America’s Bee Problem Is an Us Problem

 

“…They are the phantom backbone of our agricultural system: The bees pollinate the crops; the beekeepers shuttle them from field to field, coast to coast.

“They directly contribute to a third of America’s food: apples, peaches, lettuce, squashes, melons, broccoli, cranberries, tree nuts, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, plums, clementines, tangerines, sunflowers, pumpkins, alfalfa for your beef, and guar for your processed foods. Ninety-eight percent of organic vitamin C sources, 70 percent of vitamin A, and 74 percent of lipids; $17 billion worth of crops annually from honeybee pollination alone. The demand for their services has tripled in the past 50 years and shows no signs of abating.

“The problem is they die. You have probably heard this. The number of colonies in the U.S.—2.7 million—is less than half what it was at the midpoint of the 20th century, and it has remained flat since the early 2000s. Virtually every year for the past two decades, U.S. beekeepers are tasked with replacing the third or more of their stock that perish after pollinating the very crops that required the bees in the first place. It is a shell game with titanic stakes. (In other words, it’s very American.) It works how it works because we made it to. This you may not have heard.

“The bee-industrial complex is a quagmire linked to antiquity and the modern world. People have harnessed bees for about as long as they’ve harnessed anything at all. They are mentioned in the ancient cuneiform writings of Sumeria and Babylonia. They were domesticated for the Egyptian pharaohs by 2400 BCE. Early Roman naturalists recorded witnessing villages in northern Italy where “they place their hives on ships and take them during the night about five miles up the river” to access new fields of flowers.

“More than one classical dignitary died abroad and had their bodies preserved in nothing but honey: Agesilaus of Sparta, the philosopher Democritus, Alexander the Great. The Greeks and Romans valued some wild honeys as potential cures for madness. In Europe bees were lobbed on the battlefield at Swedish knights by English infantry. During World War I the Germans rigged trenches with them.

“The downward spiral in America began at the beginning of the 20th century, when agriculture started to consolidate and commercialize around the country. Growers increasingly scoured the landscape for potential boosts in efficiency. They noticed that where the honeybee went, higher yields always seemed to follow. “An insufficient supply of bees will hinder the setting of fruit,” read one Kansas farming bulletin in 1899. Spurred by advancements in interstate travel, pollination services soon went mobile. As cultivation continued to bend toward monocrop harvests, the honeybee’s position in the American farming structure was solidified.

“That’s when the dying started. Honeybee stocks were decimated in the 1920s and then the 1960s and once more in the 1980s and ’90s. The number of managed colonies had already been slowly eroding for half a century when the bottom fell out in the mid-aughts. Beekeepers went away for vacation and returned to depleted hives. Entire apiaries collapsed in the span of weeks.

“This last part is the one that’s most familiar in the public mind—the picture we have been taught to care about, mostly in an environmental sense. “Save the bees,” you will hear, at ice cream shops and farmers markets. A study touting the latest death rates will go viral, and pollinator protection bills will buzz out of state legislatures in response. This is also precisely where the quagmire is at its deepest, where the lines between truth, misconception, and misdirection blur.

“The problem of bees in America is not a question of peace with the environment. It’s not really even a matter of conservation, per se. The bees most folks believe ought to be saved are neither natural to the land nor essential to it. They are, instead, integral to our agricultural system, grocery stores, refrigerators, and pantries. We have built a machine in the span of centuries, and it fits so comfortably together. How and why this happened is a story as much about the appeal, adaptability, and shortcomings of American commerce as it is about the dying of bees…”  -Lex Pryor, The Ringer

https://portside.org/2023-09-18/americas-bee-problem-us-problem

 

The Real Issue in the UAW Strike (The Atlantic)

 

The United Automobile Workers’ strike against the Big Three manufacturers that began earlier today is exacerbating the most significant political vulnerability of President Joe Biden’s drive to build a clean-energy economy.

A trio of bills Biden passed through Congress during his first two years in the Oval Office has generated a torrent of private-sector investment into clean-energy projects. But so far most of that green investment and the jobs it will create are flowing into red-leaning communities that are generally hostile to both the Democratic Party and labor unions.

Congressional Democrats provided all the votes for the legislation that is catalyzing the rapid growth of the new green economy. But with so many of the new energy projects benefiting red places, many people in progressive circles worry that this historic transformation will fail to generate either sufficient political rewards for the president and congressional Democrats, or as many good-paying, blue-collar jobs as Biden has repeatedly promised.

Fear that the shift to electric vehicles will reduce the number of quality jobs in the auto industry is the backdrop for the strike the UAW launched at midnight today. In both public and private, union officials have made clear their belief that the auto industry is using the technological transition to mask a second, economic, transition.

