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Congresswoman Ilhan Omar said House Democrats “are fighting to tackle the climate crisis, expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing, and guarantee family leave in America.”
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Organizers of the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol say that several congressional Republicans and White House officials helped plan former President Donald Trump’s coup attempt.
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Corporations that previously trumpeted their support for sustainability and climate action have quietly given thousands of dollars to Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — the two right-wing Democrats most responsible for gutting the Build Back Better Act’s clean energy provisions and otherwise preventing their party from passing a transformative version of its reconciliation package.
That’s according to a new analysis out Friday from Accountable.US, a government watchdog whose review of third-quarter corporate FEC filings shows which self-styled green companies have been donating to the two lawmakers now holding the planet hostage.
Corporations that have touted their environmental commitments only to turn around and give campaign cash to Manchin (W.Va.), an unabashed coal profiteer and defender of fossil fuel subsidies, and Sinema (Ariz.), who recently proposed cutting $100 billion in climate funding from the Build Back Better Act, include:
- AbbVie, which has bragged about its “ambitious, long-term environmental, and sustainability targets for absolute reductions to carbon emissions, water, and waste generation, striving for zero waste to landfill at our sites.” In addition to giving money to Manchin and Sinema in Q3, the company is a member of the Business Roundtable and PhRMA, two major trade groups campaigning against the reconciliation bill;
- Astellas, which set out to reach the 2°C target of the Paris climate agreement. The company is part of lobbying group PhRMA, which has been campaigning against the Build Back Better plan, and it donated $3,000 to Senator Sinema in Q3 of 2021;
- AT&T, which claimed it is dedicated to “environmental stewardship,” is a part of The RATE Coalition, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Business Roundtable — all of which are fighting against the Build Back Better plan — and donated $2,000 to Sinema in Q3 of 2021;
- Amazon, which pledged a commitment to net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. In addition to giving $5,000 to Sinema in Q3 of 2021, the company is a member of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its CEO belongs to the Business Roundtable — both of which are fighting against the Build Back Better agenda; and
- Toyota, whose “Environmental Challenge 2050” initiative seeks to nearly eliminate carbon emissions from its vehicles, dealers, and operations and to “operate in harmony with nature.” Nonetheless, the company is also a member of The RATE Coalition — a major Build Back Better opponent — and donated to Manchin in the past quarter.
Throughout his 11-year career on Capitol Hill, Manchin has taken more than $1.5 million from corporate interests engaged in a lobbying blitz to undermine the Build Back Better Act, a popular piece of legislation that can be passed through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process but only with the support of all 50 Senate Democrats and all but three House Democrats.
In addition, Manchin, the chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, makes nearly $500,000 per year — roughly three times his congressional salary — from investments in his family’s coal empire, raking in a total of $5.2 million since joining the Senate in 2010 while refusing to answer questions about it.
Moreover, the West Virginia Democrat is Congress’ top recipient of oil and gas donations this election cycle. He accepted $400,000 from fossil fuel industry PACs and executives in the last quarter alone and then axed one of the reconciliation bill’s key measures to decarbonize the nation’s power grid, exemplifying why an ExxonMobil lobbyist praised the lawmaker earlier this year.
“As if it wasn’t enough that wealthy polluters have bankrolled Sen. Manchin during his fight against common-sense climate solutions — now companies that claim to value protecting the environment have opened their pocketbooks as well,” Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, said in a statement.
Manchin’s self-interested effort to torpedo the Clean Electricity Performance Program and other policies to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and promote renewable energy persists even as the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency threatens his constituents with the worst flood risks in the nation.
Meanwhile, as he endeavors to dilute the Build Back Better Act’s proposed green public spending as much as possible, Manchin has been attempting to get the widely criticized bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed first, which would give him and other conservative congressional Democrats the leverage necessary to tank more ambitious plans to hike taxes on the rich to fund an expansion of the welfare state and climate action.
Manchin was the chief architect of the energy portions of the bipartisan physical infrastructure bill, which contains $25 billion in potential fossil fuel subsidies as well as $11.3 billion in funding that would benefit his family’s coal brokerage.
