marshall.lewis's blog

Some hard truths, all of which are backed by expert consensus, and all of which encounter major opposition:

First and foremost, you can't ban private health insurance using budget reconciliation. This means that, in order to do full single payer, you need to either a) get to 60 votes in the Senate that support M4A, or b) get 50 votes that support M4A AND support getting rid of the filibuster.

Doubt Cast on Carbon Capture by Stanford Study – “It Usually Increases Air Pollution”
https://scitechdaily.com/doubt-cast-on-carbon-capture-by-stanford-study-...

SYRIA UPDATE: Yesterday, Turkey began ground operations into Syria. Their goal is to take two predominantly Arab cities, Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ayn, that are controlled by the Kurdish-aligned Syrian Democratic Forces. Taking those two cities will cut the main highway connection between the main Kurdish population centers in Kobane canton (to the west) and Cizire canton (to the east).

Elizabeth Warren has been releasing a trickle of climate change policy for what feels like 40 or 50 years now, on such hot issues as fossil fuel leasing on public lands and how much greenhouse gases our military bases emit. As much as I like Warren, I've found her approach to climate policy to be extremely irritating.

Now, at long last, she's finally released the meat and potatoes of her plan. Let's take a look at what she has to say.

CNN announces details for climate crisis town hall
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/27/politics/cnn-climate-crisis-town-hall...

Some questions I hope to see:

I'm starting to think I need to figure out what's going on in Yemen. I've mostly been ignoring the conflict, but it looks like it could be approaching a period of change.

This strikes me as slightly unfair. It is certainly true that the emissions reductions by 2030 matter more than the exact year in was which we reach net zero. (There's expected to be a long period before we reach net zero in which net emissions are extremely low, so a few more years of low emissions won't add substantially to our cumulative emissions. On the other hand, even one more year at our current level of emissions will eat pretty noticeably into our carbon budget.) It's also true that Biden's plan doesn't currently specify a 2030 reduction target.

One interesting thing about the current political situation is that I have literally no idea what's going to happen. Here are a few possibilities:

A) The House votes to impeach, but Mitch McConnell refuses to allow a vote in the Senate. Trump carries out the rest of his term under a cloud. During the debates, Biden calls him a coward and struts around him while clucking like a chicken. The Biden-Buttigieg ticket ekes out a narrow 291-247 victory in 2020. America reaches net zero emissions in 2049.

If the numbers in this article are even remotely accurate, this is a game changer for the fight against climate change, and sets the stage for a major fight within the environmental movement.