Global warming intensifies: Additional evidence

Bob Sheak, June 18, 2021

Introduction

In this post, I follow up and add information to what I wrote in my post of May 25, 2021, “The climate crisis intensifies, while meaningful political solutions remain elusive.” The main purpose of the present piece is to provide more context and additional evidence regarding the unfolding and escalating crisis, one that has for decades (at least) been taking a terrible toll on humanity and nature and one that is rapidly growing more destructive. The evidence is not uplifting but it is factual. Unfortunately, those in the U.S. who want to deny or avoid any meaningful action represent powerful forces in the society.

In the May 25 post, I referred to climate scientist Michael E. Mann’s new book, The New Climate War, who writes that “our planet has now warmed into the danger zone, and we are not taking the measures necessary to avert the largest global crisis we have ever faced.” In order to address this situation, “we must understand the mind of the enemy” (p. 1). The enemy includes the fossil-fuel corporations (e.g., ExxonMobil, Shell, BP) and their supporters, the billionaire plutocrats “like the Koch brothers, the Mercers, and the Scaifes,” who have “funneled billions of dollars into a disinformation campaign beginning in the least 1980s and working to discredit the science behind human-caused climate change and its linkage with fossil-fuel burning” (pp. 2-3). This enemy additionally includes those in government in the U.S. and abroad who deny or dismiss the seriousness of global warming and use their positions to protect and advance the interests of the fossil-fuel industry and other polluters.”

At the same time, there may be even more powerful forces, politically and in social movements, that are working to address this existential challenge and engage with others in education, mobilization, and politics to address the crisis. In reviewing Mann’s book, Richard Schiffman notes that, in the final analysis, Mann is optimistic (https://new-scientist.com/article/mg24933160-300-the-new-climate-war-reasons-to-be-optimistic-about-the-future). His optimism is “heartened by the upswell of youth activism and the rapid development of green technologies. Even investors are beginning to flee from fossil fuels.”

The earth is heating up

Some background: A new geological epoch?

We are living in a geological epoch of human-generated increasingly disruptive and catastrophic climate changes that pose an existential threat to humanity. The International Union of Geological Sciences has been considering the evidence on whether the earth has entered a new geological epoch, one referred to as the Anthropocene. This is defined as an epoch in which the activities of humans have become the dominant force, an increasingly deleterious one, in shaping the planet. The concept was first introduced by climatologist Paul Crutzen in 2000. Ian Angus, author of the 2016 book facing the Anthropocene: fossil capitalism and the crisis of the earth system, was interviewed about the concept on The Real News. (http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&ltemid=74&jumival=17159).

Angus gives us some context.

“Well, geologists divide the history of the entire Earth, the billions of years that our planet has been here, into various divisions which mark the different stages of life and the conditions of life in the history of our planet. We have for the last 12,000 years been in what’s called the Holocene, that came about when the Ice Ages ended. All the glaciers retreated, and we’ve had 12,000 years of relatively stable climate. Everything’s been very predictable. It’s the period in which agriculture was invented and all large civilizations were born.

“What became clear in the late 20th century to some scientists was that humanity’s activities have become so great that they were actually changing the way that the world functions. Not just changing individual environments or ecosystems but changing fundamental things about the way the world works. Global warming being the best known of those, but of course the destruction of the ozone layer, and so on. So, the Holocene epoch, some scientists began to argue, was coming to an end. We had moved out of that period of long-term stability and we’re moving into a very different time.”

The crux of this view is that human activities have come to represent the dominant forces in shaping the earth’s ecosphere. There’s no debate about this in the climate science community. Human activities that emit greenhouse gases have had and are having a significant and increasingly negative impact on ecosystems and human societies. At the same time, the debate over whether we are in a new geological period continues, including such questions as to when it exactly started (https://eos.org/articles/the-difficulty-of-defining-the-anthropocene).

A scientific consensus

In a post from September 28, 2018, titled “Reigning in Climate Change,” I submitted that the scientific evidence is overwhelming in agreement that human-caused, increasingly disruptive climate change, is occurring. There are multiple books, an increasing body of scientific research, and a host of in-depth journalistic articles based on authoritative sources that confirm the existence of the phenomenon. Most climate scientists have long endorsed the evidence-based proposition that the climate is changing and that it is happening at an accelerating rate.

Andrea Germanos reports that in November, 2017, nearly 17,000 scientists from 180 countries issued a warning to humanity about the advanced and unfolding disruptive changes in the “biosphere” in a letter published in the international journal BioScience. (2017). Unless humanity, that is the world’ governments, set about making transformative changes in their societies soon, the scientists believe that the best evidenced indicates that there will be “widespread misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss.” The scientists are especially troubled by actually observed trends, that is, of rising greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, agricultural production, and the sixth mass extinction event underway” (http://commondreams.org/news/2017/11/13/over-1500-scientists-just-issued-second-notice-humanity-can-we-listen-now). With respect to agriculture, they are referring to the dominant agriculture system that relies on chemical fertilizers that degrade soil, generates carbon emissions, and overutilize and contaminate water sources.

 An overview from Wikipedia of the scientific consensus.

Several studies have been done to establish that a consensus does exist. “Among the most-cited is a 2013 study of nearly 12,000 abstracts of peer-reviewed papers on climate science published since 1990, of which just over 4,000 papers expressed an opinion on the cause of recent global warming. Of these, 97% agree, explicitly or implicitly, that global warming is happening and is human-caused.^[2][3] It is “extremely likely”^[4] that this warming arises from “… human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse gases …”^[4] in the atmosphere.^[5] Natural change alone would have had a slight cooling effect rather than a warming effect.^[6][7][8][9]

“This scientific opinion is expressed in synthesis reports, by scientific bodies of national or international standing, and by surveys of opinion among climate scientists. Individual scientists, universities, and laboratories contribute to the overall scientific opinion via their peer-reviewed publications, and the areas of collective agreement and relative certainty are summarised in these respected reports and surveys.^[10] The IPCC‘s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) was completed in 2014.^[11] Its conclusions are summarized below:

• “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia”.^[12]
• “Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have increased to levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years”.^[13]
• Human influence on the climate system is clear.^[14]It is extremely likely (95-100% probability)^[15] that human influence was the dominant cause of global warming between 1951-2010.^[14]
• Without new policies to mitigate climate change, projections suggest an increase in global mean temperature in 2100 of 4.8 to 7 °C, relative to pre-industrial levels (median values; the range is 2.5 to 7.8 °C including climate uncertainty).^[18]

Wikipedia reports that all national or international science academies and scientific societies agree that global warming is a major challenge. “No scientific body of national or international standing maintains a formal opinion dissenting from any of these main points.” Furthermore, evidence from the prestigious National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) indicates that the hottest years on record are all recent years: 2015, 2016, 2017, and, by all the current evidence, 2018 (https://www.ecowatch.com/hottest-four-years-ever-259119422.html).

The IPCC’s sixth assessment report has been delayed due to the pandemic and is now scheduled to be released in May of 2022.

Some consequences of global warming

Consistent with this evidence, there are a growing number of severe weather events each year, including wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and floods. The snow-ice covers in the polar regions are shrinking, coral reefs are dying, water tables are falling, desertification is spreading, and the oceans are warming and undergoing massive acidification. Some of the changes compound the problems. Extensive deforestation is reducing one of the earth’s most important “carbon sinks,” that is, the ability of forests to take carbon out of the atmosphere. And there are other examples. As the ice/snow sheets in the arctic are reduced, more of the sun’s ultra-violet rays are retained on earth rather than reflected into space. There is also the danger that as the permafrost in northern regions (e.g., Siberia) melts that enormous volumes of methane will be released into the atmosphere. Bill McKibben made the prescient argument in 2010 in his book eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet that the earth’s climate system had already been transformed in ways that made life as we know it increasingly precarious.

Tipping points

I summarized the following information on “tipping points” in a post titled “The realty and challenges of the climate crisis” on December 28, 2019. The evidence is based on scientific research documenting that as greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, more of the sun’s heat is trapped in the earth’s atmosphere, temperatures rise, and climate-related disruptions and catastrophes occur more frequently and intensily. Soon, by 2050 according to some estimates – if not sooner – climate scientists tell us the effects of climate change will reach a point where they overwhelm societal or international capacities to recover. They are called “tipping points.” Bob Berwyn writes on how scientists think we are closer to or have already reached climate tipping points (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/27112019/climate-tipping-points-permafrost-forests-ice-antarctica-greenland-amazon-nature).

