Author: Andrew Sullivan

For Democrats, not very:

The war on coal hasn’t hurt the Democrats very much in presidential elections. Since 2000, when coal country and Appalachia helped cost Mr. Gore the presidency, Democrats have built an alternative path to victory with large margins in diverse, well-educated metropolitan areas, like Northern Virginia, Denver and Columbus, Ohio. Additional losses in coal country haven’t changed this because the areas don’t have enough voters to make a difference in battleground states.

And coal country has clear boundaries that limit harm to Democrats. In 2012, Mr. Obama suffered significant losses in the coal country of southwestern Virginia, losing as much as a net 30 points in traditionally Democratic Dickenson and Buchanan counties. Yet just a few miles to the east, in counties where there are no coal mines, Mr. Obama retained nearly all of his support. The same was true in southeastern Ohio.

Alec MacGillis adds:

Take Kentucky, the focus of much of the punditry, given the close race between Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell and Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes. Coal-mining employment in the Bluegrass State has plunged by more than half in the past three decades, from 38,000 in 1983 to under 17,000 in 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. (Nationally, there are 78,000 people employed in coal mining—well less than half as many as are employed in oil and gas extraction, and not much more than the number of people employed in logging.) To put that in perspective: the auto manufacturing industry in Kentucky employs three times as many people as the coal industry does today. When is the last time you heard pundits making grand predictions about how new auto-industry regulations would affect Kentucky “Car Country”?

Maybe:

China said on Tuesday it will set an absolute cap on its CO2 emissions from 2016 just a day after the United States announced new targets for its power sector, signaling a potential breakthrough in tough U.N. climate talks.

Plumer unpacks the news:

If China ever did put a cap on its absolute carbon emissions, that would definitely mark a big policy shift. For now, China has only aimed to restrict its “carbon intensity” — the amount of carbon-dioxide it produces per unit of economic output. That means China’s overall emissions keep growing as the nation’s economy expands. A cap on emissions, by contrast, would require overall emissions to peak.

Also:

It’s not yet guaranteed that China will actually announce a cap. The man who made the announcement — He Jiankun, chairman of China’s Advisory Committee on Climate Change — is an adviser to the government, but he’s not a government official. So we’ll still have to see if this is the official Chinese government’s position. … More importantly, we don’t yet know the details of this supposed cap. What emissions will get capped? All of them? Some? How stringent will the cap be? Will it be enforceable?

Keating hopes the Chinese follow-through:

The Chinese government and official media often present the U.S. position on emissions as deeply hypocritical. China, after all, still has much lower emissions per capita than the United States, and the U.S. and Europe were able to pollute their way to prosperity in an era before concerns about global warming. Why, the argument goes, should China and other developing countries shoulder the burden for a problem largely created by the West?

This argument, paired with the American aversion to any new emissions rules that won’t also apply to China, creates a perfect feedback loop of inaction, with both countries arguing that the issue is the other side’s problem. While still very preliminary, this week’s news could be an indication that the two countries are starting to break out of the cycle and take some action on their own.

What Andrew Revkin is hearing:

I consulted with The Times’s Beijng bureau. Christopher Buckley, a reporter [based in Hong Kong] who in 2011 had covered China’s emissions plans [and similar pushes from advisers to adopt a cap] while with Reuters, spoke with He Jiankun, who told him repeatedly that he did not in any way speak for the government, or the full expert climate committee. Here’s Buckley’s translation:

It’s not the case that the Chinese government has made any decision. This is a suggestion from experts, because now they are exploring how emissions can be controlled in the 13th Five Year Plan…. This is a view of experts; that’s not saying it’s the government’s. I’m not a government official and I don’t represent the government.

Keith Johnson adds more context:

Beijing’s formal environmental goals are designed to make the economy relatively cleaner but allow overall greenhouse gas emissions to keep rising as the economy keeps growing. The latest official targets, for instance, are meant to cut carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 2015, rather than cutting carbon emissions outright. China is struggling to meet even those lower targets. Meeting these potentially more ambitious ones will be even harder.

