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Overnight News Digest for Aug 23, 2023 (It's the CLIMATE edition) [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-08-30

Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, and JeremyBloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.

OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time

Greetings from the frontiers of climate chaos

Last week, my brother’s kid hunkered down in Los Angeles as the city was hit by a one in a thousand tropical cyclone. And my sister’s kid evacuated Kelowna as it was hit by an out of control wildfire.

Just to round things out, my wife, son and I hunkered down in Orlando last night as we were pummeled by the outer bands of Hurricane Idalia, and flew out just after the storm passed north of us (see IronTortoise’s diary, Hurricane Idalia Sends 100-Year-Old Oak Tree Crashing into Florida Governor's Mansion in Tallahassee). So I may include even more climate-related stories in tonight’s post than usual.

U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday said no one could deny that the world is facing a climate crisis, after Hurricane Idalia plowed through the Big Bend region of Florida and forced millions of residents to evacuate. "I don't think anybody can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore," Biden told reporters at the White House. "Just look around. Historic floods. I mean, historic floods. More intense droughts, extreme heat, significant wildfires have caused significant damage.” x #Hurricane #IDALIA in Perry #Florida. As the N eyewall pounded the city. pic.twitter.com/aPfSaZrzvo — Josh Morgerman (@iCyclone) August 30, 2023 Biden has made combating climate change a key goal of his presidency, setting a target of halving U.S. emissions by 2030 from 2005 levels, and enacting hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits to promote electric vehicles. Some Republican lawmakers, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is running to win the Republican presidential nomination, continue to oppose a slew of measures aimed at curbing emissions. x Main Topic: Has Humanity Finally Broken the Climate? via @guardian

On the Extreme Temperature Diary- TUE 8/29/2023 At: https://t.co/DqTUVZvnxD

+many new linked #Idalia #Climate articles@MichaelEMann @KHayhoe @ProfStrachan pic.twitter.com/HAYQiwbpFG — Guy Walton (@climateguyw) August 29, 2023

In 2019 an international team of scientists published a commentary in the celebrated science journal Nature, sounding the alarm of a planet in crisis — and calling for transformative change. x “If we’re right about the tipping points, they’re not marginal,” Lenton tells Grist. “They’re existential risks.” https://t.co/ePVQWAxQdx — David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) August 30, 2023 “We are in a state of planetary emergency,” they wrote, departing from the usual sterility of scientific writing. “The stability and resilience of our planet is in peril.” Yes, they were writing about climate change, but of a particular kind: climate tipping points, elements of the Earth system in which small changes in global temperature can kick off reinforcing loops that ‘tip’ a system into a profoundly different state, accelerating heat waves, permafrost thaw, and coastal flooding — and, in some cases, fueling more warming. The planet has already warmed by roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the Industrial Revolution, and if humans keep flooding the atmosphere with greenhouse gases at the same rate, we’re on track to increase that to 2.7 to 3.1 degrees C (4.9 to 5.6 degrees F) by the end of the century.

At Wednesday's debate, Ramaswamy said he was the "only candidate who's not bought and paid for." That couldn't be further from the truth. x In a shock to absolutely no one, yet another climate denier is revealed to be bought and paid for by fossil fuel execs.



We’d call him a joke, but he’s polling second behind fellow climate-denier Trump in the GOP presidential primary. We can’t let him win.https://t.co/UQ6Ao4tq76 — 350 Action (@350action) August 30, 2023 ...recently, he’s become best known as “the right’s most prominent crusader against climate-conscious investing.” His latest mission: ensure Republican-led states pull their money from big investment firms like BlackRock that are trying (or at least claiming) to make more climate-friendly decisions, and reallocate that money to his firm, Strive Asset Management, which explicitly promises not to invest with the climate in mind. The fossil fuel industry has wanted someone to do this for many years. As we’ve previously reported, the anti-ESG movement—which pushes corporations to reject environmentally and socially conscious investing principles—was originally created by fossil fuel industry operatives to try to delay the renewable energy transition. The movement fizzled in the early 2000s. But it was revived in 2022, when Ramaswamy launched Strive with the help of billionaire investors Peter Thiel and Bill Ackman, as well as the same fossil fuel industry-connected group that spearheaded the original movement.

