Tag: Biden

Freedom’s Warrior: Timothy Snyder


Chances are you don’t know who Timothy Snyder is, though all who love a free Ukraine should. Snyder is an esteemed centrist Yale historian, graduate of Brown University (B.A.) and the University of Oxford (D. Phil).

Snyder specializes in central and eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. Fluent in English, German, Polish, and Ukrainian, he reads in ten languages.

He’s also a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Science in Vienna. Prolific, Snyder has authored sixteen books to date, translated into forty languages, with a forthcoming book to be published in September, 2024.

Raised by Quaker parents in Ohio with leftist leanings, there’s a moral insistence conveyed in unadorned prose throughout his many books. In his classes, he uses no notes and with ease can blend Plato, Hegel, DuBois, and polymath René Girard to make his point (Baird, The Guardian, March 23, 2023).

His international awards are numerous. They include Carnegie and Guggenheim fellowships and Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought. He was a Marshall scholarship student at Oxford.

I hadn’t anticipated an ardent defense of Ukraine, buttressed from someone at Yale, but there he was, Timothy Snyder, forthright, unapologetic, in his op-ed appearance in the New York Times:

“As in the 1930s, democracy is in retreat around the world and fascists have moved to make war on their neighbors. If Russia wins in Ukraine, it won’t be just the destruction of a democracy by force, though that is bad enough. It will be a demoralization for democracies everywhere. Even before the war, Russia’s friends — Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban, Tucker Carlson — were the enemies of democracy. Fascist battlefield victories would confirm that might makes right, that reason is for the losers, that democracies must fail” (NYT, May 19, 2022).

I’ve been following Snyder ever since.

Snyder has his detractors, of course, some regarding him more as a pundit, offering personal opinion in the guise of expertise. For a good summation, and counterpointing (see LA Review of Books, Unshared History, Oct. 16, 2012).

His Marxist critics principally object to his inclusion of Russia as fascist under Putin, as they like to reserve the term for their right wing opponents. Historically, fascism was a term used by the Soviets to denounce Nazis and other factions opposed to its dictates.

Snyder answers that “People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism. But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin. It has a cult of the dead, organized around World War II. It has a myth of a past golden age of imperial greatness, to be restored by a war of healing violence — the murderous war on Ukraine” (NYT, May 19, 2022).

If you’re curious about Snyder’s political biases, he endorsed Biden in 2020 and in a Guardian interview, shared, “I vote Democrat!” He sees Trump as an autocrat appealing to popular prejudices inimical to American democracy’s survival. Trump’s policies are about making White people feel comfortable.

Snyder’s immediate concern, however, is the war in Ukraine, about to enter its third year, pitting a David against a Goliath, pitiless and unpausing in attacks on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure in a crucial struggle presently overshadowed by events in Gaza.

To his credit, Snyder has tried valiantly to keep the Ukrainian conflict center-stage: “If Ukraine does not win, we can expect decades of darkness” (NYT, May 19, 2022).

Hospitals, churches, shopping centers, apartment dwellings, it’s all fair game to Putin, whose aim is to inflict maximum terror, destroy food supplies, disrupt the electricity grid, and deny water resources to a nation he regards as historically integral to the Russian empire.

Much of Putin’s onslaught comes from not only cruise missiles, but thousands of drones, many of them supplied by North Korea and Iran.

The Biden administration and its NATO allies have been slow to respond. Patriot defense batteries are just now arriving, antiquated, and short of the seven President Zelensky says Ukraine needs to ward off the daily aerial assaults.

In contrast, Israel has 32 up-to-date batteries proven highly effective against Iran’s massive missile and drone response of April 14, 2024 (Defense Express, April 15, 2024).

If Ukrainian skies are safer now, it’s because Timothy Snyder stepped in, not the White House, raising $2,300,000 for Safe Skies, a program allowing Ukraine to install thousands of sensors throughout eight Ukrainian regions.

Safe Skies provides an early-warning alert and rapid response to drones and cruise missiles: “I visited one of the sites and saw some of the technology at work, as well as the impressive cooperation between the Ministry of Digital Transformation and the armed forces,” Snyder said (The Free Press, Substack, August 17, 2024).

