US faces extreme heat as Biden’s climate crisis plan stalls – live

Steve Bannon, a former top advisor to Donald Trump, is going to trial today for defying a subpoena by the January 6 committee, as Sam Levine reports:

A federal criminal trial is set to begin on Monday to determine whether Steve Bannon, the influential former adviser to Donald Trump, broke the law by refusing to comply with a subpoena for documents and testimony by the panel investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

Last fall, the congressional committee investigating the deadly Capitol riots subpoenaed Bannon to sit for a deposition and to provide a wide range of documents related to the events of January 6. Bannon refused to comply. The committee cited him for contempt and referred him to the US justice department for prosecution in October of last year.

The justice department pursued the referral, and a federal grand jury indicted Bannon on two counts of contempt of Congress, both misdemeanors, in November. It is extremely rare for the justice department to pursue such charges – before Bannon, the last contempt prosecution was in 1983. Bannon faces between 30 days and a year in prison if convicted on each charge.

Perhaps we are doing this whole development thing wrong. In an interview with The New York Times Magazine, Herman Daly, a lauded economist who was once a senior figure at the World Bank and is now a emeritus professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, argues that modern economics’ obsession with growth is misguided, due in part to the damage done to the planet.

Economic growth is considered a major barometer of a country’s health, both for wealthy nations and the developing world. In the interview, Daly argues that we are viewing growth incorrectly, and that it’s implausible all nations can continue expanding their GDP endlessly. From the interview, here’s an encapsulation of his argument:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} It’s a false assumption to say that growth is increasing the standard of living in the present world because we measure growth as growth in G.D.P. If it goes up, does that mean we’re increasing standard of living? We’ve said that it does, but we’ve left out all the costs of increasing G.D.P. We really don’t know that the standard is going up. If you subtract for the deaths and injuries caused by automobile accidents, chemical pollution, wildfires and many other costs induced by excessive growth, it’s not clear at all. Now what I just said is most true for richer countries. Certainly for some other country that’s struggling for subsistence then, by all means, G.D.P. growth increases welfare. They need economic growth. That means that the wealthy part of the world has to make ecological room for the poor to catch up to an acceptable standard of living. That means cutting back on per capita consumption, that we don’t hog all the resources for trivial consumption.

The article only briefly gets into what Daly would propose to change the growth paradigm across the world, and indeed, his ideas would be a tough lift for many countries:

.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} Daly’s policy prescriptions for how this would happen include, among many ideas, establishing minimum and maximum income limits, setting caps for natural-resource use and, controversially, stabilizing the population by working to ensure that births plus immigration equals deaths plus emigration.

Many parts of the United States will today also face blistering heat, particularly in the south and southwest, and the Great Plains.

The New York Times has published a map looking at where temperatures will be highest. The good news is that the heat will cool later this week. The bad news is that for the next few days, much of the country will face heat levels that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says warrant “extreme caution”. And the worst affected areas will face temperatures at the “danger” level, when heat cramps or exhaustion are “likely” and heat stroke is also a possibility.

Britain is weathering a record-breaking heat wave that just saw Wales endure its hottest day on record. Follow The Guardian’s live coverage for more:

The unhoused are one group bearing the brunt of the climate crisis – particularly in California. Sam Levin reports:

In a remote stretch of southern California desert, at least 200 unhoused people live outside, battling the extremes: blazing hot temperatures in the summer, snow in winter, rugged terrain inaccessible to many vehicles, a constant wind that blankets everything with silt, and no running water for miles.

For Candice Winfrey, the conditions almost proved deadly.

The 37-year-old lives in a camper in the Mojave desert, on the northern edge of Los Angeles county, miles from the nearest store. During a record-breaking heatwave in July 2020, she found herself running out of water. The jug of a gallon she had left had overheated, the water so hot it was barely drinkable. It was more than 110F (43C), and no one was around to help. She recalled laying in her tent, trying not to think about the heat exhaustion and dehydration overtaking her. “I thought I was gonna die. I was seeing the light. I was just waiting it out and praying to God that I’d make it.”

“Collective suicide”: that’s what the UN secretary general said humanity is facing due to rising temperatures, as The Guardian’s Fiona Harvey reports:

Wildfires and heatwaves wreaking havoc across swathes of the globe show humanity facing “collective suicide”, the UN secretary general has warned, as governments around the world scramble to protect people from the impacts of extreme heat.

António Guterres told ministers from 40 countries meeting to discuss the climate crisis on Monday: “Half of humanity is in the danger zone, from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction.”

He added: “We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”

For the past year and a half, it seemed like Joe Biden would get to sign a major piece of legislation addressing climate change.

The vehicle was at first his marquee Build Back Better spending plan, which would have allocated more than a trillion dollars to addressing a host of Democratic priorities. Then that died, and Democrats quietly began working on a follow-up bill that could pass both the Senate and the House of Representatives, which the party controlled with razor-thin margins.

Now, it seems like Congress won’t act to curb America’s carbon emissions at all. Joe Manchin, the centrist Democrat whose vote is necessary to get any legislation that doesn’t win Republican support through the Senate, has said now is not the time to spend money fighting climate change due to the current high rate of inflation, even as extreme weather continues to batter the United States and world.

The senator’s declaration last week was a major loss for the White House, but Biden may still get to use his pen by signing to-be-announced executive orders intended to keep temperatures from rising.

Good morning, US politics blog readers. Today, we’re going to take a closer look at the real-world consequences of American politics, specifically the collapse last week of Democratic efforts to get Congress’s approval of a plan to fight climate crisis. The United States and the world at large is today grappling with extreme heat and other calamities fueled by rising global temperatures, and experts warn if Washington and other top carbon emitters don’t change something, it will only get worse.

Here’s more about what’s happening today:

• Texas and much of the central US could see their hottest temperatures of the summer this week, The New York Times reports. Meanwhile in Britain, temperatures may climb to an unheard-of 43C – or 109.4F. The Guardian has a live blog covering the crisis.
• Democrats may not be able to get a major climate change bill through Congress, but they are moving forward on several other measures with an eye towards rescuing Joe Biden’s presidency, Punchbowl News reports.
• The criminal contempt trial of Steven Bannon, a former top advisor to Donald Trump, begins today, with jury selection.