27 November 20
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Bernie Sanders | How Do We Avoid Future Authoritarians? Winning Back the Working Class Is Key
Bernie Sanders, Guardian UK
Sanders writes: "As the count currently stands, nearly 80 million Americans voted for Joe Biden. With this vote against the authoritarian bigotry of Donald Trump, the world can breathe a collective sigh of relief."
A segment of working-class people in our country still believes Donald Trump defends their interests. We must win them over
But the election results did also reveal something that should be a cause for concern. Trump received 11 million more votes than he did in 2016, increasing his support in many distressed communities – where unemployment and poverty are high, healthcare and childcare are inadequate, and people are hurting the most.
For a president who lies all the time, perhaps Donald Trump’s most outlandish lie is that he and his administration are friends of the working class in our country.
The truth is that Trump put more billionaires into his administration than any president in history; he appointed vehemently anti-labor members to the National Relations Labor Board (NLRB) and he gave huge tax breaks to the very rich and large corporations while proposing massive cuts to education, housing and nutrition programs. Trump has tried to throw up to 32 million people off the healthcare they have and has produced budgets that called for tens of billions in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and social security.
Yet, a certain segment of the working class in our country still believe Donald Trump is on their side.
Why is that?
At a time when millions of Americans are living in fear and anxiety, have lost their jobs because of unfair trade agreements and are earning no more in real dollars than 47 years ago, he was perceived by his supporters to be a tough guy and a “fighter”. He seems to be fighting almost everyone, every day.
He declared himself an enemy of “the swamp” not only attacking Democrats, but Republicans who were not 100% in lockstep with him and even members of his own administration, whom he declared part of the “deep state”. He attacks the leaders of countries who have been our longstanding allies, as well as governors and mayors and our independent judiciary. He blasts the media as an “enemy of the people” and is ruthless in his non-stop attacks against the immigrant community, outspoken women, the African American community, the gay community, Muslims and protesters.
He uses racism, xenophobia and paranoia to convince a vast swath of the American people that he was concerned about their needs, when nothing could be further from the truth. His only interest, from day one, has been Donald Trump.
Joe Biden will be sworn in as president on 20 January and Nancy Pelosi will be speaker of the House. Depending upon what happens in Georgia’s special elections, it is unclear which party will control the US Senate.
But one thing is clear. If the Democratic party wants to avoid losing millions of votes in the future it must stand tall and deliver for the working families of our country who, today, are facing more economic desperation than at any time since the Great Depression. Democrats must show, in word and deed, how fraudulent the Republican party is when it claims to be the party of working families.
And, in order to do that, Democrats must have the courage to take on the powerful special interests who have been at war with the working class of this country for decades. I’m talking about Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, the private prison industrial complex and many profitable corporations who continue to exploit their employees.
If the Democratic party cannot demonstrate that it will stand up to these powerful institutions and aggressively fight for the working families of this country – Black, White, Latino, Asian American and Native American – we will pave the way for another rightwing authoritarian to be elected in 2024. And that president could be even worse than Trump.
Joe Biden ran for president on a strong pro working-class agenda. Now we must fight to put that agenda into action and vigorously oppose those who stands in its way.
Which Side Are You On? was a folk song written by Florence Reece, the wife of an organizer with the United Mine Workers when the union went on strike in Kentucky in 1931. Democrats need to make it absolutely clear whose side they are on.
One side is for ending starvation wages and raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour. One side is not.
One side is for expanding unions. One side is not.
One side is for creating millions of good paying jobs by combating climate change and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. One side is not.
One side is for expanding healthcare. One side is not.
One side is for lowering the cost of prescription drugs. One side is not.
One side is for paid family and medical leave. One side is not.
One side is for universal pre-K for every three- and four-year-old in America. One side is not.
One side is for expanding social security. One side is not.
One side is for making public colleges and universities tuition-free for working families, and eliminating student debt. One side is not.
One side is for ending a broken and racist criminal justice system, and investing in our young people in jobs and education. One side is not.
One side is for reforming and making our immigration system fair and humane. One side is not.
