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      New York has a chance to generate all its electricity from clean energy by 2030 | Ross Barkan

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      New York has a chance to generate all its electricity from clean energy by 2030Ross BarkanIf Democrats act, New Yorkers will begin to get the government they deserve. With climate cataclysms here, the political system can’t afford more delays It has been, for progressives in New York, a trying year.Major pieces of legislation that were supposed to reshape the state to safeguard the working class have stalled out. A bill to create a statewide single-payer healthcare system is no closer to passage than it was several years ago. A push to guarantee new protections for tenants as rents soar in New York City could not find the votes. And ambitious legislation to combat climate that did have the votes to go through the state legislature was halted by the speaker of the state assembly.Unlike in Washington, Democrats in New York have no one to blame but themselves. The party holds supermajorities in both chambers, the state senate and state assembly. Progressives have grown their clout in each. A handful of socialists occupy seats as well.The trouble is that institutional forces – those aligned with the real estate and fossil fuel industries in particular – have plenty of clout, too. The left is stronger, in numbers, than it’s ever been, but the state’s power brokers are centrists or those most hesitant to challenge entrenched power structures. This is true in other Democrat-run states too, but it’s been sobering in New York where progressives have nurtured such high hopes for change.The left, of course, has gotten much further in New York in the last few years than it had in the previous decades. In 2019, Democrats took control of the state senate and immediately passed a large number of bills that had been bottled up for years. Legislation to help tenants, reduce the use of cash bail, and protect voting rights and women’s health all easily passed the body and were signed into law. In 2020, the pandemic hit and ambitious legislating was put on hold. The 2021 session was more of the same.This year offered hope. The Build Public Renewables Act, or BPRA, would mandate that the state’s public power provider, the New York Power Authority (NYPA), generate all of its electricity from clean energy by 2030 and establish a process through which it can build and own renewables while closing down polluting infrastructure. The state itself could build out wind and solar energy. With its high bond rating, the NYPA could easily finance projects. Passage of the bill would have profound national implications. New York would be a leader in the fight against the climate crisis and inspire other states with Democratic governors to follow their lead. With Republicans poised to retake Congress, state-level action is crucial.Independent power producers, who fiercely oppose the BPRA, currently build out new power generation infrastructure beyond NYPA. Solar industry trade associations fought the bill bitterly. They have made inroads in the legislature.In turn, a strange thing happened: the BPRA amassed the votes to pass the state assembly – it had already passed the senate – but was never brought up for a vote before the end of the legislative session in early June. The speaker, Carl Heastie, claimed the votes were not there because, apparently, the more than 80 lawmakers who backed the bill did not inform him personally they would vote that way.Advocates and supporters, however, were certain they had the votes. At first glance, it would appear Heastie had a point, since it is theoretically true the speaker cannot know who will vote for what if he has not been told about the intentions of each lawmaker.But that’s not how lawmaking really works in Albany, the state capital. There are hundreds of bills and the speaker cannot personally hear from all legislators before one is put on the floor for a vote. Rather, most Democrats vote reflexively with the speaker unless the bill has an organized constituency in their districts that opposed it. There is no popular, grassroots outcry against the BPRA. Most New Yorkers don’t know what it is.Why did Heastie claim the votes were not there? Some moderate Democrats are wary of passing any far-reaching bills in an election year. Organized labor had opposed earlier versions of the bill, but the New York AFL-CIO had agreed to stay neutral this time. Governor Kathy Hochul may not support the BPRA either, but she would be hard-pressed to not sign the bill if it reached her desk, especially if New York’s large environmental movement and progressive infrastructure mobilized for it.The good news is that the legislation may not be dead for 2022. Though lawmakers depart Albany in June and typically don’t reconvene until the new year to pass bills, Heastie requested the chairs of the assembly’s committees on energy, corporations and environmental conservation convene a hearing on 28 July. A hearing may mean a special session – a chance to get the BPRA to Hochul’s desk before 2023.If the Democrats in Albany act as they should, New Yorkers will begin to get the government they deserve. With climate cataclysms here, the political system can’t afford any more delays.
      Ross Barkan is a journalist based in New York City. He is the author of Demolition Night, a novel, and The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York
      TopicsEnvironmentOpinionEnergyRenewable energyUS politicsNew YorkClimate crisiscommentReuse this content More

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      ‘I know how much it hurts’: Biden to release US oil in bid to lower gas prices – as it happened