As Berwyn reports, scientists are warning that a point of no return, where “‘abrupt and irreversible changes’ to the climate system could be triggered by small changes in the global temperatures to create ‘a new, less habitable, hothouse climate state.’” And there are “indications that exceeding tipping points in one system, such as the loss of Arctic Sea ice, can increase the risk of crossing tipping points in others.” In an article for Nature, cited by Berwyn, “scientists focused on nine parts of the climate system susceptible to tipping points, some of them interconnected:

 • Arctic sea ice, which is critical for reflecting the sun’s energy back into space but is disappearing as the planet warms.
• The Greenland Ice Sheet, which could raise sea level 20 feet if it melts.
• Boreal forests, which would release more carbon dioxide (CO2) than they absorb if they die and decay or burn.
• Permafrost, which releases methane and other greenhouse gases as it thaws.
• The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a key ocean current, which would shift global weather patterns if it slowed down or stopped.
• The Amazon rainforest, which could flip from a net absorber of greenhouse gases to a major emitter.
• Warm-water corals, which will die on a large scale as the ocean warms, affecting commercial and subsistence fisheries.
• The West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would raise sea level by at least 10 feet if it melted entirely and is already threatened by warming from above and below.
• Parts of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet that would also raise sea level significantly if they melted.

Naomi Oreskes and Nicholas Stern give the following examples of how the climate-induced ravages in one part of the climate crisis can affect other parts, with catastrophic effects on societies (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/23/opinion/climate-change-costs.html). They give the following examples: “a sudden rapid loss of Greenland or West Antarctic land ice could lead to much higher sea levels and storm surges, which would contaminate water supplies, destroy coastal cities, force out their residents, and cause turmoil and conflict,” or “increased heat decreases food production, which leads to widespread malnutrition, which diminishes the capacity of people to withstand heat and disease and makes it effectively impossible for them to adapt to climate change,” or “Sustained extreme heat may also decrease industrial productivity, bringing about economic depressions.” But they refer to an even “worst-case scenario,” in which “climate impacts could set off a feedback loop in which climate change leads to economic losses, which lead to social and political disruption, which undermines both democracy and our capacity to prevent further climate damage. These sorts of cascading effects are rarely captured in economic models of climate impacts. And this set of known omissions does not, of course, include additional risks that we may have failed to have identified.”

(Anthony D. Barnosky and Elizabeth A. Hadly have devoted an entire book to the subject: Tipping Points for Planet Earth: How Close are We to the Edge.)

Current evidence from the EPA

In an article published on May 12, 2021, in The Washington Post, Dino Grandoni and Brady Dennis report on how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had just “released a detailed and disturbing account of the startling changes that Earth’s warming had on parts of the United States during Trump’s presidency” (https://washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/05/12/us-has-entered-unprecedented-climate-territory-epa-warns). This occurs after years in which “Donald Trump and his deputies played down the impact of greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels and delayed the release of an Environmental Protection Agency report detailing climate-related damage.” They add: “Trump questioned the idea that burning fossil fuels was warming the planet and endangering Americans’ lives and livelihoods, and his administration delayed an update to the EPA’s peer-reviewed report on climate change indicators, first published in 2010. As a result, the report offers a snapshot of the extent to which the science around climate change grew more detailed and robust during Trump’s term [though not made public] even as his administration at times tried to stifle those findings.”

Elected officials and the public will now belatedly have access to the EPA’s evidence documenting, for example, “the destruction of year-round permafrost in Alaska, loss of winter ice on the Great Lakes and spike in summer heat waves in U.S. cities all signal that climate change is intensifying.” And for the first time, the agency “has said such changes are being driven at least in part by human-caused global warming,” a fact never acknowledged by the Trump administration.

Grandoni and Dennis also report that “EPA staffers said the data detail how the nation has entered unprecedented territory, in which climate effects are more visible, changing faster and becoming more extreme. Collectively, the indicators present “multiple lines of evidence that climate change is occurring now and here in the U.S., affecting public health and the environment,” the agency said.” In preparing the report, the agency compiled a list of 54 climate change indicators used in identifying data across academia, nonprofit institutions and other government agencies to come to its conclusions. For example, the EPA report finds that in 2020 “ocean heat reached its highest level in recorded history,and itfuelsmarine heat waves and coral bleaching.” Additionally: “The extent of Arctic Sea ice also was the second smallest on record dating to 1979. Wildfire and pollen seasons are starting earlier and lasting longer.” Here are further examples.

“Heat waves are occurring about three times more often than they did in the 1960s, the agency found, averaging about six times a year. In turn, Americans are blasting air conditioners to stay cool during the hot months, which has nearly doubled summer energy use over the past half-century and added even more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

At nearly every spot measured in Alaska, permafrost has warmed since 1978. The biggest temperature increases were found in the northernmost reaches of the state, where the thawing of the once permanently frozen soil has made it more difficult for Native Alaskans to store wild game underground and for drillers to transport oil by pipeline.

“The agency also released data that shows coastal flooding is happening more often at all 33 spots studied up and down the Pacific, Atlantic and Gulf coasts.”

Current evidence from NASA and NOAA

In an article published in The Guardian on June 17, 2021, Victoria Bekiempis reports on new findings from scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that the “Earth’s ‘energy imbalance approximately doubled’ from 2005 to 2019. The increase was described as ‘alarming’” and unprecedented (https://theguardian.com/science/2021/jun/17/earth-trapping-heat-study-nasa-noaa). In technical terms, “‘Energy imbalance’ refers to the difference between how much of the Sun’s ‘radiative energy’ is absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere and surface, compared to how much ‘thermal infrared radiation’ bounces back into space.” The NASA report finds that “A positive energy imbalance means the Earth system is gaining energy, causing the planet to heat up.” The key finding is that the earth “is trapping nearly twice as much heat as it did in 2005.” NASA described the new finding as an “unprecedented” increase amid the climate crisis.” The data comes from “comparing data from satellite sensors – which track how much energy enters and exits Earth’s system – and data from ocean floats.” The rising heat level stems from increases in greenhouse gas emissions that “keep heat in Earth’s atmosphere, trapping radiation that would otherwise move into space.”

An overview of selected evidence

Isabelle Gerrestsen offers the BBC’s “round-up of where we are on climate change at the start of 2021, according to five crucial measures of climate health” (https://bbc.com/future/articles/20210108/where-we-are-on-cliimate-change-in-five-charts). I add supplementary evidence.

1 – CO2 levels, according to Gerrestsen,reached record heights in 2020, topping of at 417 parts per million in May. The trend has been for CO2 levels to rise every year since at least 1958. “We have put 100ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere in the last 60 years,” says Martin Siegert, co-director of the Grantham Institute for climate change and the environment at Imperial College London. That is 100 times faster than previous natural increases, such as those that occurred towards the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago.”

A note on the geological history of CO2 in the atmosphere

Joseph Romm writes: “At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago, CO2 levels in the atmosphere were approximately 280 parts per million (ppm) (Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, pp. 1-2). Indeed, he writes, “going back a total of 800,000 years – CO2 levels generally never exceeded 280-300 ppm” (p. 16). Now, as reported by Doyle Rice in USA Today on May 4, 2018, carbon dioxide comprised 410 ppm. Rice cites the Scripps Institute of Oceanography as his source and notes that, according to Scripps, this quantity is the “highest in at least the past 800,000 years.” Be clear, there is agreement on this mind-boggling point by major scientific sources on climate change, with virtual unanimity among climate scientists.

Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reach historic highs despite the economic slowdown during the pandemic

Despite the pandemic and as economies around the world declined, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the most prevalent greenhouse gas, hit historically high levels, according to a report in The Washington Post by Brady Dennis and Seven Mufson (https://washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/06/07/atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-hits-record-levels). After declining early in the pandemic, “human-caused emissions rebounded fairly quickly.”

There was indeed a temporary decline. “In 2020, primary energy demand decreased nearly 4 percent, and global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions fell by 5.8 percent, according to the International Energy Agency — the largest annual percentage decline since World War II.” They reached a level that prevailed in 2012, not enough to change the world’s current warming trajectory. But emission levels soon rebounded.

There were 417 parts per million in the atmosphere in May 2020, rising to 419 ppm in May 2021. To reiterate, CO2 levels were approximately 280 parts per million 250 years ago at the dawning of the industrial revolution (Joseph Romm, Climate Change, pp. 1-2). The International Energy Agency (IEA), Dennis and Mufson write, “expects global carbon emissions to surge this year as parts of the world rebound from the coronavirus pandemic. The group projected in April that emissions are on track to reach the second-largest annual rise on record.”

Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory, told them that the record-breaking finding for May 2021 is “significant in that it shows we are still fully on the wrong track.” But it’s hardly surprising, Tans noted, as “humans continue to add about 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution to the atmosphere each year. He also said that the only way to “avoid catastrophic changes to the climate will require reducing that number to zero as quickly as possible.” Corinee Le Quere, research professor of climate change science at the University of East Anglia concurs that the CO2 concentrations will only stop rising “when the emissions approach zero.” At the same time, the situation is not yet hopeless. Tans “holds out hope that the world will be able to put itself on a better path. The science of how to do that exists, he said, but what remains unclear is whether societies can muster the kind of action that has yet to materialize.”

“Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Hits Highest Level in Over 4 Million Years”

This is the headline of Brett Wilkens article in Common Dreams on June 7, 2021 (https://commondreams.org/news/2021/06/07/atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-hits-highest-level-over-4-million-years). He reports on the findings from scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California who have ascertained through their research that the May 2021 measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere were, as already mentioned, a monthly average level of 419 parts per million, up from 417 ppm in May 2020. The researchers add that this level of CO2 concentration is “now comparable to where it was during the Pliocene Climatic Optimum, between 4.1 and 4.5 million years ago, when CO₂ was close to, or above 400 ppm.” Wilkens notes that for a time in April “atmospheric CO₂ concentrations surged past 420 ppm for the first time in recorded history.” These and other scientific findings will help to inform officials at the “upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference—also known as COP26—which will be held in Glasgow, Scotland this November.”

——————–

2. Record heat. Gerrestsen writes: “The past decade was the hottest on record. The year 2020 was more than 1.2C hotter than the average year in the 19th Century. In Europe it was the hottest year ever, while globally 2020 tied with 2016 as the warmest.” The record-breaking temperatures “triggered the largest wildfires ever recorded in the US states of California and Colorado, and the “black summer” of fires in eastern Australia.”

Record-breaking heat across U.S. west

In an article published on June 15, 2021, for The Washington Post, Matthew Cappucci reports on an historic heat wave that is bringing more than 40 million Americans to triple-digit heat, “with some spots soaring over 120 degrees as records fall across the West. He continues: “The heat in many areas is dangerous, prompting excessive-heat warnings in seven states where temperatures will be hazardous to human health” (https://washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/06/15/record-heat-western-us-draught). Furthermore, the heat “reinforces a devastating drought that continues to reshape the landscape of the West while bolstering worries of what lurks ahead in the fall come fire season. More than half of the western United States is gripped by ‘extreme’ or ‘exceptional’ drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, the two most severe categories.”

He gives the following examples, among others. (1) “On Monday [June 14, 2021], records were shattered in the desert Southwest and the Rockies, including in Tucson, where highs hit 112 degrees. Las Vegas spiked to 110” and expected to reach 113 degrees. (2) “Highs in Phoenix reached 112 degrees on Monday and didn’t fall below 90 until after 3 a.m. They’re slated to crest at 116 or 117 degrees on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday before ‘only’ hitting 114 degrees on Saturday. That would set a record every day through Friday.” (3) “Los Angeles should join the triple-digit club as well, hitting 100 degrees on Tuesday before settling into the mid-90s on Wednesday.” (4) “Death Valley, Calif., famous for holding the highest temperature ever observed on the planet, is expected to hit 125 degrees for the remaining days this week. It hit 118 degrees Monday, the nation’s hottest temperature. Wednesday and Thursday could feature highs of 127 degrees, near its June record.” (5) “In California’s Central Valley, most places will hit 90 degrees on Tuesday, but the real heat starts Wednesday — widespread temperatures between 100 and 105 will be the story for places like Redding, Sacramento and Fresno, where excessive-heat warnings are in effect. On Thursday, highs could flirt with 110 degrees, with temperatures approaching 110 on Friday and Saturday. Sacramento could establish a record Thursday by as much as 7 degrees.” (6) “Casper, Wyo., is aiming for 102 degrees Tuesday. Salt Lake City, which hit 102 degrees on Saturday and spiked to 103 on Monday, could come close to tying or breaking the June record of 105 degrees as the mercury continues to soar on Tuesday.”

————————

3. Arctic ice, according to Gerrestsen, reached 38C in eastern Siberia [100.4 degrees Fahrenheit] in June 2020, “the hottest ever recorded within the Arctic Circle. The heatwave accelerated the melting of sea ice in the East Siberian and Laptev seas and delayed the usual Arctic freeze by almost two months.” Furthermore, the melting ice means that less of the heat from the Sun is reflected back into space, more is absorbed by the ocean, and the global temperature rises with all of the myriad environmental damaging effects.

Kenny Stancil, staff writer for Common Dreams, reports on findings from The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program (AMAP). The central point of the AMAP report is this: “Over the past five decades, the Arctic has warmed three times faster than the world as a whole, leading to rapid and widespread melting of ice and other far-reaching consequences that are important not only to local communities and ecosystems but to the fate of life on planet Earth” (https://commondreams.org/news/2021/05/20/real-hotspot-study-shows-arctic-warming-3-times-faster-rest-of-earth). Specifically, the AMAP finds that “the Arctic’s annual mean surface temperature surged by 3.1ºC between 1971 and 2019, compared with a 1ºC rise in the global average during the same time period” and “Arctic warming has been accompanied by a decrease in snow cover and sea and land ice; an increase in permafrost thaw and rainfall; and an uptick in extreme events.” 

Bob Berwyn reports for Inside Climate News on May 20, 2021, on new research documenting how one of the largest Antarctic glaciers is breaking up and the implications (https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11062821/the-acceleration-of-an-antarctic-glacier-shows-how-global-warming-can-rapidly-break-up-polar-ice-and-raise-sea-level). The glacier in question is the Pine Island Glacier, a significant part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. According to Berwyn’s reporting, the “Pine Island Glacier is one of two big ice streams that drains the California-size West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is more than a mile thick in places and would raise sea level by about 10 feet if it melts completely.” He quotes the co-author of the study, Pierre Dutrieux, a polar researcher with the British Antarctic Survey. “If this process was to continue, then that would be a problem. That would basically change everything we were predicting in the past. But if that was just like a small hiccup, and now the glacier stabilizes again, then we basically go back to saying the ocean and the atmosphere are driving everything. We’re not saying everything has to be thrown away, but it is pointing to something that was unexpected.” “Currently,” Berwyn reports, “West Antarctic ice shelves are retreating between .5 and 2 miles per year, but other research suggests that, during periods of global warming millions of years ago, some ice shelves may have retreated 6 miles per year. That rate determines how fast sea level rises.”

Overall, the new study provides more evidence that global warming impacts on West Antarctica are intensifying. Dutrieux is quoted: “Just what we’ve seen over the last 20 to 30 years, that’s pretty rapid on the scale of a glacier. They operate on a scale of tens of thousands of years, so to see this much change in a few decades is rather dramatic. The processes we’d been studying in this region were leading to an irreversible collapse, but at a fairly measured pace.” The new findings indicate that “[t]hings could be much more abrupt if we lose the rest of that ice shelf.”

———————

4. Permafrost (from Gerrestsen) “Across the northern hemisphere, permafrost – the ground that remains frozen year-round for two or more years – is warming rapidly. When air temperatures reached 38C (100F) in Siberia in the summer of 2020, land temperatures in several parts of the Arctic Circle hit a record 45C (113F), accelerating the thawing of permafrost in the region. Both continuous permafrost (long, uninterrupted stretches of permafrost) and discontinuous (a more fragmented kind) are in decline.” The permafrost across Siberia, Greenland, Canada, and the Arctic holds “twice as much carbon as the atmosphere does – almost 1,600 billion tonnes. Much of that carbon is stored in the form of methane, a potent greenhouse gas with a global warming impact 84 times higher than CO2.”

Wikipedia defines permafrost as “ground that continuously remains below 0 °C (32 °F) for two or more years (often for thousands of years), located on land or under the ocean (https://en/wikipedia.org/wiki/Permafrost). According to Wikipedia, “Permafrost does not have to be the first layer that is on the ground. It can be from an inch to several miles deep under the Earth’s surface. Some of the most common permafrost locations are in the Northern Hemisphere. Around 15% of the Northern Hemisphere or 11% of the global surface is underlain by permafrost, including substantial areas of Alaska, Greenland, Canada and Siberia. It can also be located on mountaintops in the Southern Hemisphere and beneath ice-free areas in the Antarctic. Permafrost frequently occurs in ground ice, but it can also be present in non-porous bedrock. Permafrost is formed from ice holding various types of soil, sand, and rock in combination.”

