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22 July 21
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o float down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon is to meander through geologic time. As you descend, the formations you pass include the Coconino Sandstone, the Redwall Limestone, the Bright Angel Shale—by the time you reach the tortured-looking Vishnu Schist, you’re a couple billion years back in time. But, even amid the towering mesas and buttes, one of the sights that moved me the most was a pile of gravel about twenty feet high and dating back not much more than fifty years. We pulled the raft to the river bank, anchored it to a tree, and climbed up above the tailings, entering the cool, dry hole from where they had come. This tunnel—perhaps seven feet high and five feet wide—had been bored in the nineteen-sixties, when the federal government planned to build a big dam and back the waters of the Colorado up in a reservoir that would have drowned the bottom of the canyon.
That never happened. And the primary reason it never happened is that David Brower, the executive director of the Sierra Club, decided to fight the plan, and to do it in a way that environmentalists hadn’t managed before. Brower—one of the great conservationists of the second half of the twentieth century—knew that the federal Bureau of Reclamation and its massive dams were immensely popular with politicians in the West. The dams provided the water and the electricity that turned the deserts of the Southwest into powerhouses of suburban growth, including in Las Vegas, where Frank Sinatra was in residence at the Copa Room at the Sands. To Brower’s great regret, the creation of the Glen Canyon Dam, upstream, was already filling Lake Powell; it seemed a reasonable bet that the bottom of the Grand Canyon, too, would soon be underwater.
Instead, Brower waged a remarkable campaign. The coffee-table books that the Sierra Club had been publishing, at his insistence, since 1960, with photos by Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and others, had helped muster popular support for wilderness preservation. (“Time and the River Flowing” was many people’s introduction to the splendor of the Grand Canyon.) Brower took out ads in newspapers, with copy by the great public-interest ad man Jerry Mander. Government officials had argued that flooding the Grand Canyon would make it easier for more Americans to access it; in return, Brower and Mander asked, in very large type, “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” As John McPhee memorably recounted in these pages, the public responded in huge numbers; the dam plan became politically toxic; the Colorado still flows. (That there are dams throughout the Colorado River basin doesn’t keep it from being a very wild river—flash floods claimed a rafter’s life just last week.)
Sixty years after Brower’s win, the National Park Service deserves huge credit for carefully managing the canyon-bottom wilderness that the Sierra Club campaign saved. Every party that starts down the river receives orientation sessions that outline strict preservation rules; the campgrounds, without rangers or signs, remain pristine; the past, including the holes from the thwarted dam excavation, are simply left for intrepid travellers to stumble across and explore.
As I sat on a mound of blazing hot sand and stared up at the hole, I thought of the current fights that resemble the Grand Canyon battle. They are many, from the pipeline that crosses under the Straits of Mackinac to the pipeline that will, if built, threaten both local communities and nature reserves that are home to elephants and other wildlife in East Africa. But perhaps none are fiercer right now than the fight over Line 3, a pipeline that will, if finished, carry crude and tar-sands oil from Canada across northern Minnesota. The line will cross the only American river more iconic than the Colorado—the Mississippi, right at its headwaters. And, like the Grand Canyon fight, it has impacts that are both local and global.
In the case of the Grand Canyon, those global impacts were mostly psychological—the sense that an ancient place of inestimable value would be defiled. A very small percentage of Americans ever visit it: only about thirty thousand people a year make it down the river. But, for many millions more, the knowledge that it exists intact is a blessing in itself. In the case of Line 3, much of the fight has rightly focussed on local impacts: the threat to rivers, lakes, and wild-rice harvests in Minnesota, and to the treaty rights of the indigenous people who are leading the fight. But the rest of us have another reason to stop Line 3: the insane temperatures we’ve seen so far this summer across the West and the North will certainly grow higher if we add hundreds of thousands of barrels of carbon-intensive oil to the world’s supply every day. And so the Line 3 battle, like Brower’s campaign for the Grand Canyon, needs to be nationalized.
There are signs that it is happening. When law-enforcement officials in Minnesota began blockading protesters, demonstrators in Massachusetts backed them up by occupying the regional offices of Enbridge, the pipeline’s builder, outside Boston. (In Massachusetts, Enbridge has built the bitterly contested Weymouth gas-compressor station, whose approval, a Boston Globe investigation found, was a “brute lesson in power politics.”) Protesters, meanwhile, are pressuring President Joe Biden. As Alan Weisman, a journalist arrested in Minnesota last month, put it, in the Los Angeles Times, “Biden could still act. He could cancel the pipeline by executive action, as he did when he blocked the Keystone XL permits on his first day in office.”
