Month: June 2013

Ryan Koronowski outlines the main talking points from Obama’s climate speech at Georgetown University, which will take place later this afternoon:

The plan, according to senior administration officials, has three pillars: cutting carbon pollution in America, leading international efforts to cut global emissions, and preparing the U.S. for the costly impacts of climate change. President Obama will frame action as a moral obligation to do what we can for “the world we leave our children.”

Executive action remains one of the only serious avenues left to cut greenhouse gas emissions — a recent National Academy of Sciences report found that the U.S tax code is not currently doing it, and congressional action still looks unlikely. Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary, said in his briefing Monday that the president’s view “reflects reality.” Carney said “we’ve seen Congress attempt to deal with this issue and fail to.”

Brad Plumer calls the White House plan a “kitchen sink approach”:

The White House is asking the EPA to propose rules for those existing plants by the summer of 2014 and finish them by 2015. “It’s an aggressive timeline and everyone will have a strong opinion about it,” says a senior administration official. “And we’re focused on making sure there’s adequate time to engage key stakeholders here.” …

[T]he White House is pursuing a slew of complementary measures, too. For instance: The White House is hammering out an agreement with China and other countries to phase out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a potent greenhouse gas used in everything from soda machines to many car air conditioners. The administration will also develop a plan for curbing methane emissions from natural-gas production. The Energy Department will set new efficiency standards for appliances and buildings. The Interior Department will try to speed up wind and solar development on public lands. Foreign-aid agencies will cease financing coal plants overseas (except when there are no possible alternatives).

Molly Redden, meanwhile, previews the coming legal battles over any EPA action:

“There is no end to the legal creativity of the regulated industry,” said Lisa Heinzerling, a professor of environmental law at the Georgetown University Law Center. David Hawkins, director of climate programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council, agreed. “Virtually every rule that the EPA adopts under the Clean Air Act,” which the Obama administration will use to regulate power plants, “is litigated. So the fact that it’s litigated doesn’t say a thing about the strength of polluters’ legal arguments,” he said.

And yet, as Simon Lazarus and Doug Kendall have pointed out for Grist, any challenge to new regulations would wind up before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where conservative appointees hold a majority. And the threat of a court decision against them has already cowed the EPA into delaying its rules for new power plants earlier this year.

Jonathan Cohn considers the implications for international climate policy:

The U.S. and other nations have agreed to finalize a climate agreement in 2015, at another upcoming summit. If, by then, the U.S. is on track to fulfill its previous pledge, other nations might be more inclined to agree to more reductions of their own. Many experts believe that round of international negotiations represents the next, and maybe the last, great chance to avoid some serious and potentially devastating changes to the climate—among them, more severe weather like droughts, floods, and storms.

Philip Radford hopes the speech marks a beginning rather than an end:

[T]o truly meet his obligation to future generations, this must be the foundation – not the final act – of his climate legacy. The current Congress has made it clear that it will be on the wrong side of history, so it is absolutely vital for the President to use his authority to reduce power plant pollution, move forward with renewable energy projects on public lands, and increase energy efficiency. What the President will propose today is just a part of what it’s possible to do without Congress, and to solve the climate crisis, the solutions will have to be equal to or greater than the problem.

(Photo: A man poses for a picture with a kitchen sink at the Climate Camp on Black Heath on August 26, 2009 in London, England. By Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.)

Quick… Reset again!! RT @AP: BREAKING: Putin: Snowden is in transit zone of Moscow airport, Russia will not extradite him.

— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) June 25, 2013

Movie Of The Week: Edward Snowden in “The Terminal” pic.twitter.com/6W5eCwOVFS

— Hunter Walker (@hunterw) June 25, 2013

Mark Adomanis predicts Russia will pay a serious price for refusing to hand over Snowden during his time in Moscow:

As should be clear, Russia doesn’t actually gain anything from helping Snowden, all it does is expose itself to the full wrath and fury of every part of Washington officialdom. Unless you’re defending a national interest of the first order, exposing yourself to the full wrath and fury of Washington officialdom is a really stupid thing to do.

There’s no obvious principle at stake in the Snowden case, no real “interest” that the Russians are trying to defend: they’re just acting like jerks because they think they can get away with it. This is a foolish decision. Russia has never been popular in Washington and the Obama administration was barely able to prevent the Magnitsky bill from becoming a full-fledged diplomatic disaster (it did so largely by soft-peddling enforcement). How willing do you think the Obama folks are going to be to “defend” Russia when Congress inevitably starts debating additional sanctions or punitive measures? Do you really think they’re going to expose themselves to an endless array of bad press on behalf of a country that engaged in such calculated and deliberate antagonism?

