Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
From The Nation—States Are Doing What Big Government Won’t to Stop Climate Change:
In Maine, state officials are working to help residents install 100,000 high-efficiency heat pumps in their homes, part of a strategy for electrifying the state. In California, an in-demand grant program helps the state’s largest industry—agriculture, not technology—to pursue a greener, more sustainable future. Across Appalachia, solar panels are appearing on rooftops of community centers in what used to be coal towns.
The Trump administration may have pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, but most states and many rural areas in America have developed their own plans for reducing carbon emissions and moving away from fossil fuels as they maneuver—often aggressively—to address the threat of climate change.
“Even if the US government has decided to leave the Paris Agreement, we see in the US an enormous movement in favor to climate action,” United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in an interview with Covering Climate Now on Monday. “We see companies, we see cities, we see states, we see the civil society fully mobilized.”
Many state and local officials, including those in rural areas, hope stimulus funds aimed at helping rebuild economies ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic will support renewable energy and other “climate smart” initiatives that cut carbon emissions, while often creating more jobs in emerging industries than traditional infrastructure spending.
The plans for decarbonizing America have been sown and exist like seeds in a parched field, waiting for a drenching rain. [...]
The authors follow up with five examples.
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
~~John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Obama ratchets up his health care reform pitch:
The scariest thing in the health care reform debate is not fictitious death panels. It's the reality of the current system's denial of care, spiraling expenses and future projections for even worse and more expensive care in the future. And President Obama hammered home the bleak reality in this morning's weekly address, in which he cited a brand new Treasury report with some startling statistics:
...we can expect that about half of all Americans under 65 will lose their health coverage at some point over the next ten years. If you’re under the age of 21 today, chances are more than half that you’ll find yourself uninsured at some point in that time. And more than one-third of Americans will go without coverage for longer than one year.
I refuse to allow that future to happen. In the United States of America, no one should have to worry that they’ll go without health insurance – not for one year, not for one month, not for one day. And once I sign my health reform plan into law—they won’t.
Note the president's ownership now of the issue—my health reform plan— he refers to "my plan" no less than four times in today's earnest pitch. It's surely no coincidence that this, his first weekly talk after his successful address to Congress on the topic, frames the issue as his own. From his rhetoric, it appears he's more than willing to lead on it now.