A key piece of information in Romm’s report is that Sinema wants more money for drought relief, given that the Southwest is facing a 20-year megadrought partly driven by human-caused climate change. That is, she is making the bill even more green in some ways, focusing on climate resilience, which has to be a part of any climate strategy.

The bill isn’t perfect, but the $369 billion it devotes to promoting green energy and green transportation is the largest sum ever set aside for that purpose by any government in history. Early estimates are that it will reduce US carbon emissions by 37% – 40% by 2030, taking us an important distance toward President Joe Biden’s goal of reducing carbon dioxide output in the US by 50% over 2006 levels by that year.

The bill can now be submitted to the Senate parliamentarian to ensure that it is such that it can be passed by budget reconciliation, a method that allows a majority vote and sidesteps the usual requirement of 60 votes in the Senate. The parliamentarian is expected to give this bill the nod, and it may begin being debated in the Senate as early as Saturday. The Senate Democrats can pass it with the help of Vice President Kamala Harris, who as president of the Senate can break ties. The Democrats have 50 seats out of the 100 in the Senate.

It is a sad commentary that the Republican Party is so dedicated to wrecking planet earth that not a single one of its senators will vote for this bill.

To underline the importance of the IRA, Jesse D. Jenkins at Princeton University’s Zero-carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Laboratory (ZERO Lab) led a team of scholars from other institutions in evaluating the impact of the IRA on green energy, producing the study, “The Climate and Energy Impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.”

h/t to Ryan Kennedy at PV Magazine for tipping me to the ZERO Labs report; his analysis is well worth reading.

As for the fighting inflation moniker, Jenkins and his team find that it is perfectly justified, writing, “Enacting the Inflation Reduction Act would lower annual U.S. energy expenditures by at least 4% in 2030, a savings of nearly $50 billion dollars per year for households, businesses and industry.”

They point out, “That translates into hundreds of dollars in annual energy cost savings for U.S. households.”

ZERO Labs found that the act will leverage the $369 bn. government investment to “drive nearly $3.5 trillion in cumulative capital investment in new American energy supply infrastructure over the next decade (2023-2032).” Although, unfortunately Manchin managed to put in money for boondoggles like carbon capture, the scientists are clear that the the bill would only drive about $20 bn of fossil fuel industry investments.

They are clear, however, that by far the biggest impact on investments of the bill would be felt by the wind and solar industries. It would goose private investment in those two to $321 billion in 2030. Under current policy and conditions, we would only have seen $177 bn. invested in those sectors by 2030, so this bill acts to almost double that.

The report concludes that the IRA will galvanize “record-setting growth” in wind and solar. In 2020, the US added 15 gigawatts (GW) of wind capacity and 10 GW of utility-scale solar. By 2030, with this piece of legislation passed as an Act, we will be adding 49 GW of solar every year by 2030, nearly five times the 2020 pace, as Ryan also underlines.

Then they let the real kicker drop, saying, “with solar growth rates increasing thereafter.” 50 new gigawatts of solar a year is only the beginning!

We’ll see solar outstrip wind as time goes on and panels become more efficient and cheaper, since there just is so much energy to be had from the sun’s rays. Energy experts have long said that the medium and long-term future belongs to solar.

Courtesy ZERO Labs

Moreover, the ZERO Lab team says, “The Act will drive substantial additional investments by households and businesses on the demand side of the energy system, including purchases of more efficient and electric vehicles, appliances, heating systems, and industrial process.”

The report cautions that its results do not capture the effect of the “tens of billions of dollars in grants, tax credits and loan programs,” aiding in establishing solar and wind component factories, parts, batteries and essential minerals, as well as electric vehicles.

That means that the $321 billion of new investments in wind and solar in 2030 doesn’t even count all these other things that the bill will turbocharge. This is huge, folks.

Although the IRA has some provisions that seem favorable to Big Oil, there are some poison pills in that regard. It increases the fees and royalties oil companies must pay for drilling in federal territories or waters, which they say may actually reduce future oil production. Moreover, there are fees on methane production. Since most oil and gas drilling produces a lot of methane, this provision could also disadvantage the fossil fuel sector.

As for green energy and transportation, ZERO Labs reports,

“The Act contains robust support for the development of American manufacturing of solar, wind, battery and electric vehicle components and assembly as well as critical minerals processing. The bill ties bonus tax incentives for clean electricity and credits for consumer clean vehicles purchases to domestic content sourcing standards, providing strong demand for U.S. materials and manufacturing. It also provides $2 billion in grants and $30 billion in loans to retool American auto manufacturing to produce clean vehicles and $37 billion in new tax credits to spur investment in America’s capacity to produce and assemble wind and solar PV components, batteries and clean vehicles, and process critical minerals.”

Note that China already has all those things, which the US now either lacks or of which it only has the rudiments. This bill is the last best hope for the US to remain a significant industrial economy and to compete with China in the rest of this century.

And look, the IRA is not the Green New Deal, but it also doesn’t ignore the needs of the working class. Zero Labs notes that:

“A variety of programs will direct funding to cut pollution in low-income communities and areas burdened by the worst air pollution in the country. This includes $3 billion for block grants for community-led environmental and climate justice projects and more than $4 billion in funds to reduce air pollution at America’s ports, replace dirty heavy duty vehicles like garbage trucks and city buses with zero-emissions vehicles, and improve interior air quality in schools in low-income communities.”

There is also money for equitable access to clean technologies, earmarking $27 bn. to greenhouse gas reduction and devoting over half of this sum “to deploy clean energy and pollution-reducing technologies in low-income and disadvantaged communities and to establish ‘green banks’ to provide financial assistance for clean energy projects benefiting disadvantaged communities.”

Native and Hawaiian communities get help with climate resilience. There are even special tax rebates for low- and middle-income families who can’t profit from other tax credits.

Biden is aiming for 30 gigawatts of offshore wind energy by 2030. A green light had already been given for offshore wind installations off Massachusetts.

