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Climate Progress

Sen. Sessions: ‘I Am Offended’ By Views Of Climate Scientists

By Zack Beauchamp on Aug 1, 2012 at 7:53 pm

The Senate hearing on climate science this Wednesday, unsurprisingly enough, appears to have changed little with respect to the politics of climate change on Capitol Hill. Indeed, a significant portion of the discussion was dominated by debate over Dr. John Christy’s particular brand of denialism, a well-trod debate.

Nonetheless, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) was more than surprised when informed by Senator Barbara Boxer that roughly 98 percent of climate scientists, contra Christy, accepted that anthropogenic warming was real and serious — he was outraged:

Sessions: Madam Chairman, I am offended by that, I’m offended by that — I didn’t say anything about the scientists. I said the data shows [sic] it is not warming to the degree that a lot of people predicted, not close to that much…

Boxer: The conclusion that you’re coming to is shared by 1-2 percent of the scientists. You shouldn’t be offended by that. That’s the fact.

Sessions: I don’t believe that’s correct.

Watch it:

Senator Sessions may want to look over this study, which surveyed the publications of 1,372 climate scientists and vindicated Senator Boxer’s view of their conclusions. For that matter, so should Senator James Inhofe, the ranking Republican on the committee who had previously dismissed the study’s findings as irrelevant to the debate on climate change. Though Sessions and Inhofe were the most outspoken Republicans at the hearing, their views are mostly shared by their colleagues on the Environment and Public Works committee.

While these denialists debated the Committee’s Democrats on the role of climate change in fueling the current devastating drought, the best available science suggested that the current troubles are some of the earliest signs of a “dust-bowlification” of the United States as a consequence of global warming.

Economy

Major League Baseball Team Uses Taxpayer Subsidies To Pay Its Own Taxes

By Pat Garofalo on Aug 1, 2012 at 7:05 pm

As ThinkProgress has reported, several American sports franchises are looking for taxpayer dollars in order to finance new stadiums or renovate existing ones. But the example set by Major League Baseball’s Kansas City Royals should act as a warning to the cities thinking of acceding to those demands.

According to Sports Radio 810 WHB, the Royals ownership has been spending taxpayer money earmarked for stadium renovations on, among other things, employee salaries, cable tv, and telephone bills. Just 9 percent of the money given to the team has actually been used on its stadium.

Adding insult the injury, the owners even paid some of their payroll tax bill with the subsidies meant for stadium improvements, so “the team literally collected taxpayer money to pay their own taxes“:

The Kansas City Royals have requested nearly $17 million of taxpayer money the past five years from the Kauffman Stadium repair and upkeep fund but spent only 9% of the money received on actual repairs and maintenance to the stadium, according to documents obtained by Sports Radio 810 WHB.

The Royals have received at least $12.7 million from taxpayers that was approved by the Jackson County Sports Complex Authority as part of the RMMO provision of the team’s lease with the county and spent it on full and part time employee salaries, security, cable tv, first aid, utilities, telephones and even payroll taxes. By using the money for payroll taxes, the team literally collected taxpayer money to pay their own taxes.

Owners of sports franchises often claim that stadiums are good investments for taxpayers, but the evidence makes the opposite case. As ThinkProgress’ Travis Waldron noted, “the stadiums rarely pay for themselves, leaving local economies engulfed in debt while teams come back asking for even newer stadiums before the current facilities are paid off.”

And the Royals aren’t the only Kansas City team using taxpayer dollars to fund general operations. The Kansas City Chiefs of the National Football League have received $9 million for stadium maintenance and repairs, but have used just 6 percent on the stadium, with the rest going towards management and operations.

Security

House Republicans Vote To Increase Taxes On Military Families

By Ben Armbruster on Aug 1, 2012 at 6:28 pm

Photo: Roger Nomer/Associated Press

The House passed a Republican-sponsored bill (H.R. 8) this afternoon that would extend all the Bush tax cuts for one year, including those on income above $250,000 — and fast-track “tax reform.” Almost all House Republicans and a 19 Democrats voted for the measure. The bill would also actually raise taxes on about 25 million Americans because it reduces some tax credits. But as the Center for American Progress Director of Fiscal Reform Seth Hanlon notes, U.S. service members and their families would be part of that group:

A corporal (E4) in the Marines with four years of service, who is married and has two children would see a tax increase of $448 under H.R. 8

A military police staff sergeant (E5) in the Air Force with eight years’ service, with a spouse and three young children at home, would see a tax increase of $1,118 under H.R. 8

A private in the U.S. Army (E1) in his first year of service, who is married with an infant child, would see a $273 tax increase under the Republican plan

“These are just three typical military families who face a tax increase from H.R. 8’s failure to extend important tax benefits for working families,” Hanlon writes. “Many families with similar incomes, military and nonmilitary, would face similar tax increases because of H.R. 8’s failure to extend the child tax credit and earned income tax credit improvements.” See the full report here for more details.

