19 February 21
A Moment to Honor Those Who Sustain RSN
The problem of people who use Reader Supported News but will not contribute is so serious that it often overshadows the efforts of those who are quite willing to help sustain the organization, and there are many.
We are a long way from finished for February. Let’s take a moment however to thank sincerely our sustainers, large and small each and every one.
In solidarity.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
It's Live on the HomePage Now: Fossil Fuel Apologists Crafted Lies Now Heard on Fox, Blaming Wind Power for Texas Blackouts
As the widespread blackouts continued, so too did the all-out campaign of lying on behalf of the fossil fuel industry from Fox News hosts and Republican elected officials in Texas, who repeated the false claim that frozen wind turbines were to blame, hour after hour, even though wind energy is expected to power just 7 percent of the state’s grid in winter. At the end of one report from Texas on Tuesday, Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner interjected, falsely, that “millions of Americans, in the cold and dark, say the lack of power is because of green energy policies and the vilification of oil, gas, and coal — the stuff that really keeps you warm.” Later that night, Tucker Carlson began his show with the preposterous lie that, “unbeknownst to most people, the Green New Deal came to Texas. The power grid in the state became totally reliant on windmills. Then it got cold and the windmills broke.” That’s not remotely true of energy policy in a state entirely controlled by Republican elected officials in thrall to the financial support of the fossil fuel industry. Then again, Carlson had just warned viewers at the start of his show that some figures in the news media are “profoundly dishonest.” (“Imagine if lying was your job,” he said with a straight face. “Imagine forcing yourself to tell lies all day about everything in ways that were so transparent and so outlandish that there is no way that people listening to you could possibly believe anything you said. Then imagine doing that again and again, and again, every day of your professional life for your entire life.”) In fact, despite what Faulkner and Carlson and Texas Republicans like Rep. Dan Crenshaw claimed, the drop in energy produced by wind was the least significant factor in the Texas blackouts, according to Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, the organization that manages the state’s power supply. Frozen instruments at thermal power plants, which burn natural gas or coal or rely on nuclear reactors, erased nearly half of the power needed to keep the lights on, according to a detailed analysis of the grid operator’s data by Jesse Jenkins, a macro-scale energy systems engineer who teaches at Princeton. As Jenkins explained on Twitter, even though wind turbines were operating at about two-thirds of their capacity, wind was expected to provide less than 10 percent of the energy needed to power the state’s grid during the peak of a winter storm, while natural gas plants were supposed to provide 66 percent of the power. “Those of you who have heard that frozen wind turbines are to blame for this, think again,” the engineer added. “Texans were counting on natural gas and coal plants to be there when they needed them,” Jenkins observed. “Only 50-60% of that capacity has been able to produce during the past three days. If a student in my course got a <60% on the midterm, we’d call it an F. Fossil generators deserve an F here too.” “The failure to plan for and weatherize against this extreme cold,” Jenkins wrote earlier in the week, “extends from the grid operator (ERCOT), individual power plant owners of almost all types (gas, coal, nuclear, wind), pipeline utilities (which froze up) and even building design and construction practices (limited insulation for cold weather) which makes Texas gas and electricity demand extremely sensitive to cold weather events.” Ed Hirs, who teaches energy economics at the University of Houston, told the Houston Chronicle that the underlying cause of the failure was the state’s deregulated power grid, which offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. “The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union,” Hirs said. “It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances.” Texas Democrat and former presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke argued on MSNBC on Tuesday that the state’s elected Republican leaders have been so obsessed with “stupid culture battles” instead of governing that they failed to require Texas power companies to insulate their equipment, so that natural gas plants and wind turbines that function perfectly well in far colder climates are not knocked offline by cold weather there. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott proved O’Rourke right an hour later by taking time away from actually dealing with the crisis that had plunged over 4 million Texans into the cold and the dark to lie about it to viewers of Sean Hannity’s Fox News program. “I’m not against wind turbines, but my question is,” Hannity asked Abbott, teeing him up to blame renewable energy sources, “if you have these rolling blackouts, and you’ve got freezing weather and they’re not reliable … what good is it?” “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott replied, in what was obviously a pre-scripted talking point. “Our wind and our solar got shut down, and they were collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid, and that thrust Texas into a situation where it was lacking power on a statewide basis,” Abbott said, as if the much larger failures of the gas plants hadn’t happened. “It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary,” the governor concluded in words that could have been written by an industry lobbyist. “The infrastructure failures in Texas are quite literally what happens when you *don’t* pursue a Green New Deal,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat who introduced the legislation to develop renewable energy responded on Twitter. “Weak on sweeping next-gen public infrastructure investments, little focus on equity so communities are left behind, climate deniers in leadership so they don’t long prep for disaster,” she added. “We need to help people *now.* Long-term we must realize these are the consequences of inaction.” The lies about wind turbines repeated by Abbott, Hannity, and Carlson did not materialize out of thin air. Paid apologists for the fossil fuel industry have worked for years to promote the false claim that clean, renewable energy sources like wind and solar are just not reliable enough to provide electricity during severe weather events. Alex Epstein, an energy industry communications consultant who develops talking points to help clients promote the burning of fossil fuels, suggested this week that oil and gas industry boosters should say: “The root cause of the Texas blackouts is a national and state policy that has prioritized the adoption of unreliable wind/solar energy over reliable energy.” In his book, “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” Epstein repeatedly refers to wind and solar power as “unreliable.” In the years since its publication, he has mounted a campaign to rebrand the description of these clean energy sources from “renewables” to “unreliables.” As Ketan Joshi, a clean energy analyst, explained on Twitter earlier this month, lies about frozen wind turbines are not new. Joshi has been periodically debunking a misleading meme which suggests that wind turbines have to be de-iced with helicopters since 2016. In fact, as Joshi explained, the image used in the meme comes from an old experiment in Sweden and predates the use of modern wind turbines, which can be purchased with built-in de-icing systems so that they continue to turn throughout the year in cold climates. This week, as the power grid in Texas buckled, largely due to failures at natural gas plants and in natural gas production in the state, Joshi noticed that the meme had been shared by figures in the fossil fuel industry, including Luke Legate, a public relations consultant for an Austin, Texas, firm that handles “educational outreach” for the Texas Oil and Gas Association, the Texas Pipeline Association, and the Permian Basin Petroleum Association. While Fox News and other conservative outlets have greatly amplified the false claim that frozen wind turbines were to blame for the outages in Texas, Joshi also pointed out that misleading reports boosting that lie were repeated uncritically on news outlets across the ideological spectrum. Leah Stokes, who teaches environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, noted that renewable energy sources were being incorrectly blamed for power cuts in Texas during an extreme weather event, just six months after many of the same interested parties inaccurately blamed renewables for power cuts in California during an extreme weather event. Joshi echoed that observation in an article for RenewEconomy, an Australian clean-energy website. “It’s only been a half year since blackouts spread across California during intense summer heat. Those blackouts were immediately blamed on renewable energy; of course it turned out later on that a string of failures in the state’s gas plants were to blame,” Joshi wrote. “And it’s five years since South Australia’s 2016 blackout, in which precisely the same sequence of events occurred. A pattern is now clear,” he added. “Major blackout events, usually instigated by grid stress related to climate extremes, become opportunities to attack renewable energy,” Joshi continued. “Media articles, political pronouncements, tweets, Facebook posts, everything — the entire media ecosystem assumes that renewable energy must have done it and runs hard with it. And of course, later, it comes out that fossil fuel failures played a significant or even majority role in the cluster of causes of the event — none of which is covered with the intensity of the original stories. It is currently playing out in Texas.” |
illions of Texans, trying to survive a winter storm without heat or electricity following the catastrophic failure of the state’s power grid, were at least spared immediate exposure to the torrent of lies about what went wrong in their state being pumped out by Fox News.
Fight for $15 leaders are pressuring the White House and Congress to keep the wage increase provision in the coronavirus relief bill. (photo: Lynne Sladky/AP)
Biden Under Pressure to Go Nuclear to Get Minimum Wage Hike
Laura Barrón-López and Natasha Korecki, POLITICO
Excerpt: "Progressives, union leaders and activists are demanding that the Biden administration use every tool available to make sure its massive coronavirus relief package includes an increase in the minimum wage."
The president said he doesn’t think a $15-an-hour wage increase will make it into the final Covid relief bill. And it’s unlikely his VP will push the rules to make it happen.
But, already, there’s one place the White House has hinted it won’t go.
