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<p><font size="+2"><font face="Calibri"><i><b>October 20</b></i></font></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b>, 2023</b></i></font></p>
<p><i>[ <b>"Why Are So Many Americans Dying?</b>"
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/opinion/beyond-deaths-of-despair.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/opinion/beyond-deaths-of-despair.html</a>
NYTimes ]</i><br>
<b>Too many Americans, in almost all groups, are dying</b><br>
By David Wallace-Wells<br>
Opinion Writer<br>
October 18, 2023<br>
Since it was first introduced by the economists Anne Case and
Angus Deaton in 2015, the phrase “deaths of despair” has become a
sort of spiritual skeleton key that promised to unlock the whole
tragic story of a new American underclass.<br>
<br>
Beginning around the turn of the millennium, Case and Deaton
showed, deaths from suicide, opioid overdose and alcohol-related
liver disease among less educated, white, middle-aged people began
to grow in a pattern that seemed to demonstrate how the country’s
white working class was being — or at least feeling — left behind.
Last month, the economists presented their updated data with a new
paper showing a growing divergence in life expectancy between
those with college degrees and those without.<br>
<br>
But over the past few years, the “deaths of despair” story has
come to seem thinner to many of those reading the literature most
closely. And in response to the new findings, pointed critiques
were published by Dylan Matthews in Vox and by Matthew Yglesias in
Slow Boring, arguing that the deaths of despair narrative had been
overhyped, creating a just-so story about postindustrial decline
that had seemed too good to scrutinize.<br>
<br>
Eight years on, the central claim from Case and Deaton holds up
relatively well: Deaths by suicide, overdose and liver disease
have been on the rise among the white working class and the middle
class. But so have gun deaths across the country, deaths among the
young and suicides, which puts the data on white middle-aged men
and women in a different light. Among other questions about that
data, it turns out that deaths of despair increased pretty
uniformly across all demographic groups and that the rise in such
deaths among white middle-aged people was, while real and
concerning, not all that exceptional.<br>
<br>
What does that imply, though? In their critiques, both Yglesias
and Matthews argue that the data tells a narrower story than Case
and Deaton do — and that rather than invoking national malaise we
should focus on the role of opioids among the country’s worst off
in the first case, or high school dropouts and heart disease in
the second.<br>
<br>
But it seems to me that the opposite is true: The American
mortality crisis is much larger than deaths of despair, in fact
too broad and diffuse to be stuffed into one demographic box or
characterized as a failure of one policy area. You can see it
almost anywhere you care to look and any way you slice the data.<br>
<br>
Unless they’re in the top 1 percent, Americans are dying at higher
rates than their British counterparts, and if you’re part of the
bottom half of income earners, simply being American can cut as
much as five years off your life expectancy. At every age below
80, Americans are dying more often than people in their peer
nations: Infant mortality is up to three times as high as it is in
comparison countries; one in 25 kindergartners can’t expect to see
40, a rate nearly four times as high as in other countries; and
Americans between 15 and 24 are twice as likely to die as those in
France, Germany, Japan and other wealthy nations. For every ethnic
group but Asian Americans, prepandemic mortality rates in the
United States were higher than those of economic peer countries:
In 2019, Black Americans were 3.8 times as likely to die as the
residents of other wealthy countries, white Americans were 2.5
times as likely to die, and Hispanic Americans 1.8 times as likely
to die. Americans with college degrees do substantially better
than those without, but that second group represents almost
two-thirds of the country. And while mortality rates show a clear
geographic divergence, with life expectancy gaps as large as 20
years between the country’s richest and poorest places, just a
fraction of American counties even reach the European Union
average.<br>
<br>
When looking at American trend lines alone, anomalies like
overdose spikes or mortality increases among high-school dropouts
can jump out, and the divergence between, say, those with