Manchin demanded sole jurisdiction over the Clean Electricity Performance Program, and then killed it in the reconciliation bill.
In the bipartisan infrastructure bill he supports, he got $11.3 billion included that could free up more waste coal to burn.https://t.co/Maydi0gAYW
— David Moore (@ppolitics) October 16, 2021
Sinema, for her part, has accepted over $920,000 from corporate interests opposed to the Build Back Better Act since joining Congress in 2013. While Manchin’s fossil fuel-related corruption is more extensive, Sinema has accumulated her own conflicts of interest.
For instance, while padding her campaign coffers with at least $100,000 from Big Pharma and Wall Street last quarter, Sinema has come out against allowing Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices. She has also single-handedly blown up Democrats’ plan to raise taxes on big businesses and the wealthy despite voting against the GOP’s corporate-friendly 2017 tax law and campaigning against it during her 2018 senatorial run.
In addition to obstructing progressive tax reforms, Sinema has joined Manchin in fighting to slash the Build Back Better Act’s original top-line spending level of $3.5 trillion over 10 years by as much as half or more — rejecting an average yearly expenditure of $350 billion on child care, green energy, and other vital programs as “fiscal insanity” despite voting for every $700 billion-plus annual Pentagon budget.
As Herrig put it, “Manchin and Sinema are standing in the way of the nation’s largest climate bill ever.”
“If corporations are serious about their stated commitments to protecting the climate,” he added, “now is the time to put their money where their mouths are.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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“As if it wasn’t enough that wealthy polluters have bankrolled Sen. Manchin during his fight against common-sense climate solutions—now companies that claim to value protecting the environment have opened their pocketbooks as well.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“Labeling effective NGOs ‘terrorists’ is a textbook way to evade accountability for human rights violations—and an affront to everyone who cares about peace,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar.
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“This assessment provides the strongest scientific argument to date for the urgency to act, and for collective action to protect and restore our oceans from source to sea.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“The energy and culture we built over the last six months with these workers, it’s been very strong,” said Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls. “Everybody’s excited.”
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This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 20, 2021. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
A Brazilian congressional probe of President Jair Bolsonaro’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic attributes more than 300,000 deaths—half of the nation’s coronavirus death toll—to the far-right leader’s policies, and although its initial recommendation to charge him with mass homicide and genocide has been jettisoned, the draft report still accuses him of crimes against humanity.
The 1,000-plus page document, the product of a six-month investigation led by a special COVID-19 Senate committee, asserts that Bolsonaro “intentionally let the coronavirus rip through the country and kill hundreds of thousands in a failed bid to achieve herd immunity and revive Latin America’s largest economy,” the New York Times reported Tuesday.
According to the newspaper:
The panel initially recommended in the report that Mr. Bolsonaro be charged with mass homicide and genocide against Indigenous groups in the Amazon, where the virus decimated populations for months after hospitals there ran out of oxygen. But less than a day after the Times and several Brazilian news outlets reported on those plans, several senators said that the accusations had gone too far.
Late Tuesday, on the eve of the scheduled release of the report, the committee removed the recommended charges of homicide and genocide, Renan Calheiros, the centrist Brazilian senator who was the lead author of the report, said just after midnight on Wednesday local time.
Nevertheless, “the draft report accuses Brazil’s far-right leader of a total of 11 crimes, including crimes against humanity, incitement to crime, and charlatanism, for his ‘obstinate’ promotion of ineffective remedies such as the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine,” The Guardian reported. “But perhaps the most serious allegation is that Bolsonaro’s shunning of offers from vaccine manufacturers during the first year of Brazil’s epidemic amounted to murder.”
From the report:
In spite of all the vaccines that were on offer, the federal government opted not to buy them, a decision that went against all of the scientific studies which demonstrated their safety and effectiveness, and against the advice of all of the epidemiologists who declared on a daily basis that only vaccines would save lives.
The decision not to acquire vaccines between the months of July 2020 and at least January 2021, which lacked any technical or scientific basis, and flew in the face of recommendations from international health authorities, ended up claiming the lives of thousands of Brazilians who would undoubtedly have made use of such vaccines.
