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10 January 22
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The supposed point of the “war on terror” was to stop terrorism. Instead, the war on terror has created many, many more terrorists.
Days earlier, Congress had authorized Bush “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determine[d] planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 or harbored such organizations or persons.” By then, it was already evident, as Bush said in his address, that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks. But it was equally clear that he had no intention of conducting a limited campaign. “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there,” he announced. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”
Congress had already assented to whatever the president saw fit to do. It had voted 420 to 1 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate to grant an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that would give him (and presidents to come) essentially a free hand to make war around the world.
“I believe that it’s broad enough for the president to have the authority to do all that he needs to do to deal with this terrorist attack and threat,” Senate minority leader Trent Lott (R-MS) said at the time. “I also think that it is tight enough that the constitutional requirements and limitations are protected.” That AUMF would, however, quickly become a blank check for boundless war.
In the two decades since, that 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force has been formally invoked to justify counterterrorism (CT) operations — including ground combat, air strikes, detention, and the support of partner militaries — in twenty-two countries, according to a new report by Stephanie Savell of Brown University’s Costs of War Project. During that same time, the number of terrorist groups threatening Americans and American interests has, according to the US State Department, more than doubled.
Under that AUMF, US troops have conducted missions across four continents. The countries in question include some of little surprise like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and a few unexpected nations like Georgia and Kosovo. “In many cases the executive branch inadequately described the full scope of U.S. actions,” writes Savell, noting the regular invocation of vague language, pretzeled logic, and weak explanations. “In other cases, the executive branch reported on ‘support for CT operations,’ but did not acknowledge that troops were or could be involved in hostilities with militants.”
AUMFing in Africa
“[W]e are entering into a long twilight struggle against terrorism,” said Representative David Obey (WI), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, on the day that the 2001 AUMF’s fraternal twin, a $40 billion emergency spending bill, was passed. “This bill is a down payment on the efforts of this country to undertake to find and punish those who committed this terrible act and those who supported them.”
If you want to buy a house, a 20 percent down payment has been the traditional ideal. To buy an endless war on terror in 2001, however, less than 1 percent was all you needed. Since that initial installment, war costs have increased to about $5.8 trillion.
“This is going to be a very nasty enterprise,” Obey continued. “This is going to be a long fight.” On both counts, he was dead on. Twenty-plus years later, according to the Costs of War Project, close to 1 million people have been killed in direct violence during this country’s ongoing war on terror.
Over those two decades, that AUMF has also been invoked to justify detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; efforts at a counterterrorism hub in the African nation of Djibouti to support attacks in Somalia and Yemen; and ground missions or air strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. The authorization has also been called on to justify “support” for partner armed forces in thirteen countries. The line between “support” and combat can, however, be so thin as to be functionally nonexistent.
In October 2017, after the Islamic State ambushed US troops in Niger — one of the thirteen AUMF “support” nations — killing four American soldiers and wounding two others, US Africa Command claimed that those troops were merely providing “advice and assistance” to local counterparts. Later, it was revealed that they had been working with a Nigerien force under the umbrella of Operation Juniper Shield, a wide-ranging counterterrorism effort in northwest Africa. Until bad weather prevented it, in fact, they were slated to support another group of American commandos trying to kill or capture Islamic State leader Doundoun Cheffou as part of an effort known as Obsidian Nomad II.
Obsidian Nomad is, in fact, a 127e program — named for the budgetary authority (Section 127e of Title 10 of the US Code) that allows Special Operations forces to use select local troops as surrogates in counterterrorism missions. Run either by Joint Special Operations Command, the secretive organization that controls the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, the Army’s Delta Force, and other elite special mission units, or by more generic “theater special operations forces,” its special operators have accompanied local commandos into the field across the African continent in operations indistinguishable from combat.
The US military, for instance, ran a similar 127e counterterrorism effort, code-named Obsidian Mosaic, in neighboring Mali. As Savell notes, no administration has ever actually cited the 2001 AUMF when it comes to Mali, but both Donald Trump and Joe Biden referred to providing “CT support to African and European partners” in that region. Meanwhile, Savell also notes, investigative journalists “revealed incidents in which U.S. forces engaged not just in support activities in Mali, but in active hostilities in 2015, 2017, and 2018, as well as imminent hostilities via the 127e program in 2019.” And Mali was only one of thirteen African nations where US troops saw combat between 2013 and 2017, according to retired Army brigadier general Don Bolduc, who served at Africa Command and then headed Special Operations Command Africa during those years.
In 2017, the Intercept exposed the torture of prisoners at a Cameroonian military base that was used by US personnel and private contractors for training missions and drone surveillance. That same year, Cameroon was cited for the first time under the 2001 AUMF as part of an effort to “support CT operations.” It was, according to Bolduc, yet another nation where US troops saw combat.
American forces also fought in Kenya at around the same time, said Bolduc, even taking casualties. That country has, in fact, been cited under the AUMF during the Bush, Trump, and Biden administrations. While Biden and Trump acknowledged US troop “deployments” in Kenya in the years from 2017 to 2021 to “support CT operations,” Savell notes that neither made “reference to imminent hostilities through an active 127e program beginning at least in 2017, nor to a combat incident in January 2020, when al Shabaab militants attacked a US military base in Manda Bay, Kenya, and killed three Americans, one Army soldier and two Pentagon contractors.”
In addition to cataloging the ways in which that 2001 AUMF has been used, Savell’s report sheds light on glaring inconsistencies in the justifications for doing so, as well as in which nations the AUMF has been invoked and why. Few war on terror watchers would, for example, be shocked to see Libya on the list of countries where the authorization was used to justify air strikes or ground operations. They might, however, be surprised by the dates cited, as it was only invoked to cover military operations in 2013, and then from 2015 to 2019.
In 2011, however, during Operation Odyssey Dawn and the NATO mission that succeeded it, Operation Unified Protector (OUP), the US military and eight other air forces flew sorties against the military of then Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, leading to his death and the end of his regime. Altogether, NATO reportedly conducted around 9,700 strike sorties and dropped more than 7,700 precision-guided munitions.
Between March and October of 2011, in fact, US drones flying from Italy regularly stalked the skies above Libya. “Our Predators shot 243 Hellfire missiles in the six months of OUP, over 20 percent of the total of all Hellfires expended in the 14 years of the system’s deployment,” retired lieutenant colonel Gary Peppers, the commander of the 324th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron during Operation Unified Protector, told the Intercept in 2018. Despite those hundreds of drone strikes, not to mention attacks by manned aircraft, the Barack Obama administration argued, as Savell notes, that the attacks did not constitute “hostilities” and so did not require AUMF citation.
