Thanks orlbuc for getting the nest rolling

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/27/biden-climate-prders-energy-463051

President Joe Biden will issue a slate of executive orders on Wednesday designed to make climate change a national security priority for years to come, reshaping the U.S. oil and gas industry and delivering victories for environmental advocates on a central pillar of his new administration.

In a sharp contrast to the Trump administration’s focus on increasing fossil fuel production, Biden’s orders will press pause on auctions of federal lands and waters to oil and gas companies, expand conservation protections for large swathes of federal land, create a new civilian conservation corps and promise to deliver economic help to coal-producing regions suffering from the industry’s decline.

Biden will still need Congress to accomplish his target of spending $2 trillion on climate change to help reach the goal of eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector by 2035 and across the economy by 2050. But the orders to be issued Wednesday show Biden taking aggressive steps to launch a government-wide effort toward tackling climate change.

Green groups were quick to welcome Biden’s climate initiatives, which had been the subject of chatter among environmental activists for weeks. Many of those groups had spent the past four years locked in court challenges against Trump’s own steady stream of executive orders.

“These actions stand in stark contrast to the denial of climate change and the attacks our oceans and coasts have faced over the past four years,” Diane Hoskins, campaign director at Oceana, a group advocating for protection of oceans, said of Biden’s plans to place an open-ended moratorium on the issuing new leases for oil and gas drilling in federal waters. “This stuff is a major step forward.”

Wednesday’s orders are part of an early slew of actions to fulfill Biden’s campaign pledges to address climate change as one of the top four crises confronting the U.S., alongside the coronavirus pandemic, economic stagnation and racial inequality. Last week, on his first day in office, Biden signed an executive order calling for reconsidering methane emission rules from new oil and gas sources, reversing Trump rules that rolled back vehicles’ tailpipe carbon dioxide limits, and canceling a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, the subject of pitched political battles for a decade.

Wednesday’s orders fill in many of the details left out of last week’s orders, including setting the date that Biden will convene a promised climate change summit with world leaders for April 22, Earth Day.

The new orders will also address “environmental justice” issues, such as by establishing new commissions to address the concerns of so-called fenceline communities that are disproportionately people of color or low-income families that live near pollution sources. Biden is also directing agencies to weigh the climate change effects of all their decisions, a move that could affect procurement strategies for government vehicle fleets or electricity production.

In another move, Biden will call for meeting his campaign promise to place 30 percent of U.S. federal land and waters under conservation protections by 2030. The so-called 30×30 plan was proposed by Rep. Deb Haaland, Biden’s nominee to lead the Interior Department, and former New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall.

The order that has generated the sharpest opposition from oil companies is one that promises to re-write the relationship between the industry and public lands. The Biden administration will order an open-ended freeze on offering public land for oil and gas drilling and coal mining, pending reviews of whether such leases were in the public interest. Under that review, the administration is expected to consider whether to add language to new government lease agreements to tighten standards on greenhouse gas emissions and increase the royalties that companies must pay for minerals they produce on public land.

https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/joe-biden-tribal-sovereignty-will-be-a-cornerstone-yH3tHz75-Ee7W3Gii6NaSQ

Biden signed a presidential memorandum last Wednesday that requires all federal agencies and executive departments to have a “strong process in place for tribal consultation,” said Libby Washburn, Chickasaw and the newly appointed special assistant to the president for Native American Affairs for the White House Domestic Policy Council. The position previously was held by Kim Teehee, Cherokee, and Jodi Archambault, Hunkpapa and Oglala Lakota, in the Obama Administration.

The move represents the new president “committing to regular, meaningful robust consultation with tribal leaders” and it requires all federal agencies and executive departments to have a “strong process in place for tribal consultation,” Washburn said.

Fawn Sharp, Quinault, president of the National Congress of American Indians, said the administration’s first week demonstrated that the needs of tribal nations are a priority.

