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Green New Deal has overwhelming bipartisan support, poll finds. At least, for now.

by mike67i60013455 Posted on December 19, 2018

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This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Green New Deal is the most popular policy hardly anyone has heard of yet.

Eighty-two percent of Americans say they have heard “nothing at all” about the sweeping proposal to generate 100 percent of the nation’s electricity from clean sources within the next 10 years, upgrade the United States’ power grid, invest in energy efficiency and renewable technology, and provide training for jobs in the new, green economy.

But when asked “how much do you support or oppose” the aforementioned suite of policies, 81 percent of registered voters say they either “somewhat support” or “strongly support” the plan, according to new survey results shared exclusively with HuffPost from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University.

Ninety-two percent of Democrats supported the idea, including 93 percent of liberal Democrats and 90 percent of moderate-to-conservative Democrats. But 64 percent of Republicans ― including 75 percent of moderate-to-liberal Republicans and 57 percent of conservative Republicans ― also backed the policy goals outlined in the Green New Deal. 88 percent of independents endorsed the policies as well.

“Given that most Americans have strong support for the components and ideas of the Green New Deal, it becomes a communication strategy problem,” Abel Gustafson, a postdoctoral associate at Yale who co-authored a report on the findings, said by phone Sunday. “From here, it’s about how you can pitch it so you can maintain that bipartisan support throughout the rest of the process.”

The survey’s description of the Green New Deal’s tenets did not mention that more than 40 progressive members of Congress are championing the policy. The group includes Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a Democrat from New York), Representative John Lewis (a Democrat from Georgia) and Senator Jeff Merkley (a Democrat from Oregon).

Study after study shows Americans evaluate policies more negatively when they are told politicians from an opposing party back the ideas, and more positively when they are told politicians from their own party are in support. The findings therefore indicate that although most Republicans favor the Green New Deal in principle, they are not yet aware that the plan is proposed by the political left.

The survey ― administered online to 966 registered voters, with a margin of error of +/- three percentage points ― was performed from November 28 to December 11.

Support could erode if debate over the policy becomes more partisan, which seems likely. No Republican lawmakers have backed the Green New Deal. Most moderate and conservative Democrats have not said they support the idea, either.

“It matters how the Green New Deal is communicated in the future,” Gustafson said. “If it becomes more partisan and right-versus-left, we could see support drop from Americans on the right.”

The findings mirror survey results released Monday that found major support for a green jobs program across political ideologies, including party loyalists and those who move between parties. Those who say they support a green jobs program include:

98 percent of loyal Democrats
66 percent of loyal Republicans
96 percent of voters who cast ballots for President Barack Obama in 2012, President Donald Trump in 2016, and Democrats in the 2018 midterms
93 percent of voters who cast ballots for Obama, then Trump, then Republicans in 2018

The polling, published in The New York Times, came from Data for Progress, the left-leaning think tank behind the most comprehensive blueprint for a Green New Deal to date.

Polling also finds that Americans consider global warming a real issue and support policy changes to address it. Yale survey data from August found:

70 percent of Americans recognize global warming is happening
57 percent understand humans are causing the temperature rise
85 percent support funding research into renewable energy
77 percent support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant
63 percent support requiring utilities to generate one-fifth of their electricity from renewables

That made the latest findings on the Green New Deal ― one of the first major national surveys to use that term specifically ― “exciting but not necessarily surprising,” Gustafson said.

“The way we described the Green New Deal in our survey was by emphasizing the qualities that resonate with both sides, that it creates jobs and strengthens America’s economy and also accelerates the transition from fossil fuels,” he said. “We’re not surprised that conservatives support those things.”

Other polls show strong support for guaranteeing green jobs to unemployed Americans, a policy increasingly discussed as a vehicle for a Green New Deal but one that the Yale survey did not explicitly cite. In September, Data for Progress released polling that found 55 percent of eligible U.S. voters supported a jobs guarantee, while 23 percent opposed. When the jobs are green, that support remained the same, but the share of those outright opposed fell to 18 percent.

“Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike understand that they live on the same planet, the same country,” Corbin Trent, a spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez, said when read the Yale survey results over the phone. “We need highways, jobs, and improved infrastructure, and we need a 100 percent renewable-energy economy.”

The Green New Deal barreled into mainstream political discourse a little over a month ago after languishing for more than a decade on the fringes of policy debates. A new wave of progressive Democrats reclaimed the term ahead of November’s midterm election to describe the type of large-scale economic mobilization scientists say is required to keep global warming within 2.3 degrees F, beyond which sea-level rise and extreme weather are forecast to be catastrophic.

In November, protesters with the left-wing groups Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats occupied top Democrats’ offices to demand party leadership make climate change a top priority in the next Congress. Ocasio-Cortez, who campaigned on a democratic socialist vision of climate action, proposed establishing a select committee in Congress to shape a Green New Deal. Thirty-seven incoming or sitting House members pledged to support the plan.

On Friday, more than 300 state and local elected officials voiced their support for a Green New Deal in an open letter.

The legislative path forward remains unclear, but the Green New Deal is shaping up to be a major 2020 issue. Richard Ojeda, the failed West Virginia congressional candidate now running for president, said he supports the policy. Two likely contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination ― Senators Bernie Sanders (an Independent fom Vermont) and Cory Booker (a Democrat from New Jersey) ― came out in support of a Green New Deal. Merkley, another potential 2020 hopeful, was among the first to back the plan.

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Green New Deal has overwhelming bipartisan support, poll finds. At least, for now.

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More trouble in Paradise: Camp Fire region braces for floods and mudslides

by TyrellBrogan Posted on November 20, 2018

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Northern California faces a new threat in the aftermath of the disastrous Camp Fire: Weather forecasters are growing more confident that downpours, which could bring flash floods and mudslides, are headed for the fragile, scorched terrain.

On Monday night, the National Weather Service issued flash-flood watches for recent burn areas, in preparation for a series of heavy rainfall events arriving between Wednesday and Friday.

The forecast prompted an escalation of ongoing search and recovery efforts in Paradise, with fears that the rains could wash away the remains of fire victims, reducing the chances of families of the hundreds of residents still listed as missing finding closure.

Kory Honea, the sheriff of Butte County, told the Associated Press that the looming rains means that it’s within the “realm of possibility” that officials might never be able to determine the fire’s exact death toll.

As of Tuesday afternoon, at least 79 people are known to have died, 699 are still unaccounted for, and more than 40,000 displaced. The Camp Fire is already one of the deadliest U.S. disasters of any kind in the 21st century. It is the deadliest U.S. fire in 100 years, and the sixth-deadliest worldwide in that same timespan, according to numbers compiled by meteorologist Jeff Masters. The 17,148 buildings destroyed in and around the town of Paradise are nearly equal to all those lost in each of the other top-10 most destructive fires in California history, combined.

Current forecasts call for as much as six inches of rain near Paradise — about as much as the region gets in an average November — arriving in the span of just a few days. That kind of a deluge would not only frustrate recovery efforts, but it could also spawn mudslides and flash floods by turning the newly barren soil into a roiling, debris-filled torrent. That the still-burning fire that started this whole mess could be extinguished in the process is almost an afterthought.

Survivors’ stories are still emerging two weeks after a wall of flames burned through Paradise in mere hours. While the cause of the fire is yet to be officially determined, it’s nearly certain that climate change played a crucial role in how quickly it grew and spread.

It’s worth noting that climate change is likely playing a role in intensifying heavy rainfall in California, too. More rain can fall in a shorter period of time in a warmer atmosphere that’s becoming more efficient at evaporation. In California, most heavy rainstorms, including those in the forecast this week, come via such atmospheric rivers — tropical conveyor belts of moisture streaming directly ashore — and these are growing wider and more intense as the planet heats up.

The fact that two of the extremes of climate change — drier and hotter droughts, and wetter and wider floods — are manifesting as part of the same disaster is a sign of the urgency of the crisis. The Camp Fire is the latest example of the compound, complex tragedy of climate change.