They worry that the companies are using the shift from internal-combustion engines to carbon-free electric vehicles to simultaneously shift more of their operations from high-paying union jobs mostly in northern states to lower-paying, nonunion jobs mostly in southern states.

Moreover, the union and its allies worry that the massive federal subsidies Biden’s agenda is providing the companies for the EV transition is inadvertently underwriting that transition toward lower-wage and nonunion plants. As Shawn Fain, the UAW’s new president, put it earlier this week: “There’s a lot with the EV transition that has to happen, and there’s … hundreds of billions of our taxpayer dollars that are helping fund this, and workers cannot continue to be left behind in that equation.”

As the strike approached, the Biden administration took conspicuous steps to respond to those concerns by announcing a suite of multibillion-dollar Department of Energy loans and grants designed to  incentivize the auto companies to convert existing, unionized plants to EV production.

“The president’s policy position is absolutely clear: He’s pro-union,” one senior White House official, who asked not to be identified while describing internal discussions, told me. “He thinks that companies that are receiving the benefits should respect the right to organize, should not interfere with workers’ ability to exercise that right, and he wants to see these jobs be good union jobs. From a policy perspective there is no daylight between the president’s policy preferences and where the UAW is, or the other unions are.”

The challenge for the Biden administration in delivering on that pledge is the decisions that the auto companies and other industries are making in response to the bills he signed to promote more domestic investment: the bipartisan infrastructure law, a measure to encourage more U.S. production of semiconductors, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains federal assistance for the domestic manufacture and deployment of low-carbon energy sources.

The tax subsidies and federal grants and loans in those bills have triggered a towering wave of new domestic investments across a broad range of industries producing clean energy. The big auto manufacturers alone have announced nearly $90 billion in spending on manufacturing facilities to produce EVs in just the past two years, according to the Center for Automotive Research, a nonpartisan Michigan-based think tank.

Suppliers to the companies, including firms producing semiconductors for automotive use, are investing billions more in the EV transition. Brookings Metro, a nonpartisan think tank, calculated that total private-sector investment in EV manufacturing under Biden has reached nearly $140 billion.

This building surge dwarfs the typical amount of annual investment in the auto industry over the past quarter century, but still likely represents only a down payment on what’s ahead. “There’s a lot of innovation that is going to happen over the next 20 years, in terms of product, process, technology,” Alan Amici, the center’s president and CEO, told me.

For Democrats, the rub is how much of this capital is flowing into red places hostile to unions and represented by House and Senate Republicans who voted against the legislation that triggered the investments. (Every House Republican this spring also voted to repeal all of the Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives for clean-energy production.) The biggest recipients of the new investments include more red states than blue ones, Brookings has determined.

Red states are receiving so many of the new projects partly because they have lower tax rates and electricity costs. But most analysts agree that companies have also channeled so much of their new investments toward red states because most of them have “right to work” laws that make it more difficult for unions to organize.

In the auto industry, this preference for states resistant to unions has translated into a surge of investment in the South. Brookings Metro calculated that the South has attracted 55 percent of the total private investment in electric vehicles and batteries under Biden. That’s more than double the portion of the new clean-vehicle investment that has flowed into the Midwest, whose existing auto plants are largely unionized.

That torrent of new money includes plans to build EVs or their batteries by Hyundai and Rivian in Georgia, Toyota in North Carolina, Tesla in Texas, BMW in South Carolina, Mercedes-Benz in Alabama, General Motors in Tennessee, and Ford in Tennessee and Kentucky.

The EV investments announced so far are projected to generate at least 65,000 jobs across the region, Stan Cross, the electric-transportation-policy director for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, told me. Far more job growth is virtually certain in the years ahead, Cross said, largely because such investment patterns are self-reinforcing: Companies that provide parts for the big manufacturers are already locating around their new southern plants, such as the $1 billion in investment announced by suppliers near Hyundai’s Georgia facility.

This southern EV boom is reinforcing a long-term shift in the auto industry’s center of gravity that has weakened the UAW’s position. Heavily unionized, Democratic-leaning Michigan still employs many more people in the industry than any other state. But starting in the mid-1990s in plants by Mercedes in Alabama and BMW in South Carolina, the industry’s employment has steadily shifted to the South.

Since the early ’90s, the South’s share of total auto-industry employment has roughly doubled from 15 to about 30 percent, while the Midwest’s share has fallen, from 60 to about 45 percent, Karl Kuykendall, a regional economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence, told me. Kuykendall said he “would not be surprised” if the pace of this regional transition accelerates as the companies move deeper into the technological transition to electric vehicles.