One hopes that Biden does—and that continued protests can create the national pressure that will give him the political cover that he may feel he needs. The success of the climate fight will determine what our geologic future looks like. If we lose today’s battles to the fossil-fuel industry, observers (assuming that there are any) may be able to see the resulting damage on canyon and cave walls millions of years from now. Instead of looking on with real gratitude—as I did at the pile of tailings that is the only remaining mark of the dam plans which once threatened an incomparable record of our geologic past—they will stare in sad wonder. Why didn’t people follow Brower’s example?
Jeff Bezos and crew pose for photos in front of the Blue Origin New Shepard rocket after their launch from the spaceport near Van Horn, Texas, Tuesday, July 20, 2021. (photo: Tony Gutierrez/AP)
s the world’s richest man flies his Blue Origin rocket into suborbital space, here on Earth calls are growing to tax the rich and let Amazon unionize. Billionaire Jeff Bezos has faced strong criticism after Tuesday’s flight, for which he thanked Amazon workers and customers who “paid for all of this.” Bezos traveled to the edge of space just days after another billionaire, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, took a similar trip on a Virgin Galactic spacecraft. “The richest and most powerful people in the world are turning their eyes away from the planet and to the stars,” says Paris Marx, a writer and host of the podcast “Tech Won’t Save Us.” “We need to question whether we should be dedicating so much resources to this kind of grand vision of a future that may never arrive,” Marx says. We also speak with journalist Peter Ward, author of the book “The Consequential Frontier: Challenging the Privatization of Space,” who says billionaires who have monopolized large sectors of the economy are seeking to do the same for space infrastructure. “It’s not the worst thing to have the private sector involved. It’s just it can’t be where they have complete control,” Ward says.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with a look at how the world’s richest man completed a 10-minute suborbital flight aboard his Blue Origin spacecraft Tuesday. Jeff Bezos spoke at a news conference after his crew landed.
JEFF BEZOS: I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, because you guys paid for all of this. So, seriously, for every Amazon customer out there and every Amazon employee, thank you from the bottom of my heart very much.
AMY GOODMAN: The billionaire Amazon founder Bezos’s remarks drew sharp rebuke. Washington Congressmember Pramila Jayapal tweeted, “If Amazon paid its workers fairly and did not fight unionization, workers would not be funding the expensive hobbies of billionaires. They would be taking care of their families and living dignified and fulfilling lives.” Jayapal also noted that the 11-minute “joyride” cost over $2.5 million a minute. “Yes, it’s time to tax the rich,” she said.
Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union that tried to unionize Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, also responded to Bezos’ comments thanking Amazon customers and employees for paying for his spaceflight.
STUART APPELBAUM: These are people who put their lives on the line during the pandemic and did not receive adequate support from Jeff Bezos. In the middle of the pandemic, he even cut people’s wages, when he didn’t need to. People are being forced to work in conditions where their health and safety is not being adequately protected. There is so much more Jeff Bezos should be doing for his employees.
AMY GOODMAN: Bezos rocketed into suborbital space with his brother, as well as an 82-year-old aviation pioneer named Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen of the Netherlands, who was his first paying customer. Daemen is the son of Joes Daemen, the CEO and founder of hedge fund Somerset Capital Partners. It’s unclear just how many millions Daemen paid for the seat.
For more, we’re joined by two guests. In St. John, Canada, Paris Marx is with us, host of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us and writer whose article in Jacobin is headlined “Leave the Billionaires in Space.” And joining us from the U.K. is journalist Peter Ward, author of the book The Consequential Frontier: Challenging the Privatization of Space.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Paris Marx, as you watched the richest man on Earth rocket away from it for just a few minutes, talk about your thoughts.
PARIS MARX: Yeah, it was — first of all, it’s great to join you, Amy and Nermeen. It was wild to watch that, right? You know, for so long people have been criticizing this, have been saying that it’s not something that we should do. But to watch this, the richest man in the world, a man who admitted after his flight that all of his wealth comes from the workers who, you know, work for Amazon, who have been underpaid, who have been mistreated for so, so long, and then to compare that with the stories that we’ve been seeing in recent weeks about, you know, the fires in British Columbia burning a whole town to the ground, the wet-bulb temperatures in Pakistan, the flooding that’s happening in Europe, it’s just wild to put these stories next to one another and to see that at a moment when we have so many crises, even beyond the climate crisis, that we need to be dealing with, that the richest and most powerful people in the world are turning their eyes away from the planet into the stars.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Peter Ward, you’ve written a book on the privatization of space, so just could you give us some broader context? When did this begin? Who is Peter Diamandis, the founder of X Prize? What is that? And where do you see this going? It’s only been 20 years or so since this idea began, is that correct?
