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      As our former lives dissolve into uncertainty, facts are something solid to cling to | Lenore Taylor

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      I have always worked with facts. I have sifted them for relevance, assembled them to make sense of things, and used them to construct an argument or to disagree with another point of view. Facts are, for journalists, the essential ingredient, like flour for bakers or clay for sculptors. So I recall very clearly how disconcerted I felt when I first sensed they were turning to liquid and sliding through my hands.It was during Tony Abbott’s campaign against the Labor government’s carbon pricing scheme – the policy he dubbed a “great big tax on everything”. There were, for sure, some factual arguments that could have been deployed against that policy, or alternative ideas that could have been raised. The then opposition leader opted for neither of these methods. Instead, he travelled the country saying things that were patently nonsensical. But most news outlets reported them uncritically, and this firehose of nonsense proved impossible to mop up. More

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      What has four years of Donald Trump meant for the climate crisis?

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      Guardian US reporter Emily Holden looks at the Trump administration’s impact on the environment, and the consequences if he wins another term

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      The United States is one of the most polluting nations in the world – its factories, power plants, homes, cars and farms pump billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. By the end of this century, the earth’s temperature will rise by several degrees, many scientists say, if highly polluting countries such as the US don’t control their output now. The Guardian’s US environment reporter, Emily Holden, tells Anushka Asthana about Donald Trump’s environmental policies over the past four years, which have included reversing many of the pledges made by Barack Obama – most notably dropping out of the Paris climate agreement. She also looks at the proposals from the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, which include putting Americans back to work installing millions of solar panels and tens of thousands of wind turbines, making the steel for those projects, manufacturing electric vehicles for the world and shipping them from US ports. What the American people decide in November, Emily believes, is critical for the future of the planet. More

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      Anohni on her new track R.N.C. 2020: 'It's me, screaming in the past, for the present'

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      I watched the Republican National Convention last week. It’s becoming harder to put into words the dread that many of us feel.What’s really happening? Toxic levels of corruption and collusion are devouring the US. Christian extremists want to turn the country into a religious state straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale.After bombarding us with media campaigns pressuring us not to wear masks in March and April, the US now accounts for 22% of all Covid-19 deaths worldwide. I personally know three New Yorkers who died in April, I believe as a result of this official guidance.Trump has stoked racist police violence in the US to even more atrocious heights. Scaring voters with fake tales of impending anarchy and “dark shadows”, he then promises that if re-elected he will crush BLM protesters and “restore law and order”. Is he getting this stuff from Steve Bannon or Mein Kampf? Probably both.Trump is hosting federal executions in the countdown to the election as another prong of his racist, fake “law and order” platform. Last Thursday, the US government defied Navajo tribal sovereignty and executed Lezmond Mitchell, injecting him with a massive quantity of pentobarbital in a death chamber in Indiana.Behind this curtain of carefully orchestrated chaos, the network of corporate lobbyists that form the core of the GOP pillage the US Treasury and dismantle scores of environmental regulations, driving the country and the world even more hopelessly into global boiling and mass extinction.Australian-born Rupert Murdoch blares his obscene propaganda into American homes, hypnotising viewers with lies, rage and fear-mongering. Meanwhile, 40,000 square miles of Australian wilderness burned last summer, killing over a billion animals. More than half of the Great Barrier Reef has collapsed in the last five years due to rapidly increasing ocean temperatures. The same kinds of awful, permanent losses are engulfing nature on every continent.For many people, economic suffering looms while Amazon, Facebook, Google, Tesla, Apple and others expand their global footprints, sucking dry local economies. Some of the CEOs pour the wealth of the world into colonial space programs. They fantasise that they might finally shed their dependence upon Mother Earth and become the heroic creators and patent-holders of life on Mars.Unlike the Koch brothers, who paid for the malevolent spread of climate change denial, today’s tech billionaires scent themselves with a pheromone of liberal philanthropy while monetising the dismantling of checks and balances that once helped to protect us. They take meetings with Trump, provide him with the viral platforms he needs to retain the presidency, advertise themselves as having done the opposite, and then hedge their bets in private. Huge swaths of California’s ancient redwood forests continue to burn around the perimeter of Silicon Valley.Incessant, nihilistic assaults on truth, empathy and the biosphere ensure that life on earth will become much, much worse.On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump’s team described him as the first presidential candidate since Harry Truman with “the guts” to “drop the bomb”. Trump stood there, grinning with pride, and a wave of nausea spread through me. I had the same feeling a few months ago, when I heard Trump utter the words “the Chinese virus”.What waits for us on the other side of this is a world undone by endless cataclysm and aching with senseless loss.The sound of this track, RNC 2020, is pretty rough. The loop is from a concert I did at a club in New York City in my early 20s. So that’s me screaming in the past … for the present.Can you visualize a different path forward? We all have to focus on this now, with everything we’ve got. More