The War for Terror
In the wake of 9/11, 90 percent of Americans were braying for war. Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) was one of them. “[W]e must prosecute the war that has been thrust upon us with resolve, with fortitude, with unity, until the evil terrorist groups that are waging war against our country are eradicated from the face of the Earth,” he said. More than 20 years later, al-Qaeda still exists, its affiliates have multiplied, and harsher and deadlier ideological successors have emerged on multiple continents.
As both political parties rushed the United States into a “forever war” that globalized the death and suffering al-Qaeda meted out on 9/11, only Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) stood up to urge restraint. “Our country is in a state of mourning,” she explained. “Some of us must say, ‘Let’s step back for a moment, let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today, so that this does not spiral out of control.’”
While the United States was defeated in Afghanistan last year, the war on terror continues to spiral elsewhere around world. Last month, in fact, President Biden informed Congress that the US military “continues to work with partners around the globe, with a particular focus” on Africa and the Middle East, and “has deployed forces to conduct counterterrorism operations and to advise, assist, and accompany security forces of select foreign partners on counterterrorism operations.”
In his letter, Biden acknowledged that troops continue detention operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and support counterterrorism operations by the armed forces of the Philippines. He also assured Congress and the American people that the United States “remains postured to address threats” in Afghanistan; continues its ground missions and air strikes in Iraq and Syria; has forces “deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS”; others in Turkey “to support Counter-ISIS operations”; around ninety troops deployed to Lebanon “to enhance the government’s counterterrorism capabilities”; and has sent more than 2,100 troops to “the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to protect United States forces and interests in the region against hostile action by Iran and Iran-backed groups,” as well as approximately 3,150 personnel to Jordan “to support Counter-ISIS operations, to enhance Jordan’s security, and to promote regional stability.”
In Africa, Biden noted, US forces “based outside Somalia continue to counter the terrorist threat posed by ISIS and al-Shabaab, an associated force of al Qaeda” through air strikes and assistance to Somali partners and are deployed to Kenya to support counterterrorism operations. They also remain deployed in Djibouti “for purposes of staging for counterterrorism and counter-piracy operations,” while in the Lake Chad Basin and the Sahel, US troops “conduct airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance operations” and advise, assist, and accompany local forces on counterterrorism missions.
Just days after Biden sent that letter to Congress, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the release of an annual counterterrorism report that also served as a useful assessment of more than twenty years of AUMF-fueled counterterror operations. Blinken pointed to the “spread of ISIS branches and networks and al-Qaeda affiliates, particularly in Africa,” while noting that “the number of terrorist attacks and the overall number of fatalities resulting from those attacks increased by more than 10 percent in 2020 compared with 2019.” The report itself was even bleaker. It noted that “ISIS-affiliated groups increased the volume and lethality of their attacks across West Africa, the Sahel, the Lake Chad Basin, and northern Mozambique,” while al-Qaeda “further bolstered its presence” in the Middle East and Africa. The “terrorism threat,” it added, “has become more geographically dispersed in regions around the world” while “terrorist groups remained a persistent and pervasive threat worldwide.” Worse than any qualitative assessment, however, was the quantitative report card that it offered.
The State Department had counted thirty-two foreign terrorist organizations scattered around the world when the 2001 AUMF was passed.. Twenty years of war, around $6 trillion, and nearly 1 million corpses later, the number of terrorist groups, according to that congressionally mandated report, stands at sixty-nine.
With the passage of that AUMF, George W. Bush declared that America’s war would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” Yet after twenty years, four presidents, and invocations of the AUMF in twenty-two countries, the number of terrorist groups that “threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security” has more than doubled.
The 2001 AUMF is like a blank check that U.S. presidents have used to conduct military violence in an ever-expanding number of operations in any number of places, without adequate oversight from Congress. But it’s also just the tip of the iceberg
Savell told TomDispatch. “To truly end U.S. war violence in the name of counterterrorism, repealing the 2001 AUMF is the first step, but much more needs to be done to push for government accountability on more secretive authorities and military programs.”
When Congress gave Bush that blank check — now worth $5.8 trillion and counting — he said that the outcome of the war on terror was already “certain.” Twenty years later, it’s a certainty that the president and Congress, Representative Barbara Lee aside, had it all wrong.
As 2022 begins, the Biden administration has an opportunity to end a decades-long mistake by backing efforts to replace, sunset, or repeal that 2001 AUMF — or Congress could step up and do so on its own. Until then, however, that same blank check remains in effect, while the tab for the war on terror, as well as its AUMF-fueled toll in human lives, continues to rise.
A soldier transports a patient at UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts on December 30, 2021. (photo: Getty Images)
"It's just the perfect storm for a nightmare here in the emergency department," says Dr. Eric Dickson, the CEO of the hospital and an emergency physician.
The main hospital in central Massachusetts is already over capacity at 115%, and the numbers are only expected to rise in the coming weeks as the Omicron variant spreads rapidly across the region.
The primary Covid-19 testing site in downtown Worcester has been packed. On Tuesday, the positivity rate was 40%, according to the hospital, more than double what it was one year ago.
The most severe of those cases, the hospital warns, will show up over the next two weeks, a period when the hospital is already short-staffed. About 500 people are out with Covid, mostly medical staff who have tested positive for Covid or are exhibiting symptoms.
Dickson calls it the "wild card" for the hospital -- an unknown that will affect the hospital's very ability to treat incoming patients. The space, he says, can be found. But are there enough staff to allow the hospital to function?
The Massachusetts National Guard is part of that solution, deploying to hospitals just after Christmas.
"We have soldiers and airmen that may be computer programmers, that may be school teachers, they may be working in the community, business people, whatever that is, and they're filling very different roles this time," says Lt. Col. Patrick Donnelly of the Massachusetts National Guard, "roles as drivers or as transport people within the hospital - food service, security, and patient observance."
It is the third Covid activation for this Guard unit since the beginning of the pandemic two years ago, and even though it came at an "awkward time" during the holiday season, Guard members stepped up for the mission.
"We're able to feel that these guys are working very hard," says Staff Sgt. Julius Annan, "and that our presence here is helping them just even mentally-wise."
National Guard medical teams are now deployed in 10 states, according to the Army Northern Command, helping in hospitals and medical facilities. Some 13,000 Guard members have helped across the country at vaccine sites and more, according to Maj. Gen. Jill Faris, director of the Office of the Joint Surgeon General at the National Guard Bureau.
"We've done just about anything affiliated and associated with Covid support. We've seen it happen in all of our states and territories," Faris said.