The Environmental Protection Agency removed federal protections for a majority of the country's wetlands on Tuesday to comply with a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling. The EPA and Department of the Army announced a final rule amending the definition of protected "waters of the United States" in light of the decision in Sackett v. EPA in May, which narrowed the scope of the Clean Water Act and the agency's power to regulate waterways and wetlands. x Thanks to the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling this May, the EPA was forced to remove protections from most of America's wetlands this week.



Harlan Crow's firm lobbied for the rollback while he secretly plied Justice Thomas with gifts.



Anyone see a problem here? — Robert Reich (@RBReich) August 30, 2023 ...A 2006 Supreme Court decision determined that wetlands would be protected if they had a "significant nexus" to major waterways. This year's court decision undid that standard. The EPA's new rule "removes the significant nexus test from consideration when identifying tributaries and other waters as federally protected," the agency said.

Fossil Free Media, a non-profit media organization, installed the ads in cities rocked by heatwaves including Phoenix and Austin x I talked with the Guardian about our @StopBigOil Billboards:



“I think the most important thing that we can do right now is to try and connect the dots between the extreme weather that people are seeing and the fossil fuel industry that’s driving it.”https://t.co/uEwYbMlvUo — Jamie Henn (@jamieclimate) August 29, 2023 Drive down the highways of Phoenix, Arizona; Austin, Texas; or Fresno, California, this week and you may see an unfamiliar advertisement, thanks to a group of climate activists. The non-profit media organization Fossil Free Media has unveiled a series of billboards calling out oil and gas companies for their role in fueling climate disasters. Installed in cities hit hard by recent heatwaves, the ads feature a map of temperature records broken across the country this summer, and read: “Brought to you by Big Oil.” ...“I think the most important thing that we can do right now is to try and connect the dots between the extreme weather that people are seeing and the fossil fuel industry that’s driving it,” said Jamie Henn of Fossil Free Media.

This decision is radioactive, even by the very low standards of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. x Judge James Ho playing a nuclear scientist on the 5th Circuit is exactly like Denise Richards playing a nuclear scientist in the Bond Movie, The World Is Not Enough.https://t.co/jQiX8BQ4g2 — Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) August 29, 2023 Judge James Ho is not a nuclear scientist, an expert in energy policy, an atomic engineer, or anyone else with any specialized knowledge whatsoever on how to store and dispose of nuclear waste. Nevertheless, Ho and two of his far-right colleagues on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit just put themselves in charge of much of America’s nuclear safety regime — invalidating the power of actual nuclear policy regulators to decide how to deal with nuclear waste in the process. The case is Texas v. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and it involves the NRC’s decision to license a temporary storage facility for “high-level spent nuclear fuel” in Andrews County, Texas. Several plaintiffs, including Texas’s Republican government, disagreed with the decision to locate this facility in Texas, and they sued.

“People have spent time bobbing their heads to our stories of this despair and not seeing it as a call to action.” x Ahem. "Rihanna doesn’t get much recognition for the $15 million she donated to environmental justice groups. Indeed, she’s nowhere to be found on most climate warrior lists, which are typically dominated by white celebrities." https://t.co/JOdRIBkHHb — Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson 🐙 (@ayanaeliza) August 30, 2023 It’s no secret that hip hop’s most famous artists often glorify conspicuous consumption. Many of the genre’s lyrics and music videos create an aspirational energy around gas-guzzling luxury cars and private jets. Yet hip hop’s roots lie in activism, and it has long served as a voice on everything from systemic police brutality to discriminatory housing policies. The genre has also been sounding the alarm on what we now call environmental justice. In recent years, many of hip hop’s New York havens have felt the impact of extreme weather events — from the lethal floods in Run D.M.C.’s Queens to the danger of rising waters in Cardi B’s South Bronx. The creative community has rallied in response to these climate-driven disasters, with stars donating their time and money to relief efforts. And it’s been reflected in the music as well — beyond the occasional nod from the likes of Pitbull, whose 2012 dance-oriented album Global Warming had more in common with Nelly’s hit single “Hot in Herre” than with David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, and beyond the nom-de-plume of Migos cofounder Offset (a merely coincidental reference to carbon credits). Hip hop’s relationship to the environment, both in terms of lyrics and political activism, goes back to its very beginning, when smoke from apartment fires blackened the skies of the 1970s South Bronx. And yet its role in advocating for climate solutions has largely gone unnoticed.

