Tuesday, July 05, 2022

UPDATES AS SHIP OF STATE SINKS

More strife for Boris Johnson as third senior minister quits

Rows and resignations: Is this the end for Boris Johnson?

Boris Johnson’s leadership is in the balance following the resignation of his chancellor Rishi Sunak and health secretary Sajid Javid.


British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s troubles have worsened after another senior member of his government abruptly quit – the latest in a string of departures on Wednesday.

Alex Chalk resigned as solicitor-general for England and Wales, saying he could not “defend the indefensible”.

“To be in government is to accept the duty to argue for difficult or even unpopular policy positions where that serves the broader national interest. But it cannot extend to defending the indefensible,” Mr Chalk wrote in his resignation letter to Mr Johnson.

“Public confidence in the ability of No.10 [Downing Street] to uphold the standards of candour expected of a British government has irretrievably broken down. I regret that I share that judgement.

“This comes at a moment of intense challenge for our country, when trust in government can rarely have been more important. I’m afraid the time has therefore come for fresh leadership.”

It was the latest in a flurry of resignations late on Tuesday and into Wednesday, including Rishi Sunak’s departure as chancellor and Sajid Javid’s resignation as health secretary.

Four other MPs quit junior government roles while a trade envoy stood down and a vice-chairman of the Conservative Party resigned his post on live television.

Catherine Haddon from the Institute for Government think tank told the BBC she expected Mr Johnson would have “a really, really difficult day” on Wednesday. “More awkwardness” was to be expected, she said.

“It will certainly be more people publishing letters and probably more of an idea of an eventual timetable for a vote of confidence,” she said.

“It’s going to be a febrile day.”

But other senior figures expressed their support for Mr Johnson. Foreign minister Liz Truss, considered a leading contender to replace him, said she was “100 per cent behind the PM”.

The resignations followed months of scandals and missteps, with Mr Johnson so far weathering criticism over a damning report into parties at his Downing Street residence and office that broke COVID-19 lockdown rules and saw him fined by police.

They leave him facing the biggest crisis of his leadership. But, signalling his intention to stay in power for as long as possible, Mr Johnson quickly appointed former businessman and his previous education minister Nadhim Zahawi as his new finance minister.

Steve Barclay, who was appointed to impose discipline in Mr Johnson’s administration in February, was moved to the health portfolio.

The resignations came as Mr Johnson was apologising for appointing an MP to a role involved in offering pastoral care, even after being briefed that the politician had been the subject of complaints about sexual misconduct.

There have been other policy U-turns, an ill-advised defence of another politician who broke lobbying rules, and he has also come under fire for not doing enough to tackle a cost-of-living crisis, with many Britons struggling to cope with rising fuel and food prices.

Mr Sunak and Mr Javid had previously publicly supported Mr Johnson, but in their letters said enough was enough.

“The public rightly expect government to be conducted properly, competently and seriously,” Mr Sunak said.

“I recognise this may be my last ministerial job, but I believe these standards are worth fighting for.”

Mr Javid said many MPs and the public had lost confidence in Mr Johnson’s ability to govern in the national interest.

“It is clear to me that this situation will not change under your leadership – and you have therefore lost my confidence too,” his letter said.

The resignations came minutes after Mr Johnson apologised on television for appointing MP Christopher Pincher to a role involved in offering pastoral care in the Conservative Party, his latest public expression of contrition for his mistakes.

“I just want to make absolutely clear that there’s no place in this government for anybody who is predatory or who abuses their position of power,” Mr Johnson said.

Mr Pincher’s resignation last Thursday triggered days of a changing narrative from Downing Street over what Mr Johnson knew of the deputy chief whip’s behaviour and when he knew it.

Earlier on Tuesday, after a former top official accused Mr Johnson’s office of lying, the PM’s spokesman was forced into a quick about-turn to say Mr Johnson had been briefed in “some form” about the case but had forgotten about that last week.

Some Conservative politicians are trying to renew attempts to unseat him, a month after Mr Johnson survived a confidence vote, while others earlier appealed to his cabinet ministers to move against him.

“He’s finished,” one previously loyal Conservative politician said, on condition of anonymity.

“He shouldn’t prolong the agony. It’s disrespectful to his colleagues, his party and his country.”

Opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer said those who had backed Mr Johnson were complicit in how he had performed his job.

“After all the sleaze, the scandals and the failure, it’s clear that this government is now collapsing,” he said.

-with AAP


British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's government rocked by cabinet resignations

By Jack Hawke in London, wires
July 5,2022

Boris Johnson's government has been rocked by the resignations of the treasurer and Health Secretary amid the latest scandal engulfing the British Prime Minister.

Key points:

Britain's Health Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer have resigned from their positions in government

Both ministers took aim at Boris Johnson's ability to run a government that adhered to standards

Last month Mr Johnson survived a no-confidence vote by Tory MPs on his leadership


Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak and Health Secretary Sajid Javid announced their decisions as Mr Johnson was apologising for appointing a former minister to a job in government despite knowing there was a sexual misconduct complaint against him.

And the announcements came just a month after Mr Johnson survived a no-confidence vote from Conservative MPs.

As Mr Johnson's apology was being aired on nightly news bulletins on Tuesday evening local time, Mr Javid announced his resignation in a statement, saying he could "no longer continue in good conscience".

Moments later, Mr Sunak also announced he was quitting.

Both had formerly publicly supported Mr Johnson during months of scandal over his government's conduct and a damning report into parties at his Downing Street office and residence that broke strict COVID-19 lockdown rules.

The two resignations were followed later on Tuesday evening by the resignations of three junior ministers and Mr Johnson's trade envoy for Morocco.

Mr Sunak, who had reportedly clashed with the prime minister in private about spending, said: "For me to step down as Chancellor while the world is suffering the economic consequences of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and other serious challenges is a decision that I have not taken lightly."

"However, the public rightly expect government to be conducted properly, competently and seriously.

"I recognise this may be my last ministerial job, but I believe these standards are worth fighting for and that is why I am resigning."

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak said "standards are worth fighting for".(Picture: Heathcliff O'Malley/The Daily Telegraph via AP)

Mr Javid said many MPs and the public had lost confidence in Mr Johnson's ability to govern in the national interest.

"I regret to say, however, that it is clear to me that this situation will not change under your leadership — and you have therefore lost my confidence too," Mr Javid said in his resignation letter.

In separate letters to Mr Sunak and Mr Javid, the Prime Minister said he would miss working with them.

He thanked Mr Sunak for his "outstanding service to the country through the most challenging period for our economy in peacetime history" and said he was looking forward to Mr Javid's "contribution from the backbenches".

Other cabinet ministers threw their support behind Mr Johnson, with Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, Home Secretary Priti Patel and Justice Secretary Dominic Raab all indicating they would stay in government.

He also received support from Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, who said Mr Johnson "consistently gets all the big decisions right".


Opposition Leader Sir Keir Starmer said it was "clear that this government is now collapsing".

"Tory cabinet ministers have known all along who this Prime Minister is," the Labour leader said.