New research by Monique S. Patzner and an international team of researchers discovered that the quantity of methane gas released from the organic matter as permafrost melts is greater than previously thought (https://sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/2102/09113807.html). It has long been known by scientists that “microorganisms play a key role in the release of CO₂ [as methane] as permafrost melts. Microorganisms activated as soil thaws convert dead plants and other organic material into greenhouse gases like methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide.” However, until now, it thought that the mineral iron, also in permafrost, bound the gases so as to limit somewhat the amount of gas released into the atmosphere or oceans. The research by Patzner and her colleagues found that “bacteria incapacitate iron’s carbon trapping ability, resulting in the release of vast amounts of CO₂. This is an entirely new discovery.” The bacteria use the iron as another food source. More research is needed to determine just how much additional gas will be released; however, it will be greater than scientists previously projected.

————————-

5. Forests (from Gerrestsen) – “Since 1990 the world has lost 178 million hectares of forest (690,000 square miles) – an area the size of Libya. Over the past three decades, the rate of deforestation has slowed but experts say it isn’t fast enough, given the vital role forests play in curbing global warming. In 2015-20 the annual deforestation rate was 10 million hectares (39,000 square miles, or about the size of Iceland), compared to 12 million hectares (46,000 square miles) in the previous five years.” While Europe and Asia are regaining temperate forests, South America and Africa are losing tropical forests, most dramatically in Brazil, the Republic of the Congo, and Indonesia. “When forests are cut down or burned, the soil is disturbed and carbon dioxide is released.” Gerretsen points out that the “World Economic Forum launched a campaign this year to plant one trillion trees to absorb carbon. However, she also writes,” While planting trees might help cancel out the last 10 years of CO2 emissions, it cannot solve the climate crisis on its own.” She quotes Bonnie Waring, senior lecturer at the Grantham Institute, who says, “Protecting existing forests is even more important than planting new ones. Every time an ecosystem is disturbed, you see carbon lost.” The most cost-effective and productive way to capture CO2 and boost overall biodiversity is to allow forests “to regrow naturally and rewilding huge areas of land, a process known as natural regeneration, is the most cost-effective and productive way to capture CO2 and boost overall biodiversity, according to Waring.

———————–

Concluding thoughts

In a rational society and world, the evidence that documents the intensification of global warming and the threat it poses to humanity and life on earth would lead to appropriate and proportional U.S. and other government responses.

Over the last four years, Trump and his administration often denied the realty of global warming, while withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Agreement, reversing fuel efficiency standards, opening up public land to oil and gas mining, and ending the ban on the export of gas and oil exports, and loading up the Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies with people who supported his anti-scientific views. Trump’s policies had the full support of Republicans in the U.S. Congress, fossil-fuel corporations, billionaires like the Kochs, trade associations, right-wing think tanks, and right-wing media.

 President Biden and congressional Democrats have taken an approach to the climate crisis is diametrically opposite to Trump’s. They accept the scientific evidence, recognize the increasingly severe consequences, and have proposed major legislation to address this massive problem. Jake Johnson provides an update, reporting on how Democrats in the Senate’s Budget Committee are pushing for a $6 trillion infrastructure bill (https://commondreams.org/news/2021/06/17/led-sanders-senate-dems-weigh-6-trillion-infrastructure-bill-bipartisan-talks-fail). He points out that the “$6 trillion plan would go well beyond the roughly $4 trillion in spending that President Joe Biden proposed in his two-pronged infrastructure and safety-net package, which consists of the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan.” There is currently circulating in the Senate a two-page document (pdf) listing 11 potential pay-fors, including a reduction in the massive IRS tax gap and ‘asset recycling.’” Of course, Senate Republicans will try to stop any such legislation via the filibuster.

In the meantime, a bipartisan group of 20 senators led Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) have proposed a bill “for just $579 billion in new spending, a figure that a number of Democratic lawmakers in both the House and Senate have rejected as badly inadequate to address the country’s dire infrastructure needs and make necessary investments in green energy.”

At this time, it is not clear how Senate Democrats and Biden will reconcile the differences in their proposals and whether Biden will agree to break up his proposal into smaller bills. Additionally, when faced with an inevitable Republican filibuster in the Senate and regardless of how much Biden and the Democrats may compromise, the Democrats will only advance legislation dealing with the climate crisis in the Senate if they can unify their caucus and by-pass a Republican filibuster. While U.S. politics delay and perhaps end up stopping any meaningful government response to the climate crisis, signs of the accelerating crisis proliferate in the U.S. and around the world.

In conclusion, Kate Aronoff suggests that a massive grassroots movement is a necessary component of any successful effort to quell the climate crisis. Here’s a small sample of what she writes in her book, Over-Heated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet – and How We Fight Back.

“Decarbonizing the global economy and adapting to the climate-changed century ahead will be the single hardest and most important thing our species has ever done. It’s impossible without a big, democratic government and massive state investment, as well as the dismantling of the most powerful industry that has ever existed. That, in turn, seems dangerously far off unless some crucial mass of people see the Green New Deal as their path to a better life and manage to overcome the rank and racist divide-and-conquer politics that have been so successful at stopping efforts to turn these United States into a more perfect union, and this planet into a fairer place….Indeed, many of the good ideas now percolating around the climate movement can be traced back to grassroots struggles waged by people whose home lay in the path of fossils fuel infrastructure and its consequences….” (p. 358)

Bob Sheak, June 4, 2021

bsheak983@gmail.com

Introduction

In this post, I attempt to do two things.

First, I consider the extensive efforts by Trump and the Republican Party to obstruct Democratic policy initiatives in the U.S. Congress and to protect an anti-democratic agenda, while Republicans in states across the country work to extend voter suppression laws and even, yet today, try to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election. The framework for much of what Republicans are doing revolves around pushing the “big lie” that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from Trump and doing whatever it takes to hold onto power. Trump is their undisputed “leader.” His mass, cultist-like, base follows him unquestioningly. If they are successful, our already tenuous democracy will be more severely undermined than ever before.

Second, I consider what Biden and Democrats are doing to protect voters’ rights, with special attention to the For the People Act. Democratic success depends on their ability to overcome the inevitable Republican filibuster in the U.S. Senate, pass voting rights legislation, combat Republican disinformation, run successful political campaigns, and educate and mobilize their voters for the 2022 elections.

Part 1: The Republican attack on democracy

The Republican Party has mounted major efforts to shape the electoral system in ways to limit significantly the opportunities for voters, aimed at voters of color and other perceived opponents. The Republicans have long been engaged in voter suppression. Among other authors, Carol Anderson documents how Republicans have used suppression tactics for 150 years to harass, obstruct, frustrate, and purge American citizens from having a say in their own democracy (One Person, One Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy, p. 2). What is new in this era of the Trump-dominated Republican Party, is the breadth and depth of voter suppression and efforts to subvert other institutional aspects of the electoral system.

And in the 2020 elections, Republicans increased the number of state legislatures they control. This is important, because the party that has a majority in state legislatures has the power to determine the contours of congressional districts. Alvin Change and Sam Levine refer to the following evidence (https://theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/15/gerrymandering-republicans-map-charts-states).

“Democrats failed to flip any of the legislative chambers they targeted and Republicans came out of election night in nearly the best possible position for drawing districts, according to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight, and will have the opportunity to draw 188 congressional seats, 43% of the House of Representatives. Democrats will have a chance to draw at most just 73 seats. Republicans will probably also be able to draw districts that will make it more difficult for Democrats to hold their majority in the US House in 2022”

If the current efforts to limit the votes of opponents and skew the electoral rules are successful, the Republicans running for federal and state offices will be able to win elections despite losing the popular vote and even when they lose in the electoral college. And there’s more. Whenever there are legal challenges to voting outcomes in these circumstances, the radical-right majority on the Supreme Court is likely to rule in favor of what Republicans call voter “integrity” laws and legitimate the anti-democratic thrust of the Republican voter suppression laws.

The likely repercussions of not passing voting rights policies

Consider a not-so hypothetical set of consequences. If the Republicans are successful in suppressing the vote, they will be able to further consolidate their misbegotten electoral advantages and advance a right-wing agenda. The election of Trump and cronies would cascade into the control of the executive branch and the bevy of federal agencies and to both houses of Congress. At the same time, Republicans would control more state legislatures and governorships than they already do. The president, elected by a minority of voters, would then be able to appoint right-wing lawyers to the federal court and Supreme Court.

