A Nuanced History of the Forces Shaping U.S.-Israel Relations

In “The Arc of a Covenant,” Walter Russell Mead makes the case that U.S. support for the Jewish state has benefited America more than critics allow.

Activists in Jerusalem, October 2020

Credit...Ammar Awad/Reuters

By Jonathan Tepperman
Aug. 26, 2022

THE ARC OF A COVENANT: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, by Walter Russell Mead

For many decades now, a supposed mystery has lurked at the heart of American foreign policy: Why has the United States supported Israel so staunchly and for so long, especially when doing so seems to come at a high cost in blood, treasure and world opinion?

Attempts to solve this mystery — a puzzle that particularly confuses foreigners, isolationists and some realist foreign-policy scholars — have given rise to a lot of ugly conspiracy theories over the years, as well as a great many books. So it takes a certain chutzpah to wade back into the fray, given both how fraught the topic is and how far down the list of Washington’s priorities Israel has seemingly fallen.

Yet that’s just where Walter Russell Mead — a scholar, author and Wall Street Journal columnist — goes in his new book, “The Arc of a Covenant.” Not one to shy from a challenge, Mead raises the problem in his opening pages, when he writes:

“The reader of any book is entitled to ask why it had to be written at all and, if the book absolutely had to exist, why it couldn’t have been shorter. That is particularly true when it comes to books about the U.S.- Israel relationship. There are few subjects in American foreign policy that get as much attention. … Enough books on this subject have been published to fill a respectable library; do we really need another one?”

The fairest way to judge a work of scholarship or art is on its own terms. So that makes the key question for this review: Does Mead’s book pass his own test?

The answer is yes, and emphatically so.

To explain why, let’s start with a brief summary of some of the many things “The Arc of a Covenant” does in its 600-plus pages. Beginning with the premise that recent U.S. Middle East policies have largely failed, and largely because American discussions of those policies have been “emotionally dense but intellectually thin,” Mead seeks to highlight and correct the many myths and misapprehensions that have misled the public and professionals in the past. Convinced that U.S. policymakers would do better if only they better understood the region and its place in the American psyche (the words “understand,” “misunderstand” and their various cognates appear around 150 times in the text), Mead sets the record straight by presenting a long and nuanced alternative history of U.S.-Israel relations.


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But because Israel is so deeply embedded in America’s collective consciousness — as Mead puts it, the Jewish state is “a speck on the map of the world” that nonetheless “occupies a continent in the American mind” — and because U.S. debates about Israel often serve as proxies for larger “debates over American identity, the direction of world politics and the place that the United States should aspire to occupy in world history,” the book soon strays well beyond the confines of diplomatic history. Mead contends that we can understand past decisions only by understanding the context in which they were made, so he expands his narrative far outside this one corner of international relations. The result is less a history of U.S.-Israel policy than a sweeping and masterfully told history of U.S. foreign policy in general, as seen through the lens of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

This capacious approach leads Mead into myriad digressions on topics ranging from the history of European emigration; to how the Industrial Revolution affected the Ottoman, Russian and Austrian empires; to how, in the middle of the last century, the American pastor Billy Graham broke with Protestant fundamentalism to create a new and pragmatic evangelical synthesis. Given the book’s hefty size, it’s only fair to ask whether these asides feel extraneous. Few do. Mead is so fluent on such a broad range of topics — from history to religion to policy to politics — that I learned something new from each of his detours. And he’s such a good craftsman — the prose is among the best I’ve encountered in 25 years of reviewing foreign-policy books — that when he does occasionally stray beyond the strictly necessary, it’s hard to object. Does the book really need an account of President Benjamin Harrison’s struggles to quit smoking? Probably not. But reason not the need; the inclusion of such colorful details only makes the book more vivid and enriching.

Despite all the information that “The Arc of a Covenant” packs in, moreover, it never loses sight of a key argument, which is an extended attack on the “rancid urban legend” known as the Israel Lobby theory. If you’re not familiar with the phrase, it’s code for the argument — most famously put forward by the scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their 2007 book — that America’s ongoing support for Israel makes so little strategic sense that it can only be explained by the irresistible pressure applied by the Jewish-owned media, by Jewish lobbyists, by Jewish policy wonks and by their fellow travelers on the Christian right. Of course, this theory is wrong. But the theory and its advocates — whom Mead calls “Vulcanists” for a clever reason too complicated to explain here — are still dangerous. Jew-hatred is currently surging globally, and though it’s surely not what Walt and Mearsheimer intended, Mead contends that their work has “electrified antisemites around the world” by seeming to lend “the authority of well-known academics” to this calumny.


Because of the high stakes involved, Mead returns to the topic again and again throughout the book, comprehensively demolishing the libel through a sophisticated set of arguments that disprove the Vulcanists’ “Jewcentric” view of American and world affairs. He shows, among other things, the many ways (some obvious, some not) that U.S. support for Israel over the last 40 years has actually benefited America; that many pro-Israel politicians, like Donald Trump, have been loathed by the vast majority of American Jews; that Jewish-owned newspapers like this one have not always been slavishly supportive of Israeli policies; and that U.S. policy has not, in fact, always been pro-Israel: The United States didn’t start significantly arming the Jewish state until the Kennedy administration, and not until 1987 did an American president (Ronald Reagan) declare Israel a “major non-NATO ally.” Indeed, when Washington did finally start backing Jerusalem, it was because the latter had become a regional superpower without U.S. help — and America needed Israel, not the other way around.

Meanwhile, even as Mead concedes that a pro-Israel lobby does exist inside the United States, he shows that it’s only one of many interest groups, and that, thanks to the structure of U.S. democracy, such lobbies succeed only when they have broad public backing. In other words, powerful lobbies depend on public opinion for their power; they don’t create that opinion. And the American public happens to be very pro-Israel — for a long list of organic reasons that have nothing to do with AIPAC, George Soros or the Sulzbergers. Ordinary Americans don’t think there’s anything strange about their country’s support for Israel; such skepticism is reserved for some coastal elites and peripheral intellectuals.

