<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<font size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b>January</b></i></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b> 30, 2024</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font> <br>
<i>[ We can see the goal...]</i><br>
<b>Solid State Batteries - FINALLY powering electric vehicles in
2024!</b><br>
Just Have a Think<br>
Jan 28, 2024<br>
"Solid State Batteries are nearly here!" How many times have you
heard that phrase in the last 5 years or so?? Myriad developers have
tried and failed, but some have persevered, and one or two have
succeeded AND got investment AND got production under way. So is
2024 finally, FINALLY the year??<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suNUPGC2pwM">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suNUPGC2pwM</a><br>
<br>
<p><i><br>
</i></p>
<i>[ name your favorite </i>-
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/energy/truth-actually/?ca_key_code=FE1LQA3">https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/energy/truth-actually/?ca_key_code=FE1LQA3</a>
]<br>
<b>Truth Actually</b><br>
A tour through a century of climate-change documentaries.<br>
By Tom Roston<br>
There’s a chilling irony in the subtitle of the first feature
documentary film, 1922’s <b>Nanook of the North: A Story of Life
and Love in the Actual Arctic.</b> With those words, director
Robert Flaherty was clueing audiences in to how he was telling a
romantic tale about his subject, while presuming it was fair game to
refer to the Arctic setting as the “actual” part, as unmovable and
fixed as a glacier, or what we might call factual today.<br>
<br>
Yet these days anything that is presented as fact can be questioned
or twisted. The faraway Arctic now resides in a place of
abstraction, especially in the so-called debate about whether it is
actually being irreparably damaged, as a geographical region on
which the rest of the planet depends to remain healthy. In the
screwy public discussion about climate change and what we need to do
about our dependence on fossil fuels, the Arctic is something that
is akin to myth. And that’s why, one hundred years after <b>Nanook,</b>
documentary directors are banging their heads on the remaining ice
floes and trying to use the tricks of their trade to convince us
that the North Pole, and by extension the entire planet, is truly at
risk of being destroyed—day by day, carbon-dioxide emission by
carbon-dioxide emission—by modern life.<br>
<br>
For many of us, a glimmer of hope emerged in 2006, when the
documentary <b>An Inconvenient Truth </b>seemed to point the
nation in the right direction. The film’s star and visionary, Al
Gore, said, “Political will is a renewable resource.” And many of us
believed it. One could see the ripples spreading from the film to
the massive worldwide People’s Climate March of 2014, the eventual
adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015, and the ongoing grassroots
organizing of the Sunrise Movement around the Green New Deal and
beyond. It was a striking example of documentary’s power to
collectively change, or at least help focus, minds.<br>
<br>
How we got from <b>Nanook</b> to<b> An Inconvenient Truth </b>and
the climate-change documentaries that have followed demonstrates the
nonfiction form’s unique ability to persuade, entertain, and repel
people. But as Truth’s influence recedes, we can now better see the
extent and limitations of its powers.<br>
<br>
Nanook has been hailed as the first of its kind, as it should be; it
is a brilliant technical and creative achievement. It also
exemplifies the genre’s greatest fault lines. What we have come to
appreciate and to deride about<b> Nanook</b> has been passed on, as
if in the cowlicks of its progeny, to the documentaries that have
followed.<br>
<br>
First, there is the question of whether it is really real. It is not
as if things were just happening and Flaherty let his cameras
roll—he had his subject, “<b>Nanook</b>,” reenact scene after scene.
Perhaps, at the time, it didn’t matter. There were no rules or
expectations for the form. The seal Nanook kills was already dead.
The killing of the walrus was a fiasco: having grown unaccustomed to
hunting such animals, the man portraying Nanook, along with his
fellow Inuit, begged Flaherty to just shoot the darn thing. And
Nanook wasn’t his real name but one chosen by Flaherty because he
felt it was more cinematic than his actual name, Allakariallak.<br>
- -<br>
These are just a few of the many examples of ways the truth was
adjusted for the screen. Today, we like to think we know better.
