It was a bit of a shock to hear a question on the climate crisis at Wednesday night’s Democratic debate. I figured the recent announcement of the September (non-debate) climate forum for the presidential candidates would mean moderators would view such questions as no longer needed at the sanctioned debates. After all, even though the subject scarcely received any attention from Democratic candidates at all levels in 2014, 2016, and 2018, we don’t want to raise the risk of talking about the crisis too much now, do we?
The fact is the climate crisis ought to be on the lips and in the action plans of every Democratic candidate, up and down the ballot. That means candidates for, and incumbents of, school boards and city councils all the way up to the Senate and the presidency should every single day be mentioning the climate crisis and implementing policies to educate people and ameliorate the impacts .
Likewise the big media, which has, taken as a whole, with a couple of exceptions, done an excremental job covering the climate crisis, treating the lucrative lunacy of the science deniers as if they’re just one side of a two-sided argument instead of (often paid) agents of disinformation or stubborn ignoramuses. Some of the largest papers and most prominent television venues have treated coverage and climate and related environmental issues as some kind of luxury they cannot afford.
But you didn’t show up this morning to hear me whine. So here’s today’s round-up.
Caleb Redlener, Charlotte Jenkins and Irwin Redlener at The Guardian write—Our planet is in crisis. But until we call it a crisis, no one will listen:
When Senator Kamala Harris was asked about climate change during the Democratic debate in June, she did not mince words. “I don’t even call it climate change,” she said. “It’s a climate crisis.”
She’s right – and we, at Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, wish more people would call this crisis what it is.
The language we use to refer to the climate crisis has changed over time, often due to political pressures. In 1975, the geophysicist Wallace S Broecker published the first major paper on planetary heating – Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming? – and for a while the term “global warming” was the most common. But in the decades following, politicians and members of the media began to use the softer, more euphemistic term “climate change” to describe changing weather and atmospheric conditions.
Joan Walsh at The Nation writes—This Is What Happens When More Than One Woman Is Running for President:
Some people dismiss it as “identity politics.” But the reason leadership diversity matters became crystal clear on the Democratic debate stage Wednesday night. Leaders of color like New Jersey Senator Cory Booker and former San Antonio mayor Julian Castro forced tough questions about criminal justice reform on Vice President Joe Biden (even if the African American Booker also had to answer for police issues on his watch as Newark mayor, as Senator Kamala Harris had to answer for her record as a black prosecutor).
But the high point of a very uneven debate—dramatic, yes, but sometimes ridiculously so—came when Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Kamala Harris grilled former vice president Joe Biden about his stands on women’s issues over his long career. If Biden is not the Democratic nominee next summer, these will be moments we revisit to explain why.
Alyessa Rosenberg at The Washington Post writes—I’m grateful for every single woman running for president. Even Marianne Williamson:
Each time a female candidate has stepped onto a presidential or vice-presidential debate stage, she has done so alone. Shirley Chisholm, Geraldine Ferraro, Carol Moseley Braun, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and Carly Fiorina each carried the burden of their own candidacies to the podium. And, unlike the men they ran against, with the exception of Barack Obama, they were also saddled with the impossible task of representing their people — the fractious masses of American women — all by themselves.
Women in politics are hardly the only people to face this sort of pressure, though there is no arena in which the stakes are higher. Fail at the box office or in the Nielsen rankings, and another woman might not get a job. Fail at the ballot box, and women risk getting shut out of the most important decision-making processes in the world on the grounds that they’re not electable. But, either way, bearing that weight alone tends to shrink our public ideas of what women can be. [...]
On the Democratic debate stage, womanhood can look like Gillibrand, who spoke movingly about how she would have been willing to pay any price to save her son Theo when he had a serious allergy attack — and how she shouldn’t have to. Womanhood can be Sen. Kamala D. Harris’s prosecutorial feints and gray pearls, or Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s wire-rimmed glasses and joy in the fight. The Democratic debates can be a place where Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a notoriously tough boss, can have her voice waver with emotion, or where Rep. Tulsi Gabbard can be the least-expressive person on stage.
