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      Why is Joe Biden considering this man to help fight the climate crisis?

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      It was a deceptively low-key occasion on Capitol Hill: an older man in a dark suit, talking into a TV camera about an energy report.According to his firm’s 362-page analysis, the fastest path to California’s climate goals included continuing to rely on fossil fuels. The analysis was funded by gas companies and groups related to them, but he wasn’t a lobbyist or industry consultant. Quite the opposite, he was the Obama administration’s well-respected energy secretary, Ernest Moniz.“We certainly have to get beyond … the climate deniers,” he said in the April 2019 interview with C-SPAN. “But we also have to get beyond what we think are often completely unrealistic proposals for the pace at which we can decarbonize.” Fighting climate change at the pace needed would require a “broad coalition,” he said – one that included the oil and gas industry.Moniz was wading into a dispute that will define how the new Biden administration tackles the crisis: can oil and gas companies be part of the solution? Or have they proven, with years of disinformation campaigns and efforts to slow climate action, that they will always stand in the way?As the Biden transition team wrestles with this question, it is already facing pressure from activists not to hire more people with fossil fuel ties, like Louisiana congressman Cedric Richmond, who will join Biden’s White House as a top adviser.In Moniz’s case:Moniz is on the board of one of the most polluting power companies in America, the Georgia-based Southern Company.
      His firm Energy Futures Initiative (EFI) conducted research paid for by Southern California Gas (SoCalGas), which a state consumer advocate has since argued should be fined for using customer money to oppose climate progress.
      Moniz presented the results at an event sponsored by Stanford University’s Natural Gas Initiative, which SoCalGas and other fossil fuel companies help fund as affiliate members. The initiative offers corporate members access to research “from inception to outcome”.
      EFI also partnered with Stanford researchers on a report that explored opportunities to capture climate emissions from fossil fuel operations. One of the funders was the industry group the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative.
      EFI’s advisory board is chaired by the former chief executive of British oil company BP, although it also includes distinguished climate experts and environmentalists.
      EFI’s California analysis neatly aligned with what SoCalGas had been arguing as the state tightened its climate goals. It found that gas power plants with technologies to capture their emissions would reduce climate pollution more than any other option, including renewable power. It suggested an all-of-the-above approach.While gas has helped the US cut its planet-heating emissions by replacing dirtier coal, it remains a major climate polluter that is linked with significant health problems.Collin Rees, a senior campaigner for Oil Change International said Moniz’s links to fossil fuels aren’t “a blip on his resume”.“It is his entire professional career for the last couple decades, which is deeply concerning,” Rees said. More

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      Antony Blinken: Biden's secretary of state nominee is sharp break with Trump era

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      After reports first emerged on Sunday night that Antony Blinken would be US secretary of state in the Biden administration, one particular interview from his past began circulating on social media.It was a September 2016 conversation with Grover, a character from Sesame Street, on the subject of refugees, directed at American children who might have new classmates from faraway countries.“We all have something to learn and gain from one another even when it doesn’t seem at first like we have much in common,” Blinken told the fuzzy blue puppet.After four years of an administration that has separated migrant children from their parents and kept them in cages, Blinken’s arrival at the state department will mark a dramatic change, to say the least.While Mike Pompeo has remained a domestic politician throughout his tenure as secretary of state, giving the lion’s share of his interviews to conservative radio stations in the midwest, for example, Blinken is very much a born internationalist.He went to school in Paris, where he learned to play the guitar and play football (soccer), and harboured dreams of becoming a film-maker. Before entering the White House under Barack Obama, he used to play in a weekly soccer game with US officials, foreign diplomats and journalists, and he has two singles, love songs titled Lip Service and Patience, uploaded on Spotify.All those contacts and the urbane bilingual charm will be targeted at soothing the frayed nerves of western allies, reassuring them that the US is back as a conventional team player. The foreign policy priorities in the first days of a Biden administration will be rejoining treaties and agreements that Donald Trump left.There is little doubt that Blinken will be on the same page as Joe Biden. He has been at the president-elect’s side for nearly two decades. After working in Bill Clinton’s national security council, he became Biden’s chief foreign policy adviser in the Senate in 2002, as staff director on the foreign relations committee, and worked on Biden’s failed presidential bid in 2008.After Obama picked Biden as vice-president, Blinken returned to the White House as his national security adviser. His face can be seen at the back of the room in the famous photograph of Obama officials monitoring the raid that killed Bin Laden. More

