, O�Rourke stayed for more than an hour posing for selfies with giddy fans, as he does after every event, then stayed even longer to chat with a local reporter. A few days later, I e-mailed a Texas beat-reporter friend to ask her about O�Rourke�s crowds. It seemed like a silly question. In our data-focused world, crowd sizes aren�t supposed to be meaningful political guideposts. But that�s also the same logic all of us smarty-pants reporters used to dismiss Trump�s early crowds.

�I wasn�t in Iowa in 2007,� she responded, a reference to the early buzz around Barack Obama back then. �But it seems like Iowa in 2007.�

I was in Iowa in 2007. And yeah, it feels a lot like that.

***

O'Rourke�s growing appeal to Democrats beyond Texas was confirmed once again last week when a NowThis video of him defending the N.F.L. player protests rocketed around the Internet. �I can think of nothing more American,� he said of the protests, responding to a Fort Worth voter who was clearly uncomfortable with the idea of players taking a knee. The O�Rourke clip was viewed over 44 million times across Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube as of Tuesday, according to a NowThis spokeswoman.

The clip simply captured O�Rourke speaking off the cuff at one of his town-hall meetings, all without pandering or poll-tested varnish, and it was enough to land him a re-tweet from LeBron James and a guest spot on Ellen next month. The Legend of Beto is growing bigger than Texas. He�s already a bona fide political celebrity among Democrats, and he�s just a candidate for Senate in a state that shouldn�t be competitive. It�s not a stretch to say that he�s more famous among Democrats than probably 95 U.S. senators, most of his fellow congressmen, and pretty much every sitting governor in the country. Which is exactly why he can�t be ignored in conversations about the next presidential race.

Ask yourself this question: today, looking at the likely Democratic primary field, who is the person most able to fill stadiums, command attention in both traditional and social media, sell T-shirts, suck in small-dollar donations, stir up genuine excitement among millennials, and throw a haymaker at Trump in the process? Is it a U.S. senator who occasionally sends out sternly worded e-mails about Mitch McConnell? Or is it the cool Texas guy you read about in your News Feed who used to play in a punk band and who�s now taking the fight to Ted Cruz in the deep red cradle of American conservatism? If you picked the former option, you probably watch Morning Joe too much.

Bernie Sanders is perhaps the only other name that comes to mind, but Sanders was also unable to dispatch Hillary Clinton, one of the most unpopular candidates in American campaign history, in the last presidential race. Sanders is also 76. And his fellow putative front-runners, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, will also be in their 70s if they decide to run next year. Maybe that won�t matter, but millennials are now the largest voting-age population in the country, and as Florida�s 39-year-old Democratic nominee for governor, Andrew Gillum, demonstrated this week, it�s helpful to speak the language of young, diverse voters who increasingly make up the beating heart of the Democratic Party. History also bears out an important pattern: since Vietnam, Democrats have only captured the White House by nominating youthful outsiders who offered a clean break from their predecessor. Jimmy Carter was inaugurated at 52, Bill Clinton at 46, and Obama at 47.

I interviewed Biden last year and asked him about his own presidential ambitions. It was clear he was queasy about the idea of getting back into the arena, but said he would consider running �if no one steps up.� You hear that a lot from Democrats these days. They look uneasily at the current crop of potential candidates, and keep waiting for their Obama-like savior to surface. The thing is, it might be happening right now in Texas.

***

The blue checkmark Twitter experts will say that O�Rourke can�t run if he wins in November, especially after attacking Cruz for his own presidential run in 2016. That might be true. Winning a Senate race and flying straight to Iowa would be audacious, way more brazen than Obama�s decision to run after just two years in Washington. But what the wise men of Washington are absolutely wrong about is this: O�Rourke can absolutely run for president if he loses. Who is the Democratic primary voter who would care? Does that person exist? He�s a star who would pack any room in Des Moines or Nashua, end of story. Since 2008, there is simply no evidence that voters in either party care more about ladder-climbing credentials than personality and vision. Our last two presidents have been a half-term senator and a reality-television star, and even Orange County attorney Michael Avenatti is currently getting �buzz� as a possible White House contender. So on what planet is Beto O�Rourke not a presidential contender? Only on planet Twitter, where most people are wrong.

