The Biden administration on Wednesday finalized one of the most significant pieces of its ambitious climate agenda: the strongest new tailpipe rules for passenger cars and trucks that will decisively push the US auto market toward electric vehicles and hybrids.
But in a concession to automakers and labor unions, the rules will be phased in more slowly than originally proposed and will give automakers more choices for how to comply.
Nearly a year ago, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a fast ramp-up into EVs — a rule that would have ensured two-thirds of all vehicles sold were electric by the end of this decade. The EPA pumped the brakes on that plan Wednesday.
...In 2023, EVs made up just 7.6% of new car sales, according to Kelley Blue Book. The new rule is targeting 35% to 56% for EVs in 2032, and 13% to 36% for plug-in hybrids.
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments
The State of the Global Climate 2023 report shows that records were once again broken, and in some cases smashed, for greenhouse gas levels, surface temperatures, ocean heat and acidification, sea level rise, Antarctic sea ice cover and glacier retreat.
Heatwaves, floods, droughts, wildfires, and rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones caused misery and mayhem, upending everyday life for millions and inflicting many billions of dollars in economic losses.
The WMO report confirmed that 2023 was the warmest year on record, with the global average near-surface temperature at 1.45 °Celsius (with a margin of uncertainty of ± 0.12 °C) above the pre-industrial baseline. It was the warmest ten-year period on record.
...House Democrats gathered as Republicans met in a separate closed-door confab, with Speaker Mike Johnson touting a number of GOP talking points about the forthcoming package, including increased border funding and Covid cuts. He's hoping to calm conservatives who are already angry about the last-minute nature of the legislation, which is expected to top $1 trillion and needs to clear both the House and Senate by Friday to avert a shutdown. The release of text could slip to Thursday, pushing Congress dangerously close to its deadline.
The concerted effort by both sides to establish talking points shows that leadership is working to head off any last-minute opposition. Appropriators are eager to finally close out the seemingly never-ending funding process of the current fiscal year, which saw four stopgaps and near-constant bickering. No congressional leaders want a partial shutdown, which would affect most of the federal government, including the military and major health programs.
But some of those talking points seem to run directly in contrast to each other, as both sides message their victories in the absence of bill text. DeLauro said the spending package would increase money for climate change efforts, while Johnson told his members Wednesday morning that it would cut such programs. A person familiar with the details of the not-yet-final spending deal said the cuts Johnson claimed were compared to President Joe Biden’s budget request, however, not compared to current funding levels.
The Justice Department is poised to sue Apple Inc. as soon as Thursday, accusing the world’s second most valuable tech company of violating antitrust laws by blocking rivals from accessing hardware and software features of its iPhone.
The suit, which is expected to be filed in federal court, according to people familiar with the matter, escalates the Biden administration’s antitrust fights against most of the biggest US technology giants. The Justice Department is already suing Alphabet Inc.’s Google for monopolization, while the Federal Trade Commission is pursuing antitrust cases against Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.
...The Justice Department opened the latest case in 2019 under former President Donald Trump. The antitrust division, though, chose to prioritize twin cases against Google, taking a back seat as Fortnite maker Epic Games Inc. sued Apple for monopolization in 2020 and that case worked its way through the federal courts.
Trump’s brief cited an old law review article in which Kavanaugh wrote that “a President who is concerned about an ongoing criminal investigation is almost inevitably going to do a worse job as President.”
But Kavanaugh in the Minnesota Law Review article the filing cited went on to write that that was not an argument against prosecuting a former president.
“The point is not to put the President above the law or to eliminate checks on the President, but simply to defer litigation and investigations until the President is out of office,” Kavanaugh wrote.
...In a possible sign of Kim’s grassroots strength, Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop (D) cited the support the congressman has received as he switched his endorsement from Murphy to Kim on Monday.
“I told [Kim] it’s not always comfortable to admit a mistake but clearly I made one here and this convention season has demonstrated he is the better candidate to represent NJ,” Fulop posted on social media. “The backbone of our party volunteers and activists have spoken loudly and we should listen to them.”
Ashley Koning, the director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University, said Kim needs to mobilize voters he has rallied and make sure they vote on Election Day to overcome not having the county line in some of the most heavily Democratic counties.
She noted a stark divide between the types of county endorsements that Kim and Murphy have won. While Kim has almost swept the county endorsements decided by a secret ballot at an open convention, Murphy has performed better in counties where no convention is held and the county chair decides themselves who to back.
“I think their wins show this steep division where Kim has been winning all of the open conventions, and Tammy Murphy has been winning the conventions that have some sort of advisory panel or advisory vote or party boss at the helm,” Koning said.
