Tar sands protesters in St. Paul, Minnesota, June 6, 2015.
Ben Adler at Grist writes—
What’s next after Keystone? Fighting fossil fuel extraction on public lands:
What is next? So much energy has gone into stopping this pipeline and so much activist capacity and awareness has been built up to fight it. Stopping the pipeline is only one small part of the larger agenda to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Climate scientists say that 80 percent of the world’s fossil fuels that are already held in reserve by fossil fuel companies cannot be burned if we are to stay below 2°C. The Canadian tar sands that Keystone XL would have connected to U.S. pipelines are only one small part of that.
In fact, with the Keystone saga having dragged on longer than anyone expected, environmental groups have already begun their pivot toward focusing on public lands. They have formed the Keep It in the Ground coalition, which includes many of the same groups —350.org, Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club—that led the national fight against Keystone. It also includes groups working to protect individual areas such as the Arctic Ocean and Wyoming’s Powder River Basin.
About half of unexploited fossil fuels in the U.S. are on federal lands or in federally controlled offshore waters, and 91 percent of those have not (yet) been leased, according to a report commissioned by Friends of the Earth and the Center for Biological Diversity. (The remainder are on private land, so the president does not have direct control over whether they’re drilled or mined.) If all the currently unleased federal fossil fuels were exploited and burned, they would produce 319 to 450 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, which at the high end would constitute “more than a quarter of the total global emissions that can be released if the world is to limit global warming below 2°C.” The report concludes, “The potential emissions from unleased federal fossil fuels are incompatible with any U.S. share of global carbon limits that would keep emissions below scientifically advisable levels.” Already, over the last 10 years, burning fossil fuels from federal leasing has produced nearly 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.[...]
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2014—North Carolina judge: 'Why does the state of North Carolina not want people to vote?':
North Carolina's sweeping voter suppression law, passed in August 2013, may or may not be in effect for the 2014 election. Last month, a federal judge—a George W. Bush appointee—ruled that the law would be in effect in November, but an appeal of that decision to the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit could prevent that. The three-judge panel hearing the appeal consists of one Clinton appointee, Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, and two Obama appointees, Judges James Wynn and Henry Floyd. Oral arguments were held last Thursday, before a skeptical court.
One provision that received a great deal of attention from the judges during Thursday’s oral arguments in this case is a change to the state law that causes ballots to be tossed out if a voter shows up in the wrong precinct. For the last decade, voters who showed up at the wrong precinct would still have their votes counted in races that were not specific to that precinct, so long as they voted in the correct county. The new law prohibits these ballots from being counted at all. According to the Associated Press, that means thousands of ballots will be thrown out each election year.
Judge Wynn, the only member of the panel who lives in North Carolina, appeared baffled by this provision. Explaining that he lives very close to a precinct that is not his assigned polling place, he asked the state to justify why his vote should be thrown out if he did not travel to a precinct that is further away from his home. At one point, his questions grew quite pointed—"Why does the state of North Carolina not want people to vote?" Wynn asked. At another point, he described a hypothetical grandmother who has always voted at the same place. Why not “let her just vote in that precinct?” he wondered?
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