"They have been his cheerleaders throughout this sorry saga.

"The British public will not be fooled," adding that only a change in government would give Britain a fresh start.

'It was a mistake and I apologise it'

Boris Johnson apologises for appointing an MP accused of assault. (Image: AP)

The latest drama to befall Mr Johnson involves his appointment of Conservative MP Chris Pincher to the position of deputy chief whip despite knowing there had been accusations of sexual misconduct made against him.

Mr Pincher quit his role in disgrace last Thursday amid fresh allegations that he groped two male guests at a members-only club in London while drunk.

He said in a resignation letter that he had drunk too much, embarrassed himself and "caused upset".

For several days, Downing Street and government ministers told the media Mr Johnson was unaware of past allegations against Mr Pincher.

It came to a head on Tuesday morning when a former top Foreign Office official accused Mr Johnson's office of lying about what the Prime Minister knew about the complaints.

By Tuesday evening, a contrite Mr Johnson was apologising for appointing Mr Pincher to his government.

"I think it was a mistake and I apologise for it," he said.

"I think in hindsight it was the wrong thing to do.

"I apologise to everybody who's been badly affected by it and I just want to make absolutely clear that there's no place in this government for anybody who is predatory or who abuses their position of power."
Johnson on unsteady ground

The resignations of Mr Javid and Mr Sunak, two of the government's most senior cabinet ministers, came just a month after Mr Johnson survived a confidence vote by Conservative MPs in the wake of the "partygate" scandal.

The scandal saw revelations that staff at Downing Street held boozy parties throughout the COVID-19 pandemic that flouted restrictions put in place by Mr Johnson's government, and even saw the Prime Minister himself issued a fine by police for attending one.

How much longer can Boris Johnson last as British PM?


Mr Johnson won the June internal poll 211 to 148, but his 59 per cent share of the vote was less than the 63 per cent achieved by his predecessor Theresa May in her confidence vote of December 2018.

She was replaced seven months later.

The result meant he cannot face another no-confidence vote for a year, although Conservative backbenchers are agitating at changing the rules to allow one sooner, potentially before parliament goes into summer recess on July 21.

Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen, a former Johnson supporter, told the BBC the Prime Minister "should do what he should have done some time ago and resign".

"If he doesn't do that, the party will have to force him out," he said.

Mark Harper, the former chief whip, echoed Mr Bridgen's calls.

"The Conservative Party still has so much to offer to our country," he tweeted.

"It's time for a fresh start."

ABC/wires

Read Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak's shock resignation letters in full

Two of Prime Minister Boris Johnson's senior ministers resigned this evening

Sajid Javid tweeted out his resignation letter as Health Secretary after 6pm

Shortly after Rishi Sunak also resigned from as Chancellor of the Exchequer

Boris Johnson news live: Follow all the latest updates on today's dramatic events

By MATT POWELL FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 5 July 2022

Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak both announced their resignations within 10 minutes of each other this evening.

The former Secretary of State for Health & Social Care said the job was 'an enormous privilege' but that he could 'no longer continue in good conscience'.

While the former Chancellor of the Exchequer said the public 'rightly expect government to be conducted properly, competently and seriously' and that it may be his 'last ministerial job'.

Read their resignation letters below in full:

Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak, two of Boris Johnson's most senior ministers, have both resigned this evening


Sajid Javid resigned from his role as Health Secretary this evening

Prime Minister,

It was a privilege to have been asked to come back into Government to serve as Secretary of State for Health & Social Care at such a critical time for our country. I have given every ounce of energy to this task, and am incredibly proud of what we have achieved.

The UK has led the world in learning to live with Covid. Thanks to the amazing rollout of our booster programme, investment in treatments, and innovations in the way we deliver healthcare, the British people have enjoyed months more freedom than other comparable countries.

We have also made important strides in the recovery and reform of NHS and adult social care. The longest waiters are down by 70% and, as you know, I have been working hard on wider modernisation of the NHS. I have also developed radical new approaches to dementia, cancer and mental health, and prepared the Health Disparities White Paper which will set out plans to level up health outcomes for communities that have been left behind for too long.

Given the unprecedented scale of the challenges in health and social care, it has been my instinct to continue focusing on this important work. So it is with enormous regret that I must tell you that I can no longer, in good conscience, continue serving in this Government. I am instinctively a team player but the British people also rightly expect integrity from their Government.

The tone you set as a leader, and the values you represent, reflect on your colleagues, your party and ultimately the country. Conservatives at their best are seen as hard-headed decision-makers, guided by strong values. We may not have always been popular, but we have been competent in acting in the national interest. Sadly, in the current circumstances, the public are concluding that we are now neither. The vote of confidence last month showed that a large number of our colleagues agree. It was a moment for humility, grip and new direction. I regret to say, however, that it is clear to me that this situation will not change under your leadership - and you have therefore lost my confidence too.

It is three years since you entered Downing Street. You will forever be credited with seeing off the threat of Corbynism, and breaking the deadlock on Brexit. You have shone a very welcome light on the regional disparities in our country, an agenda that will continue to define our politics. These are commendable legacies in unprecedented times. But the country needs a strong and principled Conservative Party, and the Party is bigger than any one individual. I served you loyally and as a friend, but we all serve the country first. When made to choose between those loyalties there can only be one answer.

Finally, I would like to put on record my thanks to ministerial and departmental colleagues, my admiration for NHS and social care staff, and my love for my family who have been immensely patient in these challenging times.

Yours ever,

S. Javid


Rishi Sunak announced his resignation as Chancellor of the Exchequer shortly after

Rishi Sunak

Dear Prime Minister,

It is with deep sadness that I am writing to you to resign from the Government.

It has been an enormous privilege to serve our country as Chancellor of the Exchequer and I will always be proud of how during the pandemic we protected people's jobs and businesses through actions such as furlough.

To leave ministerial office is a serious matter at any time. For me to step down as Chancellor while the world is suffering the economic consequences of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and other serious challenges is a decision that I have not taken lightly.

However, the public rightly expect government to be conducted properly, competently and seriously. I recognise this may be my last ministerial job, but I believe these standards are worth fighting for and that is why I am resigning.

I have been loyal to you. I backed you to become Leader of our Party and encouraged others to do so. I have served as your Chancellor with gratitude that you entrusted me with stewardship of the nation's economy and finances. Above all, I have respected the powerful mandate given to you by the British people in 2019 and how under your leadership we broke the Brexit deadlock.

That is why I have always tried to compromise in order to deliver the things you want to achieve. On those occasions where I disagreed with you privately, I have supported you publicly. That is the nature of the collective government upon which our system relies and it is particularly important that the Prime Minister and Chancellor remain united in hard times such as those we are experiencing today.

Our country is facing immense challenges. We both want a low-tax, high-growth economy, and world class public services, but this can only be responsibly delivered if we are prepared to work hard, make sacrifices and take difficult decisions.

