Today’s comic by Tom Tomorrow is Fake calls:
What you may have missed at Sunday Kos ...
- International Elections Digest: Poland steps back from the brink, but democracy's future remains dim, by Elections
- Cancer could not stop her activism but Trump’s ACA repeal could, by Egberto Willies
- Attempting to tear the heart out of the American dream, by Frank Vyan Walton
- The Obamacare repeal attempt that just won’t die, by Sher Watts Spooner
- Honor the anniversary of the Voting Rights Act by fighting to restore it, by Denise Oliver Velez
- Why ‘America First’ really means America last, by Jon Perr
- All the president’s disappearing men, by Propane Jane
- The White House is a dump? by Mark E Andersen
- It’s not the end of the world, by it might look like it, by DarkSyde
- The timing of Trump’s most white nationalist week yet is no coincidence, by Ian Reifowitz
• U.S. nuclear “renaissance” goes the way critics said it likely would—down the tubes. The South Carolina Electric & Gas and Santee Cooper has abandoned two Westinghouse reactors it has spent $10 billion on. The reactors were supposed to make building nuclear power plants quicker and cheaper, enabling the industry to launch a bunch of new ones. But they have done nothing of the kind:
Most of the 18 nuclear projects pending before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission a decade ago have been aborted or suspended indefinitely. None of the 7 projects the NRC licensed are operational. Only one is still being built, in Georgia, at a cost of $100 million a month. Southern Company financial documents filed Wednesday say the project, slated to cost $14 billion, could cost $25 billion or more if completed.
The projects in South Carolina and Georgia were already years behind schedule and billions over budget when their shared lead contractor, Westinghouse, declared bankruptcy in March to get out of fixed-price contracts aimed at controlling escalating costs. South Carolina executives say they were forced to give up after estimated costs, budgeted at $11 billion in 2008, soared beyond $20 billion.
U.S. taxpayers put up $8.4 billion in loan guarantees for the two plants in George. [This sentence originally was written in a way that made it seem it was the South Carolina plants that got the guarantees.]
• Seventh Circuit Court says same-day voter registration in Illinois does not discriminate:
The Seventh Circuit on Friday found no evidence that allowing same-day voter registration in large Illinois counties discriminates against voters in small counties, and vacated a preliminary injunction won by a Republican congressional candidate.
Republican Illinois congressional candidate and Tea Party leader Patrick Harlan sued the Illinois State Board of Elections in 2016, claiming a state law guaranteeing same-day registration for high-population counties only benefits urban Democrats.
• Study: Only a 5% chance planet will stay under 2°C gain by 2100. And a 1% chance of staying under 1.5°C, the Paris Climate Accord negotiators’ aspiration:
There is only a 5 percent chance that the Earth will avoid warming by at least 2°C come the end of the century, according to new research that paints a sobering picture of the international effort to stem dangerous climate change. Global trends in the economy, emissions and population growth make it extremely unlikely that the planet will remain below the 2°C threshold set out in the Paris climate agreement in 2015, the study states. [...]
According to the University of Washington study, there is a 90 percent likelihood that temperatures will rise between 2°C and 4.9C by 2100. This would put the world in the mid-range warming scenarios mapped out by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It negates the most optimistic outcome as well as the worst case, which would see temperatures climb nearly 6°C beyond the pre-industrial era.
• Meanwhile, wags have nicknamed the lethal European heatwave “Lucifer”: So when global warming makes the planet really hot, what will they call it, having already used the hell reference?
• Meanwhile #2, U.S. begins formal process of withdrawing from Paris Accord: It will take until November 2020 to complete that process, something that can be reversed when (and if) a Democratic president takes over in January 2021.
• Inside the thriving subculture of eclipse chasers.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin gamely works around our 1st station break, rounding up a heavily Trump-tainted news cycle. Gop scrambles for more filibuster-proof vehicles. AG caught in collusion scandal! (In SC.) KXL may “collapse under its own weight” before Obamacare.
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