I wouldn’t vote for every woman running for president in the Democratic primary. But I’m grateful for the presence of every single one of them. Equality isn’t a single perfect human woman winning the presidency: it’s a bunch of flawed women being considered genuinely plausible contenders for the post.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Booker broke through. Biden struck back. Harris got put in the hot seat:
Wednesday night’s debate was New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker’s breakthrough, former vice president Joe Biden’s comeback and California Sen. Kamala D. Harris’s turn in the hot seat.
If Tuesday’s Democratic debate was overwhelmingly ideological, Wednesday’s debate was intensely personal. The attacks flew across the stage, with Harris and Biden facing especially heavy fire. Sometimes, the volleys were rooted in philosophical differences once again, health care was the subject of an often confusing set of exchanges around the costs, benefits and even the definition of Medicare-for-all — but they were just as often about the performance of the various contenders at challenging moments in their careers. [...]
Biden, who had been listless and at times confused under Harris’s blows in June, gave as good as he got this time around. He hit back at Booker’s police policies as mayor of Newark. He went after Harris hard on health care. He struck at former housing and urban development secretary Julián Castro’s proposals to move illegal border crossings from criminal to civil courts.
He also tried to look crisp, knowing that looking old was a far greater enemy than anyone on the stage. Many of his answers were framed as 1, 2, 3 lists. It was far from a perfect performance. There were again moments when he looked tired and seemed happy when his time expired. But he hung in, to the relief of his supporters. If he suffered a serious drop in the polls after the first debate (from which he came back), he was unlikely to face another cliff this time.
Wendy García at The Guardian writes—Why I'm fleeing Honduras to seek asylum in the US:
I am seeking asylum in the US because of a hydroelectric dam. I fled Honduras fearing for my life after being teargassed and arrested by police when our community resisted a dam which contaminated the water we rely on for drinking, cooking and washing. [...]
I come from a small community where our water flows from the mountains into the River Mezapa. The communities who rely on the river organised many years ago to install a water system which stores and distributes water to people’s houses. [...]
Early in the morning of 15 August 2017, we were coming to the end of the night shift at the roadblock when we heard that the police were on their way. It was only my third or fourth time at the roadblock. [...]
Our camp was destroyed, and the police escorted the company’s machinery to the river. We were charged with trespass for blocking a public road. The police took our photos – and this really frightened me because in Honduras, the police kill ordinary people.
Frank Figliuzzi at The New York Times writes—Why Does Trump Fan the Flames of Race-Based Terrorism? The president is making the F.B.I.’s job harder:
If I learned anything from 25 years in the F.B.I., including a stint as head of counterintelligence, it was to trust my gut when I see a threat unfolding. Those of us who were part of the post-Sept. 11 intelligence community had a duty to sound the alarm about an impending threat.
Now, instinct and experience tell me we’re headed for trouble in the form of white hate violence stoked by a racially divisive president. I hope I’m wrong. [...]
Reporting indicates that Mr. Trump’s rants emboldened white hate groups and reinforced racist blogs, news sites and social media platforms. In response to his tweets, one of the four lawmakers, Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, said: “This is the agenda of white nationalists, whether it is happening in chat rooms or it’s happening on national TV. And now it’s reached the White House garden.” She’s right.
To be clear, I am not accusing President Trump of inciting violence in Gilroy or anywhere else. But he empowers hateful and potentially violent individuals with his divisive rhetoric and his unwillingness to unequivocally denounce white supremacy. Mr. Trump may be understandably worried about the course of congressional inquiries, but his aggressive and race-baiting responses have been beyond the pale. He has chosen a re-election strategy based on appealing to the kinds of hatred, fear and ignorance that can lead to violence.
Jacques Leslie at the Los Angeles Times writes—Berkeley banned natural gas. The rest of California should too:
By becoming the first city in the nation to ban natural gas in new low-rise buildings and homes, Berkeley did something momentous in mid-July: It signaled the beginning of the end of the natural gas era. This is an altogether good thing.
California has set a climate mandate of 100% clean, renewable energy by 2045. It won’t reach that goal unless it eliminates natural gas from buildings. Burning natural gas emits carbon dioxide and other pollutants, and its distribution and storage infrastructure leaks methane. In many cities, including Berkeley, buildings are the second leading greenhouse gas-emitting sector, after transportation. Now that regulations aimed at the 2045 mandate are in place for cars, trucks and coal-fired power, natural gas has to be next.