I firmly believe the public are ready to hear that truth. Our people know that if something is too good to be true then it's not true. They need to know that whilst there is a path to a better future, it is not an easy one. In preparation for our proposed joint speech on the economy next week, it has become clear to me that our approaches are fundamentally too different.

I am sad to be leaving Government but I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that we cannot continue like this.

Kind regards,

Rishi Sunak

Hitchin MP Bim Afolami sensationally quits prominent Tory role live on TV as pressure mounts on Boris Johnson

By Layth Yousif
5th Jul 2022 10:34 pm | Local News

Hitchin MP Bim Afolami sensationally quit his prominent party role live on TV on Tuesday evening. PICTURE: Bim Afolami quits live on air. 
CREDIT: Talk TV

Hitchin MP Bim Afolami sensationally quit his prominent party role live on TV on Tuesday evening.

Our town's Parliamentarian heaped more pressure on beleaguered PM Boris Johnson by resigning from his position as Tory party vice chair on Talk TV.

Eton-educated Afolami, who had continually sided with Johnson over the course of his premiership - including the recent leadership vote and in an exclusive interview with Hitchin Nub News last week, puzzlingly reversed his position, to desert the under-fire Conservative leader, saying the 58-year-old no longer has the support of the country.

Speaking to Talk TV, Afolami claimed: "I can't serve under the Prime Minister, " adding, "'[Johnson doesn't have] the support of the party, or indeed the country any more."

Afolami's comments came moments after the PM suffered another destructive blow with the resignations of the chancellor Rishi Sunak and health secretary Sajid Javid.


Afolami joined a chorus of other senior MPs who quit their jobs in the government, calling on the prime minister to step down - something Afolami had steadfastly refused to do - until now.

Cowardly SCOTUS asked governors to quell non-violent protests


The Supreme Court marshal recently sent a letter asking governors to put an end to protests outside the homes of conservative justices.

SCOTUS IS THE THIRD BRANCH OF GVERNMENT

Abortion rights protesters demonstrate outside U.S. Supreme Court 
Justice Samuel Alito's home in Alexandria, Virginia, on June 27.
Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images


July 5, 2022, 3:28 PM MDT
By Ja'han Jones

Protesters have been gathering outside the homes of all six conservative Supreme Court justices in recent weeks. Now, in a remarkable act of cowardice, the court is asking officials to quell the demonstrations, claiming they are violating state and county protesting laws. The requests are the latest attempts to coddle a deeply unpopular court and insulate its conservative members from outrage over their anti-democratic decisions.

The requests are the latest attempts to coddle a deeply unpopular court and insulate its conservative members from outrage over their anti-democratic decisions.

Supreme Court marshal Gail Curley last week sent letters to Maryland and Virginia’s governors, both Republicans, and to the Democratic county leaders in Maryland’s Montgomery County and Virginia’s Fairfax County, asking them to put an end to the demonstrations, NBC News reported. Some conservative politicians have equated the protests to the deadly Capitol insurrection. In May, lawmakers responded by passing a bill giving judges’ families increased security.


“For weeks on end, large groups of protesters chanting slogans, using bullhorns, and banging drums have picketed Justices’ homes in Maryland,” Curley wrote in her letter to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan. She advised him to put the protest down by enforcing a state law banning people from disrupting someone else’s “tranquility,” and she described loud protests as “exactly the kind of conduct that Maryland and Montgomery County laws prohibit.” She sent a similar letter to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
JULY 5, 2022  05:09

This wave of protests first erupted in May, when someone leaked a draft of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling overturning federal abortion rights. Hogan and Youngkin, who both oppose abortion, have pushed federal officials to interpret obscure protest laws as bans on demonstrations outside justices’ homes. But Hogan’s communications director acknowledged in a tweet Saturday that both federal and local officials have said they don’t have grounds to apply the law to non-violent protests.

A spokesperson for Youngkin said he “agrees” with the marshal’s assessment that the Supreme Court justices are under serious threat (they’re not).

But local officials in Virginia and Maryland poured cold water on these feverish claims when leaders of both Montgomery County and Fairfax County said the protests are within demonstrators’ First Amendment rights.

That said, the protests are still irking our conservative Supreme Court justices, who evidently aren’t satisfied with just trampling on Americans’ civil rights. They think they deserve to trample in peace.

 
Ja'han Jones is The ReidOut Blog writer. He's a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include "Black Hair Defined" and the "Black Obituary Project."


SEE 
ABOLISH BOARDING SCHOOLS
The Christian right is facing some serious credibility issues

Reports of abuse at Christian schools and churches a reminder why religious fanatics should not control U.S. policy.
Agapè Boarding School, a Christian facility for young men in Missouri, is being investigated for alleged systemic child abuse.
Justine Goode / MSNBC


July 5, 2022, 
By Ja'han Jones

The conservative, Christian movement is better positioned to impose its will on American politics today than at any other time in recent memory, thanks to right-wing judges ex-President Donald Trump put on the federal bench and Supreme Court.

On everything from abortion to education, courts have sided with Christian ideology across the land. Meanwhile, the facade of Christian moral superiority continues to crumble.

The facade of Christian moral superiority continues to crumble.

A couple of incidents come to mind. First, there’s the scandal still unfolding at Agapè Boarding School, a Christian facility for young men in Missouri that's facing a slew of child abuse allegations. Agapè pitches guardians on its ability to “biblically teach your child the importance of submission to authority and the joys of being an obedient law-abiding citizen.”

It’s unclear what that means, but if you believe allegations from several students who attended the school, it translates too frequently into assault. The Missouri State Highway Patrol has been investigating Agapè for systemic child abuse for more than a year now. On Monday, The Daily Beast reported new details about several students who have filed lawsuits alleging they were sexually abused and beaten by workers at the school. (Agapè denied the allegations in a statement to The Daily Beast.)


MORNING JOE
'An absolute disaster': Southern Baptist sex abuse report rattles community
MAY 24, 20220  8:46

That alleged culture of abuse sounds similar to the one victims say was fostered by the Southern Baptist Convention, an ultraconservative denomination of Christian nationalists. In May, church leaders released a report showing hundreds of pastors and church workers have been accused of sexual abuse. The SBC, which is in ideological lockstep with the conservative movement, has since released the names of pastors it says were accused between 2000 and 2019. When the news dropped, SBC President Ed Litton said in a statement there “are not adequate words to express my sorrow at the things revealed in this report,” and that Southern Baptists “must resolve to change our culture and implement desperately needed reforms.”

These revelations are quite damning for the conservative, Christian movement and its members. For months, we've seen members of the Christian right framing themselves as protectors of children and ethical stewards of our world. But it's an impossible sell when the worlds they operate appear even more broken than the one they want to “fix.”


Ja'han Jones is The ReidOut Blog writer. He's a futurist and multimedia producer focused on culture and politics. His previous projects include "Black Hair Defined" and the "Black Obituary Project."




So this is how it feels when the robots come for your job: what GitHub’s Copilot ‘AI assistant’ means for coders

The Conversation
July 02, 2022

Writing code (Shutterstock)

I love writing code to make things: apps, websites, charts, even music. It’s a skill I’ve worked hard at for more than 20 years.