bachelor’s degrees and those without is quite striking. But in
comparing the overall health of Americans to those in other
wealthy countries, almost everyone looks to be suffering, and even
those remarkable anomalies turn out to be quite small,
contributing only somewhat trivially to the widening gap between
how many Americans are dying each year and how many of our peers
elsewhere are.<br>
<br>
Overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids, for instance, have
grown from less than 10,000 in 2015 to 70,000 in 2021. Add heroin
and other overdoses and the total grows to more than 100,000 — a
public health horror story, and a much graver problem than in any
of our peer countries. But that barely explains a fraction of the
exceptional American mortality pattern identified by the
researchers Jacob Bor and Andrew Stokes, who found that a million
more Americans died each year than would have if the country’s
overall mortality rates matched those of peer countries in Europe.<br>
<br>
Those million extra deaths exceed even the nearly 700,000 who die
each year from cardiovascular disease, the country’s biggest
killer. But of course many residents of other rich countries die
from it, too. And though, as Matthews emphasizes, American
progress against heart disease has stalled in recent years, the
gap between our cardiovascular mortality and those of our peers
turns out to be relatively small, accounting for just another
fraction of Bor and Stokes’s “missing Americans.” Which tells you
something about how large that number of extra deaths really is:
If American mortality rates simply matched those of peers overall,
the country’s total number of deaths would have fallen 22 percent
on the eve of the pandemic in 2019. In 2021, the researchers
found, extra mortality accounted for nearly one in every three
American deaths.<br>
<br>
“The United States is failing at a fundamental mission — keeping
people alive,” The Washington Post recently concluded, in a
remarkable series on the country’s mortality crisis. “This erosion
in life spans is deeper and broader than widely recognized,
afflicting a far-reaching swath of the United States.” In a
quarter of American counties, The Post found, death rates among
working-age adults are not just failing to improve but are also
higher than they were 40 years ago. “The trail of death is so
prevalent that a person could go from Virginia to Louisiana, and
then up to Kansas, by traveling entirely within counties where
death rates are higher than they were when Jimmy Carter was
president.” If death rates just among the country’s
55-to-69-year-olds improved to match the rates of peer countries,
The Post calculated, 200,000 fewer of them would have died in
2019. That is more than the number of them who died of Covid in
2020.<br>
<br>
There are a few things that Americans do as well or better than
other countries (cancer treatment, where outcomes have been
steadily improving now for decades, and keeping old people alive),
so chances that a 75-year-old makes it to 90 or 100 are about the
same as in other wealthy countries — though that stat is somewhat
distorted by the fact that many fewer Americans make it to 60 in
the first place, with those who do likelier in better health.<br>
<br>
But by almost every other measure the United States is lagging its
peers, often catastrophically. The rate of homicides involving a
firearm are 22 times higher in the United States as in the
European Union, for instance, a worsening trend that has given
rise to research suggesting that the country’s mortality crisis is
primarily about gun violence. Another set of researchers emphasize
exceptional mortality rates among the young, with rates of death
among American children growing more than 15 percent between just
2019 and 2021, with little of that increase attributable to Covid.
Americans also die much more often in car crashes, workplace
accidents and fires. Our maternal mortality rate is more than
three times as high as that of other wealthy countries, and our
newborns have the highest infant mortality rate in the rich world.
We are almost twice as likely to suffer from obesity as are our
counterparts in countries of the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development, and the downstream consequences —
from hypertension to heart disease and stroke — mean that obesity
could explain more than 40 percent of the U.S. life expectancy
shortfall for women, and over 60 percent for men. The life
expectancy among America’s poorest men may be 20 years shorter
than that of their counterparts in the Netherlands and Sweden.
