INDIAN COUNTRY USA

The Year That Killed the Native Mascot
If there is a silver lining to 2020, it’s the reminder that even the toughest fights in Indian Country can have a happy ending.

Nick Martin/December 14, 2020 THE NEW REPUBLIC

JUSTIN MERRIMAN/GETTY IMAGES


On Sunday evening, The New York Times reported that Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team will soon be dropping its “Indians” moniker, which the franchise has clung to for 105 years. The decision follows several seasons in which the team began to slowly phase out the use of the nickname on its uniforms; this coincided with the decision in 2018 by the MLB commissioner’s office to halt further official use of the longtime team mascot, Chief Wahoo, a red-faced, extraordinarily racist caricature of a Native man.

This year has not been a particularly kind one to anybody except maybe Jeff Bezos. The pandemic has exacerbated existing systemic failures, stolen far too many elders, and further exposed the federal government as an existential threat to its citizenry and tribal sovereignty. The outlook, more often than not, has been bleak. Yet this has also been the year in which Christopher Columbus statues were ripped down from their pedestals. The one in which multiple tribal citizens are being openly considered for a crucial Cabinet post and in which the Supreme Court declared that treaties cannot be ignored. Land and water protectors have stood strong against capitalism and greed—and won. And now, odd and conflicting as it may be, 2020 will forever be remembered as the year that rang in the beginning of the end for the Native mascot.


Cleveland is the year’s second major professional sports franchise to abandon its racist branding, joining the Washington NFL Team, which dropped its slur of a team name and similarly offensive mascot in July. While both decisions were derided by the outgoing president and plenty of other brainworm types as an example of “cancel culture,” that framing is a pathetic attempt to paint billion-dollar franchises as victims while erasing the actual harm they’ve done: Native team names have been linked to the formation of stereotypes and the historicization of Indigenous Americans among children and adults. But the names are still changing, mad as some jerks might be about it. That’s an objective win, both for Native people and basic human decency.

For years, Washington team owner Dan Snyder bristled at outside calls by Native people to concede that the R-word is racist. Snyder’s antagonistic defense of the slur only fueled his defeat, though, as corporate partners like FedEx, under the same pressure, threatened to sever ties if the name remained. In Cleveland, facing the same headwinds after the 2020 season concluded, team president Chris Antonetti informed reporters that the franchise was set “to undergo a process of engaging with key stakeholders.” Then, following the Times report on Sunday, owner Paul Dolan revealed to the Associated Press that the Cleveland franchise will continue to use “Indians” for the foreseeable future until a new name is selected.

Neither teams’ billionaire owners deserve praise for their decisions—especially in light of Dolan’s insistence on keeping the name for the time being. They just saw the writing was on the wall: The “Indians,” like the R-words and all their other slur or otherwise offensive counterparts, are soon to be relics of the past. The names and the mascots are blights that were magnified, enabled, and capitalized on by rich white people. They will one day all be rightfully buried.

It’s easy to be cynical about these things. (Why is it that they’re only now brainstorming new names?) Still, there is a stubborn amount of hope to be found. Dolan can drag his feet all he wants. He is still going where Native activists have pushed him. Whether it’s in 2021 or 2026, Cleveland will relegate its name to the past where it belongs. A victory is a victory, but it’s crucial to remember how long it took to get here. The end of the Native mascot was a battle fought over many decades—and many lifetimes.

Vernon Bellecourt, of the White Earth Nation, and Juanita Helphrey, of the the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, were the fighters on the frontline of the Cleveland battle. Helphrey was among the local leaders responsible for blocking the franchise from moving a 35-foot Chief Wahoo statue to the team’s new stadium in the late 1990s. Bellecourt—a former leader of the American Indian Movement and the lead negotiator during AIM’s takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs office—joined Helphrey in burning an effigy of the derisive Wahoo mascot outside the team stadium ahead of a World Series game in 1997, a move that got the pair and another Native protester arrested. Yet neither Bellecourt or Helphrey lived to see the payoff from their labors. In his 2007 obituary, the Times even noted that Bellecourt’s “big four” targets in his team name and mascot fight (Washington, Cleveland, Kansas City, and Atlanta) all outlived him. The same held true with Helphrey, who passed two years ago, just as Wahoo was finally going out of vogue with the MLB front office.

Even with new names on the horizon, the fight isn’t over. Franchises and school systems alike will need to be held accountable as they waffle or draw out these changes. And as I wrote in July in the wake of the Washington name change, a world without Native mascots isn’t the end of the story. The work of unwinding the violent anti-Indigenous attitudes embedded in America’s education systems will remain, as will the need to correct the erasure and pan-Indianism encouraged by these mascots and other popular culture vehicles. (And don’t forget, the Atlanta Braves, Chicago Blackhawks, and Kansas City Chiefs are all still in business and tomahawk-chopping their way through the criticism. None of these franchises responded to The New Republic’s inquiries as to whether Cleveland’s move will spur them to undertake similar plans.)

Justice often works on a long, uneven timeline. The battles we see play out in Indian Country nowadays are oftentimes the final acts in campaigns started long before we were born—that legacy of resistance is how you get an 1865 Muscogee Creek treaty standing at the center of one of 2020’s most significant legal cases. That’s how massive changes like these tend to come about: through sustained campaigns that learn from the generations before them. As long as the baton is passed, the fight lives on. Even if you don’t live to see it won.

Today is a reminder of that: Institutions like this will fall if the baton is passed down—generation to generation. For those of us who pay attention to such things, this year, for all the garbage it threw at us, will always have a note scrawled in the corner honoring Bellecourt, Helphrey, and countless others. They were 2020’s too-few silver linings. Two more teams down, plenty more to go.

Nick Martin is a staff writer at The New Republic.

The Lethal Inequality on American Farms
During the pandemic, a broken system for migrant laborers turned even more deadly.

Jonah Goldman Kay/December 22, 2020 THE NEW REPUBLIC

BRENT STIRTON/GETTY
Farm laborers from Fresh Harvest working with H-2A visas maintain a safe distance as a machine is moved in Greenfield, California.