Documentaries come with a promise that they are nonfiction. But that
can be a double-edged sword. When they work, they can be revelatory
about the real world. But the pretense that they do so without any
tweaking attaches to them a permanent cloud of falseness and doubt,
leading to skepticism for some.<br>
<br>
The second major fault is the presumption of objectivity, or at
least fairness, in many documentaries. Yet Flaherty had no interest
in appearing objective when he set out to expose the fact that the
modern world was destroying the Inuit way of life in the Far North.
“The urge that I had to make Nanook came from the way I felt about
these people,” Flaherty wrote. “What I want to show is the former
majesty and character of these people.”<br>
<br>
Scottish social critic and filmmaker John Grierson gave this new,
nonfictional application of cinema its name, documentary, in his
1926 review of <b>Moana,</b> Flaherty’s follow-up feature to
Nanook, about native peoples living in Samoa. Grierson went on to
define the genre as “the creative treatment of actuality,” which
remains about as honest a description of the form as possible.<br>
<br>
The Soviets had already found good use for film in burnishing their
proletarian ideals—Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 masterpiece <b>Battleship
Potemkin </b>is the standout—which did not go unnoticed by
Grierson. He wrote, “I look on cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a
propagandist…Cinema is to be conceived as a medium, like writing,
capable of many forms and many functions. A professional
propagandist may well be especially interested in it. It gives
generous access to the public. It is capable of direct description,
simple analysis, and commanding conclusion, and may, by its tempo’d
and imagistic powers, be made easily persuasive.”<br>
<br>
While Grierson, working for early government film boards, first in
Great Britain and then in Canada, produced documentaries valorizing
the common worker, German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl used the
propagandistic powers of documentary to glorify Adolf Hitler and the
Nazi Party and to support the Aryan myth with <b>Triumph of the
Will </b>(1935). Riefenstahl’s film may be the ne plus ultra of
documentaries designed to influence and control audiences, but it
isn’t the only example. During World War II, the U.S. government
also produced films representing its view of things—the ubiquitous
newsreels, approved by the Office of War Information, that preceded
theatrical feature films—which defined how Americans perceived the
conflict.<br>
<br>
Mercifully, perhaps, in the ensuing decades documentary took a more
subtle place in shaping minds. State and government entities
produced a multitude of educational documentaries on various
subjects, from proper hygiene to correct social behavior. <b>Duck
and Cover,</b> a 1952 film instructing American children in how to
protect themselves in case of atomic war, comes to mind.<br>
<br>
Nonfiction films were entering their green-spinach age: they were
“good for you,” with heavy-handed narration and stilted
re-creations, serving primarily as educational tools for schools,
churches, and other community organizations. They were destined to
be pushed around the plate by bored viewers. There was also a
marginally more sophisticated wave of industrial films, made by
companies to train their employees or inform the public, such as <b>The
American Road</b>, produced in 1953 by the Ford Motor Company to
celebrate its fiftieth anniversary.<br>
- -<br>
The advent of television created a place for documentary series such
as CBS’ See It Now, which first aired in 1951 as a kind of
continuation of Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly’s Hear It Now
radio series. Newsreel periodicals such as <b>The March of Time</b>
had shown current events and history to movie-theater audiences
since the 1930s, but television—with programs like the 1952 NBC
series Victory at Sea, which depicted World War II battles—was
displacing the cinema as the primary outlet for documentaries.<br>
<br>
Walt Disney landed on a subject for a theatrically released
documentary that would prove particularly popular: the natural
world. His company released numerous nature films and a series of
1950s spin-offs called True-Life Adventures, about seals, birds,
elk, lions, insects, and polar bears. The films were criticized by
some for anthropomorphizing their subjects, rather than encouraging
people to see the wild on its own terms. Despite (or, more likely,
because of) Disney’s lack of scientific rigor—it was later revealed
that a mass suicide of lemmings was fabricated for 1958’s White
Wilderness, among other falsifications—the nature documentary became
a leading genre of the form. The English also found success with
televised nature films and series, and in particular with Zoo Quest
(1954–64), a show hosted by a young naturalist named David
Attenborough.<br>