PETER WARD: Yeah, yeah, that’s correct. So, it actually goes back. The first example of space tourism happened in Russia, actually. The Russians tried to do things when they were thinking of decommissioning the Mir space station. So, while I was writing the book, I looked into the history of that and saw how — it was surprising, obviously, that Russia did it first. I think that was the source of some embarrassment for some of the American space enthusiasts.
Peter Diamandis launched an X Prize to try and get some — essentially, an easier way to get to space so we could have space tourism. And one of the entries was the vehicle that Richard Branson eventually used to get into space.
So, I think, in terms of the future, where this is going, obviously there will be more flights to space taking extremely wealthy people on 12-minute or 11-minute journeys into space. It’s not going to slow down. This was obviously the proof that if Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson will try it themselves, then they believe it’s safe. I can’t see the price ever going down to the point where, like Jeff Bezos says, everyone will have access to space. That just doesn’t seem realistic. This is always going to be something for the wealthy. And it’s kind of sad. I mean, if you compare yesterday’s event to, say, the moon landing, you know, that was a source of great pride for the whole world. Yesterday we just kind of saw a man having a midlife crisis in front of us, possibly the most expensive midlife crisis ever.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I also want to ask Peter about the potential militarization of space, not just its commercialization. A comment made by Peter Diamandis — he said, “Bezos doesn’t need” to compete — “to beat Elon” — Elon Musk — “he needs to beat Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Having the number one and number three wealthiest people on the planet using their money to open space is extraordinary.” So, can you explain, what exactly does he mean by that? “He needs to beat Lockheed Martin and Boeing”?
PETER WARD: I think what he’s referring to is that the majority of the money in space is still from military contracts. So, you see SpaceX and Blue Origin now have a massive lobbying kitty that they spend. They have a lot of people on Capitol Hill. They’re going after those military contracts. They’ve been going after them for a long time. But that’s where the money is. That’s why they’re essentially taking the public money and using it to fund their own space tourism.
AMY GOODMAN: After his suborbital flight on Tuesday, Jeff Bezos told MSNBC the trip reinforced his commitment to addressing the climate crisis by moving polluting industries to space.
JEFF BEZOS: We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry, and move it into space and keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is. But that’s going to take decades and decades to achieve. But you have to start, and big things start with small steps.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Paris Marx, if you could respond to we’ll just send the polluting industries, not deal with polluting industries, stop them from polluting, but we’ll just pollute space. What does that mean?
PARIS MARX: Yeah, it’s an absolutely wild statement, right? And especially his admission there that it will take decades to do. Like, you know, as I was saying, in this moment, we’re seeing the climate crisis accelerating. Climate change is not something that’s coming in decades down the road. It’s here right now, and it’s getting worse with every single passing year. So I think that we should see that statement as the climate denial that it is.
If we are serious about addressing the climate crisis, then by the time moving industries to space becomes realistic — and I don’t even think that will be in decades, I think that is wildly optimistic — then we will already have transformed the production systems, the transportation systems, the other systems that we rely on, to make them sustainable so that we can live on this planet. So, then, why would we even need to move them to space in the first place? It’s just a statement that makes no sense.
And as Jeff Bezos is saying these things, it’s important to understand that, you know, he is personally still living the life of a billionaire, has massive personal carbon emissions, but his company, the company that built his $200 billion of wealth, Amazon, increased its emissions by 19% last year alone. So, you know, I think that we can see this as a way to distract from the real problems that we face in the here and now, with solutions that are never really going to come.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, during his news conference on Tuesday — and just again to point out, the amount of coverage this got — CNN, I thought, moved their entire operation down to West Texas to cover this, minute by minute, so that you didn’t miss anything. And let’s compare that to the climate crisis, right? The coverage of the shows on broadcast television for those few minutes got more coverage, the hours leading up to it and after it, than a year of coverage of the climate crisis. But let’s go back to another clip of Jeff Bezos. This is Jeff Bezos talking about infrastructure. I want to turn to the news conference, where he called the flight a small step toward building a “road to space.”
JEFF BEZOS: You can tell when you’re on to something. And this is important. We’re going to build a road to space so that our kids and their kids can build the future. And we need to do that. We need to do that to solve the problems here on Earth. This is not about escaping Earth. … We are going to build an infrastructure. Just like when I started Amazon, I didn’t have to build the Postal Service or Royal Mail or Deutsche Post. There were people to — there were already gigantic, worldwide infrastructure to deliver packages. That infrastructure today is, for space, just way too expensive and doesn’t work.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, Peter Ward, to say that he spent this money — I mean, he’s making the point he built Amazon on the roads that existed, the mail system that existed. And yet, what taxes does he pay? This is really a public-funded flight, the amount of millions that he saved in not paying taxes.