It is the biggest lease auction in history, affecting 480,000 acres in the triangular area of recessed coastline called a “bight.” Offshore wind could generate all of America’s electricity needs and then some if it were fully developed. The Trump administration did nothing to promote this source of clean electricity. Trump said ludicrous things like that wind turbines cause cancer. It is actually listening to Trump that causes cancer.

An important point that should not be missed is that these are federal leases, but New York state has its own ambitious plans for offshore wind, as David Winzelburg of the Long Island Business News points out.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul welcomed the Biden plan, saying, “Here in New York, we are already living with the effects of climate change through extreme weather that pose a direct threat to our way of life. We must chart an ambitious path toward a cleaner energy economy now more than ever, and today’s milestone further highlights New York’s commitment to reaching its offshore wind goals.”

He writes that Hochul has already announced state plans for an “offshore wind transmission network.” The Master Plan 2.0 Deep Water covers five huge offshore wind facilities that will generate 4.3 gigawatts of energy, which would supply 3 million homes in the Empire State. The New York State plan will also support nearly 7,000 jobs and generate some $12 billion in revenue.

Even New York City is getting into the action, according to Dan Avery at Architectural Digest. The city has its own offshore wind farm plans. Moreover, there are plans for local manufacturing of the turbines, generating American jobs. Avery writes, “Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams boasted the infrastructure was already in place to create wind manufacturing hubs at Brooklyn Navy Yard, South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, and the Red Hook Container Terminal.” There are plans to ensure that 40% of the jobs are directed at women, minorities and “environmental justice communities.” New construction facilities and ports will likely also be developed.

All this, mind you, is on top of the gains of the federal Biden-Harris plan.

Onshore wind is also making great progress, with the largest wind facility in the Americas having just gone operational in New Mexico.

The United States is backward in the area of offshore wind, but other industrialized countries have gone into it in a big way.

Scotland now gets virtually all of its electricity from renewables, mostly wind. That country has also innovated, and is building the world’s largest fixed-bottom wind farm. This one Seagreen wind farm will generate 1,1 gigawatts. Likewise, Scotland is putting in floating wind farms in areas where the sea is too deep for fixed towers. Scotland is planning for 10 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.

The good thing is that even offshore wind farms, with their construction hurdles, can be built fairly quickly, in as little as 18 months.

The Covid-19 pandemic initially cut 22 million jobs out of the economy, only a little more than half of which have come back. Unemployment is at record highs for recent decades. Businesses can’t or won’t put all those people back to work, just as businesses did not get us out of the Great Depression. The federal government did that, just as John Maynard Keynes theorized was necessary.

In the past decade, the US has struggled along with the weakest recovery from a major economic downturn in modern history. The white working class has been so badly hit that many of those who never again found employment turned to opioids and died in their fifties and sixties, causing an unprecedented fall in their life expectancy. Some of the tiny minority (10 percent?) of the white workers who voted for Trump after having voted for Obama fell into that category of the never-really-recovered. Sure, some of them voted Trump over racism, but a weak economy promotes racial and ethnic divisions. If you have a pie that keeps getting bigger, you are more willing to share. If your pie is shrinking, you start resenting anyone else slicing off a piece, which reduces your ultimate share. Austerity, the reduction of government expenditure, is inexorably racialized in its effects. The denial of services (when you cut taxes and spending, you are really just cutting government services to people) to the population hits minorities and the less well off harder.

Congress controls the purse strings, and the Republican-dominated Congress pursued austerity from the advent of the astro-turfed and Koch-funded Tea Party in 2010. By 2014, government spending had fallen faster than at any time since the end of the Korean War. An artificial “debt ceiling” kept government spending so low that it hurt the growth of the gross domestic product. Tax cuts for the wealthy under Bush, maintained by Obama to avoid hurting the private sector during crisis, and then massively expanded under Trump, meant that the top 0.1 percent racked up a mountain of profits through monopoly practices, but the bottom half of the economy was starved of any infusion of cash and their real wages were kept from growing. They were the first generation not to get better off than their parents in post WW II America.

The economic crash of 2008-2009 was caused by all the pet projects of the Republican Party, especially deregulation. By letting Wall Street firms sell to their customers derivatives that bundled bad mortgages together, without informing investors of the hazards, the Bush administration set the stage for for the crash. Regulation is actually good. Alan Greenspan, the head of the Federal Reserve, had his world rocked by the peculation inside the big investment firms. I couldn’t imagine, he said, that an executive would steal from his own firm. Greenspan had a limited imagination, as do conservatives in general. Conservatism imagines entrepreneurs as all heroes and those of modest means as lazy couch potatoes. Certainly building a company can be heroic. But it can also be a form of theft, as with the Trumps. By the way, no one has ever legislated any significant financial or regulatory changes that might stop another such crash.

Biden has accepted the findings of a new generation of progressive economists who believe in anti-austerity. The way you make sure that people at the bottom of society economically are able to better themselves is that you use the government to pump money into the bottom half of the economy. Austerity is driven by a fear of inflation. Anti-austerity is driven by a fear of deflation for the working and middle classes.

Actually, the Republicans in Congress who did not vote for the $1.9 trillion Biden-Harris economic stimulus voted under Trump for twice as much stimulus spending. Even they don’t really believe in austerity any more.

Most of the benefit of the Trump tax cuts went to the wealthy and super-wealthy. Most of the benefits of the Biden stimulus are projected to go to workers.

The Biden administration has taken a historic step. But many of the provisions in the bill that passed today are temporary, including expanded the child tax credits. If the really, really big stimulus works well, and if the public is grateful enough and actually votes in the midterms, and if the Republicans fail in their efforts at massive voter suppression, Biden could get the sort of Congress (as with Clinton in 1998), that would allow him to make some of these anti-austerity measures permanent. And that could change the economic trajectory of America back away from growing plutocracy toward a society where workers have a fighting chance to improve their life chances and those of their children.

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Bonus Video:

House Passes $1.9 Trillion Covid Relief Bill With Stimulus Checks | Katy Tur | MSNBC

While some moderates wouldn’t even commit to eliminating the Senate’s filibuster rule before the election, the last two months of Trump-led authoritarian buffoonery and homicidal COVID dithering should have underscored the need for Democrats to take immediate, radical action on multiple fronts to shore up American democracy. And yesterday’s storming and occupation of the Capitol building by white nationalist insurrectionists at the behest of the treasonous President Trump really should put the whole debate to rest.

