Environment

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Climate researchers should play the Trump card | Brief letters

      by

      The obvious solution to American researchers having grants withdrawn for projects containing the word “climate” (Outcry as Trump withdraws support for research that mentions ‘climate’, 21 February) is to rename climate heating “Trump”. We could be amazed that “Trump makes seas rise”, “Trump makes Greenland a green land again” and “Trump makes summer warmer and longer”. Who would oppose that?Mark DavisFrome, Somerset My friend always said that you should never leave a small child and a dog of any size together as it is equivalent to leaving two toddlers together and giving one of them a pair of sharp scissors (The rise of the cane corso: should this popular status dog be banned in the UK?, 19 February).Vanessa RickettGreat Missenden, Buckinghamshire Aged 14, I received an otherwise good school report (Letters, 20 February) that included an observation made by Mrs Tinlin, my art teacher: “Steven is too easily satisfied by a mediocre standard of work.” Her acid comment provided me with the lifelong motivation to pursue a scientific career.Prof Steve ArmesUniversity of Sheffield When I worked in mainstream schools, pupils’ feedback on their teachers was all the rage. One favourite comment: “I hate RE with Mr Grieve as he occasionally manages to teach me something.” Ian GrieveGordon Bennett, Llangollen canal Re the Duchess of Sussex’s latest rebranding effort “As Ever” (Emma Brockes, 19 February), I couldn’t help feeling it was a little too close to “Whatever”.Sarah HallLeamington Spa, Warwickshire More

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      These people protected US forests and lands. Their jobs have now vanished due to Trump