Unbreaking America View All

When Flavio first heard about a temporary farm work program in the United States, it sounded like a great deal. Everything from his salary to his housing would be guaranteed in advance by his employer, who would also sponsor his visa. He forked over more than $1,000 to a recruiter in Mexico and was approved in April for an H-2A agricultural visa through a farm labor contractor. These contractors, a small but fast-growing part of the legal migrant worker system, hire laborers directly and then pair them with farmers. They are also notorious for human trafficking, and many have a background in cross-border smuggling, according to the Farm Labor Organizing Committee. Several weeks after his visa was approved, Flavio boarded a bus, chartered by the contractor, that would take him from his hometown in Hidalgo to the farm in North Carolina.

The problems started when the contractor asked Flavio and his co-workers to smuggle nearly $50,000 across the border. “Before we got to the border, they gave us each $1,000,” Flavio said. “After we got past the checkpoint, they took it right back.” (Flavio asked that he be referred to only by his first name and not name his employer because of an ongoing lawsuit and fears of retaliation.) This would prove to be the first in a series of labor violations, including cramped and unsafe accommodations, that would force Flavio to lose his visa and his opportunity to earn a living.

Over the past decade, farmers have faced severe workforce shortages—a paucity exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Many American workers have avoided agricultural employment since the pandemic began, choosing to stay closer to their families and avoid the crowded working conditions of many farms. To meet their labor needs, farmers have turned to hiring foreign workers who come to the U.S. on temporary agricultural visas, mainly the H-2A program, which allows employer-sponsored workers to stay in the U.S. for up to 10 months every year. In theory, this helps farmers fill employee shortages while providing the workers with a higher income than they could earn in their native countries; employers must pay a living wage and offer safe housing for employees. The Department of Labor, which administers the H-2A program, monitors working conditions on the farms and investigates allegations of wage theft and abuse.

Or at least that’s the intent. In practice, the H-2A program binds migrant workers to their employer, who controls every part of their lives, from work hours to living conditions to transportation. Since the employer also sponsors the visa, they also wield significant control over workers’ immigration status and whether they’ll be rehired the next year. Farmers usually hire the same group of workers every year, so if any speak out about violations, they’ll likely be out of a job when the next season comes around. In effect, workers are forced into an exploitative and one-sided relationship that leaves them vulnerable to all kinds of abuses. Joe Biden’s administration will have a chance to alleviate some of these problems by policing employers’ behavior and reversing a Trump-directed wage freeze. But more expansive reform—like allowing these workers, who spend most of their time in the U.S., to qualify for lawful permanent residency—seem sadly far off.

During the pandemic, this unequal system turned lethal. Only a handful of states have issued mandatory protection for farm workers during the pandemic. In April, the Trump administration declared that H-2A workers were essential to national security and increased its processing of new visa applications. However, the administration never provided updated worker safety regulations, leaving housing and transportation in the hands of the farmers. The results were deadly, in some cases. In Texas, a 48-year-old man on an H-2A visa died from Covid-related complications after his employer denied him medical care. In California, an H-2A worker died after contracting the virus during an outbreak in his employer-arranged congregate housing. Similar cases have been reported across the country.

Nonetheless, employers continue to pack workers into motel rooms and trailers, according to Lauro Barajas, the regional director for the United Farm Workers in the area around San Francisco. They frequently decline to implement social distancing on the buses that transport workers from their housing to the fields where they work. Very few offer protective gear in the cramped packing houses or adjust conditions in the field to accommodate social distancing. Health insurance, which is not a requirement for the H-2A program, remains out of reach for most workers.

Flavio felt the iron grip of his employer as soon as he arrived in North Carolina. His contract was clear—he’d work 35 hours a week on a blueberry farm, and the farm labor contractor would pay for a hotel for him and his fellow workers. But when he got there, he found out that the contractor had actually signed an agreement with another farm, more than an hour and a half away, planting sweet potatoes. The hotel he had been promised turned out to be a run-down trailer that he shared with more than a dozen other H-2A workers.

“There were only two bedrooms for 19 workers,” Flavio said. “We were sleeping on mattresses on the floor.”

After he complained to the local farm workers’ union, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, he was moved into a hotel, where he was kept for nearly a week without work or pay. In late June, Flavio was forced to quit in order to find other work. His employer had paid out less than a quarter of the total contract.

Wage theft is particularly rampant among farmers and farm labor contractors who employ H-2A workers, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute. Last year, the Department of Labor identified 12,000 labor violations in the H-2A program. The vast majority of those were wage violations. According to the Labor Department, farmers owed 5,000 workers a total of $2.4 million in back wages. Farm labor contractors were by far the most egregious offenders. Because many employees choose not to file complaints out of fear of retaliation, these numbers likely paint only a partial picture of the situation.

Employers have been given free rein to mistreat workers like Flavio under the Trump administration. The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, which is responsible for investigating labor violation complaints from H-2A workers, faced unprecedented budget and staffing cuts. In 2016, there were around 1,000 investigators; by 2019, there were just 780, according to the EPI report. At the same time, the number of H-2A workers increased dramatically—from around 135,000 in 2016 to more than 200,000 last year. As a result, even when workers manage to file complaints, there is a slim chance that they will be investigated.

Often, as a defense, farmers claim they are too broke to adequately compensate their employees or fulfill their contracts. Surely some farmers face unstable income and operate on slim profit margins. But the federal government has failed to police genuinely bad actors who abuse the H-2A system. Many farmers who commit multiple, severe labor violations have been allowed to hire H-2A workers, usually without needing to prove that they’ve changed their ways.

Just two days before Election Day, the Department of Labor proposed changes to the wage structure that governs wages for workers on H-2A visas, who are already some of the lowest-compensated workers in the U.S. labor market. But the Labor Department has proposed freezing those wages until 2022 and then raising them annually at a significantly lower rate than before. By the department’s own assessment, this would result in an unparalleled “transfer” of income from workers to farmers.

There is a certain amount of irony in this. If the regulation goes into effect, the very organization charged with protecting H-2A workers from wage theft would be executing the largest transfer of income from workers to farmers in the history of the H-2A program. To put that into perspective, over the past two decades, the Department of Labor ordered employers to pay $76 million in back wages. The new wage-rate system proposed by the Trump administration would result in $178 million in lost wages every year.