Overall, among 18 high-income countries, America’s life expectancy
ranks dead last.<br>
<br>
It’s not quite right to call all this simply “despair,” even if
social anomie plays a role. Doing so places too much weight on the
suffering of individuals and not enough on what epidemiologists
call the social and environmental determinants of health:
community support, education and, perhaps most important, health
care access. (Since 2015, Case and Deaton have acknowledged these
factors; their 2020 book on the subject emphasizes health care
inequalities, and Deaton’s new book “Economics in America” focuses
squarely on inequality.)<br>
<br>
But the bigger problem seems to me to be that talking narrowly
about despair localizes the American mortality dysfunction in a
small demographic, when almost the entire country is dying at
alarming rates. The burden does not fall equally, and the
disparities matter. But looking globally, our mortality crisis
appears, effectively, national.<br>
</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/opinion/beyond-deaths-of-despair.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4Ew.cZP2.Je4kvzRC9P2J&smid=url-share">https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/opinion/beyond-deaths-of-despair.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4Ew.cZP2.Je4kvzRC9P2J&smid=url-share</a><i>
[ see NYT site for links to sources ]</i>
</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/opinion/beyond-deaths-of-despair.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/18/opinion/beyond-deaths-of-despair.html</a></p>
<p>- - <br>
</p>
<p> <i>[ perhaps unfair to compare with over-simplified data from
CDC National Center for Health Statistics ]</i><br>
<b>Deaths and Mortality</b><br>
Data are for the U.S.<br>
<br>
Number of deaths: 3,464,231<br>
Death rate: 1,043.8 deaths per 100,000 population<br>
Source: National Vital Statistics System – Mortality Data (2021)
via CDC WONDER<br>
<br>
Life expectancy: 76.4 years<br>
Infant Mortality rate: 5.44 deaths per 1,000 live births<br>
Source: Mortality in the United States, 2021, data tables for
figures 1, 5<br>
<br>
Number of deaths for leading causes of death:<br>
Heart disease: 695,547<br>
Cancer: 605,213<br>
COVID-19: 416,893<br>
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 224,935<br>
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 162,890<br>
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 142,342<br>
Alzheimer’s disease: 119,399<br>
Diabetes: 103,294<br>
Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis: 56,585<br>
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 54,358<br>
Source: Mortality in the United States, 2021, data table for
figure 4<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm">https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm</a></p>
<p><font size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b><br>
</b></i></font></p>
<p><font size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b><br>
</b></i></font></p>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[ In sports this would be a bye year ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><b>California this year got off easy — SO FAR</b><br>
Kelly Andersson</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">October 16, 2023<br>
</font><font face="Calibri">The acreage burned to date in California
is less than a third of the state’s 5-year average, according to
Cal Fire, and experts attribute the lower numbers to the historic
winter storms and a record snowpack in the Pacific Southwest. But
those “atmospheric river” storms resulted in huge fuels growth
that could, with gusty autumn winds, mean wildfires into November
or even December.<br>
“Now is not the time for people to let their guard down,”...</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://wildfiretoday.com/2023/10/16/california-this-year-got-off-easy-so-far/"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://wildfiretoday.com/2023/10/16/california-this-year-got-off-easy-so-far/</a><br>
</font>
<p><font face="Calibri">- -<br>
</font></p>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[ Yikes! - You mean Congress can help? ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> </font><font face="Calibri"><b>U.S. must
shift from ‘reactive to proactive’ to manage wildfire crisis</b></font><br>
<font face="Calibri">Hunter Bassler</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">October 17, 2023</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">The U.S. faces a wildfire crisis that costs the
federal government $2.5 billion a year — a crisis that a recent
report [PDF] concluded the feds can’t face alone.</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law
in 2021 created the federal Wildland Fire Mitigation and
Management Commission and charged it with recommending
improvements to federal agencies’ management of wildfire across
the landscape. The commission was tasked with creating new policy
recommendations to address the wildfire crisis.</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">- -</font><br>
<font face="Calibri">“The Commission urges Congress to take swift
action [ what!? Congress? ] to advance the holistic solutions
needed to reduce the risk of wildfire to the nation,” the report
says. “Only through comprehensive action can we hope to prepare
for the wildfires of today and, critically, the wildfires of
tomorrow.”</font><br>
<br>
<font face="Calibri">The commission listed 148 recommended changes
in its report, which focused on eight points:</font><br>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li><font face="Calibri">Shift focus from fire response to