Hardly any of the auto plants in the South are unionized. And wages even for manufacturing workers are much lower in the region and in other red states than in the Midwest, as Michael Podhorzer, a former political director for the AFL-CIO, has calculated. The disparity between largely union and nonunion regions across the U.S. creates an enormous challenge for the UAW.

In the strike that began this morning, it is seeking a raise of about 40 percent over the next four years, and the restoration of automatic pay increases for inflation, as well as health and retirement benefits that it surrendered when the companies faced bankruptcy amid the 2008 financial crisis. But even if the union succeeds at winning a favorable contract, that could just increase the incentive for the auto industry to shift more jobs to nonunion plants across the South.

While foreign automakers have invested heavily in the South, the fabled Big Three domestic auto manufacturers (General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis) still mostly rely on facilities across the industrial Midwest. But the announcements by Ford and GM that they plan to build battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee may signal a shift in that strategy.

As important to the UAW, Ford, GM, and Stellantis are structuring their EV-battery plants, in the North and the South, as joint ventures with foreign partners that are not subject to the national labor agreement the companies are now negotiating. The union has to negotiate separate contracts with those plants—where the companies are offering much lower wages than in their unionized facilities.

“From all evidence, automakers appear to be utilizing the shift to electric vehicles to do everything in their power to lower job quality for the very workers they are relying on to make this transition happen,” Jason Walsh, an executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor unions and environmentalists, told me. Those concerns have prompted the UAW to demand in the contract talks that the auto companies guarantee that workers now building internal-combustion-engine vehicles will be assured jobs as the companies switch toward manufacturing more EVs.

Early on, the Biden administration appeared somewhat obtuse to these concerns, even though Biden has sympathized more overtly with organized labor than any other Democratic president in decades. Speaking before a Silicon Valley industry group in early June, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm turned heads among labor leaders when she said the administration was “agnostic” about where companies choose to site their clean-energy investments.

Her department, perhaps reflecting that perspective, a few weeks later approved more than $9 billion in federal loan guarantees to Ford and a Korean partner to build their EV-battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee, two right-to-work states. Fain, the union president, immediately issued a statement condemning the loan guarantees and declaring that the administration was “actively funding” a “race to the bottom” in wages and benefits “with billions in public money.”

Fain’s message appears to have been received. The administration’s tone was different in late August, when the Energy Department announced that it was making available $2 billion in grants and $10 billion in loan guarantees under the Inflation Reduction Act (as well as another $3.5 billion in grants under the infrastructure bill) to subsidize the conversion of existing plants to make electric vehicles and their batteries.

“We are going to focus on financing projects that are in long-standing automaking communities, that keep folks already working on the payroll, projects that advance collective bargaining agreements, that create high-paying, long-lasting jobs,” Granholm told reporters at the time.

That message reflected Biden’s own priorities, the senior White House official told me this week: “All I would say is, the president is not ‘agnostic’” about where the clean-energy investments are flowing. “He’s the president for all of America. But all of America ought to respect the right to organize. He is trying to move the system toward good-paying jobs and more union density.”

Labor allies agree the administration is now focusing more on the potential challenges for workers in the EV transition than it did earlier in Biden’s presidency. The late-August Energy Department announcement “is a very clear indication that the Biden administration is hearing what union workers are saying and is trying their best to be responsive to that,” Walsh said.

The problem for the administration is that it has limited tools to shape how the auto companies make their investments. Generally, under the kind of federal loan and grant programs that Granholm made available in August, the administration can encourage companies to preserve existing plants and also to remain neutral in labor organizing campaigns when the firms open new clean-vehicle facilities.

All indications point to Biden using that leverage more aggressively than he did earlier in his presidency. Over time, the senior White House official said, the administration “has strengthened its negotiating posture” to demand “stronger community benefits” from companies seeking the loans or grants.

But the Inflation Reduction Act’s biggest incentives for building electric vehicles are generous tax credits for both producers and consumers. And those credits are available to companies that build and source a specified share of their materials for EVs domestically whether or not they use union labor.

When the House passed its version of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2021, it included another $4,500 tax credit to consumers for EVs built largely with union labor, but Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, insisted on the removal of that provision as one price for his vote that allowed the overall package to pass the Senate.

That now looks like an extraordinarily consequential concession. “This is happening because Joe Manchin pulled the union requirements out of the IRA and that really opened the door to this perverse situation where, by law, the administration has constraints about how far it can push to ensure that there are going to be good quality jobs in this transition,” says Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the Economist Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

Looming over all these maneuvers is former President Donald Trump’s relentless attack on Biden’s clean-energy agenda. In speeches, Trump has repeatedly declared that Biden’s intertwined proposals to promote EVs will “kill countless union autoworker jobs forever, especially in Michigan and the Midwest.”