<br>
While these politically neutral films focused on big cats and fur
seals, the documentary saw another significant, though less popular,
development when a small group of filmmakers began to innovate more
nimble, powerful methods, with lighter cameras and sync sound, that
allowed a fly-on-the-wall perspective. They called it direct cinema
or cinema verité, a nonfiction corollary to the fictional
cinéma-vérité being made in France and Italy. Those documentaries of
the late 1960s and early 1970s, directed by D.A. Pennebaker and the
brothers Albert and David Maysles, among others, were primarily
destined for small audiences on college campuses and in art houses,
although some broke out to wider viewership, such as 1970’s
Woodstock.<br>
<br>
It’s quite a jump to go from Jimi Hendrix genuflecting onstage to a
Ronald Reagan–era corporate CEO being chased by a populist
firebrand, but I think it’s fair to say that the documentary’s next
great phase in the United States, at least commercially—what many
have called its golden age—began with Michael Moore’s 1989 personal
polemic, Roger & Me. Here was a documentary that provided
information, was raucously funny, and presented a deliberately
subjective take on a serious issue: General Motors’ indifference
toward the people of Flint, Michigan, where it was the largest
employer. One could also make the case that Roger & Me
successfully fulfills Grierson’s definition of cinema as a powerful
tool of propaganda. The film was a revelation, making corporate
greed a subject of national opprobrium, launching Moore’s career,
and after grossing more than $6 million at the domestic box office,
expanding the audience for documentary films.<br>
<br>
But it took time for the form to reach its commercial zenith. There
were other hits, such as <b>Paris Is Burning (1990)</b>, <b>Hoop
Dreams (1994)</b>, and <b>Crumb (1994)</b>, but it wasn’t until
Moore’s 2002 film about gun control, <b>Bowling for Columbine</b>,
which made a then-astounding $21 million at the U.S. box office and
won an Academy Award—at a ceremony where Moore made an anti–Iraq War
speech that sent his Q rating through the roof—that the documentary
floodgates opened.<br>
<br>
The year 2003 was a high-water mark for American documentaries as a
vital cultural form. People flocked to theaters to watch everything
from a cute spelling bee <b>(Spellbound)</b> to an unsettling
depiction of child abuse <b>(Capturing the Friedmans)</b> and
director Errol Morris cleverly putting the Vietnam War–era secretary
of defense Robert McNamara in his place <b>(The Fog of War)</b>.
The following year saw the success of another highly manipulative
and entertaining polemic, <b>Super Size Me</b>, in which Morgan
Spurlock used the kind of stunt tactics Moore pioneered to change
the way people perceived McDonald’s.<br>
<br>
Meanwhile, nature documentaries didn’t need a renaissance. Wild
Kingdom had been a successful part of Sunday-night television since
the 1960s; when its popularity began to wane, the PBS show Nature
took its place in 1982. The growth of cable channels provided a
steady stream of flora and fauna on Discovery Channel, launched in
1985; Animal Planet, introduced in 1996; and the National Geographic
Channel, which began airing in 2001. Attenborough had become a
household name. After the 2001 French film Winged Migration was
released in the United States in 2003, its success spurred a string
of nature documentaries that did well at the box office, starting
with the monumentally successful March of the Penguins in 2005.<br>
<br>
Despite decades of development expanding what the documentary could
do, the form didn’t significantly tackle the subject of climate
change until the twenty-first century—not that there hadn’t been a
smattering of attempts. In fact, one particular jewel, The<b>
Unchained Goddess,</b> was released in 1958, long before the
environmental movement coalesced around the issue.<br>
<br>
<b>The Unchained Goddess</b> was part of the Bell System Science
Series made by AT&T for television and later shown in
classrooms. This educational documentary, which was produced by
Hollywood legend Frank Capra, features a scientist and a writer
discussing the weather and the planet’s meteorological patterns
while animated characters chime in. The planet’s weather is given a
female persona, Meteora, who swoons for one of the nice men
narrating the show. At the end of the film, the scientist clearly
identifies the peril of global warming based on the then-emerging
science about carbon-dioxide emissions. “Man may be unwittingly
changing the world’s climate through the waste products of his
civilization,” and a rise in temperatures might mean mass flooding
of the United States, he says, and jokes that that could lead to
Americans looking down at drowned cities through glass-bottom boats.<br>
<br>
The film ends on an optimistic note. “If the questions are there,
because they are there, man will answer them,” the scientist says.