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More trouble in Paradise: Camp Fire region braces for floods and mudslides

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Should big corporations pay for clean energy? Portland voters will decide.

by FilomenRosa Posted on July 30, 2018

A new ballot initiative in Portland would raise $30 million a year for clean energy through a tax on giant retailers. Sound unusual? It is.

The campaign for the Portland Clean Energy Fund is led by groups representing communities of color and grassroots environmental organizations. The local branches of the Sierra Club, 350.org, and the NAACP are all involved, too.

“It’s groundbreaking,” says Jenny Lee, advocacy director at the Coalition of Communities of Color, another organization spearheading the measure. “It’s the first environmental or climate initiative, as far as we know, that’s been led by organizations of color in Oregon.”

The campaign officially qualified for the November ballot on Friday after gathering 60,000 signatures from Portland voters (it only needed 34,000.) Lee says the volume of signatures speaks to the public enthusiasm for the measure, which would place a 1 percent charge on mega-retailers on revenue from Portland sales, excluding groceries and medicine.

So who would be paying up? We’re talking Wells Fargo, Apple, Comcast, and Banana Republic — companies that make over $1 billion in revenue a year and over $500,000 in Portland alone.

Between 40 and 60 percent of the money in the fund would be directed toward renewable energy and energy efficiency projects — half of which must be specifically intended to benefit low-income residents and communities of color. The fund devotes 20-25 percent to clean-energy jobs training that prioritizes women, people of color, and people with disabilities; 10-15 percent to greenhouse gas sequestration programs; and 5 percent to a flexible “future innovation” fund.

It’s the latest instance of social justice advocates and grassroots organizers calling for climate action in the Northwest. In Washington state, a wide coalition introduced a “carbon fee” that’s almost certainly headed to the ballot this November. If passed, it would become the first state law that looks anything like a carbon tax.

This recent wave of ballot initiatives followed some legislative letdowns in the region. Right after a carbon-tax proposal fizzled out in the Washington Senate in March, Oregon lawmakers set aside their plans for a cap-and-trade program. “Maybe Blue States Won’t Take Serious Action on Climate Change,” ran a headline in The Atlantic at the time. The article called into question the narrative we keep hearing — you know, the one about progressive cities and states fighting for climate action when the federal government refuses to.

While elected officials are one way to change policy, ballot initiatives are another — and they’re beginning to look like a hallmark of the Northwest’s climate justice movement.

“We knew that we couldn’t count on our legislators, both at the state and city level,” says Khanh Pham, manager of immigrant organizing at the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon, who served on the steering committee for the Portland Clean Energy Fund.

Initially, Pham says, her group wanted to take the measure to city council — an easier, more familiar way to pass city legislation. But without strong support from their local elected officials, they decided to try and put something on the ballot instead.

She says the Portland Clean Energy Fund would be complementary to other climate policies, such as a statewide carbon price. It’s meant to address the hidden carbon emissions in the products we buy.

“When I buy clothing that comes from China or Vietnam, or food from Peru, there’s a lot of carbon emissions that are baked into those supply chains from these global retailers that are unaccounted for,” Pham says.

Reverend E.D. Mondainé, president of the NAACP Portland Branch and chief petitioner of the Portland Clean Energy Fund.Rick Rappaport / Portland Clean Energy Fund

It’s challenging to raise revenue in Oregon, especially to meet the needs of vulnerable communities, says Tony DeFalco, Verde executive director and one of the initiative’s organizers.

In 2016, Oregon voters shot down Measure 97, an attempt to place a 2.5 percent tax on corporations with more than $25 million a year in Oregon sales. DeFalco says the new initiative wasn’t inspired by that attempt. Measure 97 did, however, suggest that Portland has some appetite for a tax on corporations: 60 percent of the city voted for the measure, which would have spent the money on education, health care, and senior services.

Still, the groups behind the measure know they’re up against a challenge. There’s already a PAC, Keep Portland Affordable, that’s fighting the new initiative.