So I must confess last week’s news about the release of a new “AI assistant” coding helper called GitHub Copilot gave me complicated feelings.

Copilot, which spits out code to order based on “plain English” descriptions, is a remarkable tool. But is it about to put coders like me out of a job?

Trained on billions of lines of human code

GitHub (now owned by Microsoft) is a collaboration platform and social network for coders. You can think of it as something like a cross between Dropbox and Instagram, used by everyone from individual hobbyists through to highly paid software engineers at big tech companies.

Over the past decade or so, GitHub’s users have uploaded tens of billions of lines of code for more than 200 million apps. That’s a lot of ifs and fors and print("hello world") statements.
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The Copilot AI works like many other machine learning tools: it was “trained” by scanning through and looking for patterns in those tens of billions of lines of code written and uploaded by members of GitHub’s coder community.


Copilot produces code from instructions in plain English (the pale blue text).
GitHub

The training can take many months, hundreds of millions of dollars in computing equipment, and enough electricity to run a house for a decade. Once it’s done, though, human coders can then write a description (in plain English) of what they want their code to do, and the Copilot AI helper will write the code for them.

Based on the Codex “language model”, Copilot is the next step in a long line of “intelligent auto-completion” tools. However, these have been far more limited in the past. Copilot is a significant improvement.
A startlingly effective assistant

I was given early “preview” access to Copilot about a year ago, and I’ve been using it on and off. It takes some practice to learn exactly how to frame your requests in English so the Copilot AI gives the most useful code output, but it can be startlingly effective.

However, we’re still a long way from “Hey Siri, make me a million dollar iPhone app”. It’s still necessary to use my software design skills to figure out what the different bits of code should do in my app.

To understand the level Copilot is working at, imagine writing an essay. You can’t just throw the essay question at it and expect it to produce a useful, well-argued piece. But if you figure out the argument and maybe write the topic sentence for each paragraph, it will often do a pretty good job at filling in the rest of each paragraph automatically.

Depending on the type of coding I’m doing, this can sometimes be a huge time- and brainpower-saver.



Biases and bugs


There are some open questions with these sorts of AI coding helper tools. I’m a bit worried they’ll introduce, and reinforce, winner-takes-all dynamics: very few companies have the data (in this case, the billions of lines of code) to build tools like this, so creating a competitor to Copilot will be challenging.

And will Copilot itself be able to suggest new and better ways to write code and build software? We have seen AI systems innovate before. On the other hand, Copilot may be limited to doing things the way we’ve always done them, as AI systems trained on past data are prone to do.

My experiences with Copilot have also made me very aware my expertise is still needed, to check the “suggested” code is actually what I’m looking for.

Sometimes it’s trivial to see that Copilot has misunderstood my input. Those are the easy cases, and the tool makes it easy to ask for a different suggestion.

The trickier cases are where the code looks right, but it may contain a subtle bug. The bug might be because this AI code generation stuff is hard, or it might be because the billions of lines of human-written code that Copilot was trained on contained bugs of their own.

Another concern is potential issues about licensing and ownership of the code Copilot was trained on. GitHub has said it is trying to address these issues, but we will have to wait and see how it turns out.



More output from the same input

At times, using Copilot has made me feel a little wistful. The skill I often think makes me at least a little bit special (my ability to write code and make things with computers) may be in the process of being “automated away”, like many other jobs have been at different times in human history.

However, I’m not selling my laptop and running off to live a simple life in the bush just yet. The human coder is still a crucial part of the system, but as curator rather than creator.

Of course, you may be thinking “that’s what a coder would say” … and you may be right.

AI tools like Copilot, OpenAI’s text generator GPT-3, and Google’s Imagen text-to-image engine, have seen huge improvements in the past few years.

Many in white-collar “creative industries” which deal in text and images are starting to wrestle with their fears of being (at least partially) automated away. Copilot shows some of us in the tech industry are in the same boat.

Still, I’m (cautiously) excited. Copilot is a force multiplier in the most optimistic tool-building tradition: it provides more leverage, to increase the useful output for the same amount of input.

These new tools and the new leverage they provide are embedded in wider systems of people, technology and environmental actors, and I’m really fascinated to see how these systems reconfigure themselves in response.

In the meantime, it might help save my brain juice for the hard parts of my coding work, which can only be a good thing.

Ben Swift, Educational Experiences team lead (Senior Lecturer), ANU School of Cybernetics, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.






UPDATED
Rescuers gather body parts after Italy glacier collapse

By AFP
Published July 5, 2022




















A rescue helicopter flies over the partially collapsed glacier on Marmolada, the highest mountain in the Dolomites - 
Copyright AFP Andrew CABALLERO-REYNOLDS
Francesco Gilioli with Ella Ide in Rome

Emergency services at the scene of a deadly avalanche in the Italian Dolomites recovered what body parts they could on Tuesday, with the dangers of venturing under the partially collapsed glacier slowing the search.

Rescue teams sent helicopters and drones up for a second day after Sunday’s disaster, which saw at least seven hikers killed when a section of the country’s largest Alpine glacier gave way, sending ice and rock hurtling down the mountain.

Italy has blamed the collapse on climate change and fears more of the glacier could come crashing down have prevented access to much of the area where hikers, some roped together, are believed to be buried.

Authorities have declared 14 missing but stressed the exact number of climbers at the scene when the avalanche hit was unknown.

“Operations on the ground will only be carried out to recover any remains discovered by the drones, to ensure rescuers’ safety,” the Trentino Alpine Rescue Service said Tuesday.

Experts were surveying the area to determine how best to enable teams with sniffer dogs to get out onto the site safely on Wednesday or Thursday, the Service’s national chief Maurizio Dellantonio told AGI news agency.

Relatives of people reported missing gathered at the town of Canazei, where recovered remains were placed in a make-shift morgue at a gymnasium.

“The important finds, not just bones, are first photographed, then recovered and put onto a helicopter” and flown to Canazei to be “catalogued and placed in cold storage”, Dellantonio said.

Such finds were “bones that have not been flayed, a piece of hand with a ring, tattoos, anything that can enable a person to be identified”, including shoes, backpacks and ice-picks.

– Last selfie –


The disaster struck one day after a record-high temperature of 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) was recorded at the summit of Marmolada, the highest mountain in the Italian Dolomites.

Prime Minister Mario Draghi said Monday the collapse was certainly “linked to the deterioration of the environment and the climate situation”.

One of the bodies recovered belonged to a Czech who was travelling with a friend now registered as missing, the Czech foreign ministry told AFP.

Also missing, according to Italian media reports, was Filippo Bari, 27, who had snapped a grinning selfie of himself on the mountain earlier Sunday and sent it to family and friends saying “look where I am!”

Bari, who has a four-year old son, has not responded to repeated attempts to contact him, nor have the five friends he was believed to be hiking with, the Corriere della Sera said.

The Trento public prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation to determine the causes of the tragedy.