Climate Progress

Poll: 77 Percent of Latinos Understand Global Climate Change Is ‘Already Happening’

By Climate Guest Blogger on Aug 1, 2012 at 6:20 pm

In the 2012 election cycle, President Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney have been keeping one specific demographic in mind – Latinos.

Many analysts think Hispanic voters are the key to the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, specifically in swing states such as Nevada and Florida. With a population that reached 50.4 million residents in 2010, it is no surprise that strategies have been developed by both parties to get the Latino vote. However, immigration policies should not be the only approach candidates are taking with the Hispanic population.

Today, the Sierra Club in conjunction with NCLR (National Council of La Raza) released an extensive poll conducted by Project New America and Myers Research. The results of the 2012 Latinos and the Environment Survey show an overwhelming belief that Latinos believe in global climate change and want government regulations to protect their air and water –  a combined 92% understand that global warming is either already happening and it will happen in the future.


The Latino community clearly understands that due to fossil fuel production and usage, our nation is going through serious climate changes.

Latino voters are also mostly in agreement with the entire American demographic when it comes to regulations. The report found that 72% Latino voters agree that regulations protect our health by lowering polluting toxins in our air and water. A report released by the Pew Research Center recognized 71% of all Americans believe our government should do “whatever it takes to protect the environment.”

Regulations benefit all of us, but are particularly essential to Latinos.

According to the Center for Disease Control, Hispanics are 165% more likely to live in counties with unhealthy levels of particulate matter than were whites. The report found that 43% of Latino voters say they live or work near a toxic site, such as a refinery, a coal fired power plant, an incinerator, an agricultural field, a major highway, or a factory. This represents a significant increase since 2008, when 34% reported living or working close to a toxic site.

As a result of the environmental injustice occurring in our country, the report states that nearly half of Hispanic voters (47%) report that they or someone in their family has faced asthma as a result of environmental factors.

It seems that the GOP is on the wrong side of this issue if they want to win the Latino vote  as many of them want to not only scale back regulations (some want to just get rid of the EPA), and obstruct any possible solution to the mess we’re making by polluting.

-Matt Kasper

 

NEWS FLASH

Residential Segregation By Income Is On The Rise | New household data income from the Pew Research Center shows that residential segregation by income has increased over the past three decades. Between 1980 and 2010, the percentage of lower-income households located in majority lower-income areas rose from 23 to 28 percent, while the percentage of upper-income households in majority upper-income areas rose from 9 percent to 18 percent. As the study reports, “these increases are related to the long-term rise in income inequality, which has led to a shrinkage in the share of neighborhoods across the United States that are predominantly middle class or mixed income.” Pew also breaks down the data by the largest U.S. metro areas:

Health

The Problem With The GOP’s Health Reform Proposals In One Chart

By Jeff Spross on Aug 1, 2012 at 5:57 pm

Both Aaron Carroll at The Incidental Economist and David Phillippe at Punditocracy pointed to a new brief from the National Institute for Health Care Management this month, which found that half of all health care spending in 2009 was concentrated amongst just 5 percent of Americans. Conversely, half of all American health care spenders accounted for just 3 percent of spending.

Not surprisingly, this top 5 percent of spenders is disproportionately represented amongst the sick and the elderly. More importantly, an individual in the top 5 percent generally accounted for something in the neighborhood of $40,000 in health care spending in 2009.

That’s significant because most of the health care reforms suggested by Republicans or conservatives include things like health savings accounts, high-deductible catastrophic coverage plans, allowing insurers to compete across state lines, and the like. These approaches focus on controlling cost by increasing individuals’ price sensitivity to their health care decisions. But for people who must spend $40,000 or more in a single year, “price sensitivity” is largely meaningless — there’s no way for them to grapple with such costs themselves, unless they’re wealthy. When those same people account for half of all health care spending, the possibility of controlling health care costs via the consumer-driven model begin to decrease rapidly. As Carroll sums up:

When we talk about consumer directed health care, we’re talking mostly about healthy people. We don’t want sick people to avoid care. We want to stop healthy people from consuming it. The problem is that healthy people consume so little care to begin with. If we could incentivize the healthier half of people to forego all their personal health care spending, we’d spend $36 billion less out of a total $1.259 trillion in personal health care spending. That would be a drop in the bucket.

Health savings accounts are of little use to anyone amongst the higher spending groups who isn’t independently wealthy, as they will quickly deplete their savings or won’t be able to stock the account in the first place. Competition across state lines will allow insurers to congregate in the state with the most lax regulations and requirements, and thus compete to see who can do the best job of denying coverage to high-risk individuals, rather than competing to see who can deliver the most efficient and effective care. Catastrophic coverage plans tend to divide the pool of young and healthy coverage recipients from the old and sick, leaving the pool of the latter with less incoming funds to deal with greater costs.

