Tag: US News

One Woman Is Holding Politicians Accountable for Nasty Speech. It’s Changing Politics.

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‘The Answer to Our Problems is Dignity’
The ballroom of the Ahern Hotel in Las Vegas was a riot of red, white and blue when Pyfer arrived for the National Federation of Republican Women’s “Stars & Stripes” conference on Veteran’s Day weekend. Some 150 women from 17 western states were there, wearing bright-colored blazers and buttons. Pyfer had been invited at the last minute by one of the organizers, a woman named Kari Malkovich who had seen Pyfer talk about the Dignity Index in Utah and wanted her to do the same thing for this crowd.
Pyfer and her husband took their seats to watch the speakers who would precede her, including Utah Rep. Owens and Utah State Treasurer Marlo Oaks. Almost immediately, Pyfer realized she was in trouble.
One after the other, Owens, Oaks and other speakers stood up before the crowd and fired off volley after volley of blame, outrage and fear, whipping the crowd into something of a frenzy, according to multiple people who were present. Owens had just won re-election to Congress, although he’d declined to participate in two out of three debates. His words had been scored five times by the Dignity Index over the course of the election season, and all but one of those scores were low in dignity. This was, after all, a man who had written a bestselling book titled “Liberalism or How to Turn Good Men into Whiners, Weenies and Wimps.”
Oaks, meanwhile, had received a lot of attention as Utah’s State Treasurer for challenging the Environmental, Social and Governance policies that have caught on with many large corporations and investment firms. He’d recently moved $100 million of Utah money from the investment firm BlackRock to different asset managers, accusing BlackRock of “using other people’s capital to drive a far-left agenda.” At the Vegas event, he stressed the importance of free speech and warned of cancel culture and censorship, showing a slide deck that referenced Hitler, Marxism and fascism. During a Q&A session afterward, a woman in the audience called Democrats “barbarians.” Watching this, Pyfer felt her heart pounding in her chest. She wondered if she could find an excuse to bow out. She texted Shriver and Rosshirt: “I don’t think this is going to end well.”
“I had to have a few congressmen there, and they were the cheerleaders. And everyone was back in that red-meat mentality.”
Kari Malkovich
“It was not quite a ‘1’ on the Dignity Index but a number ‘2’ for sure,” said Malkovich, the woman who’d invited Pyfer. Malkovich was an elected city council member from Woodland Hills, UT, and she’d arranged for a mix of speakers that weekend, including a panel of Holocaust survivors and a Paralympian. But by the time it was Pyfer’s turn to speak, the vibe was a little less than dignified, she had to admit. “I had to have a few congressmen there, and they were the cheerleaders. And everyone was back in that red-meat mentality,” she says. “There was some fear.”
Sitting in the ballroom, waiting to be introduced, “I was dying,” Pyfer says.
She turned to her husband. “I can’t give my presentation,” she said.
“You have to,” he told her, sounding confident but looking worried. Frantically, she started tweaking her slides on her laptop, finding ways to remind her audience of her GOP bona fides.

“She was nervous. She was pretty much shaking,” Malkovich remembers. “I knew I was putting her in a hard spot.” She grabbed Pyfer’s hand. “You got this,” she told her. “I really feel strongly that they need to hear this.”
At the podium, Pyfer ditched her prepared opening gambit. Instead, she said: “I love the energy in this room. I’m a lifelong Republican woman, and I’m here surrounded by Republican women.” Then she paused.
“I will tell you though, I’ve been asked to give a different perspective.” The room got quiet. “It’s a counterintuitive way to solve the problems in your communities, and it’s gonna surprise you.” This was a tactic she had learned as a teacher. “We call it a pre-instruction,” she told me later. “I just wanted to signal to them: ‘This is not what you want to hear.’”
Then she hit them with the gut punch: “I think the answer to our problems is dignity.”
Watching this, Malkovich felt the energy in the room shift. It was almost like someone had said something obscene. “There was whispering. I could see the restlessness in the crowd. We could all feel it.”
Then, slide by slide, Pyfer went through the definitions of 1 through 8 on the Dignity Scale, just as she had so many times before in friendlier rooms. “Level two accuses the other side not just of doing bad or being bad,” she said, her mouth dry, “but promoting evil.” It was hard not to feel like she was indicting the entire room. So she tried to fall on her own sword, confessing that she routinely caught herself engaged in this same thinking. “Every day, I realize that the first thing that comes to mind sometimes for me is, ‘Those people are ruining everything,’ I’m like a 2 or a 3.” She saw some eye rolls — but also a few nods. She waited for someone to boo.
At one point, she referenced a survey finding that one in four Americans believed it might be time to take up arms. Several women sitting up front cheered. “You better believe it! 2nd Amendment!” Still, Pyfer continued. “Yesterday was Veteran’s Day. My dad was in the military. And it frightens me, with what they went through for our country, that we would think violence is the way to solve our internal disagreements.”
When she finished, there was tepid applause. No one booed. But about a dozen people approached Malkovich to complain about Pyfer’s talk. “Most were just angry. ‘Why did you pick her?’ That kind of thing,” she says. “I said, ‘I thought it was a really great presentation.’”
Pyfer came up to her, shaking her head. “They hate me,” Malkovich remembers her saying. “I said, ‘They don’t even know you, Tami. They are upset at themselves, and they need to project it on someone else. Let it sit. It’s a spiritual and physical emotion, not just mental.’”
The day before, these same women had listened to Holocaust survivors talk about what happens when contempt becomes the law of the land, when annihilation feels like the only option. They had wept with these survivors, wondering how countries could succumb to such brutality. Then, hearing Pyfer connect contemporary hyper-partisan language to political violence, the cognitive dissonance was hard to process, Malkovich said. It would take time. “When you recognize that you’re just one or two steps removed from the people you were crying with the day before, that’s quite a moment.”
A few people came up to Pyfer afterward. One cried. One invited her to speak in her hometown. It was the most partisan crowd Pyfer had addressed, and it was a reminder of what the Dignity Index was up against. Trying to convince partisan Americans to reject contempt in 2022 was like trying to convince people in the 1600s that the Earth revolves around the sun. That’s how Galileo ended up in prison, after all.
“They were all playing their roles in a system that we’re all part of.”
Tami Pyfer
Still, Pyfer declined to criticize anyone at the event. “They were all playing their roles in a system that we’re all part of,” she told me. “And the Republican women were dutifully playing their roles. They want so badly to make a difference and do the right thing. How could you listen to these horrible things happening to your country and not be outraged?”
The ordeal prepared her for whatever came next, she said. “It was horrible but necessary.” The Unite team is analyzing the results of the Utah demonstration project and expects to make a plan in early 2023 for expanding the Index. They might create a funders’ alliance, channeling donations to politicians who score high on the Index. Or a project like the one in Utah — but in many more states. Eventually, the Unite team could collect enough human-coded passages to develop a way of automating the scoring with artificial intelligence — a difficult but not necessarily impossible goal. One way or another, their ambition, Shriver says, is to “put dignity on the ballot in 2024.”
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#Woman #Holding #Politicians #Accountable #Nasty #Speech #Changing #Politics
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 20, 2023
The WWII Strategy Biden Can Use to Bypass Republicans on Ukraine