The glacier, nicknamed “queen of the Dolomites”, feeds the Avisio river and overlooks Lake Fedaia in the autonomous Italian province of Trento.

According to a March report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), melting ice and snow is one of 10 major threats caused by global warming, disrupting ecosystems and infrastructure.

Deadly Glacier Collapse in Italy 'Linked Directly to Climate Change'

At least seven people were killed when a glacier slid down a mountainside near a popular climbing route in the Alps on Sunday.

JULIA CONLEY
July 4, 2022

Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi joined scientists in pointing to the climate emergency as the cause of a deadly glacier collapse in the Italian Alps on Sunday afternoon, saying policymakers must act to ensure avalanches don't become a more regular occurrence.

The collapse of the glacier in the Marmolada mountain range in the Dolomites "certainly depends on the deterioration of the environment and the climate situation," Draghi said at a press conference following the disaster, which was confirmed Monday to have killed at least seven people.

"Combined with the unusually high temperatures across the region over the summer, glaciers are melting fast."

"Today Italy weeps for these victims," the prime minister added. "But the government must think about what has happened and take steps to ensure that what happened is unlikely to do so again or can even be avoided."

In addition to those killed, at least eight people were injured by the collapse, which happened near a popular climbing route, and 14 were still missing as of this writing.

A huge chunk of the glacier broke off and slid down the mountain during a heat wave that's hit the region earlier in the year than normal. Meteorologists have recorded temperatures of 50° Fahrenheit in the Marmolada mountain group in recent days.

Jonathan Bamber, director of the Bristol Glaciology Center at University of Bristol in the United Kingdom noted that the Dolomites "experienced a drought throughout the winter with very little snowfall."

"Combined with the unusually high temperatures across the region over the summer, glaciers are melting fast," he said, adding that high European mountains are "an [increasingly] dangerous and unpredictable environment to be in."

Poul Christoffersen, a professor of glaciology at the University of Cambridge, called the collapse "a natural disaster linked directly to climate change."

"High elevation glaciers such as the Marmolada are often steep and relying on cold temperatures below zero degrees Celsius to keep them stable," he explained. "But climate change means more and more meltwater, which releases heat that warms up the ice if the water re-freezes, or even worse: lifting up the glacier from the rock below and causing a sudden unstable collapse."

Water at the base of the glacier "and increased pressure in water-filled crevasses are probably the main causes for this catastrophic event," said the Alpine-Adriatic Meteorological Society.



The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in a recent report that melting ice and snow is one of 10 major threats that humans will need to contend with due to the climate crisis.

The glacier that collapsed Sunday shrank by 30% between 2004 and 2015 according to a 2019 study by the National Research Council in Italy.

Drone search resumes on Italian glacier after avalanche

By PAOLO SANTALUCIA and NICOLE WINFIELD

1 of 17
A view of the Punta Rocca glacier near Canazei, in the Italian Alps in northern Italy, Tuesday, July 5, 2022, two day after a huge chunk of the glacier broke loose, sending an avalanche of ice, snow, and rocks onto hikers. (AP Photo/Luca Bruno)

CANAZEI, Italy (AP) — Rescuers using drones resumed the search Tuesday for an estimated 13 hikers unaccounted-for following an avalanche in northern Italy that killed at least seven people and is being blamed in large part on rising temperatures that are melting glaciers.

After rain hampered the search Monday, sunny weather on Tuesday allowed helicopters to bring more rescue teams up to the site on the Marmolada glacier, east of Bolzano in the Dolomites mountain range.

A huge chunk of the glacier cleaved off Sunday, sparking an avalanche that sent torrents of ice, rock and debris down the mountainside onto unsuspecting hikers below. At least seven people were killed and an estimated 13 remain unaccounted-for, officials said.

The terrain is still so unstable that rescue crews were staying off to the side and using drones to try to find any survivors while helicopters searched overhead, some using equipment to detect cellular pings. Two rescuers remained on site overnight, and were joined by more rescuers Tuesday morning.

“We’re continuing the work of drones to find survivors, working the areas that we couldn’t monitor yesterday,” Matteo Gasperini, of the Alpine Rescue service, told Sky TG24. “We’ll try to complete the work of monitoring the entire site.”

Premier Mario Draghi, who visited the rescue base in Canazei on Monday, acknowledged avalanches are unpredictable but that the tragedy “certainly depends on the deterioration of the climate situation.”

Italy is in the midst of an early summer heatwave, coupled with the worst drought in northern Italy in 70 years. Experts say there was unusually little snowfall during the winter, exposing the glaciers of the Italian Alps more to the summer heat and melt.

“We are thus in the worst conditions for a detachment of this kind, when there’s so much heat and so much water running at the base,” said Renato Colucci from the Institute of Polar Sciences of the state-run Council for National Research, or CNR. “We aren’t yet able to understand if it was a deep or superficial detachment, but the size of it seems very big, judging from the preliminary images and information received.”

The CNR has estimated that the Marmolada glacier could disappear entirely in the next 25-30 years if current climatic trends continue, given that it lost 30% of its volume and 22% of its area from 2004-2015.

SEE 

Climate protesters in England glued themselves to a copy of 'The Last Supper'

July 5, 2022
JACLYN DIAZ
NPR

Five Just Stop Oil activists spray paint the wall and glue themselves to the frame of the painting 
The Last Supper on Tuesday at the Royal Academy in London.
Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Images

With a bit of glue and spray paint, protesters took action at a gallery at London's Royal Academy of Arts to demand greater government action on climate change.

A group of at least five activists from the group Just Stop Oil spray painted "No New Oil" underneath the painting Copy of Leonardo's The Last Supper and glued their hands to the artwork's frame. The painting depicts the scene from the Bible when Jesus holds his last supper with his Twelve Apostles and tells them that one of them will betray him. The 500-year-old copy of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece has been attributed to da Vinci student Giampietrino, and painter Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio may have also worked on it.

The protesters that targeted the painting on Tuesday called on their nation's government to commit to immediately ending all new oil and gas licenses in the U.K., according to a video showing the demonstration. They also called on members of the nation's art institutions to support a "peaceful civil resistance," Just Stop Oil said in a statement.

This is just the latest action in a spree of other moves by the U.K. group. Activists from the same organization have recently glued themselves to a painting in Glasgow, to a Vincent Van Gogh painting in London, a painting at the Manchester Art Gallery, and another at the National Gallery in London.

This past weekend six more activists from the same group were arrested following a protest on the track of a Formula 1 race at the Silverstone Circuit in England, according to the BBC.

The group says it's turning to such public displays of protest to pressure global leaders to adhere to promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions in order to curtail global warming.

Global leaders had agreed to limit the world's warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. Scientists say the most catastrophic effects of global warming can be prevented if successful, but the world is not on track to meet that target.