In the fall, when President Trump trailed many public opinion polls by 10 points or more and it looked like Democrats could net 6 seats in the Senate, partisans wanted payback for a decade of mirthless Republican hardball: eliminate the Senate’s filibuster rule, add seats to the Supreme Court, invite new left-leaning states into the union and more, all in the service of pursuing an aggressive progressive policy agenda and protecting it from the inevitable assault in the courts.

Such transformative plans for table-turning felt like sad delusions by the morning of November 4^th. The polls had once again underestimated Trump by several points and Democrats lost a series of winnable senate races, including in Maine, where incumbent Republican Susan Collins trounced her Democratic challenger by 9 points and outran the president there by a staggering 18 points. Those of us who had been dreaming of a long-overdue overhaul of the U.S. political system were forced to accept the overwhelming likelihood that Joe Biden would face a hostile Republican senate, achieving what he could via executive orders and whatever his relationships with senior Republicans could produce in the way of compromise legislation.

It felt like moving out of a house and into a sad little studio apartment. That melancholy should all be out the window now. The Biden administration will preside over the first unified Democratic government in a decade. And while all the pre-existing arguments for procedural escalation are still valid, the GOP has done its malevolent best over the past two months to create new ones, its leadership behaving so grotesquely that even moderates like Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D.-Ariz.) might recognize the need for retaliation.

Embed from Getty Images
“Georgia Republican House candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) arrive at a press conference in a Humvee . . . Greene has been the subject of some controversy recently due to her support for the right-wing conspiracy group QAnon. (Photo by Dustin Chambers/Getty Images).”

The threat to American democracy, before this year, was a built-in unfairness working against the country’s center-left coalition, exacerbated by the deliberate normative and legal warfare waged by the Republican Party for more than two decades. The result was a gathering crisis of democratic legitimacy, as institutions failed to translate majority sentiment into majority rule, and policy stasis at the national level so destructive that multiple looming national problems went blithely unaddressed by our elites.

Yet the situation is now even more urgent. The Republican Party is in the late stages of being conquered by dangerous, unapologetic authoritarians. These are not the faux-genteel top-down class warriors who brought us Bush v. Gore, Voter ID laws and a hard-right Supreme Court while still adhering to the rhetoric of democracy. Those people were odious, but at least they accepted the occasional defeat within the counter-majoritarian parameters of the system. The institutional GOP now belongs to aspiring tyrants like Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, unhinged conspiracy theorists like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and of course to the wastrel Trump family itself. The relatively subtle sabotage of democracy has been replaced by open warfare, and the party’s brightest stars no longer believe that Democrats have the right to govern after winning elections. They prefer autocracy to the peaceful transfer of power.

Embed from Getty Images
“President Donald Trump listens as U. S. Senate candidate Josh Hawley speaks at a rally on November 1, 2018 in Columbia, Missouri.” (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images).

Their plot to steal the election will fail, but just barely so. A handful of state and local Republican officials refused to play their role in Trump’s attempted putsch, and the critical battleground states either had Democratic governors or GOP executives who nonetheless did not want to be remembered as striking the match that lit the Reichstag Fire. What will happen in 2024 if Mar-a-Lago Republicans win those gubernatorial seats, local parties root out everyone with integrity and replace them with various replicas of the drunk lady from the Michigan hearing and Republican House and Senate majorities make it possible to steal the election on the day the Electoral Votes are counted?

Do you really want to find out? There’s only one way out of this mess, and that’s for newly-empowered Democrats to use all available legal and constitutional means to keep the Republican Party of the United States as far away from power as possible. And there is no better argument for this proposition than a simple recounting of the past two months of horror.

As the Coronavirus pandemic reached its destructive peak, the outgoing president was, rather than helping to coordinate a massive federal effort to distribute the miraculous vaccines, instead wallowing in self-pity, convinced of meritless conspiracy theories that evaporated into the courtroom air the moment they encountered even the friendly inquiries of Trump-appointed judges. Once it became clear that they couldn’t sue their way out of losing six different swing states, the president’s allies in the reactionary media and in the halls of Congress, latched onto a legally preposterous theory that Republican state legislatures could simply set aside the results of elections if they were not to their liking, and appoint their own slate of Electors.

When those same legislatures balked at the suggestion, the Keystone Coup was simply rerouted. There were the ominous firings of civilian leadership at the Defense Department, the ouster of lickspittle loyalist William Barr from the Department of Justice, the threats and pressure campaigns against state election officials in the critical swing states, the extralegal show hearings in Michigan and Pennsylvania. What about martial law? What if Vice President Mike Pence could be convinced to toss out the results during the official counting on January 6^th? What if Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger could be berated into somehow “finding” 11,000 votes for the president?

Where has this all led? Around 10,000 Americans have been dying of COVID-19 during each of the weeks that these hapless nihilists focused all of their energy on stealing the election. No one knows when or under what circumstances the lame duck president will leave the White House. He will not attend the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.

A supermajority of Republican voters now believes the election results were not just unfortunate but rigged, and they have also been turned against heretofore uncontroversial methods of voting. A white nationalist mob was whipped up to descend on the nation’s capital. After some encouragement in a sullen morning speech by the president himself, these yahoos stormed the U.S. Capitol, created an active shooter situation that menaced the entire national legislature and held our elected representatives hostage for several hours as the President of the United States dithered and law enforcement took its sweet time clearing the building.

In spite of this climate of fear and horror, which reached its apex yesterday, Democrats got lucky. Rather than doing everything in his power to save incumbent Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in Georgia, President Trump, ever the chaos agent, seemed bent on tackling them at the 1-yard line. His caterwauling about the alleged perfidy of Georgia’s Republican election officials might have convinced a meaningful sliver of the GOP electorate to sit out the runoffs, while his call for $2,000 stimulus checks somehow led Mitch McConnell to smack down a popular idea just days before Loeffler and Perdue faced the voters. The favorable national environment Democrats have enjoyed in some form since 2016 persisted into 2020 long enough to deliver the narrowest of Senate majorities.