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When Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivered a surprise address last month to a joint session of Congress — his first trip outside war-torn Ukraine since Russia’s invasion last winter — members of the House and Senate joined in a rare moment of bipartisan support for the beleaguered European nation and its leader. “Continuing support for Ukraine is the popular mainstream view that stretches across the ideological spectrum,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell offered. He was mostly right. But not entirely.
Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri skipped the speech. Others, including Representatives Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Andrew Clyde, Diana Harshbarger, Warren Davidson, Michael Cloud and Jim Jordan attended but sat on their hands, conspicuously refusing to stand and applaud. Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona said the quiet part out loud when he recently tweeted: “No more money to Ukraine!”
These members of Congress represent a growing number of Republican voters who have gravitated to the pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine position echoed across conservative media, from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson to alt-right impresario Steve Bannon. A survey by CBS/YouGov in November found just 55 percent of GOP voters support continued military aid for Ukraine, down from 80 percent last March. Only 50 percent support economic assistance, down from 74 percent.

More problematic still, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who recently warned that he would not provide Ukraine with a “blank check,” has a paper-thin majority in the House and plenty of rebels in his conference, as his own tortuous path to the speakership demonstrated. When the current year’s appropriation for Ukrainian military and economic assistance runs out, how will Congress pass the next package?
All of which puts Joe Biden in a bind. If one believes, as do the president and most members of Congress, that Ukraine is the West’s bulwark against Russian aggression, how to ensure that Zelenskyy and his government are equipped with the materiel they need to fight the war?
This isn’t a new dilemma. It’s similar to what Franklin D. Roosevelt faced in the late 1930s, when isolationists in Congress enjoyed sufficient numbers to block military assistance to Britain as it bravely stared down the threat of a German invasion. Then as now, the president was forced to resort to clever workarounds to ensure that the U.K. had the resources to defend itself. FDR’s creativity in the service of helping a western ally protect democracy offers an important lesson for Biden.

As the fascist governments in Germany and Italy armed themselves for what many observers believed was an inevitable conflict across Europe, and as civil war broke out in Spain between supporters of the elected government and the fascist forces of General Francisco Franco, the United States Congress passed a series of neutrality acts that prohibited the U.S. government and private citizens from providing “arms, ammunition, and implements of war” to foreign belligerents. FDR initially opposed the law but yielded to political reality. An overwhelming majority of the country opposed entanglement in foreign wars, and Roosevelt needed sustained congressional support to further his domestic agenda.
But Roosevelt saw the writing on the wall. He firmly believed that the best way to keep America out of war was to ensure that its allies in Europe could hold their own against Germany and Italy. He therefore deployed a number of clever maneuvers, some of less certain legality than others, to furnish Great Britain with arms.
The president’s first gambit was to convince Congress in 1937 to include a “cash-and-carry” provision in the reauthorization of the Neutrality Act. With the exception of arms, which were still strictly prohibited, foreign belligerents could purchase goods that could be used in war, provided they paid for their purchase in cash (no credit permitted) and transported them in their own ships. By this mechanism, Britain was able to purchase vital war materials. In 1939, FDR managed to cajole Congress into lifting the ban on arms, as long as the purchasing nation paid upfront and incurred the risk of moving the goods.
Next, in the spring of 1940, Roosevelt forced out two recalcitrant cabinet members who opposed his efforts to supply the British: Secretary of War Harry Woodring and Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison. Woodring, an ardent isolationist from Kansas, resisted the president’s entreaties to find some legal basis to transfer armaments to Britain. So did Edison, who persistently told FDR that the navy judge advocate considered his orders illegal. “Forget it and do what I told you to do,” Roosevelt replied tartly, just before he finally decided to replace both men. The administration subsequently declared a massive cache of military material to be “surplus” and ordered the Army and Navy to dispose of it. That June, 600 freight cars moved field guns, machine guns and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition onto British ships.

In the fall of 1940, in the height of his third campaign for the presidency, FDR announced a deal by which the United States would effectively trade a number of warships that Prime Minister Winston Churchill desperately needed in exchange for two British naval bases in Newfoundland and Bermuda, as well as 99-year leases on several other bases, that the U.S. most certainly did not need. Whether the deal violated the Neutrality Act was one question. The president was lucky in that he never had to defend it in court. More to the point, Roosevelt was able to sell the trade as a critical measure to bolster America’s defenses. A country that desperately wanted to stay out of the emerging conflict went along with this argument. Though he worried that he “might get impeached” for bypassing Congress, in the end, FDR initiated the destroyers-for-bases deal by executive action.
FDR’s final gambit was to ask Congress to enact “lend lease” legislation that would permit the U.S. to loan war equipment to Britain in the same way people today lease a car, with the option to purchase it outright at the end of the lease term. Senator Robert Taft, an isolationist from Ohio, noted that “lending war equipment is a good deal like lending chewing gum. You don’t want it back.” The America First Committee warned with less mirth that the proposal was sure to draw the United States into a war whose casualties would exceed those of World War I. The public was hopelessly divided — with itself. Polls showed that 88 percent of respondents opposed entering the war, but 60 percent wanted to help Britain win.
In December 1940, coming off his victory in the fall election, and after a much-needed sailing respite — the president was “tanned and exuberant and jaunty,” Labor Secretary Frances Perkins observed — Roosevelt made himself available for a press conference. He framed the issue in terms that everyday voters could understand.
“Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire,” he began, “and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now, what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want $15 — I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it. But suppose it gets smashed up — holes in it — during the fire; we don’t have to have too much formality about it, but I say to him, ‘I was glad to lend you that hose; I see I can’t use it any more, it’s all smashed up.’ He says, ‘How many feet of it were there?’ I tell him, ‘There were 150 feet of it.’ He says, ‘All right, I will replace it.’ Now, if I get a nice garden hose back, I am in pretty good shape.”
A month later, Roosevelt delivered his first Fireside Chat in several months. He told the American people that if Britain fell to Germany, they would be forced to live in a “new and terrible era in which the whole world, our Hemisphere included, would be run by threats of brute force.” The only way to keep America out of war was to ensure that Britain could stave off Germany and Italy on its own, on behalf of all free nations. To make that happen, “we must be the great arsenal of democracy.”
Congress passed the Lend Lease Act by comfortable margins, though 40 percent of the House and one-third of the Senate voted in opposition.