      by

      Approximately 2,300 people have been terminated from the agencies that manage the 35m acres (14m hectares) of federal public lands in the US.These are our lands. They encompass national parks and forests, wilderness and marine protected areas, scenic rivers. They are home to campgrounds, river accesses, hiking trails and myriad other sites and facilities that more than 500 million people visit each year.The termination letters sent to employees stated that they had “not demonstrated that your further employment at the agency would be in the public interest”. Those same people fought fires, protected sacred sites, cleared trails, cleaned campgrounds and bathrooms, educated visitors and managed wildlife. They also provided safety, including search and rescue and emergency medical treatment.All chose this career – and the low pay that comes with it – because they love the lands they worked on. The majority of them live in the small rural communities that rely on federal public lands agencies for employment. We have now lost a wealth of cumulative experience and historical knowledge; the damage to public lands, resources and livelihoods will be long-lasting. And the firings aren’t over yet.Victoria WinchUS Forest Service wilderness forestry technician
      Flathead national forest, Spotted Bear ranger district, adjacent to Glacier national park, MontanaView image in fullscreenI was on trail crew, which is responsible for creating and maintaining about 1,000 miles of hiking trails, which sometimes have to be cleared three to five times in a season from downed trees.People come on to these lands to hunt, to feed their families. People are allowed to get firewood. Outfitters, who are a big part of the local economy, use these trails.But every single field person at Spotted Bear was terminated. Those trails won’t get cleared this year. And it takes less than one season for them to be totally impassable.There will be no one to warn rafters and anglers about hazards in the river, no one to post about grizzlies in an area, no one to support the fire crews. No one to even help people find their lost dogs, which I’ve also done over the years. A million acres of public land will go unmanaged.We are hard-working, blue-collar manual laborers. We make under $40,000 a year. And we come back year after year just to have the privilege of caring for these places that we love so deeply, and making them accessible for the American people. I don’t know what’s more patriotic than that.Adin KotzlerUSFS packer and fire support
      Pintler ranger district and Bob Marshall wilderness, MontanaView image in fullscreenMy job was to pack in supplies to support Forest Service trail crews, rebuild backcountry cabins, plant tree seedlings and [help] wildlife biologists to do their research, among other things. To be able to sharpen a crosscut saw, safely fell a tree or pack a mule – those are all dying arts. It’ll be very hard to bring it back.I’m also qualified for fire support as a tree faller; I can also dig fire lines. When fires exploded in the summer, I tied up my mule and served alongside my fellow firefighters to protect our resources and our people. The fire crews are going to struggle without us.There’s a ton of economic benefits from outfitting, guiding, hunting and fishing. Now the access will not be there for people who have made their livelihoods in the mountains for generations. I was born and raised in small-town western Montana, and I have seen the positive effect of Forest Service employees, outfitters and recreationists on our small towns.What’s amazing to me about America is that we have these public lands – at the same time, it’s so incredibly fragile. And we’re really at risk of losing it to the billionaire agenda.Erica DirksUSFS archeologist
      Tongass national forest, AlaskaView image in fullscreenFederal archeologists don’t do our jobs for the money. I loved my job because I got to help preserve things that mean something to so many people.I’ve always wanted to work with local tribal entities and have their guidance in how they want us to interact with their heritage. My first day on this job, I consulted with our local tribal members and was immediately accepted thanks to this incredible relationship that had been fostered over 30 years by the archeology team in this part of Alaska.When the tribal entity found out people were losing their jobs, they organized what amounted to a downtown march in our little town of 2,000 people to show their support for us. They lost their tribal liaison, the people who worked with them in recreation and fisheries, at a time when Trump has indicated he wants to rescind the Roadless Rule [a federal regulation that protects roadless areas in national forests] and open up the Tongass for logging.We’re talking about incomprehensible damage lasting hundreds of years down the line. Now Indigenous matters won’t be considered any more.For that termination letter to say “you haven’t proved your employment worth in the public interest,” that this work that we do isn’t valuable to our community, is absolutely ridiculous. Our community showed right away that it was.Nick MasseyUSFS wilderness Ranger