But that all comes to an end when Biden is sworn in. The party will own whatever happens for the next two years, and if they don’t take measures to reinforce their power by making the political system itself more resilient and fair, they will have no one to blame but themselves when it all slips away in 2022. A set of reforms to do just that is now de rigeur on the activist left, including D.C. and Puerto Rico statehood and the enlargement of the U.S. Supreme Court. The most important, though, might be a new Voting Rights Act to cut off the now-inevitable state-level GOP push to eliminate things like mail balloting and to impose even more draconian restrictions on in-person voting.

They will need to move swiftly. The election cycle is merciless, and Democrats will have, at most, 18 months to save American democracy before the 2022 election cycle kicks into high gear. Especially with extraordinarily narrow Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, the party simply can’t afford a months-long debate about whether to eliminate the filibuster.

How can the moderates be convinced to dispense with the fantasy of bipartisanship and do what needs to be done? I don’t know, but how about this: their counterparts just spent two months plotting to overthrow the duly elected government of the United States while thousands of Americans a day died needlessly of a deadly virus because of the president’s incompetence. While dozens of elected Republicans indulged the president’s dangerous fantasies by delaying the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, the poisonous fruits of their collaboration with the worst president in our history got splattered all over the Capitol in the form of an appalling breach of security, an embarrassing and shameful episode that caused shock and horror around the world.

The GOP’s next act in power will be worse. Today it is half-baked insurrection. Tomorrow it will be something more coordinated, led by someone who isn’t too lazy and stupid to finish the job of destroying this democracy. There is only one way to stop it from happening, and the time to act is now or never.

Stop worrying about tit-for-tat retaliation and the hallowed norms of the “world’s greatest deliberative body.” Think about what it felt like to cower in your offices as the president’s goons tried to kill you. Do they seem like the kind of people who, if the tables were turned, would shy away from D.C. statehood because norms?

You know the answer to that question. This is an emergency. And the clock is ticking.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CBS Evening News: “Democrats secure Senate control as Warnock, Ossoff clinch Georgia runoffs”

(Globalvoices.org ) – As the four-year term of US President Donald Trump nears its end, what will the new administration mean for Syria’s dragging war and its embattled population? Although Trump officially ordered a comprehensive US withdrawal of troops from Syria over the last four years, the civil war remains an important issue for the US administration, as exemplified by its anti-terrorist missions over the last few months.

It is likely that US President-elect Joe Biden would bring new considerations to the US’ position on the conflict without imposing significant changes on the ground.

In an interview last month with Defense One, Jim Jeffrey, former US defense adviser on Syria, ruled out a potential full “US withdrawal” from Syria, despite Trump’s orders, saying, “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there.” According to Jeffrey, US activity in Syria never diminished under the Trump administration and remains prominent despite recent calls for troops reduction on the ground.

In fact, US forces extended their scope, carrying out regular anti-terrorism missions from Iraqi bases alongside Washington-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Officially, the Pentagon only granted US presence for 200 soldiers on the ground. Nonetheless, according to a New York Times report in October 2019, US forces could currently reach 900 troops in Syria alone. Amid recent policies aimed at securing territory control and combatting terrorism, it is increasingly likely that US forces on the ground will be reinforced.

An example of such operations is last month’s destruction of an ISIS camp in the Badiyah desert by a US-led aircraft from the international coalition, while some additional US military vehicles were rolled into eastern Syria. In the first week of November, 14 operations were carried out targeting terrorist groups in the area, while recent reports from Operation Inherent Resolve illustrate the necessity of maintaining a regular presence on the battlefield to combat what they described as ISIS’ still-active pockets on the ground. Large scale fighting was also recently reported between ISIS forces and pro-regime fighters near Deir ez Zor, the largest city in eastern Syria.

Perhaps last month’s announcement by US Senator Lindsey Graham and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of an oil contract between the SDF and a US oil firm will add further backing for more US deployments to Syria. In addition to spearheading operations against terrorist threats to its regional interest and allies, the Syrian war’s relevance to the US administration stems from Washington’s pressing desire to scale down Russian territorial expansion in the region, since Moscow remains the Syrian regime’s key supporter. Hence, Washington continues to back Kurdish forces against direct military confrontations involving Russian mercenaries.

Biden has yet to put forward his future Middle East policy as a campaign argument, so his military policy in Syria remains unclear. But last month, the upcoming US president noted he would keep up to 2,000 US boots in troubled parts of the Middle East, focusing mainly on “special forces” and that these forces “should not meddle in the political dynamics of the countries where they operate.” More generally, Biden said he will shape foreign policy based on “American interests.”

Biden appears aligned with the Trump administration on sanctions in Syria. In some of his pre-campaign interviews, Biden said he does not plan to modify or repeal the Caesar Act, a set of sanctions on Syria recently approved by the US Congress, and will “keep the US sanctions on the Syrian regime and the entities that deal with it in place.” Nonetheless, Biden’s advisers recently raised the possibility of exceptions on humanitarian grounds to ensure aid to “Syrians in need.”

The main difference between Trump’s and Biden’s administration regarding Syria will probably reside with human rights. Kamala Harris, the US vice president-elect, rose against Trump’s decision in 2019 to withdraw from Syria, following Turkey’s operation Peace Spring. Anthony Blinken, the future secretary of state of Biden’s administration, also shares this view. In an article for the Brooking Institute last year, he described the US’ military policy in Syria as an “error of doing too little.” He notably warned: “If the retreat from Syria announced by Trump proceeds, we will likely see the return of the Islamic State as well.”

In an interview with CBS last May, Blinken said Obama’s administration, in which he served as deputy Secretary of State and former Deputy National Security Adviser, had “failed” the Syrians, and the US policy toward the war had since worsened, particularly by Washington abandoning its Kurdish allies. According to a transcript of the interview, he said: “We failed to prevent a horrific loss of life. We failed to prevent massive displacement of people internally in Syria and, of course, externally as refugees,” adding that Biden’s administration will try to regain traction with a closer eye on the humanitarian angle.