Biden’s team is leaning heavily against the idea of having Vice President Kamala Harris use her powers as president of the Senate to keep the minimum wage provision inside the relief package. She could do so if the Senate parliamentarian determines that hiking the minimum wage to $15 an hour does not jibe with budgetary rules that allow a bill to pass with just 51 votes in the Senate. Harris, at that point, could be the tiebreaking vote to bypass the parliamentarian.
The White House’s reluctance to consider that step has set up the possibility of an early confrontation between the president and a progressive base that has — to this point — been pleased with his work in office.
“It's a test for how we use the power of having all three, the House, the Senate and the White House,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). “Let's not hand-wring over this ... We should use every tool in our toolbox.”
Early in his presidency, Biden has taken a historic amount of executive actions. But the president still views himself as an institutionalist, and advisers and allies say he is wary of using the Harris nuclear option. A vice president hasn’t overruled a parliamentarian in more than 40 years. And while the White House is not ruling out the idea, officials are skeptical that enough Democrats would vote to keep the wage provision in the relief package even if they deployed the option, a person familiar with the White House’s thinking said.
Biden has already said that increasing the minimum wage might turn into a “separate negotiation” from the relief package. But the administration has not been clear on how and when that separate negotiation might take place, save to affirm their commitment to it.
“The president is firmly committed to raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour — that’s why he championed it on the campaign trail and it’s why he put it in his first legislative proposal,” White House spokesperson Mike Gwin said. “That commitment will remain unshaken, regardless of what is determined to be feasible through the reconciliation process.”
While the White House may not lack determination, it does lack a clear legislative path. If Democrats cannot pass a minimum wage hike in a package that requires only a simple majority vote, then they will need at least 10 Republicans in the Senate in addition to their entire caucus to make it law.
Progressive groups and activists aren’t entertaining a separate pathway for the wage increase just yet. Instead, national union heads, alongside local "Fight for $15" leaders, are pressuring the White House and Congress to keep the provision in the relief bill. Rev. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s campaign, will visit West Virginia to press Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), a skeptic of a $15-an-hour minimum wage. Services Employee International Union members will also phone bank and potentially hold events in key states to pressure lawmakers.
“We’re going to be a gathering storm in the next three weeks because this is a tipping point,” said Mary Kay Henry, president of the SEIU. “It absolutely needs to be in this package.”
SEIU and other unions have had conversations with, or are reaching out to, other Democrats like Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire. SEIU along with a number of other major labor organizations are also planning to send a letter to the White House and Congress on Friday, making the case for why a $15-an-hour wage is a critical piece of the Covid relief package.
“By deferring the hyper minimum wage hike to another day we’re probably signing the death sentences for more Americans who are going to die because of poverty,” said Joe Sanberg, a progressive activist and entrepreneur who briefed Biden’s team on the issue during the transition.
But not everyone inside the Democratic tent shares the belief that the minimum wage hike has to be in the final relief package, even though they say Democrats should push as hard as possible to make it happen.
“My singular objective is to deliver Covid relief, and if we could get the minimum wage in there, that would be monumental and historic,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). “But I also think if minimum wage tanks Covid relief that would also be monumental and historic, but not in a good way.”
And others argued that Biden was right to say that he could get a wage hike done in future legislation.
“Raising the minimum wage is important but it’s not an emergency,” said Matt Bennett, a top official at the centrist-Democratic think tank Third Way. Bennett, who has been talking to both the White House and the Senate about the Covid package, said unemployment insurance running out in March “is an emergency.”
“I believe the minimum wage will be raised within the first two years of the Biden term,” Bennett added. “I don’t think it’ll get necessarily done by the next four weeks.”
Behind the scenes, the White House is asking for patience. A minimum wage hike is a priority to Biden, advisers and allies say, and they’re working to build support that would aid a future negotiation, if one is needed. They note that Biden advocated for a minimum wage increase in an Oval Office meeting with business leaders on Tuesday.
The White House is insistent it has maintained open communication with progressives, including lawmakers and activist groups, on both the $15-an-hour minimum wage provision and, more broadly, the Covid relief plan. A White House official specifically cited a briefing last week with 17 progressive groups. And Jayapal said she’s been in multiple conversations with the administration in the days after Biden said he didn’t believe a minimum wage hike would end up in the reconciliation bill.
Jayapal and other progressive lawmakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), are optimistic the parliamentarian will rule the minimum wage hike is germane to the budget process. And they are also beginning to lay the predicate for the parliamentarian to be overruled if that determination isn’t made.