Such changes would give Trump and a Republican Congress opportunity to consolidate their neoliberal economic agenda, including the goals of lowering taxes, advancing further deregulation, further privatization of public land, prisons, immigrant detention facilities, schools, along with pushing for unrestrained military spending, and a hawkish foreign policy. The impulsive, arrogant, autocratically-aspiring president would again have the power to launch nuclear weapons at a whim. When Republicans have power, they would support legislation that plays to Trump’s base, which is large but far from a majority, on anti-abortion, unrestricted gun ownership, support for Christian nationalism, and white supremacy. Overall, in such a dystopian situation, they would continue to make up their own “facts” to rationalize their goals and policies. Fox News and other extreme rightist media would echo it all and reinforce whatever Trump and the Republicans put forth. (See Henry Giroux’s article on Carlson and the right-wing media at: https://truthout.org/articles/tucker-carlson-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-in-right-wing-media-war-on-truth.)

Evidence of the escalating Republican attacks on voting rights

Voter suppression

Sam Levine reports for The Guardian thatthe Republican effort to suppress the vote is, as of the end of April, unprecedented “not only in its volume as more than 360 bills with voting restrictions have been introduced so far – but also in its scope” (https://theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/28/republican-voter-suppression-biden).

In an update on May 11, 2021, Nathaniel Rakich and Elena Mejia consider how and where Republicans are making it harder for some Americans to vote, with more to come (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/republicans-have-made-it-harder-to-vote-in-11-states-so-far). They refer to data from the Brennan Center for Justice and their own research and report that “at least 404 voting-restriction bills have now been introduced in 48 state legislatures, adding that “nearly 90 percent of them were sponsored primarily or entirely by Republicans.”

Many of these bills will not be approved; however, dozens or more will be approved. According to their analysis of the data, Rakich and Mejia “count 179 that are already dead — either because they were voted down or weren’t passed before a key deadline. Another 137 bills have not yet progressed beyond the committee stage, and at this point, that inaction bodes poorly for their chances of passage. On the other hand, 63 bills are still worth watching, having passed at least one step of the legislative process (with those that have passed two chambers closer to passage than those that have just passed committee). That leaves 25 bills that are already law (back in March, this number was only six); four states have even enacted multiple such laws.”

Rakich and Mejia identify 11 states that had by May 11 already enacted new voting restrictions, including Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, Utah and Wyoming. Michigan and Florida should now be added to the list and Texas is on the verge of passing extensive voter suppression legislation. These states could sway the next elections in 2022 to Trumpian Republicans.

This is an “emergency”

Sam Levine writes that the electoral system is in an “emergency.” He underlines the point that during the first 100 days of Joe Biden’s presidency Republican lawmakers have taken an unprecedented effort to make it harder to vote. Even as attacks on voting rights have escalated in recent years, the Republican efforts since January “mark a new, more dangerous phase for American democracy, experts say.”

Levine gives some examples of what the voter-suppression bills include.

“Republicans in states like Georgia, Florida and Michigan have taken aim at mail in voting with measures that require voters to provide identification information with their mail in ballot application or ballot (in some cases both). They’ve sought to limit access to mail-in ballot drop boxes, even though they were extremely popular for voters in 2020 and there’s no evidence they were connected to malfeasance.

“Texas Republicans are advancing legislation that would criminalize minor voting mistakes and give partisan poll watchers the ability to record people at the polls. In Georgia and Arkansas, new legislation makes it illegal to provide food or water to people waiting in line to vote. In Michigan, one Republican proposal would even go so far as to block the state’s top election official from providing a link to an absentee ballot application on a state government website.”

If these efforts are left unchecked, Levine posits, “it will likely not only set the stage for Republicans to retake control of the US House in 2022, but also allow the Republican party to hold on to its political power by shutting a rapidly diversifying electorate out from the ballot box.”

Jessica Corbett provides additional information on the Republican’s voter suppression and electoral subversion activities ((https://commondreams.org/news/2021/05/27/fears-mount-gops-big-lie-2020-test-run-what-comes-next). She writes: “since a right-wing mob stormed the Capitol in January, Republican state legislators have proposed, and in some cases passed, voter suppression bills that critics warn could impact ballot access in key states for next year’s midterms and the elections that follow.” As mentioned, Republican efforts to subvert the electoral system is not new. She refers to an interview by Vox’s Sean Illing with Roosevelt University political scientist David Faris.

“In 2018, Roosevelt University political scientist David Faris told Vox‘s Sean Illing that since the 1990s, ‘we’ve seen a one-sided escalation in which Republicans exploit the vagueness or lack of clarity in the Constitution in order to press their advantage in a variety of arenas—from voter ID laws to gerrymandering to behavioral norms in the Congress and Senate.’ He warned that ‘Democrats have to recognize the urgency of the moment and act accordingly.’”

In a follow-up interview, Illing interviewed Faris on May 27, when he said that “it feels like we’re sleepwalking into a real crisis here, but it’s hard to convey the urgency because it’s not dramatic and it’s happening in slow motion and so much of life feels so normal.” Faris also said, “The most destructive thing that Trump did on his way out the door was he took the Republicans’ waning commitment to democracy and he weaponized it, and he made it much worse to the point where I think that a good deal of rank-and-file Republican voters simply don’t believe that Democrats can win a legitimate election. And if Democrats do win an election, it has to be fraudulent.”

Meanwhile, according to Faris, Republicans are trying to take over election oversight offices in some states, among other shenanigans. Corbett quotes Faris: “Key figures in the attempted election theft are now running for election oversight offices in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan,” he continued. That is, they want to have their people count the votes and determine which votes are valid or not.” At the same time: “The national-level Republican Party has swung hard against the proposed congressional investigation to investigate the [January 6] putsch, and Senate Republicans are likely to filibuster it.”

Example of voter suppression in Texas

In an article for Common Dreams, Jessica Corbett reports on how Republican Texas lawmakers have put forth and will soon pass a voter suppression bill without any Democratic votes that targets people of color and in disregard of overwhelming public opposition (https://commondreams.org/news/2021/05/30/texas-gop-finalizes-ruthless-voter-suppression-bill-sparking-calls-congressional).

Among other provisions, the bill says: (1) you can vote with a gun permit but not a student ID; (2) no online voter registration; (3) must be deputized to register voters; (4) voters under 65 cannot use fear of covid to vote by mail.” The bill also plans to “limit electoral participation in the largely Democratic Harris County because it would outlaw drive-thru and 24-hour voting, which nearly 140,000 county voters used in the 2020 election.”

Other provisions “include barring election officials from sending absentee ballots to all voters, implementing new identification requirements for Texans who request mail ballots, allowing partisan poll watchers additional access, and imposing harsher punishments on election officials who violate state rules.” There is also language in the bill that would make “it easier to overturn an election, no longer requiring evidence that fraud actually altered an outcome of a race—but rather only that enough ballots were illegally cast that could have made a difference.”

The Texas Republican’s voter suppression initiative is occurring after 750 polling places across the state have been closed in recent years.

Corbett quotes Sarah Labowitz, policy and advocacy director of the ACLU of Texas, who “slammed the state GOP’s Senate Bill 7 (pdf) in a statement Saturday, declaring that “S.B. 7 is a ruthless piece of legislation.” Journalist and expert on voting Ari Berman said “S.B. 7 remains a racist voter suppression bill that belongs in the Jim Crow era.” Common Cause Texas executive director Anthony Gutierrez said Saturday [May 30] after a conference committee of state House and Senate members released the final version that “S.B. 7 remains a racist voter suppression bill that belongs in the Jim Crow era.”

The “big lie” gives momentum to Republican voter suppression efforts

Even before the November 2020 presidential election, Trump was saying that, if he lost the election, it would be due to a “rigged election,” a fraudulent election. He doubled-down on this false claim in the weeks after the election. Indeed, he still persistently tweets that the election was “stolen” from him. Here’s some of what I wrote on January 11, 2021 in a post entitled “America at Crossroads: Trump, the insurrection, and what comes next.” (You can find it at wordpress under vitalissues-bob sheak, or email for a copy to bsheak983@gmail.com.)

————–

In the weeks before and after the presidential election

Advancing the “big lie” that the election was rigged

Trump’s efforts to win the 2020 presidential election by any means began well before the election itself, when he repeatedly said that millions of mailed-in ballots were fraudulent. Then after the election, Trump claimed that he had won the election by millions of votes – that the election was fraudulent, that millions of votes cast for Biden were invalid, that millions of votes for him were not counted, and, absurdly, that Biden must prove to him that the 80 million plus votes he received were indeed valid votes before he concedes. Susan B. Glasser writes in an article for The New Yorker on January 7th that the country “had to brace for an alarming confluence of virus denialism and election denialism between November 3rd and January 20th.” Glasser continues: “As devastating as it is for American democracy, it is no longer news that the President insists, as he did in a tweet the other day, that he is the victim of the ‘greatest Election Fraud in the history of the United States.’” Then, in the days immediately following the election, “Trump said that his goal was to ‘STOP THE COUNT,’ ‘stop the steal,’ or to demand recounts, or to discover evidence of fraud’” (https://newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trump-washington/its-not-just-trumps-war-on-democracy-anymore). Glasser further writes:

“Trump has escalated and escalated, culminating on Wednesday [Nov 9] with a single-word tweet announcing his new goal: not to win the election but to ‘#OVERTURN’ the results.” Even more strikingly, while his lawyers lost 60 court cases since the election, Trump has told millions of Americans through his Tweet account to believe that the election was rigged against him—seventy-seven per cent of Republicans now say mass fraud occurred, according to a… Quinnipiac poll out Thursday [Nov 10]—and enlisted virtually the entire national leadership of the Republican Party in his concerted attack on the legitimacy of the results.”