Mead’s best argument against the Israel Lobby myth, though, lies in his thorough explication of the complex and sometimes surprising geopolitical, social and electoral forces that actually determine U.S. policy toward Israel. The book is at its best when showing, for example, that President Harry Truman’s grudging and limited support for Israel’s creation had little to do with Jewish pressure and everything to do with Truman’s desperate determination to keep his Democratic coalition together as he sought to shift U.S. foreign policy away from Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime pro-Soviet approach and toward confrontation with Moscow (which was still quite popular in many left-wing precincts of America, TROTSKYISTS ).

  Truman, moreover, wasn’t even Israel’s primary supporter during this period: Joseph Stalin deserves far more credit for ensuring Israel came into existence and for arming it once it did.

“The Arc of a Covenant” has another merit worth mentioning here: Despite its polemical power, Mead manages to keep the book’s tone high-minded and generous; when discussing his, or Israel’s, adversaries, he always strives to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

Well, almost always. No book is perfect, and “The Arc of a Covenant” is no exception. For some reason, Mead’s generosity of spirit fails him when he gets to the Obama administration, which he scornfully describes as naïve and inept — criticisms he largely spares both George W. Bush and (most mysteriously) Donald Trump, despite both presidents’ equal or greater failures. Another quibble: The book would benefit from clearer sourcing, especially when making controversial claims — such as that Trump’s Israel policy was all part of a premeditated, deliberately crafted and highly perceptive master plan. (Skim the summaries of Jared Kushner’s new book and you’ll quickly appreciate the implausibility of this claim.)

Finally, at the book’s end I found myself wishing, if not for policy recommendations, then at least for predictions about where Mead thinks the U.S.-Israel relationship is headed. He’s so good at laying out the real but often-overlooked forces that shape this alliance, while puncturing the mythological ones, that I’d love to get his take on its future prospects — especially at this moment, when global politics and U.S. foreign policy are being scrambled in so many baffling ways.

But I suppose that will have to wait for Mead’s next book. The good news is that, judging from the quality of this one, it’s bound to be brilliant too.

Jonathan Tepperman is the former editor in chief of Foreign Policy and managing editor of Foreign Affairs. He is the author of “The Fix: How Countries Use Crises to Survive and Thrive,” and is working on a new book on the rise of new elites and how power is changing around the world.

THE ARC OF A COVENANT: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People | By Walter Russell Mead | 672 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $35

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 4, 2022, Page 16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Friends With Benefits. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Scientists are stumped why quakes keep hitting this small South Carolina town

By Nick de la Canal
Published August 26, 2022 

Nick De La Canal/WFAE

The series of earthquakes, considered minor by geologists, started in December in the South Carolina town of Elgin, whose downtown is shown here. No one knows what is causing them or how long they will continue.


ELGIN, S.C. — David Horne remembers exactly where he was when the first earthquake hit his town of Elgin, S.C., on Dec. 27, 2021.

He was relaxing on his front porch, while his wife was inside caring for their young grandson. Suddenly, Horne felt the ground shake and heard a noise like thunder boom across the sky.

"And as soon as it happened, I got out of my chair and I went and told her, 'That was an earthquake. That was a 3-point-plus,'" he said.

Horne used to live in Alaska, where earthquakes are more common, but his wife, Whitney Horne — a lifelong South Carolinian — said she wasn't sure what had happened.

"Because I'd never experienced an earthquake," she said. "We're in South Carolina! You don't have earthquakes that you feel in South Carolina."

Sure enough, it was a 3.3 magnitude earthquake — too small to cause damage but big enough to light up the town's Facebook page with dozens of excited comments.

At first, David Horne said, he thought it was cool.

"Wow! An earthquake," he remembered thinking. "I've heard there was a big fault line around here. And that's all I thought about it."

Then, what seemed like aftershocks began — and never stopped. Days and months after that first quake, the ground would rumble while the Hornes were out shopping or at night, while they were in bed, and the shaking has shown no signs of stopping.

/ Nick De La Canal/WFAE
Whitney and David Horne with their dog, Scooby, on their front porch in Elgin, South Carolina.

"I mean, literally, it seems like we have an earthquake every week. It's not even a surprise anymore," David Horne said.

The U.S. Geological Survey has recorded more than 60 small earthquakes near the town since that first quake in December. The largest — a magnitude 3.6 — rumbled through in late June.

All the shaking has fascinated geologists, who've said this is the longest-running series of earthquakes in recent South Carolina history.

South Carolina's state geologist, Scott Howard, has been investigating these earthquakes with help from other experts. He said scientists refer to this phenomenon as an earthquake "swarm" — that is, a series of small earthquakes with no apparent mainshock.

"They could be a magnitude 2, 3, 1, 2," he said. "It just kind of bounces up and down."

South Carolina is on a minor fault line, Howard said, and the state has had swarms before. In the 1970s, a series of small earthquakes was traced to the creation of the Monticello Reservoir.

When the reservoir was filled with water, it put indirect pressure on the underground fault, Howard said, setting off the string of minor earthquakes.

This time, however, there's no clear explanation. Howard said it's possible heavy rain may have played a role early in the year, but it's hard for scientists to know for sure.

Many residents have worried the swarm is building up to a big earthquake, though seismologists have said that's unlikely.

Still, emergency officials have told people to look into earthquake insurance, and some have, like retired postal worker Phil Crowley, who moved to Elgin a year ago.

"You know, what can you control? You can control getting insurance. That's about it," Crowley said.

He and his wife don't think a big earthquake will hit, but they worry.

"She'll look at me when we're going to sleep and say, 'I hope it's not going to be tonight,'" he said.

If it is, they're ready. They keep two bags packed with clothes and other essentials sitting by their front door, just in case.

As for earthquake safety, the American Red Cross says: "Stay indoors until the shaking stops and you are sure it is safe to exit."

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org

Volcanoes and movie monsters ruled out as causes for recent run of earthquakes in SC

Noah Feit, The State - Jul 3,2022

Here’s what we know: There have been 21 earthquakes in the Columbia area in the past week, according to the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources.

What is not certain is the cause of all the recent seismic activity.

