“Holding Trump accountable for his crimes pulls our democracy back from the precipice and prevents his criminal attempt to overturn an election from being forgotten or normalized,” said one watchdog leader.
Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday was indicted by a federal grand jury in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Trump—now the leading candidate for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination—faces four charges: conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.
“The defendant lost the 2020 presidential election,” the indictment states. “Despite having lost, the defendant was determined to remain in power. So for more than two months following Election Day on November 3, 2020, the defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won.”
“These claims were false, and the defendant knew that they were false. But the defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway—to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election,” adds the document, which descibes but does not identify by name six co-conspirators.
This case has been assigned to Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee who is widely respected as a fair and brilliant judge. This is … not a good draw for Trump. https://t.co/yyAQHVgo5g
The election interference case has been assigned to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, an appointee of former President Barack Obama in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. NBC Newsnoted that she “is the only federal judge in Washington, D.C., who has sentenced January 6 defendants to sentences longer than the government had requested.”
Trump is expected to be arraigned in D.C. on Thursday before Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya, according toNBC.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) president Noah Bookbinder said Tuesday that “the charges leveled against Donald Trump today are the most significant he has yet faced because they address the most serious offense he committed: trying to block the peaceful transfer of power and keep himself in office despite losing the 2020 election by inciting a violent insurrection.”
“Had he succeeded, it would have effectively ended our almost two-and-a-half-century experiment in democratic self-governance,” added Bookbinder, a former federal prosecutor. “Jack Smith’s indictment cuts through Trump’s propaganda to explicitly demonstrate not just the facts, but the stakes of this case. Holding Trump accountable for his crimes pulls our democracy back from the precipice and prevents his criminal attempt to overturn an election from being forgotten or normalized. Nothing could be more important for the future of America.”
BREAKING: Donald Trump has been indicted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and inciting insurrection. These are Trump’s most significant charges yet. https://t.co/6kxuYtwMgU
Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said that “today’s charges matter beyond the fact that a former president is accused. Donald Trump and his co-conspirators tried to overthrow American democracy.”
“They wanted to negate the votes of millions of Americans. They did this using phony claims of voter fraud and rigged elections. These conspiracy theories are still being used to justify changes to voting and election law all over the country,” he continued. “Donald Trump will stand trial. The Big Lie will be on trial too.”
Stand Up America president and founder Sean Eldridge asserted that “accountability is essential to protecting our democracy and our freedom to vote, and today, Donald Trump is finally being held accountable for his attack on the rule of law and the will of the people.”
“This indictment serves as a stark reminder of the danger Trump still poses to our democracy,” he stressed. “Time and time again, Trump has demonstrated that he is unfit for the highest office in the land. To protect our democracy and our fundamental freedoms, voters must make sure he never sets foot in the White House again.”
Special Counsel Jack Smith: "Today an indictment was unsealed charging Donald J. Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding." pic.twitter.com/EH0n75BRi3
Common Cause interim co-president Marilyn Carpinteyro declared that “no American is above the law—not even former presidents. The charges that a federal grand jury leveled today against former President Donald Trump are profoundly serious and must go to trial. The charges themselves are unprecedented, but so are the events that led to them.”
The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol “revealed the monthslong conspiracy to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election and its culmination in the deadly insurrection,” she noted. “Anyone and everyone who broke the laws of this nation participating in that conspiracy must be held accountable.”
Public Citizen executive vice president Lisa Gilbert highlighted Tuesday that the bipartisan congressional panel ” recommended criminal chargesfor Trump’s role in inciting an insurrection and the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.”
“The committee’s work was based on reams of evidence obtained by nonpartisan career prosecutors, intelligence officers, and national security experts. Their recommendations were informed by more than one hundred subpoenas, over 1,000 interviews and depositions, and more than 140,000 documents,” she said, welcoming the charges.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said in a joint statement:
The insurrection on January 6, 2021 was one of the saddest and most infamous days in American history, personally orchestrated by Donald Trump and fueled by his insidious Big Lie in an attempt to undermine the 2020 election. In a deadly effort to overturn the will of the American people and block the peaceful transition of power, our nation’s Capitol—the very symbol and home of American patriotism and democracy—fell under attack to thousands of vicious and violent rioters.
The third indictment of Mr. Trump illustrates in shocking detail that the violence of that day was the culmination of a monthslong criminal plot led by the former president to defy democracy and overturn the will of the American people. This indictment is the most serious and most consequential thus far and will stand as a stark reminder to generations of Americans that no one, including a president of the United States, is above the law. The legal process must continue to move forward without any outside interference.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.)
Trump was previously indicted in June as a result of Smith’s classified documents probe and in April following Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation into alleged hush money payments during the 2016 election. He could also soon face charges stemming from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ probe of attempts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.
The ex-president claimed on social media Tuesday that the new “Fake Indictment” is an effort to interfere with the next presidential election—an unsubstantiated allegation repeated by his campaign, which also took aim at his likely 2024 opponent, Democratic President Joe Biden.
Some advocacy groups and constitutional experts argue that regardless of the results of his legal issues, the 14th Amendment disqualifies Trump from holding office again because he incited the 2021 insurrection.
Among them are Familia Vota Education Fund and Free Speech for People, whose legal director, Ron Fein, said that “these criminal charges will hold Trump accountable in the criminal justice system, but states don’t need any permission from federal prosecutors to move forward on excluding him from presidential ballots under the 14th Amendment’s insurrectionist disqualification clause.”
Héctor Sánchez Barba, executive director and CEO of Mi Familia Vota, emphasized Tuesday that “we must continue to strengthen our democracy. That is why we are urging secretaries of state and chief election officials across the country to carry out the mandate of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment and bar Trump from the ballot.”
The new charges against Trump on Tuesday came as two of his “Big Lie” allies in Michigan, former attorney general candidate Matt DePerno and ex-state Rep. Daire Rendon, were indicted for illegally tampering with voting equipment as part of the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
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America’s electric power system is undergoing radical change as it transitions from fossil fuels to renewable energy. While the first decade of the 2000s saw huge growth in natural gas generation, and the 2010s were the decade of wind and solar, early signs suggest the innovation of the 2020s may be a boom in “hybrid” power plants.
A typical hybrid power plant combines electricity generation with battery storage at the same location. That often means a solar or wind farm paired with large-scale batteries. Working together, solar panels and battery storage can generate renewable power when solar energy is at its peak during the day and then release it as needed after the sun goes down.
A look at the power and storage projects in the development pipeline offers a glimpse of hybrid power’s future.
Our team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that a staggering 1,400 gigawatts of proposed generation and storage projects have applied to connect to the grid – more than all existing U.S. power plants combined. The largest group is now solar projects, and over a third of those projects involve hybrid solar plus battery storage.
While these power plants of the future offer many benefits, they also raise questions about how the electric grid should best be operated.
Why hybrids are hot
As wind and solar grow, they are starting to have big impacts on the grid.
Solar power already exceeds 25% of annual power generation in California and is spreading rapidly in other states such as Texas, Florida and Georgia. The “wind belt” states, from the Dakotas to Texas, have seen massive deployment of wind turbines, with Iowa now getting a majority of its power from the wind.
This high percentage of renewable power raises a question: How do we integrate renewable sources that produce large but varying amounts of power throughout the day?
Joshua Rhodes/University of Texas at Austin.
That’s where storage comes in. Lithium-ion battery prices have rapidly fallen as production has scaled up for the electric vehicle market in recent years. While there are concerns about future supply chain challenges, battery design is also likely to evolve.
The combination of solar and batteries allows hybrid plant operators to provide power through the most valuable hours when demand is strongest, such as summer afternoons and evenings when air conditioners are running on high. Batteries also help smooth out production from wind and solar power, store excess power that would otherwise be curtailed, and reduce congestion on the grid.
Hybrids dominate the project pipeline
At the end of 2020, there were 73 solar and 16 wind hybrid projects operating in the U.S., amounting to 2.5 gigawatts of generation and 0.45 gigawatts of storage.
Today, solar and hybrids dominate the development pipeline. By the end of 2021, more than 675 gigawatts of proposed solar plants had applied for grid connection approval, with over a third of them paired with storage. Another 247 gigawatts of wind farms were in line, with 19 gigawatts, or about 8% of those, as hybrids.
The amount of proposed solar, storage and wind power waiting to hook up to the grid has grown dramatically in recent years, while coal, gas and nuclear have faded. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Of course, applying for a connection is only one step in developing a power plant. A developer also needs land and community agreements, a sales contract, financing and permits. Only about one in four new plants proposed between 2010 and 2016 made it to commercial operation. But the depth of interest in hybrid plants portends strong growth.
In markets like California, batteries are essentially obligatory for new solar developers. Since solar often accounts for the majority of power in the daytime market, building more adds little value. Currently 95% of all proposed large-scale solar capacity in the California queue comes with batteries.
5 lessons on hybrids and questions for the future
The opportunity for growth in renewable hybrids is clearly large, but it raises some questions that our group at Berkeley Lab has been investigating.
The investment pays off in many regions. We found that while adding batteries to a solar power plant increases the price, it also increases the value of the power. Putting generation and storage in the same location can capture benefits from tax credits, construction cost savings and operational flexibility. Looking at the revenue potential over recent years, and with the help of federal tax credits, the added value appears to justify the higher price.
Co-location also means tradeoffs. Wind and solar perform best where the wind and solar resources are strongest, but batteries provide the most value where they can deliver the greatest grid benefits, like relieving congestion. That means there are trade-offs when determining the best location with the highest value. Federal tax credits that can be earned only when batteries are co-located with solar may be encouraging suboptimal decisions in some cases.
There is no one best combination. The value of a hybrid plant is determined in part by the configuration of the equipment. For example, the size of the battery relative to a solar generator can determine how late into the evening the plant can deliver power. But the value of nighttime power depends on local market conditions, which change throughout the year.
Power market rules need to evolve. Hybrids can participate in the power market as a single unit or as separate entities, with the solar and storage bidding independently. Hybrids can also be either sellers or buyers of power, or both. That can get complicated. Market participation rules for hybrids are still evolving, leaving plant operators to experiment with how they sell their services.
Small hybrids create new opportunities: Hybrid power plants can also be small, such as solar and batteries in a home or business. Such hybrids have become standard in Hawaii as solar power saturates the grid. In California, customers who are subject to power shutoffs to prevent wildfires are increasingly adding storage to their solar systems. These “behind-the-meter” hybrids raise questions about how they should be valued, and how they can contribute to grid operations.
Hybrids are just beginning, but a lot more are on the way. More research is needed on the technologies, market designs and regulations to ensure the grid and grid pricing evolve with them.
While questions remain, it’s clear that hybrids are redefining power plants. And they may remake the U.S. power system in the process.
A strategy to unleash the green energy potential of vacant space in towns and cities should begin—and not end—with car parks.
November 19, 2022
France has approved legislation that will require all car parks with more than 80 spaces to be covered over by solar panels. This is part of a wider program that will see solar panels occupy derelict lots, vacant land alongside roads and railways, as well as some farmland.
Do the numbers add up? And should other countries do the same?
Several countries, most notably Germany, have already mandated developers of new buildings to incorporate renewables into their designs, like roof-mounted solar panels, biomass boilers, heat pumps, and wind turbines. The French policy would apply to new and existing car parks.
Several countries, most notably Germany, have already mandated developers of new buildings to incorporate renewables into their designs, like roof-mounted solar panels, biomass boilers, heat pumps, and wind turbines.
The average car parking space is about 4.8m by 2.4m, or 11.52m². Assuming an output of 120 watts per m² that works out at roughly 1.4 kilowatts of power per bay. There would be further space over walkways and traffic lanes within the car park, but the solar panels would need to be kept far enough apart to stop them shading each other.
For an output of 11 gigawatts, you’d need to cover about 7.7 million car parking spaces. Are there that many in France that would qualify? The UK has between 3 and 4 millionspaces and 40 million vehicles. France has a similar sized fleet of 38 million. So, 7.7 million spaces seems unlikely.
But the legislation covers a lot of urban land, not just car parks. In theory, 92km² of French urban land (defined as any built-up area with more then 5,000 people) could provide 11 gigawatts of solar power.
That might sound like a lot, but it’s only 0.106% of France’s total urban land area of 86,500 km². Accounting for the difference in capacity factors (how much energy each source generates a year compared with its maximum theoretical output) between French nuclear (70%) and French solar (15%), 430 km² of solar would supply the same amount of power each year in gigawatt-hours as those ten nuclear plants.
These panels need only cover 0.5% of French urban land, or about 0.07% of France’s total area. So it’s possible, though car parks will make up a tiny portion of the overall program.
Coming to a car park near you
The UK and countries further north receive less sunlight per m² and the sun sits lower on their horizon, which makes the issue of shading on panels bigger, although the longer days in summer do compensate for this to some extent.
Also, while a lot of car parks in southern Europe already have sun shades over them (which allow solar panels to be mounted onto existing structures), this is rare in cooler countries. As a result, it would probably be a lot easier to mount panels on the roofs of buildings than over the surrounding car park in some countries. Where solar panels aren’t practical, other options, like wind turbines, might well be viable alternatives.
Likewise, some car parks, especially those in city centers, are shaded for most of the day by tall buildings nearby. But there is no reason not to put panels on top of them instead.
France is likely to be pursuing this policy to ease its dependence on nuclear power, which supplies 70% of the country’s electricity. This arrangement works when demand is stable. It becomes a problem when, for example, a drought forces multiple plants to reduce their power output or shut down. France is also adding several million electric cars and heat pumps to its grid, which will need to draw from a variety of energy sources and storage options.
The U.K. is similarly dependent on gas for both electricity and heating. Creating a more diverse energy supply, much of which is directly connected to the very cars or homes consuming that power, makes a lot of sense. But a strategy to unleash the green energy potential of vacant space in towns and cities should begin—and not end—with car parks.
Originally published November 19, 2022 by The Conversation and also published on Common Dreams and republished under Creative Commons license.
Donald Trump has been colonising the world’s attention for years, via television, on social media and in books. Ironically, given Trump likes books about as much as he does germs, more than 100 books about him are listed on Wikipedia, ranging from biographies and exposés to paeans of praise (think his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski) and scathing analyses of his presidency.
One work, Plaintiff in Chief, concerns the gob-smacking number of lawsuits Trump and his businesses have engaged in – 3500 – and is already well out of date, having been published in 2019. There is even a book about all the Trump books. Its nicely punning title, What were we thinking?, might also be said to apply to the publishers of Carlos Lozada’s book although that would undervalue his insights, and those of the authors whose work he examines.
With the application of all this intellectual muscle, though, what do we still need – or want – to know about Donald Trump? All of us probably do need to know the likelihood Trump will run again for president and, worse, win. On that hinges the future of democracy in a global superpower along with prospects for real action combating the effects of climate change.
The answer to this need-to-know question is undeniably important, but I still want to know whether Trump actually believes the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Is there some psychological wound from his childhood that renders him unable to bear loss? Or is his unblinking refusal to accept the election result yet another example of his lifelong habit of lying and grifting to get his own way?
If the answer is the former, I care less about what might have happened to Donald as a toddler than that he has managed to persuade about two thirds of Republican voters to his view, according to polls analysed by Politifact.
If the answer is the latter, which bespeaks a truly chilling level of cynical disregard for the consequences of his actions, it immediately raises another question. Exactly how has Trump been able to persuade so many Republicans to believe his lies, despite all evidence to the contrary, including Trump’s legal team losing 64 out of 65 cases brought contesting the result?