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      Key events

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      ‘Incontrovertible evidence that this [war] has been a strategic disaster for Russia’ – White House

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      Biden confirms draw on oil reserves to lower gas prices

      Joe Biden says his plan to release 1m barrels daily from the US strategic oil reserves will: “Ease the pain families are feeling right now, end this era of dependence and uncertainty and lay a new and new foundation for true and lasting American energy independence.”
      The president is speaking live at the White House to announce the move, which he said would last up to six months and which will represent the largest ever draw ever on the country’s emergency supplies.
      “I know how much it hurts,” he said of rising gas prices that have followed the decision by the Russian president Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.
      “Putin’s price hike is hitting Americans at the pump.” More

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      Humanity’s failure to tackle climate change in the 1980s had many causes | Letter

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      Humanity’s failure to tackle climate change in the 1980s had many causesNathaniel Rich responds to claims about Losing Earth, his 2018 article for the New York Times, later published as a book In his article (Neoliberalism wrecked our chance to fix the climate crisis – and leftwing statements of faith have changed nothing, 17 November), Jeff Sparrow repeats Naomi Klein’s simplistic claim that, in Losing Earth, I “attribute” the missed opportunity on climate change during the critical decade between 1979 and 1989 to “human nature”. Anyone who reads Losing Earth will see that I do no such thing.The failure can be attributed to various causes. Among them are: the fecklessness of bureaucrats tasked with developing legislative solutions to a global problem; a generation of influential US scientists’ blind faith in American exceptionalism; the anti-environmental blitzkrieg launched by the Reagan administration on taking office; the failure of journalists, scientists and policymakers to explain the severity of the threat to a disinterested public; the refusal by the major environmental organisations to embrace climate change as a cause worthy of their attention; the machinations of George HW Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu; and ultimately the mobilisation of the oil and gas industry around a massive disinformation campaign, the origin story of which I reported for the first time.Humanity’s general reluctance to take urgent, dramatic action to counteract long-term threats offers a serious challenge to the passage of major climate policy, but not a decisive one. The story is far more complex, fascinating and tragic than that. It doesn’t serve anybody to condense history into talking points for the purpose of hollow sloganeering. When “neoliberalism” is the answer to everything, it’s the answer to nothing.Nathaniel RichNew Orleans, Louisiana, United StatesTopicsClimate crisisUS politicsEnergyFossil fuelslettersReuse this content More

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      Fossil fuel messaging has won over Republican voters, poll reveals

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      Climate crimesEnvironmentFossil fuel messaging has won over Republican voters, poll revealsNew polling data shows two-thirds of Republicans do not want to hold oil and gas companies accountable for the climate crisis Supported byAbout this contentAlvin Chang and Andrew WitherspoonTue 26 Oct 2021 08.00 EDTNearly two in three Republicans believe oil and gas companies are at least somewhat responsible for the climate crisis – but they don’t want to keep these companies accountable.In fact, even when they were told that oil and gas companies knowingly misled the public about their products driving climate change, most Republicans said the public and the government should not hold those companies accountable.These findings are part of a new YouGov poll commissioned by the Guardian, Vice News and Covering Climate Now, which reveal America’s lasting attachment to the fossil fuel industry.Most Republicans believe oil and gas companies are somewhat responsible for climate changeThe poll findings suggest that much of the marketing campaigns that fossil fuel companies have released to paint themselves in a positive light have worked.Revealed: 60% of Americans say oil firms are to blame for the climate crisisRead moreAbout 90% of Republicans said they have neutral or positive feelings toward America’s two biggest fossil fuel companies, Shell and Exxon. But about half of Democrats said the same, despite more than 90% of them saying oil and gas companies were at least somewhat responsible for climate change.Notably more Americans had negative opinions about BP, possibly linked to the negative publicity the company received after the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig accident in the Gulf of Mexico, which is still the biggest oil spill in American history.Opinions on top oil and gas companies are split down party linesFor decades oil and gas companies ignored their own scientists who told them their products were harmful to people and the environment as early as the 1970s.In fact, they bankrolled multimillion-dollar campaigns to downplay the climate crisis and misled the public by saying global heating was a theory not based in scientific fact.This poll shows these efforts have been largely successful, especially among Republicans who have been heavily influenced by misleading stories in conservative media like Fox News.Majority of Americans don’t think oil and gas companies participated in climate change disinformationOil and gas companies have also pushed advertising that insinuates that individuals should be responsible for climate change, not corporations like themselves.According to this poll, their efforts have worked – even on Democrats. The idea of a “carbon footprint” was introduced by fossil fuel companies to encourage individuals to reduce their emissions, and framed Earth’s runaway emissions as a problem to be changed by habit.Meanwhile, researchers have found that just 20 oil and gas companies are responsible for more than one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide since 1965.What Americans say they’re willing to do or already do to mitigate the climate crisisIn a covert recording released by Greenpeace earlier this year, the Exxon lobbyist Keith McCoy is heard on camera saying the company is actively fighting the Biden administration’s efforts on climate change, and admits that Exxon pushed back against climate science – something most Americans don’t know yet.“Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we hide our science? Absolutely not. Did we join some of these shadow groups to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that’s true. But there’s nothing, there’s nothing illegal about that,” he says in the recording. “We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders.”This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate storyTopicsEnvironmentClimate crimesUS politicsOil (Environment)Fossil fuelsEnergyOil (Business)newsReuse this content More