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      Joe Biden to nominate Antony Blinken as US secretary of state

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      The US president-elect, Joe Biden, will nominate the veteran diplomat Antony Blinken as his secretary of state and Linda Thomas-Greenfield as ambassador to the UN, moving forward on his campaign pledge to restore the US as a leader on the global stage and rely on experts.Blinken and Thomas-Greenfield bring deep foreign policy backgrounds to the nascent administration while providing a sharp contrast with Donald Trump, who distrusted such experience and embraced an “America First” policy that strained longstanding US relationships.Blinken could be named as early as Tuesday, according to sources close to Biden, while Axios first reported Thomas-Greenfield’s impending nomination.Blinken’s appointment made another longtime Biden aide and foreign policy veteran, Jake Sullivan, the top candidate to be US national security adviser, a source told Reuters.During the campaign, Biden severely criticised Trump’s go-it-alone foreign policy and pledged to recommit to Nato and other global pacts, while promising to tap experts to fight the Covid crisis and other problems at home. He has promised to rejoin the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization and potentially the Iran nuclear deal.“America First has made America alone,” Biden said in a town-hall meeting in October.Blinken is a longtime Biden confidant who served as No 2 at the state department and as deputy national security adviser in Barack Obama’s administration, in which Biden served as vice-president.Thomas-Greenfield, a Black woman who served as the assistant secretary of state for Africa under Obama, was intended to restore morale and help fulfill Biden’s pledge to choose a diverse cabinet, Axios reported.Sullivan served as Biden’s national security adviser during the Obama administration and also as deputy chief of staff to the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.Ron Klain, Biden’s choice as White House chief of staff, told ABC’S This Week that the first Biden cabinet picks would come on Tuesday.Biden said last week he had settled on a treasury secretary. The former Fed chair Janet Yellen is believed to be the top candidate in Democratic and monetary policy circles.A spokesman for Biden’s transition team declined to comment.Klain again urged that the Trump administration – specifically a federal agency called the General Services Administration (GSA) – formally recognise Biden’s victory in order to unlock resources for the transition process.Biden is due to take office on 20 January.“A record number of Americans rejected the Trump presidency, and since then Donald Trump’s been rejecting democracy,” Klain told This Week.Since Biden, a Democrat, was declared the winner of the election two weeks ago, Turmp has launched a barrage of lawsuits and mounted a pressure campaign to try to prevent state officials from certifying their vote totals, suffering another emphatic legal setback on Saturday in Pennsylvania.Biden received 6m more votes nationwide than Trump and prevailed 306-232 in the state-by-state Electoral College system that determines the election’s victor.Klain said there would be “scaled-down versions of the existing traditions” for Biden’s inauguration. Inauguration ceremonies and related events typically draw huge crowds to Washington. Covid-19 cases and deaths are surging in many parts of the country amid a pandemic that has killed more than 256,000 people in the US.Critics of Trump, including Democrats and some Republicans, have accused him of trying to undermine faith in the American electoral system and delegitimise Biden’s victory by promoting false claims of widespread voter fraud. More

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      Fight for $15 minimum wage boosted in Florida but Biden faces tough task