“Man would eventually resolve them. Not for conquest, but so that he
could live hand in hand with nature.”<br>
<br>
The film was an early warning, but one without any sense of urgency.
Other made-for-television and classroom documentaries about global
warming would follow, but nothing electrified the culture. (Does
anyone remember 1981’s <b>Warming Warning</b> or 1999’s <b>Turning
Down the Heat: The New Energy Revolution</b>?)<br>
<br>
And yet popular awareness of global warming and the need to act was
slowly building—from the first Earth Day, in 1970, through the 1997
Kyoto Protocol, when dozens of nations agreed that climate change
was happening and that it was caused by humans. President Bill
Clinton signed the agreement. The Senate, however, never ratified
it.<br>
- -<br>
By 2005 the public’s concern about climate change and the
renaissance in documentaries were reaching mutual climactic points.
Several nonfiction films were set to release that year and the
following one, including Global Warming: The Signs and the Science,
Five Ways to Save the World, and Attenborough’s <b>Are We Changing
Planet Earth?</b>, but it was An Inconvenient Truth that became
the centerpiece of a national discussion. Greenpeace executive
director Annie Leonard credits the film with shifting American
consciousness about the peril of climate change on a scale similar
to the impact of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, which
enlightened an earlier generation about the environmental harms of
pollution. Truth made $24 million at the domestic box office. The
release was covered extensively by the media: Al Gore spoke at the
Academy Awards to an audience of tens of millions of Americans, and
the film’s success positioned him to win the Nobel Peace Prize in
2007.<br>
<br>
Accepting the Oscar for best documentary feature, Gore riffed on a
line from the film: “We need to solve the climate crisis. It’s not a
political issue. It’s a moral issue.” It was a succinct and
impassioned plea, and one that deftly recast climate change to make
it accessible to a wide audience. It was also—however much you or I
may agree with the sentiment—propaganda.<br>
<br>
<b>An Inconvenient Truth</b> is an example of Grierson’s belief in
documentary’s potential as a “pulpit.” It simplified a complex
issue, reached a lot of people, and was “made easily persuasive.”<br>
<br>
When Grierson called documentaries propaganda, he wasn’t using the
word pejoratively. He was applying a literal definition of the word:
“the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of
helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.” The
definition encompasses propaganda put to both noble and ignoble
purposes, but we more commonly think of it as solely deceitful,
intending to mislead and propagate lies. When Grierson produced
documentaries that demonstrated the dignity of the common worker, he
didn’t think he was being untruthful. He was just trying to be
persuasive.<br>
<br>
Gore and Truth director Davis Guggenheim were also trying to
persuade their audience by structuring the film around a masterfully
clear and compelling mixture of personality, powerful optics, and
facts. Though the focus of the film is literally a recording of Gore
delivering a slideshow presentation about global warming, it doesn’t
feel like it. We watch the notoriously stiff, technocratic Gore
point at the numbers, ride a forklift, and make self-deprecating
jokes. We travel with him as he goes on his crusade to educate the
world. We see shocking charts and statistics that demonstrate the
catastrophic changes in carbon-dioxide levels and global
temperatures, with Gore repeatedly referring to the scientists whose
work backs up his assertions. The most powerful images are the ones
of destruction and mayhem, natural disasters such as ice caps
melting and human life imperiled, from floods in India and China to
Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana.<br>
