Rightwing groups penned a conservative wish list of proposals for the next conservative president to gut environmental protections
An alliance of rightwing groups has crafted an extensive presidential proposal to bolster the planet-heating oil and gas industry and hamstring the energy transition, it has emerged.
Against a backdrop of record-breaking heat and floods this year, the $22m endeavor, Project 2025, was convened by the notorious rightwing, climate-denying thinktank the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch.
Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president. Climate experts and advocates criticized planning that would dismantle US climate policy.
The nearly 1,000-page transition guide was written by more than 350 rightwingers and is full of sweeping recommendations to deconstruct all sectors of the federal government– – including environmental policy.
Very rich US right-wing interests intent on destroying a transition to sustainable energy. UK’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and UK Labour leader Keir Starmer are aligned with and not in any way opposing these interests. There is little doubt that climate denier – I think that it’s just beyond his abilities to understand tbh – Trump will go along with this. Charles Koch is involved with this initiative.
Image of Climate-change denier and Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg. Chris McAndrew public-domain image via WikiMedia. Please see Notes.
An episode of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s State of the Nation GB News show faces an Ofcom investigation on whether it complied with the rules of the broadcast regulator.
The programme in question covered a breaking news story about the civil trial verdict involving Donald Trump, which led to 40 complaints being made to Ofcom. The investigation will focus on whether the programme complied with rules which prevent politicians acting as newsreaders.
The regulator said, “our investigation will look at the programme’s compliance with our rules which prevent politicians from acting as newsreaders in any news programmes, unless exceptionally, it is editorially justified”.
The right-wing news channel that boasts Nigel Farage as a presenter and most recently Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson, is no stranger to Ofcom scrutiny. An investigation remains ongoing into the Saturday Morning show with Esther and Philip broadcast on GB News, related to the same rule.
1. Environment. This is the biggest single issue. Trump is a real-life world-destroying Thanos from the Avengers, and is trying his best to commit planeticide. His policies will kill the earth. The human race has a window of about 20 years to avoid the worst impacts of the climate emergency. We should have swung into action years ago to vastly reduce our use of coal, gasoline and natural gas. Trump has presided over an increase in our annual carbon dioxide emissions rather than, as he should have, greatly reducing them. If Americans give him another four years to wreak this kind of destruction, it will be game over for normal human life on the planet. We will see gargantuan disruptions, with turbocharged hurricanes, massive wildfires, raging sea level rise, coastal flooding, and mass extinctions. These disasters can be light or heavy. Trump is doing his best to ensure they are heavy.
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2. Trump’s second biggest failure was in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. For the most part, he adopted an ostrich policy of burying his head in the ground and pretending that it wasn’t there, or would abruptly disappear “like a miracle,” or that its consequences were not grave.
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3. Trump’s failure on the coronavirus is also a failure on the economy. China dealt with the pandemic in a scientific way, and is now past the crisis. It will grow 1.2 percent this year, whereas US GDP will be in negative territory. Trump blames governors’ shutdown orders for harming businesses.
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4. Health Care. Trump has tried to kneecap Obamacare, which had allowed an extra 22 million Americans to afford health care insurance. Trump has undermined the program at every turn. He is presently in court attempting get rid of the Affordable Care Act entirely. He has also consistently challenged the requirement that insurers insure people with pre-existing conditions. Trump brazenly lies about his opposition to health care for people and his attempt to get rid of the provision about pre-existing conditions. But you have to look at what he does, not what he says. What he has done is to sue to get rid of them and to get rid of the ACA. He lies and says he has a better plan in mind, but the Republicans have had a decade to produce an alternative and they never have given us a bill to examine.
5. Under Trump, the US trade deficit has climbed 14% from where it was in Obama’s last year. It skyrocketed with China, but then Trump used tariffs (paid for by Americans) to wrestle it back down to just about where it was in 2016. It then just grew with other countries.
“Trump’s lies and his rejection of science have cost us tens of thousands of lives. We need a new president,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders. by Jake Johnson, staff writer
President Donald Trump speaks during his campaign event on October 23, 2020 in The Villages, Florida. (Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
President Donald Trump late Friday repeated his lie that the United States is on its way to defeating the coronavirus pandemic just before the country reported a single-day record of more than 85,000 new Covid-19 infections, nearly 10,000 more cases than were tallied at the height of the devastating surge in mid-July.
But the president’s remarks during a campaign rally Friday at The Villages, a Florida retirement community, conveyed zero indication that the U.S. is entering what could be the worst phase of the pandemic yet.
“It’s true that country is rounding the turn of the pandemic. We are spiraling out of control.” —Dr. Zoë McLaren,School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County
“I mean, you look at what’s going on and we’re rounding the turn. We’re rounding the corner. We’re rounding the corner beautifully,” Trump said, recycling an egregious falsehood that has become a staple of his stump speech even as infections and hospitalizations surge nationwide.