      Pisgah national forest, North CarolinaView image in fullscreenBeing a wilderness ranger on the east coast is very different than a lot of places in the west, because we have really high visitation rates. On some of our wilderness trails, we see close to 400 visitors a day in the summertime.We were very, very busy with public interaction, conversations, giving directions, educating. I would come up on folks quite often who were either lost or having some sort of emergency, and I’m also a member of two mountain rescue teams in the area.I really loved seeing so many different people from different walks of life. Being able to be a part of that wilderness experience that people are having was really, truly magical.I think we’ll start seeing a lot more abuse of public lands, because there’s not any education out there to give people some guidance on how to behave. We’ll have so much more trash. And losing jobs is really going to impact the local communities involved in working in these places.Fenix Van TasselBureau of Land Management environmental planner
      Eastern Oregon and WashingtonView image in fullscreenEnvironmental planners basically determine any and every action taken on federal land, from resource extraction and grazing to installing signage, plus the rehabilitation and conservation of public lands.This winter season, we’ve done a lot of rehabilitating burn scars from big fires. We had one of our largest fire seasons this past year, and so we’ve been out planting sagebrush for sage grouse habitat and mule deer wintering areas.Our projects entailed issuing permits that would bring energy and broadband to rural communities out in eastern Oregon and Washington, including tribal. Part of Trump’s agenda is to push energy infrastructure, so it’s interesting that we’re getting laid off. All of these infrastructure projects, including telecommunications, just aren’t going to happen. There’s going to be a larger disparity of access to rural communities.Any pushes for green energy, green infrastructure, anything related to climate change or environmental justice will be completely silenced and wiped off the map.It’s sad that we got laid off, but it’s also sad for the good people who are still left on the inside. The only person that they kept from my team was a lands and realty specialist, whose job is to intake applications. But none of that work will get done – our funding was completely removed two weeks before I got fired.Ryan SchroederBLM rangeland management specialist
      South-west ColoradoView image in fullscreenI finally got this dream job after 11 years of school and working in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico rangelands to be qualified for this position. It’s one of the most difficult positions to fill in public lands management agencies.My job was to review, renew and update grazing permits for private ranchers to graze their livestock on public rangelands, and work to promote and sustain healthy habitats for all Americans, whether they’re hunting, recreating, going out on a side-by-side or grazing livestock.Last Friday, a rancher came in and we were talking about how excited we were to get a grazing allotment reopened. He was saying that maybe, with this administration, things would finally move forward.I was fired an hour later.In every place that I have worked in, there are impacts from 100-plus years ago that we’re still trying to remediate and recover from. And that’s in addition to the current impacts of changing weather patterns: more aridity, less water and more intense storms. This was an opportunity to help people, help landscapes, help wildlife, help our public resources adapt to change. This was my way to serve my country.There are a lot of people saying the national parks are going to be trashed. This is more than just trashed parks. This is the future of our ecosystem and our public land.Fischer GangemiUSFS river ranger
      Middle and south fork of wild and scenic Rivers, MontanaView image in fullscreenI led crews that would patrol the river corridor in the most protected watersheds in the nation.You don’t need a permit to float our rivers, so there’s everyone from outfitters and guides to rafters to anyone with an inner tube. In a five- to six-day patrol, we would take 15-20lb of trash out of the wilderness and bury an average of 20 piles of human waste. And still, I loved every minute of it.The community of people I worked with were the most passionate people I’ve ever worked with. I started working [for the USFS] a couple days after I graduated high school. We had to solve all of the problems we found in the wilderness on our own, which was really good for me.Without rangers out there, it’s going to be really bad. Trash will pile up, waste will pile up. Rivers are dynamic, and so a high water year might clean it out – but all that trash is just going downstream, and that’s just really sickening. More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘The path forward is clear’: how Trump taking office has ‘turbocharged’ climate accountability efforts