“I am both excited and encouraged that the Biden Administration is taking so many meaningful and significant steps towards Tribal Nations’ priority issues — respect for sovereignty, racial equity, urgent action on climate change, protection of sacred sites and ancestral ecosystems, and the commitment to meaningful Tribal consultation,” she said. “There’s immense work still to be done, but we celebrate that the first steps President Biden has taken towards truth and reconciliation with Tribal Nations are so responsive to our needs and aligned with our values and principles.”

Since Day One, the Biden administration has gone full speed on taking presidential actions that affect tribal nations.

Hours after taking his oath, Biden revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, placed a temporary moratorium on all oil and gas activities in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and signed another executive order on “advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities through the federal government.”

“I think it’s exciting and it shows that things are going to be front and center for him and his entire administration,” Washburn said, adding that includes hiring more Native people across the board.

In addition to New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland’s nomination for Interior secretary, Washburn said, “President Biden, he promised during the campaign that tribes would have a seat at the table at the highest levels of federal government and a voice throughout the government, and I think that he’s really showing in the early beginning days of his administration that he is going to make sure that happens.”

Unbelievable

They have halted trading on GameStop.

Wall St. has no problem when hedge funds short stock, destroy companies, destroy jobs, and raid pensions, but when their massive short bets start to lose they are protected??? pic.twitter.com/t2rkEWDt1m

— Free Britney (@Jamie_Maz) January 27, 2021

Tip jar for Orl…

Democrats are prepared to go straight to the floor as early as next week with a budget resolution, the first step in unlocking reconciliation, which would allow for a pared-down package to pass with a simple majority. https://t.co/xWoljptwWu

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 27, 2021

https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2021-01-27/manna-from-heaven-l-a-officials-say-biden-funding-could-get-thousands-of-homeless-off-streets

An executive order signed by President Biden last week changed federal funding rules in a way that could potentially lift thousands of homeless Angelenos off the streets as the coronavirus continues to rage.

Local elected officials hope a shift in how the Federal Emergency Management Agency reimburses municipalities will breathe new life into an effort to rent hotel rooms for homeless people who are vulnerable to the virus and struggle to isolate.

“This is a huge opportunity. This is like manna from heaven,” said Councilman Mike Bonin, who on Tuesday introduced a motion asking the city to explore options for renting more hotel rooms. He thinks the city should be thinking of renting thousands or tens of thousands of rooms.

A good but scary article from Eric Levitz about what’s at stake in the filibuster fight.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2021/01/manchin-sinema-schumer-mcconnell-filibuster.html

If Democrats do not pass structural reforms, their odds of retaining both chambers of Congress in 2022 aren’t good. The president’s party almost always loses seats in midterms. And due to the GOP’s structural advantages, even if Democrats replicated the Republican Party’s post-9/11 performance in the 2002 elections — the only time this century that an in-power party gained ground — they might well still lose the House.

All this said, Democrats could have some extraordinary winds at their back. Biden has a decent shot of presiding over a post-pandemic economic boom. To the extent that Democrats can juice that recovery with further growth and wage-boosting measures — while maintaining the enthusiasm of their core interest groups — they may pull off the unprecedented in 2022.

But it’s hard to see how the party can do that while leaving the filibuster fully intact. Democrats will be incapable of honoring their (now decade-old) IOUs to civil-rights organizations, labor unions, and immigrant communities if they allow the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to remain in place. In a kinder political universe, Democratic control of the federal government would not be an aberration akin to a Buffalo Bills playoff win. In such a world, Democrats could pacify their core constituencies by pointing to the slimness of their current Senate majority and promising to deliver on their promises after they win more seats in 2022. In the world we actually live in, however, the NAACP and AFL-CIO have every reason to believe that this is the last Democratic trifecta they’re going to see in some time.

Meanwhile, America’s rising generations of millennials and zoomers — who are both more left wing than any of their predecessors and more distrustful of the major parties — are unlikely to grade the unified Democratic government on a curve. Keeping these cohorts invested in electoral politics, and rooted in “blue America,” is vital to the Democratic Party’s medium-term prospects. If the Biden presidency features two years of tepid reform followed by a midterm wipeout, younger, left-leaning voters may grow disaffected with electoral politics. (In this way, the GOP’s structural advantages may be self-reinforcing: How many times can you watch your party win the popular vote but lose the election, and/or win the presidency but fail to govern, before you stop bothering to cast a ballot?)