In contrast, Max Fisher suggests that China thought it was doing the US a favor by sneaking Snowden out of Hong Kong:

White House spokesman Jay Carney lambasted the Hong Kong government for apparently aiding in Snowden’s flight to Moscow, saying that the “decision unquestionably has a negative impact on the U.S.-China relationship.” … Take a moment, though, to consider how this might look from Beijing. Typically, when the United States and China argue about transferring a high-profile and politically sensitive individual between their custodies, it’s a Chinese dissident whom the U.S. wants to grant asylum. Those cases are often perceived as deeply embarrassing for China, although Beijing has increasingly learned to live with them. Perhaps Chinese authorities saw this as a rare reversal: an American political dissident looking for asylum in Hong Kong, which despite its special status is a part of China. In the Chinese government worldview, granting asylum would have been the real slap to the United States.

More Dish on Snowden’s search for asylum here.

On this issue, the left in France sounds … well a little like the American anti-marriage equality left of the 1990s. But with a new twist:

An important current of French thought, which has no real American equivalent, has maintained that while women deserve equal rights, these rights must not entail the supposed erasure of sexual difference. Historians and philosophers such as Mona Ozouf and Philippe Raynaud have seen a particular threat in American-style protections against sexual harassment, which they have labeled “sexual Stalinism.” The sociologist Irène Théry has called for a féminisme à la française that acknowledges the “asymmetrical pleasures of seduction.” The philosopher Sylviane Agacinski goes so far as to call sexual difference the true basis for sexual equality in law. …

This spring, precisely the same concerns have dominated the manifestos against “marriage for all” issued by groups of law professors and psychologists. And interviews with ordinary protesters have shown just how effectively the arguments of philosophers have filtered down to street level, with one figure after another explaining their opposition to the reform in the same way. To quote a popular protest banner: “Un père et une mère c’est élémentaire” (“A father and a mother is elementary”). And the 60 percent support for same-sex marriage has not changed the fact that a majority still favors banning child adoption by homosexual couples. In short, although religion and homophobia obviously fed into the recent protests, the rhetoric employed by the opposition has trickled down from the intellectuals (as one might, indeed, expect in France).

Fawn Johnson expects so:

[T]he House is slogging along on a piece-by-piece approach that does nothing but stretch out the debate until all that’s left are wisps of ideas on work visas, local police enforcement, and electronic verification of workers. Indeed, the House might not kill the bill outright, but the GOP players are passing the ball around until the clock runs out.

Drum thinks the bill “depends entirely on the House leadership”:

If they decide they want to pass immigration reform and get it off the table for good, they can do it in four weeks. If they don’t want to, they can pretty easily fritter away the time. So we’re back to square one: do Republican leaders desperately want to put this whole thing behind them, regardless of the howling from the tea partiers, or do they care more about the backlash from their conservative white base than they do about picking up Hispanic votes in 2016?

Morrissey’s view:

There are two ways in which this gets bypassed. One is for John Boehner to simply put the Senate bill up for a floor vote, but his GOP colleagues would strongly resist that — regardless of whether it would pass or fail. Either way, it creates risk for Republicans, and they’d be better off developing their own version for Boehner to float. The other is to pass a more conservative comprehensive bill and throw it to a conference committee, but the House is so far away from that possibility (as Johnson points out) that it would have to be a shell bill.

Bouie thinks Republians are in serious trouble if the bill goes down in flames:

Latino voters don’t trust the Republican Party. Both because of their policies—hence President Obama’s three-to-one margin among Hispanics in last year’s election—and because of their rhetoric. According to a recent survey from Latino Decisions—a group that tracks and measures Latino public opinion—strongly worded statements against comprehensive immigration reform from Republican senators (in particular, Ted Cruz of Texas and Jeff Sessions of Alabama) harm the party’s standing with HIspanic voters. As Latino Decisions explains, “The results demonstrate that there is no ‘distancing from the party’ when it comes to the immigration reform bill and associated position-taking. It is perfectly reasonable that Latino voters view elected officials as spokespeople for their party, and either reward or blame them in similar proportion.”

Mataconis looks at a poll showing Rubio’s favorables dropping and a wider turning on him within the GOP:

it strikes me that the Republican/conservative (is there really a difference?) repudiation of a guy that they were all rallying behind just a few months ago is just another sign of the utter hopelessness of the GOP when it comes to immigration. One does not have to accept the Senate bill in full, indeed I’d argue that there are several provisions that I find problematic. However, the way legislating ought to work is that if you don’t like a bill then you propose alternatives and try to work out those differences through the legislative process. Instead, though, all I’ve seen from Senate GOP opponents of the bill are proposal after proposal designed more to appease their base with ineffective measures aimed at “border security” than to actually accomplish anything legislatively. In the House, meanwhile, it seems fairly clear that Republicans don’t want to act on immigration at all. In the end, it all points to reason to be pretty pessimistic about the future of immigration reform in the 113th Congress.