I ask these questions following publication of Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man: the making of Donald Trump and the breaking of America. Since the mid-1990s, Haberman has reported on Trump, first for the Murdoch-owned tabloid, The New York Post, then for its rival, The New York Daily News, and, since 2015, for The New York Times.
The driving argument of her book is that to understand Trump you need to understand the New York real-estate and property development world in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. What he learnt there, she argues, about business, politics and people, was the template of behavior he took into the White House.
‘False’, ‘Totally false’, ‘Fake News’
During two campaigns and four years in office, writes Haberman, Trump treated the country like a version of New York City’s five boroughs. His aides soon realised he had imagined a presidency that functioned like one of the once-powerful Democratic Party machines in those boroughs. A single boss controlled everything in this kingdom and knew his support alone could ensure electoral success for others. This was an “us” versus “them” realm where racial dynamics changed from one block to the next.
The argument has explanatory power. But so too, to take one example, does James Poniewozik’s view, in his 2019 book, Audience of One, that the key to Trump’s worldview is his symbiotic relationship with television. Trump did seem to govern in much the same way as he behaved in The Apprentice, the reality TV program he starred in – making contestants beholden to his every whim and impulse.
As Poniewozik puts it, the Trump administration soon became a “dogpile of competitors, cronies and relatives throttling one another daily for survival”.
Haberman tells readers that on top of her daily reporting, she conducted 250 interviews for the book, including three with Trump, either in person or in writing. For the latter, Trump annotated her list of questions in his customary black “Sharpie” pen with comments like “False”, “Totally false” and “Fake News”.
Because Haberman has known Trump for so long she has been derided as a schill. Because she enjoyed good access to him on the campaign trail and during his presidency she has been called a “Trump whisperer”. She may at times have been both, but like almost any journalist who has reported on Trump her work has been labelled “fake news”.
She has borne, too, Trump’s seemingly casual but calibrated barbs: “Did you ever notice that her glasses are always smudged?” he said to his aides.
More precisely, she reports him saying this to aides, but there is no source for the comment in the book’s end-notes. Does that mean he didn’t say it? Does Haberman take the same insouciant approach here to sourcing as the authors of Plagued, political journalists Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers, did in their recent book about the Morrison government’s response to the pandemic?
Like the authors of Plagued too, Haberman has fielded criticism for withholding information from her newspaper readers and saving it for her book. (Benson and Chambers knew about Morrison’s multiple ministerial portfolios but held onto that information for up to two years before it became public.)
In Confidence Man Haberman recounts Trump telling one aide days after the 2020 presidential election, “I’m just not going to leave”, and another, “We’re never leaving. How can you leave when you won an election?” (She also reports him in other conversations seeming to accept he had lost but does not probe the contradiction further.) Should she have reported those comments at the time rather than saving them for her book?
The information gathered by Haberman was clearly important and could, perhaps should, have been published in The New York Times contemporaneously but we don’t know the circumstances in which it was obtained. Perhaps the information was only revealed on condition it would not be published immediately. There is little doubt that people being interviewed for a book published well after the news cycle has pedalled on are willing to speak more candidly. If the aim of a book is to provide context and nuance about contested current events, then the trade-off between news now and understanding later may be worth it.
Maggie Haberman took leave from The Times to write her book. In the course of reporting the book, she shared considerable newsworthy information with The Times. Editors decided what news was best suited for our news report.
Devastating observations
Returning to the “smudged glasses” barb, we know Trump has publicly insulted women and journalists countless times. The comment has the ring of truth, so it is probably not as important that this quote was unattributed. The end-notes of Confidence Man do run to 63 pages (providing a good deal more information than the sparse end-notes in Plagued.)
At several points Haberman also tells us about news stories she has written, how they were received, those whose accuracy was later vindicated and, occasionally, those that contained errors of fact or context. In other words, she is reflective and concerned to be as fair as possible in her reporting and judgements.
When Haberman’s book was released in early October, New York magazine listed 22 revelations from it while acknowledging they “feel less like bombshells and more like laundry lists of erratic presidential behaviour”.
For many readers the coverage of New York City’s property world will be unfamiliar, but the bulk of the book covers Trump’s political career and is very familiar: the 2016 campaign, the presidency, the unceasing stream of controversies – large, small or confected – the impeachment trials, the pandemic response, the 2020 campaign and the January 6 riots at the Capitol.
Familiar though these events are, their sheer volume means they are not discussed in any great depth and what discussion there is does not venture beyond the political journalist’s inside-the-Beltway frame of reference. This can be frustrating but the value of reading Confidence Man, in my view, is not in the explosive revelations or the private, never-seen-before details. It is how Haberman uses anecdotes to build up a devastating picture of character.
It is true there is some extraordinary material in the book but Haberman does not badge it up Bob Woodward-style. Instead, she quietly but frequently enough for it to look like a deliberate strategy, drops in eye-popping anecdotes and devastating observations about Trump’s behaviour.
You have to be on the lookout for them because they are nestled within 597 pages of detailed coverage of his life and career. Some come from her own reporting while others are drawn from earlier journalists’ and authors’ work.
Haberman spends little space on Trump’s childhood but enough to show his bullying began early: a neighbour in Queens, New York, was horrified when her baby sitting in a playpen in the backyard was pelted with rocks over the fence from a five-year-old Trump. Later, Trump proudly recalled gluing together his brother Robert’s blocks to build his own tower.
That Trump is profligate with others’ money but tight with his own is well known but Haberman reminds us that one of his early antagonists, the satirical magazine, Spy, used to mail cheques to his office for steadily diminishing amounts to see whether he would keep cashing them; he did, down to one for 13 cents.
When the Trumps moved into the White House in 2017, Donald loved being able to press a button on his desk to order a valet to bring him a Diet Coke. He remade the White House to suit his tastes, installing plenty of television sets, even in the bathroom, and telling guests he had renovated the entire area, including the toilet.
“You understand what I mean,” he said to one visitor, who interpreted it to mean he did not want to use the same bathroom as his African-American predecessor. Apart from the apparent racism, Trump’s statement was also untrue as officials told Haberman it was customary for toilet seats in the White House to be replaced between one administration and the next.
Trump may not be a book reader but, Haberman reports, he has near perfect recall of anything written about him in the media. He knew little and cared less about policies or how government actually operated but staff noticed he absorbed policies far better from television coverage than from their briefings.
They noticed his “singular interest” in whether those representing him on television appeared persuasive, and on their appearance full stop. He would comment on the lighting, the make-up, the women’s dresses, their hair. Trump had always been preternaturally aware of the appearance of things. Sleeping over at a friend’s house during primary school, he earnestly commented on the “wonderful” quality of the bed-sheets.
Extra ice cream and special glassware
Trump himself noticed how he could say almost anything and supporters at his MAGA rallies would forgive him. Haberman compares this revelation – and two others – to the scene in Jurassic Park when the velociraptors learn how to open doors.
Similar penny-dropping moments happened when Trump learned how to communicate by Twitter unburdened of staff controls and when he discovered presidential pardons. “For Trump, who never really accepted the fact that Congress was a separate and equal branch of government, the ability to deliver ‘justice’ on a case-by-case basis hit like a revelation,” writes Haberman.
The Faustian pact Trump appeared to strike with his MAGA base, though, was that just as they would forgive him if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, as he infamously remarked, so he would shape his administration to suit their every demand, no matter how misconceived, extreme or counter-productive they might be.
Trump’s callousness and cruelty is well documented. (Haberman reports that one of the very few times Trump has cried was in private after his father, Fred, died.) When he began building the notorious wall on the southern border of the US to keep out Latino immigrants and asylum seekers, he urged officials to put spikes on top and to paint it black so as to burn the skin of those trying to climb the wall.
John Kelly, one of the revolving door of chiefs of staff who tried and failed to bring order to the Trump administration, had a son in the military who died while on duty in Afghanistan, and Kelly had been a general himself. Once, when he and Trump were standing together at the Arlington National Cemetery grave site where Kelly’s son was buried, Trump wondered aloud why anyone would want to join the military.
Trump’s petty, venal behaviour has also been well documented, but the details Haberman has marshalled can still surprise. After winning the 2016 election, he invited a group of moderate Democrats to join him for dinner to discuss various pieces of legislation, but he couldn’t help needling them throughout. For dessert, he made sure he received one more scoop of ice cream than any of his guests.
More importantly, as early as 23 February 2020 Trump was not only aware of the dangers of COVID-19 but was taking precautions against it. On a trip to India Trump was reluctant to eat, pushing food around his plate and drinking only from “special glassware that he said Melania [Trump] had the White House staff pack for the trip, primarily for fear of contracting the coronavirus”.
During the pandemic he sometimes acknowledged the seriousness of COVID but mostly he downplayed or denied its impact on public health, with catastrophic results.
A deeper malaise?
Carlos Lozada, in his survey of all those Trump books, identifies many that seek to explain the Trump phenomenon through a single overriding cause, and he finds that limiting. Haberman tacitly acknowledges this when she quotes Trump saying he always aimed to “put some show business into the real estate business”. When he did, she writes, Trump learnt that “he could win as much press for projects he never completed as those he did”.
Poniewozik, from his vantage point as a television critic, makes the same observation: namely, that Trump enjoyed more success playing the role of a business titan on television than actually being one, before citing Fran Leibowitz’s acid line that Trump is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person”.
Closing Haberman’s book, I do think Trump knew he had lost the election quite soon after the results came in. Just how much his years in New York’s property development world shaped that decision is hard to say. It seems part of the explanation but only part.
In my mind her book jostles alongside Poniewozik’s work and for that matter, James Zirin’s Plaintiff in Chief, which underscores how Trump sees the law not as a “system of rules to be obeyed” but “as a potent weapon to be used against his adversaries”. We’re still seeing this play out in Trump’s unremitting efforts to stave off multiple investigations of his business and his behaviour.
Lozada prefers explanations of Trump as a symptom of longer term problems in American politics and society, an approach exemplified in BBC correspondent and historian Nick Bryant’s excellent book, When America Stopped Being Great. Surely both explanatory approaches need to be deployed.
Trump may be a symptom of a deeper malaise afflicting American democracy but has there ever been a symptom quite like him? In 2020 the majority of voters opted to be cured of their Trump symptoms, but the treatment failed and the bacillus rages on.
The federal judge lambasted Florida officials’ argument that “professors enjoy ‘academic freedom’ so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the state approves.”
November 17, 2022
In an order that begins by quoting the famous opening line of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, a federal judge on Thursday blocked key provisions of a Florida censorship law that aimed to restrict how state university professors teach race, gender, and U.S. history.
“‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,’ and the powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the state has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom,'” Judge Mark Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, an Obama appointee, wrote in his scathing decision, which temporarily halts enforcement of parts of the law championed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis—a possible 2024 presidential candidate.
“To confront certain viewpoints that offend the powers that be, the state of Florida passed the so-called ‘Stop WOKE Act in 2022—redubbed (in line with the state’s doublespeak) the ‘Individual Freedom Act,'” Walker continued. “The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints. Defendants argue that, under this act, professors enjoy ‘academic freedom’ so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves. This is positively dystopian.”
The Thursday decision, which concludes that the GOP law violates the First Amendment rights of public university faculty and students, marks the second time Walker has ruled against the “Stop WOKE Act” in recent months. In August, the judge blockedthe part of the law pertaining to private businesses.
Adriana Novoa, a University of South Florida history professor and a plaintiff in the case, said in a statement that Walker’s Thursday ruling is a win “for the institutions of this country.”
“I hope that the courts will defend the existence of a public education that cannot be manipulated by politicians to push any ideology, now and in the future,” Novoa added.
Part of a recent wave of censorship laws advanced by Republicans in Florida and across the U.S., the “Stop WOKE Act” was billed as an attempt to “give businesses, employees, children, and families tools to fight back against woke indoctrination.”
But civil liberties groups and other critics of the law have argued it is both unjustifiable and exceedingly vague in its mandates, creating a chilling effecton educators as they attempt to teach their classes under the threat of state retaliation.
Emily Anderson, an assistant professor of International Relations and Intercultural Education at Florida International University, told the Miami Herald in August that “these policies have really led to increased efforts to silence and surveil academic speech.”
“Academic speech matters, because it’s a fundamental freedom that is really how our university system is grounded,” said Anderson. “When we have policies that threaten speech, in my view, it shadows threats to all other protected rights.”
In his ruling, Walker points to the eight specific concepts outlawed that are under the measure, including the notion that “such virtues as merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness are racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular race, color, national origin, or sex to oppress members of another race, color, national origin, or sex.”
“Despite [Florida officials’] insistence that the professor plaintiffs’ proposed viewpoints must serve as a mirror image for each prohibited viewpoint, the proposed speech needs only to arguably run afoul of the prohibition,” Walker wrote.
Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)—which sued Florida officials over the censorship law—said that “faculty members are hired to offer opinions from their academic expertise—not toe the party line.”
“Florida’s argument that faculty members have no First Amendment rights would have imperiled faculty members across the political spectrum,” said Steinbaugh.
Emerson Sykes, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in a statement that Walker’s ruling “is a huge victory for everyone who values academic freedom and recognizes the value of inclusive education.”
“The First Amendment broadly protects our right to share information and ideas, and this includes educators’ and students’ right to learn, discuss, and debate systemic racism and sexism,” Sykes added.
Originally published on Common Dreams and republished under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Everybody knows that consuming too much salt is bad for your health. But nobody ever mentions the potential impact of the other condiment in the cruet set: black pepper. Does it have an effect on your health?
Certainly, people through the ages have thought so. Black pepper, the dried berries of the Piper nigrum vine, has been part of traditional Indian (Ayurvedic) medicine for thousands of years. Ayurvedic practitioners believe that it has “carminative” properties – that is, it relieves flatulence. And in traditional Chinese medicine, black pepper is used to treat epilepsy.
Modern science suggests that black pepper does indeed confer health benefits, mainly as a result of an alkaloid called piperine – the chemical that gives pepper its pungent flavour, and a powerful antioxidant.
Antioxidants are molecules that mop up harmful substances called “free radicals”. An unhealthy diet, too much Sun exposure, alcohol and smoking can increase the number of free radicals in your body. An excess of these unstable molecules can damage cells, making people age faster and causing a range of health problems, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, arthritis, asthma and diabetes.
Laboratory studies in animals and in cells have shown that piperine counteracts these free radicals. In one study, rats were divided into several groups, with some rats fed a normal diet and other rats fed a high-fat diet. One group of rats was fed a high-fat diet supplemented with black pepper and another group of rats was fed a high-fat diet supplemented with piperine.
The rats fed a high-fat diet supplemented with black pepper or piperine had significantly fewer markers of free radical damage compared with rats just fed a high-fat diet. Indeed, their markers of free radical damage were comparable to rats fed a normal diet.
Piperine also has anti-inflammatory properties. Chronic inflammation is linked to a range of diseases, including autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis. Here again, animal studies have shown that piperine reduces inflammation and pain in rats with arthritis.
Black pepper can also help the body better absorb certain beneficial compounds, such as resveratrol – an antioxidant found in red wine, berries and peanuts. Studies suggest that resveratrol may protect against heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes.
The problem with resveratrol, though, is that it tends to break apart before the gut can absorb it into the bloodstream. Black pepper, however, has been found to increase the “bioavailability” of resveratrol. In other words, more of it is available for the body to use.