Donations were largely individual worldwide, with a few corporations also contributing.

We nearly lost Snyder in 2019 when, feeling ill, he resorted to ER in New Haven, spending seventeen hours there, before being diagnosed with a baseball-sized tumor in his liver along with sepsis. Snyder would subsequently spend the next three months in five hospitals.

But you don’t mess with Snyder, who kept notes on his hospital sojourn, the later basis of a scathing indictment of American healthcare: Our Malady:
Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary.

Thankfully, he’s still with us, a boon for freedom lovers everywhere,

–rjoly

The Lights Are Flashing Red

Famed entomologist E. O. Wilson passed into infinity in December, 2021.
He was 92.

I came upon him late in my life, but not too late for him to have left me with a reverence for his boundless intellect, inveterate inquisitiveness, and fervent championing of our fellow creatures, mostly outside human ken, myriad species vital to Man’s survival, yet victims of humanity’s arrogant trespass.

Recently, an extended research project, launched by the World Wildlife Fund, revealed that of the 32,000 species it analyzed, 69% of them are in decline. Shockingly, 2.5% of mammals, fish, reptiles, birds and amphibians have gone extinct just since 1970 (World Wildlife Report).

While species extinction surely is an integral fact of our 4.5 billion old planet’s history, the salient evidence of natural selection favoring those able to adapt to largely inveterate climate distillations, several near-Earth object (NEOs) visitations, volcanic acidification of oceans and acid rain, impacting land chemistry, their repetition has become marginalized by evolution’s new arbiter of destiny, homo sapiens.

“The message is clear and the lights are flashing red,” says WWF International’s Director General Marco Lambertini, one of the report’s authors.

Climate change threatens the next massive die-off, witnessed in every day record breaking temperatures, accelerating violent storms, rising sea levels, droughts, and massive fires.

Meanwhile, we continue to pour heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. All of this affects habitat, destroying the intricate ecological web that sustains us.

It doesn’t make for breaking news headlines, but should, that the Arctic
is warming four times faster than the rest of our planet, threatening the demise of the jet stream, resulting in still more climate instability.

We live our lives addicted to trivia, fingers in our ears, indifferent to the existential challenge that poses our extinction. It seems a human predilection to forfeit the future for indulgence in the ephemeral present. Rome burns while Nero plays his fiddle.

Thus far, efforts to mitigate climate change and restore balance have failed to achieve their targets. We even have a candidate running for the presidency who’s pledged to roll back environmental regulations.

Not to be outdone, we have President Biden’s recent approval of the Willow Project (March 1923), allowing ConocoPhillip’s massive oil drilling rights on Alaska’s North Slope in the National Petroleum Reserve, despite his campaign promise he’d prohibit drilling on public lands (The Willow Project).

We knew where Trump stood, but we trusted Biden, whose administration has also approved the auctioning off of 73 million acres of waters in the Gulf of Mexico to offshore oil and gas drilling interests, encompassing an area twice the size of the Willow Project (Common Dreams).

Universal human-induced loss of forest, wetlands, and ecosystems hastens the trajectory of apocalyptic consequence for future generations.

Meanwhile, beleaguered polar bears attempt to adapt, but aren’t succeeding. Given the melting ice, they cannot access their traditional foods, resulting in their numbers declining 30% since 1980 (Polar bear decline).

Penguins haven’t fared any better, their numbers declining up to 10% (Penguins declining).

Truth be known, we’re approaching a tipping point at which the ecosystem collapses.

E. O. Wilson rightly faulted humans for earth’s crisis: “Deeming ourselves rulers of the biosphere and its supreme achievement, we believe ourselves entitled to do anything to the rest of life we wish. Here on Earth our name is Power” (Half-Earth: our Planet’s Fight for Life).

Each species is its own miracle. By the century’s end, most of today’s faltering species will be gone:

No birdsong to greet the new day,
No crickets rubbing their wings;
An absence of croaking frogs at the pond,
Zinging dragonflies but memory.
Amid parched landscape, a wounding silence.