While speculation has run rampant about the possible roots of the tremors, no single thing has been pinpointed as the cause of the earthquakes.

While some have asked legitimate questions about the genesis of the earthquakes, several others have have made more unbelievable proclamations about the rumbling in the Midlands.

The South Carolina Emergency Management Division has tried to have fun on social media while confirming one quake after another. It definitely took a humorous approach to ruling out potential causes of the earthquakes in some recent posts on Facebook and Twitter.

A 3.3-magnitude earthquake hit South Carolina’s Lowcountry on Monday, September 27, 2021 according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), giving two dogs in North Charleston quite a scare.

While tackling a somewhat serious suggestion, SCEMD used comedy to say volcanoes are not the cause of the earthquakes.

“OK, a follower slid into our DMs rather concerned about volcanoes and whether or not our recent earthquake swarm could be prelude to a volcanic eruption,” SCEMD said in a post, before providing a definitive answer. “No. Nope. Not a chance.”

It cited the U.S. Geological Survey as a source for shooting down volcanoes.

“The geologic forces that generated volcanoes in the eastern United States millions of years ago no longer exist. Through plate tectonics, the eastern U.S. has been isolated from the global tectonic features (tectonic plate boundaries and hot spots in the mantle), that cause volcanic activity,” SCEMD said. “So new volcanic activity is not possible now or in the near future.”

Fair enough, but what about other man-made causes, or even monsters from movies and TV that are known for making the Earth shake beneath our feet.

Again, “No. Nope. Not a chance.”

Here’s a list of possible sources that SCEMD ruled out, while reminding followers that South Carolina is a seismically active state.

Fracking

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking as it is more commonly known, is one method of the process of unconventional development of oil and natural gas, according to the Independent Petroleum Association of America. Fracking is a proven drilling technology used for extracting oil, natural gas, geothermal energy or water from deep underground.

While fracking has been linked to earthquakes in Oklahoma, the USGS said “fracking is not causing most of the induced earthquakes,” according to the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

Mining

Mining removes minerals and other materials from the ground.

Linked to seismic activity in other instances, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control said last week that mining activity is not likely to be the cause of recent earthquakes, as mines in the Elgin area are shallow.

Tunneling

Defined as digging or forcing a passage underground or through something, tunneling was also ruled out as a cause of the recent earthquakes by the SCEMD.

Drug traffickers, like Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, built tunnels along the southern border of the U.S. to smuggle illegal narcotics into the country.

Military exercises

“Military exercises” has become code word in pop culture as an explanation for an otherwise inexplicable phenomena, like UFO sightings.

Nice to see a government agency ruling out military exercises as a cause for the earthquakes.

Kaiju

If you’re looking for a giant monster, a la Godzilla, made popular in Japanese movies and TV, you want a Kaiju. They often emerge from underground or beneath the sea to wreak havoc, in films popular in the U.S. such as “Pacific Rim” and “Cloverfield.”

Fortunately for South Carolina residents, no Mothra, Rodan or Ghidorah sightings have been reported.

Gozer

Gozer is the main villain in the “Ghostbusters” movie franchise and takes the gigantic form of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in the original 1984 film.

SCEMD has ruled out the ancient Sumerian god from Babylonian times as the cause of recent earthquakes, but keep your eyes on any marshmallows or Fluff just to be safe.

PAZUZU  THE ACTUAL GOZER, ALSO FROM THE EXCORIST

Grabboids

The giant, man-eating, earthworm-like creatures were popularized in the “Tremors” film franchise.

While they caused the ground to rumble before an attack, hence the name “Tremors,” neither they nor any Kevin Bacon dance moves are believed to be causing the earthquakes.

Vecna

No spoilers here.

While Vecna wreaks havoc from his home in the Upside Down in the fourth season of the hit show “Stranger Things,” SCEMD doesn’t see the fearsome sentient creature as the culprit behind earthquakes in the Midlands.

Cthulhu

Cthulhu is a fictional cosmic entity with an octopus-like head created by writer H. P. Lovecraft.

Although Cthulhu is known for his ability to drive any human that gazes upon his form to insanity, he has not been linked to any seismic activity in the Palmetto State.

©2022 The State. Visit thestate.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

STALINISM RESSURECTS SOCIAL FASCISM TROPE

Russia’s Claims of Western Fascism Are Straight Out of Its Soviet Past

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu compared the West to Nazis in a recent speech.

Andrew Fink
Aug 26,2022

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu at the International Anti-Fascist Congress.

 (Photo by Contributor/Getty Images.)

The Kremlin is careful to project different images of Russia to the different foreign audiences it hopes to influence.

For the Western right, in particular the nationalists and populists who are more sympathetic to Vladimir Putin, it paints an image of a traditionalist state where Christianity has been reborn, where men can be men, and where the insanities of the woke European and American “establishment” are totally rejected. Meanwhile, the Western left is on the receiving end of messaging that shows Russia as a victim, a peaceful country reacting defensively after getting pushed around by the American empire.

Last week, catering to an internal audience, the Kremlin sought to put on a different face, at the “International Anti-Fascist Congress” held during an annual military exhibition. The messaging was closer to the version fed to the Western left on some points of substance, but in style it is a chip off the old Soviet bloc. Based on the available materials from the congress, it was a kind of official re-statement of the current ideology of the Kremlin, or at least of the Russian Defense Ministry, and the emphasis was on the Nazism of the West. The ideology that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is broadcasting, or the remnants of an ideology, shows the continuity between the Soviets’ idea of their enemies and the enemies that Shoigu says he is fighting today.

Shoigu opened the Congress with a very Soviet speech, taking on the slippery task of defining fascism in the first minutes: “The staunch anti-fascist Georgi Dimitrov called fascism bestial chauvinism, medieval barbarism, and unbridled aggression against other peoples and countries.”