Roosevelt’s effort to arm Britain ran the gamut from outright executive fiat (bases for destroyers, surplus transfers) to skillful negotiation with Congress (cash and carry, lend-lease). But there was a common thread running through these maneuvers: The United States never appropriated direct military assistance to the United Kingdom. It traded stuff for stuff. Allowed the British military to buy war materiel from private manufacturers and transport it on British ships. Offloaded “surplus” goods.
Isolationists howled. Supporters of mobilization cheered. And those in the middle uneasily accepted a series of fanciful conceits: They could outwardly maintain that they opposed direct aid to Britain and privately breathe a sigh of relief that aid was on its way.

Biden faces a similar set of circumstances. To sustain America’s support of Ukraine, he will need to find creative ways to bypass the handful of GOP congressmen who currently enjoy functional control of the House. He already enjoys some leeway. Last year, he signed into law a latter-day version of the Lend Lease Act, patterned after the original law, that allows him to lease military equipment to Ukraine on a five-year basis. He might also look for ways to use NATO or other allies as a middleman in the transfer of arms.

Biden views Ukraine as the bulwark against a wider conflict that could draw America into war directly, much as FDR viewed Britain in 1940. To sustain support for Zelenskyy and his government, the president might have to take a page from Roosevelt’s playbook.

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#WWII #Strategy #Biden #Bypass #Republicans #Ukraine
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 20, 2023
What Colombia’s First Black VP Really Wants from the United States

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So, the forebears of my grandmother had to fight to wrest free from slavery; my grandmother had to fight against the development of the dam, which was going to impact their land; my mother had to fight so that the Ovejas River wasn’t re-routed toward the dam; and I had to fight to keep illegal large-scale mining out of the land, so they wouldn’t exploit our resources. Each generation of my community has been in a constant struggle — for survival, for freedom, for the land. I’m not here today as the vice president of Colombia because of something that started three years ago. It’s because of a lifelong fight. My community and my family have fought for all their lives to live in peace, to live within their rights, to live with dignity.
Rodríguez: Amid all those fights, you decided to go to law school and to become a lawyer, a profession guided by rules and norms. Now, you’re in a position working within the trappings of the state. What is your relationship to activism now that you’re working within the government and not organizing outside of its structure?
Márquez: I became a lawyer to wield the legal system’s tools. As a community, we didn’t speak the language of the institutions. They would tell us of a “right to petition” and we didn’t know how to access it. They would speak of “administrative review,” which in fact were eviction orders against our community, because the state had given the land away to multinational companies, choosing to protect corporations over communities. So I said, “I’m going to study the law to understand, to fight and to struggle.” And I have fought and struggled to defend my community to the point where my life and those who surround me have been at risk, because we have confronted power.
I grew frustrated that in spite of my advocacy and my efforts I couldn’t get answers for my community in terms of stopping femicides and preventing the persecution of our social leaders. I felt powerless to see how leaders who fought like me were being killed. I expected that someday, it would be my turn.
I thought about Martin Luther King’s dream. Even though I’ve read a lot of Malcolm X’s writings, I listened a lot to King’s “I have a dream” speech. [On Aug. 11, 2020,] there was a massacre in Cali, where five children went to a sugarcane plantation to grab some sugarcane — surely to have fun or because they were hungry, or just because that’s part of our culture. (We’re raised to be able to go grab fruit from a neighbor’s farm. It’s something that’s passed down through the generations, and it’s part of our culture as Black people.) But when those children went to practice the same customs that they were used to doing in their communities, they were murdered [by civilians]. I felt a lot of pain and a lot of powerlessness. I have two children, and I worried that they would meet the same fate.
Amid all that impotence I thought, too, about King’s speech, and I said, “I have a dream that one day our children won’t be murdered for picking sugarcane.” And that’s when I made the decision to run for president. I didn’t give it too much thought. I have to admit, I rejected politics because of everything that I had lived through, because my community has always had to defend itself from the state. Even though they say that we’re all one nation, Black people, Indigenous people and farmworkers have been the most excluded and marginalized. I didn’t want anything to do with the state or politics because the politics I knew didn’t make me feel proud of my people, of my country. It’s a politics based on corruption, based on violence, based on dispossession.
Taking a risk that I might get trapped in all of that, I decided to participate in the system and change it. I made the decision, then, to run for the presidency. After many political attacks and rampant racism, I ended up as Gustavo Petro’s running mate and we were both elected.
Politics isn’t easy. It’s hard. It’s not like I have changed much, but we’re planting a seed to grow a politics that’s different from what I have known, from what my parents knew, from what my grandparents knew.