Democrats’ job during the first 100 days of the Biden administration is to make it absolutely clear whose side they are on, and who is on the other side. That’s not only good public policy to strengthen our country. It’s how to win elections in the future.
At the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, students organized get-out-the-vote campaigns through signs, stickers, and text messages. (photo: Aaron Jackendoff/Getty)
Young Voters in the US Turned Out in Record Numbers in 2020, Powering Biden's Presidential Victory
John L. Dorman, Business Insider
Dorman writes: "Over half of all voters under the age of 30 voted in the 2020 elections, a record figure, and the demographic powered President-elect Joe Biden's victory over President Donald Trump, according to data from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University."
ver half of all voters under the age of 30 voted in the 2020 elections, a record figure, and the demographic powered President-elect Joe Biden's victory over President Donald Trump, according to data from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.
The data revealed that 52% to 55% of registered voters under 30 cast ballots. In the 2016 presidential election between Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, roughly 42% to 44% of voters in this age group voted.
This year, the voters under 30 who cast ballots this year overwhelmingly supported Biden over Trump by a 60% to 36% margin, according to Edison Research. In 2016, many of these same voters supported Clinton over Trump by a narrower but still significant 55% to 36% margin.
Early data from Colorado, Georgia, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington state showed a huge increase in youth turnout, according to The Hill.
Tom Bonier, chief executive officer at the Democratic data firm TargetSmart, told The Hill that "the increase in turnout among younger voters was greater than the increase overall."
While Biden was able to win the Democratic presidential primaries en route to his win in the general election, his early pathway was compromised by the popularity of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who had cultivated a huge following with younger voters from his 2016 campaign against Clinton.
With the Biden campaign aware that turnout dropped for Clinton in many major cities in 2016, Biden pushed to prioritize issues that many younger voters cared about, including student loan debt, health care reform, and environmental regulations.
"In the key battlegrounds, those younger voters likely netted Biden enough votes to carry the Electoral College," The Hill reported. "Based on turnout and exit poll data, the Tufts center estimates voters under 30 gave Biden enough net votes to carry Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan."
Biden did especially well with young Black voters, with 87% of them backing the president-elect, compared to 10% supporting Trump. Young Asian and Hispanic voters also overwhelmingly backed Biden, with 83% and 73%, respectively, while young white voters supported Biden overall with 51% of the vote.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
It Wasn't Ideology That Sank House Democrats. It Was Bad Strategy.
Miti Sathe and Will Levitt, POLITICO
Excerpt: "The results are still uncalled in several closely contested House races - but that hasn't stopped congressional Democrats from launching into 'deep-dive' mode, trading bitter accusations as they try to come to terms with their party's unexpectedly poor performance in key battleground districts this year."
Poor decisions from the national party left Democratic candidates in swing districts unable to hold their own.
he results are still uncalled in several closely contested House races—but that hasn’t stopped congressional Democrats from launching into “deep-dive” mode, trading bitter accusations as they try to come to terms with their party’s unexpectedly poor performance in key battleground districts this year. The scale of the losses has come to many as a shock, and yet the intramural immolation is all too familiar: Progressives accuse moderates of having alienated the party’s base, while moderates blame progressives for having scared off potential crossover voters, independents and even some Democrats in tough swing districts with sloganeering around “socialism” and calls to “defund the police.”
For the past 3½ years, through our organization, Square One, we have been working exclusively and on the ground with Democratic candidates running in precisely those sorts of districts. We are with many of our endorsed candidates from Day One, providing the connections, resources and support to launch, run and win their campaigns. And from our experience, we are sure that both arguments are wrong.
It wasn’t ideology that this year sank seeming Democratic shoo-ins like Gina Ortiz Jones, a first-generation American and Air Force veteran who, when she first ran in 2018, came only 927 votes short of winning her longtime red South Texas border district. (We endorsed and supported her in 2018 and again in 2020.) Nor were too-progressive politics what sent highly regarded first-term members of Congress like New Mexico’s Xochitl Torres Small back home to traditionally Republican districts, or that consigned other high-performing freshman incumbents like Lauren Underwood of Illinois into painfully protracted ballot counts—the latter of whom we’ve endorsed and worked with for the past two election cycles as well.