Trump, and some of the other 2024 GOP candidates, have pledged to repeal the IRA’s clean-energy incentives as well as Biden’s proposed fuel-economy standards for cars and light trucks, which would require the companies to massively shift their sales toward EVs over the next decade. In effect, Trump is presenting the transition to EVs as another example in his broader claim that the left is seeking to uproot and transform America as his supporters know and understand it.

While many labor leaders have endorsed Biden for a second term, Fain has pointedly withheld the UAW’s endorsement. And Fain has publicly warned that Trump’s denunciation of the EV transition could find a receptive audience among his members if the union can’t win a generous contract and strong guarantees of job security. Given the importance of the industrial Midwest to the president’s reelection hopes, Biden may have nearly as much at stake as Fain in the outcome of this strike.

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Ronald Brownstein is a senior editor at The Atlantic and a senior political analyst for CNN.

 

Here’s What Striking Autoworkers Are Fighting For by Jeff Schuhrke

 

After decades of accepting concessions demanded by the Big Three automakers, the United Auto Workers (UAW) is now making bold demands of its own in one of the most spirited contract campaigns in the union’s recent history. At midnight on September 14, when the union’s contracts expired with Ford, GM and Stellantis without an agreement, workers at all three automakers went on strike at targeted locations.

The Big Three have made a combined nearly quarter trillion dollars in profits in North America over the past decade — including $21 billion in the first six months of 2023 alone. The companies’ shareholders and executives have been richly rewarded through stock buybacks and exorbitant salaries.

Meanwhile, the workers who actually make the cars have seen their real wages plummet by 30% over the past 20 years. In what was once a middle-class career, some autoworkers now make as little as $15.78 per hour, often working overtime to earn enough to support their families.

The union’s contract proposals, which UAW President Shawn Fain describes as ​“audacious and ambitious,” aim to not only counter the effects of recent inflation, but also to undo the consequences of years of concessionary bargaining by the UAW’s corrupt former leadership clique, whom Fain and a slate of rank-and-file-backed reformers replaced this March in the union’s first-ever election where top officers were directly chosen by the membership. 

“You cannot make $21 billion in profits in half a year and expect members to take a mediocre contract,” said Fain. ​“Our campaign slogan is simple: record profits mean record contracts.”

The UAW’s proposals include:

• Ending tiers. Before a major contract concession in 2007, newly hired auto workers could reach the maximum wage rate within three years and have guaranteed pensions and retiree healthcare. But ​“second-tier” workers — those hired since 2007 — must wait at least eight years before reaching top wage levels and get no pensions or post-retirement healthcare. The Big Three have also increasingly hired workers as low-paid temps, often extending the length of their supposedly ​“temporary” status before they can become permanent employees. The UAW wants to equalize pay and benefits so that all autoworkers, now and in the future, have pensions and retiree healthcare, and can reach maximum pay and permanent status within 90 days of being hired.

• Double-digit raises. The multimillionaire CEOs of GM, Ford and Stellantis have gotten an average raise of 40% over the past four years, so the union is seeking similarly large raises of around 46% for autoworkers over the course of the four-year contract. The UAW is relatedly calling for significant increases to the pension benefit paid to retirees.

• Restoring cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs), which tie wages to inflation. Once a signature feature of autoworker contracts, the UAW’s former leadership agreed to suspend COLAs in 2009 as GM and Chrysler faced bankruptcy amid the Great Recession.

• Work-life balance. Because their real hourly wages have fallen so dramatically amid years of concessions, many autoworkers put in 60 to 80-hour weeks to make ends meet, leaving less time to spend with their families. In addition to calling for more paid time off, the UAW is making the eye-catching demand for a 32-hour workweek at 40 hours’ pay. ​“If Covid did anything, it made people reflect on what’s important in life, and it sure as hell isn’t living in a factory,” Fain said last month.

• Job security. With automakers shutting down factories and moving production to wherever in the world they can exploit workers the most — a process that has gone on for over 40 years and continues—the UAW is demanding the right to strike over plant closures and is calling for the creation of a Working Family Protection Program, which would make the companies keep employees at shuttered factories on payroll doing community service work.

• Enhanced profit sharing. With the Big Three’s shareholders reaping the benefits of record profits, the union is proposing that workers get $2 for every $1 million spent on stock buybacks and special dividends.

• A just transition to electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing. Aided by federal subsidies, the Big Three are building EV battery plants as ​“joint ventures” with South Korean tech firms. But these new factories fall outside the collective bargaining agreements covering other UAW autoworkers, so wages and working conditions are far worse than at plants making gas-powered cars. As part of its fight to eliminate all tiers, the UAW wants to extend the same union standards to new EV plants. Since EV workers are not currently covered by the Big Three contracts, this is a public demand rather than a bargaining proposal. ​“The people who make cars shouldn’t have to choose between a green, sustainable job and one that pays good wages they’ve negotiated,” Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous wrote last week in support of the UAW. 