      by

      Donald Trump’s re-election has “turbocharged” climate accountability efforts including laws which aim to force greenhouse gas emitters to pay damages for fueling dangerous global warming, say activists.These “make polluters pay” laws, led by blue states’ attorneys general, and climate accountability lawsuits will be a major front for climate litigation in the coming months and years. They are being challenged by red states and the fossil fuel industry, which are also fighting against accountability-focused climate lawsuits waged by governments and youth environmentalists.On day one of his second term, the US president affirmed his loyalty to the oil industry with a spate of executive actions to roll back environmental protections and a pledge to “drill, baby, drill”. The ferocity of his anti-environment agenda has inspired unprecedented interest in climate accountability, said Jamie Henn, director of the anti-oil and gas non-profit Fossil Free Media.“I think Trump’s election has turbocharged the ‘make polluters pay’ movement,” said Henn, who has been a leader in the campaign for a decade.More state lawmakers are writing legislative proposals to force oil companies to pay for climate disasters, while law firms are helping governments sue the industry. And youth activists are working on a new legal challenge to the Trump administration’s pro-fossil fuel policies.Industry interests, however, are also attempting to kill those accountability efforts – and Trump may embolden them.The state of Vermont in May passed a first-of-its-kind law holding fossil fuel firms financially responsible for climate damages and New York passed a similar measure in December.The policies force oil companies to pay for climate impacts to which their emissions have contributed. Known as “climate superfund” bills, they are loosely modeled on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s Superfund program.Similar bills are being considered in Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts and now Rhode Island, where a measure was introduced last week. A policy will also soon be introduced in California, where recent deadly wildfires have revived the call for the proposal after one was weighed last year.Minnesota and Oregon lawmakers are also considering introducing climate superfund acts. And since inauguration day, activists and officials in a dozen other states have expressed interest in doing the same, said Henn.“I think people are really latching on to this message and this approach right now,” Henn said. “It finally gives people a way to respond to climate disasters, and it’s something that we can do without the federal government.”View image in fullscreenProgressives introduced a federal climate superfund act last year. But with Republicans in control of the White House and both branches of Congress, it has a “less than zero chance of passing”, said Michael Gerrard, the faculty director of the Sabin center for climate change law at Columbia University.The state laws are already facing pushback in the courts. This month, 22 red states and two oil trade groups sued to block New York’s climate superfund law.“This bill is an attempt by New York to step into the shoes of the federal government to regulate something that they have absolutely no business regulating,” West Virginia’s attorney general, John B McCuskey, who led the suit and whose state is a top coal producer, told Fox News.In late December, trade groups also filed a lawsuit against Vermont’s climate superfund act which, if successful, could potentially topple New York’s law.Fossil fuel interests were expected to challenge the climate superfund laws even if Kamala Harris was elected president and have been boosted by Trump’s win. “I think [they] feel like they have more of a shot with the executive backing them,” said Cassidy DiPaola, spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay campaign.It “would not be shocking” if Trump’s justice department were to file briefs in support of plaintiffs fighting the laws, said Gerrard, which could tip the scales in their favor.More legal challenges may also be on the way, and if additional states pass similar policies, they are expected to face similar lawsuits. But Henn says he is confident the laws will prevail.“I think Republicans think that they’re going to be able to just scare off local legislators or local attorneys general from pursuing a polluter pays agenda, but I think they’re wrong,” he said. “We have widespread public support for this approach. People don’t like the fossil fuel industry.”Over the last decade, states and municipalities have also brought more than 30 lawsuits against fossil fuel interests, accusing them of intentionally covering up the climate risks of their products while seeking damages for climate impacts.As Trump’s pro-fossil fuel policies move the US in “precisely the wrong direction” on the climate crisis, they will “surely inspire yet more litigation”, said Gerrard. Michigan has announced plans to file a suit in the coming months, and more are likely to be rolled out this year.The cases face a formidable opponent in the fossil fuel industry, which has long attempted to fend off the lawsuits. Since January, courts have dismissed litigation filed by New Jersey, New York and a Maryland city and county, saying the states lacked jurisdiction to hear the cases.Other decisions have been positive for the plaintiffs. In three decisions since spring 2023, the supreme court turned down petitions from the fossil fuel industry to move the venue of the lawsuits from the state courts where they were originally filed, to federal courts which are seen as more friendly to the industry.Last week, a court in Colorado heard arguments over the same issue in a lawsuit filed by the city of Boulder. The outcome will have major implications for the future of the challenge.Trump has pledged to put an end to the wave of lawsuits, which he has called “frivolous”. During his first term, his administration filed influential briefs in the cases supporting the oil companies – something his justice department could do again. “It’s clear where their allegiances are,” said Gerrard. “And if they file briefs that would be good for the defendants.”Alyssa Johl, vice-president and general counsel of the Center for Climate Integrity, which tracks and supports the lawsuits, said: “There is still a long road ahead for these efforts, but the path forward is clear.”“As communities grapple with the increasingly devastating consequences of big oil’s decades-long deception, the need for accountability is greater than ever,” she said.Youth-led litigationAnother climate-focused legal movement that is gaining steam: youth-led challenges against state and federal government agencies, for allegedly violating constitutional rights with pro-fossil fuel policies.Trump’s second term presents an important moment for these lawsuits, said Julia Olson, founder of the law firm Our Children’s Trust, which brought the litigation. While some lawyers will fight each rollback individually, her strategy could “secure systemic change”, she said.View image in fullscreenOn Wednesday, a US judge rejected an Our Children’s Trust suit filed by California youth against the EPA, saying the challengers failed to show that they had been injured by the federal body. Olson said the judge “misapplied the law”.That same day, the most well-known Our Children’s Trust case, Juliana v United States – in which 21 young people sued the federal government – suffered a blow. In December, the plaintiffs filed a petition with the supreme court to send the case back to trial after it was tossed out. The US solicitor general has now filed a brief opposing their petition; Olson said it “mischaracterized” the case.Our Children’s Trust’s lawsuits have in other instances seen major victories. In December, Montana’s supreme court upheld a landmark climate ruling in favor of young plaintiffs, which said the state was violating youths’ constitutional right to a clean environment by permitting fossil fuel projects with no regard for global warming.That victory in a pro-fossil fuel red state, said Olson, inspires hope that children could win a lawsuit against a conservative, oil and gas-friendly federal government.She is working on another lawsuit against the Trump administration, whose “brazen” anti-environment agenda could bolster the challengers’ arguments, she said.“These policies will kill children … and by making his agenda obvious, I think that he helps us make that clear.” More

