Air District letter: Orcem cement proposal will increase cancer-causing pollution

Repost from the Vallejo Times-Herald
[Editor: Note the Orcem president’s insensitive response: “The threshold for approval is not zero new emissions in this community. That would restrict all development in Vallejo, whether it is a grocery store, church or a mill.”  Really, comparing Orcem/VMT to a grocery store or a church? Shame!  – R.S.]

BAAQMD issues letter of concern with Orcem project

By John Glidden, March 6, 2019 at 6:50 pm
The site of the Vallejo Marine Terminal/Orcem Americas project proposed for South Vallejo is shown. (Times-Herald file photo)

Officials with the regional air quality district issued a statement this week communicating their concerns with Orcem California’s plan to build a cement facility in south Vallejo.

In a two-page letter, obtained by this newspaper, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) said after reviewing the project’s Draft Final Environmental Impact Report (DFEIR) they concluded the Orcem project, if built, would increase air pollution.

“The project as proposed will increase air pollution in an already overburdened community and increase the health burden placed on the community from toxic air contaminants including diesel particulate matter, a known carcinogen,” BAAQMD officials wrote after reviewing the stationary sources proposed by Orcem.

BAAQMD officials further said Vallejo has been identified under two different district programs as a community which experiences high exposure to air pollution. The goals of both programs are to reduce the public’s exposure to local sources of air pollution, they wrote.

To mitigate “the potential increase in cancer risk from the stationary sources,” district officials said Orcem would need to install Best Available Control Technology for Toxics (TBACT).

The district said it has received a partial permit application from Orcem, while Vallejo Marine Terminal (VMT), which is eyeing creation of a deep-water terminal on the same site, has yet to submit an application to the district. Both projects would be located on 31 acres at 790 and 800 Derr St.

Officials also wrote that without the TBACT and application from VMT, the air district would not be able to provide a permit for the project.

Steve Bryan, president of Orcem California, claimed victory when asked on Wednesday about BAAQMD’s letter.

“We are pleased that our persistence in getting BAAQMD to write the long promised letter finally has paid off,” Bryan wrote in an email to the Times-Herald. “And even more pleased to see that after months of scrutiny and replicating our results, the BAAQMD staff found none of the flaws or deficiencies presented by the primary project opponents, Fresh Air Vallejo, or the Deputy Attorney General’s consultant.

“The results confirm that the Revised Operating Alternative (ROA) project we have proposed in the FEIR is very much improved and avoids significant impacts in air quality and health risks,” he added. “The findings are also consistent with earlier reviews from BAAQMD staff which we discovered completely dismissed Fresh Air Vallejo’s claims as far back as December 2017.”

Bryan also responded to a question regarding the air district’s claim that “the Project will increase air pollution in an already overburdened community.”

“The threshold for approval is not zero new emissions in this community,” Bryan wrote in the same email. “That would restrict all development in Vallejo, whether it is a grocery store, church or a mill. The issue is whether the increase is significant according to BAAQMD, state and federal standards. The analysis of our emissions, reviewed by the BAAQMD, say they are not.”

Peter Brooks, president of Fresh Air Vallejo, expressed puzzlement over Bryan’s comments regarding the air district’s letter.

“It is impossible to imagine how Orcem could read the BAAQMD letter and miss the point: The project as presented would not be permitted because of the increased pollution to an already overburdened community,” Brooks said. “Orcem should worry less about Fresh Air Vallejo and worry more about the people of south Vallejo who would certainly be harmed with its toxic cement factory. Fresh Air Vallejo is not the enemy. Asthma, cancer and injustice are the enemies.”

Attempts to reach the city for comment about BAAQMD’s letter were unsuccessful on Wednesday.

The city released the DFEIR for public review in early 2017 with City Hall prepared to release a Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) last week. However, communication issues between the city and VMT caused Vallejo not to release the document as scheduled — it’s not known at this point when the FEIR will be released.