Rodríguez: Now as a vice president, do you continue facing those racist attacks? Just two days ago, your security team foiled an assassination attempt. How are you processing that, and do you feel like that has to do with your race and gender?
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 20, 2023
La vicepresidenta de Colombia tiene un sueño

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Los países que han tenido esclavitud, que han tenido colonialismo son los países que tienen a la gente afrodescendiente e indígena viviendo con las necesidades básicas más insatisfechas, en situación de precariedad. Los países que fueron responsables del colonialismo y de la esclavitud son los países desarrollados, que hoy son potencias, y que paradójicamente son los países que más están emitiendo gases de efecto invernadero.
Las consecuencias del cambio climático están afectando desproporcionadamente a esas poblaciones que históricamente han vivido estas violencias — los afrodescendientes, las poblaciones indígenas, las mujeres. También las naciones de África y el Caribe son las que están sufriendo los mayores efectos y consecuencias del cambio climático. Por tanto, hablar de reparación histórica en términos de condonación de deuda externa para estos países yo creo que es una [condición] necesaria para que puedan liberar recursos y puedan invertir esos recursos en mejorar las condiciones de vida de estas poblaciones históricamente excluidas y oprimidas.
Estados Unidos debería liderar parte de esa política. Yo sé que han habido espacios de reconocimiento, de decir “Reconocemos que nuestra nación ha tenido responsabilidad con la esclavitud y con el racismo y ahora también con el cambio climático.” [Pero ahora] es necesario que ese reconocimiento se traduzca en acciones concretas. No es la única vía, la condonación de deuda, pero es una muy probable y muy posible. Si efectivamente hay un reconocimiento podemos partir de sentarnos como naciones a construir una ruta de reparación.
Rodríguez: Aquí en los Estados Unidos en el 2019 y 2020 hubo mucha conversación a nivel nacional sobre el tema de reparación para los estadounidenses descendientes de personas esclavizadas. Pero ese tema ya se ha desvanecido un poco de la conversación nacional, aunque algunas iniciativas locales sí han hecho avances. ¿Cuál es la estrategia que usted recomienda para mantener esa conversación con vida?
Márquez: Como hemos visto [con] las violencias aquí en Estados Unidos contra la población afrodescendiente, con el tema de George Floyd y otros afrodescendientes que han muerto a causa de la violencia policial o el racismo, yo creo que es un tema que debería estar vigente. A veces se coloca como tema de moda, pero después se apaga. Es difícil si no hay voluntad política de un gobierno para reconocer y avanzar la política en términos de acción.
Desde Colombia, nosotros estamos colocando en la agenda global estas discusiones que esperamos que con Estados Unidos y con otros países podamos liderar, que podamos llevar a cabo [una solución]. Porque las comunidades y la gente siguen esperando que le reparen por esos daños. Ahora, la reparación, como lo ha hecho ver la oposición, no significa que la gente se saque del bolsillo pa’ devolverle a los que han sufrido. Significa que el estado asuma unas políticas de cambio y de transformación que van a impactar de manera positiva a estas poblaciones que han vivido estas violencias históricas.
Rodríguez: Dentro del tema migratorio, hemos visto que más de 2,6 millones de venezolanos han emigrado al territorio colombiano por la crisis que se vive en ese país. El anterior gobierno impulsó una política de dar permisos de trabajo para los migrantes. ¿Es una política que piensan continuar?
Márquez: Nosotros hemos definido una política clara y es que Venezuela no es nuestro enemigo, Venezuela es nuestro hermano. Una élite que nos gobernó hizo ver Venezuela como nuestro enemigo, pero para nosotros no lo es. Al vecino se le tiende la mano, al vecino no se le pone el pie en la cabeza pa’ ayudarlo a hundir.

Efectivamente, Venezuela ha tenido problemas económicos como los tiene Colombia ahora, como los ha tenido Colombia en otros momentos. Hay momentos en los que mucha gente de Colombia migró a Venezuela, cuando Venezuela estaba en su auge. Ahora nosotros no podemos hacer lo contrario con los venezolanos que están saliendo por las situaciones políticas y económicas que ha tenido este país y ponerle el pie en la nuca como lo hizo el gobierno anterior. Esa no es nuestra política.
Por tanto, se han ido restableciendo las relaciones. Ahora Venezuela está ofreciendo su territorio para resolver un conflicto armado que hemos tenido y que ha costado mucho sufrimiento para muchas comunidades. [El gobierno] ha puesto su territorio para la mesa de diálogo con el [Ejército de Liberación Nacional], cosa que saludamos y que nos parece muy importante y que agradecemos, que una nación como esta que ha recibido los últimos años tantas agresiones por parte de nuestros gobernantes ahora esté poniendo su territorio para resolver un conflicto.
Esto no es una cuestión de izquierda o de derecha, es una cuestión humana. Yo vengo de un territorio que ha sufrido y que sigue sufriendo el conflicto armado, tenemos comunidades que esta Navidad no pudieron salir, estaban confinados, no tenían comida. Resolver el conflicto armado en Colombia sin duda es una oportunidad enorme para devolverle la tranquilidad y la paz no solo a Colombia, sino a la región América Latina.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 20, 2023
Early action electrifies 2024 Senate battle

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Candidates scrambled to stake a claim in the battleground of Michigan after Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow announced she’d be stepping down. Republicans are jumping into races in Indiana, West Virginia and Ohio. And the expected retirement of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is creating such a prime opportunity that Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) didn’t even wait on the incumbent’s announcement before launching her campaign.
“Folks want to have ‘first mover’ advantage. And that’s what you’re seeing in each one of these places. People recognize that there’s a good chance to win, so they want to get out and stake a claim,” said Jason Thielman, the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
It’s a particularly important moment for Republicans, whose lackluster candidates last cycle cost the party Senate control as Democrats vastly outraised them and GOP nominees struggled to attract independent voters. Republicans are banking on a different outcome this time, hoping part of that formula will be National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Steve Daines (R-Mont.) and GOP leaders wading into primaries to help deliver better general election candidates, if needed.
Porter joins early Republican Senate candidates like Ohio state Sen. Matt Dolan, West Virginia Rep. Alex Mooney and Indiana Rep. Jim Banks. Former Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-Ind.) will visit Washington next week to meet with GOP senators, and Dolan is expected to hit the Hill in February for his own round of Senate meetings. And incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) announced his reelection campaign on Friday.
More campaign launches in both parties are expected to become official in the coming days and weeks.
“Recruitment is a top priority for us in the cycle. So we’re certainly thrilled to see a number of top-tier candidates already launching their campaigns,” Thielman said. He said the NRSC is “having conversations with many more and I think you’ll only see acceleration.”
The Democratic strategy is all about retrenching around the three most vulnerable Democrats: Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, Montana Sen. Jon Tester and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. Only Brown has committed to running again next fall. Beyond that, Democrats are defending five states where President Joe Biden won narrowly in 2020: Nevada, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania. That’s a lot of terrain for Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chair Gary Peters to defend.
“In states that are viewed as competitive there is a desire to keep as many of the incumbents running for re-election as possible,” said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.). “Sen. Schumer, I think, has already started that [work].”