Fixing the H-2A program’s broken wage system would involve a series of regulatory changes at the Department of Labor. That would be fairly easy for the incoming Biden administration to implement, according to Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute and the author of the report on H-2A wage violations. The proposed wage freeze is already the subject of several lawsuits filed by Farmworker Justice on behalf of the UFW. If the wage freeze is found to be invalid, the Biden administration could simply choose not to litigate it further. Even if the wage freeze goes into effect, the new secretary of labor could choose to publish new regulations to supersede the Trump administration cuts.

While new regulations could take up to a year to go into effect, there is precedent for such an action. In the waning days of the Bush administration, Elaine Chao—the secretary of labor at the time—cut wages and protections for H-2A workers. Barack Obama replaced Chao with Hilda Solis, who issued new guidance that restored the previous regulations, effectively nullifying the Bush administration’s changes.

More immediately, the Department of Labor under Biden could issue guidance to the agriculture industry on pandemic-related safety measures. In the lead-up to the election, Biden repeatedly called for increased testing and safety precautions for agricultural workers. “President-elect Biden is committed to strengthening labor protections and ensuring all workers, regardless of status, have access to safe working environments and the necessary protections to report labor violations without fear of retaliation,” said Jennifer Molina, a spokesperson for Biden’s transition team.

There are also signs that Biden is committed to broader reforms of the H-2A program, particularly those relating to citizenship. Currently, workers on H-2A visas aren’t eligible for permanent resident status, regardless of how long they’ve worked in the U.S. As part of a broader modernization of the H-2A program, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act would provide a pathway to legal status for H-2A workers. The bill, which was passed by the House in 2019, is currently stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Biden’s current immigration plan proposes legislation that is almost identical to the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. His plan supports “compromise legislation” that would allow longtime agricultural visa workers to gain legal status and be fast-tracked to permanent residency and eventually citizenship. However, Costa says that any meaningful legislation would be a “heavy lift” for Biden, given the likely opposition he would face from the Republican-dominated Senate. It’s also unclear how hard the new administration will push on immigration reform given a recent NPR report that Biden’s team is “uncomfortable” with the policies proposed by immigration activists.

When he quit his job, Flavio also lost his visa. He is now undocumented and stuck in limbo, unable to work legally in the U.S. or return home to Mexico. He’s waiting for the results of a lawsuit against his employer, who owes him more than $4,000 in missing wages. What started off as a chance to earn a decent income and send money back to his family has turned into a living nightmare. Without his full wages for the contract, he doesn’t have enough to pay off his debt to the recruiter in Hidalgo, effectively trapping him in the U.S.

“I didn’t expect to be undocumented—it’s not what I wanted at all,” Flavio said. “But until I pay off my debt, I can’t see my family. I’m stuck here.”

Jonah Goldman Kay  is a writer based in New Orleans.

The Case for Giving Workers Ownership Rights

Workplace democracy would have lessened the damage from this year’s economic crisis—and could buffer the next one.

Unbreaking America View All

Osita Nwanevu/December 22, 2020  NEW REPUBLIC

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JOAN WONG. (REFERENCE PHOTO: GETTY.)

It’s a certainty that we’ll be entering both the new year and a new Democratic administration with the American economy on its knees. We’ll return to something resembling normalcy with time, but communities across the country and the lives of millions have already been irrevocably altered. The lesson of the last financial crisis—that precarity endures for working Americans long after the markets and headline figures rebound—will have to be learned again. And the central truth of our economic system will have to be confronted afresh: Ours is an economy where profits and power accrue almost wholly to a class of owners who, as we’ve seen this year, are willing and able to work their employees quite literally to death. The fact that the Biden administration is unlikely to produce solutions that get to the heart of our national iniquities hasn’t absolved us from the responsibility of devising, discussing, and promoting solutions to them. Many of the most promising ideas in circulation now proceed from a simple principle: Our economy will continue to fail the American people until they are given more control over it.

Some of the proposals that should be given consideration concern the reallocation of power at the firm level: that is to say, “reshaping company ownership so that it is democratic, inclusive, and purposeful by design,” as the policy analyst Peter Gowan wrote last year. In an interview this week, Gowan told me, “We should be encouraging the development of a lot of alternative economic models. And we should be encouraging people and workers on the ground to think about how the private ownership of capital is negatively impacting their lives.”

Gowan points, for instance, to the 100,000 establishments that have already permanently shuttered over the course of the pandemic, many of which might have been rescued with some assistance from the government or their own workers. “The bars that are closing down didn’t become unusable under Covid,” Gowan said. “It would have been entirely possible for them to sort of be put on ice and opened back up. But what happened is that a source of money got cut off and capital intervened to find a more profitable use of resources. And that does a huge amount of damage to the economy—the consequences of that are measured not in dollar terms but in whole communities that get hollowed out.”

“In principle,” Gowan continued, “there is a strong possibility—especially in a lot of companies that might have owners that want to exit the marketplace or that might want to sell off their assets⁠—that the government can be stepping in and saying even though there’s no private owner at this place, the workers might still know about what’s going on in their business. They have the expertise, they have the knowledge, they know how to run whatever is being made or whatever services are being provided, and they run it themselves. And that could save a lot of jobs, it could save a lot of livelihoods, and it could create a lot of economic security on a common need for people.”

This isn’t a new idea. In Italy, for instance, a body of legislation called the Marcora Framework offers workers financial support for turning shuttering businesses into worker cooperatives. According to the European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises, the framework facilitated at least 257 worker buyouts between 1979 and 2014 and saved at least 9,500 jobs. It also found that even distressed businesses that wound up closing eventually survived for over a decade, on average, after their worker takeovers. In 2018, the platform of the U.K.’s Labour Party included an even bolder idea—granting workers the right to a first chance to buy their companies not only when they’re at risk of dissolving but whenever they’re put up for sale.

Full worker cooperatives comprise a small portion of the American economy today. An annual survey by the Democracy at Work Institute and the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, in 2018, estimated that there are around 800 of them, and those that were verified by researchers employed fewer than 7,000 workers. But around 14 million workers at over 6,500 businesses participate in Employee Stock Ownership Plans, or ESOPs—retirement packages in which companies hold shares of their own stock in trust for their employees. In a widely overlooked campaign proposal last year, Senator Bernie Sanders, inspired by another recent Labour proposal, took the concept of the employee stock fund to the next level: the Democratic Employee Ownership Fund. “Under this plan,” the campaign wrote, “corporations with at least $100 million in annual revenue, corporations with at least $100 million in balance sheet total, and all publicly traded companies will be required to provide at least 2 percent of stock to their workers every year until the company is at least 20 percent owned by employees.”

