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Within Google, knowledge about Dragonfly has been restricted to just a few hundred members of the internet giant’s 88,000-strong workforce, said a source with knowledge of the project. The source spoke to The Intercept on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to contact the media. The source said that they had moral and ethical concerns about Google’s role in the censorship, which is being planned by a handful of top executives and managers at the company with no public scrutiny.

“I’m against large companies and governments collaborating in the oppression of their people, and feel like transparency around what’s being done is in the public interest,” the source said, adding that they feared “what is done in China will become a template for many other nations.”

From The Intercept article: Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal

Today’s post will explain why I think the U.S. tech giants are in the early stages of destroying themselves. It will focus on two of the biggest names in the space, Facebook and Google. Both face serious issues that are only now truly coming to a head and rooted in two primary factors, size and politics.

Facebook is further along in the process of being in serious trouble, so let’s start there. The social media company currently has 2.2 billion active users worldwide, which amounts to well over half of all human beings online at the moment (estimated at 3-4 billion). In other words, the company already has a tremendous share of global potential users. Since everybody already knows what Facebook is, you have to assume those who aren’t using it (like me), aren’t using it for a reason.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature”

August 4, 2018

Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not “Human Nature”

The skyline of Manhattan is seen at sunset in New York, May 23, 2018. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

The skyline of Manhattan at sunset in New York, May 23, 2018.

Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

THIS SUNDAY, THE entire New York Times Magazine will be composed of just one article on a single subject: the failure to confront the global climate crisis in the 1980s, a time when the science was settled and the politics seemed to align. Written by Nathaniel Rich, this work of history is filled with insider revelations about roads not taken that, on several occasions, made me swear out loud. And lest there be any doubt that the implications of these decisions will be etched in geologic time, Rich’s words are punctuated with full-page aerial photographs by George Steinmetz that wrenchingly document the rapid unraveling of planetary systems, from the rushing water where Greenland ice used to be to massive algae blooms in China’s third largest lake.The novella-length piece represents the kind of media commitment that the climate crisis has long deserved but almost never received. We have all heard the various excuses for why the small matter of despoiling our only home just doesn’t cut it as an urgent news story: “Climate change is too far off in the future”; “It’s inappropriate to talk about politics when people are losing their lives to hurricanes and fires”; “Journalists follow the news, they don’t make it — and politicians aren’t talking about climate change”; and of course: “Every time we try, it’s a ratings killer.”

None of the excuses can mask the dereliction of duty. It has always been possible for major media outlets to decide, all on their own, that planetary destabilization is a huge news story, very likely the most consequential of our time. They always had the capacity to harness the skills of their reporters and photographers to connect abstract science to lived extreme weather events.

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A New Broadband Network is Pitching Surveillance Enhancements to Cops Across the Country

July 31, 2018

A Chicago police officer speaks on his radio at the scene where three people were shot, one fatally, in the 2500 block of West Lithuanian Plaza Court on Friday, July 28, 2017, in the Marquette Park neighborhood of Chicago, Ill. An 18-year-old man was shot in the head and pronounced dead at Advocate Christ Medical Center. A 34-year-old man and a 33-year-old woman were wounded. (Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune/TNS via Getty Images)

Photo: Erin Hooley

A NEW BROADBAND NETWORK IS PITCHING SURVEILLANCE ENHANCEMENTS TO COPS ACROSS THE COUNTRY

THE LATEST TECHNOLOGIES promise cops the ability to whip out a smartphone, take a snapshot of a passerby, and instantly learn if that person is in an immigration or gang database.

A federal broadband program, designed after 9/11 to improve first responder communication during emergencies, will enhance this sort of capability and integrate it into an internet “super highway” built specifically for police and public safety. The program, called FirstNet, is already expanding the surveillance options available to law enforcement agencies across the country.

According to publicly available documents, as well as interviews with program participants, stakeholders, and government researchers, FirstNet will help agencies like U.S. Customs and Border Protection communicate with local police, deliver more information to officers’ hands, accelerate the nascent law enforcement app industry, and provide public safety agencies with new privileges and powers over AT&T’s commercial broadband network.