PETER WARD: Yeah, absolutely. It’s pretty outrageous. And obviously, when he’s talking about the road to space, a lot of these people think of themselves as the kind of railroad industry in America when America was being colonized. It was, obviously, they put the railroads down, and then you had all the industry and economy blossomed around it. They obviously are — not many people mention, you know, the destruction of the Indigenous population and the effects that had on the environment. But luckily, you don’t have that in space.
But the really scary thing is, if someone like Jeff Bezos were to lay down that infrastructure, what would that be to stop him conducting the monopolization of the space economy, if there was one? And if he wants to move the entire industry off planet and he controls the entire infrastructure — you know, he has had antitrust issues with Amazon, questions asked — what’s to stop him doing the same thing in space?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Paris Marx, can you talk about what the defenders of these spaceflights, people who have come out in defense of Bezos and Richard Branson, presumably also Elon Musk, saying that their efforts could set the stage for an expansion of space travel that could — and technology, that could eventually affect everyone, presumably favorably?
PARIS MARX: Certainly. You know, there are a lot of people who say the very same things that Jeff Bezos said in that clip that you just played — right? — that this is about the future, it’s about making it so everybody can go to space, and it’s also about laying the infrastructure so that we can start to develop, you know, whether it’s colonies or economies that exist in space. And I think that we really need to see this as, you know, the kind of grand visions for space that are not really realistic. It’s not something that we are going to see in our lifetimes.
And we need to question whether we should be dedicating so much resources to this kind of grand vision of a future that may never arrive, when we’re dealing with so many crises in the here and now, whether it’s climate crises, housing crises, the crisis of inequality that we’re dealing with, and whether we should be refocusing on those. You know, as the earlier clip that you played at the beginning of Jeff Bezos saying that his wealth comes from the Amazon workers, you know, imagine if that wealth had not been taken from the workers and was still controlled by them or controlled by a representative government, that could then deploy those resources to address these serious crises instead of building a potential space economy or space colony in decades or centuries to come.
AMY GOODMAN: He is now the world’s richest man, but Jeff Bezos has spent much of his life focused on going into space. In 1982, the Miami Herald summarized part of his high school valedictory, writing, quote, “[Bezos] wants to build space hotels, amusement parks, yachts and colonies for two or three million people orbiting around the earth … saying 'The whole idea is to preserve the earth.'” His, quote, “final objective is to get all people off the earth and see it turned into a huge national park.” That was from a summary of valedictory addresses that year in high school. Paris Marx, your response?
PARIS MARX: Yeah, you know, that’s the same thing that he says today, all these decades later. And we should realize that those ideas come from his college professor, Gerard O’Neill, who developed the idea for these space colonies that, you know, he thinks that we should be living in. You know, Jeff Bezos’s plan is not to colonize Mars, like Elon Musk would have us do, but to live in these space colonies that would be orbiting around Earth or in the vicinity of Earth, and we would leave the planet, as you said, and return to it sometimes for vacations, to see the wonderful world where we used to live.
It’s important, when Jeff Bezos talks about the future that we could have in space, that he imagines that the reason we need to go to space is because economic growth needs to continue. And in order to achieve that, we are eventually going to run out of energy and resources here on Earth, so we need to leave the planet. And he says it’s a choice between stasis and rationing or growth and dynamism. And I think that is a false choice.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Peter, can you talk about that, this idea that Bezos has of colonizing space, versus Elon Musk’s plan to make Mars self-sustaining, part of the justification for which he says that “If there’s a third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages”? Peter Ward?
PETER WARD: Yeah. So, the pair of them have differing views. Bezos obviously has this idea that we need to preserve the Earth. Musk, it’s more of a — it’s called the Plan B option. He thinks that we should go to Mars and have some kind of human presence on Mars just in case we destroy the entire planet, civilization, species here on Earth.
And I have to say I agree with what Paris said earlier in terms of the climate crisis. There’s no time to execute these plans. There’s absolutely no time. It will be too late by the time any of these are done. So, while I do see that there is — I mean, I believe that there is merit in space exploration. It’s not done like this, not done with billionaires heading the way, not with scenes like we saw yesterday. It’s just not what we need to save the planet. It’s like Paris said. It’s a false choice.
AMY GOODMAN: Paris Marx, how is the U.S. federal government enabling this? You’ve got Musk’s SpaceX, which won a $149 million contract from the Pentagon to build missile tracking systems. So these are private companies that are — heavily rely on public government funding. You write, “This is the real face of the private space industry: billions of dollars in contracts from NASA, the military, and increasingly for telecommunications that are helping companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin control the infrastructure of space.” Talk more about this.
