Environment

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn now to...

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: Today, a Democracy Now! special. We spend the hour with Mansoor Adayfi. At the age of 18,...

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: I want to go on to another case and then another one. I want to ask you...

Environment & Health New COVID Variants Threaten to Make Pandemic Permanent Economy & Labor COVID Relief Packages Dramatically Reduced Poverty. They Should Be Permanent. Economy & Labor Predatory Banks at Walmarts Made Over 100 Percent of Profits From Overdraft Fees Environment & Health Biden to Set Goal for Half of All Vehicle Sales to Be Electric by 2030 Environment & Health MO Coroner Says He Alters Death Certificates If Families Dislike COVID Inclusion Environment & Health Biden Made Big Compromises on Climate — and Movements That Backed Him Are Livid President Joe Biden is launching a push on Thursday to curb vehicle emissions and set a benchmark for the U.S. to begin phasing out gas vehicles. Biden is expected to sign an executive order setting a goal for half of all vehicles sold in the United States to be electric by 2030, which will likely play a key role in helping the U.S. meet Biden’s climate goals. He is also expected to reinstate and tighten tailpipe emission standards set under President Barack Obama (but rolled back by Trump) to cut greenhouse gas emissions and ramp up vehicle efficiency. The transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., making up 29 percent of emissions in 2019, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Without swift vehicle electrification, climate goals set by the administration like cutting emissions to 50 percent of 2005 levels by 2030 will be hard to reach, experts say, Still, Biden’s announced goal for vehicle electrification will be difficult to achieve, logistically and politically. “There’s a battle on every front. There’s a battle in Congress. There’s a battle in the courts. There’s a battle against time,” Jody Freeman, Harvard Law School environmental and energy law director, told The Washington Post. Indeed, as this summer’s climate events have demonstrated, time is of the essence on climate legislation. And with climate measures being carved out of the infrastructure plan, there are few options left for legislators who want to curb the climate crisis to do so. In the latest and possibly final version of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure funding ended up being cut by nearly 96 percent of Biden’s original proposal. Vehicle manufacturers have said that their compliance with Biden’s order hinges on funding and support for building more charging stations from Congress. The latest bipartisan bill calls for only $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations, half of the $15 that was allocated for charging stations in the June bipartisan framework. Car manufacturers like Ford, General Motors and Honda have signalled their support for Biden’s electrification goals. But the American manufacturers and United Auto Workers will only take the pledge to make 40 to 50 percent of their new car sales electric if the bipartisan bill passes with the $7.5 billion in EV charging funding. Biden will also reinstate vehicle mileage standards rolled back by Donald Trump. Starting with 2023 car models, Biden will propose higher mileage standards in hopes of cutting emissions by 3.7 percent a year, mirroring a California vehicle emissions reduction plan. In 2025, the emissions cuts will ramp up by a 5 percent increase annually, and possibly more after that, the Associated Press reports. Climate and environment groups have shared mixed views on Biden’s plans. “This proposal is headed in a better direction, but the Biden administration can and should be more ambitious,” Environment America Carbon Campaign Director Morgan Folger said in a statement. “Over 5 years ago, the Obama-Biden administration took the strongest federal action to reduce global warming pollution in history, only to be stalled out by the automakers reneging on their promise…. We can’t turn back the clock 5 years, so we have to go even faster to zero out pollution from our cars and trucks and solve this climate crisis.” Simon Mui, deputy director for clean vehicles and fuels at the Natural Resources Defense Council, praised the administration for taking action but told The Washington Post, “This proposal delivers less carbon pollution reductions than the Obama-era standards and includes unfortunate loopholes that undercut progress.” Climate advocates have also recently taken umbrage with Biden for making major compromises on climate despite early promises for ambitious emissions reductions. “Today, the prospect of serious action on the scale needed to address the climate emergency, and the image of the Biden administration as being committed to climate action, are both in shambles,” wrote Basav Sen for Truthout. Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Minnesota, where former police officer Derek Chauvin pleaded guilty Wednesday to a...