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      Democrats’ climate plan takes aim at the fossil fuel industry’s political power

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      Senate Democrats are set to release a 200-page plan arguing that significant US climate action will require stripping the fossil fuel industry of its influence over the government and the public’s understanding of the crisis.“It’s important for the public to understand that this is not a failure of American democracy that’s causing this,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, a senate Democrat from Rhode Island. “It is a very specific and successful attack on American democracy by an industry with truly massive financial motivation to corrupt democratic institutions.”A 16-page chapter of the report titled Dark Money lays out how “giant fossil fuel corporations have spent billions – much of it anonymized through scores of front groups – during a decades-long campaign to attack climate science and obstruct climate action”.The focus on limiting the industry’s political power could be the opening punch in what is likely to become a dirty fight over climate policy if Democrats take control of the Senate and the White House.The blueprint, from Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis, follows an extensive package of climate policy proposals from House Democrats. Its first two sections describe the depth of the climate problem and posit policy solutions. The third outlines how Democrats could carve a political pathway to substantive reductions in planet-heating pollution. Scores of media reports and lawsuits from states have exposed the industry’s efforts to conceal the scale of the problem and use of dark money groups to create partisan gridlock and slow a shift away from fossil fuels. But Whitehouse said the story has yet to reach the American public. “I don’t think we’ve even begun to get the news out adequately. We haven’t had proper hearings in Congress – the best we’ve had is the Senate’s all Democrats hearing with no ability to subpoena to investigate,” he said.The plan says the US is “almost alone among industrialized nations in having failed to implement comprehensive policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”. It directly blames the 2010 Citizens United supreme court decision that allowed industries to spend virtually unlimited sums of money to sway elections.Democrats created the Democrats-only special committee to address climate change because Republicans have majority control of the Senate and largely dictate the work of committees.The special committee recommends a three-part plan to:“expose the role of the fossil fuel billionaires, executives, and corporations in funding and organizing the groups trafficking in climate denial and obstruction.”
      “reform federal laws and regulations to require greater transparency and reduce the influence of money, particularly dark money, in politics.”
      “alert industries that support climate action to the depth, nature, and success of the covert fossil fuel political scheme.”
      Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has said he would spend $2tn to get the US to essentially eliminate its climate pollution by 2050. He is pitching his proposal as a jobs plan to lift the US out of the economic downturn. But he does not oppose fracking for natural gas – which is the main way the US industry has grown in recent years.At the Democratic National Convention last week, climate activists were also let down by a decision to remove language from the party platform opposing fossil fuel subsidies – revitalizing skepticism about Biden and moderate Democrats’ ability to get tough with the industry.Republicans meanwhile are split on the climate issue, with some outright denying the science, many questioning the severity of the crisis, and a growing minority pitching technologies for capturing emissions from fossil fuels so they can continue to be used. Donald Trump has called climate change a hoax and rescinded essentially all of the federal government’s biggest climate efforts.The report lays out a timeline stretching back to 1977, when an Exxon scientist told company management that there was scientific agreement that humans were altering the climate by burning fossil fuels. Exxon now says climate change is “a serious issue” and denies the company misled the public.In 1988, Shell scientists acknowledged carbon dioxide emissions could be setting the planet on a path to become 2C hotter, leading to rising seas and a melting Arctic, it notes. The world is currently 1C hotter than before industrialization and on a trajectory to be at least 3C hotter.In 1986, a congressional subcommittee held hearings on climate change and in 1988 Nasa scientist James Hansen testified about the threat.Senate Democrats say oil companies responded by copying the playbook of the tobacco industry to sow doubt about the problem. They started front groups and funded think tanks like the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute to deny climate science.Whitehouse was elected to the Senate in 2006, and he said everything changed immediately after the supreme court issued the Citizens United ruling in 2010. “There’s a very clear before and after,” he said.“I don’t think Americans understand enough the extent to which the fossil fuel industry has weaponized a whole variety of systems and laws that now competes with the government itself for dominance,” Whitehouse said. More