In little over a year, O�Rourke has built a thriving political movement in the country�s second-largest state, with a strategy built purely on hustle, grassroots organizing, and his hunch that the standard-issue campaign playbook met its final demise in 2016. O�Rourke has raised over $23 million so far, all from small donors and a lot it from out of state. But his campaign money hasn�t gone to television ads or consultants. It�s gone to online advertising (Sanders�s digital firm, to be precise) and a T-shirt vendor in Austin tasked with pumping out thousands of heather gray �Beto for Senate� shirts. He�s Spanish-fluent and hails from a border city, El Paso, in a moment when immigration has become the hottest-burning political issue in the country. And at a time when Americans view politics through their mobile screens, O�Rourke passes the ever-fetishized �authenticity� test by a mile. That�s partly because he has a habit of sharing almost every moment of his day, from his morning runs to his burrito lunches, on Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook. But it�s also because, so far, O�Rourke doesn�t appear to be performing a version of himself. Nothing feels practiced. The voters I spoke with in East Texas all said the same thing when I asked why they liked him: he seems �real.�

And that seems to be O�Rourke�s defining characteristic. It�s not ideology that�s carrying him as much as relatability. When I asked him in our car ride to define some kind of intellectual architecture around his campaign, he didn�t talk about Medicare for all or comprehensive immigration reform or income inequality. He reached instead for a tale about his old punk band, Foss.

�I don�t have a good label for what we are doing,� he told me. �The closest thing that I can think of to what we are doing now was being in a station wagon with three other friends touring the country and playing music in a punk band,� he said, remembering a time when he had a ponytail and played bass. �We wrote our own songs, started our own label, booked our own tour, bought the �Book Your Own Fuckin� Life� guide that listed all the bar owners and kids who let you play shows in their living rooms or parent�s basements or church halls. And we just hit the road and did it on our own and didn�t let anyone decide what we could or couldn�t do. We are just out here sharing our story�asking people of Corpus Christi or McAllen or Lufkin to tell us their story. To me that�s the most powerful way to connect.�

18 comments

How to Honor John McCain's Memory

Sunday, 02 September 2018 08:33

Burns writes: "In 2017, as Lynn Novick and I were finishing our film on the Vietnam War, I called Sen. John McCain to see if I could stop by his office and show some clips to him. He agreed."

John McCain. (photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters)

How to Honor John McCain's Memory

By Ken Burns, The Washington Post

02 September 18

n 2017, as Lynn Novick and I were finishing our film on the Vietnam War, I called Sen. John McCain to see if I could stop by his office and show some clips to him. He agreed, and when I asked if there were any sections of the 18-hour film that he�d particularly like to see, McCain said �the Vietnamese parts� � the stories that included the North Vietnamese soldiers and civilians.

McCain and I had first spoken about the film a decade earlier, just as it was getting underway. I wanted to let him know that, while we didn�t intend to interview him or his then-Senate colleague and fellow Vietnam War veteran John F. Kerry, we did plan to tell their stories. In typical McCain fashion, he had suggested we avoid his story completely � his service as a Navy pilot, his 5� years confined and often tortured as a prisoner of war.

The film, he said, should include the stories of the �ordinary� Americans who went to war. Doing so would be a chance to �save lives,� he said, by ending the war for some in a deeply personal, even psychological way. At the same time, he noted that any film that truly wanted to understand the Vietnam War had to listen to the Vietnamese as well, both America�s allies in the South and adversaries in the North.

McCain had already done the work of ending the war for thousands of American families, bringing them closure by putting to rest the pernicious and persistent lie that U.S. soldiers had been left behind in Indochina. He also helped free hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese veterans who had been imprisoned and he made it possible for the United States and Vietnam to interact as normal nations.

Kerry was McCain�s close ally in these efforts. The two men, from different sides of the political aisle, could have been antagonists, given McCain�s long family history of military service and Kerry�s impassioned antiwar leadership during the 1970s. But they shared a bond that was born in combat and nurtured by love of country. They also shared a belief in our common humanity, including the humanity of former adversaries.

Ultimately McCain and Kerry drew strikingly similar conclusions from their markedly different experience of that very complicated war. They had learned about leadership, hubris, heroism, patriotism and, perhaps most important, the need to be honest with the American people. That was McCain�s message when he and Kerry participated in a screening of the film at the Kennedy Center in Washington before its broadcast: �We can learn lessons today because the world is in such turmoil. Tell the American people the truth!�

McCain was, of course, well-known for a personal dedication to truth-telling. His bracing honesty and self-criticism are almost unknown in politics today. Perhaps it was his willingness to engage in self-reflection that allowed him to create bridges to bipartisanship and to see his life beyond narrow party objectives. But he didn�t let friendship stand in the way of speaking his mind; during the Obama administration, McCain relentlessly criticized the Iran nuclear deal championed by his old friend Kerry , the secretary of state.

