03 February 21
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RSN: Philip Green | 74 Million: Why? Why?
Philip Green, Reader Supported News
Green writes: "I was going to write about democracy from the commonplace standpoint that the U.S. isn't really much of one, and then segue to some comments about what can be done, failing constitutional amendments, to make it more so. But on reflection, I think that much consideration of that subject would have been putting the cart before the horse."
“In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betray'd by what is false within.”– George Meredith, “Love’s Grave”
was going to write about democracy from the commonplace standpoint that the U.S. isn’t really much of one, and then segue to some comments about what can be done, failing constitutional amendments, to make it more so. But on reflection, I think that much consideration of that subject would have been putting the cart before the horse. Our problem is deeper than the Electoral College and gerrymandering and the filibuster; and its name is not “Donald Trump.” Or at least it’s not only Donald Trump, it’s also “We the People,” who did not form a “more perfect Union” in 1787, and, as we have been learning to our dismay, may not have done so yet. Meredith was writing about “love;” he could also have been writing about “Democracy.” And its Grave.
The classic discussion of types of government is that of Aristotle, and his most resonant conclusion is that what he called “Polity” was the most practicable form of government, and one of his varying definitions of it is that it’s a combination of two of the three non-virtuous forms of government, democracy and oligarchy, each checking the other; the virtuous forms of aristocracy (rule of the wise) and monarchy (rule by the good) being more or less unattainable. The result, which I prefer to call “representative oligarchy,” is what we have today and have always had, the two tendencies always in conflict but never one totally displacing the other.
Being a self-styled democratic theorist, of course I tend to view “democracy – rule by the people – as the good half of that tandem, and “oligarchy” – rule of the rich – as the bad.
But suppose we stop thinking in those moralizing terms, usually defined tendentiously for the sake of an argument, and look at them in practice. That is, look at how people, the demos, are responding to whatever is the ongoing balance. And then what do we see?
For the last several months we’ve seen the people, seventy-four million of them strong, in action. And what do we find? “The people,” or at least the quite dangerous segment of them who’ve come to the fore in this period, hate democracy. The Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, the Confederate flag-wavers, the women who swear by QAnon … and everyone who followed them into the breach. I’m not making this up, or cleverly deducing it from their behavior: their hatred of democracy is right out in the open, in every first-hand account of the Insurrection, in what was overheard and in quotes given unabashedly to interviewers. And above all in the down-to-earth political behavior that has supported “Red” state efforts to roll back universal suffrage full-throttle. (See Luke Vogel’s account in The New Yorker of January 25 for copious examples.)
Or, to look at it it from the other side of the Aristotelian coin, what do the seventy-four million think about oligarchy? Answer: it’s fine with them. Doesn’t bother them at all. Don’t drain the swamp, fill it up, drown the whole polity in corruption, makes no difference. They’ve been governed for four years by the most oligarchical, kleptocratic, plutocratic regime in American history, and they’re begging for more of it, no holds barred. And down with Democracy!
So to return to my question: Why? Why? And here I’m going to depart for a moment from all the socio-psychoanalyses of The Authoritarian Personality, The Radical Right, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, etc.; not to mention all indictments of the Psychopathic President, including my own. Not because these analyses tell us nothing at all, as they indeed sometimes tell us a lot about some groups of persons: but first, because we’re in danger of adopting a position in which we look down, de haut en bas, on those somehow lesser beings who lack our own privileged standpoint of pure rationality; and second and more crucially, because they have nothing specific to offer about the actual topic of discussion: Democracy.
Is there something, about democracy itself, and if so what is it, that might lead masses of people to hate it? What makes it so susceptible to anti-democratic demagoguery as to have verged on collapse on January 6th, without any apparent concern on the part of the legitimate authorities?
I think the answer is obvious. Among all the forms of government, Plato’s or Aristotle’s or Rousseau’s or anyone else’s, Democracy is unique in the requirement that the losers of a vote have to be prepared to lose, have to think losing is ok, have to engage in “the peaceful transition of power,” to have to say if only in fake good cheer, “Wait ‘till next year.”
Like the Brooklyn Dodgers, who waited fourteen years for “next year” until they finally came up winning when a speedy left-fielder named Sandy Amoros ran down Yogi Berra’s fly ball slicing into the left-field corner. They didn’t claim they were cheated by the Yankees (five times in a row); they became more rather than less progressive, breaking the racial barrier in Major League Baseball. In other words, they happily played what the psychologist Anatol Rapoport called a “game” – competitive but rule-bound; no knives up anyone’s sleeve. (Well, the Houston Astros cheated, but high tech changes everything, even games.) Because baseball is a game; people don’t get killed over it, not even in Fenway Park.
