Showing posts with label carbon footprints. Show all posts
Showing posts with label carbon footprints. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Joe Did What? Coal edition

 

Mountaintop mining in West Virginia: Image by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images via Marketplace, and a story on Trump administration zeroing out funding for a study on the health hazards of the process.

In what I think is a stunning sign of support for the Biden administration and its infrastructure program/Green Newish Deal, President Cecil Roberts of the United Mine Workers of America showed up at the Press Club yesterday with Senator Joe Manchin (Difficult-WV) by his side, to announce that his union would back, specifically, the administration's plan for phasing out the coal industry, sort of:

The United States’s largest coal miners’ union said Monday it would accept President Joe Biden’s plan to move away from coal and other fossil fuels in exchange for a “true energy transition” that includes thousands of jobs in renewable energy and spending on technology to make coal cleaner.

Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, said ensuring jobs for displaced miners — including 7,000 coal workers who lost their jobs last year — is crucial to any infrastructure bill taken up by Congress. (Aljazeera)

Which is bigger than it sounds in the first place because the things he's demanding are already there in the plan, more or less:

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Summit cum laude

Morning taiji in Beijing. Financial Times.
Chris Buckley's lede:
HONG KONG — President Obama will sit down Wednesday with the kind of Chinese leader no American president has ever encountered: a strongman with bold ambitions at home and abroad who sees China as a great power peer of the United States.
Like Mao Zedong's and Deng Xiaoping's ambitions were so on the timid side. I get what he means to say, that Xi Jinping is easier and more fun to interpret in that familiar football-trophy mode whose subtext is always how they might win in the power-projection contest but we can pull it out—but it just sounds so irremediably fatuous.

Xi Jinping may well be the most liberal, or Liberal, Chinese ruler (discounting poor Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who didn't get to do much ruling) since the Qianlong emperor retired in 1795, but I'm pretty sure Obama had something to do with the results coming out of the APEC meeting, which are really kind of spectacular—though Edward Wong at the Times seems to think China's acquiescence to a carbon reduction target is just an odd little side effect of Chinese domestic politics, which has led Xi to a praiseworthy effort to help the citizens breathe:
Chinese leaders have turned their attention to cutting back the country’s reliance on coal, a main pillar of the economy but also a major source of pollution. That led to discussions about how weaning Chinese industries off coal would not just clean the air, but would also permit China to make global commitments in the battle against climate change, the insiders said.
Look out, Senator McConnell, now it's a World War on Coal!

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Greeting the UN Climate Summit

I was stuck with some family business (happy stuff: a nephew getting married and a lively time was had by all including your correspondent here, who left the computer at home and found no time to blog by phone) and unable to march today with the 310,000 and more who showed up for the People's Climate March to Change Everything, where a large part of my heart was.

AP photo via Huffington Post.
I hope everything really does start to change from here, as this is the year US carbon emissions started speeding up again (rising 2.9%) after four years of reductions, and that mean atmospheric concentration of CO2 continues to soar beyond the sustainable level of 350 ppm to monthly means of 397 and higher.

And thanks to New York City and Mayor Bill de Blasio for welcoming the climate summit not only with zero arrests of marchers (compared to over 2000 in Copenhagen 2009) but also with a solid program for greening the city.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Call for signatures

From Wired.
By Sean Crane.

 Please sign. It's not just for the orangutans but for the carbon-absorbing forest and its biological diversity, the lungs of future generations, and the conscience of President Yudhoyono (apparently he just started tweeting, so he might like getting the message).


Friday, April 20, 2012

Cheap shots and chasers 4/20

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie denied newspaper reports that he fell asleep during a recent Bruce Springsteen concert, saying he closed his eyes while having a “spiritual” moment during the song “Rocky Ground.” (Bloomberg, 4/19/2012)
Christie gets spiritual at Springsteen concerts? Eew.

I've often wondered how a fat cat goes to the church of his choice, hears all about the Sermon on the Mount, and comes out spiritually uplifted and energized to get back to screwing the poor. Christie's Brucism must be a little like that guy's Christianity.
Proposed interior, Los Angeles Roman Catholic Cathedral. From The Poor Church of the Rich and the Rich Church of the Poor.
The Center for Immigration Studies has released a study purporting to show that undocumented immigrants should go home for environmental reasons, because their carbon footprints in the US are four times as big as they would be in their own countries. Think Progress notes that the methodology is a little weird:
The report claims that a person’s CO2 emissions is directly related to his or her personal income — so a person making $110,000 per year will emit 10 percent more carbon than a person who earns $100,000 per year under the report’s methodology. Thus, because the report claims that each Mexican immigrant earns 53.2 percent of the average U.S. resident, it claims that these immigrants must also produce 53.2 percent of the carbon emissions. 
If there really was such a correlation, of course, getting rid of the immigrants wouldn't be the best way to deal with it—on the contrary, we need more! Most urgent, though, would be to ship more rich people to Mexico.
You could be burning next to no carbon at all! AP photo by Guillermo Arias.
Speaking of immigrants, Willard Mitt Romney has been speaking of them too, and spreading the word that he'd really like a way of getting some of those Hispanic votes just at the same time, as Digby points out, as young Senator Rubio is touting a kind of American DayDREAM act, with a path for immigrants toward the general vicinity of citizenship but careful not to get too close, if you know what I mean. (Is it starting to smell like cilantro in here?)

Digby thinks Romney is going to try to "thread the needle" of satisfying a decent quantity of Latino voters without giving apoplexy to his know-nothing nativist base. This plays into what I was saying the other day, about Romney's use of the attribution error to allow him to propose large early troop withdrawals from Afghanistan while rabidly denouncing Obama's proposals for large early troop withdrawals from Afghanistan. He could propose virtually the same DREAM act as Obama but he'd still say Obama's was socialist, and un-American, and cowardly and lazy and undignified and so on, because that's what Romney does!