When asked by this newspaper why the nearly two-year delay in providing a response on the DFEIR, Andrea Gordon, senior environmental planner with BAAQMD, and Ralph Borrmann, a spokesman for the air district, said the complex project required intensive review.

Borrmann provided a timeline to the Times-Herald on Wednesday indicating the district first reviewed the DFEIR in January 2018. The rest of the year was spent meeting with the city, its consultants and Orcem to discuss the draft report.

The Vallejo Planning Commission voted 6-1 in 2017 to reject the VMT/Orcem project, agreeing with City Hall that the project would have a negative effect on the neighborhood, that it would impact traffic around the area and the proposed project was inconsistent with the city’s waterfront development policy. The project also has a degrading visual appearance of the waterfront, City Hall said at the time.

City officials argued in 2017 that since a rejection was being recommended, a FEIR was not required.

Orcem and VMT appealed the Planning Commission decision, and in June 2017 when reviewing the appeal, a majority of the council directed City Hall to complete the impact report.

The project’s FEIR was expected to be released last year until leaders received a 13-page letter from Erin Ganahl, deputy attorney general for the State of California, writing that the project’s draft final environmental impact report (DFEIR), an Environmental Justice Analysis (EJA), and the Revised Air Analysis were misleading.

The New Deal Wasn’t What You Think

Repost from The Atlantic

The New Deal Wasn’t What You Think

If we are going to fund a Green New Deal, we need to acknowledge how the original actually worked.

By Louis Hyman, who teaches history at the ILR School of Cornell University – March 6, 2019, 6:00 AM ET
Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Emergency Banking Act
Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Emergency Banking Act | Associated Press

The term Green New Deal might remind Americans of high-school history class. What was the original New Deal about, again? Most kids are taught that it was a decidedly left-wing project to end the Great Depression, a series of big-spending government programs such as the Public Works Administration, with its schools and stadiums. That impression colors the debate over the Democrats’ important new proposal: Conservatives warn of catastrophic federal debts while liberals insist that top-down investment was and is crucial to managing disaster.

But the high-school narrative is not quite right. It leaves out the parts of the New Deal that encouraged private investment.

At the center of this other New Deal was the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), an independent agency within the federal government that set up lending systems to channel private capital into publicly desirable investments. It innovated new systems of insurance to guarantee those loans, and delivered profits to businesses in peril during the Depression. Unionists, farmers, and consumers benefited as well, all without the government needing to spend a dime of taxpayer money.

The story about the New Deal we have in our heads—that it was tax-and-spend liberalism at its worst (if you are conservative) or best (if you are liberal)—may obscure policy opportunities today. We can spend taxpayer money to address climate change, and we probably should, but that is not the only option. If we are going to fund a Green New Deal, we need to acknowledge how the original New Deal actually worked.

[Read: A centuries-old idea could revolutionize climate policy]

After the stock-market crash of 1929 and the mortgage crisis of 1932, bankers’ capital sat idle. “Our excess reserves are very big,” James Perkins, the head of National City Bank wrote to his colleague Amadeo Giannini, the head of Bank of America in 1934, and “it is almost impossible to find any use for money in credits that we are willing to take, and the rates are terribly low.” Perkins’s situation was not unusual. According to Perkins, excess reserves across the country totaled more than $1 billion (in 1934 dollars). The country’s banks and corporate coffers overflowed with capital that financiers felt unable to invest profitably. Without an outlet for those funds, even the still solvent banks would fall apart eventually—and so would the country. Capitalism depends on the investment and reinvestment of capital.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s genius was that he knew he had to get capitalism moving again. But the man who actually figured out how to do that was, ironically, inherited from the Hoover administration: Jesse Jones.

Under Hoover, Jones was appointed to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was tasked with recapitalizing regional banks. Like the other men on Hoover’s RFC, Jones was a banker—he was president of the Texas Commerce Bank system—but he was also a prominent real-estate developer and an original investor in the company that became Exxon. When FDR came to power, he promoted Jones, who had been a Democrat since the heady populist days of William Jennings Bryan, to the head of the RFC. Jones understood well the need to take risks, and how risk-averse the world of finance had become during the Depression; his basic mission was to restore safe, long-term investment opportunities.