Peters will help arbitrate an open and potentially crowded primary in his home state of Michigan, which is friendlier turf of late for Democrats but still likely to be a top-tier Senate race. Michigan Democratic Reps. Debbie Dingell and Elissa Slotkin are looking at the open seat, in addition to any number of Republicans — including Rep. John James (R-Mich.), who lost to both Peters and Stabenow in the past.
Elsewhere, Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) say they are running for reelection, and Kaine and Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) are preparing to do so. Those senators’ runs are critical for Democrats to keep control of the chamber. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is also ramping up her campaign for a third term.
Less clear is what will happen in Arizona. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), who essentially caucuses with Democrats, is undecided as Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) prepares to launch his own bid and Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.) passes on a Senate run.
Republicans could have a pile-up of their own if failed 2022 gubernatorial and Senate candidates Kari Lake and Blake Masters both run for the GOP nomination against more centrist opponents.
Democrats’ pickup opportunities appear scant at the moment, marking a highly defensive cycle for a party that just achieved a real, if slim, majority. Provided they win the presidency, Democrats can afford to lose only one seat next year and still maintain Senate control.
“Every reporter I talked to in October and November was convinced that Democrats were going to be in the minority right now. We’re not. In fact we picked up a seat,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) said. “Yes, the map in ‘24 is challenging. But if Republicans continue in the direction they’re already trending in, I feel good.”
Brown’s first declared opponent, Dolan, hails from the more centrist wing of the party, so he’s sure to have competition in Ohio. Secretary of State Frank LaRose, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) and businessman Bernie Moreno are among the conservatives weighing bids.
Yet Dolan is moving quickly to establish prime position after a third-place finish in last year’s primary, a bid he launched in September 2021.
“Matt is aggressively moving around the state this week locking down support,” said Dolan adviser Chris Maloney. “We have received requests for meetings in D.C. and will be entertaining them in due time.”
Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.) was the first to announce he was running for Manchin’s seat two months ago, but more may jump in soon. Gov. Jim Justice (R) said this week he is “seriously considering” the race, as is Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who lost to Manchin in 2018. Morrisey told POLITICO that he is “seriously evaluating the options [and] will decide on a pathway” by April.
In Montana, Republicans are bracing for a clash between GOP Reps. Matt Rosendale, a Freedom Caucus firebrand, and Ryan Zinke, a baggage-saddled former Cabinet secretary who passed on a race in 2018. Tester previously beat Rosendale in 2018, and former DSCC Chair Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) expressed confidence his Democratic colleague could do it again: “He is Mr. Montana.”
Daines has indicated he’s willing to intervene in primaries if needed to produce viable candidates, which could make for tough decisions down the stretch. In the meantime, Republicans are hoping Tester’s and Manchin’s indecision works to their advantage.
Still, Manchin already has $9.4 million on hand. Even that sum pales to the amount Porter may need to prevail in California, where Feinstein’s safe Democratic seat could nonetheless soon spark the most expensive race in the country. Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) both could enter the primary soon.
And Banks’ early splash into the open seat in Indiana has accelerated a potential clash with Daniels over a safe, GOP-held seat opened up by GOP Sen. Mike Braun‘s run for governor. Banks is already rolling out endorsements while the conservative Club for Growth prepares to spend as much as $10 million against the former governor.
Like Dolan, Mooney and Porter, Banks is hoping the early jump helps him seal the deal.
“I’ll be the first in the race,” Banks said in an interview ahead of his Tuesday launch. “I’m sure others will run as well. I like my chances.”
Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.
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#Early #action #electrifies #Senate #battle
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

January 20, 2023
‘I get a lemonade for every 1,000 hits!’ The rise of the child podcast superstars

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From pre-pubescent hosts interviewing sporting megastars to mum-assisted anchors taking adults to task over the Ukraine war, the next generation of podcast superstars has arrived – and they’re primary school-aged. Who are the ones to watch? We speak to the big names in this thrilling new wave.
‘I’d like to build a forcefield or a time machine’
Jack Andrews, nine, Hertfordshire, UK
The podcast: Jack to the Future, an award-winning show about the future, covering topics from deep space communication to renewable energy. Winner of a BBC Sounds Rising Talent award.
Sometimes people are surprised when I tell them I’m a podcaster. To be honest, I’m surprised I had the confidence to start one as a seven-year-old. But during lockdown, I found out that our delivery guy had his own show on Hertfordshire local radio, and he started recording me telling jokes. Then I started doing a feature where I would try to cheer listeners up. By March 2021, I had decided to do my own podcast.
I named it after my favourite film, Back to the Future. I’ve seen all the films five times – and the West End show! I’m really interested in science and helping the planet, and whether we can reach net zero by 2030. We got in touch with the Institution of Engineering and Technology to ask for one to interview – and I got 13 saying they wanted to do it. So I didn’t say no to any of them and did a whole season on Stem [science, technology, engineering and maths]. Some people might think doing a whole series on Stem is a very advanced thing to do for my age, but I don’t.
When I found out I won a BBC Talent award, I started running around like crazy. I also presented an award at the Arias with Harriet Rose from Kiss FM and got to meet Rylan! At one point, I went to the Houses of Parliament for a future of radio show and I was one of the youngest there. I talked to loads of people about my podcast – and there were lots of cakes and sandwiches!