Prisons & Policing Jailers Tortured and Murdered Marvin Scott III, Family Says After Viewing Video Politics & Elections A New Wave of Jim Crow Laws Is Here. Here’s What You Need to Know. Politics & Elections Facebook Board Announces Trump Remains Banned. Trump Starts His Own “Platform.” Immigration Biden’s U-Turn on Refugees Aligns With Voter Support for Pro-Immigrant Policies Economy & Labor Amazon Is Dictating Personal Hygiene, Nail Length of Contract Drivers Politics & Elections Judge Says DOJ Memo on Barr’s Decision Not to Charge Trump Must Be Released Earlier this week, President Biden, under pressure from his own voter base, executed what might end up being the most consequential political U-turn of his presidency. Having disappointed refugee rights advocates and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party a few weeks ago by adhering to Trump’s limit of 15,000 refugee admissions this fiscal year, on Monday Biden announced he was raising that cap to 62,500. It was the right decision to make, even if it took him nearly three weeks to get there. Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how many refugees will actually be admitted in practice. Even as he raised the cap, Biden warned, “The sad truth is that we will not achieve 62,500 admissions this year,” due to how badly the system for processing refugees was dismantled and drained of staff under Trump. Nevertheless, successfully pressuring Biden to ditch Trump’s restrictive policy is still a hugely important win for progressives. After Biden opportunistically decided to keep the low cap that he had inherited, an array of luminaries on the left of the political spectrum, as well as decided moderates such as Sen. Dick Durbin, called Biden out for betraying a campaign promise and, more importantly, squandering the trust of refugees who, after years of waiting in camps for the required visas and entry documents, were finally preparing for their journeys to the U.S. This one ought to have been a no-brainer. There never was a morally cogent reason to eviscerate the refugee resettlement program in the way that Trump and his team did. It was always about nativism, and, more particularly, about raw Islamophobia. It was against Muslim-majority countries such as Syria and Yemen, Somalia and Iran, that Trump turned most of his animus, blocking refugees — many of whom are fleeing particularly brutal and long-lasting civil conflicts — from those locales, not only via low caps on the total numbers admitted, but also via executive orders specifically denying entry to people from those individual countries. Trump used Congress member Ilhan Omar, who arrived in the U.S. from Somalia as a child refugee, as a foil in speech after speech, attacking her in the most incendiary of language, urging his people to turn against refugee-welcoming cities such as Minneapolis, and encouraging his audiences to chant “send her back” after he had riled them up against her. It remains to be seen how many refugees will actually be admitted in practice. Biden has consistently opposed Trump’s policies on refugees and on the Muslim travel ban. In fact, when candidate Trump first unveiled, in a short speech to his doting followers in late 2015, his desire to ban Muslims from entering the country “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” and followed up early in the new year with a TV ad touting this vile plan, Biden said Trump’s language was “dangerous.” Meanwhile the White House, at which Biden was at the time the vice president, released a statement asserting that Trump’s proposal “disqualified” him from holding high office. On the campaign trail, Biden consistently called the Trump administration out for its evisceration of the U.S.’s refugee resettlement program — between January 2017 and the fall of 2019, the Trump administration admitted fewer refugees than the Obama White House did just in its last year in office. And during the pandemic, refugee admissions all but ground to a halt. Biden promised, as I wrote back in April, to reverse this trend: to rapidly raise the refugee cap to 62,500 this year, and shortly thereafter to 125,000. All of this made his decision last month to uphold Trump’s 15,000 cap on refugee admissions this fiscal year particularly perplexing. It was a decision seemingly made in fear about the political blowback his administration was facing from the right over the high numbers of people seeking to claim asylum on the country’s southern border. Seven in ten Americans say undocumented residents should be offered a viable path to legal residency. While much of the country’s immigration policies can only be legislated by Congress, refugee admissions is one area where the president has extraordinary unilateral power. The president can raise or lower the number of admissions each year simply by issuing a new presidential finding. Thus, when the White House waffled on increasing refugee admissions numbers in mid-April and then suddenly announced that Trump’s cap would be maintained, it left immigrants’ rights advocates scratching their heads in confusion. If Biden’s initial decision to maintain Trump’s camp was a cold political calculation designed to prove the Biden administration’s immigration “toughness” in the face of would-be asylees along the southern border, as appears to have been the case, it made precious little sense even in relation to that cynical goal. For while a large majority of Americans do critique Biden’s handling of the surge of would-be migrants along the border with Mexico, many of their criticisms are about the specific ways in which unaccompanied minors are being treated and about how large numbers of children have been stuck in holding centers for days and weeks on end. It’s important to note that the Pew Research Center survey that showed that two out of three Americans thought the border surge was being handled poorly also showed nearly seven in ten Americans saying undocumented residents should be offered a viable path to legal residency. That nuance holds true for the public’s understanding of refugee admissions as well. One in three Americans tell pollsters that refugee admissions should be a high priority for the new administration, and another 45-55 percent say it should be a moderate priority. And while refugee admissions are remarkably unpopular amongst the GOP base, raising the refugee admissions cap is broadly accepted as being the right thing to do among Democrats given the messy realities of the world at the moment. All of this should have provided ample political cover for Biden to raise the refugee cap last month. Instead, inexplicably, he dropped the ball. Sometimes, it seems, politicians need to be rescued from their own worst impulses. Such was certainly the case with Biden and refugees. Had his decision to adhere to Trump’s nativist cap held, he would have squandered an opportunity to set the U.S. on a better course. Now, however, under fierce pressure from the grassroots, he has pressed the reset button. After four years in which Trump went out of his way to beat up on refugees, to humiliate the vulnerable, and to seek political hay by exploiting their misfortunes, Biden has now — albeit belatedly and only under huge pressure from his own grassroots and from many Democratic members of Congress — taken the first and most basic step toward salvaging the country’s refugee resettlement program. Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

The world first learned about Biotech Institute LLC two years ago in an explosive GQ feature by Amanda Chicago Lewis called “The Great Pot Monopoly Mystery.” In the story’s opening scene, Lewis...

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman with Juan González. The British government is facing widespread criticism...

Cannabis can be a great accompaniment for any kind of meditation, as really all that involves is presence. Following are some reflections about how to add cannabis by Tara Rose, host...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating Republican campaign donations in connection to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and his former company. As first reported by The Washington Post, FBI agents have been looking into campaign contributions potentially made by people currently and formerly employed by DeJoy. Sources told the publication that investigators have also issued a subpoena to the embattled postmaster general in connection with the donations.