In addition to shunning vaccines and promoting false solutions, Bolsonaro—who has downplayed the seriousness of the virus since the outbreak began, dismissing it as “little flu”—also rejected basic public health precautions, and instead discouraged mask-wearing and encouraged large gatherings.
Amid mounting anger from citizens over Bolsonaro’s reckless disregard for the severity of the pandemic, the senate panel “held more than 50 hearings and often led the nightly news broadcasts,” the Times noted. “They became must-see television in Brazil, featuring testimony about bribery schemes and disinformation operations.”
The committee is not scheduled to vote on the draft until next week, which means that it could still be revised by senators. Of the 11 members on the panel, seven are opponents of Bolsonaro, who entered office in 2019.
However, even if the commission greenlights the report, experts say that it is unlikely it would lead to criminal charges. That’s because Brazil’s lower chamber in Congress, which must approve the report, is dominated by right-wing supporters of the president, while the country’s attorney general, a Bolsonaro appointee and ally, would be responsible for prosecuting him.
Still, “the draft text paints a devastating portrait of the neglect, incompetence, and anti-scientific denialism many believe has defined the Bolsonaro administration’s response to a public health emergency that has killed more than 600,000 Brazilians,” The Guardian noted.
Brazil’s COVID-19 death toll is second only to the United States, where nearly 720,000 have died from the disease, according to the latest figures from the World Health Organization.
Journalist Carl Gibson argued that if the damning allegations against Bolsonaro are true, then the same can be said about former US President Donald Trump, “whose administration pursued the same ‘herd immunity’ approach to Covid.”
The Guardian reported that “many experts believe the congressional inquiry has done severe and lasting political damage to the standing of a politician who plans to seek re-election next year but whose ratings have plunged to record lows.”
Calheiros, one of the longest-serving lawmakers in the 81-member Senate, told the Times that “many of these deaths were preventable. I am personally convinced that he is responsible for escalating the slaughter.”
The Times explained next steps:
Mr. Calheiros said that if the attorney general did not pursue charges against the president, the senate committee would seek other potential legal avenues, including in Brazil’s Supreme Court and the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
If Mr. Bolsonaro is formally charged, he will be suspended from office for 180 days while the Supreme Court decides the case, said Irapuã Santana, a law professor at Rio de Janeiro State University. If convicted, he would be blocked from the presidency for eight years and likely face years in prison.
If Bolsonaro does manage to run for another term, polls indicate that he would lose the October 2022 race to former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a popular leftist who improved the living standards of the country’s working class when he led the country from 2003 to 2010.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
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Although “all of President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda can be paid for by fairer taxes on the wealthy and corporations,” noted Americans for Tax Fairness, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s refusal to support tax hikes on the rich could kill the bill.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“There are few issues of greater salience to people across this country than lowering drug prices, and few policies more commonsense and popular than Medicare drug price negotiation.”
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“Corporate America protecting itself from being called out for supporting candidates that want to ban abortion in Florida,” is how state Rep. Anna Eskamani summarized Comcast and Spectrum’s decision.
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“Many of these deaths were preventable,” said one Brazilian senator. “I am personally convinced that he is responsible for escalating the slaughter.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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“If the Biden Administration wants to be serious about its promise to demonstrate U.S. climate leadership, it must first clean up its own backyard.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.
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The Senate committee vote included $10 billion more than requested. “That’s $100 billion over 10 years—or half the cost of universal pre-K, which we’re told we can’t afford,” said one critic.
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“It’s really a no-brainer for the federal government to prioritize green investments to put our economy back on track,” said one advocate. “It’s good politics and good policy.”
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Democrats “ran on a bold agenda to help our nation roar back from the coronavirus pandemic,” said the lawmakers, “and now we need to keep our promises.”
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“Who besides a cartoon villain would ever think this is a good idea?”
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Soon after losing his 2018 primary against progressive newcomer Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in a major political upset, 10-term Congressman Joe Crowley joined one of K Street’s largest lobbying outfits, and fresh reporting reveals that the former chair of the House Democratic Caucus is now working to torpedo his party’s proposed tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy.