“The parliamentarian is not an elected representative of the people,” said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.). “I've never heard us put everything on the balance of what the Senate parliamentarian says when it impacts, especially, a once-in-a-century pandemic relief bill.”
The recent Congressional Budget Office finding that a $15 minimum wage would substantially impact the federal budget was seen as a boon to progressives’ argument for its inclusion, even as the agency found that a hike could lead to 1.4 million jobs lost over 10 years. The CBO analysis also found that the wage increase would lift 900,000 Americans out of poverty.
Lawmakers are wary, however, that if Democrats don’t find a way to pass the wage increase in the first relief package, it may never be passed. Jayapal bluntly said she sees no chance of attracting Republican support for the measure, making it imperative to pass it through reconciliation.
Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), a Biden ally, agreed. “If it cannot be in reconciliation, if that's the determination that’s made and that stands,” he said, “it's really difficult to see it passing and getting 60 votes.”
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), seen on the House steps of the Capitol during votes on Friday, December 4, 2020. (photo: Tom Williams/Getty)
Ro Khanna: Audit the Rich, Raise 1.2 Trillion
Ayelet Sheffey, Business Insider
Sheffey writes: "Wealth taxes have been the subject of much conversation since the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020, but what if you could raise more money from the wealthy just by enforcing existing taxes?"
That's an idea tucked into a bill sponsored by Rep. Ro Khanna of California following the chaos surrounding GameStop and the stock market. A member of the Progressive Caucus with a track record of work on social and economic issues, his newest bill is one to add to the list.
Khanna's Stop Corporations and Higher Earners from Avoiding Taxes and Enforce Rules Strictly (CHEATERS) Act would require the IRS to annually audit 95% of companies with at least $20 billion in assets, along with 50% of individuals with an income of at least $10 million. That would be a big change from 2018, when only 0.03% of returns from individuals making over $10 million were examined, according to IRS data.
With the more aggressive methods proposed under the bill, the government could raise an additional $1.2 trillion in tax revenue over the next decade, according to the bill text. It would require an investment of $100 billion in the IRS, but it wouldn't raise any new taxes at all.
"Wall Street has been able to act like high rolling gamblers with almost zero consequences for far too long," Khanna said in a statement. "Right now, the wealthiest 1% are responsible for roughly 70% of the 'tax gap' — the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid. It's time every American pay their fair share."
Other elements of the bill include:
- Using $10 billion of the allocated funding to upgrade IRS technology;
- Requiring additional reporting for individuals with incomes above $400,000 that include money from sources not previously disclosed to the IRS;
- Having the IRS regularly report to Congress on its auditing progress;
- And increasing penalties on millionaires who put false information on their tax returns.
Khanna's bill could prove less controversial than proposals from other Democratic lawmakers to increase tax revenue from the ultrawealthy, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-Mass.) two-cent wealth tax, which proposes a 2% tax on every dollar for families with a net worth of more than $50 million.
The UK's Wealth Tax Commission called for a wealth tax in December, proposing a 1% tax for five years on individuals worth over £500,000, while Argentina voted to tax the top 0.8% of its population — just around 12,000 people. The government hopes to bring in $3.3 billion with the measure. These measures are one-off taxes, however, unlike Warren's proposal.
Khanna's bill has backing from a 2020 study by University of Pennsylvania professor Natasha Sarin, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and former IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti, which said that the government misses out on billions of dollars in tax revenue from taxes that are owed but not paid.
"The failure of a minority of taxpayers to pay what they owe imposes significant burdens on those who are fully compliant," the study said.
Texas officials are reporting businesses are hiking up prices for food, water, and hotel rooms following a winter storm that walloped Texas this week. This is as residents wait in long lines at grocery stores and face food and water shortages. (photo: Thomas Shea/AFP)
ALSO SEE: AOC Raises $1 Million for Texas Crisis Relief as
Ted Cruz Fumbles Cancun Damage Control
Texas Officials Warn of Price Gouging as State Faces Food, Water Shortages
Jaclyn Diaz, NPR
Diaz writes: "Texas officials are cracking down on businesses they say have hiked the prices of food, water, and hotel rooms while the state continues to deal with shortages caused by unprecedented winter weather."
Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee, the chief civil attorney for Texas' largest county, and Linda Hidalgo, the Harris County Judge, said Houston area residents have complained of hotel rooms and bottled water being sold at exorbitant prices.