In a recent paper, Lenore Palladino, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, sketched out the potential benefits of such a plan, which, as constructed by Sanders, might have granted as many as 56 million workers stock dividend payments and the same corporate voting rights held by investors on Wall Street. “They’re one way to rebalance power within the corporation so that employees as a stakeholder group have two things,” she said. “One is they share in the economic benefits or the economic potential of a corporation so that when it does well, they gain some of those profits directly, and two, and really equally importantly, it’s one mechanism or one way to create an employee voice in corporate governance, in the big decisions which corporations make.”

In a poll conducted by YouGov last year, the Democracy Collaborative found that a remarkable 55 percent of voters would strongly or somewhat support a proposal requiring companies with over 250 employees to gradually put half of their shares into a workers’ fund—far more than Sanders proposed. Gowan sees this as evidence of the idea’s intuitive appeal. “It’s like: Well, I work there,” Gowan said. “I do know a lot about this place. I do contribute a lot to it. And why wouldn’t it make sense for me to have some more control over where I work? And why shouldn’t I get some share of what the place makes? If the debate got more polarized, I have absolutely no doubt that a lot of the people who would have responded to that poll would end up deciding that this is actually bad because the media influences people. There’s no doubt about that.

“But I think that it does speak to the fact that there is potential to also reinforce those ideas,” Gowan continued. “To give them a more coherent expression of their desire for more control over their lives. People, I think, on a very basic level, have a desire for the world around them to not just be something that acts upon them.”




If implemented, ownership funds would grant workers a greater say on matters ranging from pay and labor conditions to corporate ethics and the environmental costs of business activity—all while giving them hundreds or thousands of dollars in dividend payments a year. Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project is among those pushing for an even more dramatic economic intervention. In a report last year, he made the case for the creation of a “sovereign” or “social” wealth fund—a fund of stocks and assets owned by the federal government—in which every American would have a dividend-paying share, and which would grant the government, as a major economy-wide shareholder, a significant amount of control over corporate governance. These funds, on an obviously much smaller scale, already exist in a few states, including Alaska, whose Permanent Fund paid out $1,606 to each of the state’s residents in 2019.

There were around 80 sovereign wealth funds worldwide at the beginning of 2016, with most having been established since 2000. And Bruenig notes that the public ownership of financial assets has grown more and more common as a policy instrument in recent years. “You only hear about this if you read Bloomberg or The Financial Times, but Japan is slowly but surely buying up all the companies in Japan, just as a desperate effort to do monetary stimulus,” Bruenig said. “Not intentionally, but it’s like, ‘We need to get money out the door.’ That’s just where they’re at now. They’re now the biggest stock owner in the country.”

The Democracy Collaborative’s polling last year found that 57 percent of voters would support creating a national dividend-paying fund like Alaska’s—a result again illustrating that the American people are open to proposals that would structurally shift power and wealth to the working class one way or another. “There’s clearly a lot of questions in the policy design,” Palladino said, “but I actually think there is some kind of even bipartisan growing consensus that the way that corporations operate both is not producing the kind of innovation we need and is not producing the kinds of broadly shared benefits for those who participate that we need.”

There is talk all the time now about a democratic crisis; many are justly concerned that our political system and bad political actors have conspired to deny a majority of Americans an equal say in matters that affect them and the polity as a whole. But the same has always been true of our economic system. If democratic values hold enough moral weight to warrant their defense at the ballot box, they’re surely worthy of defense at the places where we earn our livings and within an economy that routinely destroys livelihoods. “All Americans deserve a say and a share”—this is promising as political messaging and promising as policy. Getting there won’t be Joe Biden’s project, and it may never be the project of the Democratic Party. But it should be ours.

Osita Nwanevu @OsitaNwanevu is a staff writer at The New Republic.

Global News VIDEO
How will the PM preserve the Keystone XL pipeline?
Duration: 06:47 

In the final part of his interview with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, ‘The West Block’ host Mercedes Stephenson asks how the Prime Minister will preserve the Keystone XL pipeline expansion, when incoming US president Joe Biden has said he will cancel the project.

One Good Thing: 

Hong Kong street refrigerator keeps giving

HONG KONG — Most people who head to Woosung Street in Hong Kong’s old-school neighbourhood of Jordan are visiting its popular restaurants serving everything from curries to seafood. Others may be headed for a lone refrigerator, painted blue, with a sign that reads: “Give what you can give, take what you need to take."

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The door of the fridge sitting outside a hockey academy opens to reveal it is stuffed with packets of instant noodles, biscuits, tins of food and even socks and towels for anyone who may need them.

Ahmen Khan, founder of a sports foundation on the same street, said he was inspired to create a community refrigerator after seeing a film about others doing the same thing. He found the refrigerator at a nearby refuse collection point and painted it blue.

“It’s like a dignity, that when you go home, you open your fridge to get food,” Khan said. “So I want the people to just feel like that. Even if it’s a street, it’s their community, it’s their home, so they can simply just open it and then just put food there, and collect the food.”

Khan’s blue refrigerator project went viral on social media and people have been dropping by to leave food inside.

Janet Yeung stopped by recently with a plastic bag filled with biscuits, instant noodles and snacks. She stacked them carefully inside.

“I think doing good deeds does not need to be on a large scale,” Yeung said. “A small act can already show our kindness, and contribute to this world.”

A resident who would only identify himself as Yeung (no relation to Janet Yeung) is one of the people benefitting from the blue refrigerator, from time to time helping himself to some food or even masks left by donors.

“Those who are really in need can take things from the fridge whenever they want without any worries, as the fridge is here 24 hours a day,” he said.

___

Associated Press writer Zen Soo contributed to this report.

___

“One Good Thing” is a series that highlights glimmers of joy in hard times — stories of people who find a way to make a difference, no matter how small. Read the collection at https://apnews.com/hub/one-good-thing

Alice Fung, The Associated Press

China to overtake US as largest global economy

 by 2028 — report

China’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has cleared its path to become the world’s largest economy before the end of the decade, according to a new report by a UK think tank.

