Three Big Stories You Should Read Over the Holiday Weekend

It’s a holiday week, plus we’ve got a forecast for some not nice weather, so I’m gonna keep it short and sweet for the rest of the week.

#1.  Those who say the concept of a sweeping Green New Deal (which is, by the way, just a framework) is too much too soon should read this Washington Post story: 

In bleak report, U.N. says drastic action is only way to avoid worst effects of climate change - 

Global temperatures are on pace to rise as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century

• Tuesday’s report, which is viewed as the benchmark of the world’s progress in meeting its climate goals, underscores how the pledges that nations made years ago in Paris are woefully inadequate to achieving the goals of the accord. To hold warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, the authors found that countries would need to triple the ambition of their current promises. To hit the more ambitious target of no more than 1.5 degrees of warming, they found, nations would need to ramp up their pledges fivefold.

• “Every year of delay beyond 2020 brings a need for faster cuts, which become increasingly expensive, unlikely and impractical,” the report states. “Delays will also quickly put the 1.5C goal out of reach.”

• A Washington Post analysis this year found that roughly 20 percent of the world has already warmed to troubling levels. Slowing future warming will require monumental changes, such as phasing out gas-powered cars, halting the construction of coal-fired power plants and overhauling how humans grow food and manage land.

• But the world’s carbon emissions have moved in the opposite direction. The United States’ energy-related CO2 emissions rose 2.7 percent last year, after a gradual decline. That increase came as the Trump administration continued to roll back Obama-era climate regulations and made clear that the United States, once a leader in pushing for climate action, will withdraw from the Paris accord in 2020.

Here’s how you tell the winners from the losers among candidates and politicians when it comes to taking on climate change: who pays?

The status quo solution is for consumers to pay, which has led to riots in France and Chile, among others. Yes, we should pay the actual costs of energy, but that is a very small part of what needs to be done. The people whose financial decisions got us here need to pay and pay some more. 

#2. There is no bar too low for the Trumplicans. Proof of this is the proposed play for the all-important anti-Geneva Convention swing-voter bloc for the 2020 GOP presidential campaign. 

From Spencer Ackerman at The Daily Beast:

Trump Tells Allies He Wants Absolved War Criminals to Campaign for Him

• If Donald Trump gets his wish, he’ll soon take the three convicted or accused war criminals he spared from consequence on the road as special guests in his re-election campaign, according to two sources who have heard Trump discuss their potential roles for the 2020 effort.

• Despite military and international backlash to Trump’s Nov. 15 clemency—fallout from which cost Navy Secretary Richard Spencer his job on Sunday—Trump believes he has rectified major injustices. Two people tell The Daily Beast they’ve heard Trump talk about how he’d like to have the now-cleared Clint Lorance, Matthew Golsteyn, or Edward Gallagher show up at his 2020 rallies, or even have a moment on stage at his renomination convention in Charlotte next year. Right-wing media have portrayed all three as martyrs brought down by “political correctness” within the military.

FYI- This Times of San Diego story suggests (and I’ve heard it elsewhere) that indicted Rep. Duncan Hunter has reached out to  Navy SEAL Gallagher about joining him on the campaign trail. 

#3. Your Long Read for the holiday weekend should include this comprehensive review of everything learned thus far in the Ukraine affair, via the Lawfare Blog.

We Wrote a Starr Report! An Account of the Record in L’Affaire Ukrainienne

• For present purposes, the relevant story—the one on which the House will necessarily focus—concerns how the president’s personal lawyer influenced Donald Trump’s views on Ukraine and how Trump put him in charge of pursuing the president’s personal and political goals in that country outside the regular channels of government. 

• It is a story about how the institutions and actors within the U.S. government struggled to deal with the president’s pursuing his inappropriate objectives, fueled by phony disinformation they all rejected, through an outside actor. 

• And it is a story about how this deviation from the normal policy process ultimately corrupted interactions with a foreign government, leading to extortionate demands of the Ukrainians that actors within the U.S. government regarded as highly inappropriate and actors in Congress correctly regard as impeachable.

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From the 1980s, and still relevant today.

https://twitter.com/carolecadwalla/status/1199121778058113026?s=20

h/t @theaaronb

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https://twitter.com/Amy_Siskind/status/1199360487282098176?s=20

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