And that is the great, to many even, maybe to seventy-four million, the unforgivable weakness, the Original Sin, of Democracy. At the end, The Great Demagogue didn’t offer them the betterment of daily life, didn’t offer more equality, didn’t tell his cohort that stopping immigration had increased their standard of living (it hadn’t). From well before November 3rd right up to and through January 6th, he offered not losing. Because losing sucks, losing is for losers, losing is weakness, and you’re either weak or you’re strong, you can’t be both. And which would you rather be? As George Steinbrenner so helpfully put it, the second-place finisher is the First Loser.
This consideration of Winning and Losing also perhaps helps to explain something else about the seventy-four million: Donald Trump’s seemingly inexplicable appeal to rabidly right-wing women. Women, at least contemporary women, want to be strong rather than weak just as much as men do, though in some cases the context might be different. It was a woman, after all, who was first to break, or try to break, the taboo on bringing guns onto the House floor. As Hobbes suggested, give a woman a gun and she’s as dangerous as a man. His understanding of that turned what should have been Trump’s great weakness into another source of his continuing strength.
In sum, for men and women who follow Trump, at some point political conflict stopped being a game with rules and became a war – with guns. No accident then that “taking away our guns” is the deepest source of right-wing hatred for liberals, along with abortion, in both cases for women as well as men.
Here then, we can return to the orthodoxies of political science, which suggest that along with the family, the most important source of political socialization is the sitting president, whoever that might be. What he has preached is what has been heard by the millions, over and over. This is “the culture war,” the source of his fiercest and most constant complaint. But we have to understand it as a social reality, a material phenomenon. And in so treating it I will also return willy-nilly to a more psychoanalytic analysis of such phenomena: but only in the recognition that I myself am and always have been a privileged white male, who has benefitted and still benefits from being in the position I now criticize and analyze.
To put it simply: after eight years of Clinton, and again of Obama, and now more to come, what does the Right have? As Joy Reid put it on Inauguration Eve, the Right has clearly lost the culture war. Multi-diversity is the name of the democratic game throughout the mass media. The Right’s foothold is reduced to Fox and Friends; going to rallies where songs by celebrities who actually oppose Trump are played without their permission; and relying on internet propaganda and talk radio harangues that consist of unmistakably fantastical and imaginary conspiracies that have no existence at all outside the closed-in world of the deranged; and are well beneath the moral level of hard-core pornography.
What has been lost, what is felt to have been lost more than anything else in the so-called culture wars, is the privileged status of being white. The evidence of this mind-set has been visible for more than four decades. In public opinion survey after survey, White Americans in large majorities have agreed with the statement that Black people have been the beneficiaries of “too much” favorable treatment “too soon” and “too fast.”
Beneath all the rhetoric about “political correctness,” and being looked down on by “coastal elites,” racism is what rings the bell. Racism and concomitantly fear, the fear instilled by a classic instance of projection in which one’s own passion to destroy the other become the threat of the Other to destroy oneself. And in which the self is taken over by the paranoid style of cognition, wherein the very lack of evidence for the Steal and the Conspiracy becomes the most frightening sign of their reality: “We are betray’d by what is false within.”
The Gun must be picked up, and carried openly, into the very heart of the treacherous Democracy. The Insurrection was, among other things, a revelation of all the myriad ways, direct or symbolic, which the underside of America can access to insult, revile, and ultimately be terrified by, its opponents, whom it has turned into invented enemies.
Postscript
It’s impossible to give a complete picture of the current rejection of democracy and embrace of autocracy without emphasizing the central role of theocratic Christian bigotry. In addition to the erasure of African-Americans, there was not a Jew to be seen or heard; the sweatshirt reading “Camp Auschwitz” set a tone that received no rebuke, and still hasn’t, from anyone on the Right.
But there is an interesting historical point here. In the 1930s, the role that Whiteness plays today was filled by anti-Semitism. Black people were not the cultural problem that agitated the hysterical Right – they were mostly invisible in the mass media of the time. That position was filled by Jews, the primary subject of all the major hate groups and deranged conspiracy mongers of the time; the Nazi Hitler was their rallying point. As an early version of Marjorie Taylor Greene put it about Sergei Eisenstein during his brief time in Hollywood, he was part of a “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy to turn the American cinema into a Communist cesspool.” Plus ça change ...