THE COP26 SUMMIT
This is what the world looks like if we pass the crucial 1.5-degree climate threshold

"We have no time left, to say that we do is a lie. We must halt all new oil and gas right now, we will stop disrupting art institutions as soon as the government makes a meaningful statement to do so," Lucy Porter, 47, a former primary teacher from Leeds that participated in the demonstration, said in a statement provided by Just Stop Oil. "Until then, the disruption will continue so that young people know we are doing all we can for them. There is nothing I would rather be doing."

The Royal Academy of the Arts didn't immediately return NPR's request for comment. It's unclear if the painting suffered any damage as a result of the demonstration.
UPDATED
Paul Krugman: The US Supreme Court is promoting a climate change ‘apocalypse’

Alex Henderson, AlterNet
July 05, 2022

Paul Krugman -- CNN screenshot

Climate change activists all around the world have been cringing in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency. In late June, the High Court ruled, 6-3, that the Clean Air Act of 1963 doesn’t give the EPA broad authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

The High Court’s decision comes at a time when climate change is asserting itself in a variety of devastating ways, from record flooding in Sydney, Australia — where around 50,000 people have been ordered to evacuate their homes — to wildfires in California.

Liberal economist and New York Times opinion writer Paul Krugman slams the Supreme Court in his July 4 column, arguing that the 6-3 majority of Republican-appointed justices is doing its part to make a bad problem even worse.

“The megadrought in the western United States has reduced Lake Mead to a small fraction of its former size, and it now threatens to become a ‘dead pool’ that can no longer supply water to major cities,” Krugman observes. “Climate change is already doing immense damage, and it’s probably only a matter of time before we experience huge catastrophes that take thousands of lives. And the Republican majority on the Supreme Court just voted to limit the Biden Administration’s ability to do anything about it.”

Krugman adds, however, that as “bad” as the Supreme Court’s ruling in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency was, some climate change activists expected it to be even more “sweeping.”

“I guess, given where we are, objectively bad decisions must be graded on a curve,” Krugman comments. “And for what it’s worth, I have a suspicion that at least some of the Republican justices understood the enormity of what they were doing and tried to do as little as possible while maintaining their party fealty. For party fealty is, of course, what this is all about.”

Krugman continues, “Anyone who believes that the recent series of blockbuster Court rulings reflects any consistent legal theory is being willfully naïve: Clearly, the way this Court interprets the law is almost entirely determined by what serves Republican interests. If states want to ban abortion, well, that’s their prerogative. If New York has a law restricting the concealed carrying of firearms, well, that’s unconstitutional. And partisanship is the central problem of climate policy.”

The Times columnist points out that “letting the planet burn” and promoting a “looming apocalypse” wasn’t always a “key GOP tenet.”

“The Environmental Protection Agency, whose scope for action the Court just moved to limit, was created by none other than Richard Nixon,” Krugman notes. “As late as 2008 John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, ran on a promise to impose a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Republican positioning on the environment is also completely unlike that of mainstream conservative parties in other western nations.”

Krugman makes a distinction between “mainstream conservative parties” and “authoritarian” far-right parties like “Hungary’s Fidesz or Poland’s Law and Justice,” arguing that the GOP has more in common with Fidesz.

“Why, exactly, are authoritarian right-wing parties anti-environment?” Krugman writes. “That’s a discussion for another day. What’s important right now is that the United States is the only major nation in which an authoritarian right-wing party — which lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections yet controls the Supreme Court — has the ability to block actions that might prevent climate catastrophe.”

The Supreme Court’s EPA ruling enables a free-riding global pariah—unless Americans reach pro-climate consensus


By Robert Socolow | July 5, 2022
BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS
 
For America to continue to lead on climate change action, new coalitions across political parties will be needed. 
Images courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Earth photo credit: NASA. Donkey and elephant by Sagearbor https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

The starting point for a useful discussion of the US response to climate change must be this:We human beings live on a small planet.

We have discovered a large energy source buried away for eons, fossil fuel, which, used in the cheapest way, produces carbon dioxide in quantities that are changing the planet’s atmosphere on a global scale. These changes are deleterious to humanity’s well-being.
Fossil fuels are present below ground in such immense quantities that, in the absence of deliberate policy, they are likely to remain the lowest-cost energy options for many decades. Yet “more of the same” for just another few decades will make the impacts of climate change far worse than they are at present.

Researchers don’t know how fast bad outcomes will arrive, but humans are risk-averse, and thus arguments for decisive action to swap our current energy system for a very different one are compelling.

Such a swap is extraordinarily difficult in the best of situations.

The Supreme Court just made strategic climate action in the United States more difficult. Effective strategic action must be coordinated at the federal level. If initiative now flows away from the federal government and toward communities, cities, and states, far less will be accomplished. There are formidable obstacles at every level of governance—notably societal inertia, special interests, and “losers” who need to be compensated. Most sub-national units have neither the resources nor the commitment to accomplish very much.

The international consequences of the Supreme Court ruling in West Virginia v EPA are even larger. Strategic action must be globally coordinated, because every country is adversely affected by inaction on climate change. At a time when global climate coordination is in a fledgling stage, with promising though halting efforts in view in the Paris-Glasgow process, the new Supreme Court decision clips its wings. The United States will lose the benefits that would have come from those positive actions in other countries that will now not happen because of the United States’ negative influence on the ambitions of these countries.

On the global level, it appears almost painless today to be a free rider while other nations take action. Granted, the European Union may soon impose border adjustment taxes that penalize imports from countries that have not put a price on carbon and thereby incentivize climate policies in such countries. But these border taxes aren’t here yet, and without US acquiescence (after all, these taxes could be imposed on us) they will probably be delayed. Since the realities of damage from climate change are accepted everywhere by now, the United States may experience shaming, and it is possible that the rest of the world will move forward without us, relegating the United States of America to pariah status.

The six Supreme Court justices who were the majority in this case know all of this. A charitable reading of their decision is that they are seeking to encourage action from Congress. It is significant that the decision keeps the greenhouse challenge within EPA’s authority, confounding more pessimistic expectations. Carbon dioxide remains a regulated pollutant.

Looking deeply, why did this happen? Over the past 20 years, a consensus in favor of environmental activism has gradually disappeared. Climate change affects all Americans comparably, so one would expect, at a minimum, rival proposals from the two principal political parties. Yet the posture of the Republican Party is to be relaxed about climate change and to be willing to postpone dealing with it indefinitely. And the Democratic Party, even though seriously engaged, is nonetheless willing to settle for fragile actions that are vulnerable to even small swings in a closely divided Congress.

West Virginia v EPA calls attention the need for new coalitions that create robust political majorities. It makes consensus-building an imperative. A place to start is with the fossil fuel industry, which can contribute expertise on behalf of low-carbon technology and can be induced to do so.

The present time appears to be a moment of realignment for the global world order, within which the likelihood of great power conflict is increasing at startling speed. Climate change is the pre-eminent non-military problem-solving assignment that requires capacity-building that goes beyond the nation state. The world is fortunate, in a perverse way, to have such a problem to chew on at this time. The cooperation among the great powers essential to address climate change may lower the chances of global decimation through war. The last thing the world needs is for the country that had been the world’s leader to become a debilitating force, a free rider, a pariah.