The new US administration could pay much more attention to the situation in Kurdish controlled areas, compared with Trump’s “laissez-faire” policy toward Turkish forces in the area. Harris had also raised in favor of a US intervention in Syria, particularly following chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian regime in 2017.

Robert Ford, a former US ambassador to Syria, even suggests that the Biden administration will provide the Kurdish community with an essential backing for the “recognition of a Kurdish state worldwide.” Sinam Mohammad, Syrian Democratic Forces’ political representative to the United States, recently told VOA

SDF hopes the Biden administration will bring more political support for us to be included in talks that will determine our future and that of Syria as a whole.

As such, Biden’s approach toward the Syrian conflict is expected to clash with Turkey, another key player in the Syrian war. While Biden’s administration is an SDF ally, Ankara’s current extensive policy has been against this Kurdish-Arab alliance in northern Syria which it considers a “terrorist group.” On the contrary, Trump had referred to the Kurds last year as “natural enemies.” Jim Jeffrey, the former US defense adviser on Syria, confirmed in his November interview with Defense One that no one in Washington had given any guarantee for the Kurds against Turkey, limiting such cooperation.

Following Biden’s election, diverse commentators predicted bumpy US-Turkey relationships over what they forecasted as US support for Kurdish territory enforcement in the region.

Within the humanitarian context, Biden’s administration also plans to implement current US refugee policy. While the outgoing administration had lowered the cap to 15,000 refugees for the fiscal year 2021, which is an all-time low, Biden promised to “set the annual global refugee admissions cap to 125,000, and seek to raise it over time.”

Written bySylvain Keller

Sylvain is currently working for the Security department of CMA CGM in Marseille. He was previously charged to carry out research missions for the French Foreign Minister on Syrian conflict and have been working for French Intelligence services. He wrote internal reports on terrorism financing and humanitarian situation in Syria. He is currently ending a Master Degree in the University of Sciences Po Toulouse.

Via Globalvoices.org

Creative Commons 3.0

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Bloomberg Quick Take: “Turkey President Erdogan Gets Ready for a Rocky Four Years of Biden”

Joe Biden’s presidency is likely to be dominated by “the three Cs”: COVID-19, China and climate change. Each one of these behemoths could make or break him.

Despite wildfires and hurricanes, this was not the long-awaited climate election. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris campaigned on the promise of a two trillion dollar investment over the next four years. This aims to put the US on course to a carbon-free electricity sector by 2035 and carbon neutrality – meaning, the country’s net carbon emissions would reach zero – by 2050. Their climate plan linked aggressive emissions reductions to social and environmental justice measures beyond compensation for workers and communities embedded in high-carbon industries like coal mining. It was forged in collaboration with the Bernie Sanders campaign and supporters of a Green New Deal.

The bad news is that Biden’s ability to implement such a transformative domestic agenda appears to be severely limited. Any big spending plans are likely to be stymied by the Senate which, even following run-off races in January, can at best end up a 50-50 partisan split, with Harris as the tiebreaker. Even “moderate” Republicans like Mitt Romney have pledged to “make sure that we conservatives keep on fighting to make sure we don’t have a Green New Deal [and] we don’t get rid of gas and coal and oil”.

But if Biden can link action on climate to economic regeneration, jobs, environmental justice, and a proactive foreign policy with both China and Europe, he could yet fulfil both his domestic and international agendas.

Rising climate ambitions

While Trump was busy pulling out of the Paris climate accord and rolling back Obama’s environmental regulations, global momentum on climate change built up a considerable head of steam.

In September 2020, the EU ratcheted up its goal from 40 to at least 55% cuts in emissions by 2030. Shortly after a bilateral meeting in Brussels, China’s president Xi Jinping stunned by announcing his country aims to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060, with “peak emissions” earlier than 2030. Japan and South Korea followed within two days of each other, announcing targets to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The devil will be in the delivery, and “net-zero” opens the door to indefinitely prolonged emissions, offset by risky bets on carbon removal technology being adequate in the future. But the direction of travel is arguably being set.

All this happened despite US sabotage. Biden’s arrival boosts the process significantly, with an election pledge to immediately re-enter the Paris agreement and convene a global summit. Careful coordination with the UK presidency of COP26 will be needed, as the special relationship is already complicated by Brexit and the Irish border question.

Opportunity abroad

Biden could leverage this international momentum to force a way forward on his domestic agenda. America’s new leader would be able to point to an outside world where two thirds of the global economy and half the world’s carbon emissions are subject to net zero by 2050. He would still need to actively make climate action attractive to the American people, circumventing the opposing Republican Party if he must. He could also go ahead and draw on a range of measures that do not require the Senate’s blessing, such as interpreting the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon, and he can ally with US states and cities leading on climate mitigation and adaptation.

But the key in the long run would be telling a new story about climate action to sell to the public. It should tie green measures with economic regeneration and social justice, as well as security from destructive climate impacts. Will it work? A sliver of hope can be found in the fact that Trump campaigned aggressively to scare voters with Democratic plans to act on climate change, phase out coal and limit fracking. But the Democrats still won back the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Biden could even rearticulate the conflict that Trump has sought with China, nudging it away from outright confrontation towards a competitive partnership in pursuit of a global green recovery. China is bidding for global climate leadership. Over the last decade it enacted a series of measures to spur an electric and hybrid vehicle revolution. US technology is advanced, but which country ultimately claims the mantle of the world’s electro-superpower still hangs in the balance.

Of course, Biden might never be able to force the Republicans to cooperate on regenerating America and avoiding worst-case warming. He would at least have a clear international lodestar and a narrative to berate them with. The post-COVID stimulus measures Biden will need to agree with Republicans could be the first step on a longer journey towards a green recovery at home and reformed American leadership abroad.

Without a national project of renewal to revive industry and improve communities hurting from decades of neglect, Trump’s politics are almost bound to return. Biden’s ultimate challenge is to get his domestic and international predicaments to play off each other so that he can act effectively on both.

