Imagine what a Trump Funeral would look like. After all, Trump turned America into a funeral home with 400,000+ deaths. Except for a birthday call early in his tenure, President Donald Trump's only interaction with the past presidents was at the funeral for one of them, George H.W. Bush. By the end...
Plants
Like Martin Luther objecting to Pope Leo X selling indulgences to raise money for a variety of excesses, the environmental costs of carbon markets far exceed the benefits. Austerity would have denied us Renaissance art which is less at risk in an age of non-fungible tokens. Today the consequences for the planet...
Rye Development is proposing a massive pumped storage power plant uphill from the site of the closed Goldendale smelter, next to the Columbia River. This facility will take over a closed pumped storage plant. Native American tribes, including tribes from Asia, originally migrated to this vicinity as a group with common languages and...
The sparse number of actual carbon capture and sequestration projects plus weak carbon markets amplify the problems of the climate crisis yet to be revisited, post-Trump. Two heartland examples in North Dakota and Texas show how there are several interlocking problems addressing the climate crisis that must be included in future environmental policy. More specifically...
Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech executives will testify before a US congressional committee tomorrow that the number of doses of their Covid-19 vaccines will increase sharply next month. Johnson and Johnson, who expects to get approval for its vaccine later this week, said it will have 20 million doses by March 31. http://www.msn.com/…...
Scientists have successfully cloned an endangered black-footed ferret from the genes of an animal named Willa that had died over thirty years ago. After Willa died, her remains were frozen and sent from Wyoming to San Diego Zoo Global that maintains a bank of frozen tissues for over 1,100 endangered and...
Ted Cruz tried to slither around the coverage of his holiday in Cancun, including an interview on Hannity to offset a series of lies once social media caught him at the airport. #TedFled because he’s really not all about the accountability or even patriotism considering his role in the insurrection. Cruz's...
Texas is the coalmine canary of failures in the GQP’s industrial policy. The “clusterfuzzle” appears to be only in Texas: perhaps they skimmed on costs and failed in winterizing their plants. The structural failure comes from the anti-federal, deregulatory policy of the Texas grid which reveals itself in the disinformation...
Greg Abbott searches for #TexasBlackoout blame in the state’s power utility but Texas deregulated its grid to avoid the very regulations that would have prevented this problem. All in the name of profit. Greg Abbott now even blames the Green New Deal. 88% of Texas electricity is supplied by natural gas...
“In all things of nature, there is something of the marvelous.” ~ Aristotle It is a fact that the biggest threat to our species is not climate change, though it will likely end much of what we experience today, but rather our war on bio-diversity. Bio-diversity is under attack from...
Many Progressives are excited about the upcoming prospective “Green New Deal” which is already taking shape, even before formal Green New Deal legislation. Multi-billion dollar manufacturing plants for electrical vehicle batteries, providing 2000 jobs per plant, are already rising in Michigan and Georgia. Fossil fuel pipelines, already partly built like...
Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice...
The January rains struck parts of NW Oregon with near-biblical storms. Bethany Lake flooded to new heights. Two inches fell overnight and never let up. The Wood Duck Island vanished. The shallow turbid muddy stream turned into a 100-foot-wide version of a real river. While I’ve often joked this weather...
We were warned, now a new study has determined that the Earth’s plants' ability to sequester carbon emissions through photosynthesis will be halved by the 2030s or 2040s from what it is today at ten percent. That kind of loss will turn the natural world into a heat and carbon source, bringing...
We were warned, now a new study has determined that the Earth’s plants’ ability to sequester carbon emissions through photosynthesis will be halved by the 2030s or 2040s from what it is today at ten percent. That kind of loss will turn the natural world into a heat and carbon source, bringing...
Clear and present danger seems to remain operative as Mike Lindell was in a meeting at the Oval Office. All Trump has left are conspiracy fantasies fed by a bedding manufacturer. x How will ever explain to the future that it's 5 pm on the last Friday of Trump's presidency,...
The neoliberals’ “free market” is not going to sequester enough carbon to save the environment. Even Warren Buffett isn’t willing to take a bet on surviving an impending climate crisis catastrophe, because “the rents are too high”. Existential threats have a critical reality, about which ruthless criticism is entailed. Even...
Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo thinks Donald Trump is a great president. She also seems to think he was robbed of reelection through fraud. In other words, it’s really easy to pull the wool — or pigskin, as the case may be — over Bartiromo’s eyes. And here’s the latest proof of...
Unlike one of her predecessors, who had numerous connections to the Trump impeachment and its hinky relations with the Russian oligarchs, Jennifer Granholm will combine clean energy policy and economic recovery. Even without explicit support for the GND, this is a direction 180 degrees from the prior administration's kowtowing to...
Back in April, President Trump issued a hollow order that meatpacking plants remain open, with safety restrictions to be fashioned by the plants’ owners. Even though the Covid-19 virus was ravaging its employees, places like Tyson Foods threatened them with firings if they dared put their health above a slab of...
Trump doesn’t care whether he loses his security deposit. He just wants the chaos of dying meat processors, conspiracy-driven ICU trespassers, and a quarter-million dead Americans from COVID-19. And in foreign policy, Trump’s inviting skunk, gophers, and groundhogs into the crawlspaces before moving out. Washington (CNN) President Donald Trump's order...
Like the counterintelligence limits of the Mueller report, there are still slender skeletons to be revealed in the corruption of US interests. Trump’s inquiry about a strike against Iran last week was not about Iran’s nuclear proliferation as much as it was part of much larger regional conflict among nuclear...