–rjoly

Let’s not change horses in midstream: The case for another Biden term


The news hadn’t bode well for Joe Biden even before his disastrous debate with Trump.

The NYT, tracking 47 polls, shows Biden trailing Democratic senate candidates in the upcoming election in all, but one poll, where he’s tied.

His low polling doesn’t come as a rebuke of his policies, at least among Democrats. If one rightly judges the merits of a presidency by its ability to promote change bettering America, Biden outpaces his predecessors, including Obama, putting him in good company with Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.

The problem is that most voters view Biden as lacking the physical and mental capacity to carry out the duties of office for another four years.

His ninety minute confrontation with Trump simply buttressed the public’s hesitancy.

Watching the debate was painful for me. Biden seemed laboring to reach the podium, stuttering repeatedly, losing his train of thought on one occasion, digressing in several of his responses, and looking down repeatedly as if searching for a response prepared by his handlers.

It was like watching a boxer, trapped in the ring corner, staggered by repeated blows.

Trump’s best line nailed it: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”

A healthy, nimble candidate would have atomized Trump quickly in fact-checking rebuttal. Trump was his usual self, hyperbolizing and mendacious, though to his credit, he exercised discipline in not interrupting his opponent.

Though just four years younger than Biden at 77, Trump came across as consistently energetic. “It seemed like a thirty year difference,” one reporter said.

So where do we go from here?

Despite a groundswell of party cohorts urging his withdrawal from the race, seconded by formerly friendly media, Biden is unlikely to heed their counsel—that is, unless there occurs another stumble, both literally and figuratively.

But here’s my take: With six weeks to the Democratic National Convention, August 19-21, an open convention would produce political chaos with a rush of candidates, inadequately assessed.

Kamala Harris is the likely designee. Biden, of course, could immediately resign, allowing Harris to assume the presidency. Any other choice, say a white male replacement at the convention, would spell unmitigated disaster, and assure a Trump victory.

Black and brown voters would abandon ship. As Areva Martin, a California convention delegate pledged to Biden, put it: “If you pick a white man over Kamala Harris, black women, I can tell you this, we gon’ walk away, we gon’ blow the party up.”

The caveat, however, is the improbability of Harris winning in November, polls indicating she enjoys even less favorability than the president.

I say, better not to panic. I believe Biden can still win. Twenty percent of Republicans distain Trump. In a close election, they could provide the margin of victory for Biden, whether by crossing over or not voting a presidential preference. I think it reasonable they’ll do just that.

As for a future four years, if Biden can’t carry out his duties, he can either resign, with Harris succeeding to office, or the Congress can implement the 25th Amendment, Section Four:

“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

Let’s not change horses in midstream. We can still win and smooth out any winkles. The alternative is unthinkable.

—rj

Biden plays politics: The Gaza fiasco


On one hand, President Biden urges a ceasefire in the nearly six month Gaza conflict; on the other, he has stealthily authorized a potent new military aid package to Israel that includes jets, 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs.

Although 2000 pound bombs are capable of taking out whole city blocks and have been abandoned by most Western militaries for employment in urban locales, they have dominated Israel’s aerial assault on Gaza, with the death toll currently estimated at 33,000, the vast majority of them civilians.

Anonymous Pentagon sources disclose the armament transfer includes transfer of 25 F-35A fighter jets and engines at a cost of 2.5 billion.
Biden isn’t mandated to disclose any of this to lawmakers since Congress had approved the transfer in 2008, presently unfulfilled.

Israel is currently the largest recipient of U.S. aid since the 1970s, receiving on average $1.8 billion in military and $1.2 billion in economic aid annually.

Such aid incentivizes documented Israeli violations of Palestinian rights by humane organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. They have included ongoing abusive detention practices (including the torture of prisoners), restrictions on freedom of movement of Palestinians, the targeting of medical personnel and facilities, and severe damage to infrastructure such as water and electricity to Palestinian civilians prior to Israel’s current Gaza incursion.