Black pepper may also improve the absorption of curcumin, which is the active ingredient in the popular anti-inflammatory spice turmeric. Scientists found that consuming 20mg of piperine with 2g of curcumin improved the availability of curcumin in humans by 2,000%.
Other studies have shown that black pepper may improve the absorption of beta-carotene, a compound found in vegetables and fruits that your body converts into vitamin A. Beta-carotene functions as a powerful antioxidant that may fight against cellular damage. Research showed that consuming 15mg of beta-carotene with 5mg of piperine greatly increased blood levels of beta-carotene compared with taking beta-carotene alone.
Piperine and cancer
Black pepper may also have cancer-fighting properties. Test-tube studies found that piperine reduced the reproduction of breast, prostate and colon cancer cells and encouraged cancer cells to die.
Researchers compared 55 compounds from a variety of spices and found that piperine was the most effective at increasing the effectiveness of a typical treatment for triple-negative breast cancer – the most aggressive type of cancer.
Piperine also shows promising effects in minimising multidrug resistance in cancer cells, which potentially reduces the effectiveness of chemotherapy.
A word of caution, though. All of these things are fairly uncertain, as most of the studies have been in cell cultures or animals. And these sorts of experiments don’t always “translate” to humans. However, you can be fairly certain that adding a few extra grinds of pepper to your food is unlikely to cause you harm – and may well be beneficial.
“What is happening in this country in terms of banning books in schools is unparalleled in its frequency, intensity, and success,” said the director of PEN America’s Free Expression and Education program.
A report published Thursday by the free expression group PEN America details an “alarming” and unprecedented surge in book banning across the United States, with 86 school districts in 26 states prohibiting more than 1,100 titles in classrooms and libraries over just the past eight months.
“Book challenges in American schools are nothing new, but this type of data has never been tallied and quite frankly the results are shocking.”
Titled Banned in the USA, the report finds that districts representing 2,899 schools with a combined enrollment of more than 2 million students banned 1,145 unique book titles by 874 different authors, 198 illustrators, and nine translators between July 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022.
In total, the new report documents 1,586 instances of individual books being banned as a right-wing censorship campaign and broader war on public education sweeps the country, prompting pushback from libraries, students, and local residents. Some book bans have been reversed in recent months thanks to student resistance.
The top three banned titles, according to PEN America’s analysis, are “centered on LGBTQ+ individuals or touch on the topic of same-sex relationships: Gender Queer: A Memoirby Maia Kobabe banned in 30 districts, All Boys Aren’t Blueby George M. Johnson, banned in 21 districts, and Lawn Boyby Jonathan Evison, banned in 16 districts.”
“Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez, a love story between a Black teenage boy and a Mexican-American girl set in 1930s Texas, was also banned in 16 districts,” the report notes. “The Bluest Eye by the late Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison is the fifth most banned book, in 12 districts.”
PEN compiled a list of the books subject to bans here.
Jonathan Friedman, director of PEN America’s Free Expression and Education program and lead author of the report, said in a statement Thursday that “book challenges in American schools are nothing new, but this type of data has never been tallied and quite frankly the results are shocking.”
“Challenges to books, specifically books by non-white male authors, are happening at the highest rates we’ve ever seen,” said Friedman. “What is happening in this country in terms of banning books in schools is unparalleled in its frequency, intensity, and success.”
“Because of the tactics of censors and the politicization of books we are seeing the same books removed across state lines: books about race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities, and sex most often,” Friedman continued. “This is an orchestrated attack on books whose subjects only recently gained a foothold on school library shelves and in classrooms. We are witnessing the erasure of topics that only recently represented progress toward inclusion.”
According to PEN America, Texas—where the state legislature is dominated by Republicans—leads the country with the most documented book bans at 713. Pennsylvania ranks second with 456 bans, followed by Florida with 204.
“A probing look at the surge in book bans across the country exposes an alarming pattern of mounting restrictions targeting specific stories and ideas and the widespread abandonment of established procedures aimed to safeguard the First Amendment in public education,” said Suzanne Nossel, PEN America’s CEO.
“By short-circuiting rights-protective review processes,” Nossel added, “these bans raise serious concerns in terms of constitutionality, and represent an affront to the role of our public schools as vital training grounds for democratic citizenship that instill a commitment to freedom of speech and thought.”
PEN’s report also raises concern over state legislators’ increasing introduction and approval of “educational gag orders to censor teachers, proposals to track and monitor teachers, and mechanisms to facilitate book banning in school districts.”
The group notes that 175 educational gag order bills have been introduced in 40 U.S. states and 15 such measures have become law in 13 states.
“Parents and community members deserve a voice in shaping what is taught in our schools,” Nossel said Thursday. “But the embrace of book bans as a weapon to ward off narratives that are seen as threatening represents a troubling retreat from America’s historic commitment to the First Amendment rights of students.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The recent announcement of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement has ignited widespread speculation about the future of Roe v. Wade. Some analysts believe that a new appointment to the Supreme Court would mean a conservative justice, particularly one who is against abortion rights, will threaten the status of the law.
The U.S. Supreme Court granted women an essential degree of reproductive freedom on on Jan. 22, 1973, by supporting the right to terminate a pregnancy under specific conditions.
Childbearing was still closely tied to marriage. Those who conceived before marriage were likely to marry before the birth occurred. It wasn’t yet common for married women with young children under age 6 to be employed; about 37 percent were in the labor force. Then, as now, finding satisfactory child care was a challenge for employed mothers.
By 1980, the average age at marriage had increased to 22. Thirty percent of American women aged 18 to 24 who had graduated from high school were enrolled in college, and 13.6 percent had completed a four-year college degree. Forty-five percent of married mothers with young children were in the labor force.
While these changes may not be directly attributable to Roe v. Wade, they occurred shortly after its passage – and they’ve continued unabated since then.
Today, roughly two generations after Roe v. Wade, women are postponing marriage, marrying for the first time at about age 27 on average. Seventeen percent over age 25 have never been married. Some estimates suggest that 25 percent of today’s young adults may never marry.
Moreover, the majority of college students are now women, and participation in the paid labor force has become an expected part of many women’s lives.
Control over choices
If the Roe v. Wade decision were overturned – reducing or completely eradicating women’s control over their reproductive lives – would the average age at marriage, the educational attainment level and the labor force participation of women decrease again?
These questions are also difficult to answer. But we can see the effect that teen pregnancy, for example, has on a woman’s education. Thirty percent of all teenage girls who drop out of school cite pregnancy and parenthood as key reasons. Only 40 percent of teen mothers finish high school. Fewer than 2 percent finish college by age 30.
Educational achievement, in turn, affects the lifetime income of teen mothers. Two-thirds of families started by teens are poor, and nearly 1 in 4 will depend on welfare within three years of a child’s birth. Many children will not escape this cycle of poverty. Only about two-thirds of children born to teen mothers earn a high school diploma, compared to 81 percent of their peers with older parents.
The future depends in large part on efforts at the state and federal level to protect or restrict access to contraception and abortion. Ongoing opposition to the legalization of abortion has succeeded in incrementally restricting women’s access to it. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that studies reproductive policies, between 2011 and mid-2016, state legislatures enacted 334 restrictions on abortion rights, roughly 30 percent of all abortion restrictions enacted since Roe v. Wade.
In 2017, Kentucky enacted a new law banning abortion at or after 20 weeks post-fertilization. Arkansas banned the use of a safe method of abortion, referred to as dilation and evacuation, which is often used in second-trimester procedures.
New battles
Of course, medical abortion isn’t the only way in which women can exert control over reproduction.
Even before 1973, American women had access to a wide range of contraceptives, including the birth control pill, which came on the market in 1960. Five years later, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court ruled that married couples could not be denied access to contraceptives. In 1972, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, the court extended this right to unmarried persons.
In 2017, a record number of states acted to advance reproductive health rights in response to actions by the federal government. In 2017, 645 proactive bills were introduced in 49 states and the District of Columbia. Eighty-six of those were enacted and an additional 121 passed at least one committee in a state legislature.
How would the lives of American women in the last decades of the 20th century and early 21st century have unfolded if the court had made a different decision in Roe v. Wade? Would women be forced into compulsory pregnancies and denied the opportunity to make life plans that prioritized educational and employment pursuits? Would motherhood and marriage be the primary or exclusive roles of women in typical childbearing ages?
With the availability of a greater range of contraception and abortion drugs other than medical procedures available today, along with a strong demand for women’s labor in the U.S. economy, it seems unlikely that women’s status will ever go back to where it was before 1973. But Americans shouldn’t forget the role that Roe v. Wade played in advancing the lives of women.
This story has been updated to correct the proportion of women enrolled in college in 1970 and 1980.
Six months ago, negotiators at the United Nations’ Glasgow climate summit celebrated a series of new commitments to lower global greenhouse gas emissions and build resilience to the impacts of climate change. Analysts concluded that the new promises, including phasing out coal, would bend the global warming trajectory, though still fall short of the Paris climate agreement.
In the U.S., the Biden administration has struggled to get its promised actions through Congress. Last-ditch efforts have been underway to salvage some kind of climate and energy bill from the abandoned Build Back Better plan. Without it, U.S. commitments to reduce emissions by over 50% by 2030 look fanciful, and the rest of the world knows it – adding another blow to U.S. credibility overseas.
As a former senior U.N. official, I’ve been involved in international climate negotiations for several years. At the halfway point of this year’s climate negotiations, with the next U.N. climate conference in November 2022, here are three areas to watch for progress and cooperation in a world full of danger and division.
In the short term, Europe’s pivot means much more energy efficiency – the International Energy Agency estimates that the European Union can save 15%-20% of energy demand with efficiency measures. It also means importing oil and gas from elsewhere.
There are issues to solve. As Europe buys up gas from other places, it risks reducing gas supplies relied on by other countries, and forcing some of those countries to return to coal, a more carbon-intense fuel that destroys air quality. Some countries will need help expanding renewable energy and stabilizing energy prices to avoid a backlash to pro-climate policies.
Their promises faced cries of “greenwash” from many climate advocacy groups. Some efforts are now underway to hold companies, as well as countries, to their commitments.
A U.N. group chaired by former Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna is now working on a framework to hold companies, cities, states and banks to account when they claim to have “net-zero” emissions. This is designed to ensure that companies that pledged last year to meet net-zero now say how, and on what scientific basis.
For many companies, especially those with large emissions footprints, part of their commitment to get to net-zero includes buying carbon offsets – often investments in nature – to balance the ledger. This summer, two efforts to put guardrails around voluntary carbon markets are expected to issue their first sets of guidance for issuers of carbon credits and for firms that want to use voluntary carbon markets to fulfill their net-zero claims. The goal is to ensure carbon markets reduce emissions and provide a steady stream of revenue for parts of the world that need finance for their green growth.
Climate change influencing elections
Climate change is now an increasingly important factor in elections.
French President Emmanuel Macron, trying to woo supporters of a candidate to his left and energize young voters, made more dramatic climate pledges, vowing to be “the first major nation to abandon gas, oil and coal.”
With Chile’s swing to the left, the country’s redrafted constitution will incorporate climate stewardship.
In Australia, Scott Morrison’s government – which supported opening one of the world’s largest coal mines at the same time the Australian private sector is focusing on renewable energy – faces an election on May 21, 2022, with heatwaves and extreme flooding fresh in voters’ minds. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro faces opponents in October who are talking about protecting the climate.
Elections are fought and won on pocketbook issues, and energy prices are high and inflation is taking hold. But voters around the world are also experiencing the effects of climate change firsthand and are increasingly concerned.
The next climate conference
Countries will be facing a different set of economic and security challenges when the next round of U.N. talks begins in November in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, compared to the challenges they faced in Glasgow. They will be expected to show progress on their commitments while struggling for bandwidth, dealing with the climate emergency as an integral part of security, economic recovery and global health.
There is no time to push climate action out into the future. Every decimal point of warming avoided is an opportunity for better health, more prosperity and better security.
What does a sustainable civilisation look like and how do we get there? A burgeoning movement of artists and activists is seeking answers.
“It is 2050. In most places in the world, the air is moist and fresh, even in cities. It feels a lot like walking through a forest, and very likely this is exactly what you are doing. The air is cleaner than it has been since before the Industrial Revolution. We have trees to thank for that. They are everywhere.”
In the current moment, these words from Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac’s 2020 book The Future We Choose might seem like pure fantasy. The world they describe seems so far from the present, where over 90% of the Earth’s population breathes air deemed unsafe by the World Health Organization, scientists warn that humans are causing “irreversible” changes to the climate and nature is declining globally at an unprecedented rate.
But a burgeoning artistic and political movement known as “solarpunk” is trying to bring this lush, verdant world closer to reality.
Solarpunk imagines an optimistic future where humans have overcome the major environmental and social crises of our time and in the process created a safe, just world powered by clean energy and organised around collaborative social ideals.
It rejects the pessimism of cyberpunk, which paints the future as a corporate-controlled and environmentally degraded dystopia. As stated in a manifesto written collectively by the online solarpunk community, “as our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings”.
The concept of solarpunk originally emerged in the late 2000s, when a handful of artists on the social media platform Tumblr began sharing drawings of futuristic green cities. Over time, the aesthetic and ethos evolved into a more robust vision for the world, and in the process has been embraced by other art forms. There are now published collections of solarpunk literature, subgenres of music, movements within architecture and even tabletop role-playing games.
At the core of this vision is the idea that humans can coexist in harmony with the rest of nature. A solarpunk world is one where vast swathes of land have been returned to wilderness, rooftop gardens dot the skylines of high-tech cities and vertical farms provide food to their residents.
Responsible use of technology is also a prominent theme. Solar, wind and wave power have entirely replaced fossil fuels as sources of energy, while widespread 3D printing has made it much easier to produce things locally, creating resilient, self-sufficient communities.
Increasingly, artists and writers in the solarpunk movement also describe a world that is just and safe for marginalised groups – especially those facing the brunt of the climate and ecological crisis today. “BIPOC [black, indigenous and people of colour] and queer people are safe in solarpunk futures,” says Brianna Castagnozzi, co-editor-in-chief of Solarpunk Magazine.
Although it may seem utopian and idealistic, solarpunk attempts to answer real questions being asked more and more often in light of the unfolding climate and ecological crisis. What can be saved? What does a truly sustainable civilisation look like? How do we get there?
It may be a big ask, but it’s increasingly clear that the scale of the environmental crises facing humanity demands transformational changes to the way we live, as well as the way we think. Art has the power to shape our attitudes, so perhaps it’s time – as Nigerian poet Ben Okri said recently – for artists of all kinds to “dedicate our lives to nothing short of re-dreaming society”.
“The 1.5°C figure is not some random statistic,” said the head of the World Meteorological Organization. “It is rather an indicator of the point at which climate impacts will become increasingly harmful for people and indeed the entire planet.”
The World Meteorological Organization warned Monday that the planet now faces a 50% chance of temporarily hitting 1.5°C of warming above pre-industrial levels over the next five years, another signal that political leaders—particularly those of the rich nations most responsible for carbon emissions—are failing to rein in fossil fuel use.
“For as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases, temperatures will continue to rise.”
In 2015, by comparison, the likelihood of briefly reaching or exceeding 1.5°C of global warming over the ensuing five-year period was estimated to be “close to zero,” the WMO noted in a new climate update. The report was published amid a deadly heatwave on the Indian subcontinent that scientists say is a glimpse of what’s to come if runaway carbon emissions aren’t halted. Thus far, the heatwave has killed dozens in India and Pakistan.