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
President Biden signed executive orders during his first few minutes in the Oval Office on January 20, 2021. (photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times)
With 28 Executive Orders Signed, President Biden Is Off to a Record Start
Tamara Keith, NPR
Keith writes: "In his first two weeks in office, President Biden has signed nearly as many executive orders as Franklin Roosevelt signed in his entire first month. And President Roosevelt holds the record."
Adding his signature to three executive orders on immigration Tuesday, Biden has now signed 28 executive orders since taking office. FDR signed 30 in his first month.
"By sheer volume, Biden is going to be the most active president on this front since the 1930s," said Andy Rudalevige, a professor of government at Bowdoin College.
Executive orders are the easiest presidential directives to track over time because they are all numbered and published in the Federal Register. But Biden is using many more levers of executive authority, also signing presidential memoranda, proclamations and letters.
Here's how Biden stacks up with other recent presidents on executive orders:
Biden's actions so far include:
- 28 executive orders
- four substantive proclamations (plus one ceremonial)
- 10 presidential memoranda
- and two letters (rejoining the World Health Organization and Paris climate agreement)
And while the numbers are large, these actions aren't barrier-breaking. They call for the creation of task forces, direct agencies to begin a regulatory process or explore a policy change.
"A lot of what these orders consist of are plans to make plans, in a sense," Rudalevige said. "There's a lot of reviewing, reporting, sort of an urging to rev up that process, but it's not a substitute for the process itself."
Executive actions can't create new laws — they have to exist within the constraints of the Constitution and existing statute. They direct the executive branch to do what is already in its power. And as a result they can be, and often are, reversed by the next president. In fact, many of Biden's actions take aim at things former President Donald Trump had done with a swipe of his Sharpie.
"There's a lot of talk with good reason about the number of executive orders that I've signed," Biden said while signing the immigration executive orders. "I'm not making new law. I'm eliminating bad policy."
Some Republicans have criticized Biden for pushing through Democratic priorities with a signature, after preaching unity and bipartisanship. The number of actions is notable, but these sorts of reversals are something most presidents do.
"The motto of the Reagan transition team was 'when in doubt, undo.' That was the motto," said Phillip Cooper, a professor of government at Portland State University. Biden's team, he said, "didn't want to just undo, they wanted to put back in place what had been there before or pick up what had been there before and build on it."
Trump made reversing Obama administration policies a mission of his presidency. Now Biden is reversing the reversals — for instance, the letter he signed returning the U.S. to the Paris climate agreement, which Trump had just pulled the U.S. out of in November.
Several other Biden executive actions relate to the coronavirus pandemic. This fits with another trend in presidential directives: There are a lot of them in times of crisis or war.
Combine a public health crisis with the first year of a presidency and "the fact that he is coming after a president that he opposes. All of that is the perfect storm to get a flurry of executive orders that we've seen," said Sharece Thrower, an associate professor of political science at Vanderbilt University.
Cooper says more than any administration in modern history, Biden's team came in prepared, with the legal groundwork already carefully laid. This is a contrast with the early days of both the Clinton and Trump presidencies, where there were drafting problems and legal overreach that opened them up to challenges and forced revisions. The Biden orders may not be as far-reaching as advocates would like, but they may be more durable.
"If you look at the orders, the language of the orders and what they're actually calling for by the agencies seem to be very measured," Cooper said. "Although they are in very controversial topics in some cases, you're not seeing anything in there that's substantively all that dramatic."
This gets at another purpose of executive orders: They can be the equivalent of very formally written press releases. They allow a president to signal that they are doing something — that they are delivering on the promises they made when they ran for office, even if the executive action is really just the first step in a long process of change.
A protest outside the headquarters of ICE in Washington in June last year. (photo: Olivier Douliery/Getty)
New Claims of Migrant Abuse as ICE Defies Biden to Continue Deportations
Julian Borger, Guardian UK
Borger writes: "US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been denounced as a 'rogue agency' after new allegations of assaults on asylum seekers emerged, and deportations of African and Caribbean migrants continued in defiance of the Biden administration's orders."