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      Joe Manchin leads opposition to Biden’s climate bill, backed by support from oil, gas and coal

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      US CongressJoe Manchin leads opposition to Biden’s climate bill, backed by support from oil, gas and coal West Virginia senator objects to bill that would steadily retire the coal industry which continues to provide ample financial support to himOliver Milman@olliemilmanWed 20 Oct 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 20 Oct 2021 13.28 EDTIn the tumult of negotiations over the most consequential climate legislation ever proposed in the US, there is growing scrutiny of the fossil fuel industry connections of the man poised to tear down the core of the bill – the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin.Manchin, a centrist Democrat, has objected to key provisions of a multitrillion-dollar reconciliation bill that would slash planet-heating emissions and help the US, and the world, to avert catastrophic climate breakdown. In a finely balanced Senate, Democrats need all 50 of their senators to vote for the bill, with no Republicans willing to vote for the climate measures.The legislation would steadily retire the coal industry that once formed the backbone of the West Virginia economy and continues to provide ample financial support to Manchin, who has spent the past four decades as a political heavyweight in his Appalachian home state, including acting as its secretary of state, governor and now US senator.Chart showing Joe Manchin has received the largest donations across multiple energy sectorsIn the current electoral cycle, Manchin has received more in political donations from the oil and gas industry than any other senator, more than double the second largest recipient. He is also the No 1 beneficiary of donations from the coal mining sector, leads the way in money accepted from gas pipeline operators, and is sixth in the ranking of senatorial donations from electricity utilities.This industry largesse has led to accusations that the senator has been unduly influenced by the companies that have helped stoke the climate crisis. Manchin’s office did not respond to a request for comment.But Manchin’s ties to the fossil fuel industry run deeper than political donations. After initially working in his family’s furniture and carpet business, Manchin set up a coal brokerage firm called Enersystems in 1988, running it until he became a full-time politician.The majority of Manchin’s assets are in a coal brokerage firm’s stockDespite handing control of Enersystems to his son Joseph, Manchin’s links to the business have proved fruitful to the senator. His shares in Enersystems are worth between $1m and $5m, according to his latest financial disclosure document, with the senator receiving more than $5m in dividend income from the company over the past decade. The coal brokerage represents 71% of Manchin’s investment income, and about a third of his total net worth.The reconciliation bill contains a huge expansion in tax support for clean energy and electric vehicles and new curbs on methane, a potent greenhouse gas, but the core of the climate measures is something called a Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP). The $150bn scheme would use payments and penalties to spur utilities to phase out fossil fuels from the US electricity system over the coming decade.The program, along with the clean energy tax credits, “are the best shot we’ve had in a generation to supercharge the clean energy transition and reduce fossil fuel pollution in marginalized communities”, said Patrick Drupp, deputy legislative director of the Sierra Club.Manchin has called the bill’s spending “reckless” and said it “makes no sense” to pay utilities to increase their share of renewable energy when they are doing so already. This is despite the fact that barely any utilities across the US are adding solar, wind and other sources of clean energy at the rate envisioned by the bill to force emissions down quickly enough to stave off climate disaster.“His statement on this is demonstrably false. Utilities aren’t growing renewables that quickly, certainly not in West Virginia,” said Robbie Orvis, senior director of energy policy design at Energy Innovation. “It’s not a secret he has ties to the coal industry. One would hope anyone elected to Congress would not hold significant financial holdings in industries they would consider regulating, but that’s the system we have, unfortunately.”Recent analysis by Energy Innovation found that the CEPP is the “carbon reduction lynchpin” of the legislation, representing around a third of the emissions cuts that would come from the bill. “It’s really unfortunate that the CEPP is not on the table anymore,” said Orvis. “But this bill would still result in a huge cut in greenhouse gas emissions, it does a lot. There may be a way to fill the gaps left by CEPP.”Projected emission reductions of Build Back Better programs by 2030Joe Biden has set a goal for the US to cut its planet-heating emissions in half this decade, before zeroing them out by 2050. America is currently on track for a 17% to 25% cut in emissions by 2030, an analysis released on Tuesday by Rhodium Group found, leaving up to 2.3bn tons of emissions left to eliminate in order to meet the goal. John Larsen, director of Rhodium Group, said that with further cuts from the federal government and states, “the US’s ambitious 2030 climate target is within reach, even with a more limited policy package from Congress”. But he added: “The US and the world have little time or room for error to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”TopicsUS CongressOil and gas companiesCoalOilUS politicsFossil fuelsEnergy industrynewsReuse this content More