THE ORIGIN OF CALLING SOCIAL DEMOCRACY SOCIAL FASCISM 

A word about Dimitrov. This “staunch anti-fascist” was the head of Communist International from 1935-1943, one of Stalin’s stable of activists who went on to be the first Communist dictator of Bulgaria. The quote Shoigu chose is just a small part of a longer disquisition from 1935, near the height of Stalinism, titled “The Class Character of Fascism.” Dimitrov’s quote there is part of his description of German fascism, the “most reactionary variety of fascism … the shock troops of the international counter-revolution … the instigator of a crusade against the Soviet Union, the great fatherland of the working people of the whole world.” According to Dimitrov, “Fascism is the power of finance capital itself.” He wrote that fascism could take different forms in different countries—sometimes in the form of social democracy and sometimes in the form of dictatorship—but that in every case fascism is a method of the “domination of the bourgeoisie.” In other words, fascist Germany in 1935 was similar to the United States of 1935 or the U.K. or France of 1935; it is just that in the supposedly “free” countries finance capital had better camouflage or had not yet come to the state of crisis where dictatorship was necessary.

STALINISM, ITSELF LEFT WING NATIONAL SOCIALISM, WAS CORRECT ABOUT RIGHT WING NATIONAL SOCIALISM

In this text Dimitrov mocks the idea that this is some smoothly-running conspiracy, that some banker committee just decide to have a dictatorship one day, but he did believe that, at core, the levers of power under fascism were held by the same type of people who held power in the so-called democracies. Other ideologues and propagandists were not so circumspect, and directly accused Western bankers of hatching fascism as a plot against the revolution. In a 1940 book for the education of Communist cadres, Stalin described the rise of Hitler as part of a conscious plan by the “German bourgeoisie” to “suppress the working class.”

A well-known Soviet cartoon from the 1930s depicted Hitler in the cradle, rocked by the French and British capitalists along with “Russian Magnates” and presided over by the guardian angel of “Wall Street” with wings of “military industry stocks”.

Shoigu probably never read Dimitrov’s work, but he was a Communist, and likely got plenty of indoctrination about the true nature of fascism and bourgeois democracy. If you pressed him, he would probably not display an ounce of cognitive dissonance in quoting a hard-core Stalinist to define fascism. In his speech at the International Anti-Fascist conference he makes a point of blaming Western capitalism for the rise of Hitler:

“The coming to power of National Socialism was due to their financing by international capital. It is quite obvious that the financial and economic cooperation between the Anglo-American and Nazi business circles was one of the main factors that led to the Second World War, which cost mankind unprecedented human casualties.”

In this view, Anglo-American capitalists are always scheming to destroy Moscow’s project. 

The project may no longer be socialist, but the Western-backed Nazi threat remains. Shoigu then breaks into the traditional lament of Russian imperialists who want to destroy Eastern Europe: His opponents are all Nazis. Memorials to Nazi collaborators are going up in Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania. He adds that the recent proposal to ban Russians from travel to Europe is also “another vivid manifestation of Nazi policy.” The main fight these days is, of course, the fight against Ukraine, and just as Western big capital created the rise of Hitler, Shoigu implies, so it is now generating a Ukrainian “Nazism.” Ukraine began oppressing its Russian minority, Shoigu narrates, and then NATO began to “develop Ukrainian territory.” This “created unacceptable threats to Russia’s security.”

As the defense minister, Shoigu knows that Russian forces were already involved in Ukraine in 2014. The “rebellion” there was not spontaneous resistance against Ukrainian “Nazism” but a Russian operation to crush the Maidan Revolution. Some deception in the cause of defeating the great deception of Western fascism is no great vice, he may reason.

The rest of the speech was given over to complaints about supposed Ukrainian atrocities, accusations about the Azov battalion (a favorite subject among Russian propagandists) and complaints about the “falsification of history,” etc. The overt nods to Soviet ideology in the first parts of the speech were not the only times this happened in this Soviet-style conference. A little later on the same day the vice-speaker of the Russian parliament, Irina Yarovaya, directly accused the United States of being an entity that finances Nazism and said that the transformation of Ukraine into a Nazi state was a project of Washington. Another Russian member of parliament, Sergey Mironov (a leader of the Kremlin-controlled “opposition” party “A Just Russia”), opined that we are witnessing “the prospect of a return to one of the darkest periods in human history” and that the war in Ukraine “is not a military conflict between two countries, two fraternal peoples. This is a confrontation between Russian civilization and world totalitarianism”—with the “totalitarian” side being the West.

Ideologies can be very sticky, and propaganda stickier still if it is ubiquitous enough for long enough. Russians were told for decades and decades that there was a conspiracy of Western bankers against them, that all democracies in the world were under the control of the CIA or some other Western intelligence agencies, that America was the country of hypocrisy and well-concealed oppression, and that any country trying to escape from Moscow's orbit or disturb the Kremlin’s grip was part of some sinister Western project. The leaders of Russia still believe this; even if they are no longer socialists, they are still Soviet at heart.

Deadly heat to surge by 2100, even with emissions reductions: study

BY SHARON UDASIN - 08/25/22 

Sunflowers suffer from lack of water, as Europe is under an unusually extreme heat wave, in Beaumont du Gatinais, 60 miles south of Paris, France, Monday, Aug. 8, 2022. France is this week going through its fourth heatwave of the year as the government warned last week that the country is faced with the most severe drought ever recorded. Some farmers have started to see a decrease in production especially in fields of soy, sunflowers and corn. (AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard)

Much of the world will face a significant uptick in deadly heat waves by the end of the century, even if countries manage to meet their agreed-upon emission reduction goals, a new study has found.

Such heat events will be three to 10 times more common in 2100 than they are today in the U.S., Western Europe, China and Japan, regardless of efforts to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the study, published in Communications Earth & Environment on Thursday.

As part of the Paris climate agreement that was signed at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, participating countries agreed to adhere to this limit, with hopes of keeping the increase to an even smaller 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

To improve their chance of success, each nation submitted its own climate action plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But the authors of Thursday’s study fear that these efforts will be insufficient to drive down heat.

“The record-breaking heat events of recent summers will become much more common in places like North America and Europe,” lead author Lucas Vargas Zeppetello, a doctoral student at the University of Washington at the time of the study, said in a statement.

“For many places close to the equator, by 2100 more than half the year will be a challenge to work outside, even if we begin to curb emissions,” added Vargas Zeppetello, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University.