“We knew that we needed to be organizing in communities beyond our own to win this,” Pham says. “It’s been really eye-opening to see the power that a coalition like ours can build — a green-brown coalition.”

Portland is 78 percent white, making it the whitest big city in America. But communities of color have always been in Portland, says Lee, and her group is seeking to make them more visible. This ballot initiative is one such effort, she says:

“It’s a very clear statement that we are here, we are leading on policy, and we are also building political power.”

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Should big corporations pay for clean energy? Portland voters will decide.

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More than 100 cities around the globe get most of their electricity from renewables.

by LatishaQ30 Posted on February 27, 2018

Facing backlash from professors, Tennessee Technological University president Philip B. Oldham sent a letter to EPA administrator Scott Pruitt on Monday asking him to ignore the results of a study produced by his own university.

Here’s what happened.

Tennessee Republican Representative Diane Black, who has been pushing the EPA to adopt looser regulations for big trucks, asked Pruitt to roll back regulations on a certain kind of freight truck called a glider last July.

Previous EPA tests found gliders produce somewhere between 40 and 50 times more pollution than new trucks, but a study from Tennessee Tech published in 2016 found that gliders produce about the same levels of emissions as other trucks.

It turns out that the largest manufacturer of gliders, Tennessee-based Fitzgerald Glider Kits, funded the study and offered to build the university a spanking new research center to boot.

In November, Pruitt cited the study when he announced plans to ease up regulations on gliders. Faculty at Tennessee Tech asked the university to denounce the study on Friday, arguing that, among other things, it was a) conducted by an unsupervised graduate student and b) unverified. Then, on Wednesday, the EPA said in a statement that Pruitt’s decision didn’t have anything to do with the controversial study. … OK.

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More than 100 cities around the globe get most of their electricity from renewables.

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There’s new evidence that facts really do make a difference.

by FrancesRosas Posted on January 5, 2018

On Thursday, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke held a press conference to discuss the Department of the Interior’s intentions for drilling rights in American-controlled waters. In brief: The Arctic, Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and possibly parts of the Pacific are pretty much all fair game now. The new policy would encompass “the largest number of lease sales ever proposed,” Zinke said.

It’s a direct take-back of the plan that the Obama administration finalized in November 2016. Those rules, which protected the Arctic and Atlantic seas from new drilling, were supposed to hold until 2022. But President Trump has long claimed the legal authority, and intention, to reverse it.

Conservation groups will almost certainly challenge this new draft plan in court. And a bipartisan group of local and state officials also oppose new drilling in some of these areas. In June, 14 House Republicans issued a joint letter opposing drilling off the Atlantic. Florida Governor Rick Scott joined the opposition Thursday, saying that his “top priority is to ensure that Florida’s natural resources are protected.”

Overall, more than 100 lawmakers — along with plenty of governors, attorneys general, and the U.S. Defense Department — oppose the plan.

Just last week, the Interior Department’s rollback of drilling safety regulations after the 2009 Deepwater Horizon spill cited their “unnecessary … burden” on industry.

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There’s new evidence that facts really do make a difference.

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Oil companies just got a surprise New Years tax break.

by GCVBlondel Posted on January 5, 2018

On Thursday, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke held a press conference to discuss the Department of the Interior’s intentions for drilling rights in American-controlled waters. In brief: The Arctic, Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and possibly parts of the Pacific are pretty much all fair game now. The new policy would encompass “the largest number of lease sales ever proposed,” Zinke said.

It’s a direct take-back of the plan that the Obama administration finalized in November 2016. Those rules, which protected the Arctic and Atlantic seas from new drilling, were supposed to hold until 2022. But President Trump has long claimed the legal authority, and intention, to reverse it.

Conservation groups will almost certainly challenge this new draft plan in court. And a bipartisan group of local and state officials also oppose new drilling in some of these areas. In June, 14 House Republicans issued a joint letter opposing drilling off the Atlantic. Florida Governor Rick Scott joined the opposition Thursday, saying that his “top priority is to ensure that Florida’s natural resources are protected.”

