“Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from> around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
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Paul Krugman: Trump Gratuitously Rejects the Paris Climate Accord
As Donald Trump does his best to destroy the world’s hopes of reining in climate change, let’s be clear about one thing: This has nothing to do with serving America’s national interest. The U.S. economy, in particular, would do just fine under the Paris accord. This isn’t about nationalism; mainly, it’s about sheer spite.
About the economics: At this point, I think, we have a pretty good idea of what a low-emissions economy would look like. I’m sure that energy experts will disagree on the details, but the broad outline isn’t hard to describe.
Clearly, it would be an economy running on electricity — electric cars, electric heat, with internal combustion engines rare. The bulk of that electricity would, in turn, come from nonpolluting sources: wind, solar and, yes, probably nuclear.
Of course, sometimes the wind doesn’t blow or the sun shine when people want power. But there are multiple ways to deal with that issue: a robust grid that can ship electricity to where it’s needed; storage of various forms (batteries, but also maybe things like pumped hydro); dynamic pricing that encourages customers to use less power when it’s scarce and more when it isn’t; and some surge capacity — probably from relatively low-emission natural-gas-fired generators — to cope with whatever mismatch remains.
What would life in an economy that made such an energy transition be like? Almost indistinguishable from life in the economy we have now.
Eugene Robinson: Trump is abdicating all the country’s moral power
With his backward policies and his tiresome antics, President Trump seems to be trying his best to do something that ought to be impossible: make the U.S. presidency irrelevant to world progress.
Climate change offers one example. Trump tried hard to build suspense for Thursday’s announcement about whether he would honor or trash the landmark Paris accord; doubtless he’d rather have attention focused on greenhouse gases than on the snowballing Russia investigations. At this point, however, I have to wonder what difference the decision to leave the agreement actually makes.
Trump’s pro-coal program of deregulation — a quixotic attempt to revive an industry being strangled by global market forces, not politicians — and his boosterish advocacy of oil and gas mean the United States has little chance of meeting its Paris emissions targets anyway. The real-world impact of Trump’s choice is more diplomatic than environmental.
Jill Abramson: Donald Trump has ditched the world in favor of Big Oil’s titans
Craven, cynical and corrupt: an alliteration that sums up President Trump’s decision to pull the US out of the Paris accord on climate change.
He rebuffed the entreaties of everyone from Elon Musk to the Pope. He ignored scientific evidence that already shows catastrophic beach erosion, cracking Arctic ice and flooding cities. Instead, he cast in with his climate change-denying EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt, and the barons of the world’s dirtiest industries, coal and fossil fuels.
It was a craven act because the United States over time is the biggest contributor to the carbon dioxide that is poisoning the atmosphere and sizzling the planet. Given our culpability in creating an urgent world-wide environmental crisis, it was a moral duty to keep our commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. To walk away is supremely selfish.
Steven W. Thrasher: Democrats take us black voters for granted. What if we abandoned them?
In a widely circulated article at FiveThirtyEight, Patrick Ruffini – a digital strategist for George W Bush’s highly divisive 2004 campaign – wrote on Tuesday that while African Americans continue to vote heavily for Democrats, they are not showing up for the Democratic party in the numbers they once did.
This certainly makes sense to me. Other than not being as crudely racist, xenophobic and misogynist as the Republican party, the contemporary Democratic party offers little to African Americans.
Looking toward the upcoming special election in Georgia, Ruffini wrote: “Lower black turnout in 2016 might be explained as a reversion to the mean after that group’s historic turnout for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012,” adding: “If there was one area where Democratic turnout was undeniably weaker in 2016 than 2012, it was among African Americans.” [..]
But after electing the first black president failed to ameliorate the plight of black America in any meaningful structural way, I suspect the jig is up that the Democrat party (as presently constituted) is going to help black Americans
Trevor Timm: Ice agents are out of control. And they are only getting worse
With arrests of non-violent undocumented immigrants exploding across the country, it’s almost as if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents are having an internal contest to see who can participate in the most cruel and inhumane arrest possible. The agency, emboldened by Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric, is out of control – and Congress is doing little to stop them.
Last week, Ice agents ate breakfast at a Michigan restaurant, complimented the chef on their meal and then proceeded to arrest three members of the restaurants kitchen staff, according to the owner.
Depraved stories like this are now almost too prevalent to comprehensively count: Ice has arrested undocumented immigrants showing up for scheduled green card appointments at a US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) office. They’ve arrested a father after dropping his daughter off at school. An Ice detainee was even removed forcefully against her will from a hospital where she was receiving treatment for a brain tumor. [..]
While some Democrats have introduced bills to curtail some of Ice’s most egregious transgressions, Republicans, who control both houses of Congress, have shown little if any interest in reining in Ice. The agency is so harmful to civil rights, there’s a good argument it should be disbanded altogether, but unfortunately it seems they are only becoming more emboldened with each passing week.
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