The popular image of gas cooking and heating — clean, cheap and reliable, a “bridge fuel” from coal to renewables — requires drastic revision. Natural gas is in fact the new coal; its greenhouse gas emissions overall in the U.S. have surpassed coal’ssince 2015. The California Air Resources Board calculates that natural gas emissions from the state’s 12 million buildings account for 12% of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. Add to that a reasonable estimate of the leaks from the state’s natural gas pipelines, and according to Bruce Nilles, an electrification advocate at the Rocky Mountain Institute, that percentage likely doubles, surpassing emissions from all the state’s power plants.
Andrew Gawthorpe at The Guardian writes—Is this fascism? No. Could it become fascism? Yes:
Amid the global rise of rightwing populism, “fascist” has become a common – indeed over-used – epithet. The F-word is convenient for critics of the new wave of populism, seeking as it does to tie their opponents to historical movements which nearly all of mainstream society regards as deplorable. But the word is convenient for the right too, allowing them to wave away their critics as overwrought and deranged while avoiding serious discussion of the substance of their policies and rhetoric.
Even the Trumpified Republican party is not a fascist movement and Trump is certainly no Hitler. Full-blown fascism usually emerges under the pressure of economic collapse or existential war, but it is constructed from pre-existing social and political raw materials. But while the Trump era hasn’t seen the rise of a true fascism in the United States, it has given us sharp and painful insights into the raw materials out of which a future American fascism might be constructed.
Any fascism of the future will be different from that of the 20th century. But it will have to share features with its forebears, including ultranationalism, illiberalism, a strong impulse to regiment society, and the forcible suppression of opposition. This fascism would, in other words, cut against what most Americans still recognize – even if only to give lip service to – as the core values of their nation.
Yet Trump’s persistent hold on his base shows how a coalition against characteristically American values may be constructed and used to hold power, even if the coalition represents only a minority of the country.
Branko Marcetic at In These Times writes—Corporate Democrats Have Been in the Driver’s Seat for 30 Years. Not Anymore:
For the past three decades, the Democratic Party has been living with a debilitating trauma that’s left it a shell of what it once was. But if Tuesday night’s debate is any indication, the Democrats may finally be moving into the home stretch of a long, painful recovery.
Rather than sticking to the longtime script of Democrats pandering to the center, the two highest polling candidates on the stage—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—articulated a clear-eyed left-wing vision of the direction the party should take. Sanders railed against the “ruling class” while advocating enshrining universal economic rights, as Warren warned that “we’re not going to solve the urgent problems we face with small ideas and spinelessness.” Sanders agreed, claiming: “I get a little bit tired of Democrats afraid of big ideas.”
Ever since the Clinton years of the 1990s, the party’s officials and apparatchiks have internalized the belief that being too bold or too far left is a ticket to political oblivion. After enjoying a near-unbroken hold on the White House from 1932 to 1968, the following 24 years saw Democratic presidential nominee after nominee go down in landslides against ever more right-wing Republican opponents. Peace candidate George McGovern, who called for pulling troops out of Vietnam within 90 days in 1972, had been too far left to win, went the conventional wisdom. So had Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis in 1984 and 1988, respectively, conveniently ignoring the reality that both had campaigned as centrists pledging to cut the deficit and reform welfare.
This set of lessons, combined with Bill Clinton’s two presidential victories, led the party to an increasingly ruinous set of choices.
Russell Berman at The Atlantic writes— Cory Booker Exposed a Key Biden Weakness:
Like others trying to knock Biden out of his top spot in the race, Booker has criticized his competitor’s authorship of the 1994 crime bill, which progressives blame for exacerbating mass incarceration in the United States. He’s also faulted Biden’s more recent proposals for criminal-justice reform as inadequate. Tonight Biden tried to minimize his differences with Booker, saying his plan was “similar” to the senator’s.
Booker wasn’t having it. “This is one of those instances where the house was set on fire and you claimed responsibility for those laws,” he told Biden, who stood next to him onstage in Detroit. “And you can’t just now come out with a plan to put out that fire.”
Biden, in fitting with his feisty style, escalated his critique by calling out Booker’s record as mayor of Newark, New Jersey. He accused Booker of overseeing a police department that engaged in stop-and-frisk, a tactic that’s been widely denounced as racial profiling.