Military discipline helps in a crowded hospital, where patient beds fill some of the hallways. And so does military training. Spc. Stephen Prochniak was deployed to Lowell General Hospital in the emergency ward one week ago when he heard an alarm he didn't recognize. The nurse sitting next to him was halfway down the hall "in a dead sprint" before he was able to catch up.
A patient had fallen to the floor and wasn't breathing or moving. The patient had no pulse. A doctor asked if Prochniak knew CPR, he recalls, and when he said he did, the doctor told him, "Glove up, get in there!"
Prochniak swapped in and out with one other person, performing CPR for a few minutes at a time, until emergency room staff detected a pulse. The 23-year-old guardsman -- who just re-upped for six more years -- remains humble about the role he played.
"I was just a very small part of the team of the real heroes that are doing this kinda thing every day," Prochniak told CNN. "I was just in the right place at the right time to help -- nothing more, nothing less."
In a hospital like UMass Memorial Medical Center where the staff is already beyond exhaustion, every new patient -- Covid or not -- is a strain on an already strained system. On Wednesday, the hospital says they had 232 Covid patients, nearly 70% of which were unvaccinated.
"Especially the people that have gotten boosters, if they get [Covid], they're not getting that sick, but people that are unvaccinated, they're dying," says Patricia Longvall, a nurse at the hospital. "We're losing 'em."
Longvall also worries about the patients who never make it into the hospital, such as someone who has symptoms of a heart attack but stays home because of how overwhelmed emergency rooms have become.
"Those people get sicker at home and maybe don't even make it in here," she says.
And the next two weeks could be the worst yet, based on the positivity rate at the city's main testing site.
Dickson, the hospital CEO, worries about a situation where the entire medical emergency response system backs up all the way to the 911 call center. If the hospital doesn't have enough staff to treat patients and move them out of the emergency room, then ambulances have no space to drop off new patients.
Dickson says they've already had cases where an ambulance had to wait and hold a patient for nearly 30 minutes before they could find space for them in the emergency room.
"If that gets bad enough, that ambulance is offline and can't get out to the next call," Dickson says. "The whole system backs up and ultimately it backs up at the 911 system when you call for an ambulance and there's just no ambulances to come pick you up."
It's a worst-case scenario, Dickson acknowledges, but one that he says isn't out of the question over the next 2-4 weeks.
Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. (photo: Jason Redmond/Getty Images)
The caucus of nearly 100 House Democrats just gave a big boost to progressives’ efforts to add four seats to the high court.
“After thoughtful consideration, the Progressive Caucus membership has determined that the urgent work to restore American democracy must include expanding the Supreme Court,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who chairs the caucus of nearly 100 House Democrats, said in a statement.
Jayapal said the Supreme Court has become too extreme and partisan in recent years, citing its decisions to gut the Voting Rights Act and public sector unions. She also criticized conservatives on the court for enforcing “unconstitutional abortion bans” and failing to overturn “the blatantly discriminatory” executive orders from former President Donald Trump aimed at banning travelers from predominantly Muslim countries.
“The current bench was filled by a partisan, right-wing effort to entrench a radical, anti-democratic faction and erode human rights that have been won over decades,” said the caucus chairwoman. “As a co-equal governing body, Congress cannot sit by while this attack on the Constitution continues unchecked. I am proud that our Caucus is joining the fight to expand the court and restore balance to the bench.”
The caucus is throwing its support behind the Judiciary Act of 2021, which would increase the number of justices on the court from nine to 13.
Sponsors of the bill were elated, of course.
"The critical issues that impact our day-to-day lives ― such as voting and civil rights, reproductive freedom, climate justice, and consumer and workers’ rights ― are being decided by a GOP-packed conservative supermajority on a United States Supreme Court, which is destroying its own legitimacy with partisan decisions that are upending decades of precedent and progress in this nation,” said Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), the bill’s lead sponsor. “I want to thank Chair Jayapal and the entire Progressive Caucus for endorsing and supporting the Judiciary Act.”
“A clear majority of Americans supports Court expansion because the people understand what’s at stake,” said Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.). “I’m thrilled that the Congressional Progressive Caucus is with us in this fight.”
The caucus’s endorsement means the Judiciary Act will now have the support of well over 100 House Democrats. The House bill currently has 46 Democratic co-sponsors; the Senate version has three: Sens. Ed Markey (Mass.), Tina Smith (Minn.) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), who announced her support last month.
In reality, the Judiciary Act isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. It’s popular among progressives, but it needs a lot more Democratic support to get moving in Congress. It also takes 60 senators to advance any legislation, and there are currently only 50 Democrats.
It’s also probably not a coincidence that the Progressive Caucus is backing the bill at the start of an election year, making the issue of Supreme Court reform a fresh talking point for progressive lawmakers heading into reelection campaigns in November.
But supporters of the bill concede it will take time to persuade a majority of Democrats to back their effort. Brian Fallon, executive director of Demand Justice, a progressive judicial advocacy group leading the charge on the issue, previously told HuffPost that the push to expand the court is part of a long-term plan to make the courts more of a priority for Democratic activists — something Republicans have outperformed Democrats on.
“After a series of major breakthroughs in 2021, The Judiciary Act is kicking off 2022 with another major endorsement, showing more and more Democrats understand it is the only way to restore balance to the Supreme Court,” Fallon said Wednesday. “With this endorsement, the CPC is giving a major boost to the only reform bold enough to rebalance a Supreme Court that currently threatens any progress on issues progressives care about.”
A Kazakh soldier stands next to a military vehicle at a check point in Kazakhstan on Friday. (photo: RU-RTR Russian Television/AP)
ALSO SEE: Kazakhstan Says Situation Stabilized,
President Firmly in Charge After Unrest
The Central Asian nation this week experienced its worst street protests since gaining independence from the Soviet Union three decades ago, and dozens have been killed in the tumult. The demonstrations began over a near-doubling of prices for a type of vehicle fuel but quickly spread across the country, reflecting wider discontent with authoritarian rule.
In a televised address to the nation, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev used harsh rhetoric, referring to those involved in the turmoil as "terrorists," "bandits" and "militants" — though it was unclear what led the peaceful protests to first gather steam and then descend into violence. No protest leaders have emerged so far.
"I have given the order to law enforcement and the army to shoot to kill without warning," Tokayev said. "Those who don't surrender will be eliminated."
Concerns grew in recent days that an even broader crackdown might be coming, as internet and cellphone service was severely disrupted and sometimes totally blocked, and several airports closed — making it difficult to understand what was happening inside the country and for images of the unrest to reach the outside world. Adding to those fears was Tokayev's request for help from a Russia-led military alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, whose troops began arriving Thursday.