Lizza describes the president’s climate agenda as evidence of his “left conservatism”:

It’s hardly unheard of for a President to be cautious about pushing social change, and it would be more surprising if a President didn’t move in the direction of shifting public opinion. Obama and his aides like to see him as someone who plays a long game. They sometimes suggest that his movement on these issues is all part of a grand plan. More likely, Obama is what might be called a “left conservative,” a phrase that Norman Mailer briefly popularized when he ran for mayor of New York, in 1969. Obama obviously shares the outlook of the left on these cultural issues, but he’s temperamentally cautious and rarely believes that it’s worth his effort to act until his own liberal base has moved the country along with it. And, even then, he sees his job as moderating the passions of the activists.

But this interaction between Obama and an activist left that is slowly pushing the country in its direction—especially among younger Americans—is becoming the main subplot of the Obama years. While people like  [environmental lawyer] James Milkey push for change at the bottom, they are increasingly finding an ally at the top.

Bouie credits Republicans for forcing the EPA’s hand. He recalls how they killed climate legislation in 2009:

It’s not that EPA action wasn’t possible, but that the administration wanted legislation and would make key concessions to get it. In the absence of a law, however, the White House was prepared to act alone. “If Republicans didn’t respond to the proposed deals,” wrote The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, “the White House could push them to the table by making a threat through the Environmental Protection Agency, which had recently been granted power to regulate carbon, just as it regulates many other air pollutants.”

With a little cooperation, Republicans could have won a better outcome for their priorities. They could have exempted coal from more stringent spectrum of regulations, enriched their constituencies with new subsidies and benefits, and diluted a key Democratic priority. Instead, they’ll now pay a steep substantive price for their obstruction, in the form of rules that are tougher—and more liberal—than anything that could have passed Congress.

Brentin Mock focuses on the racial justice angle of the new EPA rules:

President Obama hit on carbon pollution impacts on black and Latino kids within the first couple minutes of his talk with reporters yesterday, in a press call hosted by the American Lung Association. “The health issues that we’re talking about hit some communities particularly hard,” he said. “African-American children are twice as likely to be hospitalized for asthma, four times as likely to die from asthma. Latinos are 30 percent more likely to be hospitalized for asthma. So these proposed standards will help us meet that challenge head on.”

The fact that the EPA and Obama are holding up asthmatic kids of color as the avatar for the new carbon regime testifies to how much environmental-justice advocates have shaped this climate conversation over the past few years.

And Ben Adler previews the political battle to come:

Cleaner air, or less global warming, benefits everyone. But it benefits most people only marginally, and invisibly. So, as with many other types of industry regulation, support may be a mile wide and an inch deep. The costs, unlike the benefits, are heavily concentrated. Someone who works for a coal company, or a related industry, or in a community with a large coal presence, may see a direct threat to her livelihood and be much more motivated to call her congress member or show up at a town hall to express her intense opposition.

That’s why the coal industry will focus its efforts in the states that are most dependent on coal for their electricity, or that have it in the ground. “We’ve been seeking to educate and inform consumers through some of our grassroots activities in key coal and coal-consuming states,” says Nancy Gravatt, communications director for the National Mining Association, a trade organization for mining companies. There are 19 states across the Midwest, Appalachia, and the Rocky Mountains that get more than half of their electricity from coal. That’s where NMA will focus. And in Upper Midwestern states like Ohio, Minnesota, and Illinois, the group will argue that an increase in electricity costs would damage the manufacturing economy.

A couple months ago, the comedian hailed as “Egypt’s Jon Stewart” sounded defiant:

But now, just days after former field marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was elected president, Youssef has canceled his envelope-pushing satirical news show:

The cancellation of Youssef’s wildly popular show El Bernameg (“The Program”) underscored Egypt’s constriction of freedom of expression since the military removed elected President Mohamed Morsi last year. Since Morsi’s ouster, authorities put an end to the freewheeling media atmosphere that arose in the wake of the 2011 uprising. The interim government shuttered Islamist media, jailed Egyptian and foreign journalists and banned unauthorized protests. The crackdown on political opponents initially targeted thousands of Morsi’s primarily Islamist supporters, but it’s now affected many who, like Youssef, were staunch critics of Morsi.