Booker beamed, waiting for his turn to respond. “If you want to compare records—and I’m shocked that you do—I am happy to do that,” he said, drawing laughter from the crowd. “Because all the problems that he is talking about that he created, I actually led the bill that got passed into law that reverses the damages that your bills” created. “You were bragging,” Booker added, “calling it the ‘Biden crime bill’ up until 2015.” Booker was referring to the First Step Act, a bipartisan prison-reform bill that President Donald Trump signed last year.
Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic writes—Andrew Yang Is Not Your Climate Friend. Fleeing to “higher ground” isn’t an adaptation policy:
Asked in very general terms about his climate-change plan, Yang, a former technology executive, made a few points. Almost all of them were terrible. [...]
“We need to do everything we can to start moving the climate in the right direction,” he continued, “but we also need to start moving our people to higher ground—and the best way to do that is to put economic resources into your hands so you can protect yourself and your families.”
Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe Yang is just very good at staying on message. He is, after all, referring to his signature proposal, a universal basic income that would assure every American $1,000 a month. And like… sure… I guess. It is true—it is obviously true—that people who have more money will be less vulnerable to any one disaster. And people who are facing disaster should have more money. Protection from vulnerability is basically what wealth is.
But handing out money is not an adaptation policy. And $1,000 a month is not a good response to losing your house to higher sea levels, which is the malady Yang seems to be implying. It is certainly not a collective adaptive approach to the challenge of climate change.
Think about it this way. Asked about climate change on national television, Yang said that climate change is an inexorable problem, that the U.S. can’t do much of anything about it, and that if the seas take your house—that is, if a problem outside your control deprives you of your most expensive asset—then the government shouldn’t do anything specifically to help you. That is quite an argument. It does not strike as one well-chosen for a party whose voters care about climate change and who are moving to the left.
Ella Nilsen at Vox writes—Jay Inslee points to Democrats’ real problem: Mitch McConnell:
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee made an important point during Wednesday’s CNN debate: If Democrats don’t take back the US Senate in 2020, they won’t be able to do anything.
“We are all going to work like the dickens to get more Democrats elected to the Senate. If we get a majority in the US Senate because of the position of these senators, not a damn thing is going to get done,” Inslee said. “And I’ll tell you why, with all their good intentions — and I know they’re sincere and passionate — but because they embraced the filibuster, Mitch McConnell is going to run the US Senate even if we take a majority.”
Inslee’s point underscored a stark reality for Democrats: Even if they beat President Donald Trump and take back the White House in 2020, they will still need to keep the House and retake the Senate to pass any policy. And even if they do take back the Senate by a bare majority — a stretch given the current Senate map — current Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Republican caucus would likely use the filibuster to try to obstruct a Democratic agenda.
In other words, either Democrats need to win back the White House and a supermajority in the Senate, or eliminate the filibuster. Otherwise, McConnell will ensure their big ideas are toast.
Matt Ford at The New Republic writes—Status Quo Joe. Biden seems to believe that everything in America was rosy until Trump took office, and he's offering himself as a time machine:
The first words spoken by a candidate on Wednesday’s debate stage came from Joe Biden. “Go easy on me, kid,” he joked to Kamala Harris as she walked out on stage for the candidate introductions. The senator did not go easy on him, nor did most of the other Democratic contenders in Detroit. But nobody managed to land a blow that would change the trajectory of the race or dent Biden’s frontrunner status.
The second round of debates this week may have been the last real opportunity for some of the candidates to do just that. The Democratic National Committee’s qualification rules are likely to exclude at least half of the current contenders from the third debate in September. It was not quite a make-or-break night for Biden himself, who already qualified for the next round. But it was close. His languid performance in last month’s debates not only boosted Harris into the upper tier of candidates, but also raised questions about whether he could pull off a grueling presidential bid.
Biden avoided a moment like the one Harris elicited last month, and largely parried whatever attacks the other candidates threw his way. When it came to substance, however, Biden was more muddled. When their party is out of power, presidential candidates typically portray themselves as agents of bold change. Biden hasn’t done that. Instead, he’s promising to restore America to its pre-Trump state and finish the work of the Democratic president under whom he served. He’s running a status quo candidacy for a status quo that no longer exists.