Jones focused first on housing. He appointed James Moffett, a vice president of Standard Oil of New Jersey, as head of the Federal Housing Administration. With the assistance of National City Bank employees “loaned” to the FHA, Moffett and others designed mechanisms to channel the money sitting in banks back into the world in the form of mortgages. Their key innovation was to have lenders chip into an insurance pool, organized by the federal government. If a borrower defaulted on a mortgage, the lender would be paid out of the pool in low-yielding bonds. The lender would not lose the principal of the mortgage, but neither would the lender have an incentive to do business with the obviously uncreditworthy.

The FHA-administered insurance pool made mortgages safe for banks again. Moffett correctly predicted, as he issued the first FHA guidelines, that “an investor in New York City or Chicago will be able to advance money on a home in Texas or California … with a sense of security quite as great as would be the case if the property were in the next block.” The loans started small—home-modernization loans of only a few hundred dollars—but within a year, the FHA insurance program was backing loans on houses across the country. In a few months, FHA programs lent more money than the Public Works Administration spent during the entire decade, and put some 750,000 people back to work.

The FHA, as I have previously written, preserved private enterprise while accomplishing a public good. No lender had to comply with the FHA, but if he did, his business was easier to conduct. Risk-free loans with guaranteed buyers provided a strong—yet noncoercive—incentive to lend private capital. The government issued no loans and paid for no insurance, while creating new markets for lenders.

Following on the success of the FHA, in 1935 Jones created the Rural Electrification Administration as a subsidiary of the RFC. Jones asked Morris Cooke, an engineer and consultant and the head of Philadelphia’s public works, to be its founding leader. Cooke was skeptical of the motives of business owners who held “a belief in the absolutism of private property.” The financially driven “holding companies” that controlled “76 per cent of the two billions of capital invested in electric light and power companies” were more concerned with maximizing profit than the needs of the people. Cooke was not opposed to profit—as long as it did not stand in the way of progress.

The stumbling point for rural electrification had always been the perceived expense. No utility would string all those lines for just a few customers. All that empty space would eat up the profits. Private utilities estimated that rural electrification would cost $1,350 a mile. Cooke, unlike most Washington politicians, had spent his life reducing costs, even when supposed experts told him it wasn’t possible. He figured the real costs were much lower, and as it turned out, Cooke was right—the actual cost per mile was only $850.

Getting to that lower number took some imagination. Private utilities would not bear the expense of rural electrification, so Cooke had to look elsewhere. He didn’t believe, as did WPA head Harold Ickes, that capitalism had failed—in his view only the utility companies had. Having the government build the lines was the position of “extremists,” and he was no Communist.

Cooke found a middle path between big corporations and big government in the form of rural cooperatives. While urban cooperatives in industrial America had fitful starts, rural cooperatives had been a big deal since the late 19th century. They pulled together agricultural crops, branded them (think Sunkist), and then sold them around the world.

Under Cooke, the REA offered new cooperatives 20-year loans, at an interest rate of 2.88 percent—a number set to the government’s cost of borrowing through the RFC. The REA accepted applications from proposed cooperatives and examined the proposals for “economic and engineering feasibility.” It did not manage the actual work. It just provided the capital and the technical support, empowering Americans to get together and take control of their local economy. The REA also made five-year loans available “to finance the wiring of the farmsteads and the installation of plumbing systems.”

Later on, these cooperatives were denounced as “communist” by utilities, but they were anything but. Their work made possible the modernization of the American farm and farmhouse, which in turn made it possible for rural America to buy electrical goods from private companies. They also returned a modest profit to the RFC.