China is set to overtake the United States as the largest economy in the world

The coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout will help China rise past the US to become the world’s largest economy, a new report shows. Beijing is now expected to overtake the US by 2028, as opposed to 2033, a UK think tank said in its latest report.

"We expect the United States' share of global GDP to decline from 2021 onwards, and for the country to eventually be overtaken by China as the world's largest economy," the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) said in an annual report released on Saturday.

"We now expect this to happen in 2028, five years sooner than in the previous edition of the WELT," referring to the think tank’s World Economic League Table, which measures countries’ economic performance.

Watch video 42:35 China's Gateway to Europe - The New Silk Road

China was 'skillful' with the pandemic

The quickened pace has been attributed to the difference between Beijing and Washington's response to the coronavirus pandemic and the recovery that followed. The report hailed China's "skillful management of the pandemic," where an early lockdown kept the numbers under control.

The report added that the US would also see a strong post-pandemic rebound in the coming year, but its growth would slow down to 1.9% and 1.6% over the years that follow.

China, on the other hand, is headed for an average growth rate of 5.7% a year from 2021 till 2025. Between 2026 and 2030, it is expected to slow down to 4.5% a year.

Japan is expected to remain the third-largest economy until the early 2030s, when India could overtake it, pushing Germany to the fifth spot.

see/dj (Reuters, CEBR annual report)

China to leapfrog U.S. as world's biggest economy by 2028: think tank

LONDON (Reuters) - China will overtake the United States to become the world's biggest economy in 2028, five years earlier than previously estimated due to the contrasting recoveries of the two countries from the COVID-19 pandemic, a think tank said.

© Reuters/THOMAS PETER 

People look at the skyline of the Central Business District in Beijing

"For some time, an overarching theme of global economics has been the economic and soft power struggle between the United States and China," the Centre for Economics and Business Research said in an annual report published on Saturday.

"The COVID-19 pandemic and corresponding economic fallout have certainly tipped this rivalry in China's favour."

The CEBR said China's "skilful management of the pandemic", with its strict early lockdown, and hits to long-term growth in the West meant China's relative economic performance had improved.

China looked set for average economic growth of 5.7% a year from 2021-25 before slowing to 4.5% a year from 2026-30.

While the United States was likely to have a strong post-pandemic rebound in 2021, its growth would slow to 1.9% a year between 2022 and 2024, and then to 1.6% after that.

Japan would remain the world's third-biggest economy, in dollar terms, until the early 2030s when it would be overtaken by India, pushing Germany down from fourth to fifth.

The United Kingdom, currently the fifth-biggest economy by the CEBR's measure, would slip to sixth place from 2024.

However, despite a hit in 2021 from its exit from the European Union's single market, British GDP in dollars was forecast to be 23% higher than France's by 2035, helped by Britain's lead in the increasingly important digital economy.

Europe accounted for 19% of output in the top 10 global economies in 2020 but that will fall to 12% by 2035, or lower if there is an acrimonious split between the EU and Britain, the CEBR said.

It also said the pandemic's impact on the global economy was likely to show up in higher inflation, not slower growth.

"We see an economic cycle with rising interest rates in the mid-2020s," it said, posing a challenge for governments which have borrowed massively to fund their response to the COVID-19 crisis.

"But the underlying trends that have been accelerated by this point to a greener and more tech-based world as we move into the 2030s."

(Writing by William Schomberg; Editing by Toby Chopra)

Nepal in political turmoil after PM calls for new elections

Nepal is staring at a constitutional crisis after PM KP Sharma Oli dissolved parliament in a bid to counter discord within the ruling party.

A protester burns an effigy of PM KP Sharma Oli outside the parliament in Kathmandu

Nepal has plunged into a political crisis and renewed instability after President Bidhya Devi Bhandari dissolved parliament on Sunday at the request of Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli and announced general elections would be held in April and May next year, more than a year ahead of schedule.

The PM's decision has triggered unrest in his party and protests on the streets of the capital Kathmandu. It comes after months of clashes with Pushpa Kamal Dahal, a former insurgent leader who helped Oli come to power when their political parties merged in 2018. The pair had previously clashed over their power-sharing agreement and a lack of consultation.

Oli also lost support within his own Nepal Communist Party (NCP), with some members accusing him of sidelining senior party members in decision-making and key appointments. They called for him to step down.

Ninety parliamentarians from the ruling party rushed to register a vote of no-confidence after Oli sent his request to the president. Seven ministers have stepped down to challenge the dissolution and stated that it was a violation of the "popular mandate" given to them in the 2017 general election.

President Bhandari, who hails from the ruling party and is considered close to Oli, was also criticized for agreeing to Oli's dissolution recommendation quickly.

Lawyers opposed to Oli's decision argue that the PM had no prerogative to dissolve parliament under the constitution

An unconstitutional step?

Observers say Oli's move has triggered a constitutional crisis as the prime minister cannot recommend dissolution of parliament until there are chances of forming an alternative government. They fear that recent developments could lead to a phase of renewed political instability in the Himalayan nation.

"This is an unconstitutional move, which has put the new political order and Nepali democracy at risk," Tikaram Bhattarai, a senior lawyer practicing in the nation's Supreme Court, told DW.

Nepal's Supreme Court on Wednesday started hearing petitions challenging Oli's sudden dissolution of parliament. "Hearing on 12 petitions against the dissolution of parliament has begun," said Bhadrakali Pokharel, a Supreme Court spokesman.

Constitutional law expert Bhimarjun Acharya told DW that the move could end up destroying the federal, republican setup that was institutionalized through the adoption of the new constitution in September 2015. "Only way now to correct the constitutional step is by reinstating the parliament through the court of law," he said.

Fresh elections are scheduled for April 30 and May 10, but PM Oli's former press adviser Kundan Aryal has cast doubt on the likelihood of holding elections on the announced dates due to political uncertainties and the coronavirus pandemic.

The crisis comes at a time when Nepal is facing a raft of political and security challenges, including an intensification of protests by former royalist forces demanding the restoration of monarchy — overthrown in 2008 — and the resurgence of violence by sprinter factions of ex-Maoist rebels.

The latest developments plunge Nepal into months of fresh political uncertainty after years of instability and short-lived governments that followed a decade-long civil war.

Oli came to power promising a stable and good government as well as swift economic development. But his administration's failure to deliver and allegations of corruption and political scandals have eroded faith in Oli's leadership. The authorities' handling of the coronavirus pandemic has also drawn criticism, and calls grew louder from within and outside the ruling party for the PM to step down.