    • 250 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      There are many ways Trump could trigger a global collapse. Here’s how to survive if that happens | George Monbiot

      by

      Though we might find it hard to imagine, we cannot now rule it out: the possibility of systemic collapse in the United States. The degradation of federal government by Donald Trump and Elon Musk could trigger a series of converging and compounding crises, leading to social, financial and industrial failure.There are several possible mechanisms. Let’s start with an obvious one: their assault on financial regulation. Trump’s appointee to the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Russell Vought, has suspended all the agency’s activity, slashed its budget and could be pursuing Musk’s ambition to “delete” the bureau. The CFPB was established by Congress after the 2008 financial crisis, to protect people from the predatory activity that helped trigger the crash. The signal to the financial sector could not be clearer: “Fill your boots, boys.” A financial crisis in the US would immediately become a global crisis.But the hazards extend much further. Musk, calling for a “wholesale removal of regulations”, sends his child soldiers to attack government departments stabilising the entire US system. Regulations, though endlessly maligned by corporate and oligarchic propaganda, are all that protect us from multiple disasters. In its initial impacts, deregulation is class war, hitting the poorest and the middle classes at the behest of the rich. As the effects proliferate, it becomes an assault on everyone’s wellbeing.To give a couple of examples, the fires in Los Angeles this year are expected to cost, on various estimates, between $28bn and $75bn in insured losses alone. Estimates of total losses range from $160bn to $275bn. These immense costs are likely to be dwarfed by future climate disasters. As Trump rips down environmental protections and trashes federal responsiveness, the impacts will spiral. They could include non-linear shocks to either the insurance sector or homeowners, escalating into US-wide economic and social crisis.If (or when) another pandemic strikes, which could involve a pathogen more transmissible and even more deadly than Covid-19 (which has so far killed 1.2 million people in the US), it will hit a nation whose defences have been stood down. Basic public health measures, such as vaccination and quarantine, might be inaccessible to most. A pandemic in these circumstances could end millions of lives and cause spontaneous economic shutdown.Because there is little public understanding of how complex systems operate, collapse tends to take almost everyone by surprise. Complex systems (such as economies and human societies) have characteristics that make them either resilient or fragile. A system that loses its diversity, redundancy, modularity (the degree of compartmentalisation), its “circuit breakers” (such as government regulations) and backup strategies (alternative means of achieving a goal) is less resilient than one which retains these features. So is a system whose processes become synchronised. In a fragile system, shocks can amplify more rapidly and become more transmissible: a disruption in one place proliferates into disaster everywhere. This, as Andy Haldane, former chief economist at the Bank of England, has deftly explained, is what happened to the financial system in 2008.A consistent feature of globalised capitalism is an unintentional assault on systemic resilience. As corporations pursue similar profit-making strategies, and financialisation and digitisation permeate every enterprise, the economic system loses its diversity and starts to synchronise. As they consolidate, and the biggest conglomerates become hubs to which many other enterprises are connected (think of Amazon or the food and farming giant Cargill), major failures could cascade at astonishing speed.As every enterprise seeks efficiencies, the system loses its redundancy. As trading rules and physical infrastructure are standardised (think of those identical container terminals, shipping and trucking networks), the system loses both modularity and backup strategies. When a system has lost its resilience, a small external shock can trigger cascading collapse.Paradoxically, with his trade wars and assault on global standards, Trump could help to desynchronise the system and reintroduce some modularity. But, as he simultaneously rips down circuit breakers, undermines preparedness and treats Earth systems as an enemy to be crushed, the net effect is likely to make human systems more prone to collapse.At least in the short term, the far right tends to benefit from chaos and disruption: this is another of the feedback loops that can turn a crisis into a catastrophe. Trump presents himself as the hero who will save the nation from the ruptures he has caused, while deflecting the blame on to scapegoats.Alternatively, if collapse appears imminent, Trump and his team might not wish to respond. Like many of the ultra-rich, key figures in or around the administration entertain the kind of psychopathic fantasies indulged by Ayn Rand in her novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, in which plutocrats leave the proles to die in the inferno they’ve created, while they migrate to their New Zealand bunkers, Mars or the ocean floor (forgetting, as they always do, that their wealth, power and survival is entirely dependent on other people). Or they yearn for a different apocalypse, in which the rest of us roast while they party with Jesus in his restored kingdom.Every government should hope for the best and prepare for the worst. But, as they do with climate and ecological breakdown, freshwater depletion, the possibility of food system collapse, antibiotic resistance and nuclear proliferation, most governments, including the UK’s, now seem to hope for the best and leave it there. So, though there is no substitute for effective government, we must seek to create our own backup systems.Start with this principle: don’t face your fears alone. Make friends, meet your neighbours, set up support networks, help those who are struggling. Since the dawn of humankind, those with robust social networks have been more resilient than those without.Discuss what we confront, explore the means by which we might respond. Through neighbourhood networks, start building a deliberative, participatory democracy, to resolve at least some of the issues that can be fixed at the local level. If you can, secure local resources for the community (in England this will be made easier with the forthcoming community right to buy, like Scotland’s).From democratised neighbourhoods, we might seek to develop a new politics, along the lines proposed by Murray Bookchin, in which decisions are passed upwards, not downwards, with the aim of creating a political system not only more democratic than those we currently suffer, but which also permits more diversity, redundancy and modularity.Yes, we also – and urgently – need national and global action, brokered by governments. But it’s beginning to look as if no one has our backs. Prepare for the worst.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      California’s Push for Electric Trucks Sputters Under Trump