PARIS MARX: Absolutely. And, you know, I would start by agreeing with what Peter said, is that I think that there is good reason to want to explore space, but the way that it’s happening is not one that we should want to see. And I think what we have, especially in the past few years, is that the U.S. government has kind of embraced these visions from people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. You know, under Donald Trump, there was talk about going to Mars, how he kind of adopted that idea from Elon Musk and from the private space industry. And Joe Biden has said similar things about wanting to embrace the private space industry.
And so, I think we need to be concerned about the direction that this is heading us down, because there is worry in the United States about the rise of China. And one of the ways that the United States seems to be wanting to push back on that, through militarization and showing its technological power, is by doing more in space. And instead of in the past where it would have done that through NASA — and, you know, NASA still gave contracts to companies like Lockheed and other defense contractors — but in this period, we’re looking at more of a privatization of space, where companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are trying to be the face of that mission. And they are, as you said, heavily reliant on public contracts, even as they claim that they are private companies and this is entrepreneurial and all these kind of narratives that we’re used to hearing. And so, I think we need to be concerned. We need to be watching as this happens, because, really, this private space industry that is being built is being built on public dollars, and billions of public dollars.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Peter Ward, could you explain — both you and Paris have now said that there are many benefits to space exploration. Could you explain what some of those benefits are and in whose hands that exploration ought to be? And also, as you mentioned, Peter, that earlier it was Russia that began this commercialization, what are the other countries that are doing this, space exploration, and even — I’m sorry, the commercialization of space exploration?
PETER WARD: Yeah, sure. So, I mean, the advantages of space exploration, I think number one is a greater understanding of who we are and where we come from, which I think is important. You inspire people to take up science and technology to learn more about the world and how they can potentially help it. There are more practical reasons. None of us want to get hit by an asteroid anytime soon, so it is good to have plans like that in place. Obviously, we rely on the space industry for all our communications. Satellites are vitally important. So there are key reasons why we should be doing space exploration.
And it’s not the worst thing to have the private sector involved. It’s just it can’t be where they have complete control. That is only going to end one way, and it starts with the huge egos of someone like Jeff Bezos, and it ends with us having all the issues of capitalism here on Earth just being sent up to space. One of the most appealing things about space to most people is that it’s almost like a blank canvas. It’s a place, you know, where potentially we could go, and we could have this Star Trek-style utopia. But if we do let the private sector do what they want, quickly you get a kind of Star Wars-ish nightmare. Yeah, so it’s a scary thought, obviously, and something —
AMY GOODMAN: Peter, before we go, you write about mining. There are resources in space. Historically, when humans find resources, we must — we almost always kill each other to get them. Talk about, for example, minerals on the moon.
PETER WARD: Yeah. So, we can mine resources on asteroids. We haven’t found a way to do it in a cost-effective enough way to go and do that. There would be a case if we found elements on the moon. If we found water on the moon, you can convert that to fuel, so it could fuel up a rocket which is on its way further into the solar system. But, of course, we have this history throughout our species where when we find resources, we inevitably fight over it. And, you know, you don’t have to be a huge sci-fi fan to see the potential where this is going. You know, you could have companies fighting over resources on the moon, over Mars. If you had a colony on Mars which was run by a company, you would literally rely on the CEO of that company or the shareholders of that company to provide you oxygen. So, the potential of some kind of horrible dystopian nightmare out in space is really, really huge.
AMY GOODMAN: Well,, we’re going to leave it there for now. We talk about Jeff Bezos as the richest man on Earth, who founded Amazon. He also owns The Washington Post. He bought it in 2013 for $250 million. And it’s interesting to see how they covered his spaceflight. One headline read, “Jeff Bezos blasts into space on own rocket: 'Best day ever!'” One op-ed was headlined “The billionaires’ space efforts may seem tone-deaf, but they’re important milestones.” Another headline, “The billionaires’ space race benefits the rest of us. Really.”
Well, I want to thank Paris Marx, host of the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us and Jacobin article, we’ll link to, “Leave the Billionaires in Space.” And Peter Ward, journalist and author of The Consequential Frontier: Challenging the Privatization of Space.
Next up, as white men dominate the airwaves on climate coverage, we’ll speak with the co-editors of the book All We Can Save, an anthology of essays by 60 women at the forefront of the climate movement. Stay with us.
