Progressive Political News Archives | Page 17 of 18

Chemtrail Conspiracy Theories: Here’s Why RFK Jr. Is Watching the Skies

Conspiracy theorists believe condensation trails from planes are designed to cause mass sterilization or mind control.Kira Hofmann/DPA via ZUMA Press Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A conspiracy theory that…

The Climate Crisis Exposed People to Six More Weeks of Dangerous Heat in 2024

An average person was exposed to 41 more days of dangerous heat in 2024 according to experts. Cimaglia/ROPI via ZUMA Press Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The climate crisis…

Don’t Expect Donald Trump to Tackle America’s Record Homelessness

Unhoused people in Los Angeles’ Skid Row last month.Ringo Chiu/AP Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. Homelessness in America reached the highest level on record last year, according to new data released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development—and it will likely only…

New Hampshire’s Governor Thinks Elon Musk Is Too Rich for Conflicts of Interest

Musk isn’t helping Trump out of the goodness of his own heart.Brandon Bell/Pool/AP Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. A news clip making the rounds Sunday morning had CNN’s Dana Bash talking with Chris Sununu, New Hampshire’s Republican governor, about Elon Musk’s potential conflicts…

The Bold Environmental Vision of President Jimmy Carter

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The angry Alaskans gathered in Fairbanks to burn the president’s effigy. It was early December 1978 and President Jimmy Carter was that unpopular in Alaska. A few days earlier Carter had issued an unusual executive order, designating 56 million acres of Alaskan wilderness as a national monument. He did so unilaterally, using a little known 1906 Antiquities Act that ostensibly gave the president the executive power to designate buildings or small plots of historical sites on federal land as national monuments. No previous president had ever used the obscure act to create a vast wilderness area. But Congress was refusing to pass the necessary legislation, so Carter, who passed away Sunday at the age of 100, decided to act alone.
The Alaskan political establishment was flabbergasted. Despite the unpopularity of the unusual sequestration order, Carter announced that it would stand until Congress agreed to pass its own legislation. For the next two years Carter stubbornly held his ground, explaining that he wasn’t opposed to oil and gas development, but that he would not accept any bill that jeopardized the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—the calving grounds and migratory route for one of the world’s last great caribou herds.
Finally, Alaska’s senior politician, Republican Senator Ted Stevens agreed in late 1980 to break the impasse. At one point in their wrangling over what became known as the Alaska Lands Act, Senator Stevens argued that one small region should be excluded from the proposed wilderness refuge. “Well, let’s check that,” Carter said. The president then rolled out an oversized map on the floor of the Oval Office. Stevens was astonished to see the president on his hands and knees, inspecting the area in question. “No, I don’t think you are right,” Carter observed. “You see, this little watershed here doesn’t actually go into that one. It comes over here.” The senator had to concede the point, and on the car ride back to Capitol Hill he turned to his aide and remarked, “He knows more about Alaska than I do.”

Sen. Ted Stevens and President Carter discuss the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.
Anchorage Daily News/Tribune News Service/Getty
That was vintage Carter, the president who always paid attention to details. But it also illustrates Carter’s legacy as a president devoted to protecting the environment. Carter was still negotiating with Senator Stevens weeks after his defeat in the November 1980 election. But on December 2, 1980, this now lame-duck president signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, creating more than 157 million acres of wilderness area, national wildlife refuges, and national parks—tripling the size of the nation’s Wilderness Preservation System and doubling the size of the National Park System. It was, and still is, the largest single expansion of protected lands in American history.
More than four decades later, before he entered hospice care in his simple Plains, Georgia home in February, Carter signed an amicus brief, appealing to the courts and President Joe Biden, not to permit the building of a gravel road through one small portion of the designated wilderness area. It was his last act in the public arena. And it succeeded: On March 14, 2023, the Interior Department canceled a plan that would have allowed the road’s construction.
Carter was always annoyed when pundits proclaimed him a “model” ex-president, but a failed president. And he was right to be annoyed because his was actually a quite consequential presidency, and no more so than on questions of conservation and the environment.