Ice condemned as ‘rogue agency’ after rights groups allege torture by agents and man deported to Haiti who had never been there
Joe Biden unveiled his immigration agenda on Tuesday, and his homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, was confirmed by the Senate, but the continued deportations suggested the Biden White House still does not have full control of Ice, which faces multiple allegations of human rights abuses and allegations that it has disproportionately targeted black migrants.
A coalition of immigrant rights groups published affidavits from Cameroonian asylum seekers who they said were tortured by being forced to approve their own deportations. The asylum seekers described being forced to the floor and having their fingers inked and pressed on to deportation documents they had refused to sign.
An Ice plane deporting Cameroonian, Angolan, Congolese and other African migrants is expected to leave Louisiana on Wednesday, despite an order from the incoming Biden administration for a 100-day suspension of deportation flights.
A Trump-appointed judge in Texas blocked the Biden moratorium last week, approving a challenge from the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, who played a leading role in the attempt to overturn the election result.
However, the judge did not block guidelines laid down by the then acting secretary of homeland security, David Pekoske, which came into effect on Monday and stipulated that deportations should be limited to suspected terrorists, convicted felons deemed a “threat to public safety”, and migrants who arrived after 1 November last year.
Ice carried out a deportation flight to Haiti on Tuesday morning carrying people who fit none of those criteria. One of the deportees on that flight was Paul Pierrilus, a 40-year-old financial consultant from New York state, who had never been to Haiti and is not a Haitian citizen, according to the country’s ambassador to Washington. The ambassador, Bocchit Edmond, has told activists he was taken by surprise by the deportation but did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Pierrilus was taken off a 19 January deportation flight at the last moment after the intervention of his local congressman, Mondaire Jones. But despite that temporary reprieve, , he was driven to an Ice airfield in Alexandria, Louisiana, early on Tuesday and put on a plane to Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital.
“There was nothing we could do to stop it,” said Jones, the Democratic representative for New York’s 17th district. “Unfortunately, Paul’s story is not uncommon. Black immigrants have been disproportionately targeted and deported by our racist, inhumane immigration system, particularly in recent weeks.”
Jones told the Guardian: “Ice is a rogue agency that must be brought to heel. There is no world in which an agency under the control of the leader of the executive branch should continue to deport people after the president of the United States signed an executive order halting deportations for 100 days.”
There was no response from the national security council to questions about any further attempts to stop the Ice flights. The state department referred queries to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The DHS did not respond.
On Monday, a coalition of migrant rights groups – Freedom for Immigrants, Al Otro Lado and Advocates for Immigrants Rights – presented fresh allegations to the DHS of what they described as torture of Cameroonian asylum seekers.
One of them, identified by the initials HT, described being brought into a room with darkened windows on 14 January at the Winn correctional center, where he was forced by Ice agents to put his fingerprint on a document in lieu of a signature, waiving his rights to further legal process before deportation.
“I tried to stand up because of the force that they were using on me, and they tripped me,” HT said. “I fell on the floor; I kept my hands under my body. I held my hands tight at waist level so they could not have them. Five of the Ice officers and one of the officers in green … joined them. They pressed me down and said that I needed to give them my finger for the fingerprint.”
HT’s statement went on: “As one was pressing on my neck with their hands, the other came in front of me, pulling my head from above, straightening my neck so they could easily suppress me. One climbed on to my back. I had a lot of trouble breathing. This happened for more than two minutes. I was gasping for air. I told them: ‘Please, I can’t breathe.’ I asked them to release me. They said that they didn’t care; what they need is my fingerprint.”
An Ice spokesperson said it would not be possible to respond to the allegations by the end of Tuesday. The agency was previously accused of using torture to force inmates to sign deportation waivers in October.
Most, if not all, the Cameroonians on Wednesday’s scheduled flight are English speakers from the west and south of the country, who fear imprisonment, torture or death on return in the midst of a brutal civil conflict between the government and anglophone separatists.
Martha, the sister of one of the Cameroonian deportees, identified only as NF for reasons of his security, said they were the only surviving members of their family, after their brothers were killed by government security forces for being members of a non-violent organisation, the Southern Cameroons National Council.
“He is definitely going to be jailed for a very long time. I am not back home so I can bribe his way out, which is the only way you get out,” said Martha, who arrived in the US before her brother and was granted asylum.
“That’s why I’m really shaking right now, because I don’t know what is going to happen when he’s jailed. There were people that went on the first [Ice deportation] flight in October and they are still in jail.”
The Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen said on Tuesday: “Ice is accelerating pending flights for many of these asylum seekers who escaped torture and death in their home countries, only to be sent back into imminent danger without fair or complete consideration of their asylum requests.”