pre-fire planning and risk mitigation</font></li>
<li><font face="Calibri">Treat the wildfire crisis as a public
health crisis</font></li>
<li><font face="Calibri">Unify local and federal resources</font></li>
<li><font face="Calibri">Improve community and ecosystem
resilience in post-fire areas</font></li>
<li><font face="Calibri">Increase pay and hiring for wildland
firefighters</font></li>
<li><font face="Calibri">Update the fire management system with
current technology</font></li>
<li><font face="Calibri">Significantly increase investments to
reduce long-term costs and risks</font></li>
<li><font face="Calibri">Enhance work across jurisdictions</font></li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<font face="Calibri">The suggestions were similar to another report
released in September by the National Interagency Hotshot Crew
Steering Committee, which also recommended that Congress increase
investment in wildland firefighters along with hiring and pay.</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://wildfiretoday.com/2023/10/17/u-s-must-shift-from-reactive-to-proactive-to-manage-wildfire-crisis/"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://wildfiretoday.com/2023/10/17/u-s-must-shift-from-reactive-to-proactive-to-manage-wildfire-crisis/</a></font><br>
<p><i><font face="Calibri">- -<br>
</font></i></p>
<i><font face="Calibri"> [ video with Paul Beckwith reads an
overview of a harsh reality -- but he added one ]</font></i><br>
<b>11 Reasons Our Civilization Will Soon Collapse</b><br>
Paul Beckwith<br>
Oct 17, 2023<br>
An excellent article came out recently, explaining 10 reasons why
our civilization will soon collapse; here is the link: <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.okdoomer.io/10-reasons-our-civilization-will-soon-collapse/"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.okdoomer.io/10-reasons-our-civilization-will-soon-collapse/</a><br>
<br>
Since this article is so well written, well referenced, and hard
hitting I felt that it was very important to do a detailed video on
it.<br>
<br>
Given the total destruction of a hospital in the Gaza Strip today
with the loss of over 500 human lives, almost certainly by a U.S.
built JDAM 1000 pound bomb dropped intentionally from an Israeli
warplane, I have added an additional reason to the ten in the
article. <br>
<br>
Given the events of the day, we appear to be marching closer to
global catastrophe and civilization collapse, and it is hard to
argue that we don’t deserve it.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXrY4ESpIII"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXrY4ESpIII</a><br>
<p>- -</p>
<i>[ text - this is a difficult opinion -- but all of it seems to be
scientifically correct ]</i><br>
<b>10 Reasons Our Civilization Will Soon Collapse</b><br>
A deep dive into the problems world leaders have let spiral out of
control.<br>
Alan Urban<br>
OCTOBER 15 2023<br>
That’s right. Our entire global industrial civilization is going to
collapse. And soon, which means within the lifetimes of most people
alive today.<br>
<br>
I realize this is quite the claim, and a pretty terrifying one if
you’re under 50 or so. In this article, I will list 10 problems the
world is facing, each of which could cause the collapse of
civilization all on its own. Which means, if even one of these
problems isn’t solved, our civilization is doomed.<br>
<br>
Before I continue, let me explain what I mean by “collapse.” First
of all, it doesn’t necessarily mean that humans will go extinct.
While that is certainly a plausible scenario given the many
existential threats we are facing, I still believe it is unlikely.
Small groups of humans survived in very difficult conditions for
tens of thousands of years.<br>
<br>
By collapse, I mean a breakdown of social institutions like
governments and economies, followed by a dramatic decline in the
human population. I realize that’s still kind of vague, so here’s a
more specific definition I found in the book, How Everything Can
Collapse.<br>
<br>
It says, “A collapse is the process at the end of which basic needs
(water, food, housing, clothing, energy, etc.) can no longer be
provided [at a reasonable cost] to a majority of the population by
services under legal supervision.”<br>
As society breaks down, life will get simpler and simpler. By the
late 21st century, people will be living the way they did in the
early 19th century.<br>
How do I know this? Let’s start with humanity’s biggest problem. No,
it’s not climate change. It’s something most people have never even
heard of...<br>
<b>1. Overshoot</b><br>
Although I’ve listed overshoot as just one of the many problems
humanity is facing, I could argue that it’s the only problem we’re
facing because every other problem on this list is the result of
overshoot...<br>
- -<br>
<b>2. The End of Cheap Fossil Fuels...</b><br>
The first and most obvious use for fossil fuels such as oil is to
make gasoline and diesel for our vehicles. Without those, our
civilization would completely collapse because truckers need diesel
to get food and supplies to the stores. Not to mention the fact that
most people in the developed world need gasoline to get to their
jobs.<br>
- -<br>
<b>3. The Failure of Green Energy...</b><br>
This is the sad irony of the so-called green energy revolution: If
we stop using fossil fuels, we’ll see a collapse in the production
of renewables. And really, they shouldn’t even be called renewables
because wind and solar farms have to be rebuilt every 20-30 years.