"The main types of things we're seeing is hotels setting prices at ridiculous rates," Menefee told the Associated Press. "We've seen allegations of packs of water being sold for two to three times the normal price, or packs of water being divvied up and the individual bottles being sold at excessive prices."
Menefee and Hidalgo have since set up a system for consumers to report suspected incidents of price gouging. In just 20 hours, the system logged more than 450 complaints, they said.
This is while much of the state continues to face food and water shortages following bitterly cold temperatures and power outages that have lasted days after a winter storm walloped Texas this week.
Increasing prices for essentials during an emergency declaration is against the law in Texas.
Selling or leasing fuel, food, medicine, lodging, building materials, construction tools, or another necessity at an exorbitant or excessive price after the governor has declared a state disaster is illegal under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices-Consumer Protection Act.
Hidalgo said violators can face fines of up to $250,000.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton urged residents this week to report incidents of price gouging or other disaster-related scams to the state's consumer protection hotline.
"No one is exempt from price gouging laws in Texas. Any person selling goods, necessities, or services at an exorbitant price will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law," Paxton said. "I will not stand for any person or business unlawfully taking advantage of Texans."
Sticker shock hasn't been limited to just food and water. Houston Public Media reported about 27,000 Houston-area CenterPoint Energy customers opened their emails this week to a heart attack-inducing surprise: a $202,102.16 bill from their electricity provider.
But the bill was just a technical mistake, the company said.
CenterPoint Energy tweeted to its consumers who might've received such an email, "You do not owe this amount."
The company said, "We are aware of a recent technical issue caused by the power outage in Houston which led to the issuance of incorrect natural gas billing e-mails to some customers. If you have received an e-mail in the amount of $202,102.16, please disregard it."
NASA's Perseverance rover lands safely on Mars, Feb. 16, 2021, in an illustration released by NASA. (photo: NASA)
NASA's Mars Rover Successfully Touches Down on the Red Planet
Denise Chow, NBC News
Chow writes: "NASA kicked off a new era of Mars exploration Thursday with the successful landing of Perseverance, a car-size robotic explorer that will search for traces of ancient life on the planet and collect what could be the first rocky samples from Mars that are sent back to Earth."
READ MORE
President Hassan Rouhani of Iran this week in Tehran. (photo: AFP)
Biden Administration Formally Offers to Restart Nuclear Talks With Iran
Lara Jakes, Michael Crowley, David E. Sanger and Farnaz Fassihi, The New York Times
Excerpt: "President Biden campaigned on restoring an accord limiting Iran's nuclear program. It remains unclear if Tehran, which is demanding that sanctions be lifted first, will accept the offer to talk."
he United States took a major step on Thursday toward restoring the Iran nuclear deal that the Trump administration abandoned, offering to join European nations in what would be the first substantial diplomacy with Tehran in more than four years, Biden administration officials said.
In a series of moves intended to make good on one of President Biden’s most significant campaign promises, the administration also backed away from a Trump administration effort to restore United Nations sanctions on Iran. That effort had divided Washington from its European allies.
And at the same time, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken told European foreign ministers in a call on Thursday morning that the United States would join them in seeking to restore the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, which he said “was a key achievement of multilateral diplomacy.”
The Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on June 21, 2019, after a massive fire was contained. (photo: Getty)
Philadelphia Oil Refinery's Toxic and Racist Legacy Continues in Cleanup
Climate Nexus
he sprawling Philadelphia Energy Solutions oil refinery has poisoned the Greys Ferry neighborhood for 150 years, and continues to do so even after it closed in 2019 following numerous explosions, Reuters reports.
The scale of the toxic legacy left by the East Coast's oldest and largest refinery — including poisonous waste fuels poured onto the ground and even buried rail cars — is staggering, and cleanup operations continue to inflict pollution on the predominantly Black neighborhood nearby.
As many as 3,000 tanks and vessels will need to be removed from the site and, "There's enough pipeline to connect you from here to Florida, and the majority of that pipeline today is wrapped in asbestos," said Roberto Perez, CEO of the Chicago-based Hilco Redevelopment Partners that bought the property in June.
Despite the obvious hazards, local residents feel shut out of the remediation process. It was also unclear how or if those residents who have endured decades of toxic pollution will benefit from the hotel and restaurant Hilco is reportedly considering building on the site.
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