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      Malcolm Turnbull on Murdoch, lies and the climate crisis: ‘The same forces that enabled Trump are at work in Australia’

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      Australian politicsMalcolm Turnbull on Murdoch, lies and the climate crisis: ‘The same forces that enabled Trump are at work in Australia’ Systematic partisan lying and misinformation from the media, both mainstream and social, has done enormous damage to liberal democracies, the former PM writesMalcolm TurnbullSun 17 Oct 2021 16.41 EDTLast modified on Sun 17 Oct 2021 17.09 EDTThe United States has suffered the largest number of Covid-19 deaths: about 600,000 at the time of writing. The same political and media players who deny the reality of global warming also denied and politicised the Covid-19 virus.To his credit, Donald Trump poured billions into Operation Warp Speed, which assisted the development of vaccines in a timeframe that matched the program’s ambitious title. But he also downplayed the gravity of Covid-19, then peddled quack therapies and mocked cities that mandated social distancing and mask wearing.Trump’s catastrophic management of the pandemic resulted in election defeat in November 2020. It says a lot about the insanity of America’s political discourse that the then presidential nominee Joe Biden had to say, again and again: “Mask wearing is not a political statement.”Australia’s ambition on climate change is held back by a toxic mix of rightwing politics, media and vested interests | Kevin Rudd and Malcolm TurnbullRead moreFrom our relative safety and sanity, Australians looked to America with increasing horror. If the Covid-19 disaster was not enough, the callous police murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 ignited a wave of outraged protest against racism in the US and around the world. And then events took another sinister turn.Anticipating defeat, Trump had been busy claiming the election would be rigged by the Democrats. He predicted widespread voter fraud, setting himself up for an “I wuz robbed” case if the result went against him. He had done the same in 2016.As it happened, Biden won convincingly. Trump and the Republican party launched more than 60 legal challenges to the result. Their failure did not stop the misinformation campaign.Relentlessly, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and the rest of the rightwing media claque claimed Biden had stolen the election. A protest march was scheduled in Washington for 6 January 2021, the day Congress was scheduled to formally count the electoral college votes and confirm Biden’s win. The protest was expressly designed to pressure Congress, and especially the then vice-president, Mike Pence, to overthrow the decision of the people and declare Trump re-elected.They assembled in their thousands. Trump wound them up with a typically inflammatory address, culminating in a call to march on the Capitol. The mob proceeded to besiege and break into the home of US democracy. They surged through the corridors, threatening to hang Pence and the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi. Several security guards were killed, as was one of the insurgents. Luckily, none of the legislators were found by the mob, although several appeared to have encouraged them in the lead-up to the assault.It was nothing less than an attempted coup, promoted and encouraged by the president himself and his media allies like Murdoch who, through Fox News, has probably done more damage to US democracy than any other individual.Vladimir Putin’s disinformation campaigns have sought to exacerbate divisions in western democracies and undermine popular trust in their institutions. By creating and exploiting a market for crazy conspiracy theories untethered from the facts, let alone science, Murdoch has done Putin’s work – better than any Russian intelligence agency could ever imagine possible.That is why I supported the former prime minister Kevin Rudd’s call for a royal commission into the Murdoch media, which does not operate like a conventional news organisation but rather like a political party, pushing its own agendas, running vendettas against its critics and covering up for its friends.Murdoch empire’s global chief Robert Thomson to front questions at Australian Senate inquiryRead moreIn April I reinforced these points in an interview with CNN’s Brian Stelter, as I had to the Australian Senate’s inquiry into media diversity. Of all the endorsements, none was more significant than that of James Clapper, the former US director of national intelligence, who said Fox News was “a megaphone for conspiracies and falsehoods”.We have to face the uncomfortable fact that the systematic partisan lying and misinformation from the media, both mainstream and social – what Clapper calls the “truth deficit” – has done enormous damage to liberal democracies, and none more so than the US itself. Thanks to this relentless diet of lies, a quarter of all Americans and 56% of Republicans