Anne Gearan and Josh Dawsey report that “Trump has been fixated on overturning the election for weeks, making hundreds of calls to allies, lawyers, state legislators, governors and other officials and regularly huddling with outside lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and others.” And Trump fed “his base through twitter that the election was rigged against him, even before he lost the election on November 3. He asked his right-wing supporters to come to Washington for a rally on December 6, when a joint-session of Congress was convening to take the final step to sanctify Biden’s victory. It was at this rally, including an assimilate of some 30,000, that Trump told the crowd to march to the US Capitol building” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-election-capitol-building).

———————-

Republicans “test” the limits

Jessica Corbett also describes the Republican attempts to overturn the 2020 election “a test run,” to test the integrity of the Electoral College certification in the U.S. Congress. According to Vox’s Sean Illing, stopping the certification “never had a real chance of working without some external intervention like a military coup or something like that.” However, it was a test run searching “for a way to overturn an election with the veneer of legality.” What is so troubling is that Trump and Republicans were able to tap a narrative that gave the Trump’s base reasons to believe that the election was stolen from Trump. Trump and large swaths of his base appear to welcome court battles and even the possibility of a civil war, that is, if they can’t win by suppressing the vote and controlling enough state legislatures and the Congress to win Republican victories at the polls.

Levine points out that Republicans in the U.S. Congress and in some states echoed and, now with even less dissent, echo Trump’s lie that Biden’s election was based on widespread fraud and therefore is illegitimate. With the help of the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, Republican voices proclaiming the big lie are more pronounced than ever. This false message gave those who assaulted the Capitol on January 6 a self-serving justification, among others, for their violence and destruction. Corbett writes: “Recent legal proceedings for alleged members of the mob that attacked the Capitol have highlighted the effectiveness of the Big Lie—that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from Trump—among voters.”

Explaining away the assault on the Capitol

The January 6 assault on the capitol

As widely reported, on January 6, as several Republican senators tried to block certification of the electoral college vote, Trump urged a large crowd to march on the capitol and protest or somehow disrupt the certification process. The events of the riot, assault, or insurrection have been widely documented and verified by video, interviews with Capitol security personnel, a slew of in-depth reports, and court proceedings involving some of the riot participants.

A spiral and spread of radicalization

The headline of Teri Kanefield’s article in The Washington Post on April 29, 2021 is that “Republican rhetoric is getting more extreme because that’s what the base demands” (https://washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/04/29/republican-rhetoric-extreme-base). Kanefield is an author and a graduate of the University of California Berkeley School of Law. For 12 years, she maintained an appellate law practice in California. She offers this explanation.

“The Republican Party is caught in a spiral of radicalization: Having alienated moderates and corporate donors, some prominent GOP figures are turning to grass roots funding from the more radical segment of its base, which has led them to delve further into the conspiracy theories and dangerous rhetoric that their most passionate voters love but that drove centrists away.”

She later adds: “These Republican leaders are thus in a downward spiral, forced to cater to the most radicalized members of their base. The only way to break the cycle is to break with Trump, denounce the ‘big lie’ that the election was stolen, and stop feeding lies to the base — something they appear unable or unwilling to do.”  

As evidence of extremism in the Republican congressional ranks, Kanefield refers to statements by newly elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Not long after the capitol riot, Greene “liked” a comment on Twitter that advocated putting a bullet through House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s head.” Previously, Greene had questioned “whether 9/11 was a hoax, flatly stated that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim and accused the Clintons of murdering John F. Kennedy Jr.”

Kanefield also points to how false QAnon and other conspiratorial beliefs have infiltrated the Republican mainstream. The centerpiece of these beliefs, hardly the only one, is that Democrats are part of a global cabal of satanic pedophiles. She buttresses her argument with the following evidence. (`1) “A January YouGov poll found that 30 percent of Republican voters had a favorable opinion of the QAnon belief system.” (2) “Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), one of 10 Republicans to vote to impeach Trump, noted that a ‘significant plurality, if not potentially a majority, of our voters have been deceived into this creation of an alternate reality.’” (3)  The current party chairman in Texas is Allen West, a former Florida member of Congress who in 2014 described Barack Obama as ‘an Islamist’ who is ‘purposefully enabling the Islamist cause.’” (4) A keynote speaker at a recent Minnesota County Republican event told attendees that George Floyd’s murder was a “hoax.”

(5) “Last week, Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, claimed that Democrats are ‘importing’ immigrants to ‘dilute’ the votes of ‘real’ Americans. This is the ‘replacement theory,’ also known as the ‘white genocide’ conspiracy theory which holds that minorities and immigrants are seeking to replace ‘real Americans.’””

(6) “When former president Donald Trump was brought to trial in the Senate for his role in inciting the insurrection, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to walk a narrow line, as Republicans had done in the past. He nodded to the insurrectionists by voting to acquit Trump is his role in inciting the riot. He then tried to keep the support of moderates and corporate donors by stating immediately after the vote that Trump was ‘morally and practically responsible for the insurrection.’”

McConnell’s attempts to satisfy both sides of the issue didn’t work, but by supporting the big lie and Trump the outcome for the Senate majority leader proved to be beneficial. On the one hand, previously stalwart corporate supporters withdrew their support from McConnell. According to Kanefield, “During the first quarter of 2021, McConnell didn’t receive a single corporate PAC donation. In contrast, during the first quarter of 2019, he took in $625,000 from 157 corporate PACs and trade associations.” On the other hand, McConnell “then pivoted to soliciting donations from individuals by denouncing ‘cancel culture’ and putting forward claims of voter fraud.” This worked. “Appealing to grass roots supporters by stoking conspiracy theories about the election paid off. McConnell hauled in more than $700,000 from individual donors during the first quarter of 2021. Appealing to the radicalized base brought in more than relying on corporate donors had.”

Majority of Republicans polled believe the big lie

And recent polls finds that a majority of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen. Ariel-Edwards Levy reports on the findings of an Ipsos/Reuters poll released in late May ((https://mercurynews.com/2011/05/28/a-majority-of-republicans-believe-that-2020-election-was-stolen). The new polling results released in May document that a “majority of Republicans, 56%, say they believe that the 2020 election was the result of illegal voting or election rigging… with about 6 in 10 agreeing with the statement that “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.”

The Ipsos/Reuters poll also finds that Republicans agree, “4% to 30%, with the myth that the January 6 riot at the US Capitol “was led by violent left-wing protestors trying to make Trump look bad.” This belief is demolished by subsequent investigations, as sources from the FBI to alleged participants in the riot “have shot down the myth that left-wing agitators were involved. Nonetheless, Ariel-Edwards Levy reports “One-quarter of the American public as a whole say they think last year’s election outcome was determined by illegal voting or election rigging, with about 30% saying the election was stolen from Trump and roughly one-third that the Capitol riot was led by left-wingers.”

Republicans in the U.S. Senate and House reject an independent commission to study the January 6 assault on the Capitol

Author and professor Robert Reich tells us on Friday, May 28, “54 U.S. senators voted in favor of proceeding to debate a House-passed bill to establish a commission to investigate the causes and events of the January 6th insurrection. This was 6 votes short of the number of votes needed for ‘cloture,’ or stopping debate – meaning any further consideration of the bill would have been filibustered by Republicans indefinitely.” The upshot is that there will be no bipartisan investigation (https://commondreams.org/views/2021/06/01/republican-party-existential-threat-american-democracy).

Reich delves into how the Senators voted. He writes: “The 54 Senators who voted yes to cloture—in favor of the commission [and to end debate]—represent 189 million Americans, or 58% of the American population. The 35 who voted no represent 104 million Americans, or 32% of the population.” He continues: “In other words, 32% of American voters got to decide that the nation would not know about what happened to American democracy on January 6.” Moreover, “the 35 who voted against the commission were all Republicans.” Why? “They did not want such an inquiry because it might jeopardize their chances of gaining a majority of the House or Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. They also wanted to stay in the good graces of Donald Trump, whose participation in that insurrection might have been more fully revealed.” 