#ReleaseNicholasOpiyo

Nicholas Opiyo: Uganda's rebellious rights lawyer

Ugandan human rights lawyer Nicholas Opiyo has campaigned for civil rights and political freedoms. For this, he has paid a high price. His clients have included Ugandan presidential candidate Bobi Wine.


Nicholas Opiyo is a leading human rights lawyer and founder of the rights organization Chapter Four Uganda. Since 2005, Opiyo has worked to promote civil liberties in Uganda, often pro bono.

Amongst others, Opiyo has been representing Stella Nyanzi, a Ugandan academic charged with "cyber-harassment" and "offensive communication" for her comments about Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, and presidential hopeful Bobi Wine, Museveni's strongest challenger in next month's elections.

Wine has been arrested multiple times, including for "annoying" the president. Rights activists say Museveni — who is seeking a sixth term — has successfully transformed himself into an autocratic and despotic supreme leader.

Read more: Opinion: Ugandans are tired of Museveni but can't vote him out

Child soldiers and sex slaves

Opiyo, 37, grew up on the outskirts of Gulu, Nothern Uganda. The region was a center of fighting between Museveni's government and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group that is notorious for using child soldiers and terror.

Opiyo had to walk long distances in order to avoid abduction by the LRA. His sister was kidnapped and spent several years with the rebels before escaping.

Opiyo represents presidential hopeful Bobi Wine

It was a fate that befell many children and young people in the north of Uganda at the time. Countless were kidnapped to serve the rebel group as soldiers, laborers or sex slaves.

Opiyo channeled these difficult childhood experiences into his advocacy for human rights, according to the US-based Human Rights Watch.
Critical role in political freedoms

Opiyo is known as a lawyer who is willing to handle the sensitive topics of which many of his colleagues are afraid. Under Chapter Four Uganda, he progressed to civil leadership in his country.

"It has been a difficult journey in a country which you have a leader in power for the last 30 years and has no intention of leaving," Opiyo noted.

Opiyo expresses his opinion on the state of democracy in his country, and has a leading role in prominent courts dealing with the defense of civil rights and political participation — a position that has turned him into one of Uganda's most influential voices.

He is committed to observing constitutional order and the rule of law in an increasingly autocratic environment. He has been outspoken about electoral law, the restriction of freedom of assembly, and the clampdown on freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Read more: German Africa prize winner: 'There are grave rights violations in Uganda'

Opiyo: Ugandan Human Rights lawyer and winner of the German Africa Prize 2017

German Africa Prize winner

In 2017, Opiyo won the German Africa Prize — and award from the German Africa Foundation which honors "outstanding individuals for their long-standing endeavors to foster democracy, peace, human rights, art, culture, the social market economy and social concerns."

"This award will give us more impetus to carry on the work we've been doing," Opiyo said. "Despite the challenges we have on the continent, if we work hard with the support of friends — there's a better tomorrow."

As a lawyer, Opiyo successfully pushed that parliamentarians should also lose their parliamentary seats after their political parties lose elections. He campaigned against Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2013, a law which provided life imprisonment for certain cases. He eventually convinced the Uganda's Constitutional Court to declare the law null and void.

Watch video 01:41 Uganda: A brave lawyer stands up against injustice

Detained

In December 2020, Opiyo was detained over money laundering allegations. According to Bobi Wine, he was arrested along with three other lawyers and a member of his party. Chapter Four Uganda in a statement expressed its deep concern "about the abduction and incommunicado detention." The hashtag #ReleaseNicholasOpiyo began trending on social media platforms.

Human rights activists charge that the government's legal action against Opiyo is politically motivated. Opiyo had previously condemned attempts by the Museveni regime to make it harder for the opposition to access social media. Ugandan authorities had written to Google, owner of YouTube, asking it to block 14 video channels allegedly linked to the pre-election unrest in which more than 50 people died.

Human rights activists call for Nicholas Opiyo's release

COMMITTEE TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS

Opinion:

 Protecting press freedom needs to be priority for U.S. and EU

CPJ's Tom Gibson and Kerry Paterson reflect on how 2020 has shown the need for governments to collaborate in order to strengthen press freedom.


Alaa Abdelfattah is still waiting. For a brief window in 2019, there was hope for the smiley, curly-haired Egyptian blogger, celebrated for his work on human rights and politics, as he was released from prison. This hope vanished when he was arrested again shortly after without charges. Like dozens of journalists jailed in Egypt, Alaa is in prison simply for speaking out against those in power. And like so many other jailed journalists, there is no end in sight.

For global leaders on press freedom, coordinated diplomacy is not without limitations. However, at a time when COVID-19 has already claimed the life of at least one imprisoned journalist in Egypt, for others like Alaa, it may be their only hope.

For the four years of the Trump Presidency, the EU has been isolated as an international force looking to defend press freedom. To strengthen its hand, it should seek the support of a renewed US foreign policy and make press freedom a priority for discussions when President-elect Joe Biden visits Brussels in early 2021.

Alaa Abdelfattah was imprisoned in Egypt for allegedly organising  political unrest

The global situation facing journalists is bleak. Last week, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued our prison census. This year saw 274 journalists languishing in prisons around the world: a record number for CPJ and the fifth consecutive year with at least 250 journalists behind bars.

Countries like Egypt, China, or Turkey have shown the EU’s limits for holding autocrats to account. The EU’s policy of silent diplomacy with President al-Sisi in Egypt has shown little impact in reversing the repression of critical journalists in the country. EU calls for the freeing of Turkish journalists have been dwarfed by the drilling crisis in the Eastern Meditarrean and the need to cooperate with President Erdogan on migration. And the bloc routinely fails to hold China to account for its rights record, as it seeks to build trade relations with the repressive superpower.

In 2015, a CPJ special report noted how the EU’s international diplomacy lacked consistency and was open to accusations of double standards, for being too soft on repressive governments who are at the same time trade partners or strategic allies. Five years on and it seems not much has changed.

Human rights advocates in Egypt face severe repression for their work

Finding fresh support from the U.S. could help unblock the path for more robust international diplomacy. This year, as social unrest erupted around the globe, EU leaders struggled to deal with fresh clampdowns. 