During a recent encounter between Pope Francis and Jesuit priests in Lisbon, one of them seemed to commiserate with the pontiff through a question. During a sabbatical in the United States, the priest lamented, he’d noticed that even bishops openly criticized Francis’s leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. How did the pope feel about that? Francis, as he has increasingly done at this point in his papacy, did not hold back. He blasted the “strong reactionary attitude” among American Catholics. He described them with an apparently self-created word — “indietristi,” or backward-looking people — and argued that they don’t understand how faith and morals can evolve. “Those American groups you talk about, so closed, are isolating themselves,” the pope replied, according to a transcript of the Aug. 5 meeting released Monday by the Catholic outlet La Civiltà Cattolica and reviewed by the Vatican before publication. “Instead of living by doctrine, by the true doctrine that always develops and bears fruit, they live by ideologies.”

Fox contributor Ned Ryun called Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell "expendable" on Laura Ingraham's program this evening. The comment was especially cruel and callous coming as it did on the day that McConnell appeared to suffer another medical issue live during a press conference in Covington, KY. Ryun was listing what he considered to be McConnell's achievements during his time as Senate Majority Leader and minimizing each one as only possible because Trump was elected, or because McConnell had help from his staff. x You can spend your whole life working to advance the right wing agenda. You think you’re a hero to them. Then, an orange buffoon comes along and all the people you worked so hard to please don’t even care if you die. https://t.co/bFlYowfMqh — MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) August 31, 2023 ...If this is the prevailing cruel attitude of the Republican Party in 2023, which McConnell bent our Republic to it's breaking point to serve by injecting dirty political gamesmanship into all three branches of government, we can only ask: was it worth it Mitch? Was this the Party you fought for? The Party you hoped for?

"The goal of any federal cannabis policy reform ought to be to address the existing, untenable chasm between federal marijuana policy and the cannabis laws of the majority of U.S. states," said NORML's deputy director. Cannabis reform advocates and industry representatives on Wednesday renewed demands for legalizing marijuana at the federal level as U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra confirmed his department's rescheduling recommendation. Marijuana is currently a Schedule I drug—the most restricted category under the Controlled Substance Act (CSA)—but President Joe Biden ordered Becerra and Attorney General Merrick Garland to initiate a review last October, when he issued a mass pardon for simple federal cannabis possession. Bloomberg initially reported Wednesday that a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) official on Tuesday wrote to Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chief Anne Milgram to recommend reclassifying cannabis Schedule III, a development Becerra confirmed on social media at 4:20 pm ET.

x Today seems like a good day to debunk the 12 biggest myths about taxing the rich. pic.twitter.com/4XYS7BZ0WY — Robert Reich (@RBReich) August 29, 2023

Okay, enough talk about climate change — how about you get on the phones tomorrow and DO SOMETHING? Join RL Miller of Climate Hawks Vote and make some calls to get a serious climate dude elected to Congress in next month’s special election in Rhode Island!

Join us over Zoom and make some calls for Aaron Regunberg for Congress, a true climate champion for Rhode Island! x I’m attending @AaronRegunberg for Congress’s event, “Climate Call In Day for Aaron Regunberg for Congress” – sign up now to join me! #RI01 @ClimateHawkVote #aaronregunbergforcongress https://t.co/b1wFgrS8mi — RL Miller (@RL_Miller) August 28, 2023 Thursday night from 5-7:30pm EST, 2-4:30pm PST, we'll hit the phones to spread the word about Aaron and the campaign.

x Rugby doesn’t need fossil fuels, neither does our planet.



The only way to win the game for climate justice is to kick fossil fuels out of the field.



Are you on our team? 🌏



Watch and share the video.#EndFossilCrimes #RWC2023 #TotalPollution pic.twitter.com/5oxcUou2W1 — Greenpeace International (@Greenpeace) August 30, 2023

Who are you rooting for tonight? Tell us all about it in the comments!

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