What must Democrats do? Reich gives this advice: “Senate Democrats must get rid of the filibuster and push through major reforms—voting rights, as well as policies that will enable more Americans in the bottom half—most of them without college educations, many of whom cling to the Republican Party— to do better.” Better said, then done.

Karen Tumulty also considers the underlying reasons for why the Senate Republicans rejected the proposal in the Senate to create an independent commission to study the January 6 assault on the Capitol (https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/28/really-scary-republicans-dont-want-to-face-the-truth-about-jan-6).

There is no mystery here, Tumulty writes. “Anything that looks back to the final ugly spasms of the Trump presidency… would hurt the Republicans’ chances for gaining back control of Congress, McConnell acknowledged to reporters on Tuesday.”

As already notes, the Senate Republicans “blocked a motion to invoke cloture [to end debate and vote] on legislation to create a Jan. 6 Capitol attack commission 54-35 on May 28.” Sixty votes were needed to overcome the filibuster. Six Republicans broke ranks, and nine Republicans and two Democrats were absent for the vote. The defeat of the commission bill happened, even though “Democrats had given them just about everything they had claimed to want — including a power-sharing arrangement under which the GOP would have equal representation on the 10-member panel, as well as a say in any subpoenas it might issue.” The commission was to be “structured on the model of the one set up after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”

Trump’s calls to Republican senators to reject the commission proposal made a difference. Just a week before the vote, “nearly three dozen GOP members joined Democrats in the House last week to approve the proposed commission.” But then “the former president issued a statement blasting those ‘35 wayward Republicans’ and warning of ‘consequences to being ineffective and weak.’” Trump’s power rests on the fact “that a not-insignificant portion of the GOP’s Trumpian base actually appears to believe that the violent mob was justified in its effort to disrupt Congress as it conducted its pro forma tally of the electoral votes that made Joe Biden the 46th president.”

Tumulty offers this concluding assessment. “McConnell may be right that dodging and delaying accountability for what happened on Jan. 6 could help Republicans win back power in Congress. But by standing in the way of a reckoning with the poisonous forces that are growing within the ranks of their own party, they are doing a disservice to the country — one for which democracy itself will ultimately pay a price.”

No end to it: Arizona Republicans promote a phony audit

In an article for The Atlantic, staff writer David A. Graham analyzes the implausible Arizona Republican arguments for advancing a made-up, phony, audit of the 2020 votes cast the heavily Democratic Maricopa County (https://theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/arizona-audit-will-only-undermine-faith-democracy/619072).

The so-called audit is becoming a model for Republicans in other states to undertake similar baseless audits. Their purpose is to perpetuate the myth that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump.

Graham puts it this way: “The firm that was hired by the Arizona Senate to oversee the count, Cyber Ninjas, which has no evident qualifications and is run by a ‘stop the steal activist, touts ‘the systemic, transparent method we have created to ensure Arizonan and American confidence in the election process and results.’” Republicans in Wisconsin are “launching an Arizona-style investigation, as well as in other states that have moved to restrict voting, such as Texas, Georgia, and Florida, leaders have similarly argued that such efforts are necessary to guarantee faith in elections.”

Maricopa election officials have months ago “conducted both a hand recount of a sample of ballots and a forensic audit.” The real purpose of the Arizona selective county audit is to foster further doubts about the validity of the 2020 presidential election. Graham reports that “Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, has begun posting a series of concerns about the security, counting process, equipment, and professionalism of the Cyber Ninjas’s audit at the site.”

Journalists Steven Rosenfeld and Jeremy Stahl have,” Graham writes, “chronicled in detail, the procedures are a mess, which is all but certain to result in a different tally than the official final tally, even if it still finds that Joe Biden beat Trump by a wide margin.” But this charade will “seed only more doubts and questions about the result—and the audit’s sloppy handling of ballots means that the evidence may be irreversibly tainted ahead of any future count. And that’s just what the audit’s proponents want.”

A coup?

Mark Joyella reports that, according to New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, “Trump is telling people he expects to be ‘reinstated” as president by August (https://forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/20201/06/01/maggie-haberman-trump-telling-people-he-expects-to-be-reinstated-as-president-by-august/?sh=7b5b58de7a76).

Here’s how Joyella puts it: “The New York Times’ Washington Correspondent Maggie Haberman reports that former President Donald Trump is telling ‘a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated’ as president by August.”

Trump’s baseless assertions about a stolen election are being reinforced by the phony audit in Arizona and others on the way in other Republican-controlled states. The audits, in turn, help to keep the “big lie” alive. Combined with Republican acts of voter suppression in most states, Republican support in the U.S. Congress for Trump, the tyrannical hold Trump has on Republicans nationwide, and the obedient right-wing media, perhaps there will be further acts of insurrection.

The rub, Joyella says, is that some Trump supporters and QAnon believers hope for a coup that would restore Trump to the White House.

Trump and QAnon

Wikipedia has a section on QAnon (https://en.wikipedia.org.wiki/QAnon).

The online encyclopedia describes QAnon or simply Q as “a discredited American far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satanic,^[1] cannibalistic pedophiles run a global child sex trafficking ring and conspired against former President Donald Trump during his term in office.^[2][3][4][5] QAnon is commonly described as a cult.^[6][7][8] On the Trump-Qanon connection, Wikipedia reports the following.

 “QAnon adherents began appearing at Trump reelection campaign rallies in August 2018.^[35] Bill Mitchell, a broadcaster who has promoted QAnon, attended a White House “social media summit” in July 2019.^[36][37] QAnon believers commonly tag their social media posts with the hashtag #WWG1WGA, signifying the motto “Where We Go One, We Go All”.^[38] At an August 2019 Trump rally, a man warming up the crowd used the QAnon motto, later denying that it was a QAnon reference. This occurred hours after the FBI published a report calling QAnon a potential source of domestic terrorism, the first time the agency had so rated a fringe conspiracy theory.^[39][40] According to analysis by Media Matters for America, as of October 2020, Trump had amplified QAnon messaging at least 265 times by retweeting or mentioning 152 Twitter accounts affiliated with QAnon, sometimes multiple times a day.^[41][42] QAnon followers came to refer to Trump as “Q+”.^[43]”

Part 2: Biden and the Democrats

Biden’s initial steps through executive actions

Sam Levine reminds us that the “constitution gives the US president little unilateral power over voting laws, a power explicitly given to the states” and that “Biden has done just about all he can to act alone against these efforts.” Levine gives these examples of what Biden has done (https://theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/28/republican-voter-suppression-biden).  

“On the day he was inaugurated, he halted a Trump administration effort to try and use the census to limit non-citizen representation. He has used the power of the power of his bully pulpit to unsparingly criticize the measures (“Jim Crow in the 21st century” is how he described Georgia’s voting measure).” Then in March, Biden “issued a relatively modest, but potentially significant executive order, directing federal agencies to expand voting access. He has created a senior-level White House role focused on voting rights tapped two longtime civil rights lawyers with an expertise in voting rights to top roles at the justice department, which is responsible for enforcing some of the nation’s top voting rights laws.”

Eugene Daniels also reports on Bident’s executive order that was signed on Sunday [March 7]. It came symbolically on the 56th anniversary of the march for voting rights in Selma, Ala., known as ‘Bloody Sunday’” (https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/07/biden-voting-access-474041).

The order was described as an “initial step” to protect voting rights — one that uses the authority of the president “to leverage federal resources to help people register to vote and provide information,” according to an administration official.”

According to Daniels, “Federal agencies will be directed to notify states about the ways in which they can help with voter registration, in addition to being tasked with improving voting access to military voters and people with disabilities. Biden also directed the federal government to update and modernize Vote.gov, the website it operates to provide the public with voting-related information.” It remains to be seen whether Biden’s executive order is an “initial step” or a last step in protecting and opening up access to voting. The prospects for the legislation avoiding a filibuster and being passed with a simple majority in the Senate appear to be challenging. At the same time, Congressional Democrats were just able to pass a Covid-19 relief act on the basis of reconciliation, circumventing a Republican filibuster and passing the legislation with a simple majority, 50 to 49 (one Republican was absent).

Biden also pushes voting rights policies

Biden and his advisers have also authored two voting rights proposals, both of which have been taken up and passed by Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives and have been introduced by Democrats in the U.S. Senate. Indeed, they have already passed with a slim Democratic majority in the House. However, unless Democrats can muster 50 votes in the Senate, Republicans will use the filibuster to keep the bills from being passed. The bills are titled (1) For the People Act and (2) the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. I’ll focus on the former bill here.