Jo Biden had offered 20 billion to preserve the Amazon. It was ridiculed denied by the Trump of the Tropics, Jair Bolsonaro. Perhaps a similar offer to the nations involved in Africa would be a rational response and likely considered. It’s worth a try. I highly suspect this diary will...
For six years, tadpoles have morphed into tiny chorus frogs in my backyard ponds. But once they’ve turned into frogs I seldom see them again. For the first few days into July, I find them near their birth ponds. Their default move is to hop back into the water for...
I look forward to this MAGA experiment ending in November and being stuffed away in a coffee can, wrapped in a sock, and buried in the backyard at noon on January 20th, 2021. This embarrassing blight on modern American politics and democracy thankfully has an early expiration date, or so...
If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze — Joe Biden Vice President Joe Biden’s climate plan has received rave reviews across the planet. Many have hope that the United States carrot and...
A backyard pond turns oily. A DIY oil test confirms it’s more than iron oxide, I found tiny broken eggs and cat-sized poop nearby (not pictured). I suspect coon. I found knocked over plants in another pond. I put rounded rocks into abandoned birds’ nests and set them on the...
“Oyez! The Summer Session of Frog Court is called to order, Judge Jeramiah Bullfrog presiding,” honked the Bailiff, who was a Canadian goose. In strode two robed judges, who were six foot tall bullfrogs, trying to walk on two legs, but instead hopping from foot to foot. The third bullfrog...
That debate was revelatory, because we were exposed to yet another Trump falsehood about that raking of forest floors, because he’s king Swidden. And we so wanted Joe Biden to ask him “which city”. We did get another Trump ‘sir’ story without the exploding trees. x “In Europe, they live, they have...
Trump's in Ohio today, trying distract us from knowing that the Manhattan DA has grounds to prosecute Trump and his business on these grounds: -Scheme to Defraud -Falsification of Business Records -Insurance Fraud -Criminal Tax Fraud x Q: Who do you think poisoned Alexey Navalny in Russia? TRUMP: Uhhhh … we'll...
which will be running next week in Akron (home of Goodyear), Cleveland, and Youngstown (which should bleed over into PA). Also note — all three cities are areas with a fair number of union workers, many White working class — in other words, the type of folks who were Obama-Trump...
GOP Senators took their three weeks off, as the COVID death toll rises, Some left to campaign for re-election, others to disinform in support of IMPOTUS*. And then there’s Trump corrupting USPS in unprecedented election meddling. All the while, even Trump cannot condemn QAnon’s tacit escalation of Trumpian themes. x Which...
Huffington Post has a piece out about how U.S. Senate candidate, Matt Lieberman (D. GA), self published a book he wrote in 2018 called “Lucius” which is about an old man who believes he owned a slave for all for most of his adult life and how the slave could...
Yes I am SHOUTING. That’s because this is about the most important thing you can read today. The piece is titled How the Pandemic Defeated America and is subtitled “A virus has brought the world’s most powerful country to its knees.” Yong, a staff writer for The Atlantic, actually warned...
Good news for the Arctic, and the entire planet, as Deutsche Bank announced that they were ending financing fossil fuel projects at the tar sands in Alberta, and projects of fossil fuel extraction in the Arctic. Burning the filthy dirty tar sands for energy is far worse than crude oil. The...
Scott Bixby at The Daily Beast has a great piece out that calls out U.S. Senate candidate, John James (R. MI), for following the GOP playbook to talk tough on China as a way to rile up their base. But of course, like pretty much every GOPer trying to make...
WYFP = “What’s Your (F*ing) Problem?” x I'm honored that @SenWarren and @SenBooker cited reporting that @estherhonig and I did for @MotherJones in their letter to meatpacking companies. I hope that theyâÂÂand youâÂÂwill keep an eye out for a new piece by me in the @newrepublic, calling for big meat...
But of course the damsel flies are not really drinking; they are laying eggs. They contort on the edge of a lily pad with their abdomen curved into the water seemingly under the lip of the pad. It’s called ovipositing. I’d seen lots of damselflies joining at the end of their...
Trump went to another COVID “hotspot” and gave an infrastructure speech because it's that week again. CNN and MSNBC had the good taste not to broadcast it. Trump wore no mask, in violation of Atlanta policy. Strange how only GOP governors void local mask mandates, not coincidentally they have higher...
Blake Neff, who bragged that he authored the first draft of Tucker Carlson’s programs, is gone and one can only hope that the reader of the final drafts goes as well. Because “Blake's writing and his points of view didn't affect this show”. Carlson whined about “ghouls” to attempt to reframe...
“Quit being so emotional, Elaine, it’s not about the people, it’s about the money.” Mick Mulvaney to Elaine Duke, acting director of Homeland security in 2017. Of course, he did. Some news outlets stated that he was joking, where have we heard that canard before? If we have learned anything...
The Economist has a great piece out about former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential candidate. The part that I think always deserves emphasis about how Biden has quickly reached out to Bernie Sanders and his team to help draft a progressive agenda that he can implement as president: When Mr...
When you bear hug Trump, this is what you get: ‘Iowa senator Joni Ernst signed on to a letter begging EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler – whom she voted to put into office – to reject retroactive biofuel blending waivers harmful to many Iowa farmers. Ernst and other Senators urged the...
“We have to be aware that climate change and biodiversity loss are stress factors for ecosystems, for humans, for animals, and for the microbiome. Our research shows that if the different axes of the disease pyramid are destabilized, new infectious diseases can be expected, including for humans.” Dirk Schmeller, Université de...