Vargas Zeppetello and his colleagues evaluated projections for the future “heat index,” a combination of air temperature and humidity that measures the impact of heat on the human body.

A “dangerous” heat index is defined by the National Weather Service as 103 degrees Fahrenheit, the authors explained. Meanwhile, an “extremely dangerous” heat index is 124 degrees Fahrenheit and is considered unsafe to humans for any amount of time.

“These standards were first created for people working indoors in places like boiler rooms — they were not thought of as conditions that would happen in outdoor, ambient environments. But we are seeing them now,” Vargas Zeppetello said.

The scientists said they used a probability-based method to calculate a range of future possible scenarios, by combining historical data with population projections, economic growth and carbon intensity.

They observed that even if countries met their Paris agreement commitments, the U.S., Western Europe, China and Japan would cross the “dangerous” heat index threshold three to 10 more times than they do today by the end of the century.

In this same scenario, the tropics could see their “dangerous” days double — covering half the year, according to the study.

And in a worst-case circumstance — a scenario in which emissions remain unchecked until 2100 — “extremely dangerous” conditions could become common in countries near the equator, such those in sub-Saharan Africa and in India, the authors determined.

“These are frightening scenarios that we still have the capacity to prevent,” Vargas Zeppetello said. “This study shows you the abyss, but it also shows you that we have some agency to prevent these scenarios from happening.”

GOP targets powerhouse Wall Street firms over investments meant to fight climate change

BY TOBIAS BURNS 

- 08/26/22 

Republicans are fighting against a social movement in the financial sector meant to address systemic issues like climate change.  

Governmental initiatives in Florida, West Virginia and Texas are targeting powerhouse Wall Street firms that they say are engaging in environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing, which they view to be harmful to their states’ economies. 

Letters dated Aug. 10 were sent out this month by the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs to Wall Street firms Blackrock, Vanguard, Institutional Shareholder Services and State Street, asking for details about the companies’ ESG practices and how they could affect the state’s public pensions, including retirement funds for teachers and state employees. 

The letter to Blackrock requested “all documents and communications relating to the actual or potential effects of ESG integration practices on the financial outlook, risk/return profile, performance, or profitability of any of your funds, portfolio companies, or institutional accounts of ESG integration practices.” 

Texas State Affairs Committee Chairman Bryan Hughes (R) said in an interview with The Hill that numerous public pension funds, endowments and retirement accounts could all be affected by ESG investing practices. 

“The Teacher Retirement System of Texas and the Employees Retirement System of Texas, all of our university endowment funds and various other pension funds, as well as the millions of investors who are trusting these firms with their 401(k)s, and then of course all the Texas companies that are being bullied and being manipulated by these firms – for all those reasons, this is important for the Texas legislature to do something about,” he said. 

“The people of Texas are finding out that a handful of Wall Street firms are using other people’s money to push a narrow agenda and we’re pushing back,” he said. 

While ESG doesn’t have a hard and fast definition, it generally aligns with the United Nations’s sustainable development goals (SDGs), a massive international program of environmental and social equality objectives agreed to by all of the U.N.’s 193 member states, including the U.S. 

“As of December 2020, over two thirds of the world’s GDP was being generated in places with actual or intended ‘net zero by 2050’ targets, covering over half of the world’s population and emissions,” a write-up on the latest SDG status report from the U.N.’s statistics agency says, referring to the goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions, which are produced in abundance by the fossil fuel industry.  

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says that “the main human activity that emits CO₂ [carbon dioxide] is the combustion of fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and oil) for energy and transportation.” 

Fossil fuels are a major industry in Texas, where oil and gas make up more than a third of the state’s economy, according to Texas Railroad Commissioner Christi Craddick.  

A representative for Blackrock indicated that the company had received the letter requesting documents and “[plans] to respond” but did not provide further details. 

“Blackrock does not boycott fossil fuels – investing over $100 billion in Texas energy companies on behalf of our clients proves that,” the company said in a statement, adding that “elected and appointed public officials have a duty to act in the best interests of the people they serve. Politicizing state pension funds, restricting access to investments, and impacting the financial returns of retirees, is not consistent with that duty.” 

Fossil fuels are also a big industry in West Virginia, where coal mining has long played a leading role in the state’s economy. Similar moves by state officials there have also gone after ESG investing. 

“There is a campaign that’s being waged through ESG on multiple fronts – rating agencies, asset managers, the big banks. They’re all pushing their agenda through our capital markets,” West Virginia state Treasurer Riley Moore (R) said in an interview with The Hill.  

“It’s coercive capitalism and a distortion in the marketplace. They are pushing policies they can’t achieve in the ballot box, and they’re using the power of their capital to achieve their goals by other means.” 

“All of this is tied to the fossil fuel industry,” he added. 

In July, West Virginia blacklisted Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Blackrock, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo by adding them to the state’s list of restricted financial institutions. They wouldn’t be removed until they had “ceased all activity that boycotts energy companies,” according to a proclamation signed by the treasurer. 

“I’m the tip of the spear on this, but there’s an army behind me. Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee. Their own lists will likely come out this year or next. There are fifteen states with upcoming legislative sessions. We are proud to be leading, but we are not the only ones. We are looking also at proxy voting on our pension boards,” Riley said. 

On Tuesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) banned ESG investing from the state’s pension funds, voting for a resolution mandating that investment decisions “must be based only on pecuniary factors [which] do not include the consideration of the furtherance of social, political, or ideological interests.” 

“We are reasserting the authority of republican governance over corporate dominance and we are prioritizing the financial security of the people of Florida over whimsical notions of a utopian tomorrow,” the governor said in a Tuesday statement. 

While ESG may be in the crosshairs of Republicans, it’s not clear that the financial initiative from multinational corporations is making any difference when it comes to fighting the causes of climate change. 

The U.N.’s latest SDG report found that fossil fuel emissions rebounded to a record high in 2021 as the global economy bounced back from the coronavirus pandemic, wiping out pandemic-related declines. 

The report found that “With the phasing out of COVID-related restrictions, demand for coal, oil and gas increased. Consequently, energy-related emissions for 2021 rose by 6 percent, reaching their highest level ever and completely wiping out the pandemic-related reduction seen in 2020.” 