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      It has been a long time coming but Hector Rivera is hopeful that one day soon he will be able to take a day off work. The 61-year-old works as a janitor in Miami, Florida, making just over $9 an hour. Because the pay is so low, Rivera works two janitorial jobs and scrambles to find gig jobs on the weekends in order to cover his rent and bills every month.“Trying to survive on this salary is extremely difficult because I’m constantly looking for more work,” said Rivera, a Dominican and one of the millions of Latino and Black Americans who are disproportionately represented in the low-wage sector.On 3 November Rivera, and the millions of Americans fighting for a raise for low-wage workers, were given a boost when Florida passed a resolution to increase its minimum wage to $15 an hour.Raising the minimum wage was a central plank of Joe Biden’s election campaign and Florida’s vote came even as the state voted for Donald Trump. But while workers and activists are cheering the victory, the road ahead for Biden and a raise in the minimum wage looks tough.It’s been eight years since fast-food workers walked off their jobs in New York City and began calling for a $15 minimum wage. In that time the Fight for $15 movement grew to be the largest protest movement for low-wage workers in US history and has won some important victories.Florida is the first state in the south and the eighth state overall to adopt such a measure. And some big corporations including Amazon, Target and Walt Disney have raised, or promised to raise, their minimum wages to $15.After Biden’s win, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a longtime supporter of the movement, urged the incoming Biden administration to use all the “tools in their toolbox” to push a raise through and Biden has promised to back unions who are also pushing hard for a statewide raise for low-wage workers.Rivera was among the low-wage workers who got involved with a union organizing drive for change at his workplace with Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ. The Florida ballot, known as amendment two, will gradually increase the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2026 from its current minimum wage set at $8.56 an hour.“With amendment two passing, I’ll be able to spend more time with my family,” said Rivera, who recently spent 35 hours working straight without any sleep. “Hopefully now I’ll be able to take a day off,” Rivera added. “The only way we can live a decent life here in Miami is if they raise our wages because everything is expensive. It’s impossible to save money without making more.”A raise has broad support in the US, even in Republican states. Over 60% of Florida voters approved the measure. In Louisiana, another Republican state where the minimum wage is just $7.25 an hour, a Louisiana State University poll 59% of residents support raising it to $15.Nor is there much evidence that a raise would be bad for business. A UC Berkeley report published in July 2019 found even low-wage areas in the US can afford a $15 minimum wage, which would reduce poverty and have no adverse effects, such as job losses. Most economic research on the subject has demonstrated little to no negative consequences to employment while providing positive gains for the low-wage workforce. The last time Florida increased its state minimum wage in 2004, unemployment dropped and 200,000 jobs were added the following year. More

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      Gary Younge on minority voters and the future of the Republican party – podcast

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      A look at the history of US voting rights and what the changing demographics of the country mean for Republicans

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Black and Latino voters overwhelmingly favoured the Democrats in the 2020 US election. Without their huge margins in key states, Joe Biden could not have won, the journalist Gary Younge tells Anushka Asthana. By 2045, white voters will be in the minority. These changing demographics are a concern for the Republican party. In 2013, just a year after turnout rates for black voters surpassed those for white voters for the first time, the supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which affected poor, young and minority voters. It’s important to remember, Gary tells Anushka, that the US was a slave state for more than 200 years; and an apartheid state, after the abolition of slavery, for another century. It has only been a non-racial democracy for 55 years. And that now hangs in the balance. If Biden does not produce something transformative, the disillusionment among voters may grow and people may once again look for someone who can disrupt the status quo, which is how Donald Trump won in 2016. • Read Gary Younge’s piece: Counted out: Trump’s desperate fight to stop the minority vote More

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      Trump faces pressure from Republicans to drop 'corrosive' fight to overturn election