<br>
<b>An Inconvenient Truth</b> helped galvanize activism in response
to climate change. It’s impossible to measure the exact impact, but
it’s commonly thought that the film had a significant effect on the
emerging climate movement, culminating in worldwide demonstrations
in 2014—heck, Swedish wunderkind Greta Thunberg partly credits Truth
for inspiring her launch into activism.<br>
<br>
Other climate-change documentaries followed, including<b> No Impact
Man (2009)</b>, <b>Earth Days (2009)</b>, <b>The Island
President (2011)</b>, <b>Chasing Ice</b> (2012), <b>Thin Ice </b>(2013),
<b>Racing Extinction</b> (2015), <b>This Changes Everything </b>(2015),
<b>Antarctica: Ice and Sky </b>(2015), <b>Chasing Coral</b>
(2017), and <b>The Hottest August </b>(2019). Leonardo DiCaprio
produced several climate-change documentaries, including <b>The
11th Hour </b>(2007) and <b>Before the Flood </b>(2016).<br>
<br>
But after the initial jolt of <b>An Inconvenient Truth</b>, these
films did not inspire the mass interest or action sparked by their
predecessor. The director Louie Psihoyos promoted his film <b>Racing
Extinction</b> (2015) by projecting images of endangered animals
onto the Empire State Building. Psihoyos told me why he sought a
larger audience: “To create a tipping point, you probably need 10
percent of the population. With the film and this event, we are
trying to reach that number. If you hit that number, then you have a
chance of moving the needle.” But <b>Racing Extinction</b> fizzled
at the box office, and though it later found a respectable
television audience on Discovery, the film didn’t move the needle...<br>
- -<br>
The only environmental documentary since <b>An Inconvenient Truth</b>
that seems to have had a significant effect on the national
conversation was 2010’s <b>Gasland</b>, about the dangers of
fracking, in which gas is extracted from the earth by injecting
high-pressure water and other materials into the bedrock. It made a
meager thirty thousand dollars in U.S. theaters but found far more
viewers on HBO, riding a wave of press coverage that recast fracking
as a hot-button issue in the public discussion about fossil-fuel
energy.<br>
<br>
Perhaps it was the newness of the issue of fracking that helped <b>Gasland</b>
catch on. But much credit must also go to the film’s director, Josh
Fox, who borrows directly from the Michael Moore toolbox. Fox
positions himself as the on-camera common man who is not getting
answers from the powers that be, and uses provocative
demonstrations, such as setting fire to the gas-infused running
water near fracking sites.<br>
<br>
Despite the increasing momentum and clear need for action on climate
change, why have no other documentaries had the impact of<b> An
Inconvenient Truth</b> or even <b>Gasland</b>? It could well be
that the increasing prominence of the issue has made documentaries
on the subject less powerful. Anyone who cares enough to do anything
about the crisis is already aware of it. The net effect of a
documentary on the subject may well have been diminished, limiting
the persuasive potential envisioned by Grierson. Gore’s <b>An
Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power</b>, which came out in 2017,
was less an attempt to persuade the unconcerned and more a review of
what had changed in the previous ten years.<br>
<br>
I’d contend that nonfiction filmmakers’ climate-change messages
have become background noise and that recent films are merely
preaching to the converted. For those who are interested, there’s
always something new on<b> PBS (The Age of Nature, Changing Planet,
the NOVA episode “Can We Cool the Planet?</b>”). And in nature
documentaries, warnings about climate change are common. In the
series <b>Our Planet</b>, released in 2019, narrator Attenborough
leads with dire warnings about humankind’s destruction of the earth,
along with a reminder that “with our help, the planet can recover.”