On Friday, Kazakhstan's Interior Ministry reported that security forces have killed 26 protesters during the unrest, which escalated sharply on Wednesday. Another 26 were wounded and more than 3,800 people have been detained. A total of 18 law enforcement officers were reported killed, and over 700 injured.
The numbers could not be independently verified, and it was not clear if more people may have died in the melee as the protests turned extremely violent, with people storming government buildings and setting them ablaze.
More skirmishes in Almaty were reported on Friday morning. Russia's state news agency Tass reported that the building occupied by the Kazakh branch of the Mir broadcaster, funded by several former Soviet states, was on fire.
But in other parts of the country life started to return to normal. On Friday morning, news reports said the internet was partially restored in the capital, Nur-Sultan, but it remained unclear for how long.
The Almaty airport — stormed and seized earlier by the protesters — was back under the control of Kazakh law enforcement and CTSO forces, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said. But the facility will remain shut at least until Sunday, the Kazakh TV channel Khabar 24 reported, citing the airport's spokespeople.
Hours before he authorized the use of lethal force against those participating in unrest, Tokayev indicated that some measure of calm had been restored, saying "local authorities are in control of the situation."
Tokayev has vacillated between trying to mollify the protesters — including issuing a 180-day price cap on vehicle fuel and a moratorium on utility rate increases — and promising harsh measures to quell the unrest.
As he vowed a tougher response, he called on the CSTO alliance for help. A total of 2,500 troops have arrived so far, all of them in Almaty, Kazakh media reported, citing foreign ministry officials.
Kazakh officials have insisted that troops from the alliance, which includes several former Soviet republics, will not be fighting the demonstrators, and instead will guard government institutions. It wasn't immediately clear whether the foreign troops deployed thus far were involved in suppressing the unrest.
The involvement of CSTO forces is an indication that Kazakhstan's neighbors, particularly Russia, are concerned the turmoil could spread.
In his address to the nation, Tokayev repeated his allegations that "foreign actors" along with "independent media" helped incite the turmoil.
He offered no evidence for those claims, but such rhetoric has often been used by former Soviet nations, most prominently Russia and Belarus, which sought to suppress mass anti-government demonstrations in recent years.
Kazakhstan, which spans a territory the size of Western Europe, borders Russia and China and sits atop colossal reserves of oil, natural gas, uranium and precious metals that make it strategically and economically important — and the crisis sparked concern in many quarters.
Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, said she was following the developments with a "great worry," while French president Emmanuel Macron called for de-escalation.
In Germany, Foreign Ministry spokesman Christofer Burger said officials were looking into the reports of Tokayev's shooting order. From Germany's point of view, "it must be said very clearly that a use of lethal force, of live ammunition against civilians can only be a very last resort, particularly if military forces are deployed."
But China appeared to step up its support for Kazakhstan's government on Friday.
Kazakhstan is a critical component in China's "Belt and Road" overland connection to Europe and persistent unrest in the country could upend Beijing's hopes for closer trade and political relations with the continent.
Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed his condolences to Tokayev over the "large-scale riot," praising him for having "decisively taken strong measures at critical moments and quickly calming down the situation."
"As a fraternal neighbor and a long-term strategic partner, China is willing to provide necessary support within its means to Kazakhstan to help it get over this difficult period," Xi said.
Despite Kazakhstan's vast resource wealth, discontent over poor living conditions is strong in some parts of the country. Many Kazakhs also chafe at the dominance of the ruling party, which holds more than 80% of the seats in parliament.
Migrant farm laborers with Fresh Harvest working with an H-2A visa line up for a meal in the company living quarters on April 28, 2020 in King City, California. (photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images)
According to the census, net international migration into the U.S. last year was one-quarter what it was in 2016.
The forces behind the shortages are complex, from fears of infection to child care needs to worker burnout, but one factor that may be overlooked is that fewer new Americans are coming into the country. Immigration has dropped sharply in the last few years, and the declines have had real impacts on the worker pool.
The impacts can be seen by looking at the most basic measure, net international migration into the U.S. According to the census, that figure last year was one-quarter what it was in 2016.
The latest figure for that population was 247,000. Five years earlier, it had been more than 1 million. (The figures are gathered midyear to midyear, so the above numbers represent figures from July 1 of one year to June 30 of the next.)
There may be some questions about the 2021 number, because data collection occurred during the pandemic, when reaching survey respondents was difficult. The challenge around data collection remains the biggest unanswered question about the 2020 decennial census. Just how reliable was the tally?
But the trend of declining immigration numbers began long before the pandemic started. The net international migration figures have been falling every year since 2016. So even though the pandemic has almost certainly played a role in the last few years, policy changes also seem to have had an impact.
And all those declines since 2016 mean there would have been millions more immigrants in the country today if migration had kept at a steady pace.
The big story out of the 2020 census was slow population growth. The last decade had one of the slowest rates of growth for any decade in U.S. history. And behind the slow growth was a declining birth rate, coupled with slower immigration. Add in longtime workers’ opting out of the workforce and you have the makings of an economic problem.
When you look at the kinds of jobs foreign-born workers tend to fill, you can see some of the industries that have taken hits in the pandemic.
Foreign-born workers, for instance, are more likely to work in service jobs than native-born citizens. Among the foreign-born, 21 percent work in the service industry, compared to 14 percent of the native-born population, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Preparing and serving food, along with building and grounds maintenance, are examples of jobs for which the differences between the two population groups are notable.
Natural resource extraction and construction also over-index for foreign-born workers — 14 percent of foreign-born workers, compared to 8 percent of native-born workers.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean foreign-born workers dominate those fields, but if you remove enough immigrants from the labor pool, you are more likely to have shortages in them. That means employers are probably going to have to look harder to find good candidates.
And then there is the question of wages.
Pay is another area to keep in mind as the number of immigrants declines. First, worker shortages tend to mean higher pay for employees, which is simple supply and demand. But beyond that, foreign-born workers tend to earn less than their native-born counterparts.
Median weekly earnings for foreign-born workers were about $885 a week in 2020, compared to $1,000 a week for native-born workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
There are several possible reasons. Foreign-born workers tend to have lower levels of education than native-born workers, and the jobs they tend to get (in the service professions, in particular) tend to pay less.
Regardless of the reasons, however, or whether the wage differences are fair, the reality is that foreign-born workers earn less. When you remove enough of them from the labor force, wages are likely to rise.