Overall, more than 100 lawmakers — along with plenty of governors, attorneys general, and the U.S. Defense Department — oppose the plan.

Just last week, the Interior Department’s rollback of drilling safety regulations after the 2009 Deepwater Horizon spill cited their “unnecessary … burden” on industry.

Originally posted here – 

Oil companies just got a surprise New Years tax break.

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Will Trump’s EPA Greenlight a Pesticide Known to Damage Kids’ Brains?

by WolfganHQOJ Posted on March 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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By Friday, President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency will have to make a momentous decision: whether to protect kids from a widely used pesticide that’s known to harm their brains—or protect the interests of the chemical’s maker, Dow AgroSciences.

The pesticide in question, chlorpyrifos, is a nasty piece of work. It’s an organophosphate, a class of bug killers that work by “interrupting the electrochemical processes that nerves use to communicate with muscles and with other nerves,” as the Pesticide Encyclopedia puts it. Chlorpyrifos is also an endocrine disrupter, meaning it can cause “adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune effects,” according to the National Institutes of Health.

Major studies from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the University of California-Davis, and Columbia University have found strong evidence that low doses of chlorpyrifos inhibits kids’ brain development, including when exposure occurs in the womb, with effects ranging from lower IQ to higher rates of autism. Several studies—examples here, here, and here—have found it in the urine of kids who live near treated fields. In 2000, the EPA banned most home uses of the chemical, citing risks to children.

Stephanie Engel, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina and a co-author of the Mount Sinai paper, says the evidence that chlorpyrifos exposure causes harm is “compelling”—and is “much stronger” even than the case against BPA (bisphenol A), the controversial plastic additive. She says babies and fetuses are particularly susceptible to damage from chlorpyrifos because they metabolize toxic chemicals more slowly than adults do. And “many adults” are susceptible, too, because they lack a gene that allows for metabolizing the chemical efficiently, Engel adds.

But even after banning chlorpyrifos from the home, the EPA allowed farms to continue spraying it, and while its US use has declined in recent years, it remains quite high, widely used on corn and soybeans in the Midwest and on fruit, vegetable, and orchard crops in Washington state, California, and the Southeast. California is home to about fifth of all the chlorpyrifos applied on US farms. There, the main target crops are alfalfa, almonds, pistachios, walnuts, tomatoes, and strawberries.

In October 2015, after a review spanning more than a decade, the EPA concluded that exposure to chlorpyrifos posed an unacceptable risk to human health, both from residues on food and in drinking water, and proposed a new rule that would effectively ban farm use of it. The agency also expressed concern about “workers who mix, load and apply chlorpyrifos to agricultural and other non-residential sites and workers re-entering treated areas after application.”

The EPA then dragged its feet on finalizing the rule; but in August 2016, a US Federal Appeals court demanded that a decision be made by March 31, 2017, chastising the agency for its “continued failure to respond to the pressing health concerns presented by chlorpyrifos.”

A few moths after that order, of course, Trump won the presidency, and so his EPA team will make the final decision on chlorpyrifos. Uh-oh. Trump often trumpets his own hostility to regulation and has backed it up by proposing a 31 percent cut in the EPA’s budget. Before taking office, Trump looked to Myron Ebell of the hyper-libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute to lead the EPA’s transition. Ebell focuses mainly on denying climate change and promoting fossil fuels, but as I noted in November, CEI runs a website, SafeChemicalPolicy.org, that exists to downplay the health and ecological impacts of pesticides.

Trump’s pick to lead the EPA, former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, is a non-scientist with little track record in assessing the health risks posed by chemicals. But he does hew to Trump’s general hostility to regulation. At his confirmation hearings, Pruitt couldn’t name a single EPA regulation he supports, and he even declined to say whether he’d finalize the EPA’s proposed ban on asbestos.

Meanwhile, Dow and the pesticide industry trade group Croplife America are pushing the EPA to backtrack on the chlorpyrifos ban. “The court ordered EPA to make a final decision on the petition by March 31, 2017, but did not specify what that decision should be,” Dow noted in a November 10 press release urging the agency to maintain the status quo.