These proposals have energized the UAW’s rank and file, whose frustration at the retreats overseen by the union’s former leadership helped prompt them to elect Fain earlier this year.

“We vote on these contracts, but we also have been led to believe that this is all we can get, this is all we’re worth. And I believe that it’s time to change that mindset, that we are worth more,” explained Sara Schambers, a Ford worker in Livonia, Michigan. 

A fourth-generation autoworker, it took Schambers 15 years to reach Ford’s maximum pay of $32 per hour, including six years as a ​“temp.” In contrast, it took her mother just three years to reach the company’s top wage rate.

“We need to stop getting left behind and be the working class again, instead of the working poor,” Schambers said. “We are now talking about fighting back, fighting for what was lost and fighting in regards to what’s coming.”

Unlike previous negotiations at the Big Three, the new UAW leadership is keeping the rank and file well informed about developments at the bargaining table. Fain is hosting regular Facebook Live streams viewed by thousands of members, where he lays out the companies’ counteroffers — which so far have not come close to meeting the unions’ demands — and places them in what he calls the ​“proper filing cabinet”: a trash bin.

Additionally, the union ran a high-profile contract campaign this summer, with members and allies holding rallies and practice pickets from coast to coast. This kind of member engagement and public outreach did not happen during Big Three negotiations in the recent past, including in the run-up to the 2019 GM strike.

“I think for the UAW rank and file it is so refreshing to see this and to begin to identify with the UAW that they want to identify with,” said retiree Frank Hammer, a veteran UAW activist and former president of Local 909 in Warren, Michigan.

Hammer recently told Status Coup News that the union has experienced ​“a dramatic turnaround” in the six months since Fain was elected. ​“We are now talking about fighting back, fighting for what was lost and fighting in regards to what’s coming,” he said.

But not everyone is happy with the UAW’s more militant direction. In recent weeks, media outlets have bombarded the public with warnings that an auto strike would send car prices soaring, wreak havoc on the supply chain and devastate the economy. Several of these news stories have uncritically highlighted a report produced by a consultancy firm that lists GM and Ford as business clients.

“You don’t hear the media wringing their hands over how Big Three profits are driving up the cost of cars,” Fain said last week. ​“You don’t see big splashy nightly news segments on how consumers will be impacted by companies choosing to spend billions on executive salaries and stock buybacks and special dividends.”

Fain himself has been demonized by many in the establishment media, with numerous news outlets referring to the UAW’s democratically elected president as a ​“union boss.” The Chicago Tribune​’s editorial board called Fain ​“problematic” and ​“belligerent,” while CNBC anchor Jim Cramer said on the air last month that he finds the union leader ​“frightening.”

“He’s talking about capitalism and the nature of capitalism and how it really hurts workers,” Cramer said of Fain. ​“And then the notion that we’re fat cats, the shareholders are fat cats and have been overly rewarded…That’s class warfare. And it’s very shocking to hear class warfare.”

Despite this media onslaught, a recent Gallup poll found that a whopping 75% of Americans say they side with the autoworkers in their contract fight.

“Working people in this country know what’s really going on,” Fain said in a recent video. ​“We know what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck while the companies we work for make out like bandits…We know the truth, and the truth is that the cost of a strike might be high, but the cost of doing nothing is much higher.”

Jeff Schuhrke is a labor historian, educator, journalist and union activist who teaches at the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies, SUNY Empire State University in New York City. He has been an In These Times contributor since 2013. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSchuhrke.

In These Times carved out a unique space on the Left, bridging coverage of social movements with progressive electoral politics while publishing groundbreaking investigations that challenge the growing influence of corporations over government and our daily lives.

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Source URL: https://portside.org/2023-09-16/heres-what-striking-autoworkers-are-fighting

Scientists Find Earth Is "Well Outside Safe Operating Space for Humanity"

 

Earth’s life support systems have been so damaged that the planet is “well outside the safe operating space for humanity,” scientists have warned.

Their assessment found that six out of nine “planetary boundaries” had been broken because of human-caused pollution and destruction of the natural world. The planetary boundaries are the limits of key global systems – such as climate, water, and wildlife diversity – beyond which their ability to maintain a healthy planet is in danger of failing.

The broken boundaries mean the systems have been driven far from the safe and stable state that existed from the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, to the start of the industrial revolution. The whole of modern civilization arose in this time period, called the Holocene.