That's not the only force behind rising inflation — there are many things — but it plays a role. And that's the larger point in all these data and the immigration decline.
The pandemic has caused major disruptions to the U.S. economy in a long list of areas. Many workers are re-examining the courses of their lives and trying to chart new ones. Supply chain issues have wreaked havoc. And the sheer uncertainty around the coronavirus and the "return to normal" has left businesses and investors playing a perpetual game of "let's see what things look like next month."
But the drop in immigration and the workers it provides has played a role. And as the stories about worker shortages continue, the political discussions around immigration may be in for an adjustment in the next few election cycles.
Levesque, then 19 years old, poses for a portrait on the campus of Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, N.H., on June 21, 2018. (photo: Erin Clark/Boston Globe/Getty Images)
Cassie Levesque wants to abolish a centuries-old practice. Even in free-thinking New Hampshire, her campaign is proving a hard sell.
Levesque was hopeful but still unsure of her bill’s chances. All the Democrats on the committee had pledged their support for her bill. But the majority of Republicans hadn’t shown their hand.
Levesque had worked for this day for a long time. In 2017, as a part of a Girl Scout project, she lobbied the New Hampshire legislature to act against child marriage. She was 17, old enough to marry in her state, but not old enough to vote. A year later, Levesque, by then a college freshman, stood next to Gov. Chris Sununu as he signed a law raising New Hampshire’s minimum marriage age to 16 — up from 13 for girls and 14 for boys. “Cassie… really enlightened, I think, the entire state,” the governor said. But to Levesque, the new law was a disappointing compromise. She wanted New Hampshire to become the first state to raise its minimum marriage age to 18, with no exceptions.
With unfinished business, Levesque won a seat in the state legislature later that same year, becoming the youngest lawmaker in the Capitol — and also a burgeoning national voice in a movement that was just getting traction.
In 2017, all 50 states allowed minors to marry in some cases. Since 2018, six states have banned all marriages before 18: Delaware and New Jersey in 2018, Pennsylvania and Minnesota in 2020, Rhode Island and New York in 2021. Other states have recently tightened permissive child marriage laws, raising ages and adding some safeguards. But most states still allow teens to marry at 16 or 17 if parents and a judge consent. Some allow 14- or 15-year-olds to marry. Nine states still have no minimum marriage age at all, including liberal states such as California — where opponents of ending child marriage include civil libertarians on the left as well as family-first conservatives.
Though fewer minors marry in the U.S. than in the past, child marriage still happens here. The U.S. Census’ American Community Survey estimated that there were nearly 88,000 married teens ages 15 to 17 nationwide in 2019. An April 2021 study by the activist group Unchained At Last, funded by the Gates Foundation, estimated that 297,000 minors were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018, and that 60,000 of them were under their state’s age of sexual consent.
“A hundred years ago, women were still getting married young,” said Levesque. “Now we understand that kids need to be kids. They need to be able to grow up, because if they’re thrown right into adulthood, they tend to sink versus swim.”
Levesque and other anti-child-marriage activists argue that too many parents and grooms coerce girls into marriage, for reasons ranging from patriarchal cultural traditions to exploitation. The typical American child marriage isn’t a Romeo-and-Juliet story of teenagers in love, they say; more than 80 percent involve a girl under 18 marrying an adult, often someone several years older. Child marriage, they warn, undermines rape laws. Once child brides are trapped in a coercive marriage, it’s hard for them to escape; minors often find it hard to obtain a divorce, advocates say, and often can’t get into women’s shelters.
“It’s not just the 16-, 17-year-old-puppy love,” said Levesque. “It’s the 16-year-old marrying the 20-something-plus-year-old who is a family friend from a different country, who’s going to take them, and then they’ll be gone.”
Throughout her three years in the legislature, Levesque has advanced arguments like this from her seat on the Children and Family Law Committee. In February 2021, she rallied 13 child-marriage opponents to testify via Zoom, including five child-marriage survivors from states including California, Texas and Maryland (though not New Hampshire), who described their marriages as forced or coercive. “I was 16 when I was forced to marry while living in a cult in California,” testified one witness. “I was forced to marry a 28-year-old after an engagement of three days. … And then I was taken to the South Pacific for 2 1/2 years. They took my passport.” One advocate for banning child marriage argued that judicial review of marriage petitions is often ineffective at stopping forced weddings, because teens fearful of familial violence “have to choose between telling the truth and facing repercussion back home or lying to the court.” Another witness noted that a 2020 U.N. report found linkages between forced marriage and human trafficking.
Levesque and activists who testified in February offered statistics showing that the likelihood of divorce approaches 80 percent for those who marry before 18. Married teen mothers are less likely to return to school than unmarried teen mothers, which often means increased poverty later in life. And women who married as girls are much more likely to end up with mental-health struggles.
But as she walked into the committee room — the first time since the pandemic began that the group had convened in person — she wondered whether that testimony had made any impact on her colleagues. The fact that none of the Republican members wore masks was a sign that bipartisanship would be scarce.
As soon as the chair gaveled the meeting to order, a Republican lawmaker moved to declare Levesque’s bill “inexpedient to legislate,” New Hampshire jargon for recommending that the full House reject the bill. He didn’t offer a reason.
“I would definitely like to see this put through,” Levesque responded, quietly but firmly, “because even though the [age] 16 bill is helping, still we’re seeing a lot of marriages still happening. And this can lead to further problems down the road.”
Kim Rice, the Republican committee chair, responded. “Just so everyone knows, I did ask the committee researcher to send me data, and in 2019, there were five 17-year-olds who got married. In 2020, there was a total of zero.” It’s the only explanation for what happened next: The committee voted down the bill, 8-7, on party lines.
After the committee vote, Levesque was disappointed but undaunted. Her bill would have one more chance: a vote by the entire New Hampshire House. “I presented them with numerous facts, and they still didn’t change their minds,” she said of the committee’s Republicans. The child-marriage numbers Rice cited didn’t faze her. “It’s happening, whether we like it or not,” Levesque said, “and five is way too many.”
Levesque was 15 and imagining a career in photography when she first heard about child marriage. A lot of women in her family had married young, so her mother had raised her to be independent and self-supporting instead. “I was the person outside of politics who was just like, ‘Down with the patriarchy,’” she recalls. “I was taught there’s not always going to be someone to advocate for me, so I have to advocate for myself.”
Then, at a 2015 conference for high-school Girl Scouts in Rhode Island, Levesque heard presenters from UNICEF USA talk about gender inequality, child marriage and human trafficking. The message that girls in trouble needed other girls to advocate for them resonated with Levesque. Back home in New Hampshire, she looked up her state’s laws and was appalled to learn that girls as young as 13 could be married there. She asked state representatives she’d met through Girl Scouts to sponsor a bill raising the marriage age to 18.