Everybody asks me what I want to be in the future. I’d like to be an engineer, or a biologist or a physicist or a chemist – the more people I interview, the more ideas I get. I’d like to do things that seem impossible now, like make a forcefield! Or a time machine!
‘Our minds are little, not our thoughts’
Siyona Vikram, 11, Bangalore, India
‘Maybe a kid could fix our oceans’ … Siyona Vikram. Photograph: Geetha K
The podcast: Little Mind Chats, a current affairs show for children, featuring themed seasons on topics such as education and health. Has its own spin-off environmental activist group, Little-WISE Club, featuring 400 children collecting plastic that’s converted into agricultural piping.
When I was seven, I discovered podcasts and realised that all the series for children were storytelling ones. There weren’t any covering things like current affairs, so I decided to tackle that. My slogan is: ‘Our minds are little, not our thoughts.’ Children may have small minds, but our ideas can be big. We can start revolutions – we just need to put our thoughts into action. One expert on our podcast said there’s a lot of plastic in the ocean. Well, maybe a kid could come up with a solution – if only they knew about the problem.
When I ask guests to appear, mostly they say yes. I think it’s exciting for them to be interviewed by a child. It’s not something they encounter every day. Some of them think it’s a fascinating experience; some come on just to see what my podcast is like and then they’re stunned to find it’s just like an adult one. Most of them enjoy the interview.
I cover topics like the Ukraine invasion, as I think it’s important to cover negative news. We need a mix of good and bad: like we need a balanced diet, we need a balanced knowhow, so we can take action in the future. If adults are going to start unnecessary wars, how can they tell us kids not to hit our peers without a reason? It doesn’t make sense. Wars deeply affect us. If adults are going to go round starting wars all over the world, they’re going to destroy the place. This is a good thing for kids to know about.
The podcast will run as long as I’m interested in it. I’m starting to lose interest a little bit as I’ve been doing it for a long time. It will run for maybe three more years, until I’m a teen, when there will be a lot more schoolwork. I’ll pause the podcast for a few years, then come back to it. I will keep podcasting.
‘Lady Hale was my first guest. I wore a brooch’
Alma-Constance Denis-Smith, 11, London, UK
‘I’m scared now’ … Alma-Constance Denis-Smith. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian
The podcast: Kids Law, a legal show that interviews prominent figures in the judicial system about how children are affected by the law. Guests have included judges, MPs and the director of the Crown Prosecution Service.
I started podcasting as a 10-year-old, when my parents told me I’d reached the criminal age of responsibility. I was shocked to realise I could be prosecuted – and wanted to inform other children. My mum is a lawyer, my dad a barrister. I’ve grown up in this world. Even so, when I found out what turning 10 means, I thought: ‘I’m scared now.’
For my first episode, I was very nervous, shaking, really trying not to get things wrong. Now I just take the microphone, try to articulate and it’s OK. The hardest part of being a child podcaster is understanding the things adults say. Sometimes it’s a lot to get into your head. Law’s a difficult topic. Luckily, I have a co-host, the lawyer Lucinda Acland, who works with my mum. I invited her as she has experience, is very good with children and has a great voice.
When people find out my podcast is about the law, they’re really surprised. They just don’t think children can understand that. ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘but it’s about basic law, right?’ I have to explain in detail, otherwise they just can’t get their head around it.
I actually got to meet Lady Hale [former president of the UK supreme court]. I wore my ladybird brooch which has all these sparkly bits on and she noticed. I was very proud – she had a brooch on, too! She was actually my first guest. It was a great start to have this amazing person on.
Most of our interviews are done with Zoom, although I did meet Cressida Dick [ex-head of the Met] in person. I went to New Scotland Yard. I met two spaniels and a German shepherd. And Cressida Dick gave me a toy dog to keep!
When I look back at what I’ve done, I’m so proud of myself. We always have this little celebration at home whenever I reach another 1,000 downloads: I have some lemonade. Knowing that I’ve done something that will impact children is great. I’m going to carry on until at least series 10. I just think this show is really important.
‘After 300 episodes, I’m about to launch another’
Eva Karpman, 13, Los Angeles
‘The new podcast is about homesteading’ … Eva Karpman. Photograph: PR
The podcast: Dream Big, a show encouraging young people to pursue their passions. Episodes vary between interviews with celebrities and ‘solo shows’ that examine personal development.
Today, I find it easy to talk to people, to just start a conversation. I did a speech for Nike a couple of years ago in front of 5,000 people at the launch of a new campaign. I was actually the guest MC. I was nine at the time. But a couple of years before that, I was very shy. I didn’t talk to a lot of people. I would never have been able to do something like order at a restaurant. So when my parents realised I was struggling to find kid-friendly podcasts to listen to, they thought starting my own would get me out of my shell.
I soon realised that if I wanted a guest to accept my invite, I had to send them a video of myself. Unless they saw my face, I don’t think they really took me seriously. I needed them to see how important it was to me. They’d be reading an email saying: ‘Hi, I’m an eight-year-old who has a podcast.’ And a lot of them would think: ‘This is just a fan letter.’ One of the most difficult things about podcasting as a kid is that a lot of times, people don’t exactly take you seriously.
The most exciting guest I had on the show has to be the basketball star Kobe Bryant, back in 2018. He actually emailed us asking if he could be on the podcast – which was really exciting. I went to one of the Lakers games as a kid and had always looked up to him.
After 300 episodes, I’ve decided to take a step back, and let my seven-year-old sister start doing more, while I launch another podcast about homesteading. Listening back to those early episodes shows me how much I’ve grown. At the beginning, I was this squeaky voiced seven-year-old. To get to here is pretty awesome.
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#lemonade #hits #rise #child #podcast #superstars
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

January 20, 2023
The week in wildlife – in pictures

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A wild Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus) is spotted in a weak and exhausted semi-conscious state in the bushes of parthenium plants at Tehatta, West Bengal, India. The Asian palm civet, a nocturnal carnivore species also known as the common palm civet, toddy cat, and musang, is found in south and south-east Asia, it produces a buttery, honey-like secretion that is scraped off its perineal glands. This civet is threatened by poaching and illegal wildlife trade; buyers use it for the increased production of the world’s most expensive coffee, kopi luwak (civet coffee)
Photograph: Soumyabrata Roy/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock
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#week #wildlife #pictures
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

