Dangerous CO2 Levels; Exploding Police Costs; and Barr's Overreach

 #Elizabeth Kolbert, "The Catastrophist," The New Yorker, July 27, 2020.

"Carbon dioxide isn't just approaching dangerous levels; it is already there. Carbon dioxide is being pumped into the air some ten thousands times faster than natural weathering processes can remove it." "If we burn all the fossil fuels and put all that CO2 into the atmosphere, we will be sending the planet back to the ice-free state." "The only way we can constrain the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is to cut off the coal source by saying we either will leave the coal in the ground or we will burn it only at power plants that actually capture the CO2."

"Antarctica, for example, had not been expected to show a net loss of ice for another century, but recent studies indicate that the continent's massive ice sheets ae already shrinking." "There is also broad agreement among scientists that coal represents the most serious threat to the climate. Coal now provides  half the electricity in the United States. In China, that figure is closer to eighty per cent, and a new coal-fired power plant comes on line every week or two."

Some climate scientists support a direct tax on carbon emissions. "The tax should be significant at the start -- equivalent to roughly a dollar a gallon -- and then grow steeper overtime. All revenues from the law, ought to be distributed back to Americans on a per-capita basis, so that households that use less energy would actually make money."

"In order to stabilize carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, annual global emissions would have to be cut by something on the order of three-quarters. In order to draw them down, agricultural and forestry practices would have to change dramatically as well." 

"For his part, [climate scientist James] Hansen argues that while the laws of geophysics are immutable, those of society are ours to determine." Hansen says: "We can point to other countries being fifty per cent more energy-efficient than we are. We're getting fifty per cent of our electricity from coal."

#Dexter Jenkins, "Just Investment," The New Yorker, July 27, 2020. 

Cedric Lawson, a founding member of BYP100, insists that it is not enough to defund the police, and "reallocate residual funds to the people's vision of public safety." He has said "we must also divest from the prison-industrial complex and a system of administrative fees for probationers and parolees." 

""The 1950s proved to be the pivotal decade for the dramatic expansion of police personnel and for investment in new vehicles for crime control technologies." Author Simon Balto wrote that the Chicago Police Department's budget was 900 percent higher than it was in 1945, approaching $200 hundred million per year. "Since then, the numbers have only continued to climb -- and climb. In 2018, Chicago appropriated more than $1.57 billion for the police (some 18 percent of the city's overall budget of nearly $8.9 billion, not including grant funds)." "Indeed, the Action Center on Race and the Economy estimated that Chicago borrowed more than $709 million to cover these costs from 2010 to 2017. And ' most of the city's police-related settlement and judgment costs,' the group said -- $360 million from 2010 to 2016 -- were 'covered by bond  borrowing.' " 

"The ideological aversion to deficits, the outsize power of rating analysts, the ups and downs of letter grades and the effect of these dynamics on the cost of borrowing suggests that investment, particularly in the context of revenue shortfalls, will invariably come with strings attached -- strings that could strangle any attempt to build a more 'just society' in the 'cradle.' " 

"The proposed corporation would 'guarantee the payment of principal and interest' on debt issued by state and local governments borrowing to finance one or more needed public facilities. It would also offer interest-rate-reduction grants, and turn the federal government into a clearinghouse for new municipal information, obviating the capricous opinions of credit analysts." 

#Jeffrey Toobin, "Barr's Overreach," The New Yorker, July 20, 2020.

"More to the point, the Justice Department, under Attorney General William Barr has engaged in precisely the kinds of excesses that the reform movement has  endeavored to correct. Yet Barr's prosecutors have stepped in and charged at least seventy people with crimes in connection with the protests." 

"The problems with mandatory minimums only begin with the simple fact that they keep people in prison for too many years. They also concentrate power in the hands of prosecutors and removing discretion from judges, who usually have a broader perspective on the appropriate levels of punishment." 

"In federal courts today, a remarkable ninety-seven per cent of defendants plead guilty rather than go to trial." 

"As usual, Barr is [responding] to the George Floyd protests with ugly spasms of race-baiting and bigotry. But as bad as Trump's invective is on Twitter and elsewhere, Barr's actions are worse, because individuals and communities will be paying the costs for years, or decades, to come."