To restore America’s leadership in the international struggle to slow the pace of climate change and to lower the risks to ourselves, Americans must pressure both major parties to engage with each other to decouple climate change from the culture wars, where it never should have landed in the first place, and to produce a path forward that can be broadly defended for its pragmatic wisdom and its fairness. The path will need to be clearly defined for the next few years, yet responsive to new options and changed perceptions in later years. It is within the capabilities of American society to stake out a path that, in spite of its substantial inherent costs and disruptions, will be judged overwhelmingly by public opinion to be an appropriately vigorous response to a common danger. Were that to happen, historians would look back on West Virginia v EPA as a blessing in disguise.

Good, bad, ugly, relieved: Reactions to the Supreme Court decision on the EPA and climate change

By John Mecklin | July 1, 2022
BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS
 
Climate activists protest against a US Supreme Court ruling
 limiting government powers to curb greenhouse gases, in New York on June 30.
 (Photo by Ed JONES/AFP via Getty Images)


The future of US efforts to fight climate change was, at the least, clouded significantly Thursday when the US Supreme Court ruled to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s powers to broadly regulate power plant greenhouse gas emissions. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion in the case, West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, concluding that “[c]apping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day’. But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme…. A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body.”

The country’s political divisions were reflected in reactions to the 6-3 decision, with Republicans praising it, sometimes in fulsome terms. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said, “This ruling will have a significant impact on the Commonwealth. Even as energy prices spiral out of control and experts warn of electricity blackouts, the Biden Administration has continued the Left’s war on affordable domestic energy and proposed to saddle the electric power sector with expensive regulatory requirements.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton put out a press release: “With Biden in the White House, the radical left has re-captured the levers of environmental power and are forcing their green agenda on the nation. Today, we stopped him.” Texas was a party to the case and its related proceedings.[1]

The decision was simultaneously and harshly criticized from many quarters on the political left—including the three Supreme Court justices appointed by Democratic presidents—as a serious blow to the Biden administration’s efforts to meet climate goals. Writing for three dissenting justices, Elena Kagan asserted that “[t]oday, the Court strips the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the power Congress gave it to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.’”

A range of Democratic officeholders also emphasized the impact of the decision on US efforts to fight climate change.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling in West Virginia vs. EPA is another devastating decision that aims to take our country backwards,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “While this decision risks damaging our nation’s ability to keep our air clean and combat climate change, I will not relent in using my lawful authorities to protect public health and tackle the climate crisis.”

“Just like last week’s dangerously misguided and abhorrent decisions on gun safety and abortion, the extremist MAGA Court’s ruling today in West Virginia v. EPA will cause more needless deaths—in this instance because of more pollution that will exacerbate the climate crisis and make our air and water less clean and safe,” Reuters quoted Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as saying.

The three co-chairs of the US Climate Alliance—New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom—are Democrats from states that formally joined the the EPA’s opposition to the suit. They denounced the Supreme Court decision, while noting it would have no effect on state-level climate action. “We are deeply disappointed in this regressive decision, but it only hardens our resolve to act with the boldness and urgency the climate crisis demands. At a time when we’re seeing devastating droughts, wildfires, and storms become the norm, the Supreme Court has sided with polluters at the expense of the American people,” an alliance news release quoted the three governors as saying. “This ruling makes clear that the actions of governors and state legislatures are more important than ever before. Thankfully, state authority to curb greenhouse gas emissions has not changed.”

Less ideological commentary on the decision tended to point out that, from the greenhouse-gas regulation point of view, it was bad, but not as overwhelmingly terrible as was conceivably possible, given general Republican hostility toward what the hard-right often calls “the administrative state.” (Side note: Charlie Savage provides an excellent overview of the GOP’s long-running attempt to roll back federal regulation of business in this New York Times piece.) The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer is one of the country’s most astute observers of climate politics and policy and is worth quoting at length on this score:

Today’s major environmental ruling from the Supreme Court, West Virginia v. EPA, is probably most notable for what it did not do.

It did not say that the Environmental Protection Agency is prohibited from regulating heat-trapping carbon pollution from America’s existing power plants.

It also did not strip the EPA of its ability to regulate climate pollution at all.

In short, it did not, as some progressives feared, blast away any possibility of using the federal government’s environmental powers to solve climate change, the biggest environmental problem of our time.

Yet its effects will be felt for years to come. The ruling limits the EPA’s ability to regulate climate change, but leaves enough room that the agency still must try to do so. With these constraints, the Court is forcing the agency to approach the problem of carbon pollution with brute-force tools. In short, the Court has ensured that climate regulation, when it comes, will prove both more cumbersome and more expensive for almost everyone involved.

If that sounds strange … well, it was a weird case.

The saga of West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency is indeed odd and convoluted. Perhaps its strangest element: It began as a case against an Obama-era regulation that was no longer in effect and ended with a Supreme Court ruling against a Biden administration regulation that wasn’t yet even in place. Meyer’s introduction and the ensuing interview with Stanford University research fellow Michael Wara are worth reading all the way through.

So is Andy Revkin’s latest piece in the “Sustain What” newsletter, appropriately headlined, “Hot Combination: Legislative Blockade, Presidential Climate Push, Supreme Court Red Shift.” A longtime New York Times reporter on climate change and other environmental concerns now at Columbia University, Revkin has a wide-ranging take on this week’s Supreme Court decision and its place in the overall, nostalgic Supreme Court approach to American life.

Revkin’s piece doesn’t argue to a single conclusion so much as marshal a constellation of notions around a general line of thinking, but its discussion of the “major questions doctrine” at the center of this week’s Supreme Court decision is valuable. (Spoiler: It appears that a “major question” will be whatever the Supreme Court decides it is.) Revkin’s presentation seems, sometimes, even somewhat optimistic, from the point of view of those who wish to save Earth from the worst that climate change could bring. He quotes a tweet from Princeton researcher Jesse Jenkins:

“The Majority’s introduction of ‘major questions doctrine’ will result in more legal uncertainty for new regulations, as lower courts have a new tool to reach for when they want to strike down a rule they don’t like, increasing number of legal controversies & time to sort out. Bad.”

But, Revkin notes, Jenkins also expressed a degree of relief, writing: “In what may be best of plausible outcomes, a radical SCOTUS that has been tearing up precedent all term left EPA’s authority to regulate climate-warming gases intact, though more narrowly constrained.”

Note

[1] Contextual information: Paxton is under criminal indictment for allegedly committing felony securitie
s fraud and is under FBI investigation regarding allegations of corruption in office.


The Supreme Court’s EPA decision heralds a broad assault on democracy


By Adam Sobel | July 1, 2022
BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS
 
The US Supreme Court building. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

“The Court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decision maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.” Justice Elena Kagan wrote that, in her dissent from the Supreme Court majority’s ruling in West Virginia v Environmental Protection Agency. I agree—but I can easily think of a few things that are about equally frightening. Namely, the Supreme Court decisions that immediately preceded it, and the ones that are likely to come soon after.