It’s tough to understand what’s going on at No Labels, the centrist political group that is trying — and repeatedly failing — to find a candidate for its presidential ticket this year. But judging by a slew of bad press over the past week, even the group’s insiders are starting to question what, exactly, their bosses are up to.
No Labels has faced rejection from over a dozen prospective candidates who want nothing to do with them, for reasons ranging from distaste over the party’s shadowy funders to an unwillingness to play spoiler in the pitched battle between President Biden and Donald Trump. It looks like the organization that promised to shake up the 2024 presidential race may end the cycle with no candidate at all. Yikes!
...It isn’t just that No Labels can’t find any credible politician willing to give them the time of day. The party’s long list of rejections undercuts CEO Nancy Jacobson’s core argument that American voters are crying out for an alternative to Biden and Trump. If that were the case, No Labels would certainly be able to produce convincing polling on the subject. So far, none of the numbers the group has come up with have convinced a single politician to give a unity ticket a try.
...No Labels’ efforts are crashing and burning because the movement is an astroturfed effort by conservative big-money donors to throw a wrench into the 2024 election cycle. Ambitious politicians from all corners of the political room have so far been smart enough to keep their distance from whatever it is No Labels is cooking up. Voters should do the same.
Donald Trump invited his extended family to Mar-a-Lago in the mid-1990s. As the clan gathered at the palatial Florida estate, though, his father was badly struggling, according to Mary L. Trump, Donald’s niece.
Fred Trump Sr., the pugnacious developer then in his late 80s, didn’t recognize two of his children at the party, recalled Mary L. Trump, who attended the gathering. And when he did recognize Donald, the family patriarch approached his son with a picture of a Cadillac that he wanted to buy — as if he needed his son’s permission.
The incident, Mary L. Trump said, left Donald Trump visibly upset at his father’s descent into dementia, which medical records show had been diagnosed several years earlier. Trump reflected his anguish in an interview around that time, with Playboy in 1997 reporting that seeing his father “addled with Alzheimer’s” had left him wondering “out loud about the senselessness of life.”
...Today, as the 77-year-old Trump seeks to return to the White House, he is still focused on the ravages of dementia — but this time he is using the condition as a political weapon, alleging without medical proof that President Biden, 81, is “cognitively impaired.” Those attacks follow a long pattern for the former president, who for years has bashed enemies as mentally frail while boasting in public about “acing” the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, a basic test that flags signs of early dementia.
Trump regularly claims to have passed the test twice, but through a spokesman, his campaign declined to release his test results or to specify when he most recently took it. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), the former White House physician, said in an interview this month that he administered it to Trump once, in January 2018. Trump in November released a three-paragraph letter in which Bruce Aronwald, a doctor of osteopathy, said that Trump’s health was excellent and that “cognitive exams were exceptional” but provided no details. Aronwald did not respond to a request for comment.
The Democratic Party Pizzaburger Theory of Electioneering is: half the electorate wants a pizza, the other half wants a burger, so we'll give them all a pizzaburger and make them all equally dissatisfied, thus winning the election.
But no one wants a pizzaburger. The Biden administration's approach of letting the Warren/Sanders wing pick the antitrust enforcers while keeping judicial appointments in the Manchin-Synematic universe is a catastrophe in which progressive Dem regulators (who serve one term) are thwarted by corporatist Dem judges (who serve for life)
...The 2022 midterms included enough races to start testing these theories – and, unlike traditional midterms, these races enjoyed high voter turnout, thanks to the unpopularity of GOP positions like abortion bans, book bans and anti-trans laws. Jacobin teamed up with the Center for Working-Class Politics, Yougov and the Center for Work and Democracy at ASU and analyzed those races.
Their conclusion:
That's the good news: if Dems recruit leftist, working class politicians and put them up for office on policies that address the material reality of voters' lives, they can beat fascist GOP candidates.
One thousand years ago, the first settlers of Rapa Nui — also known as Easter Island — feasted on a fusion cuisine of plants native to Polynesia but also ones indigenous to South America, around 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) away, a new study finds.
Researchers discovered the food remnants by identifying starch grains clinging to obsidian blades at the archaeological site of Anakena, the earliest known settlement on Rapa Nui, which was occupied from about A.D. 1000 to 1300, according to the study, published Wednesday (March 20) in the journal
PLOS One. The finding suggests that the early Polynesians had regular contact with the people of South America as far back as a millennium ago.
...In addition to the Polynesian crops, the researchers found three species of South American starchy foods: achira, sweet potato and cassava. In particular, "the identification of sweet potato starch grains in the lower levels of the Anakena site suggests an introduction of this species to Rapa Nui during the earliest settlement period," the researchers wrote. Cassava also seems to have been present on Rapa Nui long before European explorers visited its shores.
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