It does not move the needle to a two state solution.

All of this comes even as Biden expresses concern over a pending Israeli assault on the alleged remaining Hamas stronghold of Rafah along the Egyptian border and UN warnings of incipient mass starvation. 1.2 million Gaza refugees have sought refuge in this enclave.

Jewish pressure weighs heavily on the Biden administration in an election year with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee donating millions to unseat Democrats deemed unfriendly to Israel. A recent Pew Research survey indicates 80% of American Jews regard aid to Israel as essential.

Those constituencies calling for suspension of aid to Israel are branded as anti-Semite, with surging efforts to pass legislation abridging their First Amendment right to free speech.

Republicans, even more than Democrat leaning Jews, have vigorously supported aid to Israel, though increasingly resistant to approving aid to a besieged Ukraine.

Biden would do well to mind an increasingly assertive Muslim-American electorate that threatens to boycott him in November.

Meanwhile, any full scale attack on densely populated Rafah, gateway for food convoys, would conceivably result in thousands, not hundreds, of killed and maimed.

The morally compromised Biden administration has been complicit in Israel’s blitzkrieg that includes mosques, churches, hospitals and refugee camps, abetted by American armaments.

For this, the U.S. proves deserving of world condemnation.

The elephant in the room is Biden; but then again, endeavors to dislodge him by voting for his Republican adversary are surely non sequitur.

Conversely, efforts to encourage divestiture at home and abroad of Israel merit encouragement. They brought down South Africa’s apartheid regime.

America must do what is right, not what is easy.

–rj

Oh, my god! The Political Morass Confronting Americans

Oh, my god! We’re all in trouble. Here we are, facing a presidential election, caught in a catch-22 situation, the choice between a president clearly showing incipient symptoms of mental decline, and an ex-President promising revenge and demagoguery. Biden’s lapses have been widely reported in the press for some time: tumbling on aircraft steps, lingering pauses in speech delivery, mix-up in identifying political leaders, befuddled recall of events.

Now comes the President’s frantically called press gathering, just 23 minutes warning in the aftermath of special prosecutor Robert Hur’s devastating findings on Biden’s alleged national security lapses: storage of top secret files in his Delaware home and sharing of classified information with the ghostwriter of his memoirs, Mark Zwonitzer.

Hur’s office considered charging Zwoniker, who has been cooperative, but the ghostwriter had previously destroyed the interview tapes with Biden when he learned of the special counsel probe, resulting in the improbability of a conviction for lack of evidence.

Hur found the president’s recall of how the classified documents ended-up in his basement as “hazy.” He had said he found them in his then rented house in Virginia.

What really instigated Biden’s frenetic press appearance was probably Hur’s reporting the President’s inability to recall when his son Beau died of brain cancer: “I don’t need anyone, I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away,” the President angrily retorted.-

Biden couldn’t even recall the dates he’d been vice-president.

The reality is that his combative press conference only seems to lend credence to Hur’s allegations of a President of “diminished faculties in advancing age.”

About to leave the room, Biden returned to the lectern to respond to a reporter’s belated question on the Gaza crisis. Committing yet another gaffe of mistaken identity, piling up in recent days to the chagrin of his staff, Biden confused Egyptian leader Abdel Fatah al-Sisi as “the president of Mexico.”

Several days earlier in Nevada, he confused deceased French president Francois Mitterand with current French president Emmanuel Macron. Mitterand died in 2015.

This past Wednesday, Biden said he had interviewed Germany’s chancellor Helmut Kohl in 2021. Kohl died in 2017.

I think of Ronald Reagan in his second term, then America’s oldest president, falling asleep in cabinet meetings. A few years later, 1994, Reagan announced his Alzheimer diagnosis. The signs, however, of its progression had already been evident while in office.

I wish our President well, but I fear the fallout of mental facility in a nuclear age, the challenge of climate warming, the looming threat of a Russia-China-Iran alliance, and still more, to nightmare my sleep.

Hiding presidential infirmity has a long history, embracing Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. We’ve mustered through so far, but why take the risk?