Soon, Levesque was lobbying legislators at the state capitol in Concord. “She was very, very shy,” recalls former state Rep. Jackie Cilley, a Democrat who represented Levesque’s hometown of Barrington, “but this is an issue that really had her heart and soul. She pushed through that challenge, speaking to groups, to committee hearings.”
At first, Cilley was incredulous that 13-year-old girls could marry in New Hampshire — but once she confirmed that Levesque was right, Cilley and other sponsors brought a bill to raise the minimum marriage age to 18 before the state House in early 2017. It would’ve been the nation’s first, and opposition emerged. Some Republican legislators argued that 17-year-olds joining the military should be able to marry their pregnant girlfriends. The bill failed on a 179-168 vote, with all Republicans and 18 Democrats voting no.
The vote left Levesque surprised, but wiser. “We all thought it was a pretty easy bill,” she recalled. “It was just fixing an old law that needed to be changed.” The defeat taught her a lesson about politics. “It’s not going to be all straightforward,” she said. “It’s going to be difficult.”
But thanks to Levesque, the once-obscure issue of child marriage got a burst of national attention. A Boston TV report showed Levesque, wearing her badge-adorned scouting vest, making a succinct case for the bill. It was a sharp contrast with the dismissiveness of a then-representative who said he didn’t want to change a century-old law because of “a request from a minor doing a Girl Scout project.” “You’ve made a very good point!” Levesque recalls thinking. “I’m still a kid!” — but still of legal age to marry. It was a ripe target for comedian Samantha Bee, who mocked the state rep on her TBS show Full Frontal.
As Levesque’s activism grew, her grandmother confided in her about her experience as a child bride. “She never shared about it with her children,” Levesque said. Born in 1927, her grandmother had married a Navy sailor at age 16 to escape living with an uncle who molested her. But her husband became emotionally abusive. Returning from deployments to Hawaii, he’d brag about his many infidelities. She left him when she was 18 and later remarried. “I want to tell you the story about it,’” Levesque recalls her grandmother saying. “She wanted it to be heard.” Levesque now tells her grandmother’s story in hearings about her bill.
In 2018, Cilley proposed compromise bills to raise New Hampshire’s minimum marriage age to 16 and to require judges to grant marriages involving 16-to-17-year-olds only “upon clear and convincing evidence” that it was in the minor’s best interest. Sununu endorsed the bills, and they passed easily. “I was a little bit disappointed,” Levesque said of the compromise, “but it’s a stepping stone toward the right direction.” Levesque brought her grandmother with her to the signing ceremony.
Around the same time, Cilley was retiring, so local Democrats asked Levesque to run for state representative in the multi-member district representing Barrington, her hometown. “We need younger people who are bolder,” said state Rep. Ellen Read, a Democrat from nearby Newmarket who helped recruit Levesque to run. “We really need people who are willing to fight for the right thing, not necessarily what is in their best interest career-wise. Cassie has shown she’s willing to stand up and fight for something, even if it upsets people.”
Levesque paid the $2 filing fee with two Susan B. Anthony dollar coins. She ran on addressing water-quality problems and representing small-town businesses — a good fit for Barrington, a rural town known for the 152-year-old Calef’s Country Store. “The first time that I ever voted was the time that I voted for myself,” she said.
In a four-person race for two seats, Levesque came in first, defeating two Republicans in their 60s, an Air Force veteran and a library trustee. “I’m very young,” she explains, “so I wasn’t the typical politician most people think of.”
Child marriage has existed throughout American history. Though it has declined in recent decades, especially as the stigma has lessened around unwed motherhood, it has never completely disappeared, said Nicholas Syrett, author of the 2016 book American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States.
“It has never been a norm, but there have always been a significant number of people who have married as minors,” said Syrett. In 1960, 6.6 percent of American girls aged 15 to 17 were married; in 2010, only 0.4 percent were, according to Census figures cited in Syrett’s book. “The stigma around illegitimacy and unwed motherhood really declined.”
But even that small percentage represents a surprisingly high number of people. Unchained At Last’s study, based on full marriage-license data from 32 states and partial data from 12 more, confirmed that at least 232,474 children married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018. The study found that the number of minors marrying has decreased nearly every year, from about 20,000 in 2002 to about 2,500 in 2018.
“People who object to banning child marriage believe a baby will be better off if its parents are married,” Syrett said. “There’s not much evidence to suggest that’s true, if the parents are poor and minors to begin with.” Quite the contrary, Syrett adds: “From the early 20th century onward, the younger you get married, the more likely you are to get divorced.”
The politics of child marriage don’t map neatly onto our partisan divides. In some states, child-marriage bans have passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. In Pennsylvania, a Republican-sponsored law prohibiting marriage before age 18 passed the Republican legislature unanimously in 2020. In Minnesota that same year, a Democrat-sponsored child-marriage law passed the GOP-controlled Senate without opposition.
But in New Hampshire and some other states, debate about child-marriage bans does seem to have a partisan edge. Democrats support a ban, concerned about exploitation of girls, while Republicans see the bans as government overreach into parents’ and teens’ decisions. Conservative legislators in states such as Louisiana and Idaho — which each recorded about 5,100 marriages involving minors between 2010 and 2018 — have refused to pass similar bans, saying pregnant teens shouldn’t be kept from marrying. Instead, the two states, which had no minimum marriage age four years ago, have since set it at 16.
New Jersey’s first attempt to ban child marriage failed in 2017, when then-Gov. Chris Christie vetoed a Republican-sponsored bill, saying it “does not comport with the sensibilities and, in some cases, the religious customs, of the people of this State.” (He didn’t specify which religious customs.) Since New Jersey allows pregnant girls to get an abortion without parental consent or notification, Christie also argued, banning 16- and 17-year-olds from marrying was “disingenuous” and an “inconsistency in logic.” In 2018, the reintroduced child-marriage ban passed the state House, 59-0, and the Senate, 30-5, despite opposition from members of Orthodox Jewish communities who wanted a religious exemption. Christie’s successor, Democrat Phil Murphy, signed it into law.