Richard Beardsworth, Professor of International Politics, University of Leeds and Olaf Corry, Professor of Global Security Challenges, University of Leeds

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Sky News Australia: “Fiji welcomes Biden’s ‘ambitious’ climate agenda”

You know about the five-second rule. According to conventional wisdom, food that has dropped on the floor can be safely eaten if retrieved within five seconds. Some scientists have even set up experiments to confirm this folk saying.

Of course, all bets are off if your toast falls on the floor buttered side down and you haven’t mopped the kitchen in recent memory.

Today, after a contentious election and with the results of the presidential race still uncertain, we are all now looking down at the ground. It’s been four years since Donald Trump dropped the buttered toast of our democracy onto the floor.

After four years face down in the dirt, can our democracy be picked up, dusted off, and restored to some semblance of integrity?

The 2020 Election

The polls made it look like Joe Biden would be an easy winner, maybe even in a landslide. The Democrats were expected to retake the Senate. The huge number of early votes — nearly 100 million — suggested that the 2020 turnout would be the greatest in more than 100 years. The Democratic Party is supposed to benefit from more souls at the polls.

The polls were off. If Joe Biden wins, he will do so by a slender margin and only after considerable legal wrangling by both parties. The Democrats are now a long shot to win control of the Senate. And the huge turnout has translated into Donald Trump getting more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, more in fact than any Republican candidate in history.

Texas did not go blue. Neither did Florida or Ohio. The Republican Party went all in for Trump, and he delivered beyond his base.

But Arizona flipped. And Georgia might as well. If the infamous “Blue Wall” holds — at least Wisconsin and Michigan if not Pennsylvania — then Biden will become the next president.

Still, who in their right mind would want to lead the United States at this perilous moment? The pandemic is surging. The economy hasn’t climbed out of its hole. Donald Trump has applied his scorched-earth approach to both foreign and domestic policy. The Republican Party has demonstrated that it delights in playing dirty, refuses to compromise for the national good, and embraces the most malign of Trump’s many fictions from the uselessness of masks to the myth of climate change.

Exit polls, meanwhile, reveal a country divided by more than just party affiliation. Democrats, for instance, overwhelmingly want to contain the current pandemic while Republicans want to focus on reopening the economy. This dynamic explains why so many Trump voters believe the president better handles both the economy and the pandemic, even if the evidence of his mismanagement is obvious to everyone else.

Trump’s “law and order” message also proved influential among Republican voters, despite the president’s blatant violations of law and disruptions of order. Heck, according to a recent judicial ruling, even the president’s Commission on Law Enforcement broke the law!

Perhaps the most sobering conclusion from the election is that nearly half the country is indifferent to the actual mechanisms of democracy. They just don’t care that their president refused to endorse a peaceful transition of power if he loses. They don’t care that he has derided the very act of voting by insisting, as he did early Wednesday morning, on enlisting the Supreme Court in an effort to stop the counting of the remaining ballots (except in those states, like Arizona, where he hopes to catch up). Nor do they see anything wrong with the Republican Party’s efforts to keep certain groups of people away from the polls.

That doesn’t bode well for the future of American democracy, especially if the country continues to abide by the Electoral College. For the last several decades, U.S. presidential elections have resembled Groundhog’s Day — and I don’t mean the movie. Why should one groundhog determine the length of winter? Don’t the other groundhogs get a vote? Likewise, why should a voter in Pennsylvania matter more than a voter in Maryland or Wyoming?

Trump is not the only culprit here. The ground was dirty before he dropped our democracy on it.

The Democrats and their patronage systems, like Tammany Hall in New York and Richard Daley’s machine in Chicago, set some dismal precedents. But now it is the Republican Party that, to preserve its governing majority in the absence of a popular mandate, is warping the rules of the game and breaking the fair rules that remain.

People vs. Putative Adults

Let’s say that Biden ekes out a victory. What’s the damage report on Trump’s four-year assault on democracy?

After the 2016 election, the pundit class asserted that one man, however powerful, could not tear down the 250-year-old edifice of American democracy. There was much talk of “guardrails” and “adults in the room,” all of which were supposed to contain the ungovernable id in the White House.

Over the course of four years, however, Trump systematically disposed of the supposed adults in the room — Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, John Kelly — in favor of yes-men (and one or two yes-women). In addition, through executive orders, judicial appointments, and obsessive Twittering, he moved the guardrails so that he could steer America wildly off the road.

Just before the 2018 midterm elections, I wrote, “it would be poetic justice if what’s left of the mechanisms of democracy — voting, the courts, and the press — can still be used to defeat a potential autocrat, his family, and all the putative adults he’s brought into the room to implement his profoundly anti-democratic program.”

Over the last two years, those mechanisms were in fact on full display. Despite Trump’s full-court press, the judiciary has represented an important check on his power, by blocking some of his attacks on immigrants, his efforts to withhold his financial information, and to throw out ballots.

The mainstream media, meanwhile, continued to nip at Trump’s ankles. The New York Times, for example, published one expose after another about Trump’s record on the pandemic, his taxes, his financial relations with China, and so on.

And now the voters have had their say. Despite all the efforts by the Republican Party to suppress the vote, around 67 percent of eligible voters turned out in 2020, the highest percentage since 1900. Trump supporters did what they could to push against that tide. They intimidated voters. They disrupted Biden events and even tried to run a Biden bus off the road in Texas. They restricted the number of ballot drop-off locations. The post office, run by a Trump appointee, ignored a court order to locate 300,000 mail-in ballots at risk of not being delivered. But voters gonna vote.

Let’s also salute all the people who have made that vote possible. Despite a pandemic, tens of thousands of people showed up to staff polling sites and count ballots. Then there are all the volunteers who participated in get-out-the-vote campaigns by knocking on doors, making phone calls, sending texts, and doing the grassroots fundraising to keep the operations going.

Democracy, in other words, is not just about the politicians and the voters. It requires an immense effort by a veritable army of people. They, not the candidates, are the winners of the 2020 election.