The program will also hasten these agencies’ migration from public radio frequencies to encrypted broadband networks, potentially eliminating one resource that local newsrooms and citizens have historically relied upon to monitor police and first responders.

FirstNet is a public-private partnership that creates a dedicated lane for public safety agencies within AT&T’s existing broadband network. As of January, all U.S. states had opted in to FirstNet, meaning that they agreed not to build their own competing broadband lanes for law enforcement and public safety. Then, in March, AT&T announced that FirstNet’s core — the infrastructure that isolates police traffic from the commercial network — had become operational at last.

“It’s like having a super highway that only public safety can use,” the company wrote in a press release.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ecuador Will Imminently Withdraw Asylum for Julian Assange and Hand Him Over to the UK. What Comes Next?

July 22, 2018

Ecuador Will Imminently Withdraw Asylum for Julian Assange and Hand Him Over to the UK. What Comes Next?

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange addresses the media holding a printed report of the judgement of the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on his case from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in central London on February 5, 2016.During a press conference on February 5 Julian Assange, speaking via video-link, called for Britain and Sweden to "implement" a UN panel finding saying that he should be able to walk free from Ecuador's embassy, where he has lived in self-imposed confinement since 2012. / AFP / NIKLAS HALLE'N (Photo credit should read NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP/Getty Images)

Photo: Niklas Halle’n/AFP/Getty Images

ECUADOR’S PRESIDENT Lenin Moreno traveled to London on Friday for the ostensible purpose of speaking at the 2018 Global Disabilities Summit (Moreno has been using a wheelchair since being shot in a 1998 robbery attempt). The concealed, actual purpose of the President’s trip is to meet with British officials to finalize an agreement under which Ecuador will withdraw its asylum protection of Julian Assange, in place since 2012, eject him from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and then hand over the WikiLeaks founder to British authorities.

Moreno’s itinerary also notably includes a trip to Madrid, where he will meet with Spanish officials still seething over Assange’s denunciation of human rights abuses perpetrated by Spain’s central government against protesters marching for Catalonia independence. Almost three months ago, Ecuador blocked Assange from accessing the internet, and Assange has not been able to communicate with the outside world ever since. The primary factor in Ecuador’s decision to silence him was Spanish anger over Assange’s tweets about Catalonia.

Presidential decree signed on July 17 by Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno, outlining his trip to London and Madrid

A source close to the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry and the President’s office, unauthorized to speak publicly, has confirmed to the Intercept that Moreno is close to finalizing, if he has not already finalized, an agreement to hand over Assange to the UK within the next several weeks. The withdrawal of asylum and physical ejection of Assange could come as early as this week. On Friday, RT reported that Ecuador was preparing to enter into such an agreement.

The consequences of such an agreement depend in part on the concessions Ecuador extracts in exchange for withdrawing Assange’s asylum.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Beginning of the End of the World

July 8, 2018

THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE WORLD

A ‘Reckless’ Fracking Company, Poisoned Springs, and a Family Forced to Buy Water at Walmart

DRIVING WEST ALONG the Pennsylvania Turnpike from Harrisburg to rural Washington County, sign after sign pitted energy companies against environmentalists. An evil-looking clown leered down at passing drivers above the words: “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” Then there was another: “Wind dies. Sun sets. You need reliable, affordable, clean coal electricity.” Yet another featured a picture of Yoko Ono and the message “Would you take energy advice from the woman who broke up The Beatles?”

The billboards were the handiwork of a corporate lobbyist named Rick Berman. His campaign depicted anti-fracking activists, who often called themselves fractivists, as a bunch of rich outsiders. In his world, hypocrites like Robert Redford, who flew private, and kooks like Yoko Ono didn’t understand the give-and-take long established in Appalachia between extractive industries and the communities that relied on them for their livelihoods.

If you followed the highway far enough, turned off the exit for Lone Pine/ Amity, then took a right past the truck stop, you’d wend your way into a steep, unnamed valley. Loren “Buzz” Kiskadden lived at the base of that valley, in a spot known locally as the Bottoms, or Dogpatch. On its 26 acres, the Kiskadden family had run a junkyard from the mid-60s until 2006. An ex-car-thief and recovering heroin addict, Buzz had been the neighborhood bad boy, “always driving around on something,” he told me later.