Signatories to the Paris climate accord have agreed to act to limit the global average temperature increase to well below 2°C—preferably to 1.5°C—by the end of the century. Climate advocates have deemed the 1.5°C target “on life support” following world leaders’ refusal to commit to more ambitious action at the COP26 summit in Glasgow late last year.
“We are getting measurably closer to temporarily reaching the lower target of the Paris Agreement,” Petteri Taalas, the secretary-general of the WMO, said in a statement Monday. “The 1.5°C figure is not some random statistic. It is rather an indicator of the point at which climate impacts will become increasingly harmful for people and indeed the entire planet.”
“For as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases, temperatures will continue to rise,” Taalas added. “And alongside that, our oceans will continue to become warmer and more acidic, sea ice and glaciers will continue to melt, sea level will continue to rise and, our weather will become more extreme. Arctic warming is disproportionately high and what happens in the Arctic affects all of us.”
BREAKING from the World Meteorological Organization @WMO: There is now a 50% probability that at least one of the next 5 years will temporarily reach the Paris Agreement threshold of 1.5°C. In 2015 this chance was estimated to be zero.Our house is truly on fire. #ClimateEmergencyhttps://t.co/u5sTx63weR
— Scientist Rebellion (@ScientistRebel1) May 10, 2022
Dr. Leon Hermanson, a climate expert at the U.K. Met Office who led the WMO report, stressed that a short-lived breach of the 1.5°C threshold would not mean that the world is guaranteed to fall short of the Paris accord’s most ambitious warming target, which climate experts and campaigners have long decried as inadequate.
Such a breach, however, would “reveal that we are edging ever closer to a situation where 1.5°C could be exceeded for an extended period,” said Hermanson.
The WMO’s latest research also estimates that there is a 93% chance that at least one year between 2022 and 2026 will be the warmest on record. Currently, 2016 and 2020 are tied for the top spot.
Even if global warming is limited to 1.5°C by 2100, countless people across the globe will still face devastating heatwaves, droughts, and other extreme weather, with the poor facing the worst consequences.
Meanwhile, key ecosystems could be damaged beyond repair in a 1.5°C hotter world. One recent study found that 99% of the world’s coral reefs would experience heatwaves that are “too frequent for them to recover” if the planet gets 1.5°C warmer compared to pre-industrial levels.
Scientists behind the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report cautioned last month that if there’s to be any hope of keeping warming to 1.5°C or below by 2100, “it’s now or never.”
“Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible,” said Jim Skea, co-chair of IPCC Working Group III.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JAKE JOHNSON and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
What is the purpose of making NFTs and what makes some of them so costly? – Tanvi, aged 16, Delhi, India
An NFT is a technology that proves who the owner of a digital object is. This digital object could be a song, a picture, a video, a tweet – or even a piece of digital land in an online game or virtual world. Recently, pieces of digital land in a forthcoming virtual world called Otherside sold for nearly US$6,000 (£4,791) each. What’s more, people were so keen to buy them that they also paid thousands of dollars in transaction fees.
NFT stands for non-fungible token. If something is non-fungible, this means that it cannot be replaced or exchanged for something of identical value. An example of something fungible is a current coin, such as a one pound coin, because this can be exchanged for another pound coin. It doesn’t matter which of the coins you have – you still have £1.
Something like a painting, though, is non-fungible. That particular painting only exists once. If you bought a painting, you could take that painting and hang it up in your bedroom. It would be yours – no one else would own that exact painting.
Owning something is more tricky for digital objects, because they can be copied. For instance, if you find a picture online that you like, you can right-click it, save it in your computer, and use it as a background if you want. This is where NFTs come in.
If you bought an NFT of a digital painting from the person who made it, a record of your purchase is kept in the blockchain. The blockchain is a giant database maintained by many people in their computers, and it is almost impossible to alter. Once the blockchain keeps a record of a transaction, it’s there forever. Everyone can see that you bought the NFT – and it proves that you are the only owner of the digital painting.
High values
Some digital objects have been bought for large sums of money. For instance, in 2021, the first tweet ever sent was sold for almost US$3 million. But why would someone pay so much money for an NFT?
First of all, most NFTs actually have a low price. We just only get to hear about them whenever there has been a record sale. It is the same with physical art. We hear about it when someone paid millions for a painting by a famous artist like Picasso, and never about all the paintings sold for much less.
Like physical things, the value of digital art or other digital objects depends on how much someone is willing to pay for it – and that can come down to a lot of factors.
The person buying it might think it is very beautiful or important, and so is happy to pay a lot of money for it. The person who bought the first tweet, businessman Sina Estavi, wrote about it on Twitter, saying, “This is not just a tweet! I think years later people will realise the true value of this tweet, like the Mona Lisa painting”.
The Mona Lisa, a painting by the Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, is one of the most famous pieces of art in the world. It hangs in the Louvre gallery in Paris, and millions of people go to see it each year.
As well as the fact that the first tweet is unique and historical, buying it is also a matter of status. Only one person in the world can say that they own the first tweet ever sent.
In a bubble
Another reason NFTs might be so expensive is because of something economists call a bubble. We say that there is a bubble in a market when investors buy things with the main prospect of selling them shortly afterwards at a higher price. This pushes the price up.
Bubbles tend to occur whenever new technology appears. Plenty of investors come with their money after hearing about the astronomical price of a new technology, or about celebrities buying them. They buy them without fully understanding them, just attracted by the money they might be able to make by selling them on. Some people think this is what is happening with NFTs.
This is not to say that NFTs have no value: it is to say that some of the people buying them are doing so solely to obtain a profit, not because they are interested in owning an image.
Another reason NFTs might be so expensive is because of the potential they have to link with the metaverse. The metaverse is a virtual universe in which people would be represented by avatars and own digital space, like the digital land sold in the Otherside virtual world.
In the future, NFTs could be displayed in this digital space, in the same way we might hang a painting up in a physical house. It will probably also be possible to convert some of them into unique avatars that the owner can use to interact in that world. Since Otherside is owned by the same company that created a famous collection called the Bored Ape Yacht Club, maybe there will be a way in future for avatar versions of these apes and other NFTs to move around in the Otherwise metaverse.
A leaked draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito suggests the Supreme Court is on the brink of overturning two rulings, including Roe v. Wade, that guarantee the right to abortion in the U.S.
The Supreme Court confirmed that the document, obtained and first reported on by Politico, is real, but said “Although the document described in yesterday’s reports is authentic, it does not represent a decision by the court or the final position of any member on the issues in the case.”
The opinion is due to be issued later in the year. The leaked document indicates that a conservative majority in the court is on track to end a woman’s constitutional right to abortion, opening the door for states to enact bans.
Although a seismic development in the long-running legal battle and social debate over abortion rights, the development is not entirely unexpected. In recent years, pro-abortion rights advocates have been ringing alarm bells over threats to Roe. Legal scholars, health experts and sociologists have helped explain in The Conversation U.S. what is at stake and what it would mean for American women should the historic ruling be overturned.
1. How Roe changed women’s lives
A lot has changed in the nearly 50 years that separate the constitutional enshrining of the right to abortion in the U.S. to the brink of ending that right.
Constance Shehan, a sociologist at the University of Florida, provides a snapshot of life for women prior to the landmark case. In 1970, the “average age at first marriage for women in the U.S. was just under 21. Twenty-five percent of women high school graduates aged 18 to 24 were enrolled in college and about 8 percent of adult women had completed four years of college,” she notes. But today, she says, “roughly two generations after Roe v. Wade, women are postponing marriage, marrying for the first time at about age 27 on average. Seventeen percent over age 25 have never been married. Some estimates suggest that 25 percent of today’s young adults may never marry.”
How much of this change in the experiences of American women is due to Roe? And if it is overturned, will the trends be reversed? Such questions are difficult answer. But there is evidence that carrying through with an unwanted pregnancy may have a detrimental effect on a woman’s education – and that, in turn, has an impact on career opportunities and income, writes Shehan. “Two-thirds of families started by teens are poor, and nearly 1 in 4 will depend on welfare within three years of a child’s birth. Many children will not escape this cycle of poverty. Only about two-thirds of children born to teen mothers earn a high school diploma, compared to 81 percent of their peers with older parents.”
Medical abortion isn’t the only option for young women seeking abortion. As Shehan notes: “With the availability of a greater range of contraception and abortion drugs other than medical procedures available today, along with a strong demand for women’s labor in the U.S. economy, it seems unlikely that women’s status will ever go back to where it was before 1973. But Americans shouldn’t forget the role that Roe v. Wade played in advancing the lives of women.”
2. Who might be affected?
“One important group’s voice is often absent in this heated debate: the women who choose abortion,” writes Luu D. Ireland at UMass Chan Medical School. She notes that 1 in 4 American women have the procedure at some point in their life, yet because of the perceived stigma involved, their perspective is largely missing. As an obstetrician/gynecologist, Ireland does, however, hear on a daily basis stories from women who opt for an abortion.
She notes that while abortion is a routine part of reproductive health care for many, and women of all backgrounds choose to end their pregnancies, unintended pregnancies are more common in certain groups: poorer women, women of color and those with lower levels of formal education.
“Women living in poverty have a rate of unintended pregnancy five times higher than those with middle or high incomes. Black women are twice as likely to have an unintended pregnancy as white women,” she writes.
The reason women opt to terminate a pregnancy varies. The most common reason is that the timing is wrong – it would interfere with education, careers or caring for family members. The second most cited reason is financial – the women seeking an abortion just can’t afford the associated costs of raising a child at that time. One impact of abortion restrictions, research has shown, is that women unable to get one “are more likely live in poverty or depend on cash assistance, and less likely to work full-time,” Ireland writes.
To be clear, this is not what would happen should the Supreme Court overturn Roe – rather, it would allow states to implement bans based on the ending of a constitutionally guaranteed right to abortion. Nonetheless, Stevenson’s research gives context as to risks involved for women who may find themselves in states that do not allow abortion, and who lack the means to get to a state that does.
She notes that staying pregnant actually carries a greater risk of death than having an abortion.
“Abortion is incredibly safe for pregnant people in the U.S., with 0.44 deaths per 100,000 procedures from 2013 to 2017. In contrast, 20.1 deaths per 100,000 live births occurred in 2019,” she writes. Stevenson estimates that “the annual number of pregnancy-related deaths would increase by 21% overall, or 140 additional deaths, by the second year after a ban.” The jump in deaths would be even higher among non-Hispanic Black women.
Other progressive lawmakers echoed that message, with Rep. Cori Bush declaring: “Abolish the filibuster. Codify Roe. Expand the Supreme Court. Protect abortion rights by any means necessary.”
After a leaked draft ruling provided the most concrete evidence yet that the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority is set to end the constitutional right to abortion, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez late Monday said Democrats in Congress must pull out all the stops to enshrine Roe v. Wade into federal law as “people’s futures and equality are on the line.”
“We need all of the above. This is an emergency.”
“People elected Democrats precisely so we could lead in perilous moments like these—to codify Roe, hold corruption accountable, and have a president who uses his legal authority to break through congressional gridlock on items from student debt to climate,” Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) wrote in a pair of tweets. “It’s high time we do it.”
“If we don’t, what message does that send? We can’t sit around, finger point, and hand-wring,” the New York Democrat added. “It’s time to be decisive, lead with confidence, fight for a prosperous future for all, and protect the vulnerable.”
If we don’t, what message does that send? We can’t sit around, finger point, & hand wring as people’s futures + equality are on the line.
It’s time to be decisive, lead with confidence, fight for a prosperous future for all and protect the vulnerable.
In September 2021—weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court let Texas’ draconian abortion ban take effect—the House of Representatives passed the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA), legislation that would enshrine into federal law the right to abortion care free from medically unnecessary restrictions such as mandatory waiting periods, which are commonplace in states across the U.S.
“Removing medically unjustified restrictions on abortion services would constitute one important step on the path toward realizing reproductive justice,” the legislation states. “This Act is intended to protect all people with the capacity for pregnancy—cisgender women, transgender men, non-binary individuals, those who identify with a different gender, and others—who are unjustly harmed by restrictions on abortion services.”
“If there aren’t 60 votes in the Senate to do it, and there are not, we must end the filibuster to pass it with 50 votes.”
But the bill has stalled in the U.S. Senate thanks to opposition from the entire Republican caucus and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), an opponent of abortion who has previously voted to defund Planned Parenthood. Earlier this year, Manchin joined Senate Republicans in filibustering the WHPA.
Other progressive lawmakers joined Ocasio-Cortez in calling on Democratic leaders to do everything in their power—including launching another push to abolish the 60-vote legislative filibuster—to defend abortion rights from the Supreme Court and Republicans, who are reportedly scheming to pursue a nationwide abortion ban if they take control of Congress in November and the high court overturns Roe.
“This will endanger the very people who need access to legal abortion,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said of the leaked draft ruling authored by right-wing Justice Samuel Alito.
The draft opinion states that Roe, a 1973 decision, was “egregiously wrong from the start” and should be overturned along with Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a 1992 ruling that largely reaffirmed Roe.
“The Senate must pass the House legislation to codify Roe, abolish the filibuster, and expand SCOTUS,” Tlaib added late Monday.
Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) tanked their party’s attempt to temporarily weaken the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation earlier this year and—to the dismay of progressives—Democrats have done nothing since to diminish the 60-vote rule’s power.
“Abolish the filibuster. Codify Roe. Expand the Supreme Court. Protect abortion rights by any means necessary,” Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) tweeted Tuesday. “We need all of the above. This is an emergency.”
In a joint statement after Politico published Alito’s draft opinion, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) condemned the document as an “abomination,” arguing it would mark “one of the worst and most damaging decisions in modern history.”
But the Democratic leaders didn’t provide any indication that they intend to target the filibuster as part of a renewed effort to pass the WHPA.
Speaking to CBS News Monday night, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.)—the lead sponsor of the WHPA in the Senate—said congressional Democrats are “going to support states that resist” the Supreme Court but lamented that options at the federal level are “limited” due to the party’s narrow majority in the upper chamber.
Such an excuse for inaction is unlikely to satisfy progressive members of Congress or advocates who are planning to take to the streets in the nation’s capital and across the country Tuesday.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), chair of the Senate Budget Committee, urged his colleagues to “pass legislation that codifies Roe v. Wade as the law of the land in this country NOW.”
“And if there aren’t 60 votes in the Senate to do it, and there are not,” Sanders added, “we must end the filibuster to pass it with 50 votes.”
Originally published on Common Dreams and republished under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
The United States, the European Union, and dozens of other countries on Thursday launched a global Declaration for the Future of the Internet vowing online protection of human rights, respect for net neutrality, and no government-imposed shutdowns that was applauded by progressive advocates for a more open and democratic web.
“If acted upon,” the declaration “would ensure that people everywhere can connect, communicate, organize, and create new and amazing things that will benefit the entire world—not entrench the power of unaccountable billionaires and oligarchs.”
“Today, for the first time, like-minded countries from all over the world are setting out a shared vision for the future of the internet, to make sure that the values we hold true offline are also protected online, to make the internet a safe place and trusted space for everyone, and to ensure that the internet serves our individual freedom,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement.
“Because the future of the internet,” she said, “is also the future of democracy, of humankind.”
The unveiling of the three-page document came months after President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy at which his administration was reportedly mulling the launch of an Alliance for the Future of the internet. It also comes amid swelling scrutiny over the power of big tech corporations and continued attacks to online access imposed by authoritarian regimes.