Democracy’s Future

Trump is not done. Even if he doesn’t get his presumed entitlement of four more years, he has two more months to trash his frat house of a presidency before turning it over to the next administration. That means more executive orders like the recent ones that opened up Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and removed workplace protections from federal civil servants.

If Biden manages to take his place in the Oval Office, he’ll likely face a Republican-controlled Senate that will block his every move (just as the Republicans adopted a no-compromise position after the election of Barack Obama).

Certainly, Biden aims to reverse many of Trump’s executive orders with his own executive orders. That will work in the foreign policy realm, for instance recommitting the United States to the Paris climate accords. But any domestic orders will face court challenges, and suddenly the Republican Party’s strategy of pushing through an unprecedented number of federal judges takes on an even more ominous cast.

Popular will be damned. The Republicans will rely on senators, lawyers, and judges to institutionalize Trump’s legacy.

Unlike 2008, the Democrats will be hard-pressed this time to claim an overwhelming popular mandate after such a close election. Trump voters, meanwhile, are not going away. They’ll continue showing up with guns. They’ll refuse to wear masks. They’ll spread fake news and outlandish conspiracy theories.

They’ll also challenge the federal government — now led by an adversary, not an ally — at every turn. Remember the 2016 standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge when a bunch of right-wing extremists seized government property and faced off against law enforcement? Expect an uptick in outright confrontations between federalists and anti-federalists during the Biden presidency.

Let’s face it: The democracy that Donald Trump dropped on the floor suffered a great deal from the experience. It’s going to take more than an election to put it right.

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

Featured Illustration: Shutterstock.

The irony, of course, is that the Trumpies are always demanding that people be canceled for daring disagree with the Orange One. On Friday, a whole caravan of hate was gotten up on a Texas highway, where vehicles festooned with Trump and MAGA insignia ambushed a Biden-Harris campaign bus carrying Democrats to a planned rally. At one point, a truck hit a staffer’s SUV as though attempting to roll it over and kill the occupants. Using cars to ram people is a common ISIL terrorist tactic, and was also used by a neo-Nazi Trump supporter at Charlottesville in 2017, killing Heather Heyer.

The bus was boxed in. The Democratic rally had to be canceled.

I study the Middle East, and have seen these sorts of attempts to stop democratic rallies on the part of Muslim fundamentalists or partisans of nationalist dictators, and it chills me to see it on I-35 going north out of San Antonio toward the state capital of Austin. That is likely the same road on which a pro-Trump individual drove to San Antonio on August 3, 2019 and killed 23 people.

But Trump rallies themselves, often hatefests with racist or male chauvinist chanting against the objects of Trump’s “two minutes hate” exercises, turn out to participate in cancel culture in another, deadly way. They are themselves engines of disease and death that have canceled hundreds of lives.

A Stanford University study released on Friday examined the after-effects of 18 Trump campaign gatherings June 20 – Sept. 30, using county coronavirus data. The researchers found a high likelihood that these rallies led to over 30,000 extra cases and over 700 deaths that might otherwise have been avoided. The research was carried out by B. Douglas Bernheim, Nina Buchmann, Zach Freitas-Groff and Sebastian Otero in the Department of Economics.

The economists focused on counties and cities that hosted Trump rallies in those weeks, comparing the rates and deaths to the period before the gatherings and also to other similar communities. They were careful to control for testing rates, so that can’t explain anything. They write,

“More interesting patterns emerge when we direct our attention to earlier weeks. Looking at Panels A and B, we see that in both rally counties, positivity rates rose sharply and quickly after the rally despite displaying no upward trend prior to the rally. For Marathon county [Wisconsin], the increase in positivity rates started immediately after the rally and continued to climb sharply for several weeks. For Winnebago county [Wisconsin], positivity rates roughly doubled over the first four weeks, and then continued to climb sharply. Testing did not rise immediately in either county.”

The authors conclude:

“Our analysis strongly supports the warnings and recommendations of public health officials concerning the risk of COVID-19 transmission at large group gatherings, particularly when the degree of compliance with guidelines concerning the use of masks and social distancing is low. The communities in which Trump rallies took place paid a high price in terms of disease and death.”

The American people have it in their power to stop this cancellation of our health, well-being and basic constitutional rights.

On Tuesday, they can cancel Trump.

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Bonus Video:

‘Trump Train’ Ambushes Biden-Harris Campaign Bus in Texas | NowThis

The Pence-Harris debate was what disagreements among normal people might look like, as opposed to the weird behavior of Trump in the first presidential debate. While pundits are saying that it lacked fireworks, that is not true if you define fireworks as policy disagreement as opposed to mud wrestling.

The election at this point seems to be Biden-Harris’s to lose. Harris may not have had a “moment.” But she did what she needed to do. She demonstrated forcefulness and that she is on top of the issues. She showed that an African-American woman and an Asian-American woman can stand her ground against a privileged white male. She was likeable and sharp. She seems a credible president, which is one of the jobs of a vice presidential candidate.

Here are some moments where I thought Kamala Harris drove point crucial points, along with a tally of Pence’s worst lies.

1. The most impressive moment in Kamala Harris owning Mike Pence was her opener, in which she laid out the case against this administration on its handling of the coronavirus. Polls show that this is an issue at the top of voter concerns. She needed to make this case, and she did:

“the American people have witnessed what is the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country. And here are the facts. 210,000 dead people in our country in just the last several months. Over 7 million people who have contracted this disease. One in five businesses closed. We’re looking at frontline workers who have been treated like sacrificial workers. We are looking at over 30 million people, who in the last several months, had to file for unemployment. And here’s the thing, on January 28th, the vice president and the president were informed about the nature of this pandemic. They were informed that it’s lethal in consequence, that it is airborne, that it will affect young people, and that it would be contracted because it is airborne. And they knew what was happening, and they didn’t tell you.