Buzz was clean now, but chain-smoking cigarettes. He and his brothers were known to drive their junkyard’s tow trucks around the town of Washington, the county seat, removing any breakdowns left on the roadside. Instead of repairing them, they stripped them for parts.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Democracy Dies in the Blinding Light of Day

July 4, 2018

DEMOCRACY DIES IN THE BLINDING LIGHT OF DAY

DESPITE BEING ONE of the United States’s founding statesmen and its second president after independence from Britain, John Adams was quite skeptical of democracy. “Democracy never lasts long,” Adams reflected in an 1814 letter. “It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.”

“There never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.”

The United States that existed when Adams wrote the letter was not very worthy of being described as a democracy in any case. Millions of African-Americans held in slavery were denied the most basic human rights, while women were denied any meaningful participation in civic life. Not until the civil rights movement and women’s suffrage in the 20th century could the United States start to be considered a full-fledged democracy, despite the country’s founding under the false flag of democracy in 1776. American democracy, in any meaningful sense of the term, is then less than a century old.

Recent events suggest that, even now, American democracy may be starting to enter a decrepit late-middle age. While many people assume that our current political turbulence is an aberration, long-term trends suggest that undemocratic illiberalism may one day become the norm in the United States and elsewhere. Democracy is eroding and may no longer be a plausible means of governance. Technological change, decaying institutions, and populist demagoguery may well make genuine democracy effectively impossible, validating Adams’s prediction that a democratic system could never really endure. 1_how_democracy_ends_courtesy_basic_books-1530208642

Book cover of “How Democracy Ends.”

A new book by Cambridge University professor David Runciman, provocatively titled “How Democracy Ends,” charts a number of trends in the United States and Europe that he believes foretell the approaching end of democracy as we know it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Google and Facebook Are Quietly Fighting California’s Privacy Rights Initiative, Emails Reveal

June 27, 2018

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the annual F8 summit at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California on May 1, 2018. - Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg announced the world's largest social network will soon include a new dating feature -- while vowing to make privacy protection its top priority in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. (Photo by JOSH EDELSON / AFP) (Photo credit should read JOSH EDELSON/AFP/Getty Images)

GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK ARE QUIETLY FIGHTING CALIFORNIA’S PRIVACY RIGHTS INITIATIVE, EMAILS REVEAL

LOBBYISTS FOR THE largest technology and telecommunications firms have only three days to prevent the California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, a ballot initiative that would usher in the strongest consumer privacy standards in the country, from going before state voters this November.

The initiative allows consumers to opt out of the sale and collection of their personal data, and vastly expands the definition of personal information to include geolocation, biometrics, and browsing history. The initiative also allows consumers to pursue legal action for violations of the law.

The idea that Californians might gain sweeping new privacy rights has spooked Silicon Valley, internet service providers, and other industries that increasingly rely on data collection, leading to a lobbying push to defeat the initiative before it gains traction. Their best hope may be to convince the sponsors of the initiative, including San Francisco real estate developer Alastair Mactaggart, to pull the proposal in exchange for compromise privacy legislation, AB 375, which would achieve some of the same goals of the initiative. Lawmakers behind the legislation, led by state Assembly Member Ed Chau, D-Monterey Park, and state Sen. Robert Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys, have promised to swiftly pass their bill this week if sponsors withdraw the CCPA.

Emails obtained by The Intercept reveal that tech giants are fighting behind the scenes to water down the privacy legislation, hoping to prevent an expensive and potentially losing ballot fight this year.

Andrea Deveau, a lobbyist for TechNet, a trade group for Google, Facebook, and other tech companies, has continually updated an ad-hoc business lobbying coalition formed to defeat the CCPA. In an update sent on Sunday evening, Deveau provided a “compilation of feedback re: the most problematic aspects of AB 375.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Wiretap Rooms

June 26, 2018

THE WIRETAP ROOMS

The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities

THE SECRETS ARE hidden behind fortified walls in cities across the United States, inside towering, windowless skyscrapers and fortress-like concrete structures that were built to withstand earthquakes and even nuclear attack. Thousands of people pass by the buildings each day and rarely give them a second glance, because their function is not publicly known. They are an integral part of one of the world’s largest telecommunications networks – and they are also linked to a controversial National Security Agency surveillance program.

Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. In each of these cities, The Intercept has identified an AT&T facility containing networking equipment that transports large quantities of internet traffic across the United States and the world. A body of evidence – including classified NSA documents, public records, and interviews with several former AT&T employees – indicates that the buildings are central to an NSA spying initiative that has for years monitored billions of emails, phone calls, and online chats passing across U.S. territory.

The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.” It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it “has access to information that transits the nation,” but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

More Than Just Russia–There’s a Strong Case for the Trump Team Colluding with Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the UAE

June 11, 2018

DONALD TRUMP HAS fully embraced both official, legalized corruption as well as good, old garden-variety individual corruption. Did Trump directly conspire with Vladimir Putin and Russia to influence the 2016 election? That is certainly possible. Will we see concrete evidence of that, especially evidence that would stand up in a court? That also is possible. It is also plausible that Robert Mueller issues a public report that would be damaging, if not damning, to Trump, but for whatever reason decides not to or, because of Trump’s influence over the Justice Department, cannot pursue criminal action. We shall see. But this much is clear: It is a major mistake to place all focus on Russia. We know that Trump’s team has colluded with Israel. We know they colluded with Saudi Arabia. We know they colluded with the United Arab Emirates.

There has been much discussion of the secret meetings during the 2016 campaign held at Trump Tower with various members of Trump’s inner circle and family members. Recently we learned of yet another — this one reportedly took place on August 3, 2016, and was arranged by Blackwater founder Erik Prince, the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. He has served as a shadow adviser, not only to the Trump campaign, but also to the Trump administration. He was the guy that pitched Trump on this idea of a privatized force for Afghanistan and was also involved with pitching the idea of a private intelligence force that could circumvent the deep state. Prince and his mother were also major financiers of the Trump election campaign.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Congressional Democrats Demand Answers About Amazon’s Facial Recognition Technology

May 25, 2018

DIGITIZED FACIAL RECOGNITION USING GRID WITH SPECIFIC FEMALE POINTS. (M)

CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS DEMAND ANSWERS ABOUT AMAZON’S FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY

REPS. KEITH ELLISON, D-Minn., and Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Friday morning, demanding answers about how the tech giant’s facial recognition technology is being used by law enforcement agencies around the country.

The letter, provided to The Intercept ahead of its public release, lists a total of 12 requests for information regarding Amazon’s facial recognition service, branded as “Rekognition,” including the names of any law enforcement or government agencies that use the system and data on how the service could enable, or itself engage in, discrimination, including racial and gender bias.

“The disproportionally high arrest rates for members of the black community make the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement problematic,” the letter reads, “because it could serve to reinforce this trend.”

According to an Ellison aide, the letter is an attempt to enact at least a baseline level of congressional oversight for the tech giant — an attempt that comes less than two months after congressional hearings that tried to do the same for Facebook.

Ellison Cleaver Letter to Jeff Bezos 3 pages

Amazon came under fire earlier this week after the American Civil Liberties Union and its affiliates, as well as 35 other civil liberties organizations, released a public letter expressing concerns about how Amazon markets its technology to law enforcement agencies. The ACLU letter coincided with the release of a trove of documents, which the organization obtained through public records requests and after a six-month investigation, that shed light on the company’s relationship and correspondence with law enforcement agencies in Oregon and Florida.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Edward Snowden on Privacy in the Age of Trump and Facebook

May 25, 2018

NAHAL OZ, ISRAEL - APRIL 13: (ISRAEL OUT) Israeli soldiers take positions as Palestinian gathered for a protest on the Israel-Gaza border on April 13, 2018 in Netivot, Israel. Thousands of Gaza residents assembled on Friday at the border with Israel to stage another protest as part of their "March of Return" for a third consecutive week. (Photo by Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