January 20, 2023
On the edge of extinction: why western chimpanzees matter – photo essay
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Pepe is starting to be fond of school. He often struggles to stay focused, since engaging in rough-and-tumble play with his new peer, Michelle, is much more fun. This baby chimp belongs to the most endangered subspecies of chimpanzees – western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus).
Pepe, a one-year-old baby chimp rescued from poaching by the Chimpanzee Conservation Centre, enjoying one of the school sessions in the forest.
At a very young age, he became an orphan when his mother was killed by poachers. For the group of resident orphans at the Chimpanzee Conservation Centre (CCC) in Guinea, “going to school” means daily excursions into the lush forests of the High Niger national park, where caregivers teach them the skills they will need to navigate the challenging environment and the complex social lives of their wild counterparts. It takes several years before the young chimpanzees are ready to be released, and successful recovery is far from granted.
Caregivers are essential to baby chimps’ education. They play a crucial role in fostering social bonds of chimpanzees. Here, Antoine is playing with one of the orphans before they start their daily walk through the forest.
Once common throughout equatorial Africa, chimpanzees have disappeared from most of their historic range. In 2003, a population of 170,000-300,000 wild individuals was estimated across a highly discontinuous distribution covering 1m sq miles (2.6m sq km). There are four recognised subspecies of chimpanzees, among which western chimpanzees stand out for their many unique behaviours. Some communities of this subspecies have been shown to manufacture wooden spears to hunt down other primates, crack nuts open by balancing them on a root and pounding them with a stone, soak themselves and play in water to cool down on hot days, travel and forage at night, and regularly gather in caves to socialise and sleep. Many of these behaviours could be culturally transmitted through social learning across generations.
Researchers are understandably excited by the prospect of understanding this rich cultural diversity, though sadly they are under considerable time pressure. After reports of unprecedented decline, in 2016 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) upgraded the western chimpanzee’s threat status from endangered (the status of every other subspecies) to critically endangered. According to the western chimpanzee conservation action plan 2020-30, 10,000-52,000 wild chimpanzees are thought to remain in west Africa, with Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone being the strongholds of the subspecies. Guinea harbours more than 60% of the remnant population. Importantly, more than 80% of chimpanzees in Guinea are found outside protected areas, so that remoteness and inaccessibility are the main factors ensuring the viability of wild populations.
“Guinea is rich in mineral resources such as bauxite (used in electronic devices), and this sector is expanding rapidly. Deforestation and habitat fragmentation caused by large-scale development projects (such as mines and their associated infrastructures), as well as the expansion of subsistence agriculture (due to increased demographic growth and soil infertility), are gradually taking chimpanzee territory,” says Tatyana Humle, the board chair of the CCC. Although traditional (and correct) beliefs of kinship have historically helped chimpanzee conservation in some areas of Guinea, poaching to sell the babies as pets and adults as bushmeat is becoming one of the most severe problems for their conservation. “This is an unfortunate byproduct of the rapid conversion of natural chimpanzee habitat for human activities. Chimpanzees living in forest-farm mosaics often rely on crops and fruit orchards to compensate for the loss of their natural food resources, which frequently results in retaliatory killings and orphaned chimpanzees as a byproduct,” she says. Nearly half of western chimpanzees live within 5km of a human settlement or a road, and remoteness will continue to dwindle if urgent measures to control anthropogenic pressure are not implemented.
More than a sanctuary
Started in 1997, the CCC aims to rehabilitate and release chimpanzees that are victims of illegal trade, or that have been injured, or orphaned as a result of retaliatory killings. After almost 26 years, the CCC has grown into a leading institution in the conservation of African apes, and its message has permeated the different layers of Guinean society.
A worker at the Chimpanzee Conservation Centre classifies and manages the food, mainly vegetables, fruits and cereals, to be given to the chimpanzees.
Workers from the Chimpanzee Conservation Centre rush to support national authorities when chimpanzee poaching victims are found. Right: People sell their products to be used as food for chimpanzees. This becomes a continual source of money for communities that contributes to raising environmental awareness about the importance of protecting chimpanzees.
Most importantly, by ensuring the lifelong care and welfare of confiscated individuals, the CCC plays a fundamental role in supporting national authorities in combating the illegal trade of live chimpanzees. They boost the local economy by feeding chimpanzees with local produce (vegetables, fruits and cereals), which also helps to raise environmental awareness about the importance of protecting this threatened subspecies.
Pepe is a baby chimpanzee whose diet is still milk-based. Michelle, his caregiver, feeds him before their time together in the forest. An intimate moment between Pepe and his caregiver Michelle after they were playing for almost an hour in the forest. The trust built between them will help Pepe grow up under a healthy context of sociality. Nonsocial animals are not only difficult to rehabilitate but also difficult to integrate into family groups.
Cédric Kambere, a Congolese veterinarian with a great deal of experience working with apes, is a key part of the project. His expertise becomes particularly critical when sick chimpanzees, often recently orphaned babies, arrive at the sanctuary. There are currently 62 chimpanzees living at the sanctuary, 18 of which are still infants or sub-adults that have a lot of learning to do if they are ever to be released back into the wild. The stories surrounding their arrival to the sanctuary are heartbreaking. Marco, a four-year-old unweaned baby, was rescued after his mother was shot for meat. The bullet hit the baby’s mouth, forcing vets to remove several teeth. Sewa, a six-year-old female, was rescued from a home where she was kept as a pet. The owners had dressed her in children’s clothes and shaved her head in imitation of a human haircut. Together with Tola, Bomba, Bingo, and another two babies who did not overcome injuries from poaching, one-year-old Pepe was among six baby chimps to arrive at the sanctuary in 2022.
Notably, the CCC is the only chimpanzee sanctuary currently releasing individuals back into their natural habitats. But the situation is looking increasingly dire for the release project. “Many recovered chimpanzees cannot be released simply because of the physical or psychological trauma they experienced prior to their arrival. Worse still, loss of habitat coupled with human expansion is hampering the availability of suitable release sites,” says Miguel García, a Spanish primatologist in charge of the CCC’s conservation activities, including the release project. Suitable release sites need to encompass the typical home range of a chimpanzee community (ranging between 15-60 sq km) and provide sufficient food and water all year while not being part of the existing territory of another group. Four areas have been recently assessed to date, and none met the requirements for a release. A promising assessment study is ongoing at the Ndama reserve in northern Guinea, close to the border with Senegal. The recently established Moyen Bafing national park offers yet another note of hope. This park harbours 15% of the chimpanzee population in the country, and was established to offset the impact of two bauxite mining companies in the Fouta Djallon region. But Tatyana Humle has concerns. “There is a growing commitment from the Guinean government to make offsets compulsory for the mining sector; however, offsets should be a last resort and a push for avoiding impacts on chimpanzees and other threatened species should be preferred.” Securing sustainable funding for this national park and for sanctuaries such as the CCC would make a world of difference for chimpanzee conservation in Guinea.
Why care about western chimpanzees? Throughout history, the erroneous intuition that humans are radically different (even superior) to other animals has been used to justify our exploitative attitude towards nature. By holding a mirror up to ourselves, apes force us to abandon this “human exceptionalism”. In 1758, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus not only dared to place humans alongside monkeys and apes within the “primate” order, but even assigned humans and apes the same genus, Homo. Later genomic analyses would vindicate Linnaeus’s intuition, confirming that indeed chimpanzees and bonobos are more similar to humans than to gorillas. Our striking parallels with chimps become evident when considering almost any aspect of our biology. For instance, our immune systems are so alike that many infectious diseases that affect humans are also able to infect chimps, gestation also lasts around nine months, and infants have a prolonged childhood (up to 10-12 years) where they need to remain close to their mother and learn a set of skills that will be crucial in their adult life. At the same time, almost weekly we are shown new evidence suggesting that tool use, empathy and other capacities widely believed to be exclusive to our species are also present in other primates. As Darwin suspected, the gap between humans and apes (once thought an impassable abyss) seems to be “one of degree, and not of kind”. By fixing humans firmly within the animal kingdom, our ape relatives provided us with the right framework to understand our place in nature, and replace our dismissive attitude towards other animals with one founded on respect and curiosity. Paradoxically for the self-appointed “thinking ape”, we’ve been so obsessed with finding what makes humans “uniquely human” that only recently we’ve started to appreciate what makes chimps “uniquely chimpanzee”.
We should act now if we intend to preserve the rich cultural heritage of our closest relatives. Failure to implement urgent measures in order to balance chimpanzee conservation and the cumulative impact of large-scale development will mean not only that rescued orphans at CCC will never know freedom again, but also the irreversible extinction of western chimpanzees.
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#edge #extinction #western #chimpanzees #matter #photo #essay
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
January 20, 2023
Grace Lau’s portraits in a Chinese studio – in pictures