Economists aren’t certain that market dynamics and targeted investment practices are even capable of dealing with climate change. Former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern wrote in 2007 that “greenhouse gas emissions are externalities and represent the biggest market failure the world has seen.” 

“Emissions are not ordinary, localized externalities. Risk on a global scale is at the core of the issue,” he wrote in an academic paper. “These basic features of the problem must shape the economic analysis we bring to bear; failure to do this will, and has, produced approaches to policy that are profoundly misleading and indeed dangerous.” 

Still, the trend of ESG in the private sector appears set to continue. 

A March report from the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance said recent proxy voting seasons, which are the times when activist investor shareholders can make their moves to influence how companies are run, were “unpredictable” and  “unprecedented, with record support for shareholder proposals on environmental and social issues, growing opposition to director elections, and significant support for governance proposals.” 

“Major institutional investors, especially those with large passive index funds, have embraced these shifts toward a focus on ESG and a multistakeholder model, and that is coming through in their support for E&S [environmental and social] shareholder proposals,” the school’s report said. 

Updated 12:00 p.m.

• JPMorgan Eyes Return to Texas Munis After Escaping GOP’s ESG Ire

Amanda Albright and Danielle Moran, Bloomberg News 

Aug 26, 2022

(Bloomberg) -- JPMorgan Chase & Co., which has mostly been absent from the business of underwriting Texas municipal bonds for the past year, plans to revive its work with the state and its local governments soon. 

The firm, the No. 2 underwriter in the $4 trillion market for US municipal debt, joined a small group of major banks in stepping back from Texas after two new GOP-backed laws there took effect there on Sept. 1, 2021. The measures target Wall Street for what local officials said were restrictive policies related to the firearms and energy industries. 

Wednesday, however, brought a key development that opens the door for JPMorgan to ramp up its muni business in Texas, one of the three most lucrative US public-finance markets. In a nutshell: Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar, wrapping up a months-long inquiry mandated by the new law, didn’t include the bank among the 10 finance firms he deems boycott the oil and gas industry.

It stands to be a big win for the New York-based bank, which was the largest muni underwriter on the list of more than 150 firms that were caught up in Hegar’s probe. 

With that cloud lifted, JPMorgan intends to begin bidding on public contracts again, including municipal underwriting, according to a person familiar with the matter. To begin underwriting muni deals in Texas, the bank first has to file a letter verifying its compliance with the firearms and energy laws with the Texas attorney general’s office, the person said. The exact timing of that filing is to be determined.

The bank would likely resume underwriting for Texas and its localities by bidding on what’s known as competitive bond deals, where banks buy the debt via an auction, according to the person.

No Cuts

JPMorgan didn’t cut any public-finance jobs in Texas after the laws went into effect, and bankers kept sending financing pitches to municipalities there to maintain relationships with clients, the person said.

The bank’s return is also potentially a boon for Texas municipalities, which haven’t been able to work with some of the biggest banks -- with the broadest network of investor contacts -- on their bond deals. 

The absence of large banks from the Texas underwriting market because of the two new laws has resulted in “large adverse effects for borrowers,” according to a study by a University of Pennsylvania professor and an economist at the Federal Reserve.

Bank of America Corp., the No. 1 US muni underwriter, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., ranked sixth, haven’t handled any deals by Texas or its cities since September 2021.

The Texas gun law says its governments can’t work with companies unless they verify that they don’t “discriminate” against firearms entities. JPMorgan doesn’t finance companies that make military-style weapons for civilians. 

Citigroup Inc. also suspended muni-bond work after the law took effect in 2021, but it was able to revive its underwriting work in November. The bank continues to underwrite bond deals and is the seventh-biggest underwriter of Texas muni deals this year, after ranking first in 2020, data compiled by Bloomberg show. 

JPMorgan Takes First Step to Revive Texas Muni-Bond Business

JPMorgan has long argued that it can comply with the firearms law. In September 2021, JPMorgan said its business practices should permit it to certify compliance with the firearms law. But it said the legal risk from the “ambiguous” law prevented it from bidding on most business with Texas public entities. 

In May, Foley & Lardner LLP, a law firm representing JPMorgan, sent a letter to officials with the Texas attorney general’s office stating it believes the bank can verify compliance with the laws, marking a key step for the bank to return.

“JPMC’s risk-based framework does not discriminate against or prevent JPMC from doing business with any firearm entity or firearm trade association ‘based solely on its status as a firearm entity or firearm trade association’ without a traditional business purpose,” the letter said.

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

U$A
Q&A: How Agricultural Power Structures Inform Rural Responses to Climate Change

U.C. Berkeley PhD candidate Margiana Petersen-Rockney studies how climate change messaging – or the lack thereof – by farm service providers affects rural communities.

by Olivia Weeks

July 1, 2022

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.

Margiana Petersen-Rockney is a PhD candidate in U.C. Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. Her research is focused on climate, agriculture, and the power structures that inform rural responses to our changing world. In this interview, Petersen-Rockney and I discuss two of her projects, both of which began in Siskiyou County, California.

In her work on the social risks facing farmers who openly pursue climate-adaptation projects, and throughout another paper “Cannabis farmers or criminals?” (written with co-author Michael Polson), a major through line is the unkept promise of local control. In another project, she finds that local farm service providers benefit from their autonomy: instead of being given universalized talking points about anthropogenic climate change, these agencies are able to mold their messaging to the local audiences they know well – in hopes of reducing the social harms of adaptation for the farmers they interact with. But this autonomy also means that local institutions can avoid climate conversations altogether if forcing the topic seems too difficult. Faced with the same social pressures as farmers, farm service providers in Siskiyou County told Petersen-Rockney they had no intention of introducing information about climate change to their programming. In this way, local wisdom justifies harmful policies.

While studying the local government response to cannabis legalization in the same county, Petersen-Rockney and her co-author found that local government responses to change also proved regressive. Homegrown regulations led to a highly punitive and exclusionary landscape for marijuana cultivation, especially as new rules were enforced against Hmong-American farmers in the region. In the eyes of the county’s regulatory code, these newcomers to the county weren’t farmers at all. They were criminals.