They should be called rebuildables.<br>
- -<br>
<b>4. Dwindling Resources</b><br>
Rubber..., Sand..., Fertilizer...<br>
- -<br>
<b>5. Topsoil Erosion</b><br>
...once topsoil erodes away, the land it was on becomes
unproductive. This is why the loss of our topsoil is one of
humanity’s biggest problems.<br>
- -<br>
<b>6. Water Shortages</b><br>
...cities and states begin fighting each other for water rights, to
the point where water mafias emerge and decide who gets water and
who doesn’t. Neighboring countries that rely on the same mountains
and rivers for water go to war with each other.<br>
This is the future we’re heading for if something isn’t done about
the global water shortage. In fact, this is what life is already
like in many parts of the world, especially India...<br>
- -<br>
<b>7. Climate Change</b><br>
Part of the problem is that scientists and the media have done a
terrible job explaining climate change to the public... <br>
The increasing number and severity of natural disasters will
eventually cause simultaneous breadbasket failures around the world,
and the subsequent food shortages will lead to global famine and the
breakdown of society.<br>
- -<br>
<b>8. Biodiversity Loss...</b><br>
We are living through our planet’s sixth mass extinction event. The
last one occurred about 65 million years ago and was the result of
an asteroid. It was so destructive that it caused the dinosaurs,
which had been around for 165 million years, to go extinct. Now we
are in another mass extinction event, but this one is being caused
by us....<br>
- -<br>
<b>9. Migrant Crisis...</b><br>
The Syrian refugee crisis is considered the largest refugee crisis
of modern times, and it has caused chaos and tension all across
Europe. This happened because of a mere 7 million people leaving the
Middle East and heading North.<br>
<br>
The climate crisis is expected to produce up to 1.5 billion migrants
by 2050. Even if only half of them leave their home countries, it
will be a refugee crisis 100 times worse than the one that has
happened across Syria and Europe over the past decade...<br>
- -<br>
<b>10. Increasing Conflict...</b><br>
As I write this, Russia and NATO are in a dangerous proxy war in
Ukraine. The reasons for this are extremely complicated, but one of
the major causes is dwindling resources.<br>
- -<br>
<b>Conclusion</b><br>
For decades, it’s been obvious that our global industrial
civilization has an expiration date, but only recently have many
scientists come to realize that the expiration date could be during
their own lifetimes.<br>
<br>
Fifty years ago, humans overshot the carrying capacity of the
planet. Since then, we have been exploiting the Earth’s resources
faster and faster, stealing from future generations. Our
civilization wouldn’t even exist without fossil fuels, but we are
rapidly running out of them. And it appears green energy won’t be
able to replace them as there aren’t enough metals in the ground.<br>
<br>
Even if we had unlimited clean energy, we would still run out of
crucial resources like rubber, sand, groundwater, and the
ingredients for fertilizer. As the world’s topsoil erodes, it will
get harder and harder to grow enough food for everybody.<br>
<br>
Eventually, we might not be able to grow food at all. Water
shortages are already becoming a major problem, and this is just the
beginning. Climate change is drying up the rivers, burning down the
forests, and causing disasters the likes of which we’ve never seen.<br>
<br>
Meanwhile, life of all types—from tiny plants to giant mammals—are
going extinct even faster than they did during previous mass
extinction events. As the web of life falls apart, human societies
will become impossible to maintain.<br>
<br>
All this chaos will lead to the worst migration crisis in the
history of the world. The political tension and fights over
resources could very well lead to nuclear annihilation. But things
are so bad that even without nuclear war, we could still see human
extinction by the end of this century.<br>
<br>
Believe it or not, there’s a lot more bad news that I didn’t cover
in this post. I barely touched on climate tipping points, and I
could have written about our crumbling infrastructure, the millions
dying from pollution, the increasing risk of deadly pandemics, and
much more, but this article is already far longer than I originally
intended.<br>
<br>
It doesn’t please me to share this information. Personally, I am
terrified. Not just for myself, but for my two young children who I
had before I knew all this. I apologize if I have frightened you.<br>
<br>
People have asked me, “If we’re all doomed anyway, then what’s the
point of scaring people? Why not just let them live their lives?”