Faulting Republican Robert Hur constitutes its own partisanship.

As Democratic strategist James Carville candidly put it, “I don’t know how you get out of this.”

–rj

US Complicity: A Lack of Political Will


KHAN YUNIS, GAZA -t. (Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

If ever there’s been a clarion call for the United States to abandon its military support for Israel, it’s now. Prime Minister Natanyahu has made it clear to Washington that there will be no Palestinian state on the West Bank, rejecting Secretary of State Blinken’s recent plea for a two state resolution as Israel’s surest means to security.

Nor will the Prime Minister, a friend of Donald Trump since the 1980s, scale back Israel’s offensive in Gaza until total victory and return of remaining hostages is achieved.

As I write, nearly 25,000 Palestinians have been killed, two-thirds of them women and children; hospitals, mosques, churches and refugee camps bombed; and a frightened civilian population, 1.9 million of them, or 80% of the Gaza population, herded into a southern corridor, and confronted with disease and starvation.

This constitutes the true genocide, which South Africa has brought to the attention of the International Court of Justice (ICC), the UN’s highest court. Fifty-six other nations support the suit, but not the United States and UK. The European Union has chosen silence.

KHAN YUNIS, GAZA – General view of buildings which were destroyed during Israeli bombardment. Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

South Africa has also filed a referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC), not to be conflated with the ICJ, though both are located in the Hague. The ICJ can issue arrest warrants, as it did for Vladimir Putin, who must now avoid signatory countries that include South Africa.

What’s not received ample attention is the economic plight Palestinians face. Before Hamas’ October 7 incursion, 400,000 Palestinians were employed by Israel, largely in construction, agriculture and service sectors. I87,000 Gazans have had their work permits canceled; similarly, 167,000 Palestinians on the West Bank.

In the meanwhile, Israel has set up worker recruiting offices in India and Sri Lanka, with the goal of importing between 50,000 to 100,000 replacements.

This may be part of a long term stategy by Israeli nationalists to encourage Palestinians to leave Israel. Take, for example, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s call for Palestinian residents of Gaza to leave, replaced by Israelis, who could “make the desert bloom.”

Unfortunately, the Biden administration, despite its call for a cease fire and a two state solution, is unwilling to risk political capital and rebuff Netanyahu by suspending military aid to Israel.

By default, it’s rendered the US complicit in Israel’s criminality, angered Progressives, alienated the Muslim community, made the US a global atavar of hypocrisy, and risks dragging the country into a wider conflict, inflicting incalculable consequences, both home and abroad.

–rj

The Truth Must be Told: The Tragedy of Gaza


As we all know, several thousand Gaza Hamas fighters bulldozed their way through an Israeli security fence on October 7, 2023, and committed some of the most barbaric crimes against humanity not seen since Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Holocaust.

More than 1400 Israelis died, most of them civilians, some slaughtered in nearby fields while celebrating the ending of Sukkot, an annual fall event in the Jewish calendar; others, in their beds on nearby kibbutzim. Reports are that Hamas insurgents raped, pillaged, and slaughtered even children, including babies. More than 200 civilians and soldiers were taken hostage, including citizens of other countries. Israeli wounded stands at 4600.

The Israeli response has been unceasingly withering in Gaza, Prime Minister Netanyahu declaring war on Hamas, calling up 300,000 reservists, bombing Gaza’s civilian infrastructure daily, and ordering one million Gaza civilians to evacuate to southern Gaza.

A land invasion of Gaza by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is anticipated. They will face up to 50,000 Hamas fighters, dispersed in a labyrinthian tunnel weave, threatening a Stalingrad consequence of casualties in house-to-house fighting. American pressure has slowed any launching of an immediate invasion, but not halted the daily bombing, killing 700 civilians in the last twenty-four hours, half of them women and children.

Hezbollah, to the north in Lebanon, have been firing rockets into nearby Israeli border towns, forcing their evacuation and possibly opening a second front in a dangerously escalating Middle East conflict. Iran has pledged to intervene if Israel launches a land invasion of Gaza.