The issue breaks down differently at the federal level. Though the U.S. State Department declared child marriage a human-rights violation in 2016, U.S. immigration law includes no minimum age for visa petitions involving marriages. A 2019 U.S. Senate report found that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had approved 8,686 visa petitions involving minor spouses and fiancées from 2007 to 2017. (Mexican nationals made up 40 percent of the approved beneficiaries. Middle Eastern nationals, mostly from Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan and Yemen, had the highest approval rates for petitions.) In Congress, it is conservative Republicans who carry the anti-child marriage banner. In 2019, Republican U.S. Sens. Ron Johnson, Joni Ernst and Tom Cotton proposed a bill to require both parties in a spousal visa to be 18.
In a few states, though, opposition to banning child marriage comes from the left. In California, a bill to raise the marriage age to 18 failed in 2017 after state chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood opposed it; the ACLU argued that the bill “unnecessarily and unduly intrudes on the fundamental rights of marriage without sufficient cause.” A compromise law, signed in 2018, requires judges to look for evidence of coercion before granting a marriage license to a minor.
California is one of nine states with no minimum marriage age. Assemblymember Cottie Petrie-Norris, a Democrat from Laguna Beach, wants to change that. “In a state where we like to think of ourselves as setting the trend lines, this is a place where we’re just failing,” she said. She plans to introduce this year a new bill to ban child marriage.
Petrie-Norris said some abortion-rights supporters are concerned that a child-marriage ban could become a slippery slope affecting reproductive rights; California is one 11 states with no parental involvement in minors’ abortions. “I think these are fundamentally different issues,” she said. “We have minimum ages to smoke cigarettes, drive a car and buy alcohol. None of that has any implication for the right to access reproductive health care in my mind.”
The California debate is stymied by a lack of baseline facts. It’s one of six states that provided no marriage-license data to Unchained At Last for its 2021 study. The California Department of Public Health, responding to a reporting requirement in the 2018 law, counts 17 marriages of minors statewide in 2019 and 17 in 2020 — including two men, ages 25 and 22, marrying 15-year-old girls. Petrie-Norris said she’s struggling to reconcile those double-digit figures with the U.S. Census American Community Survey estimate that 12,000 married minors ages 15 to 17 lived in California in 2019. “I worry it’s more likely something falling through the cracks with respect to reporting,” she said.
In New Hampshire, too, a debate about the prevalence of child marriage is part of the controversy. State records show that 407 minors married in New Hampshire between 1995 and 2021. Eighty percent were girls marrying men 18 years or older. But even before the 2018 law raised the minimum marriage age to 16, child marriage in New Hampshire was on the decline. Annual numbers of girls marrying in the state have fallen from about 35 in 1995 to five each in 2019 and 2021. Now, opponents of reform argue that child marriage has become too rare to merit banning.
“I don’t think it’s a huge problem in New Hampshire,” said Rice, the Republican chair of New Hampshire’s Children and Family Law Committee.
Rice defends the right of older teens to marry. “If a 17-year-old gets pregnant and they decide to get married, that’s between them and their parents.” Indeed, activists’ testimony about teen marriages’ high failure rates seems only to have hardened Rice’s opposition to a ban. “I don’t want to put so much negativity on marriage,” said Rice, who said at the February committee hearing that she married at 19. “I don’t want to tell someone who got married at 17 that you’re doomed to fail. That’s not the attitude to have towards marriage. That’s probably why everybody gets divorced these days.”
Levesque has heard such arguments before. “A couple of representatives have said, ‘I got married young, and I’m still married to them, and it was a good marriage,’” said Levesque. “And I said, ‘That’s really great, [but you] are the 20 percent, versus the 80 percent who end up in situations that they wish could’ve been stopped.”
In late September, a week after the disappointing committee vote, Levesque took a train to Boston to join a protest against child marriage organized by Unchained At Last. She donned a white bridal gown, draped chains on her wrists, and duct-taped an X over her mouth. She was one of a dozen child-marriage opponents dressed in white who marched from Boston Common uphill to the Massachusetts State House. Lesvesque hoped that passing a ban in Massachusetts might pressure her own legislature to follow suit.
The protest brides gathered on the steps in front of the gold-domed building. Levesque held a sign: “Why is child marriage still legal in MA?” A driver passing by on Beacon Street honked in support of the protest, then another.
Fraidy Reiss, executive director of the anti-child-marriage group Unchained At Last, led the protest through a white-and-red megaphone.
“There are 44 states in this great country that still allow marriage under the age of 18,” Reiss said. “Is that OK?”
“NO!” shouted the brides.
This year, Massachusetts may become the seventh state to ban child marriage. Rep. Kay Khan, the bill’s author, has lined up two-thirds of Massachusetts’ senators and House members as co-sponsors. Massachusetts has no minimum age of marriage if parents and a judge consent. Khan said 1,231 minors, some as young as 14, were married in Massachusetts between 2000 and 2016; 84 percent were girls marrying men, as opposed to boys and girls marrying someone their own age. Between July 2016 and June 2021, state probate court records show, judges fielded 130 more applications for marriages of minors.
“Once a marriage contract is signed, it’s very difficult to get out of,” Khan, also dressed in white, said at the rally. “If she’s under 18, it’s very difficult to find a lawyer, very difficult to go to court and ask for help.”
Khan’s effort in Massachusetts seems to be moving forward, even as Levesque’s in New Hampshire has stalled.
“Cassie is determined,” said Reiss, the national activist, after the rally. “No matter how hard New Hampshire makes it, she’s determined to end child marriage. I’ll be honest: I gave up on New Hampshire years ago. But thank goodness we have Cassie, who has not given up.”
Reiss said Unchained At Last’s next goal is to convince other Northeastern states to join Rhode Island in banning child marriage. “Our strategy is going to be, get every state around New Hampshire to end child marriage, and then tell New Hampshire, ‘Now do you want to become the destination site for child marriage?’” said Reiss. “Because guess where parents are going to start taking their children to force them to marry? New Hampshire.”
Levesque said her state often waits to see how liberal reforms go in neighboring Massachusetts, Vermont or Maine before adopting them. So, for now, she’s giving advice to Girl Scouts in Maine and California who want to ban child marriage in their states.
Meanwhile, in her three years in the 400-member New Hampshire House of Representatives, Levesque has emerged as an advocate for abortion rights and for raising the state minimum wage from the current $7.25 an hour to $15. “She’s not afraid to do the right thing,” said Ellen Read, the fellow legislator who helped recruit Levesque to run. “Her demeanor is quiet, and she’s very sweet, but when it comes to a bill, she’s all business.”
This past Wednesday, Levesque stood to address her colleagues and make one last argument for her bill. The New Hampshire House, seeking a bigger space than its Capitol chambers amid the Covid-19 Omicron outbreak, had convened in an expo center at a Manchester hotel. Wearing a black plaid coat over a white shirt with black polka dots, Levesque spoke through a black mask.