The assessment was the first nine planetary boundaries and represented the “first scientific health check for the entire planet,” the researchers said. Six boundaries have been passed and two are judged to be close to being broken: air pollution and ocean acidification. The one boundary that is not threatened is atmospheric ozone, after action to phase out destructive chemicals in recent decades led to the ozone hole shrinking.

The scientists said the “most worrying” finding was that all four of the biological boundaries, which cover the living world, were at, or close to, the highest risk level. The living world is particularly vital to the Earth as it provides resilience by compensating for some physical changes, for example, trees absorbing carbon dioxide pollution.

The planetary boundaries are not irreversible tipping points beyond which sudden and serious deterioration occurs, the scientists said. Instead, they are points after which the risks of fundamental changes in the Earth’s physical, biological, and chemical life support systems rise significantly. The planetary boundaries were first devised in 2009 and updated in 2015, when only seven could be assessed.

Prof Johan Rockström, the then director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre who led the team that developed the boundaries framework, said: “Science and the world at large are really concerned over all the extreme climate events hitting societies across the planet. But what worries us, even more, is the rising signs of dwindling planetary resilience.”

Rockström, who is now joint director of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said this failing resilience could make restricting global heating to the 1.5C climate goal impossible and could bring the world closer to real tipping points. Scientists said in September that the world was on the brink of multiple disastrous tipping points.

Prof Katherine Richardson, from the University of Copenhagen who led the analysis, said: “We know for certain that humanity can thrive under the conditions that have been here for 10,000 years – we don’t know that we can thrive under major, dramatic alterations [and] humans impact on the Earth system as a whole are increasing as we speak.”

She said the Earth could be thought of as a patient with very high blood pressure: “That does not indicate a certain heart attack, but it does greatly raise the risk.”

The assessment, which was published in the journal Science Advances and was based on 2,000 studies, indicated that several planetary boundaries were passed long ago. The boundary for biosphere integrity, which includes the healthy functioning of ecosystems, was broken in the late 19th century, the researchers said, as destruction of the natural world decimated wildlife. The same destruction, particularly the razing of forests, means the boundary for land use was broken last century.

Climate models have suggested the safe boundary for climate change was surpassed in the late 1980s. For freshwater, a new metric involving both water in lakes and rivers and in soil, showed this boundary was crossed in the early 20th century.

Another boundary is the flow of nitrogen and phosphorus in the environment. These are vital for life but excessive use of fertilizers mean many waters are heavily polluted by these nutrients, which can lead to algal blooms and ocean dead zones. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization data, three times the safe level of nitrogen is added to fields every year.

The boundary for synthetic pollution, such as pesticides, plastics and nuclear waste, was shown to have been passed by a 2022 study. The Richardson-led analysis assessed air pollution for the first time, which affects plant growth and monsoon rains. It found air pollution has passed the planetary boundary in some regions such as south Asia and China, but not yet globally. Ocean acidification is also assessed as getting worse and being close to exceeding the safe boundary.

The scientists said: “This update finds that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity.”

Rockstrom said: “If you want to have security, prosperity and equity for humanity on Earth, you have to come back into the safe space and we’re not seeing that progress currently in the world.”

Phasing out fossil fuel burning and ending destructive farming are the key actions required.

The planetary boundaries are set using specific metrics, such as the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere for climate change. The Earth’s systems are resilient to some level of change, so most of the boundaries have been set at a level higher than that which persisted over the last 10,000 years. For example, CO₂ was at 280 parts per million until the industrial revolution but the planetary boundary is set at 350ppm.

Prof Simon Lewis, at University College London and not part of the study team, said: “This is a strikingly gloomy update on an already alarming picture. The planet is entering a new and much less stable state – it could not be a more stark warning of the need for deep structural changes to how we treat the environment.”

“The planetary boundaries concept is a heroic attempt to simplify the world, but it is probably too simplified to be of use in practically managing Earth,” he continued. “For example, the damage and suffering from limiting global heating to 1.6C using pro-development policies and major investments in adapting to climate change would be vastly less than the damage and suffering from limiting warming to 1.5C but doing this using policies that help the wealthy and disregard the poor. But the concept does work as a science-led parable of our times.”

A related assessment published in May examined planetary boundaries combined with social justice issues and found that six of these eight “Earth system boundaries” had been passed.

The researchers said more data was needed to deepen the understanding of the current situation, as well as more research on how the passing of planetary boundaries interact with each other. They said the Earth’s systems had been pushed into disequilibrium and, as a result, “ultimate global environmental conditions” remained uncertain.

A separate initiative to define the end of the Holocene and the start of a new age dominated by human activities moved forward in July, when scientists chose a Canadian lake as the site to represent the beginning of the Anthropocene. This group settled on a date of 1950, significantly later than the dates indicated by most of the planetary boundaries.