In the EPA ruling, the court’s majority argued that the Clean Air Act didn’t give the EPA the authority to make broad regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Only Congress has that power, they argued. The court acknowledged that modern life is sufficiently complex that the historical practice, in which Congress makes laws expressing broad intent and federal agencies work out the details required to implement them, is to some extent necessary in our complex modern age but ruled that it isn’t enough in the case of “major questions.” This is apparently a new legal theory, just invented to justify the court’s decision.

If one wants to see an upside, the ruling is not as broad as those of us who want a functioning government had feared. Because it affects only a specific EPA rule, it doesn’t yet invalidate the entire “administrative state” that, in practice, allows the United States to exist as a modern country, and that gives citizens some protection from corporate power.

But the ruling puts everyone on notice. Anything any federal agency does that the new far-right majority on the court doesn’t like can apparently be declared a “major question,” so that no action can be taken by the agency unless Congress explicitly approves the specific rule in question—even when (as in the case of the Clean Air Act) Congress has already instructed the Agency to implement a law with clear intent.

Of course, as the majority knows, the US Congress—with its gerrymandered House and unrepresentative, filibuster-bound Senate—is too dysfunctional to do almost anything. So this decision threatens us all with the prospect of a nation ruled by the unchecked profit motives of large corporations and the ultra-wealthy, those in the fossil fuel industry first among them.

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How bad, specifically, is the ruling for the climate? It’s not good. But it certainly doesn’t end the energy transition, either. It still allows the EPA some leverage to regulate emissions. States and cities can continue to act on their own, and the private sector can keep pushing forward as renewables continue to drop in price. But the decision takes away what was arguably—given the near-certainty of congressional inaction—the broad regulatory authority over power plant carbon emissions that is the federal government’s most important tool for reducing the rate at which we’re putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

This decision has made me feel a toxic stew of negative emotions; high among them is shame. Until relatively recently, the United States was the highest carbon-emitting nation, and its cumulative emissions to date—the metric that matters most about changing the climate—still beat any other country’s by a long shot. US emissions per capita remain substantially higher than those of any other country of comparable size. And for most of the history of international climate negotiations, the United States has thrown wrenches in the gears, when we should have been leading efforts to limit climate change. Those Americans who understand the gravity of the climate problem have long been unable to defend the actions of their national government (the Paris Agreement under Obama being the main exception). This decision locks that dismal situation in, maybe for a long time to come, while time is rapidly running out to take action that would avert dangerous levels of global warming.

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The larger situation is even grimmer, when one also considers the other Supreme Court rulings rendered in the last couple weeks. These include the distressing rulings on gun laws and indigenous rights. But most of all, with the overturning of Roe v Wade, the court rolled back a human right that Americans—not just women, all of us—had come to take for granted over the last 50 years. And with the announcement that the court will hear Moore v. Harper, a test of the “independent state legislature” theory, the majority now threatens to give gerrymandered state legislatures complete control over elections, threatening US democracy to the core.

Are those other decisions scarier or less scary than West Virginia v EPA? I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. They’re all connected. A future United States in which the Republican Party holds complete power, unfettered by free and fair elections, is not one in which human rights or the climate will do well. But such a future seems much likelier than most of us could have imagined, at least before 2016.

This dystopian vision is not a given, yet. But as someone who studies natural disasters, one thing I know is that human beings, individually and collectively, almost inevitably under- rather than overestimate the risks of disasters that they’ve never experienced. This tendency makes humans less able to act in a timely manner to prevent the worst outcomes. If Americans are going to do whatever they can to prevent the worst from happening on climate—and on all the other fronts where we’ve historically been able to take some semblance of functioning democratic governance for granted—they need to understand the gravity of the situation. The potential, eventual harm the United States faces is greater, even, than what these recent Supreme Court decisions, awful as they are, will cause.

Supreme Court rules against EPA’s power to fight climate change

By Oliver Milman | June 30, 2022
BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS
Image courtesy of David Mark/Pixabay

Editor’s note: This story was originally published by The Guardian. It appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The US Supreme Court has sided with Republican-led states to in effect hobble the federal government’s ability to tackle the climate crisis, in a ruling that will have profound implications for the government’s overall regulatory power.

In a 6-3 decision that will seriously hinder America’s ability to stave off disastrous global heating, the Supreme Court—which became dominated by rightwing justices under the Trump administration—has opted to support a case brought by West Virginia that demands the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) be limited in how it regulates planet-heating gases from the energy sector.

The case, which was backed by a host of other Republican-led states including Texas and Kentucky, was highly unusual in that it was based upon the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era strategy to cut emissions from coal-fired power plants that never came into effect. The Biden administration sought to have the case dismissed as baseless given the plan was dropped and has not been resurrected.

Not only was this case about a regulation that does not exist, that never took effect, and which would have imposed obligations on the energy sector that it would have met regardless. It also involves two legal doctrines that are not mentioned in the constitution, and that most scholars agree have no basis in any federal statute.

However, the Supreme Court has sided with West Virginia, a major coal-mining state, which argued that “unelected bureaucrats” at the EPA should not be allowed to reshape its economy by limiting pollution—even though emissions from coal are helping cause worsening flooding, heatwaves and droughts around the world, as well as killing millions of people through toxic air.

“Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day’,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the opinion. “But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme in Section 111(d). A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body.”

Roberts was joined by the conservative justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The three liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Stephen Breyer—dissented. It is the most important climate change case to come before the supreme court in more than a decade.

But the ruling could also have sweeping consequences for the federal government’s ability to set standards and regulate in other areas, such as clean air and water, consumer protections, banking, workplace safety and public health. It may prove a landmark moment in conservative ambitions to dismantle the “regulatory state,” stripping away protections from Americans across a wide range of areas.

It could fundamentally change what the federal government is and what it does. And, as justice Elena Kagan pointed out in her dissent, it could leave technical decisions to a political body that may not understand them. “First, members of Congress often don’t know enough—and know they don’t know enough—to regulate sensibly on an issue. Of course, members can and do provide overall direction. But then they rely, as all of us rely in our daily lives, on people with greater expertise and experience. Those people are found in agencies,” she wrote.

Several conservatives on the court have criticized what they see as the unchecked power of federal agencies, concerns evident in orders throwing out two Biden policies aimed at reducing the spread of Covid-19.

Last summer, the six-to-three conservative majority ended a pandemic-related pause on evictions over unpaid rent. In January, the same six justices blocked a requirement that workers at large employers be vaccinated or test regularly for the coronavirus and wear a mask on the job.

The Biden administration was supported in the EPA court case by New York and more than a dozen other Democratic-led states, along with prominent businesses such as Apple, Amazon, and Google that have called for a swift transition to renewable energy.

The administration has vowed to cut US emissions in half by the end of this decade but has floundered in its attempts to legislate this outcome, with a sweeping climate bill sunk by the opposition of Republican senators and Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia.

The federal government also had the power of administrative regulations in order to force reductions in emissions but the supreme court ruling will now imperil this ability.