While the Daily Yonder has covered countless instances of hyperlocal knowledge and governance changing the world for the better, this research shows that these forces are “not a silver bullet.” As far as I can tell, the actions of local democracy in a destabilized rural America will not follow any predictable blueprint.

We talk more about this problem, the limits of nonprofit work, and Petersen-Rockney’s time as a student-farmer at Brown, below.

Petersen-Rockney’s research looks into the way farmers are adapting to changing ecological, policy, and market conditions by adopting new farming practices and enterprises, like these mobile chicken tractors that replaced alfalfa. (Photo provided.)

Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: Beginning with your upbringing on a goat farm in rural Massachusetts, can you walk me through your path into academia?

MPR: I was homeschooled until college, and I began my college education at my local community college. I went there for like a year and a half before going to Brown University, which was the closest school that I applied to. The farm that I grew up on was very close to the Rhode Island border in Massachusetts, so Providence was always the home city where many of the people who bought eggs and milk and other things from the farm were coming from.

DY: So were you commuting to college, even when you attended Brown?

MPR: No, I commuted when I was going to the community college, but at Brown I lived on campus for a year, and then my last two years, I lived off campus with friends, which was common. And then the summer of 2009, after my sophomore year, a friend and I got a grant from Brown, to do this research project and start a vegetable farm on my family’s land. My mom has been a full time farmer my whole life, but she is a dairy goat farmer primarily and raises some other livestock, like sheep and livestock guardian dogs which are a main source of income. We had a small subsistence garden growing up, but we didn’t raise fruits or vegetables for sale. So halfway through college, I started farming vegetables on old hay fields there. That really structured the next few years of my college experience, because I never took classes that met on Mondays or Fridays. I would choose my course schedule based on being able to spend a three or four day weekend farming. People often are like, “Well, that seems like a lot. How did you do that?” But it doesn’t seem that different to me than student athletes, you know, who spend a ton of time doing whatever sport they’re doing. For me that was farming. So I operated a vegetable CSA and the first year, I think we had 25 or 30 members. The next year, we had 60 families who were doing a CSA share for six months of the year. So we had a pretty long CSA, where people could come to the farm every week to pick up a box of produce, or we had some delivery sites in Providence. So farming and school really overlapped for me.

Also during that time, I really became embedded in the local beginning farmer community. I wasn’t alone — we were all kind of doing it on our own, reinventing the wheel. And there were a few moments of federal policy that were coming down the pipe that it felt like we needed to do some organizing around, like the Farm Bill and the Food Safety Modernization Act. That really galvanized us as a community and we started to do some grassroots organizing. We were asking, “How can we as relatively small-scale, direct-market farmers get involved in these policy conversations and make sure that regulations like the Food Safety Modernization Act have some sense of scale appropriateness so that they won’t just wipe out the small scale producers?” This is a theme that has run through my research.

Coming up to the present, something we’re finding now in this research with cannabis cultivators is that coming into the legal market, which has happened since Proposition 64 passed in 2016 here in California, we’re seeing a very rapid bifurcation of cannabis cultivation, just like we’ve seen in the rest of agriculture. The requirements for compliance with the licensing and permitting processes are so onerous that really only the largest firms can do that. So it’s cutting a lot of smaller scale producers and the people who’ve been involved in cultivating for a long time out of the market. So that’s just to say that I sort of became acquainted with the issue of agricultural regulation not being scale-appropriate, and small-scale farmers often not having a real voice in how those regulations are structured, way back in 2009.

Back then we also began organizing a group of beginning farmers originally around this policy work, but then we started to form a community socially and also realized there’s a lot of opportunity to reintroduce reciprocity. So we would hold various forms of informal and formal equipment exchanges and knowledge sharing sessions and things like that. Now, the Young Farmer Network has around 300 members. It’s still going, though I’m not involved any more in any sort of day-to-day way. After college, I worked in a few different nonprofits, mostly with recent immigrant and refugee farmers, like the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, which has one of the oldest incubator farms in the country, and also manages a network of incubator farms. Eventually, I became a little disillusioned with the nonprofit world that saw how the work we were trying to do was important, but it was often just a band-aid, and was not actually addressing the structural issues that farmers were facing. Offering a business planning course to new entry farmers, or new American farmers may be a little bit helpful, but it’s not actually addressing the fact that their land tenure is really insecure, or any of the other much deeper issues that are making farming difficult. That’s when I decided to think about going back to grad school.

In between there, I also worked at Harvard for a couple years, which was important financially for me. And then I began my Ph. D. program at Berkeley in 2016, which is when I stopped farming. So while I was working in the nonprofit world and at Harvard, I had scaled down the farm from a full-time 60 family CSA, which was the first four years, and then the next three years we only did like two acres and it was mostly garlic, and popcorn – crops that I could tend to a day a week or so, and I sold those wholesale.

DY: That all makes a lot of sense, that the structural issues within farming itself would lead you toward academia. But do you ever miss the tangibility of farming now? How do you scratch that itch now that you’re fully immersed in the academic sphere?

MPR: Yeah, I very much do. I miss it a lot. And I think I’m hopeful that someday I will be able to find balance – I feel like I swung very far from the tangible, which came along with very little capacity and time to work on the structural. It’s really hard to be farming all the time, and then have the energy to work on policy issues. Now, I feel like my work is really disconnected from the everyday. I try to make sure that my research program is grounded. Everybody says “I do policy-relevant research.” But I really do try to ensure that the research I’m doing is as tangible as possible. Terms like participatory-action research and community-engaged research are so popular right now, and I think they’re really important ideas, but they’re also really hard to do in graduate school because you’re transient. It’s hard to build those relationships and have true reciprocal exchanges with communities. But I think that there are ways to make one’s research – even if it’s a shortish-term project like a dissertation – informed by community needs. There are ways I’ve learned to work with advocates and activists and journalists, who are able to take the sort of academic timeline and compress it and help bring the less tangible work to communities sooner. So that has been really key like in my work with the Hmong farmers around cannabis issues, and policy and local control and inequities. I’ve formed some real relationships with journalists and lawyers who are working on cases, and those have been very fruitful in making the research more tangible.