These days, one of the films I�m working on is about the writer Ernest Hemingway. McCain volunteered to be interviewed for it, and not long ago we were able to get him on camera to share a few thoughts about his favorite Hemingway novel, �For Whom the Bell Tolls.� As he had noted elsewhere over the years, McCain long identified with the book�s flawed hero, Robert Jordan, who struggles with moral dilemmas and is grievously wounded in this tale of the Spanish Civil War. Contemplating Jordan�s story, McCain said, helped him survive the horrors of his imprisonment.

McCain might not have appeared on camera for our Vietnam War film, but it is very much his story, as it is everyone else�s who either fought in the U.S. military or chose to resist. It is also the story of the Vietnamese who battled against the United States, men and women who eventually gained McCain�s respect, even admiration, and with whom he and others sought to create a better future.

He realized we could learn from these stories. But, as with all stories, you have to be willing to listen. In a world where considering opposing views seems increasingly endangered, you can honor the memory of John McCain by stopping to hear the stories of others.

22 comments

Insulin's High Cost Leads to Lethal Rationing

Sunday, 02 September 2018 08:26

Sable-Smith writes: "Diabetic ketoacidosis is a terrible way to die. It's what happens when you don't have enough insulin. Your blood sugar gets so high that your blood becomes highly acidic, your cells dehydrate, and your body stops functioning."

'It shouldn't have happened,' says Nicole Smith-Holt of Richfield, Minn., gazing at the death certificate of her son Alec Raeshawn Smith. (photo: Bram Sable-Smith/NPR)

Insulin's High Cost Leads to Lethal Rationing

By Bram Sable-Smith, NPR

02 September 18

iabetic ketoacidosis is a terrible way to die. It's what happens when you don't have enough insulin. Your blood sugar gets so high that your blood becomes highly acidic, your cells dehydrate, and your body stops functioning.

Diabetic ketoacidosis is how Nicole Smith-Holt lost her son. Three days before his payday. Because he couldn't afford his insulin.

"It shouldn't have happened," Smith-Holt says looking at her son's death certificate on her dining room table in Richfield, Minn. "That cause of death of diabetic ketoacidosis should have never happened."

The price of insulin in the U.S. has more than doubled since 2012. That has put the life-saving hormone out of reach for some people with diabetes, like Smith-Holt's son Alec Raeshawn Smith. It has left others scrambling for solutions to afford the one thing they need to live. I'm one of those scrambling.

Not enough time

Most people's bodies create insulin, which regulates the amount of sugar in the blood. In the U.S., the roughly 1.25 million of us with Type 1 diabetes have to buy insulin at a pharmacy because our pancreases stopped producing it.

My first vial of insulin cost $24.56 in 2011, after insurance. Seven years later, I pay more than $80. That's nothing compared with what Alec was up against when he turned 26 and aged off his mother's insurance plan.

Smith-Holt says she and Alec started reviewing his options in February 2017, three months before his birthday on May 20. Alec's pharmacist told him his diabetes supplies would cost $1,300 a month without insurance � most of that for insulin. His options with insurance weren't much better.

Alec's yearly salary as a restaurant manager was about $35,000. Too high to qualify for Medicaid and, Smith-Holt says, too high to qualify for subsidies in Minnesota's health insurance marketplace. The plan they found had a $450 premium each month and an annual deductible of $7,600.

"At first, he didn't realize what a deductible was," Smith-Holt says. She says Alec figured he could pick up a part-time job to help cover the $450 per month.

Then Smith-Holt explained it.

"You have to pay the $7,600 out of pocket before your insurance is even going to kick in," she remembers telling him. Alec decided going uninsured would be more manageable. Although there might have been cheaper alternatives for his insulin supply that Alec could have worked out with his doctor, he never made it that far.

He died less than one month after going off of his mother's insurance. His family thinks he was rationing his insulin � using less than he needed � to try to make it last until he could afford to buy more. He died alone in his apartment three days before payday. The insulin pen he used to give himself shots was empty.

"It's just not even enough time to really test whether [going without insurance] was working or not," Smith-Holt says.

A miracle discovery

Insulin is an unlikely symbol of America's problem with rising prescription costs.

Before the early 1920s, Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence for patients. Then, researchers at the University of Toronto � notably Frederick Banting, Charles Best and J.J.R. Macleod � discovered a method of extracting and purifying insulin that could be used to treat the condition. Banting and Macleod were awarded a Nobel Prize for the discovery in 1923.

For patients, it was nothing short of a miracle. The patent for the discovery was sold to the University of Toronto for only $1 so that live-saving insulin would be available to everyone who needed it.