It’s a fair question. My answer is that the more people know about
our predicament and start preparing for what’s coming, the greater
chance humanity has of surviving this century and creating
sustainable societies in the distant future.<br>
<br>
I don’t know if that’s even possible. Perhaps we will pass so many
climate tipping points that temperatures will rise high enough to
snuff out life across the entire planet.<br>
<br>
Or perhaps after the population declines and the planet warms, new
societies will spring up in places like Greenland and Antarctica.
They won’t be societies that use fossil fuels, so they will likely
be much simpler and more connected to the Earth. Maybe these
societies will learn from our mistakes and take better care of
nature—and each other.<br>
<br>
If there’s any chance that a future like that is possible, then we
should do everything we can to make it happen. The first step is to
inform people about what’s happening, and the second step is to help
them prepare. Those are the twin goals of this site.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.okdoomer.io/10-reasons-our-civilization-will-soon-collapse/"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.okdoomer.io/10-reasons-our-civilization-will-soon-collapse/</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ OK here's a fresh new try out ....]</i><br>
<b>Major U.S. science group lays out a path to smooth the energy
transition</b><br>
October 17, 2023<br>
By Alejandra Borunda<br>
It's no big mystery: to slow down human-driven climate change, the
U.S. and other countries need to cut carbon emissions fast and
thoroughly. The Biden administration has set the goal of hitting
'net zero' carbon emissions by 2050. That means bringing most fossil
fuel burning to a near halt by then.<br>
<br>
Major climate-focused laws passed in 2021 and 2022, like the
Inflation Reduction Act, have put the country on a solid theoretical
pathway toward hitting that goal, says a new report from the
National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine
(NASEM)–but, it warns, the efforts are still nascent and fragile...<br>
<br>
The two dozen engineers, scientists, medical specialists, and policy
experts who authored the report developed a series of
recommendations for how to take that theoretical pathway into
concrete actions.<br>
<br>
One of the most pressing issues on the wishlist? A concerted effort
to ensure that the energy transition helps those most directly
affected by climate change. The report's authors say that effort
also must address and remedy historical harms. For example,
redlining policies from the 1930s still today leave many Black and
brown communities bereft of trees and shade, which drives
temperatures 5, 10, or 15 degrees higher. Similar policies have led
to health-damaging infrastructure, like fossil fuel plants or
highways, more often ending up in poor communities and communities
of color.<br>
<br>
"This is the first time that the National Academy of Sciences have
devoted so much time and focus on energy justice and equity," says
Michael Mendez, a sociologist at the University of California,
Irvine, and an author of the report.<br>
<br>
The NASEM report is the second in a two-part series. The first,
released in 2021, laid out a broad menu of policies that would
result in major cuts to the country's fossil fuel emissions. Many of
those recommendations became centerpieces of major climate-focused
laws like the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 and 2021's Bipartisan
Infrastructure Law in 2021. Recent climate policy efforts, taken
together, have the potential to cut America's emissions by as much
as 80% by 2030 if fully implemented, according to several
independent analyses...<br>
- -<br>
"A lot of what [the first report] recommended got adopted in
spectacular legislation," says Stephen Pacala, the report's lead
author and an ecologist at Princeton University. "So our second
report is very much in reaction now to [these] comprehensive pieces
of legislation," he says.<br>
<br>
Equity isn't an afterthought<br>
<br>
Figuring out how to put equity at the center of climate policy isn't
just a question of ethics, says Patricia Romero-Lankao, an energy
sociologist now at the University of Toronto and a report author.