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      Donald Trump faced growing pressure from Republicans on Sunday to drop his chaotic, last-ditch fight to overturn the US presidential election, as victor Joe Biden prepared to start naming his cabinet and a Pennsylvania judge compared Trump’s legal case there to “Frankenstein’s monster”.Despite Republican leadership in Washington standing behind the president’s claims that the 3 November election was stolen from him by nationwide voter fraud, other prominent figures, including two of his former national security advisers, were blunt.Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton said that Biden would be sworn in in January and added: “The real question is how much damage Trump can do before that happens.”The president’s efforts were designed mainly to sow chaos and confusion, he told CNN’s State of the Union show, as a demonstration more of “raw political power” than a genuine legal exercise.Bolton noted that the Trump campaign has so far lost all but two of more than 30 legal challenges in various states.“Right now Trump is throwing rocks through windows, he is the political equivalent of a street rioter,” Bolton said.And another former Trump administration national security adviser, HR McMaster, told CBS’s Face the Nation that Trump’s efforts were “very corrosive” and warned that his actions were sowing doubt among the electorate.“It’s playing into the hands of our adversaries,” he said, warning that Russia, for example, “doesn’t care who wins” as long as many Americans doubt the result, undermining US democracy.On Sunday evening, hours after former New Jersey governor and adviser to the president Chris Christie said Trump’s legal team was a “national embarrassment” the campaign issued a statement distancing itself from lawyer Sidney Powell, who has been a prominent figure arguing the Trump case that the election was fraudulent, while positing wild theories but no evidence.Meanwhile, Maryland governor, Larry Hogan, another Republican, said he also was confident Biden would be sworn in on schedule on 20 January and said “I’m embarrassed” at the lack of party leadership speaking out to recognize the election result.Hogan added that he thought Trump’s pressuring last week of state legislators “to somehow try to change the outcome” was “completely outrageous”.The US used to supervise elections around the world but was now “beginning to look like we’re in a banana republic,” Hogan told CNN’s State of the Union politics show.Hogan later tweeted, in response to a critical tweet from Trump, who had gone to the golf course for the second time this weekend: “Stop golfing and concede.”If you had done your job, America’s governors wouldn’t have been forced to fend for themselves to find tests in the middle of a pandemic, as we successfully did in Maryland.Stop golfing and concede. https://t.co/tCXO8etxge— Governor Larry Hogan (@GovLarryHogan) November 22, 2020
      On Friday, the president met withRepublican leaders from Michigan at the White House in a wild attempt to sway them and leaders in other battleground states in the electoral college to set aside the will of the people and declare Trump the winner, despite officials at local and federal level declaring it the most secure election in American history.In the latest setback to Trump’s efforts, Matthew Brann, a Republican US district court judge in Pennsylvania, threw out the Trump campaign’s request to disenfranchise almost 7 million voters there.“This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together from two distinct theories in an attempt to avoid controlling precedent,” he wrote in a damning order, issued on Saturday.It came after similar failed court bids in Georgia, Michigan and Arizona to prevent states from certifying their vote totals.Ruling that Pennsylvania officials can certify election results in the state, where Biden has a lead of more than 80,000 votes, Brann said the Trump campaign presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations… unsupported by evidence” in its attempt to challenge a batch of thousands of votes.Brann also suggested that the Trump campaign’s case demonstrated a failure to understand the US constitution, writing: “Plaintiffs seek to remedy the denial of their votes by invalidating the votes of millions of others. Rather than requesting that their votes be counted, they seek to discredit scores of other votes, but only for one race. This is simply not how the constitution works.”For Trump to maintain any hope of staying in the White House, he would need to eliminate Biden’s 81,000-vote lead in Pennsylvania. The state is due to start certifying its results on Monday – as is Michigan.Kristen Clarke, president of the lawyers’ committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said of the Pennsylvania result and forthcoming result certification: “This should put the nail in the coffin on any further attempts by President Trump to use the federal courts to rewrite the outcome of the 2020 election.”On Sunday afternoon, the Trump campaign filed an appeal against Brann’s ruling in Pennsylvania.But Christie agreed that it was time for the president to concede and said the legal team fighting to overturn the election was “a national embarrassment”.Last week, lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell represented the Trump campaign in court and held a long press conference side by side at the Republican National Committee headquarters that was characterized by lies and wild claims about a fraudulent election, without presenting credible evidence.Then the Trump election campaign abruptly issued a statement on Powell.“Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own,” Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis said in the Sunday evening statement. “She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”Powell recently represented Michael Flynn, who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser before he was fired and prosecuted, in his tangled criminal case.Biden has garnered the most votes of a presidential winner in history, recording 6 million more votes than Trump. More