Protests following the presidential election in Belarus underscored that EU statements and sanctions must be accompanied by a further, long-term support strategy for journalists on the ground. In Ethiopia, the emergence of inter-ethnic violence raises the question of how to balance conflict resolution with the need to protect large numbers of journalists at risk. EU advocacy is being forced to be at once flexible in complex environments, and sustainable over the long term. U.S. diplomacy can help to shoulder this weight.

In order for renewed cooperation to bear fruit however, the U.S. must first contend with its own recent record on press freedom. The conspicuous lack of U.S. leadership and the open attacks on the press by President Trump have significantly increased the vulnerability of journalists. The U.S. press freedom tracker, of which CPJ is a founding member, reports a total of 311 journalists attacked and 110 journalists arrested or criminally charged so far in 2020 (although none are in prison, some still face charges).


The Press Freedom Tracker has counted more than 900 press freedom violations this year in the United States

The worsening environment for US journalists in part explains the neglect of U.S. foreign policy: Trump has allowed autocrats to hide from traditional U.S. scrutiny of press freedom. The President has turned a blind eye to the inflamed rhetoric of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, and to the ongoing impunity enjoyed by the Saudi authorities for the gruesome 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

But in a year like no other, one where a devastating global pandemic underscored the essential role of the press, the promise of a new administration brings with it a new opportunity for engagement.

Both the U.S. and the EU should now examine where international coordination can yield the greatest impact, including by pressuring some of the world’s most intransigent autocrats. CPJ’s recent recommendations to the incoming Biden administration include establishing a Special Presidential Envoy for press freedom and strengthening the State Department’s support for press freedom.

Biden’s entry to the international scene should spell a new beginning and allow both sides of the Atlantic to prioritize press freedom in their international diplomacy- together. Journalists like Alaa Abdelfattah may not be able to wait much longer.

Kerry Paterson, CPJ Deputy Advocacy Director

Tom Gibson, CPJ EU representative

Journalists under threat: December's 10 most urgent cases

Every month, the One Free Press Coalition draws attention to unresolved cases of crimes against journalists. This month, the list focuses on violations of press freedom and freedom of expression relating to COVID-19.

'2020 has brought home the reality that there has never been a more dangerous time to be a journalist.'

"There have been a number of concerning developments in recent months." In a DW interview, Courtney Radsch of the Committee to Protect Journalists talked about press freedom violations around the world.

Violence against women journalists: ‘It is about silencing women’

Female journalists worldwide are experiencing violence and harassment, impacting them physically and psychologically. Online abuse and hate speech increasingly influence their work. How can they protect themselves?

UN Special Rapporteur Šimonovic: 'Gender-based violence forms part of women journalists' daily routine'

Dubravka Šimonovic spoke to DW about the reality and implications of gender-based violence against female journalists.

Norway rejects Greenpeace appeal over Arctic oil exploration

In a landmark case, Norway's top court has approved oil exploration in the Barents Sea. Greenpeace had argued that oil licenses violated the Norwegian constitution, which guarantees the right to a healthy environment.



The environmental groups argued that oil licenses violated an article in the Norwegian constitution

Norway's supreme court on Tuesday approved government plans for oil exploration in the Barents Sea off the country's northern coast, rejecting a lawsuit by environmental groups.

The groups, including Greenpeace, had claimed the oil licenses breached an article in the Norwegian constitution which guarantees the right to a healthy and viable environment.

"The supreme court is rejecting the appeal," Chief Justice Toril Marie Oeie said as she announced the verdict on Tuesday.

The Nature and Youth advocacy group denounced the ruling in a tweet: "This means today's youth lacks fundamental legal protection from environmental damage jeopardizing our future... This is shocking and we are furious."

Norway 'must be held accountable'

The verdict upheld rulings made by two lower courts, dismissing the arguments by Greenpeace and the Nature and Youth group that a 2015-2016 oil licensing round giving awards to Equinor and others had violated the constitution.

The environmental groups sued the Norwegian state in 2016, saying the "Norwegian government must be held accountable." The Grandparents Climate Campaign and Friends of the Earth Norway subsequently joined the case

Watch video 26:06  Beneath the waves

The groups also argued that new oil activities in the region would be contrary to the 2015 Paris climate accord, which seeks to limit average global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

Curbing emissions

Norway is western Europe's top oil and gas producer with a daily output of around 4 million barrels of oil equivalent. That has enabled the country to amass the world's biggest sovereign wealth fund valued at more than $1 trillion.

The oil and gas industry is also the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2), which has been linked to dangerous climate warming.

The environmental groups launched the lawsuit as part of an emerging branch of environmental law around the world, where plaintiffs seek to use a country's founding principles to make the case for cutting emissions.

In the Netherlands last year, the Dutch supreme court supported a case led by environmental group Urgenda aimed at forcing the Dutch government to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

mvb/rt (dpa, Reuters, AFP)

Doggerland: How did the Atlantis of the North Sea sink?

For a long time, scientists believed that a powerful tsunami destroyed Doggerland 8,200 years ago. Sediment analysis now suggests that the land once connecting Great Britain with the rest of Europe had a later demise.

Latest research indicates that Doggerland did not completely vanish in one tsunami

Around 10,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, the sea level in northern Europe was still about 60 meters (197 feet) below what it is today. The British Isles and the European mainland formed a continuous landmass.

Relatively large rivers crossed this landmass, but in a different way than we know today. The Elbe, for example, flowed into a large inland lake. The Rhine flowed from east to west over long distances. Before it reached the sea at the latitude of Brittany, the Thames flowed into it.


Where the North Sea is today, there were fertile meadows and forests through which hunter-gatherers roamed. The coast ran about 300 kilometers (186 miles) further north along an area of about 30,000 square kilometers (11,580 square miles) that received the name of "Doggerland" in the 1990s, called after a sandbank now located in the region.
First finds in nets

We do not yet know much about life on this sunken tract of land. Every now and then, fishermen have found mammoth teeth and bones of now-extinct land animals, such as aurochs, in their nets.

In 1931, fishermen discovered a 21.6-centimeter-long (8.5-inch-long) prehistoric harpoon made of bone with ornate decorations in their trawl nets, which has been dated to 11,740 BC. In 1988, a stone disc ax from the Mesolithic was recovered. For a long time, however, Doggerland remained a seeming myth.