Can you imagine if you knew on January 28th, as opposed to March 13th, what they knew, what you might’ve done to prepare? They knew, and they covered it up. The president said it was a hoax. They minimized the seriousness of it. The president said, “You’re on one side of his ledger if you wear a mask. You’re on the other side of his ledger if you don’t.” And in spite of all of that, today, they still don’t have a plan. They still don’t have a plan. Well, Joe Biden does. And our plan is about what we need to do around a national strategy for contact tracing, for testing, for administration of the vaccine, and making sure that it will be free for all. That is the plan that Joe Biden has and that I have, knowing that we have to get a hold of what has been going on, and we need to save our country. And Joe Biden is the best leader to do that.”

2. Another moment where Harris clearly had the best of the argument was her comments on Trump-Pence packing the courts mostly with white male arch-conservatives, many of them unqualified.

“Do you know that of the 50 people who President Trump appointed to the court of appeals for lifetime appointments, not one is Black?”

Politifact notes that according to Bloomberg, Trump has actually confirmed 53 life appointments to the court of appeals. And, as she said, none were African-American. Some 7 were Asian-American and just one was Latino.

Politifact also mirrored this graphic from The New York Times showing the Trump appointees to the court of appeals, just to reinforce Harris’s point.

African-Americans are 13.4 percent of Americans, and another 2 percent of Americans have African heritage along with some other (Native American and/or White).

You know what 15.4 percent of 53 is? Eight. If Trump’s judicial appointments had not actively discriminated against persons of African descent, there should have been 8 Black judges on the court of appeals.

3. Harris was also strong on the environment and the climate emergency. Climate is another issue voters increasingly feel strongly about, and on which a majority of Americans in polls are willing to base their choice of candidates.

“Joe Biden’s economic plan… Moody’s, which is a reputable Wall Street firm, has said will create seven million more jobs than Donald Trump’s.

And part of those jobs that will be created by Joe Biden are going to be about clean energy and renewable energy. Because, you see, Joe understands that the West Coast of our country is burning, including my home state of California. Joe sees what is happening on the Gulf states, which are being battered by storms. Joe has seen and talked with the farmers in Iowa whose entire crops have been destroyed because of floods.

And so Joe believes, again, in science. I’ll tell you something, Susan, I served when I first got to the Senate on the committee that’s responsible for the environment. Do you know, this administration took the word science off the website, and then took the phrase climate change off the website? We have seen a pattern with this administration, which is they don’t believe in science. And Joe’s plan is about saying we’re going to deal with it, but we’re also going to create jobs. Donald Trump, when asked about the wildfires in California, and the question was, the science is telling us this… You know what Donald Trump said? Science doesn’t know.

So let’s talk about who is prepared to lead our country over the course of the next four years on what is an existential threat to us as human beings. Joe is about saying we’re going to invest that in renewable energy, which is going to be about the creation of millions of jobs. We will achieve net zero emissions by 2050, carbon neutral by 2035. Joe has a plan. This has been a lot of talk from the Trump administration, and really it has been to go backward instead of forward. We will also reenter the Climate Agreement with pride.”

As for Pence, I can’t think of any moment where he really shone, but maybe you have to be a conservative. He was workmanlike and the best thing you can say about him is that he was good at making Trumpism sound less like the apocalypse than it actually does.

These are the most horrible lies he told:

1. “President Trump and I have a plan to improve healthcare and protect pre-existing conditions for every American.”

As the BBC points out, there is no sign that he and Trump actually have any health care plan at all. Trump’s executive order saying the US government supports mandatory coverage of pre-existing conditions is without legal effect and is dishonest for that reason. Trump and Pence are right now in court trying to abolish Obamacare, which extended coverage to 20 million more Americans, and which kept 55 million Americans with pre-existing conditions from having to pay top-off fees to the big insurers.

2. Pence said “Our air and land are cleaner than at any time ever recorded, our water is among cleanest in the world.”

Our air is cleaner, but it is no thanks to Pence and Trump. It is a long term trend, often from local regulation. They have tried to remove mileage requirements from automobiles, guaranteeing they use more gasoline and so produce more pollution. They have promoted coal plants, the dirtiest fossil fuel. They have turned the EPA into an anti-EPA, allowing polluters to run riot.

Worse, Pence’s definition of “clean” is so 1972. Air is not clean if it is being pumped full of 5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually in the US. That is a heat-trapping gas and the opposite of clean and healthy.

As for water, as the BBC says US water is alarmingly dirty from corporate polluters using it as a sewer. The US is ranked 26th in water quality in the world.

On the climate emergency, Pence said,

“Now with regard to climate change, the climate is changing, but the issue is what’s the cause and what do we do about it? President Trump has made it clear that we’re going to continue to listen to the science. Now Joe Biden and Kamala Harris would put us back in the Paris Climate Accord. They’d impose the Green New Deal, which would crush American energy, would increase the energy costs of American families in their homes, and literally would crush American jobs.

And President Trump and I believe that the progress that we have made in a cleaner environment has been happening precisely because we have a strong, free market economy. What’s remarkable is the United States has reduced CO2 more than the countries that are still in the Paris Climate Accord, but we’ve done it through innovation. And we’ve done it through natural gas and fracking, which Senator, the American people can go look at the record. I know Joe Biden says otherwise now, as you do, but the both of you repeatedly committed to abolishing fossil fuel and banning of fracking.”

We know the cause of global heating, and it is that human beings are burning gasoline, natural gas and coal, which put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and trap the sun’s heat on earth. Pence’s smarmy question about what causes it ignores the science. This is a man who still denies that smoking cigarettes causes cancer. He says whatever his corporate backers tell him to.

Since climate change is caused by burning hydrocarbons, you cannot in fact stop it by fracking (which releases extra methane, a very potent heat-trapping gas) or by burning natural gas. Natgas is half as polluting as coal, but it is still very carbon intensive compared to wind and solar.

The US has not reduced its greenhouse gas emissions and cannot do so by fracking and burning natural gas! Pence is just talking nonsense. He even referred to Trump’s ridiculous idea that California’s wildfires problem could be solved by forest management as opposed to ceasing the discharge of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

It was a glib, deeply dishonest, and above all destructive performance by Pence.

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Bonus video:

CNBC: “Pence and Harris spar on economy and healthcare”