Today, however, the list price for a single vial of insulin is more than $250. Most patients use two to four vials per month (I personally use two). Without insurance or other forms of medical assistance, those prices can get out of hand quickly, as they did for Alec.

Depending on whom you ask, you'll get a different response for why insulin prices have risen so high. Some blame middlemen � such as pharmacy benefit managers, like Express Scripts and CVS Health � for negotiating lower prices with pharmaceutical companies without passing savings on to customers. Others say patents on incremental changes to insulin have kept cheaper generic versions out of the market.

For Nicole Holt-Smith, as well as a growing number of online activists who tweet under the hashtag #insulin4all, much of the blame should fall on the three main manufacturers of insulin today: Sanofi of France, Novo Nordisk of Denmark and Eli Lilly and Co. in the U.S.

The three companies are being sued in the U.S. federal court by diabetic patients in Massachusetts who allege the prices are rising at the expense of patients' health.

The Eli Lilly did not make anyone available for an interview for this story. But a company spokesman noted in an email that high-deductible health insurance plans � like the one Alec found � are exposing more patients to higher prices. In August, Eli Lilly opened a help line that patients can call for assistance in finding discounted or even free insulin.

A dangerous solution

Rationing insulin, as Nicole Smith-Holt's son Alec did, is a dangerous solution. Still, 1 in 4 people with diabetes admits to having done it. I've done it. Actually, there's a lot of Alec's story that feels familiar to me.

We were both born and raised in the Midwest, just two states apart. We were both diagnosed at age 23 � pretty old to develop a condition that used to be called "juvenile diabetes." I even used to use the same sort of insulin pens that Alec was using when he died. They're more expensive, but they make management a lot easier.

"My story is not so different from what I hear from other families," Smith-Holt recently told a panel of U.S. Senate Democrats in Washington D.C., in a hearing on the high price of prescription drugs.

"Young adults are dropping out of college," she told the lawmakers. "They're getting married just to have insurance or not getting married to the love of their lives because they'll lose their state-funded insurance."

I can relate to that, too. My fianc� moved to a different state recently, and soon I'll be joining her. I'll be freelancing and won't have health benefits, though she will via her job. We're getting married � one year before our actual wedding � so I can get insured, too.

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How Many More Racist Trump Policies Will America Normalize?

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=48731"><span class="small">Jamil Smith, Rolling Stone</span></a>

Saturday, 01 September 2018 13:09

Smith writes: "Eight years ago, Arizona tried to legalize racial profiling. SB-1070, known colloquially as the 'Show Me Your Papers' law, merely codified the bigotry that disgraced Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio had been putting into practice."

Border Patrol agents inspect vehicles passing through a checkpoint in Amado, Arizona. (photo: Jae C. Hong/Shutterstock)

How Many More Racist Trump Policies Will America Normalize?

By Jamil Smith, Rolling Stone

01 September 18

By revoking passports and starting deportations for Hispanic U.S. citizens, the White House continues to promote white supremacy

ight years ago, Arizona tried to legalize racial profiling. SB-1070, known colloquially as the �Show Me Your Papers� law, merely codified the bigotry that disgraced Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio had been putting into practice. It permitted officers to question a person�s immigration status based on their appearance. The law was defanged in the courts, but Arpaio�s star rose in Republican circles. President Trump endorsed his practices when he pardoned him last year for a contempt-of-court misdemeanor conviction, which Arpaio received because he refused to obey a federal order to stop racially profiling people.

Arpaio, who was most recently running for U.S. Senate, was crushed Tuesday in Arizona�s Republican primary. But Arpaio doesn�t need to go to Washington; Trump is already doing his work. One day after Arpaio�s defeat, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration is nationalizing SB-1070 in practice if not in law, accusing �hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies.�

This is birtherism for non-presidents, and it is a new low for this president.

Some citizens who try to cross back into the U.S. from Mexico are being marooned at the border, their passports revoked at a whim. Passport applicants of Hispanic descent are being jailed and even threatened with deportation. The justification that the government has offered is feeble, at best: Because there are isolated cases of midwives along the Texas-Mexico border falsifying U.S. birth certificates for children actually born in Mexico from the 1950s through the 1990s, it is up to the Trump administration, apparently, to catch all these nefarious ex-baby criminals. How? Discriminate, indiscriminately. Everyone with the wrong melanin or the wrong name could be a suspect.