All this makes it difficult for the Democratic leadership to accept the constraints that the filibuster, and the ideological orientation of its marginal senators, place on the prospects for reform.

Only partisanship can save us now.

Following Manchin and Sinema’s remarks Monday night, Schumer assured reporters, “We are not letting McConnell dictate how the Senate operates.” The majority leader then went on Maddow and vowed to pass major climate-, racial-justice-, and democracy-reform legislation. His office, meanwhile, declared victory in the standoff with McConnell and promised to get “big, bold things done for the American people.”

In the immediate term, the Democrats’ internal conflict over the filibuster will move to the backburner. Joe Biden’s COVID-relief package and green-infrastructure “recovery” plan consist primarily of tax-and-spending measures that the party can advance through the budget-reconciliation process. And Schumer has signaled that he intends to bend the rules of that process as far as the Senate parliamentarian will let him, arguing that both a ban on new vehicles with internal-combustion engines and a $15 minimum wage are actually, primarily means of reducing government spending, when you really think about it.

But once reconciliation is done, attention will turn to the large stack of Democratic-coalition priorities that are currently subject to a 60-vote requirement. It will not be easy for Schumer to tell the NAACP that his caucus values a “Senate tradition” (that is anti-constitutional, historically associated with Jim Crow rule, and less than two decades old in its present form) more than it values a new Voting Rights Act. Nor will it be easy for the majority leader to tell organized labor that it will just have to wait until next time to see a $15 minimum wage (assuming that doesn’t get through reconciliation) or collective-bargaining reform. And it might be hard for Schumer to accept that he probably won’t ever wield majority power again after 2022 because his caucus would rather maintain the GOP’s structural advantage in the upper chamber than abolish the filibuster and add new states.

For these reasons, Schumer, Senate Democrat Whip Dick Durbin, and Delaware senator (and Biden confidant) Chris Coons have all telegraphed an intention to eliminate the filibuster if McConnell obstructs their coalition’s priorities. The apparent hope is that — while Manchin, Sinema, and a few others support the filibuster in the abstract — in the heat of a legislative battle over voting rights or a $15 minimum wage, they may consent to weakening the filibuster while lamenting what Mitch McConnell is making them do.

Sinema and Manchin have repeatedly insisted that they will not “eliminate” or “get rid of” the filibuster. But there are plenty of ways to erode the Senate’s 60-vote requirement that stop short of filibuster abolition. You could create new exemptions, modeled on budget reconciliation, that allow for the passage of certain categories of legislation by simple majority vote. Or you could restore the requirement for those mounting a filibuster to speak continuously from the Senate floor. Or you could throw every Democratic priority into a reconciliation bill and then let Kamala Harris overrule the parliamentarian when she objects.

But Manchin & Co.’s cooperation with this scheme is far from assured. The Democratic Party has a vital interest in passing sweeping reforms that gratify its base and mitigate its structural disadvantages. But Joe Manchin doesn’t necessarily have an interest in the institutional health of the Democratic Party.

Thus the Democrats’ existential interest in eroding the filibuster remains on a collision course with its moderate senators’ aversion to power. Anyone with a fondness for democracy must hope that, against all odds, the forces of partisanship will prevail.

This man pic.twitter.com/gx9KA4FbLB

— Susan Sarandon (@SusanSarandon) January 27, 2021

In keeping of Orl’s opening theme…

Not often I will be featuring a Thomas Friedman column

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/opinion/us-capitalism-socialism.html

I understand why Democrats are fuming.

Donald Trump ran up budget deficits in his first three years to levels seen in our history only during major wars and financial crises — thanks to tax cuts, military spending and little fiscal discipline. And he did so prepandemic, when the economy was already expanding and unemployment was low. But now that Joe Biden wants to spend more on pandemic relief and prevent the economy from tanking further, many Republicans — on cue — are rediscovering their deficit hawk wings.

What frauds.