January 6th Capitol riot. (photo: John Minchillo/AP)
ALSO SEE: Pelosi Says GOP Antics Won't Stop Jan 6 Panel's Work
onald Trump can be heard gushing over the “loving crowd” that turned up to hear him speak ahead of the Capitol riot in a newly released audio clip. The audio, from an interview in late March for the new book I Alone Can Fix It, shows Trump at his most misty-eyed about the rioters. “It was a loving crowd too, by the way, there was a lot of love,” he said, referring to the crowd who come to hear him speak before they marched to the Capitol building. “I’ve heard that from everybody—many, many people have told me, that was a loving crowd.” Then, seemingly realizing that he may have been talking too highly of the mob that stormed the Capitol, he added: “You know, it was too bad, it was too bad that they did that.” Asked what he meant when he told the crowd to head to the Capitol, Trump neatly avoided the question and blamed police, who he said “ushered” the rioters into the building. “They were very friendly,” said the ex-president.
Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema applauds during Donald Trump's State of the Union address on Feb. 4, 2020, in the U.S. Capitol. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty)
Arizona offers a natural experiment in whether people would rather see a Democrat hold out for Republican cooperation or just pass stuff they like.
he current debate within the Democratic Party is one that our existing political nomenclature can’t quite capture, and yes, this is one of those high-octane posts about “political nomenclature,” so get your finger or cursor ready to click the heck out of that share button! The deal is, a loosely affiliated group of so-called “centrist” or “moderate” members in Congress is blocking action on several fronts:
- Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin are refusing to eliminate or reform the filibuster process, which is preventing the Senate from passing voting-rights legislation—or any other legislation that can’t get through the budget-reconciliation loophole.
- A group of House Democrats who receive substantial contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, HuffPo reports, are trying to kill legislation that would allow the government to use its purchasing power to negotiate down the prices that Medicare recipients pay out-of-pocket for prescription drugs. (Medicare covers some, but not all, drug costs.)
- An anonymous House Democrat told the insider publication Punchbowl News that Senate Democrats’ $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” reconciliation spending plan is “a non-starter for many of us” because it includes “massive new taxes.”
These are the sort of positions—institutionalist, industry-friendly, anti-tax—that self-styled moderate Democrats have traditionally taken to make themselves seem more practical and sensible than their party’s left wing. But the moderates of 2021 are not defying progressives, leftists, liberals, activists, or “the Squad,” or, at least, those are not the primary groups they’re defying. Voting-rights protections, prescription-drug reforms, and reconciliation spending are the top current priorities of President Joe Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, three figures who consider themselves extremely pragmatic and centrist, and who hold their positions in large part because center-inclined voters and members of Congress have long trusted them to protect their interests.
The establishment leaders have a strong argument that their agenda at the moment is what looks truly centrist. The polls say that making it easier to vote, making drugs cheaper, and spending money that you raised by taxing corporations and wealthy people on eldercare and childcare subsidies are all comfortably popular ideas. The thinking goes that if you pass popular legislation that makes voters’ lives easier, you have a better chance of reelection.
There’s another theory of political moderation, though, which is that you get reelected by proving you can “work together with the other side” and by avoiding backlash. There is some grounding for this theory too: Voters always say they support “bipartisan solutions,” Joe Manchin keeps getting reelected in West Virginia despite a heavily Republican electorate, and lots of Democrats lost their seats during the 2010 backlash against the Affordable Care Act. (This theory of politics, incidentally, tends to call for behavior which overlaps with the interests of corporate tax lobbyists.)
The question before the Democratic Party is which centrist theory most correctly describes the current reality, and there happens to be a natural experiment out there which could answer that question. Arizona has two senators who consider themselves centrists, in Sinema and Astronaut Mark Kelly—and where Sinema has emphatically preserved the filibuster and emphatically voted against Biden’s proposal to raise the minimum wage, for example, making herself into one of the president’s most high-profile obstacles, Kelly voted for the minimum wage increase, is reportedly receptive to reforming the filibuster and has, in general, gone along with party leadership fairly quietly since taking office. (A good example of this: Kelly, like Sinema, is a member of the group trying to create a bipartisan physical infrastructure bill, but while he wasn’t captured in photographs of the group announcing their tentative deal at the White House, Sinema led the negotiations and stood in the center of the White House photo op.)
The firm Data for Progress had the smart idea of seeing which, if any, approach to centrism was more popular with Arizona’s tipping-point electorate. The result, released Wednesday: Mark Kelly’s approval-disapproval split among Arizonans is 50-39, or +11, while Sinema’s is 44-42, or +2. The difference is basically the same among independent voters, too: Kelly 46-36, Sinema 38-38. In her effort to appear independent, this poll finds, Sinema is alienating many Democrats but not impressing independents.
A striking feature of the Biden era so far has been that the left side of the Democratic Party, the faction usually blamed for losing voters and undermining the party’s goals because of ideological purism, has reliably cooperated with leadership to help hold its narrow legislative majorities together. And while Bernie Sanders is going to the White House to make deals with the president, the biggest threat to internal discipline and political capital is manifested by figures, like Sinema, who like to think of themselves as mainstream realists. It’s the latest filing in the divorce case known as Centrism v. Bipartisanship— a Centrist Civil War, if you will, whose battlefields are the Twitter feeds of Politico and Washington Post reporters rather than the farms of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. May God help us all.