What’s more, once the REA demonstrated that rural America could be cheaply electrified, other entrepreneurs took notice. Rather than “crowding out” private initiative, government provided an example that worked. Most small businesses, then and now, are imitative rather than innovative. That is fine. Small business can replicate best practices rapidly through the economy, which is exactly what happened in rural America. Installment lenders stepped in to provide new services, and even the electrical utility companies began to string lines out into the country.

As late as 1935, 90 percent of rural homes had no electricity. By 1940, 40 percent of rural America had electricity—a rise of 30 percent in only a few years. Ten years later, in 1950, 90 percent had electricity.

Housing filled a social need, and rural electrification enabled country folk to buy electrical goods. But to really get the economy on a sounder footing, New Dealers would have to encourage investment in new industries, an imperative that dovetailed with the need to prepare for war with the Nazis.

While it is now conventional wisdom that World War II ended the Depression, amateur historians rarely consider the contrary example of World War I, which brought not prosperity but ruin. The aftermath of World War I was recession everywhere, and in rural America, the recession began in 1920 and did not end until after World War II. The disparity lies in the fact that, in World War I, firms invested their own capital to expand weaponry production, only to confront the collapse of demand a year and a half later with the armistice. Manufacturers were left with overflowing inventory and a demilitarized America.

In the run-up to World War II, private companies were not going to get suckered again. And banks couldn’t stomach investing the money necessary for war. The government, for its part, did not want to spend billions of dollars on state-owned weapons factories, which smacked of the fascism they sought to fight. Besides, they needed those billions to buy the guns and pay the soldiers.

Somehow, however, the country had to prepare itself, and to develop advances in aerospace in particular—still a new sector but of increasingly obvious utility for the war effort. So the RFC did for planes and other instruments of war what it had done for houses and electrification: It created channels for capital investment through the Defense Plant Corporation (DPC).

Like Jones, the people behind the DPC were not ideologues but practical men and women from both management and labor. William Knudsen, the president of General Motors, who had helped organize the first Ford production line, was there. The president of a major railroad, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, Ralph Budd was on the committee too, as well as a vice-president of Sears, Roebuck. Labor was represented by none other than Sidney Hillman, the famous unionist who helped draft the National Labor Relations Act. The DPC even had lifelong activist reformers, including Leon Henderson and Harriet Elliot. It was a committee that reflected an alliance of interests between labor, capital, and the state.

These men, and one woman, positioned the DPC as an intermediary between investors and borrowers, providing capital for planes and munitions in two ways: the first as a lender, and the second through tax benefits. The loans originated with the RFC, which shunted the money through the DPC to the manufacturers. In some cases, the government nominally owned the plants, but private companies got the profits, managed the facilities, and, after the war, bought the plants. The tax benefits came in the form of accelerated depreciation schedules for war-time plant investment. Firms could normally deduct depreciation—the loss of value in equipment—from their taxable incomes, but only over a long period of time, usually 20 years. The DPC lobbied for five-year depreciation timelines, so that firms could quickly write off the entire cost of their investments. Over the course of the war, this dual system directed $25 billion into manufacturing.

Nothing had ever been attempted on this scale before—or succeeded so well. While the FHA and REA were crucial for the economy, the DPC channeled the equivalent investment of 25 percent of the entire GDP in 1940. DPC financing added the equivalent of half of the entire prewar manufacturing capacity to the country by the end of the war.

DPC financing reoriented the entire economy. Aerospace, which absorbed three-fifths of all DPC loans, went from making a few thousand planes in 1939 to nearly 100,000 planes by 1944. By 1943, 40 percent of the Los Angeles workforce—about 2.1 million people—worked for an aircraft company. Curtiss-Wright grew from a small firm to being second only to General Motors in size. In the postwar period, aerospace became one of America’s largest industries, and it attained that size through DPC financing.

During World War II, the GDP, in real terms, doubled. After the war ended, it continued to grow at a breakneck speed, because wartime investments paid off.

Under Jones, the RFC worked across economic scales, from local construction contractors to giant corporations. It did not try to fulfill a particular utopian vision of how the economy “ought to be” but worked within the system to fix the system. It relied not on abstract economic ideas like socialism or capitalism, but on practical business methods. And it worked. There was no single magic bullet, but a portfolio of opportunities.