Dow AgroScience’s parent company, Dow Chemical, has also been buttering up Trump. The company contributed $1 million to the president’s inaugural committee, the Center for Public Integrity notes. In December, Dow Chemical Chairman and CEO Andrew Liveris attended a post-election Trump rally in the company’s home state of Michigan, and used the occasion to announce plans to create 100 new jobs and bring back another 100 more from foreign subsidiaries. Around the same time, Trump named Liveris chair of the American Manufacturing Council, declaring the chemical exec would “find ways to bring industry back to America.” (Dow has another reason beside chlorpyrifos’ fate to get chummy with Trump: its pending mega-merger with erstwhile rival DuPont, which still has to clear Trump’s Department of Justice.)

Kristin S. Schafer, policy director for the Pesticide Action Network, says it would be highly unusual for the EPA to backtrack on a decision to ban a chemical after so strongly signaling that it would. (PAN is one of the advocacy groups that sued the EPA in 2014 over its previous lack of action on chlorpyrifos.) But she added that “all bets are off with this administration.”

She pointed out that the EPA and Dow have been battling over the chemical since the Clinton administration. Back in 1996, the agency fined the company $732,000 for failing to disclose more than 100 reports of chlorpyrifos poisoning. “These reports are particularly important,” the agency complained, because chemicals enter the marketplace without any human testing, and poisoning notices “may document effects not seen in animal studies, or indicate areas which warrant further research.” Most of those alleged poisoning incidences involved exposure in the home—chlorpyrifos was then the most-used household and yard insect-killer. By 2000, as noted above, the EPA had seen fit to ban most home uses of the insect killer.

In an analysis of the risks posed by chlorpyrifos released in November 2016, the EPA crunched data on residues found in food and compared them to the levels at which the chemical can harm the most vulnerable populations: kids and women of child-bearing age. The results (found on page 23 of the EPA doc) are startling. Natural Resources Defense Council researchers turned them into this handy graphic:

NRDC

It would be quite something for the Trump administration to dismiss such overwhelming evidence from EPA scientists and continue allowing chlorpyrifos to be sprayed on crops with few restrictions. But he has already displayed a willingness to trash the agency’s rule-making process to placate his Big Ag supporters.

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Will Trump’s EPA Greenlight a Pesticide Known to Damage Kids’ Brains?

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The Economy Is Not Booming

by UPNKatia977560 Posted on March 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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Neil Irwin writes about the fabulous Trump economy:

The stock market reached yet another new high on Wednesday, the latest development to make a mockery of what savvy economic commentators thought they knew about the world.

Consider how things looked one year ago. The world economy seemed hopelessly trapped in a cycle of low growth and inflation. Markets recoiled at the mere possibility that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates. Populist political insurgencies seemed to threaten yet more financial market chaos.

Now, interest rates and inflation forecasts have risen substantially from last winter’s lows; financial markets are shrugging off — or even rallying at the possibility of — imminent Fed rate increases; and it is all taking place during Donald J. Trump’s presidency.

Why do we keep hearing this? Once again, here’s the S&P 500 since the end of the Great Recession. I’ve even adjusted it for inflation just to be super fair:

There nothing there. The stock market is growing at precisely the same rate as it has for the past eight years. If you zoom in and take look at the S&P 500 just since Election Day, you see the same thing: it’s been bouncing tightly around a trend line the entire time. There has been no rally at the possibility of interest rate increases from the Fed.

As for inflation, I’ve already dealt with that today. It’s been closely following a trendline too, and literally nothing new has happened since the election. However, it is true that inflationary expectations started rising last June—though a little context helps here:

If you start your chart in mid-2016, you can make it look like inflationary expectations are taking off like a rocket. But in reality, we’re still nowhere close to where we were five years after the end of the Great Recession, and expectations have flattened out in the past couple of months.