It was weak strategy, based on bad polling information and poor decisions from the national party that left Democratic candidates in swing districts—and candidates of color in particular—unable to hold their own in the face of a massive, and massively underestimated, Republican voter surge. The fact is: If you’re going to win a campaign, you’ve got to campaign, which means getting in front of voters and meeting them where they are. And that was the one thing that Democrats running for Congress could not do this year, upon orders from the party’s campaign arm in Washington.
Every election cycle, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, along with the Democratic National Committee and their biggest and most influential allies, wield disproportionate influence through the weight of their endorsements and their power of the purse. Often operating in concert, and inspiring big donors to follow, they decide which candidates are “viable,” who is worthy of full financial support, how their campaigns should operate and which consultants they can hire. And this year, the direction set by D.C. Democrats proved to be a very big part of why House Democrats fell far short of a hoped-for 2020 blue wave, instead diminishing their hard-fought majority won in 2018.
Their data was bad—the result of polling that vastly underestimated how many Republicans would turn out to vote and how their ever-strengthening fidelity to President Donald Trump would cause them to back GOP candidates all the way down the ticket. Their understanding of very specific voter beliefs in very different local districts was even worse—which is why Hispanic voters, lumped together into a non-differentiated, assumedly pro-immigration and anti-Trump bloc, provided the party with such disastrous surprises in South Florida and border areas of Texas. While the party isn’t solely to blame for using bad data, it should have known better than to use polls as the main indicator of future success and voter preferences. Indeed, 2016 had offered ample warning that polling was unreliable.
And the messaging dictates coming from Washington—delivered to all the congressional campaigns in conference calls and memos and advertising guidance from consultants—frequently missed their mark. Democratic campaigns we endorsed and were in frequent communication with were told to hit the Republicans hard for their poor handling of the deadly coronavirus epidemic. Yet swing voters didn’t view their local GOP candidates or officials as complicit in the Russian roulette that the Trump White House had played around Covid. And advice on conference calls we sat in on that encouraged candidates to run TV ads saying they were “angry,” “fed up” and “frustrated,” was laughably ill-suited for candidates of color—especially Black women—running in nearly all-white districts.
Guidance from Washington broadly understood by campaigns as a ban on in-person canvassing was the most damaging decision of all—an error that compounded all the others. It seemed to make sense on its face. But it was also—like the defiant lack of mask-wearing at Trump rallies is for Republicans—a form of Democratic brand messaging: They walk in the low-down footsteps of Typhoid Mary, we take the high road with Tony Fauci. Applied to campaigns all across the country, it backfired terribly. Instead of finding ways to safely campaign in swing districts and talk to voters, wearing masks and social distancing, in the weeks before the election—as did Joe Biden’s presidential campaign—Democratic campaigns had to rely on secondhand insights, filtered through the misperceptions of pollsters and politicos in far-off Washington, D.C. They had no option but to rely on polling data, which a more robust ground operation would have exposed as inaccurate: Nothing better gauges voter sentiment than meeting voters in person. And so they had to connect with voters through the largely impersonal means of TV ads, email blitzes and massive spends on social media.
Again, based on our experience working with congressional campaigns, meeting a congressional candidate on-screen just doesn’t work—and it especially doesn’t work for candidates of color, who are seen as “the Black candidate” or “the Hispanic candidate” or “that Asian candidate” when they’re seen on TV, but simply become “the candidate” when encountered in person. Lack of direct contact is what made it possible to apply the label of “radical leftist” to Midwesterner Lauren Underwood, who grew up in her almost 90 percent white district, shares the health, economic and safety concerns of her neighbors, but was depicted this year in TV attack ads that darkened her skin, made a caricature of her features and tied her to lawless “riots.” It’s also why Gina Ortiz Jones, despite her military service and longtime home base in South Texas, could be portrayed as a carpetbagger for owning a (rented-out) condo in Washington, D.C., and be painted as all but irredeemably “other” by attack ads that focused on her life with a female partner.