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      President-elect Joe Biden will announce cabinet picks Tuesday

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      US president-elect Joe Biden will announce the first names chosen for his cabinet on Tuesday, the incoming White House chief of staff said – and is expecting a scaled-down inauguration celebration because of the risks of spreading coronavirus.In a sign that his transition team is pressing ahead swiftly – despite Donald Trump’s failure to concede the election and ongoing attempts to thwart the transition process – Ron Klain said on Sunday that the appointments were moving at a faster pace than the previous two administrations.“You’re going to see the first cabinet picks this Tuesday. But if you want to know what cabinet agencies they are, who’s going to be in those cabinet agencies, you’ll have to wait for the president-elect to say that himself on Tuesday,” he told ABC.Antony Blinken, a career diplomat who served as No 2 at the state department and as deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration, was Biden’s most likely pick to be secretary of state, according to reports on Sunday night by the New York Times and Reuters.It comes after Biden said on Thursday that he had already chosen his treasury secretary, hinting only that it is somebody who will be “accepted by all elements of the Democratic party”.Klain said that while parts of the transition are moving at “record setting pace”, there are limits to what the Biden team can do while the current administration continues to attempt to block the transition, the impacts of which “escalate every day”.He said Biden and vice-president-elect Kamala Harris are not getting access to intelligence briefings, coronavirus data or background checks for cabinet nominees and criticised US general services administration (GSA) administrator Emily Murphy, who has delayed ascertaining Biden’s win.“The law only requires her to find who is the apparent victor of the election and I can’t imagine there’s any dispute that Joe Biden is the apparent winner of the presidential election.”Klain said the president “has definitely set back the democratic norm here in the United States. He’s been doing that for four years and that’s ramped up since the election.”Asked about how the incoming administration plans to balance moving forward with holding the previous one accountable, he said the president-elect “is not going to tell the justice department who to investigate or who not to investigate.” On inauguration day, 20 January, the incoming president normally enjoys being received by the outgoing president at the White House, followed by the swearing-in in front of the Capitol, watched by the public on the National Mall and millions on television. There’s a special launch, a procession down Pennsylvania Avenue and the inaugural balls.Everything about Joe Biden’s celebrations are expected to be different in January, because of the ongoing pandemic.“We know people want to celebrate … we just want to try to find a way to do it as safely as possible,” Klain said.There is speculation that Trump will not participate at all.And that some events could be cancelled or will involve social distancing and mask-wearing with many obliged to watch an online stream instead of attend in person. More

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      The shadow of Obama: what influence will the ex-president have on Biden?

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      He’s back with a vengeance. After four years lying low as Donald Trump occupied the White House, Barack Obama is suddenly everywhere again – on TV, on radio, online and in bookshops.
      The 44th US president’s memoir, A Promised Land, was published this week and, shifting nearly 890,000 copies in its first 24 hours, is likely to become the bestselling presidential memoir in modern American history. It topped his wife Michelle Obama’s book, Becoming, which sold 725,000 copies on day one.
      As he promotes the 768-page tome, Obama is being asked what influence he and his allies may wield when his former deputy, Joe Biden, assumes the presidency in January. It is a double-edged sword. Biden knows that he will always be able to call on his old boss for advice – but he has big shoes to fill and could suffer by comparison.
      “I’m certain Barack would be happy to react to any question or request Biden put to him,” said David Garrow, author of Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. “But I wonder, having spent eight years as VP [vice-president], whether Biden would hesitate to rely on Barack in any meaningful way because of a feeling that it would be like relying on your older brother.” More