“Not once has anyone, or any organization, presented data to support the opinion that child marriage has any benefits to children,” said Levesque, pushing her soft voice to maximum volume. “Six states have seen the harm that child marriages do and made the decision to end child marriage. So I ask you, ‘Why can’t we?’”
Kim Rice, the Republican committee chair, spoke next to defend the Republicans’ recommendation to reject the bill. The 10 marriages of 17-year-olds in New Hampshire in the past three years, Rice argued, “were informed decisions made between the parents, judges and [teens].” Levesque’s bill, Rice added, is “trying to fix a problem that doesn’t exist in New Hampshire.”
The House voted Levesque’s bill down, 192-165. But Levesque said she isn’t done.
Levesque plans to run for a third term in 2022, then try again to ban child marriage in 2023. As older legislators retire, she said, she’ll have another chance to press her arguments. “I’m going to talk to those that are opposed the bill and see why,” she said. If it’s still about wanting to let teen moms marry young, she’ll show them her research about child marriages’ frequent harms and high failure rates. “I’ve shown,” Levesque said, “why that argument is not really a great answer anymore.”
A 'Global Day of Action' protest on the sidelines of the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, on Nov. 6, 2021. (photo: Emily Macinnes/Bloomberg)
A jump in coal-fired power helped drive the increase, according to a report from the Rhodium Group.
A 17 percent surge in coal-fired electricity helped drive an overall increase of 6.2 percent in greenhouse gas emissions compared with the previous year, according to an analysis published Monday by the Rhodium Group. While emissions remained below pre-pandemic levels, it marked the first annual increase in reliance on the nation’s dirtiest fossil fuel since 2014, the independent research firm said.
The rise in the nation’s emissions, which many experts anticipate will continue this year, is a sign of an economy on the mend. But it also signals a potentially ominous climate reality: The United States is not yet emerging from the coronavirus pandemic with a greener economy, making it that much harder for Biden to deliver on his pledge to cut the nation’s emissions in half by 2030.
“In an ideal world, we want the economy to rebound, but not the emissions,” Kate Larsen, a co-author of the analysis who leads Rhodium’s international energy and climate research, said in an interview.
Larsen added that the surge in coal generation was “almost entirely due to high natural gas prices” as oil and gas producers curbed new production in response to lower global demand because of pandemic lockdowns. “Emissions from our power sector were pretty much at the whim of energy markets,” she said.
The nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions — transportation — also saw the steepest rebound during 2021, rising 10 percent over the previous year, Rhodium found. The arrival of coronavirus vaccines and the nation’s fitful efforts to emerge from the pandemic meant more Americans traveled on roads and in the skies than in 2020. But road freight was the only mode of transportation that rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, as thousands of diesel-powered trucks rumbled along the nation’s highways to deliver consumer goods.
Last spring, Biden vowed to launch an all-of-government effort to cut U.S. carbon pollution 50 to 52 percent by 2030, compared with 2005 levels, and to put the nation on track to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
“We’re going to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by well over a gigaton by 2030, while making it more affordable for consumers to save on their own energy bills with tax credits for things like installing solar panels, weatherizing their homes, lowering energy prices,” Biden told fellow world leaders at a United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in November.
He promised to electrify school bus fleets, increase tax credits for electric vehicles, ramp up construction of solar panels and wind turbines and incentivize cleaner manufacturing — all while creating well-paying union jobs.
“We’ll demonstrate to the world the United States is not only back at the table but hopefully leading by the power of our example,” he said.
Biden used his executive authority during his first year in office to jump-start an array of climate policies, including proposing tougher tailpipe emissions standards for new cars and requiring the federal government to become carbon neutral by 2050. But a major piece of his climate agenda is stalled on Capitol Hill, where Democrats are still struggling to pass their roughly $1.75 trillion climate and social spending bill.
The Build Back Better Act contains a historic $555 billion package of tax credits, grants and other policies aimed at reducing emissions and boosting clean energy. But Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) said in late December that he could not support the legislation, potentially dooming its chances in the Senate.
John Podesta, who served as a counselor to President Barack Obama and chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, said that without Build Back Better, it will be impossible to meet Biden’s goal of halving U.S. emissions by 2030.
“I’ve been a proponent of executive action, particularly in the face of Republican opposition, going back to Clinton. And I certainly would urge them to use every tool they have. But without these investments, you just can’t get the job done,” said Podesta, who is also the founder of the Center for American Progress and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post.
Earth has warmed roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times, and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other potent gases, such as methane, have continued to rise. Two weeks of international talks last fall in Glasgow led to promises to reduce methane emissions, halt deforestation and stop the funding of coal power, but even then the U.N. Environment Program reported that the Earth remains on track to warm about 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century — though other analyses suggested that that number could drop if countries took swift action to fulfill their long-term pledges.
Monday’s findings from Rhodium are in line with what other researchers have found: that a deadly global pandemic and a massive economic downturn have done little to slow the accumulation of planet-warming gases in the atmosphere.
Late last year, a collection of scientists from 70 institutions on five continents detailed how the world’s greenhouse gas emissions were rapidly rebounding after a brief slump during the height of the pandemic in 2020.
The Global Carbon Budget report, released in the middle of the U.N. climate talks in Glasgow, said the world has only about 11 years of burning fossil fuels at the current rate if it hopes to hit the most ambitious goal of the Paris climate agreement: to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
But an initial drop in emissions that came in 2020 when the covid-19 pandemic shuttered factories, grounded planes and hindered economic activity across the globe proved to be little more than a blip on the world’s trajectory toward more warming.
One twist from 2021 that is unlikely to last, at least in the United States, is the sharp rise in burning coal for electricity, researchers said. Coal power has steadily declined over the past decade and now accounts for only about 19 percent of U.S. electricity generation, half that of natural gas, according to the Energy Information Administration.
“Clearly, coal use in the U.S. in the long term is going down,” said Corinne Le Quéré, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia who was not involved with the Rhodium report. “The coal power stations are very old, and it would cost a lot of money to invest in them to put them up to shape. And that’s not the direction of travel because of climate policies.”
Rob Jackson, a professor at Stanford University and chair of the Global Carbon Project, said the United States, which has generated more greenhouse gases than any other country in history, must do more to flatten the curve of its emissions trajectory before the next U.N. climate summit in Egypt in November.
Biden’s credibility on the world stage depends on it, he said.
“Other countries will be looking at what commitments we have made,” Jackson said, adding that “they will look at us and say we’re not putting our money where our mouth is.”
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