Under Jones, the RFC did not ask Congress for money. It could borrow billions from capital markets or banks. And borrow it did. But with Jones at the helm, overall, it made money. The RFC developed different projects that turned cutting-edge technology into self-sustaining commercial enterprises. Nervous businessmen said it couldn’t be done. Jones—and the rest of the RFC agencies—did it anyway.

These financial lessons of the New Deal have been largely forgotten, overwritten by the story of “big government spending”—celebrated by the left and denounced by the right. Yet they’re worth dredging up. They provide many examples of how to harness private capital for public good, and help promote free enterprise, entrepreneurship, and technological innovation.

The government can spend taxpayer money on the Green New Deal (and it should), but direct spending is not the only option, and if the New Deal is a good guide, not even the most important option. Government power lies not just in spending, but in helping businesses overcome risk-aversion and finance new opportunities for growth. As we imagine policies to fight climate change—certainly as crucial as fighting World War II—let’s remember how the New Deal really worked, so that we can do it again.


LOUIS HYMAN is a historian of work and business at the ILR School of Cornell University, where he also directs the Institute for Workplace Studies in New York City.

Far-Right Climate Denial Is Scary. Far-Right Climate Acceptance Might Be Scarier.

Repost from New York Magazine – Intelligencer
[Editor: This incredibly thoughtful piece could’ve been stated in half as many words, and might’ve made the case in simpler plain English.  But it is in fact profound!  Be sure to read this – and stick with it to the final paragraph and last sentence where Levitz refers to the Green New Deal.  “Aspirational” indeed!  – R.S.]

Far-Right Climate Denial Is Scary.  Far-Right Climate Acceptance Might Be Scarier.

By Eric Levitz, March 6, 2019, 9:00 a.m.
Warming’s coming. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images

The reality of climate change has a well-known liberal bias.

Once you accept that the (so-called) free market’s price signals have guided humanity to the brink of destruction, laissez-faire conservatism becomes a filthy joke. And once you recognize that industrial policy in India could determine the fate of your grandchildren — just as the past century of industrial policy in the developed world has (literally) shifted the ground beneath Bangladesh’s feet — jingoistic nationalism becomes a childish indulgence. Global carbon emissions can’t be curbed without accepting more government intervention in national economies and more international oversight of nation-state governance. There’s plenty of room for debate about exactly what policies the science demands. But the data can’t be reconciled with any ideology that rejects humanity’s interdependence, or venerates individual accumulation over some conception of the collective good. And this is why the far right has had such a hard time believing what the scientists, wildfires, and floods have been telling them.

Or that’s the story we liberals have been telling ourselves, anyway. Lately, I’ve begun to wonder if this notion — that one can’t reconcile the scientific consensus on climate change with right-wing ideology — isn’t its own form of denial.

In his new book The Uninhabitable Earth, (New York’s own) David Wallace-Wells argues that one implication of contemporary climate science is that, in the not-too-distant future, there might not be enough food for everyone on the planet (unless those in the well-fed West accept a leaner diet):

Climates differ and plants vary, but the basic rule of thumb for staple cereal crops grown at optimal temperature is that for every degree of warming, yields decline by 10 percent. Some estimates run higher. Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the end of the century, when projections suggest we may have as many as 50 percent more people to feed, we may also have 50 percent less grain to give them. Or even less, because yields actually decline faster the warmer things get. And proteins are worse: it takes eight pounds of grain to produce just a single pound of hamburger meat, butchered from a cow that spent its life warming the planet with methane burps.

To a progressive, the science summarized here clearly demonstrates that the Green New Deal (or a decarbonization program on a similar scale) is needed pronto, and that we must make our food systems less wasteful, our agricultural technologies more innovative, and the distribution of resources within countries — and between them — more equitable. But those are hardly the only political conclusions one might draw from Wallace-Wells’s grim prognosis.

