I’m a couple days late this week. When I went through my ‘worth reading’ list for the week there were a higher than usual number of environment-related pieces. Environment-related pieces are first and then a handful of others follow.
Before the links to those pieces: It doesn’t appear that Gov. Baker is going to sign it before the legislative session expires in several hours but the MA Legislature passed an excellent climate bill by huge margins in the House and Senate several days ago. It’s a damning statement on leadership that they didn’t pass it soon enough to force Baker’s hand. When the legislative session ends at midnight the bill is dead if unsigned. He can ‘pocket veto’ it or actually veto it. Despite the bill passing by a veto-proof majority when the legislative session ends there’s no legislature to override his veto. They’d need to pass a new bill next session. Legislative sessions run two years in MA so a new bill may be a while coming. Unfortunately, we don’t have time to waste. The bill is S.2995, An Act creating a next-generation roadmap for Massachusetts climate policy. WBUR story on the bill here.
Worth Reading
Will Collins, Paul Kingsnorth’s Surprising Conservatism
To certain readers, especially those familiar with Kingsnorth’s background as an environmental activist and climate change Cassandra, this might sound like left-wing ecological primitivism. Alexandria’s environmental message will certainly resonate on the left, but there is also an idiosyncratic strain of conservatism running through the book. One expects a modern fable set in a small religious community to valorize characters who violate taboos and question the established order. Kingsnorth neatly inverts this expectation. In Alexandria, the received wisdom turns out to be true. Those who ignore the community’s strictures and wander off into the forest are lost.
A profoundly traditional view of human nature lurks just below the surface of Kingsnorth’s fiction. In Alexandria, taboos and customs are vital guardrails against our darker impulses, the same impulses that nearly destroyed the planet some 900 years ago. This apocalyptic pessimism echoes the Catholic science fiction of Walter Miller, who imagined a community of monks painstakingly preserving scientific knowledge after a nuclear holocaust in A Canticle for Leibowitz. Miller’s book ends with humanity rediscovering science, ignoring the church’s warnings, and promptly destroying the world all over again. The apocalyptic visions of Miller and Kingsnorth are quite different from each other, but both authors take a dim view of technological advancement and humanity’s capacity for collective restraint.
Kingsnorth has said that, “The central question that runs through the novel—the question that has riven humanity and created an entirely new world—is to what degree humans should live within the bounds that nature has set for them, and to what degree they should attempt to break them and remake the world in their own image.”
James Temple, The pandemic taught us how not to deal with climate change
Huge portions of the population stopped driving to work [this year]; going to bars, restaurants, and theaters; and flying around the globe. Economic growth plummeted. Hundreds of millions of people lost their jobs. Hundreds of thousands of businesses have closed for good. People are going hungry. And the world is becoming much poorer.
None of this is a viable or acceptable way of slowing climate change. Moreover, all this devastation only shaved about 6% off US greenhouse-gas emissions this year, according to BloombergNEF estimates. Global estimates are about the same. The pollution reductions came at a massive economic cost, at somewhere between $3,200 to $5,400 per ton of carbon, according to earlier estimates by the Rhodium Group.
We would need sustained cuts on that level, year after year for decades, to prevent far more dangerous levels of warming than we’re already seeing. Instead, emissions are likely to bounce back close to 2019 levels as soon as the economy recovers.
It’s hard to point to a clearer example of how deeply embedded climate pollution is into an even basic level functioning of our society—and how drastically we need to overhaul every part of our economy to begin substantially and sustainably cutting emissions.
We need to transform the economy, not shut it down. And that transformation is happening far too slowly.
Michael Benson, Watching Earth Burn
The earth from space is an incomparably lovely sight. I mean the whole planet, pole to pole, waxing and waning and rotating in that time-generating way it has, and not the views from the International Space Station, which is in a low orbit about 200 miles up and gives us only part of the whole.
My earth-watching, made possible by NOAA and Colorado State University websites, originates in three geostationary weather satellites parked in exceedingly high orbits above the Equator. Despite their seemingly static positions, GOES-16 and 17, two American satellites, and Himawari-8, a Japanese one, are actually whizzing through space at 6,876 miles per hour. They do so to remain suspended imperturbably over the Ecuadorean-Colombian border, the Eastern Pacific and the Western Pacific respectively. At 22,236 miles above sea level, they are in effect falling around earth at the exact pace it turns.
The views they provide are astonishing. The planet shines spectacularly in steady sunlight. It’s white and blue, green, ocher and tan, with complex coruscating swirls of cloud. An exquisitely thin aquamarine line defines its dayside limb, delineating its atmospheric perimeter and shading gradually to black at the migratory border between day and night. There’s something sacred to this sight. As the source of all life, as the birthplace of our species, it deserves veneration. It follows that any harm done to it — and we’re doing plenty — is a desecration.
Stanley Reed, A Monster Wind Turbine Is Upending an Industry
The giant turbines have turned heads in the industry. A top executive at the world’s leading wind farm developer called it a “bit of a leapfrog over the latest technology.” And an analyst said the machine’s size and advance sales had “shaken the industry.”
The prototype is the first of a generation of new machines that are about a third more powerful than the largest already in commercial service. As such, it is changing the business calculations of wind equipment makers, developers and investors.
The G.E. machines will have a generating capacity that would have been almost unimaginable a decade ago. A single one will be able to turn out 13 megawatts of power, enough to light up a town of roughly 12,000 homes.
Kate Aronoff, The Pragmatism of the Radical Climate Left
Even before the 2020 election cycle, centrist Democrats had a habit of portraying leftists and progressives as unflinching ideologues imposing purity tests on their fellow party members. Counter-examples, of course, have abounded. And now there’s a particularly good one in the Georgia runoff election ending January 5.
