The Hidden Climate-Change Story Behind Trump’s ‘National Emergency’
Walls and borders are this country's most consistent climate-change ‘adaptation.’
Global News and Analysis
What War Films Never Show You
I treated wounded GIs from Vietnam. I saw carnage that seldom makes its way into harrowing war stories like “They Shall Not Grow Old."
A Green New Deal can give us the freedoms to allow humanity to flourish
Source: The Guardian
Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to redefine freedom in the face of war. The Green New Deal imagines goals for a colorful democracy
One of the biggest challenges of climate politics is that the solutions seem scarier than the problem. We worry that to truly decarbonize, we’d need an authoritarian government or endless austerity. But a big and bold enough Green New Deal could finally make us truly free.
The principles that animated the New Deal are often associated with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s proposed (but never fully enacted) Economic Bill of Rights. These included rights to employment, medical care, housing, education, and social security. Those goals are tragically unrealized for many Americans, and any just version of the Green New Deal must start there. They’re familiar goals for the left, ones we’ve been fighting over for decades. But we also need to rework another New Deal-era statement of principles – FDR’s Four Freedoms.
European colonization of Americas killed so many it cooled Earth’s climate
Source: The Guardian
Research finds killing of native people indirectly contributed to a colder period by causing deaths of around 56 million by 1600
European colonization of the Americas resulted in the killing of so many native people that it transformed the environment and caused the Earth’s climate to cool down, new research has found.
Settlers killed off huge numbers of people in conflicts and also by spreading disease, which reduced the indigenous population by 90% in the century following Christopher Columbus’s initial journey to the Americas and Caribbean in 1492.
A Brief History of Our Longest, Most Futile War
The grand plan to transform Afghanistan into a democracy by force was a U.S. imperial fantasy.
Climate Change, Not Border Security, is the Real National Emergency
Source: The Intercept
The shutdown might be over for now, but President Donald Trump’s threat to declare a national emergency still looms. The continuing resolution passed Friday afternoon does not contain funding for a border wall, and the president has suggested that if Congress doesn’t compromise on a funding plan within three weeks, he may still proclaim a national emergency at the border.
When Trump first threatened to use emergency powers to unlock $5.7 billion for his $20 billion border wall project, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. came out strongly against it — but not for humanitarian reasons or because he is concerned about an unmistakable creep toward authoritarianism. Rather, Rubio worried that normalizing the call for a state of emergency might make it easier for politicians to act on a genuine existential threat: “If today, the national emergency is border security,” said Rubio, “tomorrow, the national emergency might be climate change.”