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Limiting EPA’s Power To Regulate Climate-Changing Gases

Supreme Court To Consider Limiting EPA’s Power To Regulate Climate-Changing Gases

The ruling could challenge the Biden administration’s plan to curb carbon emissions right after a key White House proposal died in Congress.

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear a set of cases challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases, potentially limiting the Biden administration’s options to curb planet-heating pollution.

The lawsuits, filed by Republican-controlled states and a West Virginia oil company, aim to curb the federal government’s power to mandate a transition away from fossil-fueled power plants.

If the high court’s 6-3 conservative majority finds in favor of the plaintiffs, the ruling wouldn’t eliminate the federal government’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act, a legal determination known as the endangerment finding. It would, however, restrict the legal routes through the Clean Air Act for enacting such rules. That could make it harder for the United States to hit its goal to cut emissions in half by the end of this decade.

In an updated grant of certiorari, the Supreme Court said it plans to ask questions about a legal issue known as “non-delegation doctrine,” which Cornell Law School describes as the “principle in administrative law that Congress cannot delegate its legislative powers to other entities.”

A ruling that explicitly requires Congress to pass new laws allowing EPA to regulate carbon emissions could prove an even bigger setback.

The White House abandoned its main legislative proposal to pay utilities to produce more zero-carbon electricity, and fine those that fail to increase their clean output each year, after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said he’d torpedo the administration’s agenda if Democrats included the measure in a sweeping spending bill currently under consideration. Democrats are also expected to lose control of Congress in next year’s election.

The Battle To Save Our Dying Soil

This camp in southern Spain is finding ways to restore degraded land

LA JUNQUERA, Spain ― In this sparsely populated region of rural Murcia in southern Spain, fields of thirsty almond trees eek sustenance out of the dusty soil and pale rocks tumble down slopes onto the sides of the road. Successive years of low rainfall have led to serious issues with water security, and some locals say increasingly mechanized farming has been detrimental to the land. This is agricultural country, but it’s clear that these are not fertile plains.

Scan the horizon quickly and you might not notice it the first time. But near a dip in the valley, something unusual is happening. Colorful yurts, compost toilets and an outdoor kitchen dot the landscape. It’s only a 12-acre plot, but it stands in stark contrast to its arid surroundings. Several species of green plants and colorful wildflowers cover the ground, and vegetable patches grow mustard leaf, spinach and broccoli. In the ponds, tadpoles swim in the shallows, and a trotter print in the mud nearby indicates a wild boar has recently stopped by for a drink. Young apple trees are blossoming, and people are digging trenches and planting potatoes.

This is Camp Altiplano, where volunteers are using simple practices such as creating ponds and loosening hard earth to return the soil to health.

“When the first tractors arrived [in the 1950s and 60s], that was a big moment for the degradation here,” says Alfonso Chico de Guzman, who owns the plot of land where Camp Altiplano is located. With machinery, most farms increased their amount of productive land by cutting down trees and shrubs, which are vital for healthy soil, the farmer says.

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In The Rush Toward A Cashless Society, The Poorest Are At Risk Of Further Exclusion

“Unless you’re poor, it’s hard to understand what it’s like to be poor.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a grand ambition to make his country into a cashless society. In 2014, he launched a scheme to provide bank accounts to the nearly 40 percent of the population with little or no access to financial services. In November 2016, he withdrew 500 and 1,000 rupee notes ($7.80 and $15.60), the country’s two most common banknotes, from circulation.

The aim was to clamp down on black-market money and get more people into the formal economy, but it had a negative effect on the poor, with micro and small-scale service businesses cutting 35 percent of staff in the first few months, and some families left unable to afford fruit and vegetables.

Cash is on the decline worldwide; non-cash transactions grew 11.2 percent globally in 2015. But for some, the Modi experiment is a sign that cashless societies will hurt the poor, and India is not alone in having poor, unbanked populations. An estimated 7 percent of American households don’t have access to bank accounts, according to the most recent survey from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. And a government study at the end of last year found that the U.S. homeless population had risen for the first time since 2010. Given rising inequality, what happens to those on the margins of the economy when cash is no longer king?

Proponents of a shift away from cash often point to Kenya or Sweden as proof that such a transition can happen without further disadvantaging the poor. In Sweden, which is on track to be the world’s first cashless society, a magazine called Situation Stockholm has equipped its homeless sellers with credit card readers. And M-Pesa, a mobile money service first rolled out in Kenya, has 30 million subscribers and has been credited with raising 2 percent of Kenyan households out of extreme poverty.

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How Russia-gate Rationalizes Censorship

How Russia-gate Rationalizes Censorship

Special Report: The Russia-gate hysteria has spread beyond simply a strategy for neutralizing Donald Trump or even removing him from office into an excuse for stifling U.S. dissent that challenges the New Cold War, reports Joe Lauria.


At the end of October, I wrote an article for Consortiumnews about the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign paying for unvetted opposition research that became the basis for much of the disputed story about Russia allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election on the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaking with supporters at a campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

The piece showed that the Democrats’ two paid-for sources that have engendered belief in Russia-gate are at best shaky. First was former British spy Christopher Steele’s largely unverified dossier of second- and third-hand opposition research portraying Donald Trump as something of a Russian Manchurian candidate.

And the second was CrowdStrike, an anti-Putin private company, examining the DNC’s computer server to dubiously claim discovery of a Russian “hack.” In a similar examination of an alleged hack of a Ukrainian artillery app, CrowdStrike also blamed Russia but used faulty data for its report that it was later forced to rewrite. CrowdStrike was hired after the DNC refused to allow the FBI to look at the server.

My piece also described the dangerous consequences of partisan Democratic faith in Russia-gate: a sharp increase in geopolitical tensions between nuclear-armed Russia and the U.S., and a New McCarthyism that is spreading fear — especially in academia, journalism and civil rights organizations — about questioning the enforced orthodoxy of Russia’s alleged guilt.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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