For one thing, a central point of The Uninhabitable Earth is that humanity’s best-case scenario is now likely to be a two-degree-Celsius rise in global temperatures. Which means it’s plausible that an increasing scarcity in humanity’s food supply is already inevitable. Technological advances could make that outcome less likely; but various agriculturally destructive feedback loops could make it more so.

Perhaps the widespread recognition of scarcity will be a boon to the left, underscoring the necessity of robust redistribution, vegetarianism, and social solidarity. But the right’s worldview is also — at least superficially —compatible with a world of unavoidable austerity. One reason pundits mock Donald Trump’s zero-sum conception of trade is that, in a context where real resource constraints place no hard limits on growth, China’s prosperity need not come at our expense. And yet one could plausibly interpret the scientific consensus on climate as saying that non-zero-sum conditions aren’t long for this Earth. Eventually, there won’t be enough grain to keep a chicken in every pot, or at least not enough to maintain America’s per-capita hamburger consumption, allow the Chinese middle-class to enjoy a rising standard of eating, and keep those in the most impoverished corners of the globe alive. Malthus may have been less wrong than he was hasty.

This is a distinctly pessimistic reading of our climatic reality. But it is a scientifically defensible perspective that’s been growing more defensible with each passing year. And while this dour version of climate realism is not inherently reactionary in its implications, its progressive implications are contingent on the premise that maximizing the living standards of the global one percent (a category that includes much of the American middle class) is less important than preventing millions in the developing world from dying from starvation. By contrast, if one insists that the U.S. government must put “America first,” then taking the most dire implications of climate science for granted makes Trump’s zero-sum, nationalist worldview appear more coherent, not less.

It is worth remembering that a pillar of Adolf Hitler’s rationalization of conquest and genocide was an assertion of ecological scarcity. “The annual increase of population in Germany amounts to almost 900,000 souls,” Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. “The difficulties of providing for this army of new citizens must grow from year to year and must finally lead to a catastrophe, unless ways and means are found which will forestall the danger of misery and hunger.” This premise informed the Nazi regime’s attempts to secure “living space” for the German people through both the extermination of the Jews, and the deliberate starvation of 30 million Eastern Europeans. Hitler’s genocidal Malthusianism was, of course, completely divorced from agricultural reality. The next fascistic tyrant’s may not be.

Regardless, the far right need not wait for future food shortages to cast climate science as a rationale for ultranationalism. Even in our present era of indefensibly ill-distributed abundance, one can credibly claim that the Third World’s growing affluence poses an existential threat to our own. After all, China’s share of global carbon emissions is twice that of the U.S. and rapidly rising. And while India’s carbon footprint is currently relatively small, it’s poised to explode in the coming decades, as the Earth’s second-most populous country continues to industrialize. If you accept the consensus projections for carbon emissions over the next half-century — but reject the idea that all human lives have inherent value (as, by all appearances, many of our current leaders do) — you can argue somewhat coherently that sustaining the American “way of life” requires keeping the Global South down. In fact, the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro made this very observation late last month.

To be sure, no amount of climate fatalism could render Shapiro’s sarcastic proposal coherent. In all circumstances, initiating a nuclear war creates more problems than it solves. But the world’s wealthiest nations may not need to drop bombs on India to stunt its development. It is quite possible that merely refusing to help that country cope with its metastasizing water crisis (which our carbon emissions helped create) will be enough to achieve that evil end.

None of this is to say that Trumpian nationalism is not, in the final analysis, an irrational response to climate change, even on its own terms. Making massive investments in renewable technology — and giving the innovations away to developing nations — seems far more likely to preserve the ecological basis of American prosperity than any attempt to suffocate industrialization in the Global South. Our species’s greatest asset has always been its singular capacity for large-scale cooperation on complex, novel problems. If there is way to sustain a decent civilization for another few centuries anywhere on Earth, I believe it will involve expanding our capacity for solidarity, not contracting it.