The nonbinding declaration references a rise in “the spread of disinformation and cybercrimes,” user privacy concerns as vast troves of personal data is collected online, and platforms that “have enabled an increase in the spread of illegal or harmful content.”
It further promotes the internet operating “as a single, decentralized network of networks—with global reach and governed through the multistakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.”
Signed by over 55 nations—including all the E.U. member states, the U.K, and Ukraine—the document states in part:
We affirm our commitment to promote and sustain an internet that: is open, free, global, interoperable, reliable, and secure and to ensure that the internet reinforces democratic principles and human rights and fundamental freedoms; offers opportunities for collaborative research and commerce; is developed, governed, and deployed in an inclusive way so that unserved and underserved communities, particularly those coming online for the first time, can navigate it safely and with personal data privacy and protections in place; and is governed by multistakeholder processes. In short, an internet that can deliver on the promise of connecting humankind and helping societies and democracies to thrive.
The declaration won plaudits from U.S.-based digital rights group Free Press, whose co-CEO Craig Aaron said it “points to a vision of the internet that puts people first” and that, “if acted upon… would ensure that people everywhere can connect, communicate, organize, and create new and amazing things that will benefit the entire world—not entrench the power of unaccountable billionaires and oligarchs.”
“We’re encouraged by the declaration’s strong statements of support for net neutrality, affordable and inclusive internet access, and data-privacy protections, and its decisive stance against the spread of hate and disinformation,” he added.
Aaron called on the U.S. to “take the necessary steps to live up to these ideals—protecting the free flow of information online, safeguarding our privacy, ending unlawful surveillance, and making broadband affordable and available to everyone.”
The Center for Democracy & Technology also welcomed the declaration, describing it in a Twitter thread as “an important commitment by nations around the world to uphold human rights online and off, advance democratic ideals, and promote an open Internet.”
While it “hit on the right priorities” including protection of personal data privacy and a commitment to a multistakeholder internet governance process, the group called on each signatory to “review their own laws and policies against admirable standards articulated in the Declaration.”
“For the Declaration to have any persuasive power,” said the group, “the U.S. and other nations need to get their own houses in order.”
Jennifer Brody, U.S. advocacy manager at Access Now, also greeted the document with a tepid welcome.
“Of course we support calls in the declaration, like refraining from shutting down the internet and reinvigorating an inclusive approach to internet governance, but we have seen so many global principles and statements come and go without meaningful progress,” she said. “The burden is on the Biden administration and allies to do more than talk the talk.”
Originally published on Common Dreams and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The award-winning documentary titled YOUTH v GOV premiered globally on the streaming platform Netflix Friday as the youth plaintiffs featured in the film await a decision that could put their historic climate lawsuit on a path to trial.
“In under two hours, you get an inside look at nearly seven years of Juliana v. United States,” said Julia Olson, executive director and chief legal counsel at Our Children’s Trust, in a statement about the independent film. “And it’s not over. We are determined to get to trial because our young clients deserve to take the stand and have their evidence heard by a judge.”
The documentary—directed by scientist and filmmaker Christi Cooper—focuses on the federal suit filed in 2015 and its 21 plaintiffs. The Our Children’s Trust legal team, which represents the young people, argues that by contributing to the climate emergency, the U.S. government is violating their clients’ constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, and failing to protect essential public trust resources.
Shortly after settlement negotiations between the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and attorneys for the Juliana youth ended without resolution last November, federal lawmakers and advocacy groups sent President Joe Biden and other leaders in his administration letters in support of the plaintiffs.
“The question now is whether the Biden administration will keep fighting tooth and nail to keep them silenced, and whether our courts will stand up for their constitutional rights,” Olson said Friday. “After 50 years of the government—both Democrats and Republicans—knowingly making the climate crisis worse, I’m not betting on partisan politics. But I do have faith in the judiciary.”
The plaintiffs—now ages 14 to 26—are waiting for a court to rule on a motion to amend their complaint, which could put the case on track for a trial.
Take a peek at the stories of the youth who sued the U.S. government through a campaign supported by @youthvgov and WITNESS!
Since talks with the DOJ concluded, climate scientists have reiterated warnings about the need for systemic changes on a global scale, Congress has failed to pass a package containing key climate measures, and Biden has facedcriticism for not taking executive action to address the planetary emergency.
“I think for a lot of young people right now, life is really scary, because we’ve never seen a moment like this in history, and our feelings about our life and our future [are] all because of choices that we had no participation in,” says 26-year-old Kelsey Juliana—the named plaintiff in the case—during the first two minutes of the film.
“And so the plaintiffs joined this case,” Juliana adds, “because we all know who’s to blame and what needs to be done.”
The Netflix release of the film—which has won over two dozen awards at film festivals worldwide—was met with excitement by climate action advocates.
“Put this on your must watch list this weekend!” tweeted the Wisconsin Environmental Health Network. “Let’s get this important documentary into Netflix’s trending now category!”
Noting that one of the plaintiffs—21-year-old Xiuhtezcatl Martinez—is based in Boulder, Matt Benjamin, a member of the Colorado city’s council, also highlighted the doc on Twitter.
“Make sure to check out this film streaming tonight on Netflix,” he said. “It’s inspirational. It’s emotional. It fills me with hope that our younger generations will take control of their future.”
Originally published on Common Dreams and republished under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Around the world, many countries are becoming less democratic. This backsliding on democracy and “creeping authoritarianism,” as the U.S. State Department puts it, is often supported by the same industries that are escalating climate change.
It’s a dangerous shift, both for representative government and for the future climate.
Corporate capture of environmental politics
In democratic systems, elected leaders are expected to protect the public’s interests, including from exploitation by corporations. They do this primarily through policies designed to secure public goods, such as clean air and unpolluted water, or to protect human welfare, such as good working conditions and minimum wages. But in recent decades, this core democratic principle that prioritizes citizens over corporate profits has been aggressively undermined.
Today, it’s easy to find political leaders – on both the political right and left – working on behalf of corporations in energy, finance, agribusiness, technology, military and pharmaceutical sectors, and not always in the public interest. These multinational companies help fund their political careers and election campaigns to keep them in office.
When it comes to the political parties, it’s easy to find examples of campaign finance fueling political agendas.
In 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen testified before a U.S. Senate committee about the greenhouse effect, both the Republican and Democratic parties took climate change seriously. But this attitude quickly diverged. Since the 1990s, the energy sector has heavily financed conservative candidates who have pushed its interests and helped to reduce regulations on the fossil fuel industry. This has enabled the expansion of fossil fuel production and escalated CO2 emissions to dangerous levels.
The industry’s power in shaping policy plays out in examples like the coalition of 19 Republican state attorneys general and coal companies suing to block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
Corporate interests have also fueled a surge in well-financed antidemocratic leaders who are willing to stall and even dismantle existing climate policies and regulations. These political leaders’ tactics have escalated public health crises, and in some cases, human rights abuses.
Brazil, Australia and the US
Many deeply antidemocratic governments are tied to oil, gas and other extractive industries that are driving climate change, including Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and China.
In “Global Burning,” I explore how three leaders of traditionally democratic countries – Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Scott Morrison of Australia and Donald Trump in the U.S. – came to power on anti-environment and nationalist platforms appealing to an extreme-right populist base and extractive corporations that are driving climate change. While the political landscape of each country is different, the three leaders have important commonalities.
Bolsonaro, Morrison and Trump all depend on extractive corporations to fund electoral campaigns and keep them in office or, in the case of Trump, get reelected.
For instance, Bolsonaro’s power depends on support from a powerful right-wing association of landowners and farmers called the União Democrática Ruralista, or UDR. This association reflects the interests of foreign investors and specifically the multibillion-dollar mining and agribusiness sectors. Bolsonaro promised that if elected in 2019, he would dismantle environmental protections and open, in the name of economic progress, industrial-scale soybean production and cattle grazing in the Amazon rainforest. Both contribute to climate change and deforestation in a fragile region considered crucial for keeping carbon out of the atmosphere.
Bolsonaro, Morrison and Trump are all openly skeptical of climate science. Not surprisingly, all have ignored, weakened or dismantled environmental protection regulations. In Brazil, that led to accelerated deforestation and large swaths of Amazon rainforest burning.
In Australia, Morrison’s government ignored widespread public and scientific opposition and opened the controversial Adani Carmichael mine, one of the largest coal mines in the world. The mine will impact public health and the climate and threatens the Great Barrier Reef as temperatures rise and ports are expanded along the coast.
Notably, all three leaders have worked, sometimes together, against international efforts to stop climate change. At the United Nations climate talks in Spain in 2019, Costa Rica’s minister for environment and energy at the time, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, blamed Brazil, Australia and the U.S. for blocking efforts to tackle climate injustice linked to global warming.
Brazil, Australia and the U.S. are not unique in these responses to climate change. Around the world, there have been similar convergences of antidemocratic leaders who are financed by extractive corporations and who implement anti-environment laws and policies that defend corporate profits. New to the current moment is that these leaders openly use state power against their own citizens to secure corporate land grabs to build dams, lay pipelines, dig mines and log forests.
Fortunately, there is a lot that people can do to protect democracy and the climate.
Replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and reducing the destruction of forests can cut greenhouse gas emissions. The biggest obstacles, a recent U.N. climate report noted, are national leaders who are unwilling to regulate fossil fuel corporations, reduce greenhouse gas emissions or plan for renewable energy production.
The path forward, as I see it, involves voters pushing back on the global trend toward authoritarianism, as Slovenia did in April 2022, and pushing forward on replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy. People can reclaim their democratic rights and vote out anti-environment governments whose power depends on prioritizing extractive capitalism over the best interests of their citizens and our collective humanity.
By the time Leamsy Salazar sat down in front of a video recorder in a lawyer’s office in Dallas, he had grown accustomed to divulging state secrets. After swearing to tell nothing but the truth so help him God, he recounted that he was born in Venezuela in 1974, enlisted in the army and rose through its special operations ranks. He described how in 2007 he became the chief of security for Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan leader whose electoral victories had been challenged by outside observers and opposition parties. After Chávez died in 2013, Salazar said he provided intelligence on top Venezuelan officials involved in drug trafficking to American law enforcement agencies, which had helped him defect.
After about 45 minutes of Salazar telling his life story, the lawyer questioning him, Lewis Sessions, abruptly changed the course of the conversation. “I want to take a moment to get off the track,” said Sessions, the brother of Republican Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas. “Why are you here? What has motivated you to come forward?”
“I feel that the world should know — they should know the truth,” Salazar answered. “The truth about the corruption. About the manipulation. About the lies.”
“The truth about what?” Sessions asked.
“In this case, it’s the manipulation of votes,” Salazar said. “And the lies being told to a country.”
That morning of Nov. 13, 2020, Salazar had a new sort of intelligence to share. He claimed to know that the 2020 U.S. presidential election had been rigged — and how.
Speaking through an interpreter, Salazar said that when he worked for Chávez, he had attended meetings in which the administration discussed how to develop specialized software to steal elections with representatives from Smartmatic, a voting technology company whose founders had ties to Venezuela.
He recalled that during the 2013 presidential election, in a secret counting center in Caracas, the capital, he saw officials use software to change votes in favor of Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, after the polls closed. Watching the 2020 American election, he said, he noticed votes for Joe Biden jumping in a pattern that he thought was similar.
When Sessions asked if Salazar could draw a connection between the events in Venezuela and the recent American election, Salazar replied, “I can show the similarity.” In the 2020 election, Smartmatic machines were only used in Los Angeles, but Salazar explained away this discrepancy. He claimed that the company’s software had been “purchased” by Dominion Voting Systems, whose machines were used in such battleground states as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all of which had gone to Biden, sealing his victory over Donald Trump.
Salazar said in a subsequent court filing that he had taken his concerns about the election to “a number of reliable and intelligent ex-co-workers of mine that are still informants and work with the intelligence community.” (He did not specify whether he meant the U.S. or Venezuelan intelligence community.) From there, sources told ProPublica, his concerns reached a former intelligence officer active in Republican politics and then the conservative lawyer Sidney Powell.
Powell was on the hunt for just such information.
By the second week of November, it had become known in right-wing circles that she was working behind the scenes with the president’s legal team to challenge the results of the election. In an email to ProPublica, Sessions wrote that he “conducted the interview at the request of a person working with Sidney Powell’s legal team.” The day after the interview, Trump made Powell’s position official with an announcement on Twitter.
The following morning, Powell traveled to South Carolina, where a loose coalition of lawyers, cybersecurity experts and former military intelligence officers were gathering on a plantation owned by the defamation lawyer Lin Wood to search for evidence of election fraud. One person present at the plantation said that Wood and Powell treated the Salazar video “like the holy grail of evidence.” (In an email to ProPublica, Wood wrote that he was not part of any coalition and that he had only seen “a few minutes” of the video, in which he had “no interest beyond general curiosity.” Powell did not respond to requests for comment.)
There was just one problem. Salazar’s claims were easily disprovable. Hours after the video was recorded, Trump campaign staffers reviewed some allegations about Dominion that were almost identical, and it took them less than a day to discover they were baseless. The staffers prepared an internal memo with section headings that read: “Dominion Has No Company Ties To Venezuela,” “Dominion And Smartmatic Terminated Their Contract In 2012” and “There Is No Evidence That Dominion Used Smartmatic’s Software In The 2020 Election Cycle.” Independent fact-checkers came to the same conclusions.
Dominion later released a statement calling a version of these allegations that Powell pushed in a lawsuit, “baseless, senseless, physically impossible, and unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.” A lawyer for Smartmatic wrote to ProPublica: “There are no ties between Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic — plain and simple.” He added that “Salazar’s testimony is full of inaccuracies,” strongly denied that Smartmatic’s technology was designed to steal Venezuelan elections, and said the company, which operates worldwide, has “registered and counted over 5 billion votes without a single security breach.” (Salazar did not respond to requests for comment.)
Salazar’s story was just one of many pieces of so-called evidence that members of the coalition have offered as proof that the 2020 election was rigged. That unfounded belief has emerged as one of the most potent forces in American politics. Numerous polls show that over two-thirds of Republicans doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Millions of those Republicans believe foreign governments reprogrammed American voting machines.
ProPublica has obtained a trove of internal emails and other documentation that, taken together, tell the inside story of a group of people who propagated a number of the most pervasive theories about how the election was stolen, especially that voting machines were to blame, and helped move them from the far-right fringe to the center of the Republican Party.
Those records, as well as interviews with key participants, show for the first time the extent to which leading advocates of the stolen-election theory touted evidence that they knew to be disproven or that had been credibly disputed or dismissed as dubious by operatives within their own camp. Some members of the coalition presented this mix of unreliable witnesses, unconfirmed rumor and suspect analyses as fact in published reports, talking points and court documents. In several cases, their assertions became the basis for Trump’s claims that the election had been rigged.
Our examination of their actions from the 2020 election to the present day reveals a pattern. Many members of the coalition would advance a theory based on evidence that was never vetted or that they’d been told was flawed; then, when the theory was debunked, they’d move on to the next alternative and then the next.
The coalition includes several figures who have attracted national attention. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who served briefly as national security adviser to Trump before pleading guilty to lying to law enforcement about his contacts with Russian officials, is the most well known. Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com who left his position after his romantic relationship with the convicted Russian agent Maria Butina became public, is the coalition’s chief financier and a frequent intermediary with the press. Powell, who represented Flynn in his attempt to reverse his guilty plea, spearheaded efforts in the courts.