In a news conference Monday at the downtown Cairo theater where his show used to be recorded, Youssef did not explain exactly why the show would not return to the airwaves, but suggested government pressure was to blame. “The Program doesn’t have a space,” he said. “It’s not allowed.”

Max Fisher sees a hint of irony in that Youssef supported the coup that brought Sisi to power:

It is true that Youssef, during the difficult year of Muslim Brotherhood rule in 2012 and 2013, was an important truth-teller whose jokes challenged the government’s abuses. He was briefly arrested for teasing the government on his TV show and faced real threats of serious prison time. This is the Youssef who is celebrated in the United States and elsewhere for his political satire, for challenging authoritarianism even when it put him at personal risk.

The Youssef who we do not typically see in the United States is the satirist who didn’t just challenge the Muslim Brotherhood government — but who went a step further, vilifying the regular Egyptians who supported the Islamist government, characterizing them as lesser citizens or internal enemies in a way that played into Egypt’s hate-filled political polarization, Sisi’s coup, and the disastrous consequences of both. Indeed, Youssef cheered on the military coup — as well as the bloodshed of anti-coup protesters, because unlike him they were Islamists

H.A. Hellyer also marks the show’s end:

Had Youssef been willing to make certain compromises, El-Bernameg could have gone on. He could have turned his show into one that lauded the now president-elect — certainly, that is what nearly all of the Egyptian media now does in some shape or form. He could have chosen to leave Egypt and broadcast in exile, or he could have gone to another channel — either another Arab one, or a European station.

But Youssef always made it clear that his program was an Egyptian program, and that it would be aired from Egypt on an Arab station — otherwise, it wouldn’t be aired. The last thing he wanted was to invite yet more attacks about the program being some sort of treasonous foreign entity. In discontinuing his show, Youssef and his team have sent a message: They refuse to compromise on their content to satisfy the powers that be. That is certainly unlike most of the Egyptian media — indeed, unlike media outlets the world over, including within the United States and Europe.

Late last night, Molly Ball explained what just went down in Mississippi:

Given the choice between an out-of-touch incumbent and a flawed challenger, Mississippi Republicans could not make up their collective mind. In a stunning result here Tuesday, the Republican civil war was fought to a draw. Senator Thad Cochran, a 41-year incumbent, took 48.8 percent of the vote, while state Senator Chris McDaniel, his Tea Party-aligned opponent, took 49.6 percent with more than 97 percent of precincts reporting late Tuesday. (One county had not reported its results because the election commissioner had gone to bed.) With the outstanding results unlikely to push either candidate over 50 percent, the two candidates appear headed for a runoff in three weeks’ time.

Beutler thinks the run-off won’t matter “in as much as McDaniel will be a junior Senator, who won’t vote much, if at all differently than Cochran would have”:

But it matters quite a bit as a reflection of the American right, and as a check against the growing narrative that Republicans have sloughed off their “Tea Party” problem. I’ve written skeptically of the idea that the GOP’s victories over “Tea Party” candidates this primary season are particularly meaningful. If the trick to beating “Tea Party” candidates is to nominate better-polished hardliners and throw tons of money at them, then the “Tea Party” hasn’t been beaten so much as the revanchist faction of the American right has been subsumed into the Republican party.

Weigel finds “no modern example of an incumbent senator losing the first round of a primary and winning a runoff”:

Cochran can’t bring any  more Democrats into the electorate in three weeks, because Mississippi law prevents you from voting in one party’s primary and other party’s runoff.