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This weekend and for the following month, the artist Grace Lau will recreate a 19th-century Chinese portrait studio in a Southampton shopping centre, inviting passersby to sit for free photographic portraits alongside lunar new year celebrations. She first undertook the project in 2005 for her series 21st Century Types.
Portraits in a Chinese Studio is presented by John Hansard Gallery, part of the University of Southampton. It runs from 21 January to 12 February at The Marlands shopping centre, Southampton, in association with Chinese Arts Southampton, Chinese Association of Southampton, UK Shaolin Centre and the Confucius Institute.
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#Grace #Laus #portraits #Chinese #studio #pictures
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

January 20, 2023
‘Super-tipping points’ could trigger cascade of climate action

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Three “super-tipping points” for climate action could trigger a cascade of decarbonisation across the global economy, according to a report.
Relatively small policy interventions on electric cars, plant-based alternatives to meat and green fertilisers would lead to unstoppable growth in those sectors, the experts said.
But the boost this would give to battery and hydrogen production would mean crucial knock-on benefits for other sectors including energy storage and aviation.
Urgent emissions cuts are needed to avoid irreversible climate breakdown and the experts say the super-tipping points are the fastest way to drive global action, offering “plausible hope” that a rapid transition to a green economy can happen in time.
The tipping points occur when a zero-carbon solution becomes more competitive than the existing high-carbon option. More sales lead to cheaper products, creating feedback loops that drive exponential growth and a rapid takeover. The report, launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said the three super-tipping points would cut emissions in sectors covering 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Speedy action is vital to help avoid triggering disastrous tipping points in the climate system. Scientists said recently that global heating had driven the world to the brink of multiple tipping points with global impacts, including the collapse of Greenland’s ice cap and a key current in the north Atlantic.
“With time running out, there is a need for action to be targeted,” said Mark Meldrum, at the consultancy Systemiq, which produced the report with partners including the University of Exeter, UK. Each super-tipping point crossed raises the chance of crossing others, he said. “That could set off a cascade to steer us away from a climate catastrophe.”
The tipping point for electric vehicles is very close with sales soaring, the report says. Setting dates around the world for the end of sales of fossil-fuel powered vehicles, such as the 2030 date set for new vehicles by the UK and 2035 in China, drives further growth, the report adds.

This scale-up means the batteries used will become cheaper and these can be deployed as storage for wind and solar power, further accelerating the growth of renewables. More green energy means lower electricity bills, in turn making heat pumps even more cost-effective.
The second super-tipping point is setting mandates for green fertilisers, to replace current fertilisers, which are produced from fossil gas. Ammonia is a key ingredient and can be made from hydrogen produced by renewable energy, combined with nitrogen from the air.
Governments requiring a growing proportion of fertiliser to be green will drive a scale-up and cost reductions in the production of green hydrogen, the report says. That then supports long-distance aviation and shipping, and steel production, which will rely on hydrogen to end their carbon emissions. Mandates are being considered with India, for example, targeting 5% green fertiliser production by 2023–24 and 20% by 2027–28.
The third super-tipping point is helping alternative proteins to beat animal-based proteins on cost, while at least matching them on taste. Meat and dairy cause about 15% of global emissions. Public procurement of plant-based meat and dairy replacements by government departments, schools and hospitals could be a powerful lever, the report says.
Increasing uptake would cut the emissions from cattle and reduce the destruction of forests for pasture land. A 20% market share by 2035 would mean 400m-800m hectares of land would no longer be needed for livestock and their fodder, equivalent to 7-15% of the world’s farmland today, the report estimated. That land could then be used for the restoration of forests and wildlife, removing CO₂ from the air.
Tipping points already passed within countries include electric car sales in Norway and the plunge in coal-powered electricity in the US in the past decade.
“We need to find and trigger positive socioeconomic tipping points if we are to limit the risk from damaging climate tipping points,” said Prof Tim Lenton at the University of Exeter. “This non-linear way of thinking about the climate problem gives plausible grounds for hope: the more that gets invested in socioeconomic transformation, the faster it will unfold – getting the world to net zero greenhouse gas emissions sooner.”
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#Supertipping #points #trigger #cascade #climate #action
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

January 20, 2023