EDWARD SNOWDEN ON PRIVACY IN THE AGE OF TRUMP AND FACEBOOK

EXACTLY FIVE YEARS ago this week, Edward Snowden absconded to Hong Kong with a trove of documents detailing the extent of the U.S. government’s global and domestic surveillance programs. He soon found himself in exile in Russia and dubbed “the most wanted man in the world.” The Snowden leaks started a new conversation about digital privacy and online security, and even led to changes in the law. But more recently we’ve discovered it isn’t just Big Government that poses a massive threat to our privacy, but also Big Tech. Facebook, for example, exposed data on up to 87 million Facebook users to a researcher who worked at Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy employed by the Trump campaign. The issues of surveillance and privacy and mass data collection, not just by the government but by Big Tech firms like Facebook, are still as live and and as contentious as ever. On this week’s episode of Deconstructed, Edward Snowden joins Mehdi Hasan from Moscow to discuss surveillance, tools that can help protect people’s privacy, and the likelihood of a Trump-Putin deal to extradite him.

Transcript coming soon.

The Untold Story of Japan’s Secret Spy Agency

May 20, 2018

THE UNTOLD STORY OF JAPAN’S SECRET SPY AGENCY

EVERY WEEK IN Tokyo’s Ichigaya district, about two miles east of the bright neon lights and swarming crowds in the heart of Shibuya, a driver quietly parks a black sedan-style car outside a gray office building. Before setting off on a short 10-minute drive south, he picks up a passenger who is carrying an important package: top-secret intelligence reports, destined for the desks of the prime minister’s closest advisors.

Known only as “C1,” the office building is located inside a high-security compound that houses Japan’s Ministry of Defense. But it is not an ordinary military facility – it is a secret spy agency headquarters for the Directorate for Signals Intelligence, Japan’s version of the National Security Agency.

The directorate has a history that dates back to the 1950s; its role is to eavesdrop on communications. But its operations remain so highly classified that the Japanese government has disclosed little about its work – even the location of its headquarters. Most Japanese officials, except for a select few of the prime minister’s inner circle, are kept in the dark about the directorate’s activities, which are regulated by a limited legal framework and not subject to any independent oversight.

Now, a new investigation by the Japanese broadcaster NHK — produced in collaboration with The Intercept — reveals for the first time details about the inner workings of Japan’s opaque spy community. Based on classified documents and interviews with current and former officials familiar with the agency’s intelligence work, the investigation shines light on a previously undisclosed internet surveillance program and a spy hub in the south of Japan that is used to monitor phone calls and emails passing across communications satellites.

Night view of the C1 building, inside Japan’s Ministry of Defense compound in Ichigaya.
Photo: NHK

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Business is Booming for the U.K.’s Spy Tech Industry

May 11, 2018

Aerial photograph of the GCHQ, Government Communications Headquarters.

Photo: David Goddard/Getty Images

BUSINESS IS BOOMING FOR THE U.K.’S SPY TECH INDUSTRY

DRIVING INTO CHELTENHAM from the west, it is hard to miss the offices of Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s surveillance agency. The large, doughnut-shaped building sits behind high-perimeter fencing with barbed wire and many levels of security. The facility – used to eavesdrop on global emails and phone calls – is located on the edge of the sleepy Gloucestershire town, which feels like an incongruous location for one of the world’s most aggressive spy agencies.

Cheltenham has a population of just 117,000 people, and GCHQ’s presence has turned the area into one of Europe’s central hubs for companies working in the fields of cybersecurity and surveillance. GCHQ says it employs almost 6,000 people in Cheltenham and at some smaller bases around the U.K., although the agency has in recent years secretly expanded its workforce, reportedly employing thousands more staff.

People in the area are now talking of a cyber “corridor” that stretches for 50 miles from Malvern, just north of Cheltenham, all the way to Bristol, where the Ministry of Defence has its equipment and support headquarters at Abbey Wood. Many quaint English towns, known for their farming and country pubs, have seen an influx of companies dealing in cybersecurity and electronic spying. Even office space on former farms is being used for this burgeoning industry.