The For Peoples’ Act

The full title of this act, H.R.1 and S.1, “An Act to expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, strengthen ethics rules for public servants, and implement other anti-corruption measures for the purpose of fortifying our democracy, and for other purposes.”

Wendy R. Weiser, Daniel I. Weiner, and Dominique Erney provide a comprehensive analysis of the proposed legislation, section by section, and what it can accomplish.  (https://brennancenter.org/our-work/policy-solutions/congress-must-pass-people-act).

“The Act” they write, “incorporates key measures that are urgently needed, including automatic voter registration and other steps to modernize our elections; a national guarantee of free and fair elections without voter suppression, coupled with a commitment to restore the full protections of the Voting Rights Act; small donor public financing to empower ordinary Americans instead of big donors (at no cost to taxpayers) and other critical campaign finance reforms; an end to partisan gerrymandering; and a much-needed overhaul of federal ethics rules. Critically, the Act would thwart virtually every voter suppression bill currently pending in the states.”

Wikipedia also provides an extensive analysis of the potentially far-reaching provisions of the bill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_People_Act).

The Wikipedia account considers 7 key provisions of the bill, dealing with voting rights, election security, campaign finance reform, ethics, findings in support of D.C. Statehood, gerrymandering, and the number of federal election commissioners. With respect to “voting rights,” the bill would eliminate obstacles and institute changes that would streamline and increase the accessibility of voting for the American people.

Here I quote excerpts from Wikipedia on the proposed changes in voting rights.

Excerpts

“The bill would require states to offer same-day voter registration for federal elections^[3][2] and to permit voters to make changes to their registration at the polls.^[3] It would require states to hold early voting for at least two weeks and would establish automatic voter registration^[17][3][2] for individuals to be eligible to vote in elections for federal office in the state.^[18] Under the automatic voter registration provision, eligible citizens who provide information to state agencies (including state departments of motor vehicles or public universities) would be automatically registered to vote unless they opt out of doing so.^[17] The bill would also expand opportunities to vote by mail and would make Election Day a federal holiday.^[17] The bill would require states to offer online voter registration,^[3][17] which has already been adopted in 39 states and the District of Columbia;^[17] under the bill, states would be required to establish a system to allow applications to be electronically completed, submitted, and received by election officials, and to allow registered voters to electronically update their voter registration information.^[17] The bill would establish criminal penalties for persons who ‘corruptly hinder, interfere with, or prevent another person from registering to vote’ and for voter deception or intimidation (the bill would specifically ‘prohibit knowing and intentional communication of false and misleading information – including about the time, place, or manner of elections, public endorsements, and the rules governing voter eligibility and voter registration – made with the intent of preventing eligible voters from casting ballots’).^[17] The bill would instruct the Election Assistance Commission to adopt recommendations for states on the prevention of interference with voter registration.^[17]

 The bill would also prohibit the practice of voter caging^[17] and restrict the practicing of voter-roll purges^[9] by limiting states’ ability to remove registered voters from the rolls^[4] and setting conditions for when they could do so.^[3] Specifically, the bill would require states to obtain certain information before removing voters from the rolls, and would prohibit voter purges from taking place less than six months before an election.^[17] The bill prohibits any person from communicating “materially false” claims meant to prevent others from voting 60 days before an election^[20] and compels the attorney general to correct such misinformation.^[21] The bill also requires elections officials to timely notify any voter tagged for removal from the rolls and give them an opportunity to contest the removal or seek reinstatement of their registration.^[17] It also restores voting rights to felons who complete prison terms.^[2][22]

“The bill contains various provisions to promote voting access for people with disabilities and provisions to strengthen the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) by providing additional protections for military and overseas voters.^[17] 

“The bill would also create a Congressional task force on voting rights in American territories.^[17]

——————————

Can the Democrats in the U.S. Senate muster the votes to get past Republican filibustering and pass the For People Act?

The filibuster, a procedural rule in the US Senate, requires 60 votes to by-pass the filibuster and advance legislation.  Democrats do not have enough votes to eliminate the filibuster, and it’s currently blocking a bill that would block many of the restrictions advancing at the state level and dramatically expand access to the ballot, including national requirements for same-day, automatic and online registration. If Biden and the Democrats do not find ways around the filibuster, then their chances in the elections of 2022 and 2024 are considerably reduced. In the absence of successful policy victories, including H.R. 1, the Democrats would rely on an unprecedented massive voter turnout in the 2020 mid-term election, large enough to overcome Republican suppression, gerrymandering, and subversion of state electoral institutions. Even then, however, that may not be enough.

Sam Levine quotes Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something, “which seeks to recruit candidates for state legislative races.” Litman says, “If the Senate does not kill the filibuster and pass voting rights reforms … Democrats are going to lose control of the House and likely the Senate forever. You don’t put these worms back into a can. You can’t undo this quite easily.”

There are two challenges to which Senate Democrats must successfully respond in order to block Republican filibusters. One, they must use Senate procedures to defeat the filibuster and, two, the must have unity in their caucus to do so. There are presently two prominent holdouts, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. The two Senators are presently refusing to support procedural changes that would allow Democrats to sidestep the inevitable Republican filibuster and pass S. 1 by a simple majority, that is, 50 Democratic votes plus the vote by Vice-President Kamala Harris. Manchin and Sinema justify their positions in support of the filibuster by arguing that it is a necessary tool to protect input of the minority. It’s not yet clear how Democrats might persuade them to change their minds.

Overcoming a Republican filibuster procedurally

The filibuster is based on the Senate’s cloture rule, “which” Molly E. Reynolds writes, “requires 60 members to end debate on most topics and move to a vote” (https://brookings.edu/policy2020/votervitals/what-is-the-senate-filibuster-and-what-would-it-take-to-eliminate-it). The Senate is evenly divided, with 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans. Given that Republicans are unified in their opposition to virtually any bill put forward by Democrats, this means that it is impossible for Democratically-supported legislation to pass in the Senate as long as this rule stands.

Reynolds discusses a number of procedural options that can circumvent the filibuster. One is often referred to as “the nuclear option,” or formally as “reform by ruling.” It certain circumstances, this option can be employed with support from only a simple majority ofsenators.” A senator can raise a point of order, or claim that a Senate rule is being violated. If the presiding officer (typically a member of the Senate; presently a Democrat) agrees, and has the support of a majority, which would mean that all fifty Senate Democrats plus the vice-president Kamala Harris agree, the ruling would establish a new precedent and permit passage of the legislation in question by a simple majority. This, in theory, would be the most direct way of avoiding a filibuster. The problem is that there are some Democrats who oppose this option and thus, for the time being, eliminate the opportunity of a majority vote. It all hinges on the Democratic holdouts.

Concluding thoughts

The anti-democratic Republican Party and their supporters represent a growing threat to American democracy. Luckily, they don’t yet have a well-organized army of brownshirts to violently attack opponents and rip apart American political institutions, but they have other facilitative conditions.

As I wrote in the earlier post to which I have referred, “Professors of government Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt identify the signs of the rise of authoritarian behavior and government in their book, How Democracies Die.

First, “there is a rejection of (or weak commitment to) democratic rules of the game.” For example, authoritarians want to restrict basic civil or political rights (e.g., voter suppression).

Second, authoritarians deny the legitimacy of their political opponents, as when they describe them as an “existential threat, either to national security or to the prevailing way of life,” “describe their partisan rivals as criminals.” Trump’s continuously bellowed “big lie” that the election was stolen and the support for this allegation by much of the Republican Party and Republican base.

Third, authoritarians tolerate or encourage violence. They have “ties to armed gangs, paramilitary forces, militias….” Trump and many Republican legislators want to blame the January 6 attempted insurrection on leftist influences and dismiss the actual right-wing mob. Indeed, they encouraged “mob attacks on opponents.” There is little doubt that Trump incited and enflamed those who invaded the Capitol building. The refuse to unambiguously condemn violence and punish it.

Fourth, authoritarians “curtail civil liberties of opponents, including the media.” For example, they support laws restricting protests and Trump has expressed his hatred toward the mainstream media as “fake news” and worse.

Despite all this, the majority of American voters support democratic values and institutions. Despite all this, the Democratic Party stands against Trump’s authoritarian party and movement. Despite all this, the majority of Americans reject Trump’s “big lie.” Despite all this, there are ongoing investigations by government authorities of Republican corruption.

If Democrats in Congress can find ways to overcome Republican obstruction and enact the For the People Act and other legislation, and if a massive number of people vote in 2022, then the momentum toward authoritarian and autocratic government may be defeated – and Trump finally relegated to the trash heap of history.