It�s worth revisiting the two core truths of racial profiling: It�s illegal, and it doesn�t work. The stop-and-frisk policies that police departments nationwide have used under the pretense of crime prevention disproportionately target black and brown people, while at times letting white offenders off the hook. Choosing to stop, harass or subject a person to criminal justice penalties based on race or ethnicity violates the Fourth Amendment�s personal protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

There have been instances of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) wrongly detaining and incarcerating American citizens of color � more than 1,480 since 2012. This new initiative is in line with the Trump administration�s attempts to add a citizenship question to the Census and its new denaturalization campaign to catch those it believes have cheated the immigration process. One military veteran, a citizen who will face deportation proceedings in 2019, told the Post that the State Department requested all manner of obscure documentation when he tried to renew his passport earlier this year � things like evidence of his mother�s prenatal care, his baptismal certificate, and housing rental agreements from when he was a baby. I doubt that most Americans could produce most or any of those documents.

This isn�t about law enforcement. In fact, it�s foolish to wonder whether Trump is truly worried about crime.

We have seen too much evidence of his inclination for using the perception of criminality as a political tool. His administration�s stance on immigration, including its noxious family separation policy, is designed to not only make criminal behavior synonymous with Hispanic and Latino ethnicity, but to also exempt whiteness.

Trump showed us who he was long ago: He remains the man who pardons a racist torturer like Arpaio while doggedly ignoring the evidence exonerating the Central Park Five. This isn�t hard to figure out.

Those who can assume their own safety under the Trump administration must take action. Too often, the security of whiteness permits talk of �slippery slopes� in our politics that warns of consequences that are not dire at all. Most often, we hear these warnings about political correctness, in which demands for common propriety and exhibitions of respect are depicted alternately as fascist and feminine (and therefore, soft or weak). The next time we hear woeful warnings about where we�re headed, we should take note of how far we have already fallen, and recognize that we have not yet hit bottom.

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In Epochal Shift, California Votes for 100% Green Electricity by 2045

Saturday, 01 September 2018 08:40

Cole writes: "This week, the California state legislature voted to mandate that all the state's electricity come from non-carbon sources (chiefly wind, solar and hydro) by 2045."

Solar and wind projects are being built in more places around the globe more cheaply than any time in history. (photo: EcoWatch)

In Epochal Shift, California Votes for 100% Green Electricity by 2045

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

01 September 18

his week, the California state legislature voted to mandate that all the state�s electricity come from non-carbon sources (chiefly wind, solar and hydro) by 2045.

Since California if it were a country would have the world�s fifth largest economy, and since so many other states are economically integrated with it, this plan, if signed by governor Jerry Brown, could help transform the entire country.

The goal is less difficult than it seems on the surface. California had already committed to getting one third of its electricity from renewables by 2020, and reached that goal in 2017. It committed to getting 50% of its electricity from renewables by 2030, and in fact will likely reach that goal 10 years early, in 2020.

As we speak, solar provides nearly one fifth of California�s electricity, and hydro nearly another fifth. Solar grew by 20% in the first half of 2018, year on year. Wind supplies about 7 percent of California�s gross electricity generation. Con Edison says the state is at 42% renewables in 2018, will be at 47% next year, and 50% the year after.

California has much more wind potential than it is realizing, and the cost of wind-generated electricity is in free-fall. It just spiraled down to 2 cents per kilowatt hour. Coal, once considered cheap, is 5 cents a kilowatt hour if you don�t count the disasters of climate crisis that it causes, along with the smog and heart attacks and other health problems it produces. Wind in contrast is now less than half as costly and is clean, and the fuel is free. California only has one small coal plant left, and let us say it isn�t the future.

In the first half of 2018, 6.2 percent of new vehicle registrations in California were electric cars. With constant improvements in batteries and design, these vehicles will take over through the 2020s, no matter what Trump does (he is trying to prevent California from regulating emissions).

In the first half of 2016, only 3.6% of new vehicle registrations were EVs. At that rate, it won�t be long before they are all electric. Californians know that if you combine EVs with solar panels on your roof (if you are a homeowner), both get paid off a lot sooner and you have no gasoline or electricity bill to speak of.

Europe just reached a milestone of one million electric vehicles on the road. Chinese bought 600,000 or so just last year. California is set to become a leader in this area, as well.

California is showing us where the whole country is going, even if some states will take longer to get there. But likely it also will be a big influencer for the whole Pacific Rim. Can Japan really continue its natural gas + nuclear electricity mix once California has shown how easily renewables can supply all our needs? Moreover, California�s efforts will synch with those of China, in ways that will create synergies and thwart Trump�s fossil fuel obsession.

California will save enormous amounts of money by going to green energy, but more importantly, it will rapidly reduce carbon dioxide emissions and show others how to do it, putting a brake on the runaway greenhouse gases that threaten the stability of our natural ecosystems on earth. California is one of the more vulnerable states to the climate crisis.

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