Now that party leaders in Washington are embarking upon (yet another) much-publicized “deep dive” into their failures, we’d like to suggest that they start with some tough questions: Why do we Democrats know so little about our Republican counterparts—right down to where to find them and how to speak to them so we can conduct accurate polls? Why doesn’t our national party trust individual campaigns, especially the promising campaigns of candidates of color, to hire their own people and make their own decisions on messaging and strategy?
Our party leaders need to respect the judgment of candidates running in towns, suburbs and rural areas far outside of the Beltway. They need, in particular, to do a better job of listening to candidates of color, who are not currently well-served by the “top” professionals dispatched from D.C. to advise them. And they need to vastly loosen the reins when it comes to imposing potentially destructive one-size-fits-all national strategies on local congressional races.
Washington is a top-down town, but today’s electoral landscape is a bottom-up, grassroots-driven world that both reflects and rewards diversity—not just of candidates, but of ideas and strategies. Losing sight of that truth is how we fail to win elections.
Roberto Arias prepares a grave for burial at Woodlawn Cemetery during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Everett, Massachusetts, U.S., May 27, 2020. (photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters)
US Hits Highest Death Toll Since May With Hospitals Already Full
Maria Caspani and Gabriella Borter, Reuters
Excerpt: "Record hospitalizations and a surging death toll failed to keep Americans from traveling a day before the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, raising fears that the unchecked spread under way is a prelude to further contagion at Christmastime."
mericans defied pleas from state and local officials to stay home for the Thanksgiving holiday in the face of the surging coronavirus pandemic, triggering fresh warnings from health officials with the release of vaccines still weeks away.
U.S. President-elect Joe Biden joined in the calls for safety, urging people to forgo big family gatherings, wear protective masks and maintain social distancing.
“I know we can and we will beat this virus,” Biden said in a speech delivered in a near-empty Wilmington, Delaware, theater to a handful of staffers and reporters wearing masks and sitting inside socially distanced circles on the floor. Biden did not wear a mask.
“Life is going to return to normal. I promise you. This will happen. This will not last forever,” said Biden, a 78-year-old Democrat.
Deaths from COVID-19 surpassed 2,000 in a single day for the first time since May on Tuesday and hospitalizations reached a record of more than 89,000 on Wednesday as the country recorded 2.3 million new infections in the past two weeks.
Spiraling infections typically result in a rising death toll weeks later. Coronavirus deaths reached 2,157 on Tuesday - one person every 40 seconds - with another 170,000 people infected, as millions of Americans traveled for Thanksgiving.
Nearly 1 million passengers a day have been screened at airport security checkpoints for the past week, with Sunday’s total of 1.047 million being the highest number since the early days of the pandemic in mid-March.
“It’s tough. It’s a big holiday in the U.S., Thanksgiving. But with the situation that we’re in right now, it just seems like the safe play is to not come to the airport, to not travel,” Los Angeles International Airport spokesman Charles Pannunzio told Reuters.
“But if you are traveling, we’re going to do our best to make the journey safer for you.”
‘WE WANT TO SEE THE FAMILY’
Daliza Rodriguez, a 33-year-old childhood educator, was traveling to Texas from New York’s LaGuardia Airport on Wednesday.
“We know we’re taking a risk but we want to see the family, and it has been a long time,” she said.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, urged people to keep Thanksgiving gatherings as small as possible.
“If we do those things, we’re going to get through it. So that’s my final plea before the holiday,” Fauci told the ABC News program “Good Morning America” on Wednesday.
Families with university students have been forced to evaluate the risk of reuniting for Thanksgiving.
Francesca Wimer, a student at Northwestern University in Illinois, flew home to Washington wearing an N95 mask and a face shield and checked into a hotel for 14 days, quarantining to protect her parents and grandparents.
“She was returning to a vulnerable set of people. We didn’t trust that a test was enough,” said her mother, Cynthia Wimer.
Luke Burke, studying at Syracuse University in upstate New York, was planning to spend Thanksgiving with his family in New Jersey until his roommate tested positive last week.