Increasing price sensitivity means individualizing risk, by leaving more of the cost of an individual’s care on their own shoulders. Absent a single-payer system, or something along the lines of Obamacare’s framework, it’s hard to see a possible route to controlling costs that doesn’t involve simply pricing large numbers of sick and elderly Americans out of receiving health care entirely. In fact, that’s precisely what the American system has already been doing for some time.

NEWS FLASH

House Republicans Defeat Bill To Extend Bush Tax Cuts On Income Below $250K | House Republicans today — by a vote of 170 to 257 — defeated a Democratic proposal to end the Bush tax cuts on income above $250,000. 19 Democrats joined all the Republicans in voting down the bill. The House Republican plan would instead extend all of the Bush tax cuts, as well as fast-track “tax reform” that includes more giveaways to the wealthy and corporations.

Update

The House did vote to extend Bush-era tax cuts for one year by a vote of 256 to 171. 19 Democrats supported the measure, 1 Republican opposed it.

NEWS FLASH

Appeals Court Temporarily Blocks Arizona 20-Week Abortion Ban | Just one day before it would go into effect, Arizona’s 20-week abortion ban has been temporarily blocked by a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel. A trial judge upheld HB 2036 on Monday. The appellate court will hold a hearing on the ban as soon as possible this fall. Called the most extreme ban in the nation, the law measures the gestational age of a fetus from the first day of the woman’s last period, technically prohibiting abortions after 18 weeks of pregnancy. It would have forced doctors to withhold care until a pregnancy posed an immediate threat of death or major medical damage. It also contains no exceptions for fatal fetal birth defects, giving women no choice but to carry to term a fetus with no chance of survival.

Alyssa

How A Hijab Controversy Almost Undermined The Olympics’ Goal Of Increasing Female Participation

By Travis Waldron on Aug 1, 2012 at 5:09 pm

Two weeks ago, Saudi Arabia and the International Olympic Committee agreed to add two female athletes to the conservative Muslim kingdom’s Olympic team, marking the first time in Olympic history that women would participate under the Saudi flag. Two days ago, one of those women nearly withdrew from the Games.

Wojdan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shaherkani, one of the two Saudi women, learned this week that she would not be allowed to wear her traditional hijab during competition because the International Judo Federation worried that it would threaten her safety. Faced with the possibility of participating without her hijab — a decision that would violate her religious beliefs — Shaherkani threatened to withdraw.

The IJF’s eventual compromise, reached yesterday, to allow Shaherkani to wear a headscarf was always obvious, given the Asian Judo Federation allows women to compete wearing hijabs and top judokas said it wouldn’t cause safety issues, making such concerns seem illegitimate. But for whatever reason, this issue keeps arising in international sport, creating a needless tension between the ideal of increasing female participation in sports and respecting their religious freedoms while doing so.

Safety of athletes should, of course, should be a concern, but participation should remain the most prominent goal. The IOC has gone to great lengths to increase participation of women in the Olympics, particularly women from countries like Saudi Arabia. But those efforts also go far beyond these Olympic Games. Saudi women are still struggling to gain any (much less equal) participation in sports in their own country, and had the SAOC and IJF let an unnecessary hijab controversy get in the way of that fight, it not only would have ruined Shaherkani’s opportunity, it would have put another barrier in front of Muslim women who want to play sports. That would have been a tragic ending to an otherwise wonderful story, and though the IJF ultimately made the right decision, it came dangerously close to undermining the fight that got Shaherkani to London in the first place.

Climate Progress

GRAPHIC: A Day In The Life Of Big Oil

By Rebecca Leber and Adam Peck on Aug 1, 2012 at 4:52 pm

Every hour so far in 2012, the five largest oil corporations have recorded a $14,400,000 profit. And every hour, they received more than $270,000 in federal tax breaks. That adds up to $2.4 billion in subsidies every year for the five largest oil corporations — Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and ConocoPhillips — all ranked as the top 9 companies in the world.

Even though BP posted an unexpected second-quarter loss, these five companies are on track to meet last year’s record profits. Put these numbers into context, and they are not so “disappointing“: Big Oil profits more in one minute than what 96 percent of American households earn in one year. Even so, Mitt Romney and House Republicans want to double what the five companies receive in federal tax breaks to $12.8 million per day, even though the three publicly owned U.S. companies paid an average tax rate of under 17 percent.

The graphic below illustrates where Big Oil directs these profits and its pollution over the course of a day:

1 Center for American Progress, 7/30
2 Center for American Progress, 7/31
3 EPA
4 Wall Street Journal
5 Open Secrets

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