Finally, economic growth. You can talk about animal spirits all you want, but GDP growth in the US has been running steadily between 1 percent and 3 percent since 2010. Last quarter it was 1.9 percent, and there’s no particular reason to think it’s about to take a sustained jump. As for the rest of the world, the IMF doesn’t seem especially optimistic:

US growth might be a little sluggish, but it’s still a lot better than China and Europe, which are projected to decline in 2017 and 2018. The rest of the world will do a little better, but only a little.

However, there is one part of the economy that has unquestionably been booming since Trump was elected: big Wall Street banks.

Wall Street has been kicking major ass since November 8. And why not? The economy may or may not be booming, but they’re pretty sure that Trump is going to lower their taxes and ease up on all those pesky regulations that Obama tried to force on them. If I were a big bank, I’d be pretty excited too.

I’m not especially trying to badmouth the economy here. It’s doing fine, if not great. Growth is decent, wages are showing signs of life, we’re getting close to full employment, and inflation is under control. As labor markets tighten, we might even some real improvement in wages and living standards. That’s not bad, especially compared to the rest of the world. But there’s really not much evidence that we’ve been in any kind of boom times since November. Growth is steady, the stock market is steady, employment is steady, and inflation is steady. Just because Wall Street is excited doesn’t mean they know something we don’t.

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The Economy Is Not Booming

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California’s drought causes a lot more pain than brown lawns and empty swimming pools.

by Oliva01Ush Posted on January 10, 2017

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, released a report Tuesday morning that adds up the many ways in which the incoming Trump administration could enrich the world’s largest oil company.

The report comes a day before Rex Tillerson, Exxon’s former CEO, starts his nomination hearing to be President-elect Trump’s secretary of state.

In that role, Tillerson could do a lot for his former employer. The oil giant has massive holdings in foreign oil reserves and remains one of the biggest investors in the Canadian tar sands, with rights worth around $277 billion at current prices.

As it happens, the State Department is responsible for approving the fossil fuel infrastructure that could bring Canadian tar sands oil to the U.S. market. Remember the Keystone XL pipeline? It could come back from the dead and get approved by Tillerson.

Tillerson could also undo sanctions on Russia that have blocked Exxon’s projects there, including a deal with Rosneft, the Russian state oil company, worth roughly $500 billion.

And then there are the Trump administration’s domestic plans to lift every restriction on extracting oil from public lands and offshore. The CAP report also figures that Trump’s Department of Justice is unlikely to investigate Exxon’s effort to mislead the public about climate change. Tally all the benefits and you get nearly $1 trillion.

So who was the biggest winner of the November election? According to the CAP report, ExxonMobil.

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California’s drought causes a lot more pain than brown lawns and empty swimming pools.

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ExxonMobil could reap as much as $1 trillion under Trump, report says.

by divorcemom4783 Posted on January 10, 2017

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, released a report Tuesday morning that adds up the many ways in which the incoming Trump administration could enrich the world’s largest oil company.

The report comes a day before Rex Tillerson, Exxon’s former CEO, starts his nomination hearing to be President-elect Trump’s secretary of state.

In that role, Tillerson could do a lot for his former employer. The oil giant has massive holdings in foreign oil reserves and remains one of the biggest investors in the Canadian tar sands, with rights worth around $277 billion at current prices.

As it happens, the State Department is responsible for approving the fossil fuel infrastructure that could bring Canadian tar sands oil to the U.S. market. Remember the Keystone XL pipeline? It could come back from the dead and get approved by Tillerson.

Tillerson could also undo sanctions on Russia that have blocked Exxon’s projects there, including a deal with Rosneft, the Russian state oil company, worth roughly $500 billion.

And then there are the Trump administration’s domestic plans to lift every restriction on extracting oil from public lands and offshore. The CAP report also figures that Trump’s Department of Justice is unlikely to investigate Exxon’s effort to mislead the public about climate change. Tally all the benefits and you get nearly $1 trillion.

So who was the biggest winner of the November election? According to the CAP report, ExxonMobil.

Taken from:

ExxonMobil could reap as much as $1 trillion under Trump, report says.

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