So the Tea Party is war-whooping. FreedomWorks, which has been struggling after staff departures and weak fundraising, dispatched its president to the McDaniel victory party and sent reporters evidence of its hard work  — 100,000 door knocks, 100 events, 40,000 yard signs. (You really can see the bold RETIRE COCHRAN songs all over the state.) The Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, a PAC that spent a half a million dollars on late ads, is currently meeting to discuss further investments.

Kilgore also doesn’t like Cochran’s chances:

[N]ow a deeply wounded Cochran faces a three-week runoff campaign in which many factors — especially turnout — favor his opponent. And with the heavy investment of groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund and the Club for Growth in Mississippi as their best prospect for a Senate RINO “scalp,” it would take a phenomenal effort by the incumbent or a big gaffe by the challenger to change the momentum in this race. When the smoke clears on June 24, Mississippi will likely join Kentucky and Georgia as states where the loss of a Republican Senate seat in November is possible, and the dissipation of GOP resources better spent elsewhere is certain. Beyond that, Republican pols everywhere would know that not even four decades of genial service and effective money-grubbing for a very poor state, or the support of virtually everyone there ever elected to a position above dogcatcher, is enough to survive the ever-rightward tide of the conservative activist “base.”

Should McDaniel become the nominee, Albert R. Hunt suggests that Democrats could win in Mississippi:

Before the primary, national Republicans admitted they were nervous over a possible McDaniel upset. They particularly feared the “Akin effect,” whereby his views would force other Republicans to either embrace or repudiate McDaniel. Still, the general feeling was McDaniel likely would squeak through in such a heavily Republican state. Actually, with a huge African-American population, Mississippi is not as red, or Republican, as it its neighbors, Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee. In these three states, Barack Obama got less than 40 percent of the vote in the last presidential election; he got 44 percent in Mississippi.

Chait views this is wishful thinking:

[T]he most favorable polling still shows Democrats losing the seat even if McDaniel wins the nomination. As Nate Cohnshows, a majority of Mississippi is comprised of white Evangelicals who vote almost unanimously Republican in every election no matter what. So the only real question at stake is whether Mississippi’s Republican senator is a boring partisan or an entertainingly crazy one.

Uncropped version of Jeff Widener’s famous photo of Tank Man on Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1989. pic.twitter.com/G2s4plNmqH

— ClassicPics (@History_Pics) June 1, 2014

On the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, Chinese activist Hu Jia feels “completely hopeless” about the prospects for reform in his country:

You have to say that a lot of the CCP’s methods are successful. They use the propaganda ministry to obfuscate this country’s true situation. They brainwash people, and the legal system is in their hands. If you criticize them, there are so many ways to deal with you: jail camps, labor camps, detention camps, prison camps, black prison camps, mental asylum camps. They have so many ways. Each method can make you disappear for a few years. And they can even have you die in prison like Cao Shunli. She was someone who simply asking to participate in the United Nation’s human rights review process. Someone who foreign countries were watching out for, but she died. So think about that.

“It is possible,” Melinda Liu argues, “to draw a direct line between the regime’s successful suppression of the Tiananmen generation then and the assertive China we see today”:

What’s not well understood is that the Communist Party leadership believes it has to behave in this bullying manner abroad, in part as a way of satisfying the patriotic sentiments it set in motion to quell Tiananmen-era discontent. Thus, Americans and other foreigners who are wary of China’s future power would do well to observe this anniversary, if only as a way of comprehending the roots of China’s new confidence.

But Andrew Nathan and Hua Ze believe China’s paranoid security state displays weakness, not strength:

The need to sustain and progressively intensify repression is a sign that the June 4 crackdown did not solve China’s problems; it exacerbated them. The ruling Chinese Communist Party faced a fork in the road in 1989. It could have dialogued with the students, as party leader Zhao Ziyang advocated, forming a common front against corruption. But the prime minister, Li Peng, argued that dialogue could end the Party’s monopoly on power. The top leader, Deng Xiaoping, sided with Li and the rest is history.

Refusal to dialogue with citizens has marked the regime’s modus operandi since then. This explains why citizens lack trust in government when it comes to land seizures, corruption, and pollution. Recent demonstrations against the building of a chemical plant in Maoming, Guizhou, and against an incinerator project in Hangzhou are signs of this corrosive mistrust.