DY: I want to focus on one part of that answer, which is what you were saying about how the timeline of grad school makes it hard to build truly local, rooted relationships with the communities you’re studying. In the two papers you sent me – one of which was about Hmong-American Cannabis farmers in Siskiyou County, California, and the other was about more traditional farmers in that county, and their views on climate change – did doing those separate projects in the same place create a stronger sense of rootedness? Were you thinking a lot about the relationship between the two different communities you were studying within the same county?

MPR: Yes, I was. And I guess I should say how it happened. When I came to grad school, I wanted to research climate change and look at how farmers were adapting to it. Part of this is because in my own community of farmers and as a farmer myself, there were some really impactful climatic events that occurred that we were grappling with, like really intense floods and hail storms in the middle of the summer. There were pests and diseases like late blight that for a season or two just wiped out all the tomatoes. That was a disease that hadn’t existed before in our region.

So I was interested in climate and its relationship to events like these. But what I learned going out into the field, is that farmers didn’t really want to talk about climate change. In fact, it’s pretty low down on the priority list. The droughts in California and wildfires are obviously climate related, and those are clearly impacting and complicating many anxieties that farmers and ranchers are already facing. But they’re not necessarily as pressing as market conditions, and consolidation. For example, in the beef industry, ranchers who I was working with work all year to sell their calves on a video auction, where they make 90% of their income in three minutes, and then they just get what they get.

So climate change was not at the top of anyone’s list of problems, basically, but farmers were very concerned with this new group of farmers in the area who were growing cannabis. That’s how my dissertation research on climate change led to this research on cannabis cultivation. I never set out thinking I was going to study cannabis and local government control, but that became such a big issue in the place I was doing research. The institutional actors there are sort of obsessed with it, so it felt like a really important thing to explore. There have been two lawsuits brought against the county government itself for racism in the way they have treated Hmong farmers who were growing cannabis. So sometimes with research, especially if it is ethnographic in nature at all, you have to go into a place with a little bit of an open mind. And try to understand what is important from people’s own perspectives and experiences, and let that guide where the research takes you.

In terms of how cannabis farmers and the ranchers are interacting, I think in a lot of these rural communities, there is sometimes this idea that local control is a silver bullet that can fix all our problems. If we give power to the people, then they can figure out what they need and that’ll be a good thing. But those uncritical calls for local autonomy can really retrench existing power relations. Not just in Siskiyou County, but in some other counties that we’re looking at across the state, “traditional” farmers and ranchers have a lot of power – they have a lot of cultural and social capital. So there may not be as many farmers and ranchers in these places as there once were, but the ones who are recognized as such have a lot of clout. So as water becomes a scarcer and scarcer resource, and a lot of these farmers – even traditional farmers and ranchers – have already had their water totally cut off, the need to create really strong boundaries around who gets to claim that identity of a farmer grows. I don’t want to downplay the extreme hardship they’re facing, but the clash over water inflames the need to keep farmers who are growing this other plant called cannabis out of that protected and politically powerful identity group. So that’s one way in a little bit of an abstract sense that I’ve seen this “traditional” farming-ranching community and the cannabis farmers interacting.

DY: What’s next for you, research-wise?

MPR: Now we’re working on this project looking across California at issues that arise out of this neo-prohibitionist approach to cannabis, where localities get to decide on non-agriculture designations for this one crop, so that its cultivators don’t count as farmers and sometimes even count as criminals. We’re looking at the equity outcomes of these bans, as well as the ways that environmental narratives and discourses are used to re-criminalize farmers. To give you one example, under Proposition 64, growing cannabis – which used to be a felony – became a misdemeanor in California. But since then local sheriffs and law enforcement have realized that the way to re-villainize people who grow this crop is to charge them with environmental crimes. If you violate fishing game code – for example, if there’s an illegal stream diversion or the presence of a pesticide that’s banned – you can charge someone with a felony. So we’re seeing an unlikely alliance between local law enforcement and fish and wildlife folks because it provides an opportunity to re-criminalize people who are growing this crop. So that’s just one example of the ways that I think environmental change concerns along with sort of enforcement-first approach to addressing changing rural landscapes is creating some real inequities. But there are many other things that I want to be working on around land access and generational change, as I mentioned, and how we have come to this place where conservation is considered a dirty word. There’s a lot of hurt and harm that has come out of things like the Endangered Species Act. I can’t tell you how often that is brought up as a big concern, even in this work on cannabis, but certainly in the work on water and climate. So there are several different projects that I’m moving forward with. I’m also, you know, hopefully trying to find a job at some point. So who knows what will happen.



This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. 

Video: Reclaiming Indigenous Narratives in Media and Entertainment

Four prominent voices discuss the importance of visibility and how to create more opportunities for Indigenous storytellers.

by Tyler Owens and Xandr Brown

August 26, 2022

“The Battle to Break Through: Reclaiming Indigenous Narratives” via Rural Assembly on YouTube.

Editor’s Note: This story was produced by the Rural Assembly, a program of the nonprofit Center for Rural Strategies, which also publishes the Daily Yonder.

Over the past few years, we have seen a burst of Indigenous representation in mainstream media. From the success of shows like “Reservation Dogs” and “Rutherford Falls” to the confirmation of the first Native American to serve as a U.S. cabinet secretary, Indigenous voices are reclaiming the narrative to tell their own stories.

What did it take to get here?

We talk with friends from around Indian Country who have worked to combat stereotypes about Native American and Alaskan Native communities. They talk about the significance of breaking through, what the future holds, and the importance of continuing to create opportunities for more Indigenous people.

The video features interviews with Bobby Wilson, performer from the sketch comedy group The 1491s and cast member on TV shows Rutherford Falls and Reservation Dogs; journalists Aliyah Chavez and Mark Trahant of ICT (Indian Country Today); and policy expert Maria Givens, co-founder of Tahoma Peak Solutions, a Native-woman owned strategic communications firm.

Video by Tyler Owens and Xandr Brown.