Before Powell arrived at the plantation, Wood had filed a lawsuit in federal court in Atlanta against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that sought to stop him from certifying Biden’s victory. Soon after Powell showed up, Wood submitted an anonymized declaration from Salazar as evidence of how the election was corrupted. He then filed an emergency motion that sought access to Dominion machines in Georgia to “conduct a forensic inspection of this equipment and the data therein.” The case was eventually dismissed, but it would serve as a template for the series of high-profile lawsuits that Powell would file in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia.
Salazar’s declaration was central to the four lawsuits, and it went further than the assertions he had made in the video. His claim that he could show “the similarity” between anomalies in Venezuelan and American elections expanded to become an allegation that “the DNA of every vote tabulating company’s software and system” in the United States was potentially compromised.
Wood told ProPublica, “I was not involved in the vetting, drafting or filing any of the lawsuits filed by Sidney Powell,” though his name appears as “of counsel” in all four. A judge sanctioned him in the Michigan case, writing that “while Wood now seeks to distance himself from this litigation to avoid sanctions, the Court concludes that he was aware of this lawsuit when it was filed, was aware that he was identified as co-counsel for Plaintiffs, and as a result, shares the responsibility with the other lawyers for any sanctionable conduct.”
All the lawsuits would fail, with judges excoriating the quality of their evidence. It wasn’t just the evidence in the lawsuits that was flawed. In fact, much of the evidence that members of the coalition contributed to the stolen election myth outside the courts was also weak. Yet the coalition’s failure to prove its theories has not hindered its ability to spread them.
This is the story of how little untruths added up to the “big lie.”
When Powell and Rudy Giuliani, who was leading the Trump campaign’s legal team in challenging the vote, began investigating election fraud in November 2020, they quickly were inundated with tips. This flood increased once Wood and others began soliciting evidence on far-right message boards and mainstream social media platforms.
Some of the participants at the plantation described the inundation of claims, which overwhelmed their inboxes, as a type of evidence in itself: There must be something to allegations of election fraud if so many people were making them. ProPublica spoke to eight sources with firsthand knowledge of the coalition’s efforts on the plantation, many of whom said they worked relentlessly in a chaotic environment. Tips that easily could have been dismissed as dubious instead were treated as credible.
In examining hundreds of emails sent to the plantation, ProPublica found that some were hearsay or anecdotes seemingly misinterpreting everyday events; others were internet rumors; and many were recycled narratives that some members of the coalition had pushed on social media. None of the tips that ProPublica examined provided concrete proof of election fraud or manipulation.
One of the first tips Powell and Giuliani promoted came from Joe Oltmann, a Denver-based conservative podcast host who said he had infiltrated an antifa conference call and had heard a high-level Dominion employee named Eric Coomer declare that he would make sure that Trump lost the election. Powell and Giuliani highlighted Oltmann’s claim at a press conference on Nov. 19, 2020, at the Republican National Committee headquarters.
By that time, Powell was paying for an investigator to travel to Denver, according to a person familiar with the events. The investigator, the source said, interviewed Oltmann at a brewery in Castle Rock, Colorado, and spent several days checking out his story. Not long after the press conference, according to the source, the investigator emailed Powell his assessment that Oltmann was at the very least embellishing, but she did not respond.
Powell soon referred to Oltmann’s allegations in court filings in Georgia and Michigan; roughly a week later, she submitted an affidavit from Oltmann in the Arizona and Wisconsin lawsuits. Coomer has denied being on the call and has brought a defamation suit against Oltmann, Powell, Giuliani, the Trump campaign and others. Oltmann has never presented proof of Coomer being on the call, and in March 2022, the judge overseeing the defamation case sanctioned Oltmann, fining him almost $33,000 for failing to appear for a deposition. When Powell was asked in a July 2021 deposition if she had anyone look into Oltmann and “his background,” she said she did not recall. (Oltmann did not provide responses to questions about the investigator’s assessment.)
Within days of the investigator’s Oltmann probe, Powell turned to another dubious witness: Terpsehore Maras, a QAnon-promoting social media influencer and podcaster who goes by the online handle Tore Says.
In September 2020, in a civil consumer-fraud judgment in North Dakota, Maras had been found to have made false online charitable fundraising solicitations and to have created “an entirely fake online persona.” (Maras has claimed that the allegations against her remain “unproven” despite the legal finding and that “false identities were imperative for me to execute my duties,” which include being a “former private intelligence contractor, whistleblower, and investigative journalist.”)
Powell filed a declaration in early December 2020 from an anonymous individual in the Arizona and Wisconsin lawsuits. The individual claimed that there was “unambiguous evidence” that “foreign interference is present in the 2020 election” and pointed to a vast and unproven conspiracy that involved Dominion, George Soros, a company with an office in China, and the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations. The Washington Post later identified the declaration’s author to be Maras.
In the weeks after the election, Maras presented herself to Byrne as knowledgeable about election fraud. But he discovered that she was unreliable after he had a team of investigators debrief her. Byrne and Maras said the debriefing occurred after Powell filed the declaration.
In an email to another witness he had debriefed, Byrne described the investigators’ assessment: “Tore was taken out and interviewed by some people I know from the intelligence community who are absolutely on our side. They came back telling me: ‘She knows some things and has been behind the curtain, but she also lies, exaggerates, deflects, changes subject rapidly trying to throw people off, and we cannot rely on her for anything factual because we caught her in too many lies and exaggerations over three hours.’” (“I tried my best to deceive” the debriefers, Maras wrote on her blog in response to questions from ProPublica. “I was scared.”)
Byrne has since repeatedly promoted Maras’ right-wing activism, as he does in this September 2021 video, some of which revolves around questioning the legitimacy of the election. (“She’s a friend and an ally, and I know that she’s a little goofy,” Byrne told ProPublica in an interview, explaining that he had recently been impressed by work she had done on their shared causes. “I think she has relevant knowledge.”)
Byrne, Powell and other coalition members weren’t just relying on witness statements in their effort to prove the election was rigged. Some of them also pointed to multiple mathematical analyses. One that Powell and Byrne advanced came from a man named Edward Solomon. In the weeks after Nov. 3, 2020, Solomon produced a series of online videos purporting to demonstrate how algorithms adjusted the vote total in Biden’s favor.
Before Byrne and Powell highlighted Solomon’s voting analysis, he came to public attention briefly in 2016, after authorities seized 240 bags of heroin, 25 grams of cocaine and weapons from his home; he later pleaded guilty to selling drugs. (Solomon did not respond to requests for comment.)
One person who coalition members entrusted to vet Solomon’s analysis was Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence officer who was brought into the group by Flynn and who acknowledged to ProPublica that his mathematical expertise drew from “a long track record of baseball statistics.” In the end, his level of expertise didn’t matter; because of a server error, the emailed request to vet Solomon never reached Keshel, who said he had no memory of checking Solomon’s claims.
Byrne used Solomon’s analysis in his book, “The Deep Rig,” to make the case that the election was fraudulent. In February 2021, a month after the book was published, the University of Pennsylvania’s FactCheck.org reported that officials at the college Solomon had attended said that, though he had been a math major, he had never received a degree. The article quoted experts who pointed to flaws in Solomon’s analysis, especially that the “vote shares” he suggested were suspicious were “not at all surprising,” and a Georgia elections official who said that Solomon “shows a basic misunderstanding of how vote counts work.”
A paper posted that month by University of Chicago and Stanford researchers found that the numbers Solomon had said were suspicious were normal for a fraud-free election and that by not considering this, his analysis was a classic example of how “fishing for a finding” can “lead an argument astray.”
Byrne kept promoting Solomon’s work until at least July 2021, when he described him in a blog post as a “Renowned Mathematician.”
Five months after the FactCheck.org story and the research paper, Powell was asked in a sworn deposition which mathematicians or statisticians she relied on to support her belief that the election was fraudulent. She cited among others a “Mr. Solomon.”
In addition to relying on the flawed claims of Salazar, Oltmann, Maras and Solomon, Powell also promoted the assertions of an Arizona woman named Staci Burk, who had contributed to two fraud rumors after the election. In the first, Burk claimed that she’d spoken with a worker at a FedEx operations center in Seattle who had observed suspicious canvas bags marked as “election mail ballots” passing through the facility. The second involved a South Korean airplane flying fake ballots for Biden into Phoenix a few days after the election; Burk said that she had recorded a man who had confessed to the scheme.
A lawsuit that Powell filed in Arizona on Dec. 2, 2020, later included a “Jane Doe” witness who would “testify about illegal ballots being shipped around the United States including to Arizona.” Burk told ProPublica that she was the “Jane Doe.” The same day that Powell filed the Arizona lawsuit, she claimed at a rally outside of Atlanta to have evidence of “a plane full of ballots that came in,” and she continued pushing the idea, declaring in a Dec. 5 interview with the host of a YouTube channel, “We have evidence of a significant plane-load of ballots coming in.” The judge tossed the case before Burk could testify.
Burk’s theories proved false, and at least three coalition members were informed of this. Byrne said that he passed Burk’s claims to a contact at the Department of Homeland Security, who told him about a week later that it “had been looked into and there was nothing there.” This was in November 2020, before Powell filed her lawsuit. Byrne said that he let some of his associates know that Homeland Security had dismissed the claim but was unsure if he informed Powell. (He also said that later his contact showed renewed interest in the idea.)
In late December, James Penrose, a former senior official for the National Security Agency who had been at the plantation and described himself as working for Wood and Powell, called Burk and explained that he had spent $75,000 on a team of former FBI analysts turned private investigators to check out the theories. On the call, which she recorded, Penrose said that the investigators had tracked the claims about the South Korean airplane to the person who first made them. “When he was pressed, that guy admitted that he made it up because he hated the MAGA people that he worked with. And he was purposely trying to troll them by saying he saw ballots on the plane,” Penrose told Burk. “That created the rumor.” The man whom Burk recorded confessing to his involvement in the ballot scheme told Penrose’s investigators that in trying to impress Burk “he fabricated everything.”
“I mean, are you saying that it — that none of it’s true?” Burk asked. Penrose replied: “Yes. I’m saying that the entire thing was fabricated. It’s all bullshit.”
Penrose’s team had also checked out the Seattle FedEx incident, and he told Burk, “We’re not able to confirm anything that looked like conspiracy along those lines.”
Neither Penrose nor anyone associated with the coalition ever publicly released the findings of the investigation. (Penrose did not respond to requests for comment.)
Burk has since renounced her belief in the rumors she had once backed. “I obviously made a mistake believing lies,” Burk wrote to ProPublica. She said she had come to believe that some members of the coalition had manipulated her and her stories to further their ends. “As things unfolded over time, it became apparent I [was] used as a theatre set piece.”
Burk’s stories would shape the audit of the election results that Arizona legislators would later authorize — and which Byrne, Flynn, Powell, Wood and other associates helped fund, contributing about $5.7 million. The 2021 audit was criticized by elections experts and uncovered no proof of fraud.
“You have no idea how widespread the belief is in Arizona to this day that there’s 300,000 ballots that were brought in via an airplane,” said Doug Logan, a coalition member who worked with Penrose on the plantation and whose company Cyber Ninjas would run the audit. Logan said that Penrose told him that the woman’s theories were false. Still, Logan said, he had auditors examine ballots to check a range of theories, including whether bamboo fibers were mixed into the paper, which auditors believed could show that they were imported from Asia. “Our goal in the audit was to figure out what’s really true and deal with it,” Logan told ProPublica. “That’s why we did paper examination.”
No fibers were found.
Few pieces of evidence were more consequential to the stolen-election theory than a report that claimed to have found evidence of intentional election fraud in Dominion voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan. It was heralded as technical proof that votes were stolen for Biden. It was repeatedly promoted by the president. And Byrne and other proponents of the stolen election myth continued to refer to it when speaking to ProPublica reporters.
However, one of the authors of the report recently told ProPublica that the original version never found definitive evidence of election fraud in the Antrim voting machines.
“There was no proof at that specific moment,” the author, Conan James Hayes, said. He described finding what he considered a surprising number of errors in the data logs that he thought “could lead to” election fraud. “But there was no, like, ‘There was election fraud,’” he said, “at least at that time in my mind.”
Antrim had been the subject of national attention when, on election night, returns showed that Biden had unexpectedly won the Republican stronghold. The next day, the county clerk, a Republican who supported Trump, explained that officials had discovered that a clerical error had switched roughly 3,000 votes from the president to Biden. After the clerk’s office made corrections, Trump, as expected, had won the county with more than 60% of the vote.
Internal documents reviewed by ProPublica reveal that some members of the coalition almost immediately suspected that the mistake in Antrim was not human error. Rather, it was an incident in which the voting machine software hadn’t been surreptitious enough in stealing votes and unintentionally revealed itself. Their logic was simple: If they could do a forensic audit of the Antrim machines, they could finally establish how the election was stolen. The challenge was how to access the machines.
The day after Thanksgiving 2020, Byrne paid for a private plane to fly two cybersecurity specialists working with the coalition to Antrim: Hayes, a former professional surfer who had taught himself about computers, and Todd Sanders, a Texas businessman with a cybersecurity consulting business. Hayes and Sanders were turned away from the first two offices they tried, but at a third, a county worker agreed to unroll voting tabulation scrolls, which they photographed.
Highlighting discrepancies in the vote tally produced by the error, a Michigan lawyer won a court order to allow the machines to be formally accessed. On Dec. 6, Hayes, Sanders, a deputy for Giuliani and data forensic specialists engaged by Wood flew to Antrim, again on a private plane paid for by Byrne, and imaged the hard drives of a computer that was the county’s election management server.
Hayes and Sanders returned to Washington, where they examined the data and, in less than a week, assembled a report. Hayes and another individual familiar with the original version described it as a straightforward technical document, which noted aspects about the data that seemed suspicious but was cautious about claiming election fraud. Then the report was turned over to Russell J. Ramsland, the head of Allied Security Operations Group, a small security contracting company connected to Texas conservative circles.
When the report was released after a court hearing on Dec. 14, it was a very different document, according to Hayes and the other person familiar with the original version. It had “REVISED PRELIMINARY SUMMARY, v2” and Ramsland’s name at the top and his signature at the bottom, and it made an outright accusation. “The Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election results,” it claimed. “This leads to voter or election fraud.” Allied Security, it said, had discovered enough proof of election fraud to decertify the results in Antrim.
Hayes’ and Sanders’ names were nowhere on the report. Hayes told ProPublica that the new “information must have been written by” Allied Security. (Sanders did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
It wasn’t just people associated with the original report who believed Ramsland’s version was flawed. An analysis commissioned by the Michigan secretary of state found that the report contained an “extraordinary number of false, inaccurate, or unsubstantiated statements,” including that “the errors in the log file do not mean what Mr. Ramsland purports them to” and were instead “benign” lines of code generated by processes that did not affect the vote outcome. A bipartisan investigation led by Republican legislators in Michigan declared that the Antrim theories are “a complete waste of time to consider.” (Ramsland did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about revising the report. But he did tell The Washington Post that the Michigan analysis only addressed 12 of Allied Security’s 29 “core observations.”)
Trump supporters immediately seized on the report as definitive proof that the election was rigged. Flynn tweeted, “MI forensics report shows a massive breakdown in national security & must be dealt w/ immediately. @realDonaldTrump must appoint a special counsel now.” Byrne and Flynn lobbied for Powell to become the special counsel.