      by

      The state will no longer require some truckers to shift away from diesel semis but hopes that subsidies can keep dreams of pollution-free big rigs alive.President Trump’s policies could threaten many big green energy projects in the coming years, but his election has already dealt a big blow to an ambitious California effort to replace thousands of diesel-fueled trucks with battery-powered semis.The California plan, which has been closely watched by other states and countries, was meant to take a big leap forward last year, with a requirement that some of the more than 30,000 trucks that move cargo in and out of ports start using semis that don’t emit carbon dioxide.But after Mr. Trump was elected, California regulators withdrew their plan, which required a federal waiver that the new administration, which is closely aligned with the oil industry, would most likely have rejected. That leaves the state unable to force trucking businesses to clean up their fleets. It was a big setback for the state, which has long been allowed to have tailpipe emission rules that are stricter than federal standards because of California’s infamous smog.Some transportation experts said that even before Mr. Trump’s election, California’s effort had problems. The batteries that power electric trucks are too expensive. They take too long to charge. And there aren’t enough places to plug the trucks in.“It was excessively ambitious,” said Daniel Sperling, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in sustainable transportation, referring to the program that made truckers buy green rigs.California officials insist that their effort is not doomed and say they will keep it alive with other rules and by providing truckers incentives to go electric.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 188 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      A tale of two suckers: Donald Trump’s plastic straws and Keir Starmer | Stewart Lee