He added: “This is unacceptable and goes against our values as a nation. Ice must halt these flights at once.”
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said that the decision on whether to grant Donald Trump access to intelligence briefings was 'under review'. (photo: Yuri Gripas/Alamy)
Trump's Continued Access to Classified Intelligence Briefings "Under Review," White House Says
Melissa Quinn, CBS News
Quinn writes: "The White House is examining whether former President Donald Trump should continue to receive intelligence briefings now that he is out of office, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday."
Psaki told reporters during the White House press briefing she raised the issue of Mr. Trump's access to the nation's secrets with President Biden's national security teams.
"It's something, obviously, that's under review, but there was not a conclusion last I asked them about it, but I'm happy to follow up on it and see if there's more to share," Psaki said.
Former presidents typically continue to receive routine intelligence briefings and have access to classified information. But just before Mr. Trump left office last month, Sue Gordon, the former principal deputy director of national intelligence, suggested this perk should not be available to the 45th president.
"My recommendation, as a 30-plus-year veteran of the intelligence community, is not to provide him any briefings after Jan. 20," Gordon wrote in The Washington Post. "With this simple act — which is solely the new president's prerogative — Joe Biden can mitigate one aspect of the potential national security risk posed by Donald Trump, private citizen."
Gordon said Mr. Trump's post-presidency "security profile" is "daunting."
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, also said last month he doesn't believe Mr. Trump should have access to classified information as a private citizen.
"There is no circumstance in which this president should get another intelligence briefing — not now, not in the future," Schiff said in an interview with "Face the Nation." "I don't think he can be trusted with it now, and in the future he certainly can't be trusted."
Asked about this issue last month, White House chief of staff Ron Klain told CNN that Mr. Biden would "look for a recommendation from the intelligence professionals" in the administration before determining whether to bar Mr. Trump from receiving the briefings.
FCC acting Chair Jessica Rosenworcel at an oversight hearing on June 24, 2020, in Washington, DC. (photo: Jonathan Newton/Getty)
Biden's FCC Takes Its First Steps Toward Making the Internet Affordable
Sara Morrison, Vox
Morrison writes: "President Joe Biden's Federal Communications Commission isn't wasting any time trying to get low-income families online."
resident Joe Biden’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) isn’t wasting any time trying to get low-income families online. Under acting Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC is moving to expand a broadband services discount program to cover remote schooling. And at least one company, possibly hoping to get into the new FCC’s good graces, has now voluntarily doubled the internet speeds on its package for low-income people.
On Monday, the FCC announced it was seeking comment on requests to expand E-Rate, which offers schools and libraries discounts on equipment and services needed to access the internet. With the Covid-19 pandemic forcing many students to do their schooling from home, Democrats have called for expanding the E-Rate to cover residential connections as well. Millions of students don’t have adequate internet in their homes, forcing them to use mobile phone data and even internet from nearby fast food restaurants. So discounted home internet services could help quite a bit.
Previous FCC Chair Ajit Pai repeatedly denied calls to consider the expansion. Instead, he asked companies not to cut Americans off from the internet if they couldn’t pay their bills, waive any late fees, make their wifi hotspots free, and consider adopting programs for low-income people. Then, Pai had to hope that the companies would say yes to these suggestions. Rosenworcel, on the other hand, is a vocal proponent of E-Rate expansion, so it’s no surprise that she’s moving quickly here.
“It’s clear that a priority for the Biden-Harris administration and its FCC is going to be getting robust broadband to every household in the US,” Gigi Sohn, a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Technology & Law Policy, told Recode. “It’s a social justice issue, it’s an economic issue, it’s a health care issue, it’s an education issue, it’s a democracy issue. In other words, broadband internet access enables all of the administration’s top priorities.”
Perhaps sensing which way the wind is blowing (and under pressure from student activists), Comcast announced on Tuesday that, starting in March, it will double the download speeds on its Internet Essentials package to 50 Mbps download and bump the upload speed to 5 Mbps for no extra cost. Currently, Comcast offers 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload speeds for $9.95 per month to people who are on government assistance. That’s the bare minimum to meet the FCC’s standard for broadband speed, and it’s actually an increase over the 15/2 Mbps Comcast offered before the pandemic hit.