believe Trump is the true president today.Biden is leading a more traditional and rational administration. The friends and allies Trump had outraged around the world are breathing a sigh of relief. The US has rejoined the Paris agreement on climate change and Biden is seeking to lead the world with deeper, faster cuts to emissions.But the same forces that amplified and enabled Trump are still at work in the US and here in Australia. In April the Murdoch press bullied the New South Wales government into reversing its decision to appoint me chairman of a committee to advise on the transition to a net zero emission economy. My “crime” was to not support the continued, unconstrained expansion of open-cut coalmining in the Hunter Valley. In the crazed, rightwing media echo chamber so influential with many Liberal and National party members, the primary qualification to advise on net zero emissions is, apparently, unqualified support for coalmining.As though we hadn’t had enough demonstration of the Murdochs’ vendetta tactics, right on cue on 2 May Sky News Australia broadcast a “documentary” designed to disparage me and Rudd as being, in effect, political twins separated at birth. As a job, I am told it gave hatchets a bad name. But the message was clear to anyone inclined to hold Murdoch to account: step out of line and you will be next.And while politicians are accountable, the Murdochs are not. Their abuse of power has been so shameful that James Murdoch has resigned from the company. His brother, Lachlan, however, is thoroughly in charge and apparently more rightwing than his father. Yet he has chosen to move back to Australia with his family, fleeing the hatreds and divisions of America that he and his father have done so much to exacerbate.As bushfires raged in the summer of 2019-20 I hoped that this red-raw reality of global warming would end the crazy, politicised climate wars in Australia. Well, it didn’t. The onset of the pandemic served to distract everyone, although the irony of following the virus science while ignoring the climate science seems to have been lost on too many members of the Australian government.Australia is more out of step with its friends and allies than it has ever been. All of our closest friends – the US, the UK, the EU, Japan and New Zealand – are now committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2050.On 18 May the International Energy Agency released a new report on how the world can, and must, reach net zero.For the first time this expert agency, always regarded as sympathetic to the oil and gas sectors, demanded that investment in new oil, gas and coal projects cease and that we make a rapid shift to renewables and storage. They described how this would enable us to have more, and cheaper, electricity.02:13To coincide with this report (of which the Australian government had full prior notice), Scott Morrison chose to announce that his government would invest $600m to build a new gas-fired power station in the Hunter Valley. The energy sector, the regulators, the NSW government and other experts were united in saying the power station was not needed – $600m wasted. To the rest of the world, increasingly puzzled by Australia’s fossil-fuel fetish, it must have looked like a calculated “fuck you” to the global consensus demanding climate action.More Australians than ever are worried about the climate crisis, annual survey suggestsRead moreTo those concerned about the lack of leadership on climate, Morrison says his five predecessors all lost their job, one way or another, because of climate policy. He is determined not to let the right wing of the Coalition do to him what it did to me. Before June he would point to the instability in the National party and warn how a shift on climate could trigger a party room revolt, led by Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan and others, to overthrow Michael McCormack. That has now happened, and Joyce made his case for change on the basis of McCormack not doing more to oppose Morrison’s edging towards a net zero commitment.So Morrison is determined not to lead on climate; he wants business and other governments to take the lead and for events to take their course so that the transition to zero emissions happens without any discernible action from the Australian government at all. In the meantime he will continue to use support for coal as a totemic issue to rally working-class voters in mining areas.Scott is long on tactics and very short on strategy. With climate, he underlines my biggest concern about his government: that it will be successful at winning elections but do little in office. And with Barnaby back as deputy prime minister, he has another excuse to do nothing.
      This is an edited extract from the new foreword to A Bigger Picture by Malcolm Turnbull (Hardie Grant Books, available now in paperback)
      TopicsAustralian politicsMalcolm TurnbullAustralian mediaNews CorporationScott MorrisonUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpextractsReuse this content More