But climate models won’t make that argument for progressives. And raw data on carbon emissions certainly won’t tell American voters why they have a moral obligation to the people of the Maldives. It seems possible, however, that in the not-too-distant future, far-right demagogues will be telling us why we don’t. Today, the Trumpists deride those who insist that America can afford to take in more refugees — and pay out more foreign aid — as “globalists.” Tomorrow, they may call us “climate deniers.”

For now, much of the global far right does not believe in the dire effects of climate change. But there’s reason to think those effects are already making people believe in the far right. Some scholars argue that climate played a pivotal role in triggering the Syrian civil war — and thus, much of the migrant crisis that fueled the resurgence of right-wing nationalism in much of Europe. Even if that thesis is wrong, there is no question that climate change will condemn far more people to statelessness than events in Syria have. It isn’t hard to imagine how the climate migrants’ losses could become the nationalist right’s gains.

Hungarian president János Áder, an ally of far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán, recently called for more aggressive efforts to combat climate change because worsening ecological conditions will “trigger migration.” Given the Orbán government’s fundamental opposition to mass immigration — and the ostensible popularity of such opposition within Hungary — Áder’s acceptance of the link between the climate and migratory pressures doesn’t just function as an argument for reducing carbon emissions. It also serves as one for empowering border enforcement hardliners. After all, if you accept the climate science, then this migration problem is only going to get worse — which means that only unsentimental nationalists can be trusted to protect our people from the huddled masses to come.

Beyond the issue of immigration, there is a significant amount of political science research positing a correlation between material abundance and liberal pluralism. Such research suggests that in circumstances of scarcity, people might naturally gravitate toward more conformist and authoritarian attitudes and social structures. A nasty, brutish, and hot world — routinely upended by massive storms and agricultural failures — may be one in which mass publics are less tolerant of social difference, and more eager to submit to a political leviathan.

All of this underscores the necessity of minimizing temperature rise. But it also suggests that revitalizing faith in liberal, universalist ideals is an indispensable component of “climate readiness.” In 2019, it is banal to say that the environmental movement’s primary challenge is political. By now, advocates are well aware that IPCC reports can’t force governments to mount an aggressive response to the crisis. But there is another, less appreciated dimension of difficulty: Persuading governments to mount an aggressive response to the crisis won’t force them to mount a just response. Some critics of the Green New Deal — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s inchoate plan for achieving fully renewable social democracy — have lambasted the proposal for wedding action on climate to an explicitly egalitarian moral and ideological vision.

They should consider the hazards of the alternative.

Jay Inslee for the Climate, and for President

Repost from Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight
[Editor: I am not endorsing Inslee here, but I’m impressed.  The ONLY criterion for my vote will be the ability to draw us together to defeat of the malfeasant now holding the office of president.  – R.S.]

How Jay Inslee Could Win The 2020 Democratic Nomination

By Christie Aschwanden and Geoffrey Skelley, March 1, 2019, 7:00 AM

TOC-INSLEE-4×3In his 2020 presidential announcement video, two-term Washington Governor Jay Inslee declares that climate change is the “most urgent challenge of our time.”

Inslee intends to make climate change his signature issue. “I have heard from around the country that people believe that this issue demands priority, and it demands a candidate from the Democratic Party that will make it front and center,” he told FiveThirtyEight before his campaign announcement. He’s convinced that when voters see his work on climate change along with a laundry list of progressive achievements, it’ll be enough to become the nominee.

But to do that, he first has to beat the Democratic field. As a whole, Inslee has a solidly liberal record, one that could conceivably attract voters on the left of the party. But that could be a crowded part of the field, with well-known names such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders already running. Sanders, for example, has increasingly sought to make climate change one of his core issues, which could steal some of Inslee’s thunder. Still, Inslee probably will be one of the few Democratic governors running, and his ability to point to tangible accomplishments rather than just rhetoric could allow him to differentiate himself from many other Democratic contenders.