The FCC’s 25/3 Mbps standard has been in place for the last six years and the entirety of Pai’s tenure, despite the changes in what the internet offers and what people use it for, and despite repeated calls to raise the standard. Some of those calls came from Rosenworcel, who argued that necessary services like telemedicine and school need faster speeds, especially when multiple people are using them. She has advocated for a download speed baseline of 100 Mbps.
Comcast isn’t going that far, but its 50/5 Mbps — and the timing of its announcement — suggest that it’s paying very close attention to how the new FCC will regulate its business, and possibly hoping to get on its good side with these proactive changes. It’s safe to say that Comcast understands that Pai’s “light-touch framework” days are over.
In addition to the E-Rate expansion, the FCC is also accepting requests for comment from the public about its Emergency Broadband Benefit Program, part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which offers discounts of up to $50 on broadband services and equipment. While Sohn says the latest moves are a good sign, much more is still needed to close the digital divide.
“That includes the FCC, other federal agencies, the states, localities, philanthropy, digital inclusion advocates, and industry,” Sohn said. “As the industry will readily admit (and did admit by supporting the $50 emergency broadband benefit), it can’t close the digital divide itself.”
A demonstration outside Myanmar's embassy in Bangkok on Monday against the detainment of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. (photo: Adam Dean/The New York Times)
Healthcare Workers 'Civil Disobedience Campaign' Intensifies Across Myanmar
Hmue Angel, The Myanmar Times
Excerpt: "More than 80 hospitals across Myanmar have joined the 'Civil Disobedience Campaign' launched by healthcare workers in protest of the state of emergency declared by the Tatmadaw [military]."
READ MORE
Smog in Los Angeles, California. (photo: Walter Bibikow/Getty)
American Cities Under-Reporting Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Nearly 20%, Research Says
Louise Boyle, The Independent
Boyle writes: "Cities in the United States may be under-reporting greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 20 per cent, according to new research."
Up to 75 per cent of all carbon emissions produced by burning fossil fuels coming from cities
Urban areas are a major contributor to the climate crisis, accounting for 75 per cent of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions produced by burning fossil fuels.
Around the world, cities are expected to triple in size by 2030 with populations forecast to grow by 2 billion people.
To get a sense of emissions - and how they might go about reducing them - many cities estimate GHG levels using "self-reporting inventories", or SRIs, which follow one of a few publicly-shared frameworks.
However questions remain over the accuracy of SRIs as they are not subject to systematic, peer-reviewed assessment.
A new study, published on Tuesday in Nature Communications, found that cities were missing the mark on emissions calculations by 18.3 per cent, on average.
“Were the 18.3 per cent difference extrapolated to all US cities, the total would be 23.5 per cent larger than the entire 2015 California state emissions," the authors noted.
Analysis found that the vast majority of cities under-reported emissions. In one example, Indianapolis in Indiana was found to be underestimating emissions by 26.9 per cent.
But some cities - like Flagstaff, Arizona, and Madison, Wisconsin - were doing better than they thought and the SRIs were overshooting emission levels.
The research team from Northern Arizona University investigated the SRIs of 48 cities across the country. The sample cities accounted for 13.7 per cent of US urban emissions in 2015, and 17.7 per cent of the urban population at the time.
The study found that in emissions accounting, some cities omitted certain fuels, and estimated transportation emissions in different ways. But the authors also noted the difficulty that cities faced, as "the development of an SRI is a costly endeavor, placing a burden on city staff and resources".
Cities play both positive and negative roles in tackling the climate crisis. While urban development might make it difficult to switch to low-carbon pathways, the study notes, some cities have also been beacons of positive change.
In particular, US cities became a significant force in climate action during the Trump era amid a vacuum of leadership at the federal level.
The study was led by Kevin Gurney, a computing professor and senior sustainability fellow at the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation.
The team compared SRIs to independent estimates from the so-called "Vulcan Project" which aims to estimate “bottom-up” CO2 emissions in US fossil-fuel use and cement production.
The authors note that if cities are working with skewed data, it makes strategies to reduce emission levels less effective.
“For example, the city of Indianapolis has indicated that they aim to make a 20 per cent reduction in building GHG emissions between by 2025 relative to 2016 values,” the study says.
"However, with the 26.9 per cent underestimate found here, it will be difficult to know when and if this target is truly achieved or track progress towards it."
As a potential solution, the authors suggested, is a more "systematic" accounting of emissions that collaborates with city staff, using local knowledge and tailoring to local needs, that could be scaled nationally.
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