Damian Carrington is an environment editor at the Guardian. @dpcarrington

 

"We are in a pivotal moment in this country"-Joyce Vance

 

Today marks the twenty-second anniversary of 9/11. The three-year-old who sat on my lap and pointed tearfully, not fully understanding, to “my people, my buildings,” on the computer monitor in front of us just turned 25. Although she still remembers, many of my law students are now young enough that they have no memory of that day. Nor does my youngest son, born the following year.

That feels like a substantial dividing line between generations to me. An older generation that remembers the two days of empty skies that turned into weeks of looking up every time you heard a plane. And a younger generation that has always taken for granted long security lines and shoe removal at airports.

September 11 and the terrorist attack on our country, which shaped so much of our lives in the following years and continues to, to this day, is now history. We were unprepared, but we responded and came together in remarkable, heartfelt ways. A Boston-based flight attendant who had to drive from Chicago to get home told the New York Times a few weeks later that as she drove, “people had put American flags up on every single overpass all the way from Chicago to Boston.”

That history has a sad echo today. We have not come together. We are deeply divided as a country that has come under attack and continues to be threatened by the tide of Trumpism that continues to have a hold on something like 30% of the country and the white supremacist domestic terror groups that Trump has embraced into the fold.

We did not unite during a global pandemic or following an attack on our Capitol itself. It is as if a third of the country approved of the attacks that felled the Towers and carved a cleft into the Pentagon. It’s as if a third of the passengers on Flight 93 supported the hijackers, not their fellow passengers who downed the plane in a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, so that no one else—other than themselves—would die.

It is unthinkable. It is the ongoing peril that Trump has opened the country up to, bringing the worst, the fringe groups that serious Republican leaders would not have tolerated a decade ago, into the mainstream. But it is the persistent drumbeat of misinformation that fuels the country’s failure to come together.

After the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, committed by homegrown domestic terrorists, the country did come together. We watched as the number of dead grew to 168. We covered our mouths in horror when we learned there was a daycare, and children were among the victims.

But while no one in the mainstream condoned the act of terror, it was seen as a one-off, not as part of a dangerous development in our country. It’s clear in hindsight we have never taken the risk seriously enough. We must do so now.

We are in a pivotal moment in this country. It comes at a time when Trump fatigue is high. And yet, it has never been more important to keep events in focus. Democracy truly could die in darkness. We must continue to shine light and find ways to share details. Facts have a way of rippling quietly across the surface and finding a home.

Although the popular mythology says Trump supporters are lost, again and again I hear stories—we have some among our own friends and family—of people who began to rethink because a kernel of truth got through to them. That’s what we need at this point, not agreement on everything, just a commitment to the ongoing American experiment.

So, we head into another important week, with four criminal prosecutions and numerous civil cases proceeding against the former president. In a sign of his break with reality, he still refuses to acknowledge that he lost in 2020, and reporting just today on a story about his government-provided post-presidential office in Florida underscores that the people around him still hesitate to refer to him as the former president. The charade that he didn’t lose has to be maintained. With Trump, the ridiculous becomes the expected.

Speaking of ridiculous, George Santos is still a member of the House of Representatives. That, despite the fact that he has been indicted on federal fraud charges. The situation goes to demonstrate the depths of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s desperation to hold onto his slim majority as he contemplates impeachment and the impending government shutdown.

A scheduled pre-trial conference in the case set for last week has been rescheduled for late October. The government wrote in a letter to the court that “the parties…continue discussing paths forward in this matter. The parties wish to have additional time to continue those discussions.” That’s prosecutor speak that means, we’re talking about a guilty plea with the defendant. It would be remarkable to have a sitting member of Congress who has acknowledged his guilt and is on the path to pleading guilty still part of the caucus and able to vote. 2023.

There is no indication at present that the former president is contemplating even a remote possibility he might plead guilty. And, in the Fulton County case, a federal judge has rejected Mark Meadows’ bid to remove the case to federal court. Meadows’ failure would seem to doom efforts by Jeff Clarke and some of the fake Georgia electors. Evidentiary hearings on those motions are set for the week of September 18, but it’s likely all over but the shouting. Ditto for Trump if he proceeds, although the cautionary tale of Meadows’ difficult turn on the witness stand should cause other defendants to question the wisdom of this path beyond merely suffering a loss.

Here’s why a motion by Trump would be substantively weaker than what Meadows was able to put forward: Meadows argued that even when Trump was off and acting in his personal capacity, he, Meadows, as the chief of staff, was still acting in his official capacity as advisor. That’s true. If the president decides to go see a football game, he still has to be staffed by people who are at the ready in case of national emergency or more routine business that must be handled.