In the meantime, the death toll of Gaza civilians now exceeds 5,000, including more than 2000 children, the cut off of food, water, and energy to Gaza, the forestalling of shipments of humanitarian aid from Egypt, which threatens the closure of hospitals treating thousands of wounded civilians. Mass starvation and disease looms as an aftermath, Israel insisting that hostages be released, despite international calls for restraint and observance of humanitarian values.

Recently, a Christian hospital in Gaza came under rocket attack, killing 500 people among those taking shelter. International intelligence indicates it was an errant Hamas rocket that caused this tragedy. Nonetheless, the World Health Organization has documented 171 Israeli attacks on health care in the occupied Palestinian territory,” killing 473 health workers.

As I write, unrest continues on the West Bank, with some 100 Arab protestors killed. A pending historic security alliance has been withdrawn by the Saudis and Israel’s peaceful relationship with Jordan has been strained. Settler crimes against West Bank farmers have been chronicled over the years, with killing of livestock, destruction of olive groves, and slaying of those who resist.

The U.S. response has been typical, Biden ordering two aircraft carriers into the gulf and threatening to intervene should Hezbollah open a second front.
It has called for a two state settlement for many years, yet overlooked Israeli intransigence. It gives $3 billion in aid annually to Israel and recently concluded a $37 billion loan agreement in military aid. Israel will have access to the F-35, the world’s most advanced fighter jet.

At home, dissenters are regaled as antisemitic. Many, including Democrats, have called for disbandment of Palestinian student campus organizations and denounced the growing Leftist faction in the Democratic Party that includes Bernie Sanders. Frenzied Republicans, increasingly resistant to continuing aid to Ukraine, have no difficulty supporting huge expenditures to Israel. Lindsey Graham says, “Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place!”

There is, in short, a context for Arab and Palestinian resentment and outburst.
We seem to have learned nothing from the rage that lay behind the 9/11 horror. We began two long wars, fought by America’s poor White and Blacks. We lost both. Did Vietnam teach us nothing?

Do we lust for another war? Have we forgotten George Washington’s warning to avoid “entangling alliances”? “The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave” (Farewell Address).

UN secretary-general António Guterres speaks for me: “Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” He likewise condemned Hamas: “No injustice to the Palestinians justifies the appalling attacks by Hamas.”

The Israeli response to Guterres? “Due to his remarks we will refuse to issue visas to UN representatives” (Gilad Erdan, Israel ambassador to the UN). “The time has come to teach them a lesson. Guterres should resign.”

Hamas was elected to power in 2006. There have been no elections since. Does “Israel’s right to defend itself” (Biden) justify its war on Gaza civilians, half of whom are children?

Ultimately an apartheid Israel will reap its own folly. Israel’s growing Arab population will soon outnumber Israelis. It will become a South Africa before Nelson Mandela’s victorious crusade for a liberated biracial nation enjoying equity.

-rj

Update: Protests Continue in Iran

Update:

At least 83 protestors, including women and children, have now been killed in Iran since the beating death of Mahsa Amini by the regime’s morality police. The protests, led by women, continue and will be joined world-wide on Saturday.

The Biden administration would do well not to renew the nuclear treaty with this brutal regime, releasing billions of frozen funds as a payoff for Iran’s signing the treaty. Doing such only advances Iranian repression and exporting of terrorism abroad.

While protests do matter, what hurts regimes like Iran most are freezing their assets and sanctioning trade.

Please support the valiant women of Iran!

The Inflation Reduction Act: Fossil Fuels Become Law

WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 21: Sen. Joe Manchin(D-WV) faces reporters as he arrives at a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee at the Dirksen S.O.B. at the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The so-called Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 promises much, but better read the fine print in this massive 700 page proposal.

A patchwork compromise with coal baron Senator Joe Manchin, its motivation is the Democratic Party leadership’s desperate need for a legislative victory in addressing escalating inflation, the primary concern of American voters, as the mid-term elections loom. Thus the bill’s name. (The previous version was called Build Back Better).