“I’m sorry I can’t be there with my parents, but it’s the right thing to do,” Burke said.
LINES IN NEW YORK CITY
Across New York City, lines at COVID-19 testing sites wrapped around the block on Wednesday, video on Twitter showed. Bundled-up New Yorkers queued up outside clinics in Astoria, Queens, and Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, starting early as 8 a.m.
MG Robinson, a contract analyst at the Office of New York City Comptroller, waited in line for seven hours outside a CityMD clinic in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn on Wednesday.
“I woke up at 6 (a.m.) and I got here at 6:30 ... I couldn’t even see the front of the line,” said Robinson, 30, who is planning to gather with a small group of family members on Thanksgiving.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was criticized after telling a local TV station he had invited his 89-year-old mother and two daughters to Albany for Thanksgiving, since reversed course.
“This is not a normal Thanksgiving, and to act like it’s a normal Thanksgiving is to deny the reality of every health expert in the nation,” Cuomo told reporters on Wednesday in urging New Yorkers to stay home.
The first COVID-19 vaccines could be weeks away with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration due to rule Dec. 10 on whether to approve Pfizer Inc’s vaccine for emergency use.
A second vaccine, manufactured by Moderna Inc, could also be ready for U.S. authorization and distribution within weeks, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has said.
The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed program plans to release 6.4 million COVID-19 vaccine doses nationwide as soon as one is approved.
ICE detention facility in McAllen,Texas. (photo: U.S. Customs and Border Protection
Justice Department Places New Pressure on Immigrants Facing Deportation
Priscilla Alvarez, CNN
Alvarez writes: "The Justice Department is requiring some immigrants facing deportation to file to stay in the United States in a matter of weeks, a highly unusual move that puts them at a disadvantage and at an increased risk of removal."
EXCERPT:
Immigrants fighting deportation generally have a chance to make their case in court, where they can ask a judge to allow them to stay in the US by arguing they qualify for asylum or another legal option.
This year, as the coronavirus pandemic gripped the US, the nation's immigration court system -- which is operated by the Justice Department -- partially shut down, leading to the postponement of hearings and fueling the growing backlog already facing the system. As of August 2020, the current active court case backlog grew to around 1.2 million, up 11% from the start of March, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks immigration court data.
But as of late, despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, immigration attorneys have begun to see a slate of orders requesting that their clients file applications requesting relief from deportation within around five to six weeks. If the deadline is not met, a judge could issue a removal order, meaning they'd be subject to deportation at any time.
Victoria Neilson, a managing attorney at the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, called the orders "disturbing" and "politically motivated."
"The intended result appears to be to increase deportation to even people who have every intent of filing an application with an immigration court. For some people, their next court date is not for many months or a year into the future," she said.
Members of the San Carlos Apache Nation protest to protect parts of Oak Flat from a copper mining company on July 22, 2015, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/Getty)
Trump Admin Is Rushing to Mine Sacred Tribal Land in Arizona
Carly Nairn, EcoWatch
Nairn writes: "In yet another attack on the environment before leaving office, the Trump administration is seeking to transfer ownership of San Carlos Apache holy ground in Oak Flat, Arizona, to a copper mining company."
The administration pushed to finish the environmental review process, a necessary step to transfer ownership to copper mining company Resolution Copper, and its two parent companies Rio Tinto and BHP, to December 2020, almost a full year ahead of the planned completion.
"The Trump administration is cutting corners and doing a rushed job just to take care of Rio Tinto," Democratic Arizona representative Raúl Grijalva told The Guardian. Grijalva has been outspoken in his opposition to the mine plans.
"And the fact they are doing it during Covid makes it even more disgusting. Trump and Rio Tinto know the tribes' reaction would be very strong and public under normal circumstances but the tribes are trying to save their people right now," Grijalva said.