Systematic mapping of the seafloor

It is only in the last 20 years that researchers from the UK in particular have been using special ships to systematically examine the seabed for traces. Most of the investigations focus on the area of Brown Bank, also known as Brown Ridge, a shoal about 30 kilometers long between the UK and the Netherlands. Today, the sea there is between 18 and 20 meters deep.

The scientists are compiling geophysical data and analyzing cores from the sediment layers there. Using artificially generated seismic waves, archaeologists at the University of Bradford have been able to map the geological makeup of the seabed fairly accurately.
Paradisiacal conditions

In the sedimentary layers, they have found the genetic material of animals and plants, which suggests there were extensive mixed forests and sprawling hilly landscapes with wild cattle and pigs, reindeer and other mammals — ideal conditions for the Stone Age hunter-gatherers.

Many of today's Halligen, or small islands without protective dikes, in the North Sea also barely peek out of the water

However, this fertile land became smaller and smaller over time, because with the end of the ice age, the sea level rose — by 35 meters in two millennia, or almost 2 centimeters per year. Gradually, only the higher parts of Doggerland still rose out of the sea. But the remaining island was still about as large as today's Wales, with an area of some 23,000 square kilometers.

Deadly monster waves

An apocalyptic catastrophe far off the Norwegian coast put an end to the shrinking island. About 8,200 years ago, huge parts of the continental slope broke off in the sea far below the surface in several phases during the so-called "Storegga Slides". Over a stretch of about 290 kilometers, an estimated 3,500 cubic kilometers of rock and debris plunged into the water's depths.
The resulting tsunami, at least 10 to 12 meters high, raced across the sea. On the Shetland Islands north of Scotland, sediment data have indicated a tidal wave that was more than 20 meters high. Even in England, the effects of this wave can still be traced 40 kilometers from the present-day coast.

Destroyed, but not sunk

For a long time, scientists assumed that a tsunami of this kind also caused the Dogger Bank, which was still protruding from the sea, to sink completely. According to a study by researchers at the University of Bradford, however, there was no single, all-destroying tsunami.



Rather, by examining sediments, the researchers were able to prove that only the northern part of Doggerland was submerged after the tsunami and that the destructive force of its floods was probably slowed down by hills or forests on the island.

New life after the flood

It is true that large parts of the forests were destroyed, that people and animals perished in the floods, that the seawater salinized the soils and that, in many places, only marshlands were left behind.

However, after the water receded, the flooded area recovered over the years, as is demonstrated by the fact that evidence of plants and animals can be found again in the sediment layers above the disrupted tsunami layer.

The rocks of Helgoland may be the last visible remains of the former Doggerland

So life probably continued on the Dogger Bank for some centuries after the tsunami,.

It was not until 700 years after the Storegga landslides — around 5500 BC — that the sea level rose so much that the North Sea engulfed the rest of the Dogger Bank. At that point, the island was completely submerged, and all traces of it vanished into the waves of the rough North Sea.

Does Haaland pick show Biden commitment to public lands fracking ban?

While Joe Biden was certainly not the climate movement's first pick during the Democratic primary, his position on ending fossil fuel drilling on public lands was crystal clear: "No more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period." Biden has the power to act on this as soon as he takes office in January, and now that he has chosen an Interior secretary who supports this goal, it will be the first test of his climate commitment.

© Getty Does Haaland pick show Biden commitment to public lands fracking ban?

While much of his domestic policy agenda rests on Congress, Biden does not need to corral the slim Democratic majority to pass a bill that would please the Senate. He has the executive power to require the federal agencies that manage our public lands to prioritize protecting our air and water and slashing greenhouse gas emissions that are creating climate catastrophe.

This would be a substantial and necessary shift from the profoundly destructive practices of the Trump era. On his way out of his town, Trump has been conducting a federal lands fire sale, handing the fossil fuel industry land that belongs to all of us - including a frantic, legally dubious scheme to auction drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge right before Biden is inaugurated. This was shocking, the Trump years have seen a massive rush to lease public land for oil and gas drilling.

That's one reason why a halt to new oil and gas leases on public lands would be a substantial first step for Biden. Another reason is simple climate math: Almost a quarter of our country's total greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel activities occur on public lands. Any serious plan to slash emissions must start on public land.

While there will be pressure to get Biden to keep his word, some lawmakers will likely push a less ambitious approach. Last year, Democrats pitched a 'net zero' public lands bill. That benchmark is suddenly popular with major corporations too; even oil companies are patting themselves on the back for setting 'net zero' goals. The problem is that it is mostly an illusion; net zero creates loopholes for fracking companies to continue business-as-usual, while claiming that climate-destroying emissions from new drilling are 'offset' by improved land use practices, carbon capture technologies or unrelated renewable energy projects.

This is a familiar type of climate accounting scheme, where the existence of beneficial and necessary projects are used as cover for continued fossil fuel extraction. Drilling companies are more than happy to find creative ways to portray new fracking wells as a win for the climate simply because a solar array is being built somewhere else.

The policy choice is Biden's to make, but his choice of Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.) as his next Interior secretary sends an unmistakably strong signal. As she put it recently, "If I had my way, it'd be great to stop all gas and oil leasing on federal and public lands because those lands belong to all of us."

When it comes to creating climate policies that actually make a difference, our guiding principle should be simple: We must do everything we can to immediately and substantially restrict the supply of fossil fuels. That means no more drilling, no more pipelines, and no more fossil fuel power plants. Anything less than that represents a failure of ambition.

We can - and must - commit to this strategy everywhere, sooner rather than later. There is no easier place to start than on public lands. This policy shift must be combined with a federal government commitment to provide financial support for states like New Mexico, whose budget is heavily dependent on fossil fuel revenue. Relying on dirty energy development to pay for public schools creates terrible incentives to continue oil and gas drilling forever. It is time to end these fossil fuel Faustian bargains.

Navigating the path to meaningful climate action will be treacherous, and at all points there will be pressure to accept less-than-ideal policies for the sake of politically expediency. But bipartisan compromise will not deliver climate justice. The Biden administration has the opportunity to deliver on a key promise with an ironclad ban on fracking and fossil fuel development on public lands.

Wenonah Hauter is the executive diretor of the national advocacy group Food & Water Watch.