      by

      It’s difficult to know whether to set any store by Donald Trump’s bleak and yet also often banal pronouncements, which read as if handfuls of offensive concepts have been tossed into the air by a monkey, read out in whatever order they landed and then made policy. Until it’s clear they can’t work. At which point, the monkey must toss again.But this month, Trump, whose morning ablutions increasingly appear to consist of dousing himself in sachets of the kind of cheap hot chocolate powder I steal from three-star hotels, like a flightless bird stuck in the machine that glazes Magnum lollies, declared he wanted to build his hotels on the mass graves of Gaza. Hasn’t Trump seen The Shining? It won’t end well. Pity those whose children have the misfortune to die next to a monetisable stretch of shoreline. And hope humanity’s next wave of mass killings happens somewhere uneven and way inland that hopefully wouldn’t even make a decent golf course.Is Ukraine the frontier upon which the future of European democracy hinges, or is it just a massive stretch of undeveloped fairway, its leisure/conference utility value currently compromised only by the desire of some losers to continue living in the country they consider home? Where we see the falling domino chain that starts with Poland and ends in your back garden, does Trump see only a succession of 18-hole courses full of men in caps and enormous flapping flares brokering manly deals at the tee? Drive your golf carts over the bones of the dead!But maybe Trump’s horrible mouth-cack is just continuing evidence of his former acolyte Steve Bannon’s advice to “flood the zone with shit”? Does Trump really hate all sea creatures so much that he has to reinstate the plastic straws Joe Biden successfully, and commendably, outlawed? Perhaps he was once told to keep his hands to himself by a mermaid. “These things don’t work,” Trump said of paper straws. “I’ve had them many times, and on occasion, they break, they explode.” Must millions of seabirds, turtles, manatees and dolphins die because Trump imagines that paper straws explode? Or so he can suck up his Diet Coke fast enough to amuse Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth and JD Vance by burping a smelly chorus of YMCA in Biden’s face next time there’s a gathering of ex-presidents.Because Trump, a fully grown man with unlimited funds, loves Diet Coke, and it’s tempting to wonder how many of his seemingly incomprehensible policy decisions can be traced back to his desire to be continually saturated by the soft drink. Maybe there is a subterranean lake of the stuff somewhere deep beneath the Greenland tundra that the climate crisis, which doesn’t exist, will soon make accessible to Trump’s deep Diet Coke drills? Delighted Inuit strip off their sealskins and dance in the showering liquid as they realise they have just struck a rich seam of their new master’s black gold. Like some kind of infantilised diaper king, Trump has genuinely had a special Diet Coke-summoning button installed in the Oval Office. Hopefully, he won’t get it mixed up with that other button. It will be a shame if all life on Earth is fatally irradiated just because Trump wanted a 500ml bucket of fizz to swill down his Big Mac and fries.But are we meant to take Trump’s erratic announcements seriously? While the last concerned voices of the dying liberal press pen outraged articles to their dying liberal readers about Gaza hotels, the invasion of Canada and Trump making it compulsory to drink everything through a Trump Plastic Freedom Straw Company Deluxe Plastic Freedom Straw ™ ®, even cauliflower cheese soup, his homunculus Musk has been quietly dismantling the infrastructure of American government as you knew it. There are cup-and-ball tricksters on Parisian street corners with more subtle moves.Half a dozen of Musk’s own hand-harvested incels-in-waiting, the kind of people who under normal circumstances would have got rich by inventing a way in which hardcore digital pornography could have been mainlined directly into the bloodstream in liquid form, have, under the spurious authority of Musk’s imaginary “department of government efficiency”, gone in and stolen all the data about everyone and everything in the US ever. Never mind. I am sure they will use it responsibly. What can possibly go wrong?Some people gathered at the scenes of Musk’s cost-cutting exercises and waved placards. Others sat and gawked at news footage of Kanye West’s naked wife’s arse or enjoyed disappointing trailers for the new Captain America movie, while the world as they knew it crumbled beneath their king-sized sofas. Keir Starmer backed away, as one might from a neighbour’s unpredictable weapon dog, avoiding direct comment, dodging a commitment to the AI declaration like a coward and hoping for the best, while Trumpy growls and foams. Which simply won’t do.Look. I’m as disappointed as the next metropolitan liberal elitist champagne socialist by Starmer’s government. While I accept, for example, the migration crisis must be addressed, I didn’t expect Starmer, who once left his “village and went to the city of Leeds” and “discovered a whole new world of indie bands – like Orange Juice and the Wedding Present”, to do it with Nigel Farage-style performative cruelty. Address the migration crisis, by all means, but don’t be a c*** about it. Did Orange Juice suffer the indignity of their eponymous third album not even entering the top 50 in 1984 just so, 41 years later, Starmer could send Yvette Cooper out to downgrade the desperate, like Paul Golding in heels.Currently, as Putin puffs up under Trump’s protection and unregulated AI threatens to rewrite history in real time, Starmer is on his knees sucking the paper straw of Trump’s presidency. I fear it may be about to explode in his mouth.

      Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf this year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump names oil and gas advocate to lead agency that manages federal lands

      by

      Donald Trump has nominated a longtime oil and gas industry representative to oversee an agency that manages a quarter-billion acres of public land concentrated in western states.Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Colorado-based oil industry trade group Western Energy Alliance, was named Bureau of Land Management director, a position with wide influence over lands used for energy production, grazing, recreation and other purposes. An MIT graduate, Sgamma has been a leading voice for the fossil fuel industry, calling for fewer drilling restrictions on public lands that produce about 10% of US oil and gas.If confirmed by the Senate, she would be a key architect of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda alongside the interior secretary Doug Burgum, who leads the newly formed National Energy Council that Trump says will establish US “energy dominance” around the world. Trump has vowed to boost US oil and gas drilling and move away from Joe Biden’s focus on the climate crisis.The former interior secretary David Bernhardt relocated the land bureau’s headquarters to Colorado during Trump’s first term, leading to a spike in employee resignations. The bureau went four years under Trump without a confirmed director.The headquarters for the 10,000-person agency was moved back to Washington DC under Biden, who installed the Montana conservationist Tracy Stone-Manning at the bureau to lead his administration’s efforts to curb oil and gas production in the name of fighting the climate crisis.Sgamma will be charged with reversing those policies, by putting into effect a series of orders issued last week by Burgum as part of Trump’s plan to sharply expand fossil fuel production.Burgum ordered reviews of many of Stone-Manning’s signature efforts, including fewer oil and gas lease sales, an end to coal leasing in the country’s biggest coal fields, a greater emphasis on conservation and drilling and renewable energy restrictions meant to protect a wide-ranging western bird, the greater sage grouse. Burgum also ordered federal officials to review and consider redrawing the boundaries of national monuments that were created under Biden and other presidents to protect unique landscapes and cultural resources.Sgamma said on social media she was honored to be nominated.She said she greatly respects the agency’s work to balance multiple uses for public lands – including energy, recreation, grazing and mining — with stewardship of the land. “I look forward to leading an agency that is key to the agenda of unleashing American energy while protecting the environment,” she wrote on LinkedIn.But environmentalists warned that Sgamma would elevate corporate interests over protections for public land. “Kathleen Sgamma would be an unmitigated disaster for our public lands,” said Taylor McKinnon at the Center for Biological Diversity, adding that Sgamma has “breathtaking disdain for environmental laws, endangered species, recreation, or anything other than industry profit”.The Wyoming governor, Mark Gordon, said Sgamma’s nomination was an “excellent choice”.“I know she is well-qualified and knowledgeable when it comes to Wyoming, the West, and multiple use of public lands,” Gordon, a Republican, said in a statement.Trump nominated Brian Nesvik to lead the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which also is under the interior department and helps recover imperiled species and protect their habitat.Nesvik until last year led the Wyoming game and fish department, where he pushed to remove federal protections for grizzly bears. That would open the door to public hunting for the first time in decades after the animals bounced back from near-extinction last century in the northern US Rocky Mountains.The Biden administration in its last days extended protections for more than 2,000 grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, a move that was blasted by Republican officials in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. More

    • 138 Shares109 Views

      in Elections

      The New NIMBY Battle Over the Waste From the L.A. Fires

      by

      Federal and state officials say the temporary sites for processing hazardous waste pose no threat, but residents are worried about their air and water.Gov. Gavin Newsom of California visited Altadena on Tuesday to praise the progress of the cleanup after the devastating Eaton and Palisades fires, vowing to complete debris removal at “unprecedented, record-breaking speed.”Catalina Pasillas has a problem with the debris, but her home is far from Altadena. She lives near one of the four federal staging areas where hazardous materials from the rubble are being stored.Ms. Pasillas, a real estate agent who lives in Duarte, about a mile from one of the sites in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles, said smoke from the fires had exacerbated her asthma. Now, she worries that the waste site, in Lario Park, will poison the air even more.“I understand they need to put the toxic waste somewhere,” she said. “But it feels like they chose our city because they thought we wouldn’t say anything.”Near the ruins of the Los Angeles fires, a new battle has been emerging over how to dispose of the toxic waste left behind.Federal officials said the four temporary sites processing the debris pose no threat to public health or to the environment. But some local leaders and residents worry that their neighborhoods could suffer long-term environmental harm and accuse officials of selecting them because they are working-class Black and Hispanic communities.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More