Netflix claims that 100 million households have seen it.<br>
<br>
Nothing exemplifies the representation of global warming in the
United States today better than the ubiquitous greenwashing ads by
companies such as BP (rebranded from British Petroleum) and Toyota.
These companies that accelerated climate change now offer new,
improved products that are purported to help slow its impact. Global
warming is now a marketing opportunity.<br>
<br>
<b>Isambard Kingdom Brunel Standing Before the Launching Chains of
the Great Eastern</b>, by Robert Howlett, 1857. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, purchase, Harriette and Noel
Levine Gift, 2005.<br>
<br>
Concern about climate change is split between two opposing teams.
One team knows it’s happening and believes something should be done
about it. The other team is more like…meh. In a 2021 Pew Research
Center survey, 94 percent of Americans who identify politically with
the left said that they were willing to modify how they live in
order to reduce the effects of climate change. Of those who identify
with the right, only 45 percent said that they were willing to do
the same. The survey found that from 2015 to 2021, the percentage of
Americans who were concerned about being personally harmed by
climate change decreased, from 30 percent to 27 percent. Again there
was a political divide: liberals were more concerned than
conservatives were by a gap of 59 percent.<br>
<br>
During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, aided and abetted by
cable channels on both ends of the political spectrum, climate
change became a culture-war issue akin to abortion or gun control.
No Democratic candidate diverged from the scientific consensus that
climate change is happening and is caused by humans. Although
several Republican candidates acknowledged the existence of climate
change, most were skeptical or adamantly opposed to the idea that it
was man-made. Former Texas governor Rick Perry declared it a
“contrived, phony mess,” while Texas senator Ted Cruz said, “The
global-warming alarmists are the equivalent of the flat-earthers.”
Donald Trump called global warming “bullshit.” This is not so
surprising. Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan explains in a 2007
paper that “individuals subconsciously resist factual information
that threatens their defining values.” In a 2015 interview, Kahan
pointed out that “positions on climate change have become symbols of
whose side you are on in a cultural conflict divorced from science.”
For politicians financially supported by the fossil-fuel industry
and neck-deep in the culture of Big Oil, a skeptical position on
climate change is self-serving.<br>
<br>
Could nuclear power be a subject in the conversation about energy
and climate change that is less tied to these political teams?
Republicans have been open to the use of nuclear energy for some
time, though they haven’t taken the lead on the issue. And for the
first time in almost fifty years, the Democratic Party included a
pronuclear statement in its 2020 platform.<br>
<br>
Environmental groups such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club remain
adamantly opposed to nuclear power, but it seems reasonable to
expect that as the rate of climate change increases and the
projections worsen beyond the capacity of wind and solar power to
address them, more people will be receptive to the option of nuclear
energy.<br>
<br>
Back in 2013, the documentary <b>Pandora’s Promise</b> tried to
change our understanding of nuclear power. Director Robert Stone, a
seasoned filmmaker with a long-standing interest in the
environmental movement going back to the 1970s, argued that nuclear
power was reasonably safe, with a smaller carbon footprint and fewer
long-term costs than fossil fuels; most important, it was more
capable of meeting the planet’s demand for energy than any other
resource. Stone believes that the risk of nuclear disaster is
manageable and that concerns about nuclear-waste storage are
exaggerated, leading him to make the sort of “commanding conclusion”
that Grierson recommended for effective propaganda. <b>Pandora’s
Promise</b> helped motivate a new strain of pronuclear
activists—from skeptics and freethinkers to concerned parents and
nuclear academics—in the environmental movement, but it was far from
a popular hit.<br>
<br>
Stone has most recently executive-produced Atomic Hope, a 2022
documentary directed by Frankie Fenton that depicts the struggles of
pro-nuclear activists, many of whom were influenced by <b>Pandora’s
Promise</b>. <b>Nuclear Now,</b> a documentary by Oliver Stone
(no relation to Robert), came out in the United States this spring.