Politicians and organizations that backed Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary are now pouring time and resources into electing candidates who have little interest in their platform. Jon Osoff, the Democratic challenger running against Republican incumbent Senator David Perdue, has repeatedly stated his opposition to the Green New Deal. Despite that, thousands of young Sunrise volunteers are phone-banking in the hopes of sending him to Washington.
This isn’t because Ossoff is secretly a “radical liberal.” Rather, it’s because Democrats on the party’s left wing are more practical than the party has ever given them credit for. They understand the stakes of these races for dealing with the climate and a whole host of other pressing crises. Democratic control of the Senate could dramatically shift the bounds of possible policy in the next few years, while Republican control could serve as a hard brake on bills to meaningfully curb emissions.
As an interested citizen and a former member of the Arbor Resources Committee, I don’t like the sound of this: Scenic Roads Hearing at 7 pm on Tuesday, January 12 to Consider Felling Multiple Page Road Trees
A legal notice printed in the Bedford Minuteman on Thursday, December 24 calls for a Scenic Roads Hearing at 7 pm on Tuesday, January 12, 2021, during a scheduled Planning Board meeting.
The notice calls for the removal of 31 trees on Page Road and Springs Road that pose a risk to Eversource infrastructure, electricity reliability, and public safety.
Bedford Arbor Resources Committee chair Jacqueline Edwards expressed concern that the notice was posted in print on Christmas Eve.
Interested parties may offer testimony at the public hearing on January 12. Background materials may be viewed on the Planning Department website at http://www.bedfordma.gov/planning and labels are being placed on the trees listed for removal.
See the list of trees to be removed here.
Also Worth Your Time
It cracks me up to see a Democracy 101 lesson in a scholarly journal. That said, these authors make good points and state them eloquently:
Ole F. Norheim, Joelle M. Abi-Rached, Liam Kofi Bright, Kristine Bærøe, Octávio L. M. Ferraz, Siri Gloppen & Alex Voorhoeve, Difficult trade-offs in response to COVID-19: the case for open and inclusive decision making
We argue that deliberative decision making that is inclusive, transparent and accountable can contribute to more trustworthy and legitimate decisions on difficult ethical questions and political trade-offs during the pandemic and beyond…
Given the uncertain duration of the pandemic, and even as vaccines are in the process of being approved, there are important moral, legal and practical reasons to engage in open and inclusive decision-making processes. These include an improvement in the quality of decisions, an increase in legitimacy and trust, compliance with legal obligations and improved adherence to restrictions on behavior that are necessary to curb the spread of the virus. Such deliberative processes also respect people’s abilities to offer, appreciate and act on reasons and are required by human rights and rule of law principles. To serve their purpose and build public trust, these processes should be institutionalized rather than ad hoc, thus making inclusive, transparent and accountable decision making a routine feature of governance, now and beyond the pandemic. We argue the case for such open and inclusive decision making, characterize it and offer examples of how to put it into practice.
Fintan O’Toole, Trump has unfinished business. A republic he wants to destroy still stands
The big question to be answered about Trump is why he did not do two things that might have seemed obvious: infrastructure and war…
Arguably, these two things – building infrastructure and starting a military conflict – might just have got Trump re-elected. So why did he not do either of them?
His personal laziness is certainly one explanation: galvanising and directing such huge efforts is hard work.
But there is a deeper reason. Great building projects and military engagements validate the idea of government itself. Trump’s overwhelming instinct was to destroy that idea.
It is not just that Trump really was not interested in governing. It is that he was deeply interested in misgovernment…
With this discrediting of democratic governance, it is not just that we cannot disentangle the personal motives from the political ones. It is that the replacement of political institutions by personal rule was precisely the point.
Trump’s aim, in the presidency as in his previous life, was always simple: to be able to do whatever the hell he wanted.
Touré F. Reed, Between Obama and Me
Racial ideology does, indeed, inform how we perceive people and their place in the pecking order, as is its purpose. Racism, thus, influences inequities. It does so, however, within a larger political-economic framework. Efforts to redress racial disparities that do not consider the work that race does in American labor and housing markets will be doomed to fail, just as they have since the War on Poverty.
Neil Irwin, There’s a Way Biden Can Raise More From the Rich Without Higher Taxes
How do you raise more money from the wealthy if you can’t raise tax rates?
One potential answer: do better on enforcing the existing tax laws.
Tax experts have long identified a large “tax gap” between the amount Americans owe and what is actually collected. This is disproportionately a result of underpayment of taxes by high earners, especially in certain types of closely held partnerships and midsize businesses that face little scrutiny from either the Internal Revenue Service or outside investors…
The I.R.S.’s budget has declined in inflation-adjusted terms, and the agency has directed more of its enforcement work toward verifying eligibility of those claiming a tax credit for low-income workers. The rich, as a result, got less attention. In 2018, less than 7 percent of tax returns showing more than $10 million in income were audited, down from about 30 percent in 2011, according to I.R.S. data.
That has made it easier for people to get away with questionable or illegal tax strategies. The Congressional Budget Office, in a report this month on options that Congress might consider for reducing the budget deficit, estimated that by increasing the I.R.S. enforcement budget by $20 billion over the next decade, the government would increase tax collections by $60.6 billion, meaning it would reduce the deficit over that span by about $41 billion.
Ending on a Positive Note
Linda Greenhouse, My Joe Biden Story
I’ve interviewed many politicians during a career in daily journalism that included covering Congress and, earlier, New York State government and politics for The Times. I’ve known officeholders who could talk endlessly about policy or hand out political gossip as if it were candy. What I hadn’t encountered was a politician like Mr. Biden, willing to let his guard down and reflect on his vulnerabilities. I was hardly the first or the last to discover this trait in our next president.