A recently filed document on the Senate’s disclosure website shows that Crowley and other lobbyists at Squire Patton Boggs—a massive corporate law firm whose clients include Amazon, Royal Dutch Shell, UnitedHealth, and the Saudi monarchy—were hired in July by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), “one of Wall Street’s most powerful advocacy groups,” The Intercept reported Friday.
“SIFMA, whose members range from BlackRock and J.P. Morgan to Amazon Web Services and IBM,” The Intercept noted, “has deployed Crowley to court his old colleagues as Democrats finalize legislation to implement President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better initiative, which seeks a fairer tax system and greater revenue to pay for expanded Medicare coverage, universal pre-K, and other domestic priorities.”
According to Sara Sirota, a reporter at the news outlet:
Senior lawmakers-turned-lobbyists like Crowley typically serve their special interest clients by convincing former allies to promote industry talking points to committee chairs or party leaders. On September 24, Texas Democratic Reps. Vicente González, Henry Cuellar, and Filemón Vela sent House Speaker Nancy Pelosi [D-Calif.] and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer [D-N.Y.] a letter criticizing the proposed tax increases on corporations’ foreign profits that Crowley is now targeting for SIFMA. Crowley’s former leadership PAC donated to all three congressmen’s campaigns over his time in Congress, and Vela was a vocal supporter of Crowley’s leadership ambitions.
[…]
This wasn’t the only time González, Cuellar, and Vela tried to undermine House Democrats’ Build Back Better Act. They also joined New Jersey Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s unsuccessful attempt to weaken the party’s unity and commitment to finish the reconciliation process, which allows the bill to pass with a simple majority.
Although Crowley opposed the GOP’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act when he was in Congress—describing it as a “tax scam” benefiting the “largest, wealthiest multinational corporations in the history of the world”—the former lawmaker is now collaborating with Wall Street to undermine Democrats’ attempts at progressive reform.
SIFMA is particularly opposed to efforts to raise the rate on global intangible low-taxed income (GILTI) from its current level of 10.5%—established four years ago by Republicans and deemed a handout to multinational corporations by Democrats—to 16.5%.
That modest increase is lower than the rate sought by Biden and a majority of congressional Democrats, who want to equalize the GILTI tax rate and the domestic corporate tax rate—now at 21%, but potentially higher if current legislative proposals succeed—in order to disincentivize offshoring.
Sirota pointed out that IBM’s “global tax policy director earlier this year said Democrats’ plan to fix that scam is ‘penalizing companies that have been operating overseas for years.’”
SIFMA has also “made its opposition to the Build Back Better Act’s tax increases on the wealthiest individuals clear,” Sirota added. “Days after the Ways and Means Committee finished marking it up, SIFMA Managing Director Tim Cameron released a statement on September 17 criticizing capital gains tax hikes, restrictions on individual retirement account contributions, and other changes intended to reduce inequality.”
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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As the United Nations Biodiversity Conference wrapped up Friday, critics are once again pointing to the glaring absence of the United States from negotiations to strengthen an international treaty to restore and protect the variety of life on Earth that has been ratified by every country except the U.S.
“The world cannot afford for China and the U.S. to not find ways to work together to address climate change and nature loss.”
The U.S. did send a team to this week’s meeting, which was hosted by China and attended in-person and virtually because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic—a crisis that has highlighted the need to reform humanity’s relationship with nature.
U.S. delegates, however, had no official say and could only observe, as diplomats from around the globe debated how best to update the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and hashed out strategies to safeguard the world’s flora, fauna, and ecosystems, increasingly under threat due to the relentless quest to maximize profits at all costs.
The resulting “Kunming Declaration“—a pledge that was welcomed by conservation advocates, who also emphasized the urgent need to match words with bold and concrete policies—sets the stage for the development of a post-2020 global biodiversity framework, which governments are scheduled to negotiate further in January 2022 and adopt next May at part two of the U.N. Biodiversity Conference.
“Washington’s obstinance is striking,” Sara Schonhardt wrote Friday in E&E News. “It is not without consequence either. Because the United States has refused to ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity, it cannot vote on procedures that continue to shape the treaty. And critics say the lack of participation in this arena hurts U.S. diplomacy in other environmental matters, such as global warming.”