Oak Flat is a high desert wonderland full of rock spires, choppy hills, ancient oaks, medicinal plants and long stretches of desert flatland. It contains many Indigenous archaeological sites dating back 1,500 years, and is near Tonto National Forest, the largest of six national forests in Arizona. For centuries, the Apache have considered the site holy, using the area for ceremonies. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
However, what is estimated to be one of the world's largest copper deposits resides 7,000 feet underneath the site. If mining proceeds, more than 11 miles of Indigenous sacred sites, burial grounds and petroglyphs would be destroyed, The Guardian reported. Not only that, but Resolution Copper intends to extract 1.4 metric tons of ore, which would create a crater stretching almost two miles wide and 1,000 feet deep.
Rio Tinto, the world's second largest mining company, is no stranger to controversy. The Anglo-Australian company was recently involved in destroying a 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site in order to mine iron ore, against the wishes of the land's traditional owners, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people.
In 2014, a proposal called the Southeastern Arizona Land Exchange was tacked onto the end of a spending bill to exchange federal land for privately owned land for Resolution Copper. Several Arizona legislators supported it, despite opposition from regional Arizona tribes.
Currently there is no federal law that allows control of ancestral lands outside of Native reservation boundaries.
After the environmental review process is complete, the transfer must occur within 60 days, potentially before President-elect Joe Biden's Jan. 20 inauguration.
The move marks one of many attempts by the outgoing administration to keep pushing for environmental rollbacks as it leaves office, including opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling and weakening migratory bird protections.
"We are looking at the destruction of some of the Apache's most significant cultural and historic sites with this project," Kathryn Leonard, an Arizona state historic preservation officer, told The Guardian.
"Our preservation laws are not set up to prevent this level of loss. It weighs heavily on me."
Smog envelopes the skyline in New Delhi, India, Wednesday, Nov. 4. (photo: Altaf Qadri/AP)
Surge in Greenhouse Gases Sustained Despite COVID-19 Lockdowns, UN Says
Reuters
Excerpt: "Greenhouse gas concentrations climbed to a new record in 2019 and rose again this year despite an expected drop in emissions due to Covid-19 lockdowns, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Monday, warning against complacency."
The World Meteorological Organization described the projected 2020 drop as a “tiny blip."
Many scientists expect the biggest annual fall in carbon emissions in generations this year as measures to contain coronavirus have grounded planes, docked ships and kept commuters at home.
However, the WMO described the projected 2020 drop as a “tiny blip” and said the resulting impact on the carbon dioxide concentrations that contribute to global warming would be no bigger than normal annual fluctuations.
“...In the short-term the impact of the Covid-19 confinements cannot be distinguished from natural variability,” the WMO’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin said.
The annual report released by the Geneva-based U.N. agency measures the atmospheric concentration of the gases — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — that are warming our planet and triggering extreme weather events.
Levels of carbon dioxide, a product of burning fossil fuels that is the biggest contributor to global warming, touched a new record of 410.5 parts per million in 2019, it said.
The annual increase is larger than the previous year and beats the average over the last decade.
“Such a rate of increase has never been seen in the history of our records,” WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas said, referring to rises since 2015, calling for a “sustained flattening of the (emissions) curve."
Global data is not yet available for 2020, but the trend of rising concentrations appears to be intact, the WMO said, citing initial readings from its Tasmania and Hawaii stations.
Like other scientific bodies, the WMO said it expects annual global carbon emissions to fall this year due to Covid measures, and ventured a preliminary estimate of between 4.2-7.5 percent.
Such a drop would not cause atmospheric carbon dioxide to go down, but would slow the rate of increase temporarily on a scale that falls within normal variations, it said.
Irrespective of what we do to curb emissions today, much of the carbon dioxide already emitted decades ago remains in the atmosphere and contributes to global warming, climate scientists say.
Over the 2018-2019 period, concentrations of the more potent heat-trapping gas methane increased by 8 parts per billion, the report said, slightly lower than the previous year-on-year change but still above-average over the last 10-year period.
Methane concentrations data is closely watched by scientists as the gas is prone to unexpected leaks such as those from the fossil fuel industry. That can make its atmospheric levels harder to predict than carbon dioxide.
Levels of nitrous oxide, which erodes the atmosphere’s ozone layer and expose humans to harmful ultraviolet rays, also increased in 2019 but at a lower rate than the previous year and on par with the average growth over the last decade.
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