The New York Timesreported late Friday that “since the start of October, the rise in cases has been steady and inexorable, with no plateau in sight… By that measure, Friday was the worst day of the pandemic, and health experts warned of a further surge as cold weather sets in. The number of people hospitalized with Covid-19 has already risen 40 percent in the past month.”
Consistent with his reckless downplaying of the pandemic from the very start, Trump once again peddled the lie that the U.S. is “rounding the turn” during a late Friday rally in Pensacola, one of many largely maskless and closely packed in-person campaign events the president has held in recent days against the warnings of public health officials.
Watch:
Just hours after news broke that the US set a single-day record today for new coronavirus cases, Trump absurdly claims in Pensacola that the country is “rounding the turn” of the pandemic pic.twitter.com/fG0uXxluPu
“It’s true that country is rounding the turn of the pandemic,” responded Dr. Zoë McLaren, associate professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “We are spiraling out of control.”
In addition to the record number of cases, the U.S. also reported more than 940 coronavirus deaths on Friday, bringing the nation’s death toll to nearly 224,000—the highest in the world.
“This is only getting worse,” tweeted epidemiologist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, warning that the U.S. could soon reach 100,000 new cases per day as the winter months approach.
With the November 3 election less than two weeks away, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted Friday that “Trump’s lies and his rejection of science have cost us tens of thousands of lives.”
“We need a new president,” Sanders said.
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“The policy of the Japanese government to dump nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean is not based on scientific or environmental protection principles and has no justification.”by Andrea Germanos, staff writer
Storage tanks for radioactive water stand at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s (TEPCO) Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant on Jan. 29, 2020 in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. (Photo: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)
Greenpeace sounded alarm Friday over the Japanese government’s plan to release stored water from the ill-fated Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean, releasing a new report warning about the presence of carbon-14, which the group says “has the potential to damage human DNA.”
The warning laid out in a new report says the government and plant operator TEPCO’s controversial plan—which has been under consideration for some time—is founded on “a series of myths” and pursues the cheapest option to get rid of the water over what is best for human and ecological health.
The plan allows “the government [to] create the impression that substantial progress is being made in the early decommissioning of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors,” Greenpeace says.
Entitled Stemming the tide 2020: The reality of the Fukushima radioactive water crisis, the publication argues that the planned release of the water “will have serious, long-term consequences for communities and the environment, locally and much further afield.”
“Nearly 10 years after the start of the disaster, TEPCO and the Japanese government are still covering up the scale of the crisis at Fukushima Daiichi,” said Shaun Burnie, author of the report and senior nuclear specialist with Greenpeace Germany. He further accused the entities of having “deliberately held back for years detailed information on the radioactive material in the contaminated water.”
Beyond the remaining radioactive material tritium in the water, an additional problem is the presence of high levels of carbon-14, which belies the government’s assertion that the water is not “contaminated,” said Greenpeace.
According to the report,
If the contaminated water is discharged to the Pacific Ocean, all of the carbon-14 will be released to the environment. With a half-life of 5,730 years, carbon-14 is a major contributor to global human collective dose; once introduced into the environment carbon-14 will be delivered to local, regional, and global populations for many generations. […]
Contrary to the understanding of the Japanese government, water that contains large quantities of radioactive carbon-14 (as well as the other radioactive isotopes including strontium-90 and tritium) can only be described as contaminated.
Burnie said that TEPCO and the Japanese government “have failed to explain to the citizens of Fukushima, wider Japan, and to neighboring countries such as South Korea and China that the contaminated water to be dumped into the Pacific Ocean contains dangerous levels of carbon-14. These, together with other radionuclides in the water will remain hazardous for thousands of years with the potential to cause genetic damage.”
“It’s one more reason why these plans have to be abandoned,” said Burnie.
The report puts some of the blame on TEPCO’s decision to rely on technology known as ALPS that the operator should have known was incapable of bringing concentrations of radionuclides down to acceptable levels.
Rather than quickly moving to dump the water into the ocean, the Greenpeace report says the government should pursue “continued long-term storage and processing of the contaminated water.”
“There is no technical, engineering, or legal barrier to securing additional storage space for ALPS-treated contaminated water. It is a matter of political will,” said Burnie.
“The policy of the Japanese government to dump nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean is not based on scientific or environmental n principles,” he said, “and has no justification.”
Poor little snowflake Donny’s been super busy throwing tantrums after one of those mean girl reporters hurt his feelings again. When 60 Minutes’ Leslie Stahl started her interview with, “Are you ready for tough questions?” – and then asked some – he was so mad he left in a huff and posted it all to expose her “bias, hatred and rudeness,” aka her competence as he lied, dodged, stumbled. And earlier he even gave her a big book of all the health care things he’s done! It was blank, but still. Read More… More Further
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