Opponents of capital punishment have said they hope the Biden administration will move to end the practice. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)
The decision not to seek the death penalty in federal cases around the country has raised defense lawyers’ hopes that the administration may end the practice.
ne man was charged in Orlando, Fla., with kidnapping and fatally shooting his estranged wife. Another man was indicted in Syracuse, N.Y., in the armed robbery of a restaurant and the murders of two employees. And a third man was charged in Anchorage with fatally shooting two people during a home invasion.
Those cases and four others prosecuted in federal courts around the country all had a common theme — they were among cases in which the Justice Department under President Donald J. Trump directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty if they won convictions.
Pro-government supporters shouting during an anti-Trump demonstration on August 10, 2019, in Caracas, Venezuela. (photo: Carolina Cabral/Getty)
"Hundreds of Venezuelan patients could die because they have been trapped in the excessively strict application of U.S. sanctions aimed at Venezuela and the state-owned oil company Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA)," reads the letter.
he Foreign Minister of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Jorge Arreaza, informed this Wednesday on his social network Twitter account that six United Nations rapporteurs and experts, through a communiqué, denounced the United States (U.S.) Government for directly affecting the fundamental rights of Venezuelans through Illegal sanctions that prevent treatments for cancer patients.
The experts assure that "targeting PDVSA as a way to control Venezuela's political agenda has had devastating consequences for hundreds of people undergoing treatment for transplant rejection both in Venezuela and abroad."
"The Biden Administration is so progressive until it turns out that it is hindering Venezuelan cancer patients from being treated. Genocidal imperialism."
In that sense, they point out that there are currently some 190 cancer patients on a wait-list for treatment abroad, and some 14 children, including three young children, died between 2017 and 2020 waiting to receive the same.
"While the right to health and the right to life are fundamental for all people around the world, we call on states, banks, and private companies to take full responsibility for the effects of their actions on people and withdraw sanctions, zero risks, and over-compliance policies that affect fundamental human rights," the document concludes.
A fledgling Cooper's hawk takes in its surroundings after being returned to the Oregon wilderness by the Portland Audubon in early July. (photo: Fern Wexler)
s the Pacific Northwest baked in 115 degree heat last month, fuzzy baby hawks sat sweltering in their nests, 50 feet off the ground. Unable to fly, the young raptors dealt with the heat in the only way they could: One by one, they threw themselves out.
Nearly 50 baby Cooper’s and Swainson’s hawks were rescued from the ground beneath towering pines in Washington and Oregon and brought to Blue Mountain Wildlife, a rehabilitation organization in Pendleton, Oregon, which specializes in treating birds of prey. More still were brought to Portland Audubon and other rehabilitation facilities throughout the Pacific Northwest.
The historic heatwave coincided with nesting season, says Lynn Tompkins, director of Blue Mountain Wildlife. If the young birds had been able to fly, they could have sought reprieve in a cooler spot. If they’d had feathers, they’d have been able to regulate their body temperatures. “But these guys were just downy babies,” she says, “and there was nothing to do but bail out.”
The hawk nosedives are one dramatic example of the many ways wild animals have been affected by extreme heat in the West. Marine life, including mussels and sea stars, have died en masse from exposure to unusually hot air. One estimate puts the death toll at more than a billion. Other effects aren’t yet clear. In some cases, human development prevents animals from being able to flee to cooler areas. Other animals are likely to take new risks by venturing places they normally wouldn’t, in search of shade or water.
As extreme heat events become more frequent and median temperatures rise, experts are concerned about animals’ ability to survive and adapt.
Stressor on top of stressor
To understand how wildlife is affected by extreme heat, says Mažeika Sullivan, an associate professor at Ohio State University's School of Environment and Natural Resources, it’s important to keep in mind that heat waves are just one of the challenges wildlife face.
“It’s about multiple stressors,” he says. Extreme heat events are compounded by drought, rising temperatures, bigger and more intense wildfires, and increasingly fragmented habitats. (This is how animals cope with wildfires.)
Animals “only have so many coping mechanisms,” he says. “And asking them to cope with so many environmental stressors that are happening over long time scales and then heat waves for multiple days—it’s impossible to talk about one without talking about it in context.”
Salmon, for example, are migratory fish, moving from the ocean up rivers to spawn. They’re already stressed by the network of dams they need to get over or around, Sullivan says.