In a statement, Giuliani said: “This new revelation makes it clear that the vote count being presented now by the democrats in Michigan constitutes an intentionally false and misleading representation of the final vote tally. The Electors simply cannot be certified based on these demonstrably false vote counts.” (Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment.)
Byrne described the report as a “BOMBSHELL,” posting it on his blog under the claim: “You wanted the evidence. Here is the evidence.”
Trump tweeted: “WOW. This report shows massive fraud. Election changing result!” Over the next three days, on social media, he promoted the Antrim report and suspicions about Dominion voting machines 11 times.
Late on the afternoon of Dec. 14, Trump’s personal secretary sent an email to the deputy attorney general with the subject line “From POTUS.” The Antrim report was attached to the email. An additional document included talking points (“This is a Cover-up of voting crimes”) and conclusions (“these election results cannot be certified in Antrim County”). That email launched Trump’s attempt to persuade the Department of Justice to assist in overturning the election results, according to a 2021 report by Senate Democrats. In the end, the deputy attorney general rebuffed the president, and officials in the department threatened to resign en masse if he was replaced.
When Trump demanded that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes,” enough for him to win the state, in a recorded phone call on Jan. 2, the president mentioned the Dominion conspiracy 10 times.
At the Jan. 6 “Save America” rally on the Ellipse, directly before Trump spoke, Giuliani took the stage and suggested that halting the certification of Biden’s victory was justified because of “these crooked Dominion machines.”
Trump’s speech emphasized the “highly troubling matter of Dominion Voting Systems” and the events in Antrim to explain that the election had been stolen.
Not long after, while Trump supporters made their initial assault on police barricades, Republican Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona was on the House floor objecting to the certification of his state’s electoral votes — the beginning of the effort to block the certification of Biden’s victory by Congress. He cited as evidence “the Dominion voting machines with a documented history of enabling fraud.” About a minute later, Gosar’s speech was interrupted and then cut off. The crowd was storming the Capitol. One person in the throng raised a sign that read, “No Machines Dominion STEALS.”
In the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, many of the same people who had pushed the claims about Dominion repackaged their theory of how the election was stolen. It relied on the same data and the same arguments, except now it had a new name.
This transformation happened after Dominion’s parent company filed a lawsuit against Powell for defamation in a Washington court on Jan. 8. She and others began talking less about Dominion and more about voting machines in general. Dominion would go on to sue Byrne, Giuliani and others for billions of dollars in collective damages, contending that they promoted and in some cases manufactured false claims. The defendants have each denied responsibility or wrongdoing. (Smartmatic USA Corp. also brought defamation suits against Powell, Giuliani and others, all of whom have denied wrongdoing.)
By the summer of 2021, Hayes and Sanders, the two cybersecurity specialists who had performed the Antrim operation, had become involved in an effort to prove a theory called Hammer and Scorecard. The theory had been making the rounds in conservative circles for more than five years, and Powell had promoted it before the 2020 election. It posited that a supercomputer called Hammer had been developed by the CIA and then commandeered by the Obama administration to spy on Americans, including Trump, Flynn and Powell. Around the time of the election, the theory expanded to suggest that Hammer was using a software called Scorecard to alter results in voting machines and that foreign governments had possibly gotten ahold of it.
Part of the usefulness of Hammer and Scorecard is that built into the theory is an explanation for why it can’t be disproven: It is so top secret that the person who could expose the conspiracy can’t. That person is a former Department of Defense contractor named Dennis Montgomery. The people promoting the theory claim he can’t reveal the evidence because he’s under a gag order imposed by the U.S. government.
Phil Waldron, a former Army colonel, a spokesperson for Allied Security and a member of the coalition who worked remotely with those on the plantation, said in an online interview that if the gag order against Montgomery were lifted, “Specifically what that would reveal is the level of foreign interference in the election.”
Montgomery has been accused of fraud by former associates, though no criminal charges have resulted from those accusations. In the aftermath of 9/11, he allegedly duped the Department of Defense and other federal agencies out of more than $20 million in part by selling them software that he claimed could unearth messages to terrorist sleeper cells hidden in Al-Jazeera broadcasts. (It does not appear that the government ever attempted to get the money back.) Once those claims collapsed, allies of Montgomery began spreading the idea of Hammer. In 2018, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed a suit Montgomery had filed against FBI Director James B. Comey, which attempted to expose an alleged government spy program, calling it “a veritable anthology of conspiracy theorists’ complaints.” (Montgomery did not reply to repeated requests for comment, but in the past he has denied the fraud accusations.)
The person behind the 2021 campaign pushing Hammer and Scorecard was Mike Lindell, the My Pillow magnate who has claimed to have poured about $35 million into efforts to prove the 2020 election was fraudulent. In July 2021, Lindell announced that he had gotten hold of a mysterious set of data that would prove the election was stolen. According to sources and messages reviewed by ProPublica, the data related to Hammer and Scorecard, though Lindell didn’t publicly name the theory or refer to Montgomery.
Lindell said he would reveal the data at a three-day “cyber symposium” he was hosting in August 2021 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Reporters, cybersecurity experts and elected officials — as well as anyone tuning in online — would finally see the proof that the election was fraudulent. Lindell said that independent cybersecurity experts would vet 37 terabytes of data at the symposium and posted an online offer of a $5 million reward to any attendee who could prove that “this cyber data is not valid data from the November 2020 election.” The event, he suggested, would result in Trump being returned to the presidency.
In the run-up to the symposium, before the independent experts did their analysis, the data was given to a group that included Waldron, Hayes, Sanders and Joshua Merritt, a self-described “white hat” hacker — all of whom had been associated with Allied Security at one time or another. (They called themselves the “Red Team” but coordinated on a group chat named “Purple Unicorns.”) Also on the team was Ronald Watkins, who has been identified by two independent forensic linguistic analyses as “Q,” the anonymous figure behind the QAnon conspiracy theory. (Watkins has denied on numerous occasions that he is Q; he did not respond to requests for comment.) Private communications reviewed by ProPublica show that he was in contact with people at the plantation in November 2020, advising them on how to set up secure systems to transfer information and helping with research into the Dominion theory.
Soon after arriving at Sioux Falls, it became evident to the Red Team that the data Lindell had provided wasn’t what was promised. “I have checked them all and they are NOT PROOF,” Watkins wrote in a text message to the rest of the team. “So there are a few files that could potentially be from hammer/scorecard in there, but that is only because it didn’t include a source. Since there is no source, it could be from anywhere — or even fake.”
“At the 11th hour, why do we still have zero proof,” another person on the chat wrote, frustrated that Montgomery hadn’t delivered on his guarantees. “If this software does exist, and the developer” — Montgomery — “is working with us, it shouldn’t take him 10 months to figure out how to extract data” that would prove his assertions.
According to Merritt, when the Red Team tried to inform Lindell two nights before the symposium was to start that the data contained no proof, the CEO yelled at them that they were wrong.
For months leading up to the event, conservatives who believed that the 2020 election was stolen had warned Lindell or an attorney working with him that promoting Hammer and Scorecard risked discrediting other efforts to prove the election was rigged. Two people, including election fraud activist Catherine Engelbrecht, the executive director of True the Vote, cautioned that they had had negative experiences with Montgomery and his representatives and that Hammer and Scorecard wasn’t credible, according to documents viewed by ProPublica and interviews with people familiar with the matter.
On the eve of the symposium, the Red Team learned that Montgomery would not be attending; he said he had suffered a stroke. The final proof of election fraud, which he was supposed to deliver last minute, was no longer going to arrive.
The event drew hundreds of thousands of viewers online, with more than 40 state legislators and others gathering in person. Onstage with Lindell, Waldron explained that the Red Team had looked at the data and “we’ve seen plausibility” and that a separate group of independent analysts would now comb through it.
By the end of the third day, the independent analysts — longtime election security and computer experts, some skeptical of Lindell’s claims and others sympathetic — appeared to have reached a consensus: None of the data contained the proof that Lindell had promised, according to accounts from five of them. In fact, much of the data turned out to be from the Antrim voting machines or harvested from other elections offices and was just a recycling of evidence that had already been discredited.
The data “was some gobbledygook,” said Bill Alderson, a cybersecurity specialist from Texas who had voted for Trump. Merritt told ProPublica that he feared that the hollowness of the data undermined other, more legitimate efforts to prove the election was stolen. Partway through the symposium, The Washington Times quoted him saying that “we were handed a turd.”
Waldron and Lindell, however, did not inform the crowd and those online what the analysts had found. On the last day of the conference, Waldron claimed to have “credible information on a threat in the data streams,” implying the evidence could have been sabotaged.
The day after the symposium ended — the day he had suggested that Trump would be returned to office — Lindell dined with the former president at Mar-a-Lago, a photo of which was leaked to Salon. At a rally, not long after, Trump called the symposium “really amazing,” and he has continued to praise Lindell’s efforts on his behalf. Lindell did not respond to a list of questions from ProPublica and instead wrote, “The election crime movement started November 3rd when the CCP” — the Chinese Communist Party — “and many others did a cyber attack on our election!”
In March 2022, ProPublica sent dozens of letters to the individuals named in this article and others that asked about factual problems with the evidence many had put forth as proof that the election was rigged.
Some of the responses were dismissive. “Stupid article,” wrote Michael T. Flynn’s spokesperson and brother, Joseph J. Flynn. “No one we care about will read it.”
Others contested the article’s findings. Russell J. Ramsland wrote, “So much of this narrative is false or highly misleading that I am not willing to respond point-by-point.”
Despite repeated requests, others did not respond. They include Sidney Powell, James Penrose, Phil Waldron and Todd Sanders.
Some, like Doug Logan, disputed that they had worked as part of a coalition. Others, however, felt it was an accurate description. “I was a member of said coalition,” wrote Seth Keshel.
“‘Coalition’ may not be the right word,” wrote Patrick Byrne, who said that he has spent $12 million on “election integrity” efforts through early 2022, often working in close coordination with Flynn. “We think of it as a network of fellow-travelers who were all volunteering to work to expose what we believed was a rigging of the election on November 3. But I can live with ‘coalition.’” Messages and documents reviewed by ProPublica reveal that the named individuals were in closer contact than has been publicly known, especially in the weeks immediately following the election.
On the whole, coalition members who responded to ProPublica doubled down on their belief in the stolen election myth. “I’ve not wavered on this,” Keshel emailed ProPublica. “I can spend hours with you showing you point after point after point to demand full investigation of this.” The single exception was Conan James Hayes, who wrote to ProPublica: “I don’t believe anything until I have all of the information to analyze, which to this point I do not have. So I can’t say either way.”
Over the course of months, Byrne acted as a champion of sorts for the coalition’s ideas, making himself available for numerous interviews and message exchanges. He also sent a 16,000-word letter in response to more than 80 fact-checking questions.
When presented with evidence that some of his past claims had proven incorrect, he acknowledged that there were instances when he and his allies had been wrong, especially when they were trying to interpret shifting information in the weeks after the election. He downplayed the weight they had put on claims about Dominion voting machines being exploited by foreign governments, though their own court filings and public statements from the time show this was their major claim. “I think that it’s picking at nits to look back at some of the stuff,” he said. He defended the coalition, saying, “I think they got the gestalt of it correct.”
Don’t pay attention, Byrne argued, to the many parts of the Antrim report that a technical expert commissioned by the Michigan secretary of state had debunked. (These errors included Allied Security’s central contention that Dominion machines were “purposefully designed” to create “systemic fraud” through a process known as “adjudication.”
The machines in question did not have the “adjudication” software installed, according to the Michigan analysis.) Instead, Byrne stressed that what was now important was the claim that the voting machines’ security logs only went back to the day after the election, making it impossible to rely on any data on them. (The Michigan secretary of state expert found that logs were automatically overwritten to free up memory and that “the timing appears to be a coincidence,” though it said that having a limited amount of memory “is contrary to best practice.”)
Dominion voting machines, South Korean jets and Dennis Montgomery, Byrne suggested, weren’t central to the case. He repeatedly turned the conversation toward newer arguments for election fraud. He highlighted a March 2021 interim election audit report from a special counsel hired by Republican legislators in Wisconsin.
The report’s primary claim was that a nonprofit had engaged in “election bribery” by providing funds to boost voter turnout in five urban areas, where voters are disproportionately Democratic. The special counsel raised the possibility that the report’s findings were serious enough that Biden’s victory in the state could be decertified. (A federal judge in October 2020 rejected the argument that the nonprofit’s work was illegal, and courts have repeatedly come to the same conclusion.)
Byrne continued to bring up new, supposedly bombshell claims. In his letter to ProPublica, he promoted a forthcoming documentary called “2000 Mules” by conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza that alleged that thousands of shadowy operatives filled drop boxes across the nation with ballots marked for Biden. “Videotapes of drop boxes, cell phone tower pings, and the testimony of a whistleblower,” Byrne wrote, “all point to about one million votes being stuffed” in Georgia.
There was always another report. Another debunking of the debunking.
Byrne acknowledged that no single piece of smoking gun evidence of election fraud had emerged, but he argued that the breadth of evidence that he and those with similar views had assembled made it inconceivable that elections weren’t corrupted.
What he was doing was necessary to save American democracy, Byrne had concluded. He was sure of it. “I’ve got my cards. You got your cards,” he said. “I’ll go all in.”
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
In the global effort to transition from fossil fuels to clean energy, achieving a “100% renewables” electricity system is considered ideal.
Some Australian states have committed to 100% renewable energy targets, or even 200% renewable energy targets. But this doesn’t mean their electricity is, or will be, emissions free.
Electricity is responsible for a third of Australia’s emissions, and making it cleaner is a key way to reduce emissions in other sectors that rely on it, such as transport.
So it’s important we have clarity about where our electricity comes from, and how emissions-intensive it is. Let’s look at what 100% renewables actually implies in detail.
Is 100% renewables realistic?
Achieving 100% renewables is one way of eliminating emissions from the electricity sector.
It’s commonly interpreted to mean all electricity must be generated from renewable sources. These sources usually include solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal, and exclude nuclear energy and fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage.
But this is a very difficult feat for individual states and territories to try to achieve.
The term “net 100% renewables” more accurately describes what some jurisdictions — such as South Australia and the ACT — are targeting, whether or not they’ve explicitly said so.
These targets don’t require that all electricity people use within the jurisdiction come from renewable sources. Some might come from coal or gas-fired generation, but the government offsets this amount by making or buying an equivalent amount of renewable electricity.
A net 100% renewables target allows a state to spruik its green credentials without needing to worry about the reliability implications of being totally self-reliant on renewable power.
So how does ‘net’ 100% renewables work?
All east coast states are connected to the National Electricity Market (NEM) — a system that allows electricity to be generated, used and shared across borders. This means individual states can achieve “net 100% renewables” without the renewable generation needing to occur when or where the electricity is required.
The ACT government buys renewable energy from generators outside the territory, which is then mostly used in other states, such as Victoria and South Australia. Meanwhile, people living in ACT rely on power from NSW that’s not emissions-free, because it largely comes from coal-fired power stations.
This way, the ACT government can claim net 100% renewables because it’s offsetting the non-renewable energy its residents use with the clean energy it’s paid for elsewhere.
SA’s target is to reach net 100% renewables by the 2030s. Unlike the ACT, it plans to generate renewable electricity locally, equal to 100% of its annual demand.
At times, such as especially sunny days, some of that electricity will be exported to other states. At other times, such as when the wind drops off, SA may need to rely on electricity imports from other states, which probably won’t come from all-renewable sources.