Chris Dunning-Walton, the founder of a nonprofit called Cyber Cheltenham, or Cynam, organizes quarterly events in the town attended by politicians and entrepreneurs. “Historically, there has been a need for the companies that are working here to be very off the radar with their relationships with GCHQ and to some extent, that does exist,” says Dunning-Walton. But since Edward Snowden leaked information in 2013 about GCHQ’s sweeping surveillance activities, the agency has been forced to come out of the shadows and embrace greater transparency.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cure Worse Than Disease: Bill to Restrict Trump’s War Powers Would Actually “Endorse a Worldwide War on Terror”

April 21, 2018

RAQQA, SYRIA - AUGUST 18: Smoke rises from a building believed to be housing ISIS, after being hit by a mortar round fired from a United States military base on August 18, 2017 in western Raqqa.The MFS is a group of Assyrian Christians who fight alongside the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Raqqa. The SDF was created in 2015 with the specific purpose of fighting ISIL and was armed by former US President Obama. The second Battle of Raqqa was launched in June 2017 and is the fifth and final phase of the Raqqa Campaign by the SDF. (Photo by Rick Findler/Getty Images)

Photo: Rick Findler/Getty Images

CURE WORSE THAN DISEASE: BILL TO RESTRICT TRUMP’S WAR POWERS WOULD ACTUALLY “ENDORSE A WORLDWIDE WAR ON TERROR”

ON MONDAY, THREE Republican and three Democratic senators, led by Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Tim Kaine, D-Va., released a draft of a new “authorization for use of military force,” or AUMF.

This AUMF would repeal the AUMF passed on September 14, 2001, which gave the president the power “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” It would also nullify the October, 2002, AUMF that authorized the president to use the military to “defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq.”

Not surprisingly, Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump have each taken this extremely broad language and run with it. A 2016 Congressional Research Service report found 37 examples in 14 different countries of Bush and Obama using the 2001 AUMF to justify the use of military force. When a U.S. jet shot down a Syrian government bomber in June 2017, the Trump administration explained that it could legally do so because the jet was there as part of the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State — which is somehow an organization that committed the 9/11 attacks, even though it didn’t exist before 9/11.

So, something needs to be done about this. “For too long, Congress has given presidents a blank check,” Kaine recently said. “Our proposal finally repeals those authorizations and makes Congress do its job by weighing in on where, when, and with who we are at war.”

That sounds good. But the actual language of the Corker-Kaine bill appears to do almost the opposite of what its authors claim.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Denial by a Different Name

April 17, 2018

NEW YORK, NY - JUNE 20: Environmental activists protest outside of the Harvard Club where Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt was scheduled to speak, June 20, 2017 in New York City. Pruitt abruptly cancelled his appearance, where he was supposed to discuss the United States' environmental role in the world following the decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

DENIAL BY A DIFFERENT NAME

It’s Time to Admit That Half Measures Can’t Stop Climate Change

IT CAN FEEL GOOD to make fun of climate deniers. So let’s take a little romp with one: Wolfgang Müller.

Here he is in a Dusseldorf hotel conference room, 100 people gathered to take a group photo before him. He’s distributing stemware and pouring champagne, at the 11th annual International Conference on Climate and Energy, a convening this past November of some of Europe’s pre-eminent denialist minds.

Given that this is Europe, it’s not a huge crowd. Müller and company fit the stereotype: cranks poking holes in scientific consensus, railing against the pointy-headed academics — often, though not in his case, with generous industry funding. This particular gathering is co-hosted by the European Institute for Climate and Energy, known as its German abbreviation EIKE; the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an American outfit; and a handful of smaller groups of self-identified climate skeptics.

It’s not hard to see why EIKE sits on the margins. In one presentation, a historical building preservationist argued that medieval building practices — castles with 2-foot-thick stone walls — were better suited to insulate heat than Germany’s apparently tyrannical energy efficiency standards, in a talk that included an extended, only half-joking anecdote involving sex and boar skins. A session on renewables pleads sympathy for wildlife; literature handed out by the presenter features a picture of a dead bird at the foot of a wind turbine. The sole caption, in German, asks: “Bird shredder?”

Billed as a “Contra-COP23,” it takes place about an hour’s train ride from COP23, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s 23rd annual Conference of Parties talks in Bonn, where the world is vowing to redouble its efforts to combat climate change in spite of the spurning of U.S. President Donald Trump.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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