With close analysis, you’ll discover it isn’t up to the hype. While an unprecedented $369bn is dedicated to mitigating climate change, it locks in reliance on fossil fuel expansion by hamstringing the Interior Department: no renewable energy development on public lands unless drilling leases are also offered to oil and gas entities.

As such, this bill is pure political charade. Fossil fuels cause climate change, yet they’re locked into the bill’s provisions. There is no mechanism to phase them out.

What we get is the loosening of regulations regarding environmental review and, horribly, mandated drilling leases in Alaska’s Cook Inlet and the Gulf of Mexico. The result? More pipelines, oil leaks, methane leaks, wilderness lost, species endangered, and continuing temperature rise. In 2016, the U.S. averaged one crude oil spill every other day (undark.org).

There are no caps on carbon admissions!

While the legislation features tax credits for carbon capture and sequestration, the fallout is that this could extend the life of polluting coal plants, exposing the public to toxic fumes, and making it difficult to achieve clean power goals.

Not talked about is an ominous separate agreement to move a bill in September that could potentially weaken protections under the Environmental Policy Act, which grants communities a say in what happens to their local environment. This is subterfuge, pure and simple.

You’re told the legislation will reduce greenhouse gas admissions 40% by 2030 (Rhodium Group, rpg.com). Considering the pressing problems we have with securing energy resources, it’s dangerously possible that fossil fuels will gain the upper hand over renewables, upsetting any trajectory of even-handedness. As is, the Biden administration in early July held its first onshore lease auction, releasing a proposed plan for off shore drilling, despite Biden’s campaign pledge to cease new oil and gas development on federal lands and waters (insideclimatenews.org).

In short, the Inflation Reduction Act takes back what it gives out, a Faustian wager that forfeits the future for a short-sighted political shell game in the present.

I’m not saying there aren’t good things in the bill. And, yes, there are groups like Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, and Earth Justice, urging speedy passage of the legislation. They may be willing to drink the Kool-Aid, but not me, nor should you.

I go by the late E. O. Wilson, “Darwin’s heir,” my icon in environmental matters, who repeatedly denounced such organizations for their compromises, perpetuating environmental demise. They’ve thrown in the towel, their credo, Nature is already gone. We live in the Anthropocene. Wilderness must serve human needs (Wilson, Half–Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life).

This is a climate suicide pact,” comments Brett Hartl, government affairs director for the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). “It’s self-defeating to handcuff renewable energy development to massive new oil and gas extraction.”

–rj

Only the beginning…

Britain is experiencing an unprecedented heat wave today, with temperatures soaring to 104F over much of England. Scientists are apprehensive, their future model scenarios occurring faster than anticipated.

Meanwhile, we continue our dependency on fossil fuels, our president begging Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, yes, the same guy our intelligence names as ordering the killing of Washington Post Saudi critic, Jamal Khashoggi, to increase oil output.

Widespread reports have it that Biden is proposing to open up Alaska’s North Slope wilderness to drilling, despite the Interior Department’s initial draft supplemental impact statement, projecting a thirty year time bomb release of 284 metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

Under the proposal, ConocoPhillips would obtain drilling rights to five federal land sites, along with a processing facility, pipelines to transport oil, gravel roads, and at least one airstrip and a gravel mine site, according to the draft EIS.

The fallout would be consequential to wildlife as well, threatening caribou, polar bears and migratory birds.

Ominously, the Arctic and Antartica, which help cool the earth by reflecting sunlight back into space, are melting faster than other earth regions. Hence, the heat waves increasingly scorching the Earth. The proposal only increases the speed of melting ice, resulting in rising seas, release of methane, and alteration of sea currents such as the Gulf Stream

As I write, Alaska has been burning faster than in the last 80 years, with 500 fires since April of this year, the consequence of rising temperatures, increased vapor with accompanying lightning strikes, and accumulating kindle. 264 fires are currently burning across the state.

While I’m ashamed of Biden’s betrayal of his campaign pledges, what bothers me most is the public’s myopic indulgence to pursue life in a bubble, ignoring the ominous natural signatures to our coming doom.

Unless we amend our ways, our children will have no meaningful future.
—rj