Considering China’s rise to geopolitical prominence, Will Inboden addresses what its authoritarianism implies for US foreign policy:

It may seem now like distant history, but 2009 witnessed the shared hopes of the Obama administration and Beijing to forge a “G-2″ economic partnership of China and the United States, with other countries of the region envisioned in cooperative supporting roles. Instead today brings a region fraught with tension, division, suspicion of Chinese hegemony, and fears by other Indo-Pacific nations of American weakness and retrenchment. These trends are exemplified by tense exchanges between the United States and China at regional security conferences, neo-imperial territorial claims by China and aggression against the maritime vessels of neighboring countries, and a percolating China-Russia condominium based on shared interests in energy, countering American power, and preserving authoritarianism.

It is that latter factor that connects contemporary Asia with the legacy of Tiananmen Square. Beijing’s willingness 25 years ago to massacre its own citizens, and refusal today to admit it, let alone atone for it, illuminates this uncomfortable reality: The internal character of the CCP drives much of its external behavior.

Evan Osnos remarks on how effective the CCP’s propaganda has been “in framing the violence in 1989 as insignificant in the grand scheme, because it came amid broader gains in human development”:

In the government’s only official acknowledgement of the anniversary, the Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said, “In the last three decades and more of reform and opening up, China’s enormous achievements in social and economic development have received worldwide attention. The building of democracy and the rule of law have continued to be perfected.”

The message has been delivered to young people, in particular. We often imagine that young Chinese know nothing about the events of 1989; reporters who ask students to identify the image of the “tank man” frequently get blank stares. But more than a few students know the details and have applied a shade to the history. Several years ago, I met Liu Yang, a graduate student in environmental engineering at Stanford, who grew up in China. We happened to be chatting on the day of the nineteenth anniversary of Tiananmen Square, and, as I later wrote in The New Yorker, I asked him what he thought of the incident. He said, “If June 4th had succeeded, China would be worse and worse, not better.”

Christopher Beam finds Chinese millennials hazy on the details of what exactly happened and why:

Everyone I talked to knew the basic outline: Student protests, government crackdown, innocent civilians shot dead. But they weren’t all sure why the protesters were so upset. Jenny, a sharp 25-year-old legal expert living in Beijing, guessed it had to do with corruption. Several people suggested that the students were being manipulated by outside forces, particularly foreign governments. “Do you believe in conspiracy theories?” one young woman asked me. “It wasn’t about ideas,” said Susan. “It was just a power struggle.”

You can’t blame them for being confused. The 1989 protesters themselves didn’t know exactly what they wanted. They complained variously about high inflation, corruption, and a lack of democracy. As Wu’er Kaixi, one of the student leaders, put it in one interview: “What do we want? Nike shoes. Lots of free time to take our girlfriends to a bar. The freedom to discuss an issue with someone. And to get a little respect from society.” Even if they’d agreed on a set of goals, they couldn’t agree how to achieve them: Some wanted revolution, while others pushed for incremental change.

Lastly, Ai Weiwei stresses that Tiananmen isn’t the only thing the Party has sought to erase from history:

Modern China’s forgetfulness did not start or end with Tiananmen. Even before the summer of 1989, dozens of darker, crueler incidents lay hidden in Chinese history. Today’s leaders cannot acknowledge their stated ideology before 1949, the principles that helped the Communists gain power over the Nationalist government: establishing a democratic and law-abiding society, ending the one-party system and having an independent judiciary. In 1989, the students in Tiananmen Square asked for those same things. Since then, they’ve become unmentionable.

During Chairman Mao’s lifetime, he started dozens of political movements, none of which have been re-examined by the party in a forthright way. Huge topics such as the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward lack any accepted accounting. Because there is no discussion of these events, Chinese still have little understanding of their consequences. Censorship has in effect neutered society, transforming it into a damaged, irrational and purposeless creature.