It makes similar attempts to promote atomic energy, but with a
strong dose of the director’s moxie, including allegations that the
Rockefeller family seeded many antinuclear myths, such as the claim
that low levels of radiation cause significant health risks, in
order to take down a competitor of Big Oil.<br>
- -<br>
Neither film is likely to be the next <b>An Inconvenient Truth</b>,
revolutionizing the cultural conversation around energy. But could
the fact that they don’t align with a preexisting team make those
inclined to ignore or even deny climate change more receptive to the
discussion about how we’re going to power the planet without
destroying it?<br>
<br>
Expecting tangible, global change from a particular documentary may
be the wrong way to look at <b>Nanook of the North</b>’s
descendants, however. Nature documentaries have allowed us to behold
the world beyond our couches and movie-theater seats as it is (and
was). Climate-change documentaries have, in turn, made the case that
the earth is worth fighting for. They have allowed us to bear
witness to our planet and, however grim this may sound, to its
demise.<br>
<br>
<b>An Inconvenient Truth </b>might have realized the documentary’s
potential as a persuasive tool. But it also displayed the limits of
the form. Without a political apparatus that responds to the will of
the people—led by scientists, activists, NGOs, and, of course, local
and federal governments with mandates to combat global warming—even
the greatest climate-change documentary won’t stem the tide.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/energy/truth-actually/?ca_key_code=FE1LQA3">https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/energy/truth-actually/?ca_key_code=FE1LQA3</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<font face="Calibri"><br>
</font><font face="Calibri"> <i>[The news archive - follow the big
money ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> <font size="+2"><i><b>January 30, 1976 </b></i></font>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> </font> January 30, 1976: The US Supreme
Court issues the Buckley v. Valeo ruling, one of several
controversial rulings that effectively allow polluters to interfere
with the US political process.
<blockquote>
<p>Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976), was a landmark decision of the US
Supreme Court on campaign finance. A majority of justices held
that, as provided by section 608 of the Federal Election
Campaign Act of 1971, limits on election expenditures are
unconstitutional...</p>
<p>The court held 5–4 that the freedom of speech clause of the
First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting
independent expenditures for political campaigns by
corporations, including nonprofit corporations, labor unions,
and other associations.<br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p><b>Summary</b><br>
On January 30, 1976, the Supreme Court issued a per curiam opinion
in Buckley v. Valeo, the landmark case involving the
constitutionality of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971
(FECA), as amended in 1974, and the Presidential Election Campaign
Fund Act.<br>
<br>
The Court upheld the constitutionality of certain provisions of
the election law, including:<br>
<br>
The limitations on contributions to candidates for federal office
(2 U.S.C. §441a);<br>
The disclosure and recordkeeping provisions of the FECA (2 U.S.C.
§434); and<br>
The public financing of Presidential elections (Subtitle H of the
Internal Revenue Code of 1954).<br>
The Court declared other provisions of the FECA to be
unconstitutional, in particular:<br>
<br>
The limitations on expenditures by candidates and their
committees, except for Presidential candidates who accept public
funding (formerly 18 U.S.C. §608(c)(1)(C-F));<br>
The $1,000 limitation on independent expenditures (formerly 18
U.S.C. §608e);<br>
The limitations on expenditures by candidates from their personal
funds (formerly 18 U.S.C. §608a); and<br>
The method of appointing members of the Federal Election
Commission (formerly 2 U.S.C. §437c(a)(1)(A-C)).<br>
</p>
<p><b>Conclusions</b><br>
In this complicated case, the Court arrived at two important
conclusions. First, it held that restrictions on individual
contributions to political campaigns and candidates did not
violate the First Amendment since the limitations of the FECA
enhance the "integrity of our system of representative democracy"
by guarding against unscrupulous practices. Second, the Court
found that governmental restriction of independent expenditures in
campaigns, the limitation on expenditures by candidates from their
own personal or family resources, and the limitation on total
campaign expenditures did violate the First Amendment. Since these
practices do not necessarily enhance the potential for corruption