So what happens if all states commit to net 100% renewable energy targets? Then, the National Electricity Market will have a de-facto 100% renewable energy target — no “net”.
That’s because the market is one entire system, so its only options are “100% renewables” (implying zero emissions), or “less than 100% renewables”. The “net” factor doesn’t come into it, because there’s no other part of the grid for it to buy from or sell to.
How do you get to “200% renewables”, or more?
It’s mathematically impossible for more than 100% of the electricity used in the NEM to come from renewable sources: 100% is the limit.
Any target of more than 100% renewables is a different calculation. The target is no longer a measure of renewable generation versus all generation, but renewable generation versus today’s demand.
Australia could generate several times more renewable energy than there is demand today, but still use a small and declining amount of fossil fuels during rare weather events. Shutterstock
Tasmania, for example, has legislated a target of 200% renewable energy by 2040. This means it wants to produce twice as much renewable electricity as it consumes today.
But this doesn’t necessarily imply all electricity consumed in Tasmania will be renewable. For example, it may continue to import some non-renewable power from Victoria at times, such as during droughts when Tasmania’s hydro dams are constrained. It may even need to burn a small amount of gas as a backup.
This means the 200% renewable energy target is really a “net 200% renewables” target.
Meanwhile, the Greens are campaigning for 700% renewables. This, too, is based on today’s electricity demand.
In the future, demand could be much higher due to electrifying our transport, switching appliances from gas to electricity, and potentially exporting energy-intensive, renewable commodities such as green hydrogen or ammonia.
Targeting net-zero emissions
These “more than 100% renewables” targets set by individual jurisdictions don’t necessarily imply all electricity Australians use will be emissions free.
It’s possible — and potentially more economical — that we would meet almost all of this additional future demand with renewable energy, but keep some gas or diesel capacity as a low-cost backstop.
This would ensure continued electricity supply during rare, sustained periods of low wind, low sun, and high demand, such as during a cloudy, windless week in winter.
The energy transition is harder near the end — each percentage point between 90% and 100% renewables is more expensive to achieve than the previous.
That’s why, in a recent report from the Grattan Institute, we recommended governments pursue net-zero emissions in the electricity sector first, rather than setting 100% renewables targets today.
For example, buying carbon credits to offset the small amount of emissions produced in a 90% renewable NEM is likely to be cheaper in the medium term than building enough energy storage — such as batteries or pumped hydro dams — to backup wind and solar at all times.
The bottom line is governments and companies must say what they mean and mean what they say when announcing targets. It’s the responsibility of media and pundits to take care when interpreting them.
Off the Massachusetts and New York coasts, developers are preparing to build the United States’ first federally approvedutility-scale offshore wind farms – 74 turbines in all that could power 470,000 homes. More than a dozen other offshore wind projects are awaiting approval along the Eastern Seaboard.
Offshore wind farms are uniquely positioned to do both – and save money.
Most renewable energy lease areas off the Atlantic Coast are near the Mid-Atlantic states and Massachusetts. About 480,000 acres of the New York Bight is scheduled to be auctioned for wind farms in February 2022. BOEM
The systems use filters or liquid solutions that capture CO2 from air blown across them. Once the filters are full, electricity and heat are needed to release the carbon dioxide and restart the capture cycle.
For the process to achieve net negative emissions, the energy source must be carbon-free.
The world’s largest active direct air capture plant operating today does this by using waste heat and renewable energy. The plant, in Iceland, then pumps its captured carbon dioxide into the underlying basalt rock, where the CO2 reacts with the basalt and calcifies, turning to solid mineral.
A similar process could be created with offshore wind turbines.
If direct air capture systems were built alongside offshore wind turbines, they would have an immediate source of clean energy from excess wind power and could pipe captured carbon dioxide directly to storage beneath the sea floor below, reducing the need for extensive pipeline systems.
Researchers are currently studying how these systems function under marine conditions. Direct air capture is only beginning to be deployed on land, and the technology likely would have to be modified for the harsh ocean environment. But planning should start now so wind power projects are positioned to take advantage of carbon storage sites and designed so the platforms, sub-sea infrastructure and cabled networks can be shared.
Using excess wind power when it isn’t needed
By nature, wind energy is intermittent. Demand for energy also varies. When the wind can produce more power than is needed, production is curtailed and electricity that could be used is lost.
For example, New York State’s goal is to have 9 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2035. Those 9 gigawatts would be expected to deliver 27.5 terawatt-hours of electricity per year.
Based on historical wind curtailment rates in the U.S., a surplus of 825 megawatt-hours of electrical energy per year may be expected as offshore wind farms expand to meet this goal. Assuming direct air capture’s efficiency continues to improve and reaches commercial targets, this surplus energy could be used to capture and store upwards of 0.5 million tons of CO2 per year.
That’s if the system only used surplus energy that would have gone to waste. If it used more wind power, its carbon capture and storage potential would increase.
Several Mid-Atlantic areas being leased for offshore wind farms also have potential for carbon storage beneath the seafloor. The capacity is measured in millions of metric tons of CO2 per square kilometer. The U.S. produces about 4.5 billion metric tons of CO2 from energy per year. U.S. Department of Energy and Battelle
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has projected that 100 to 1,000 gigatons of carbon dioxide will have to be removed from the atmosphere over the century to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial levels.
Researchers have estimated that sub-seafloor geological formations adjacent to the offshore wind developments planned on the U.S. East Coast have the capacity to store more than 500 gigatons of CO2. Basalt rocks are likely to exist in a string of buried basins across this area too, adding even more storage capacity and enabling CO2 to react with the basalt and solidify over time, though geotechnical surveys have not yet tested these deposits.
Planning both at once saves time and cost
New wind farms built with direct air capture could deliver renewable power to the grid and provide surplus power for carbon capture and storage, optimizing this massive investment for a direct climate benefit.
But it will require planning that starts well in advance of construction. Launching the marine geophysical surveys, environmental monitoring requirements and approval processes for both wind power and storage together can save time, avoid conflicts and improve environmental stewardship.
“Despite half of U.S. and U.K. adults getting their news from social media, social media companies have not taken the steps necessary to fight industry-backed deception,” reads the report.
Weeks after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified disinformation as a key driver of the planetary crisis, three advocacy groups published a report Wednesday ranking social media companies on their efforts to ensure users can get accurate data about the climate on their platforms—and found that major companies like Twitter and Facebook are failing to combat misinformation.
The report, titled In the Dark: How Social Media Companies’ Climate Disinformation Problem is Hidden from the Public and released by Friends of the Earth (FOE), Greenpeace, and online activist network Avaaz, detailed whether the companies have met 27 different benchmarks to stop the spread of anti-science misinformation and ensure transparency about how inaccurate data is analyzed.
“Despite half of U.S. and U.K. adults getting their news from social media, social media companies have not taken the steps necessary to fight industry-backed deception,” reads the report. “In fact, they continue to allow these climate lies to pollute users’ feeds.
⚠️NEW RESEARCH: Fossil fuel industry-backed climate disinformation pollutes our social media feeds and fans the flames of the #ClimateCrisis. This is why tech companies must take responsibility and stop leaving the public in the dark! https://t.co/7h0rI2jAKWpic.twitter.com/rYEtNETJrY
The groups assessed five major social media platforms—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and TikTok—and found that the two best-performing companies, Pinterest and YouTube, scored 14 out of the 27 possible points.
As Common Dreams reported earlier this month, Pinterest has won praise from groups including FOE for establishing “clearly defined guidelines against false or misleading climate change information, including conspiracy theories, across content and ads.”
“One of the key objectives of this report is to allow for fact-based deliberation, discussion, and debate to flourish in an information ecosystem that is healthy and fair, and that allows both citizens and policymakers to make decisions based on the best available data.”
The company also garnered points in Wednesday’s report for being the only major social media platform to make clear the average time or views it allows for a piece of scientifically inaccurate content before it will take action to combat the misinformation and including “omission or cherry-picking” of data in its definition of mis- or disinformation.
Pinterest and YouTube were the only companies that won points for consulting with climate scientists to develop a climate mis- and disinformation policy.
The top-performing companies, however, joined the other firms in failing to articulate exactly how their misinformation policy is enforced and to detail how climate misinformation is prioritized for fact-checking.
“Social media companies are largely leaving the public in the dark about their efforts to combat the problem,” the report reads. “There is a gross lack of transparency, as these companies conceal much of the data about the prevalence of digital climate dis/misinformation and any internal measures taken to address its spread.”
Twitter was the worst-performing company, meeting only five of the 27 criteria.
“Twitter is not clear about how content is verified as dis/misinformation, nor explicit about engaging with climate experts to review dis/misinformation policies or flagged content,” reads the report. “Twitter’s total lack of reference to climate dis/misinformation, both in their policies and throughout their enforcement reports, earned them no points in either category.”
TikTok scored seven points, while Facebook garnered nine.
The report, using criteria developed by the Climate Disinformation Coalition, was released three weeks after NPRreported that inaccurate information about renewable energy sources has been disseminated widely in Facebook groups, and the spread has been linked to slowing progress on or shutting down local projects.
In rural Ohio, posts in two anti-wind power Facebook groups spread misinformation about wind turbines causing birth defects in horses, failing to reduce carbon emissions, and causing so-called “wind turbine syndrome” from low-frequency sounds—a supposed ailment that is not backed by scientific evidence. The posts increased “perceptions of human health and public safety risks related to wind” power, according to a study published last October in the journal Energy Research & Social Science.
As those false perceptions spread through the local community, NPRreported, the Ohio Power Siting Board rejected a wind farm proposal “citing geological concerns and the local opposition.”
Misinformation on social media “can really slow down the clean energy transition, and that has just as dire life and death consequences, not just in terms of climate change, but also in terms of air pollution, which overwhelmingly hits communities of color,” University of California, Santa Barbara professor Leah Stokes told NPR.
As the IPCC reported in its February report, “rhetoric and misinformation on climate change and the deliberate undermining of science have contributed to misperceptions of the scientific consensus, uncertainty, disregarded risk and urgency, and dissent.”
Wednesday’s report called on all social media companies to:
Establish, disclose, and enforce policies to reduce climate change dis- and misinformation;
Release in full the company’s current labeling, fact-checking, policy review, and algorithmic ranking systems related to climate change disinformation policies;
Disclose weekly reports on the scale and prevalence of climate change dis- and misinformation on the platform and mitigation efforts taken internally; and
Adopt privacy and data protection policies to protect individuals and communities who may be climate dis/misinformation targets.
“One of the key objectives of this report is to allow for fact-based deliberation, discussion, and debate to flourish in an information ecosystem that is healthy and fair, and that allows both citizens and policymakers to make decisions based on the best available data,” reads the report.
“We see a clear boundary between freedom of speech and freedom of reach,” it continues, “and believe that transparency on climate dis/misinformation and accountability for the actors who spread it is a precondition for a robust and constructive debate on climate change and the response to the climate crisis.”
The latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that to avoid massive losses and damage from global warming, nations must act quickly to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The good news is that experts believe it’s possible to cut global greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 through steps such as using energy more efficiently, slowing deforestation and speeding up the adoption of renewable energy.
Many of those strategies require new laws, regulations or funding to move forward at the speed and scale that’s needed. But one strategy that’s increasingly feasible for many consumers is powering their homes and devices with electricity from clean sources. These four articles from our archives explain why electrifying homes is an important climate strategy and how consumers can get started.
1. Why go electric?
As of 2020, home energy use accounted for about one-sixth of total U.S. energy consumption. Nearly half (47%) of this energy came from electricity, followed by natural gas (42%), oil (8%) and renewable energy (7%). By far the largest home energy use is for heating and air conditioning, followed by lighting, refrigerators and other appliances.
The most effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from home energy consumption is to substitute electricity generated from low- and zero-carbon sources for oil and natural gas. And the power sector is rapidly moving that way: As a 2021 report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory showed, power producers have reduced their carbon emissions by 50% from what energy experts predicted in 2005.
“This drop happened thanks to policy, market and technology drivers,” a team of Lawrence Berkeley lab analysts concluded. Wind and solar power have scaled up and cut their costs, so utilities are using more of them. Cheap natural gas has replaced generation from dirtier coal. And public policies have encouraged the use of energy-efficient technologies like LED light bulbs. These converging trends make electric power an increasingly climate-friendly energy choice.
The U.S. is using much more low-carbon and carbon-free electricity today than projected in 2005. Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, CC BY-ND
2. Heat pumps for cold and hot days
Since heating and cooling use so much energy, switching from an oil- or gas-powered furnace to a heat pump can greatly reduce a home’s carbon footprint. As University of Dayton sustainability expert Robert Brecha explains, heat pumps work by moving heat in and out of buildings, not by burning fossil fuel.
“Extremely cold fluid circulates through coils of tubing in the heat pump’s outdoor unit,” Brecha writes. “That fluid absorbs energy in the form of heat from the surrounding air, which is warmer than the fluid. The fluid vaporizes and then circulates into a compressor. Compressing any gas heats it up, so this process generates heat. Then the vapor moves through coils of tubing in the indoor unit of the heat pump, heating the building.”
In summer, the process reverses: Heat pumps take energy from indoors and move that heat outdoors, just as a refrigerator removes heat from the chamber where it stores food and expels it into the air in the room where it sits.
Another option is a geothermal heat pump, which collects warmth from the earth and uses the same process as air source heat pumps to move it into buildings. These systems cost more, since installing them involves excavation to bury tubing below ground, but they also reduce electricity use.
3. Cooking without gas – or heat
For people who like to cook, the biggest sticking point of going electric is the prospect of using an electric stove. Many home chefs see gas flames as more responsive and precise than electric burners.
But magnetic induction, which cooks food by generating a magnetic field under the pot, eliminates the need to fire up a burner altogether.
“Instead of conventional burners, the cooking spots on induction cooktops are called hobs, and consist of wire coils embedded in the cooktop’s surface,” writes Binghamton University electrical engineering professor Kenneth McLeod.
Moving an electric charge through those wires creates a magnetic field, which in turn creates an electric field in the bottom of the cookware. “Because of resistance, the pan will heat up, even though the hob does not,” McLeod explains.
Induction cooktops warm up and cool down very quickly and offer highly accurate temperature control. They also are easy to clean, since they are made of glass, and safer than electric stoves since the hobs don’t stay hot when pans are lifted off them. Many utilities are offering rebates to cover the higher cost of induction cooktops.
4. Electric cars as backup power sources
Electrifying systems like home heating and cooking made residents even more vulnerable to power outages. Soon, however, a new backup system could become available: powering your home from your electric vehicle.
With interest in electric cars and light trucks rising in the U.S., auto makers are introducing many new EV models and designs. Some of these new rides will offer bidirectional charging – the ability to charge a car battery at home, then move that power back into the house, and eventually, into the grid.
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Only a few models offer this capacity now, and it requires special equipment that can add several thousand dollars to the price of an EV. But Penn State energy expert Seth Blumsack sees value in this emerging technology.
“Enabling homeowners to use their vehicles as backup when the power goes down would reduce the social impacts of large-scale blackouts. It also would give utilities more time to restore service – especially when there is substantial damage to power poles and wires,” Blumsack explains. “Bidirectional charging is also an integral part of a broader vision for a next-generation electric grid in which millions of EVs are constantly taking power from the grid and giving it back – a key element of an electrified future.”
Editor’s note: This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.