But during a heat wave, they’re hit with “a double whammy,” says Jonathon Stillman, adjunct biology professor at University of California, Berkeley, who researches how environmental changes affect marine life. Salmon face both increased water temperature and decreased oxygen, he says, because warmer water contains less of it. “It’s like if you had to run a marathon while wearing a plastic bag over your head, while it’s 10 degrees warmer outside,” Stillman says. “You’d die too.”
In California’s Sacramento River, it’s a “crisis situation” for young, endangered Chinook salmon in particular, says Jordan Traverso, spokesperson at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The fish cannot survive beyond their egg stage in waters heated by extended temperatures that exceed 100 degrees. In an effort to save as many as possible, the department has transported more than 16 million juveniles from four hatcheries in the Central Valley to seaside net pens in San Pablo Bay and San Francisco Bay.
Other aquatic species that live in shallow waters have also been hit hard, according to researchers from the University of British Columbia, who estimate that hundreds of millions of mussels likely died in the heatwaves, essentially steaming in their shells, as well as sea stars, barnacles, hermit crabs, and other shoreline-dwelling organisms. These creatures are used to being exposed to the air when the tide is low, but they aren’t evolved to cope with such extreme air temperatures as the West has been seeing, Sullivan says. (Read about thousands of flying foxes that died in Australia’s extreme heat.)
Who survives?
Environmental stressors kill animals all the time. That’s just part of the evolutionary process, says Stillman: the sometimes-overlooked inverse of the survival and reproduction of animals hardy enough to withstand those stressors. . The problem is if there isn’t enough genetic variation to keep up with the rapid pace of climate change, which includes more frequent and widespread heat waves. Animals now have only a few decades to adapt to changes that historically occurred over millions of years. The hope is that every species has enough extreme-heat-tolerant individuals that they can pass on their genes to offspring. “The alternative is pretty bleak,” Stillman says. “The alternative is that there are no individuals that can survive.”
“We might expect all [species] will be affected to some degree,” Sullivan says, but those effects will be on a spectrum, depending on a species’ exposure to heat, their physiology, and their vulnerability.
Salamanders, for example, are vulnerable because they can’t handle desiccation—a total absence of moisture from their skin. Birds that are diurnal—active during the day—may fare worse than nocturnal birds. Animals that spend their lives above-ground may have a harder time than burrowing animals, Sullivan says.
An animal’s behavior is also a factor in their ability to handle heat, he says. Birds spread their wings and pant to cool off, which uses water. But, for birds in the Mojave Desert at least, the more water a species requires, the more likely its numbers were to plummet, according to a 2019 study of bird populations there.
No escape
Many wild animals rely on having large expanses of nature through which to move. “But human development has cut [those paths] off,” Stillman says. Roads, farmland, and other infrastructure impedes their ability to move to cooler areas or forces them to expend more energy to try to find them. Habitat fragmentation is also an issue for aquatic wildlife, Sullivan says. Dams and waterway fragmentations have reduced “refugia”—deep, shaded pools of water where it’s cooler at the bottom.
Sullivan also expects to see increased human-wildlife interaction amid extreme heat waves and drought. “Animals will most likely be taking risks they wouldn’t normally take to seek water,” he says, such as passing through urban areas and crossing roads. In late June, a viral video showed a mother bear and her three cubs wandering onto a busy Lake Tahoe beach to swim as onlookers filmed from nearby.
In much of the Pacific Northwest, temperatures have dropped again—for now. (But massive wildfires are raging in southern Oregon—the largest so far this year in the U.S., having already burned through 530 square miles of forest and grassland.) Many of the baby hawks brought to Blue Mountain Wildlife have made a full recovery. The Cooper’s hawks have all been released, and the Swainson’s hawks are almost ready.
Still, director Tompkins says, “it’s kind of scary. The more hopeful side of my brain says it was the perfect storm [of freakish extreme heat],” that caused the hawks to ditch their nests. “But the logical part of my brain says this is what the future holds.”
“Drought affects us all,” says Traverso of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which is closely monitoring impacts of the heat and drought on wildlife populations. She says her team is often reminded of a quote by poet W.H. Auden: “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.”
In a heat wave, should you leave out water for wildlife?
This question is fiercely debated. Some experts say that putting out water can encourage wild animals to become dependent on humans, or potentially bring them into conflict with people, pets, or each other.
Others say that filling up your bird bath or leaving a dish of water outside for wildlife during a heat wave is fine. Just make sure to change the water daily and clean out the vessel with a mixture of 10 percent bleach to 90 percent water to prevent the spread of disease.
A compromise: Plant bushes and trees in your yard to offer wildlife shade, and keep your gardens watered—many animals get their water from vegetation.
Your local wildlife rehabilitation organization may help advise on the best course of action in your area. You can search by zip code here.
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