Equity is also a critical practical tool. The NASEM report stresses
that many of the technological strategies needed to transition the
country away from fossil fuel dependency exist, yet other factors
slow the transition down.<br>
<br>
"The transition is not only technical but social, and political, and
institutional," says Romero-Lankao.<br>
<br>
Renewable energy costs, for example, have become more competitive to
fossil fuels helping to spur the transition along on its own. Within
the last decade the cost of utility-scale solar projects dropped by
roughly 90%, while the cost of lithium-ion batteries for electric
vehicles has fallen by more than 80%, according to the Department of
Energy.<br>
<br>
People's choices matter. If communities don't want a solar farm in
their city limits, or if they don't want electric car charging
stations taking up parking spots, those technologies won't spread as
fast as they need to.<br>
<br>
Often, Romero-Lankao says, the message she has heard from
technologically focused scientists and planners is that "we cannot
wait–the transition needs to happen like yesterday." The
sociologists, she says, will agree, "but you better wait and listen
and work with communities–because if you don't do it, you will get a
lot of pushback from it." That means projects can slow or even stop
completely.<br>
<br>
Shortly after President Biden took office he signed an executive
order that included a mandate, the Justice40 Initiative, to direct
40% of the investments from major climate policy toward historically
disadvantaged communities. The NASEM report suggests that order gets
codified into law so it will remain a long-term, robust part of
future decision-making...<br>
- -<br>
Christopher Tessum is an air pollution expert at the University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign who wasn't involved in the report. "This
is a major technological transition we have to undertake," he
says–and it needs to happen faster than any previously undertaken.
"In the past [the transitions] have not happened equitably. There
are clear winners and losers. For this one to succeed, because we
need buy-in from everyone, we really need it to be equitable."<br>
<br>
There's more to be done<br>
<br>
The report highlights a major gap in the current policy landscape:
how to track successes and failures of new climate policy. No
comprehensive, centralized clearinghouse–or agreed-upon way–to keep
track of how the vast investments in climate policy are working,
exists. That's an opportunity for problems, the report stresses.<br>
<br>
On a practical and technical level, the existing laws don't go far
enough to push buildings and heavy industry toward fossil-fuel-free
futures, the report says. It points out that buildings alone account
for about 35% of carbon emissions in the U.S.<br>
<br>
"For whatever reason, the current policies don't go as far as they
need to go," says Pacala. "We have identified 10 different things
that could be done to get billion metric tons per year of cuts to
carbon emissions from buildings," he says. That includes everything
from investing in programs like the Low Income Home Energy
Assistance Program to strengthening and clarifying building codes to
prioritize electrification.<br>
<br>
The last few years have seen an incredible increase in
government-driven climate action, says Pacala. But "the stakes
couldn't be higher. We have one shot at this," he says. "We need to
implement what we now have [in plans]. We are only going to do that
if we are relentless."<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.npr.org/2023/10/17/1205592486/major-u-s-science-group-lays-out-a-path-to-smooth-the-energy-transtion#:~:text=Major%20U.S,Alejandra%20Borunda"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.npr.org/2023/10/17/1205592486/major-u-s-science-group-lays-out-a-path-to-smooth-the-energy-transtion#:~:text=Major%20U.S,Alejandra%20Borunda</a><br>
<br>
<p><br>
</p>
<font face="Calibri"><i>[ The news archive - looking back at the
calling out of dark, secret disinformation battalions ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> <font size="+2"><i><b>October 20, 2011</b></i></font>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> </font> October 20, 2011: MSNBC host Rachel
Maddow challenges Charles and David Koch to come on to her show
after repeated rhetorical attacks on the program by Koch operatives.
The challenge is never accepted.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh8O7tZ2GD4"
moz-do-not-send="true">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh8O7tZ2GD4</a><br>
<font face="Calibri"><br>
</font>
<p><font face="Calibri"> <br>
</font><font face="Calibri"><br>
=== Other climate news sources
===========================================<br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><b>*Inside Climate News</b><br>
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We deliver climate news to your inbox like nobody else. Every
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</font> <font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://insideclimatenews.org/" moz-do-not-send="true">https://insideclimatenews.org/</a><br>
--------------------------------------- <br>
*<b>Climate Nexus</b> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
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================================= <br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><b class="moz-txt-star"><span
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Every weekday morning, in time for your morning coffee, Carbon
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more at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
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<br>
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