As governor of Washington, Inslee has built a record of economic growth for which he credits his progressive policies. Among those policies are a minimum wage that is more than 50 percent higher than the federal one, a family leave policy1 that allows some workers to take up to three months of paid leave for a medical condition or to care for a new child or ailing family member, and a law that requires workers to receive equal pay and career advancement opportunities regardless of gender. Inslee has overseen an expansion of college financial aid for undocumented students and a large-scale transportation infrastructure program. He’s confident his record would help him beat President Trump.

But Inslee’s candidacy also relies on an unproven gambit: that climate change can be a winning issue in the 2020 Democratic primary.

At first glance, climate change may not have sufficient salience to carry a presidential campaign. It received little attention during the 2016 presidential race. In three presidential debates and one vice presidential face-off, the topic was never raised specifically.

But Inslee said the time is right to make climate change a central issue because it’s no longer a hypothetical but something that “touches everyone in every part of the country” and “every aspect of life.”

Just before the 2018 midterm elections, Gallup released findings that placed climate change as the fifth-most-important issue to Democratic voters, behind topics like health care and wealth inequality. Still, 75 percent of Democrats said it was an extremely or very important topic, compared with just 27 percent of Republicans. We can see how much the parties have diverged on the issue using a Gallup question that looks at concern about climate change. In 1990, the share of Americans who worried a great deal or a fair amount about global warming did not really differ by party identification. Today, Democrats and Republicans are a world apart.

Given the level of concern among Democrats, perhaps a campaign that homes in on climate change can help Inslee make inroads on the left during the primaries. It’s a topic receiving a lot of attention at the moment because of the proposed “Green New Deal” being pushed by some progressive Democratic House members. Moreover, Democrats can easily use the issue to attack the president’s record. The Trump administration has hindered efforts to address global warming by withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement and working to roll back auto fuel efficiency standards.

But putting climate change ahead of all other issues could be risky, Stanford University psychologist Jon Krosnick said. He has helped lead national surveys of public opinions on climate change since 1995 that have found that most voters don’t make their ballot box decisions based on climate change alone. Krosnick’s surveys show that about 18 percent of voters are passionate about climate change, which means that “taking a stand on this issue is electorally very wise, but making this a signature issue is probably unwise.”

Inslee plans to try anyway. He’s framing climate change as a threat to national security that warrants a huge government response on a scale akin to the Manhattan Project or NASA’s program to put humans on the moon. “This is the eleventh hour, but it should be our hour to shine and for we, as Americans, to do what we do best, which is to create, innovate and build,” Inslee said. His goal is to make the economy less reliant on fossil fuels over the next several decades, a task he called “a massive undertaking requiring a huge concentration of our intellectual talents, our entrepreneurial zeal, and to some degree, our investment.”

To achieve this goal, he advocates for clean fuel standards to reduce emissions from vehicles. He wants to revamp the U.S. electrical grid with a 100 percent clean power plan like the one he’s pushing for in his state of Washington, make buildings “net zero” emissions with stringent building codes, and promote alternative energy with subsidies.

It will be interesting to see whether he proposes a carbon tax to help him accomplish some of those goals. It’s an approach that has broad support from economists across the political spectrum, yet Inslee has been unable to get one passed by voters or the legislature in his own state. He doesn’t think that makes it kryptonite. “A carbon tax is just one of the tools in the toolbox,” he said, adding that it may not be the most important one. The carbon tax that failed in Washington didn’t derive most of its carbon savings from the signal to consumers sent by higher carbon prices, Inslee said, but, rather, from “putting people to work on building and installing solar arrays and building homes and businesses that are net zero. That’s where you’ve actually got the carbon savings.”

Is the failure of that carbon-tax measure in his own state an omen or just a bump in the road for Inslee? Whichever it is, it hasn’t nudged him off his strategy. “I believe that contrast is good in elections,” Inslee said, and the contrast between Democrats and Republicans on climate issues is stark. “We should embrace that contrast, magnify it, and run with it.”