that individual contributions to candidates do, the Court found
that restricting them did not serve a government interest great
enough to warrant a curtailment on free speech and association.<br>
</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.fec.gov/law/litigation/Buckley.pdf">http://www.fec.gov/law/litigation/Buckley.pdf</a><br>
</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/buckley-v-valeo/">https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/buckley-v-valeo/</a><br>
</p>
<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>
Newsletters<br>
We deliver climate news to your inbox like nobody else. Every
day or once a week, our original stories and digest of the web’s
top headlines deliver the full story, for free.<br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://insideclimatenews.org/">https://insideclimatenews.org/</a><br>
--------------------------------------- <br>
*<b>Climate Nexus</b> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://climatenexus.org/hot-news/*">https://climatenexus.org/hot-news/*</a>
<br>
Delivered straight to your inbox every morning, Hot News
summarizes the most important climate and energy news of the
day, delivering an unmatched aggregation of timely, relevant
reporting. It also provides original reporting and commentary on
climate denial and pro-polluter activity that would otherwise
remain largely unexposed. 5 weekday <br>
================================= <br>
</font> <font face="Calibri"><b class="moz-txt-star"><span
class="moz-txt-tag">*</span>Carbon Brief Daily </b><span
class="moz-txt-star"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/newsletter-sign-up">https://www.carbonbrief.org/newsletter-sign-up</a></span><b
class="moz-txt-star"><span class="moz-txt-tag">*</span></b> <br>
Every weekday morning, in time for your morning coffee, Carbon
Brief sends out a free email known as the “Daily Briefing” to
thousands of subscribers around the world. The email is a digest
of the past 24 hours of media coverage related to climate change
and energy, as well as our pick of the key studies published in
the peer-reviewed journals. <br>
more at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.getrevue.co/publisher/carbon-brief">https://www.getrevue.co/publisher/carbon-brief</a>
<br>
================================== <br>
*T<b>he Daily Climate </b>Subscribe <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://ehsciences.activehosted.com/f/61*">https://ehsciences.activehosted.com/f/61*</a>
<br>
Get The Daily Climate in your inbox - FREE! Top news on climate
impacts, solutions, politics, drivers. Delivered week days.
Better than coffee. <br>
Other newsletters at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.dailyclimate.org/originals/">https://www.dailyclimate.org/originals/</a>
<br>
<br>
</font> </p>
<font face="Calibri">
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------/
<br>
/Archive of Daily Global Warming News <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/">https://pairlist10.pair.net/pipermail/theclimate.vote/</a><br>
<br>
<br>
/To receive daily mailings - click to Subscribe <a
class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E"
href="mailto:subscribe@theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request"><mailto:subscribe@theClimate.Vote?subject=Click%20SEND%20to%20process%20your%20request></a>
to news digest./<br>
<br>
Privacy and Security:*This mailing is text-only -- and carries no
images or attachments which may originate from remote servers.
Text-only messages provide greater privacy to the receiver and
sender. This is a personal hobby production curated by Richard
Pauli<br>
By regulation, the .VOTE top-level domain cannot be used for
commercial purposes. Messages have no tracking software.<br>
To subscribe, email: <a
class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="mailto:contact@theclimate.vote">contact@theclimate.vote</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E"
href="mailto:contact@theclimate.vote"><mailto:contact@theclimate.vote></a>
with subject subscribe, To Unsubscribe, subject: unsubscribe<br>
Also you may subscribe/unsubscribe at <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote">https://pairlist10.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/theclimate.vote</a><br>
Links and headlines assembled and curated by Richard Pauli for <a
class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://TheClimate.Vote">http://TheClimate.Vote</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="http://TheClimate.Vote/"><http://TheClimate.Vote/></a>
delivering succinct information for citizens and responsible
governments of all levels. List membership is confidential and
records are scrupulously restricted to this mailing list. </font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font>
</body>
</html>