Stewart Patrick, a senior fellow in global governance at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Schonhardt that “it reinforces the notion that the U.S. is a fair-weather partner when it comes to environmental conservation, including issues of climate change.”
According to E&E News:
Nearly all the blame lies with the U.S. Senate, which for years has balked at approving the treaty. But the Biden administration hasn’t spent much political capital on it either—in a year that officials often describe as pivotal for the climate.
For decades, Republican lawmakers have argued against ratification because they say it would require that the United States bring its laws and regulations into conformity with global standards and infringe upon U.S. sovereignty. In addition, American industry groups have raised concerns that entry into the deal would pose a risk to intellectual property rights.
Patrick rejected both of those talking points. The CBD “doesn’t oblige the U.S. to do anything it’s not already doing,” he said, adding that U.S. environmental laws are relatively strong compared with the rest of the world.
The U.S. Senate’s refusal to ratify the CDB—sometimes referred to as the Paris agreement for nature—is “embarrassing,” Tierra Curry, a conservation biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The American Prospect‘s Lee Harris.
Harris wrote Friday that “the continued snub dates back to lobbying by the biopharmaceutical industry, which objected to intellectual property provisions and wanted to maintain its ability to extract natural resources from developing countries.”
As The Prospect reported:
Habitat destruction threatens more than the extinction of the charismatic megafauna—panda bears, rhinos, elephants, and other cuddly animals that are most popular stuffed. It is also a key contributor to the emergence of infectious diseases, bringing people and livestock in contact with wildlife.
Around the world, humans continue to expand the wildland-urban interface. In the past year, that encroachment set off record-breaking fires across mismanaged land in California and Covid-19, as farming and resource extraction give pathogens opportunities to spread to human hosts.
Following a year when conspicuous examples of the perils of biodiversity loss came from the world’s top two polluters, however, only China is leading rhetorically on responsible land management.
COP 26, the U.N. conference on climate change that starts in just over two weeks in Glasgow, has received far more attention—including from the U.S., which rejoined the Paris agreement in January.
Harris, however, noted that the biodiversity crisis “is arguably an even more complex and intractable problem.”
Although the global extinction crisis is driven in part by rising temperatures caused by greenhouse gas pollution, it will take more than slashing fossil fuel emissions to restore vital ecosystems, revive pollinators whose populations are declining, prevent the further collapse of freshwater mussels that play a key role in keeping waterways clean, and protect the Amazon rainforest—”the lungs of the world” recently transformed from a carbon sink into a net emitter.
The Biden administration, for its part, “has endorsed a proposal to protect 30% of national lands and waters by 2030,” E&E noted. The so-called 30×30 goal “is expected to be a centerpiece” of the new CBD, though such an approach has been criticized by some ecologists.
Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, told the news outlet that “the world cannot afford for China and the U.S. to not find ways to work together to address climate change and nature loss.”
“Our survival requires it,” he stressed.
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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“I am offended as hell by somebody who says I should have an opposing view to the Holocaust in my library,” said one teacher.
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“Witnesses who try to stonewall the select committee will not succeed,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, chair of the panel investigating the January 6 insurrection.
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“There is now little to gain and everything to lose from building new fossil fuel projects,” said Oil Change International.
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“The more sway mega-corporations have over our economy, the more power they have to gouge customers, squeeze Main Street, and exploit workers.”
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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“There’s no good excuse,” said Sen. Ben Ray Luján. “I’m absolutely fearful that what the administration is setting up is a 2-1 Republican majority FCC under a Democratic administration.”
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“Holding back funds for teachers and healthcare workers is punishing the victims,” said one advocate.
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“It is critical that the EPA start regulating PFAS—now,” said one scientist.
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“We cannot look the other way as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes, and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
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“What we are seeing now with these increasing disasters is with just one degree of warming on our planet,” said one scientist. “We have to choose now between bad or terrible outcomes.”
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“Our results stress the need for urgent action to avert this looming disaster. The spill and its potentially disastrous impacts remain entirely preventable through offloading the oil.”
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“Our nation’s infrastructure is not built to a standard that protects against the level of flood risk we face today, let alone how those risks will grow over the next 30 years as the climate changes,” said one expert.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community.