The flaw in Meadows’ argument was that this was not a football game, it was an effort to steal an election, and he was not involved in official duties when he tried to interfere in Georgia’s vote count. The possibility of success for Trump is even more remote. He was acting as candidate Trump, whose case must be tried in state court, not President Trump who would have an argument for removal.

Meadows has appealed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Local rules in the 11th Circuit permit an appeal to be expedited for “good cause shown.” That means it’s up to the judges. I’d expect the Court to act quickly, as it did when it considered Judge Cannon’s rulings limiting DOJ’s access to evidence following the search at Mar-a-Lago. The 11th Circuit process will be facilitated because Judge Jones ordered a full briefing schedule and held an evidentiary hearing, which gives the Court of Appeals a lot of factual detail they can rely on to make their ruling.

On Tuesday, Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis owes Judge McAfee, the state court judge who will be trying the case, post-hearing briefs from last week’s severance hearing. MSNBC anchor and legal analyst Katie Phang, who was in the courtroom for the hearing, tells me that the judge has questions about the intersection of the removal issue with double jeopardy. In other words, we’re now in the weeds of some incredibly complicated legal minutiae.

There are potential complications because the district attorney still wants to try all 19 defendants together on October 23. The Judge asked how that would play out if some of the defendants had removal petitions pending on appeal on that date. Here’s the heart of the matter: once a jury has been sworn in, double jeopardy “attaches.” Willis only gets one bite at the apple—prosecutors don’t get to try their case a second time, say, because a court of appeals orders a case to be removed to federal court. That’s obviously unlikely here, but it’s not beyond the pale. There are other possible complications as well. The Judge gave Willis the weekend to contemplate the different ways different rulings could impact the proceedings before getting back to him.

Ultimately, it makes sense to sever the 17. It’s a complicated case, and they’re not getting discovery until this week. To avoid due process problems that could make any convictions Willis obtains susceptible to reversal on appeal because defendants were forced to go to trial on such a short timeline, a short delay makes sense. And, as a practical matter, the Judge might be unable to rule on the flurry of pre-trial motions that would have to be resolved for all defendants to proceed in October, with only six weeks between now and the start of trial for the defendants who made speedy trial requests.

We’ll keep our eyes on Georgia this week, while anticipating the possibility of more developments with Jack Smith’s grand jury in Washington, D.C. Recently, they appear to be looking at Trump’s Georgia co-defendant and Kraken lawyer Sidney Powell over allegations of fraudulent fundraising after the 2020 election, based on some of the reporting.

Finally, I can’t close out tonight without thanking all of you who reached out here or on social media when Trump, apparently feeling the heat of the steady drumbeat of losses in both criminal and civil cases against him, took a cheap shot at the Deputy Attorney General, Lisa Monaco, and included my friend and colleague Andrew Weissmann and me in his post on Truth Social.

It's unconscionable for any former president to do this, let alone one who knows there are people in his army of followers who react unpredictably and sometimes violently to his ranting. The Republican Party that continues to condone it is complicit.

It is impossible to see Trump calling the Justice Department “injustice” and baselessly attacking the Deputy Attorney General, the number two official at DOJ, without wondering whether there is any bottom for the party that used to bill itself as the party of law and order, the party that supported law enforcement. Now, it’s a party that condones attacks by its front runner for the presidency in 2024 on private citizens.

Sometimes, and especially with the daily barrage of inane behavior from Trump, it’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. But Trump continues to show us who he is. He is still the person who rode down an escalator and dubbed Mexicans criminals and rapists. He is still the man who made fun of a reporter with a disability, criticized a federal judge over his ethnicity, and stood by, heartless, after he put policies in place that ripped babies from their mothers’ arms at the border. He might as well have been the one wearing the “I really don’t care, do u?” jacket Melania sported on her visit to the border.

I’ve lost track of all the times Trump named, implicitly targeting, people who served our government, like Colonel Alexander Vindman and FBI agent Pete Strzok. Trump relentlessly attacked people who should have been his political partners from the loyal opposition. His refusal to refrain from doing so led to the brutal attack on Speaker Pelosi’s husband.

Yet Trump stood silent as an attack was launched on the Capitol with members of the Congress, including those from his own party, inside. And his comments, his unfair, untrue, comments about Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss damaged their lives and for what purpose? So Trump could hold onto power. That’s what all of this is about. It’s never about service, and it’s not about making America great. It’s about Trump and only Trump.

There will be verdicts forthcoming in his criminal and civil cases. But there should be no doubt about the verdict in the court of public opinion. Trump wasn’t worthy to serve in the first place and shouldn’t be returned to office. He keeps telling us. The question is whether, when it counts, when they vote, enough Americans will believe him.

We’re in this together,

Joyce Vance