We need to do whatever it takes to help the most vulnerable Americans who have lost jobs, homes or businesses to Covid-19 — and to buttress cities overwhelmed by the virus. So, put me down for a double dose of generosity.

But, but, but … when this virus clears, we ALL need to have a talk.

There has been so much focus in recent years on the downsides of rapid globalization and “neoliberal free-market groupthink” — influencing both Democrats and Republicans — that we’ve ignored another, more powerful consensus that has taken hold on both parties: That we are in a new era of permanently low interest rates, so deficits don’t matter as long as you can service them, and so the role of government in developed countries can keep expanding — which it has with steadily larger bailouts, persistent deficit spending, mounting government debts and increasingly easy money out of Central Banks to finance it all.

This new consensus has a name: “Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest,” argues Ruchir Sharma, chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley Investment Management, author of “The Ten Rules of Successful Nations” and one of my favorite contrarian economic thinkers.

“Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest” — a variation on a theme popularized in the 1960s — happens, Sharma explained in a phone interview, when government intervention does more to stimulate the financial markets than the real economy. So, America’s richest 10 percent, who own more than 80 percent of U.S. stocks, have seen their wealth more than triple in 30 years, while the bottom 50 percent, relying on their day jobs in real markets to survive, had zero gains. Meanwhile, mediocre productivity in the real economy has limited opportunity, choice and income gains for the poor and middle class alike.

The best evidence is the last year: We’re in the middle of a pandemic that has crushed jobs and small businesses — but the stock market is soaring. That’s not right. That’s elephants flying. I always get worried watching elephants fly. It usually doesn’t end well.

And even if we raise taxes on the rich and direct more relief to the poor, which I favor, when you keep relying on this much stimulus, argues Sharma, you’re going to get lots of unintended consequences. And we are.

For instance, Sharma wrote in July in a Wall Street Journal essay titled “The Rescues Ruining Capitalism,” that easy money and increasingly generous bailouts fuel the rise of monopolies and keep “alive heavily indebted ‘zombie’ firms, at the expense of start-ups, which drive innovation.” And all of that is contributing to lower productivity, which means slower economic growth and “a shrinking of the pie for everyone.”

As such, no one should be surprised “that millennials and Gen Z are growing disillusioned with this distorted form of capitalism and say that they prefer socialism.”

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/535884-court-upholds-ruling-invalidating-dakota-access-pipeline-permit-but?utm_campaign=Hot%20News&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=108324171&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9m7oocVp02MyBmzX7ARHeUfCMv7GJEzebqHUHtsJh9rSs5jOpOIsoc0PQ7X02v028-gtyYfJ6MYVrOKfValB0Pq135IQ&utm_content=108324171&utm_source=hs_email

A federal appeals court on Tuesday declined to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline even as it upheld a ruling from a lower court throwing out a decision that allowed its construction.

The three-judge panel ruled that the government should have conducted an environmental impact statement before going forward with the pipeline, and vacated easements granted for its construction to cross federally-owned land.

It also ordered the U.S. Army Corps. of Engineers (USACE), which had granted the easement allowing for the pipeline’s construction to be completed, to conduct the environmental assessment.

But the D.C. federal appeals court did not agree with the D.C. federal district court’s decision that the pipeline should be shut down. It left the decision on the pipeline’s future to USACE.

The panel, made up of a Clinton, Obama and Reagan appointee, decided that shutting down the pipeline isn’t automatically necessary because the easement was vacated. They argued that saying so would circumvent court precedent requiring a legal test to decide whether to grant such injunctions.

However, the decision left room for both agency action and additional litigation to potentially shut down the pipeline, leaving its future uncertain.

“It may well be — though we have no occasion to consider the matter here — that the law or the Corps’s regulations oblige the Corps to vindicate its property rights by requiring the pipeline to cease operation,” the ruling stated.

A spokesperson for Energy Transfer, the company behind the pipeline, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Hill. A request for comment from USACE was also not immediately returned.

Some of the pipeline’s opponents, meanwhile, expressed optimism that the Biden administration would shut it down.

“The court is giving the Biden administration the opportunity to get this right but holding the door open to further court action if they do not,” said Jan