Carter signs the Energy Bill on November 9, 1978.
HUM Images/Universal Images Group/Getty
Early in his presidency, in the spring of 1977, he famously vetoed a slew of water projects, mostly small dams and river diversion facilities, in dozens of congressional districts around the country. Federal funding of such projects was often a waste of taxpayer funds. And these boondoggles, always encouraged by the US Army Corps of Engineers, often harmed the rivers’ natural habitat. Carter knew he was doing the right thing—even though it eroded his support in a Democratic-controlled Congress.
Carter’s instincts for conservation had been evident earlier when, as governor of Georgia, he had opposed unbridled commercial development, favored tough regulations to protect the state’s coastal wetlands, and endorsed the creation of two major seashores and river parks.
But when Carter got to the White House, he shocked many observers by appointing James Gustave Speth, age 35, to the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. Speth was regarded by the Washington establishment as a radical on environmental issues. A Yale-trained lawyer and Rhodes Scholar, he had co-founded in 1970 the Natural Resources Defense Council, a tough advocacy group on environmental issues. Speth, who later served as dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, used his position in the administration to educate Carter about the dangers of acid rain, carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere, and the likely extinction of 100,000 species during the next quarter century.
Just before leaving office, Carter released a prophetic report, largely written by Speth, that predicted “widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social and agricultural patterns” if humanity continued to rely on fossil fuels. The Global 2000 Report to the President became an early clarion call for scientists studying climate change.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Danielle Brigida/US Fish and Wildlife Service
History will judge Carter as a president ahead of his time. He set a goal of producing 20 percent of the nation’s energy from renewable sources by 2000. In an age of soaring energy prices and stagflation, he famously wore a cardigan on national television during a fireside chat in which he urged Americans to lower their thermostats and conserve energy. He put solar water heating panels on the roof of the White House, telling reporters, “A generation from now this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.” Ironically, while Carter put federal money into solar energy research, a few years later his successor Ronald Reagan ripped the solar panels off the White House roof—and a few are still displayed in museums.
Carter spent much of his time in office trying to deal with energy issues. He proposed a 283-page National Energy Act (NEA) that included a tax on oversized, gas-guzzling cars, tax credits for home insulation, and investments in solar and wind technologies. Carter insisted that his energy bill was the “moral equivalent of war.” In response, The Wall Street Journal labeled it with the sarcastic acronym MEOW. Republican Party chairman Bill Brock charged that the president was “driving people out of their family cars.” Michigan Democratic Congressman John Dingell told Carter aides that it was an “asinine bill.” The legislation nevertheless passed the House, but then encountered much more opposition in the Senate. Carter complained in a private White House diary, “The influence of the oil and gas industry is unbelievable, and it’s impossible to arouse the public to protect themselves.”

Carter announces his solar energy policy in front of PV panels installed on the West Wing roof.
Warren Leffler/Library of Congress
The final bill, passed in October 1978, was a complicated compromise—but it did impose penalties on gas-guzzling cars, required higher efficiency standards for home appliances, and provided tax incentives to develop wind and solar technologies. But environmentalists would criticize it for also providing incentives to mine domestic coal and produce corn-based gasohol. Carter’s goal here was to lessen the country’s dependence on imported Arab oil—and in this he was marginally successful, leading to a decline in oil imports during his term in office. But in an unintended consequence, environmentalists would complain that a part of the bill required that any new power plants be fired with fuels other than oil or natural gas. In practice, that meant coal received a major boost.
In retrospect, the most consequential part of the energy bill was the phased decontrol of natural gas prices. This deregulation eventually stimulated exploration for natural gas in the United States and created the market conditions decades later for the innovative fracking technology that would make the country a major supplier of liquefied natural gas.
Politically speaking, Carter’s energy policies were criticized by both sides. He was faulted by liberals for enacting too much deregulation, while conservatives perceived him as an enemy of the oil and gas industry.

Former President Carter with grandson Jason Carter during a ribbon cutting for a solar project on family farmland in Plains, Georgia.
David Goldman/AP
If environmentalists should remember one thing about the Carter presidency it should be his so-called “malaise speech” in July 1979. It was an extraordinary sermon about America’s limits—a most un-American idea for a people constantly fed on the manna of manifest destiny. “We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own,” he said. “Our people are losing that faith…In a nation that was once proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”
Taking a page straight from Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (which Carter had recently read), Carter observed, “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”
This was the born-again Southern Baptist in Jimmy Carter speaking, the Southern populist, warning his people about the need to be aware of our environment’s fragility and limitations. It was not a message most Americans wanted to hear. But it remains a key part of his presidential legacy.

Elon Musk Doubles Down on His Support for Germany’s Ultra-Right Party

AfD leader Alice Weidel “has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!” Musk wrote.Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. Elon Musk is nothing if not shameless. He proved that again this weekend, when he…

Heavy Car Dependency Is Making American Lives Less Satisfying, Study Shows

H. Armstrong Roberts/Retrofile/Getty Images Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The United States, with its enormous highways, sprawling suburbs and neglected public transport systems, is one of the most car-dependent…

Trump Asks the Supreme Court to Save TikTok

Jaap Arriens/AP Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. Weeks before the Supreme Court’s emergency session that could determine the fate of TikTok in the United States, Donald Trump on Friday issued a legal filing asking the high court to pause the law that would…

Elon Musk vs. Laura Loomer: MAGA Clashes Over Immigration

Brandon Bell/AP Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. Less than a month before Donald Trump returns to office, two of his most ardent allies have plunged into a fierce online debate over immigration, specifically the government’s visa program that allows American companies to hire…

Israel Expands Its Occupation in Syria

In response to the fall of the government of Bashar al-Assad on December 8, the United States, Türkiye, and Israel have all launched bombing campaigns on Syria. Shortly after the government’s collapse, Israel also destroyed most of the Syrian Navy in port at Latakia, and invaded Syria from the long-occupied Golan Heights, advancing to within sixteen miles of the capital city of Damascus.

On December 9, U.S. Central Command said its bombing targeted remnants of the Islamic State (ISIS) in the east of the country, hitting seventy-five targets with 140 bombs and missiles. Meanwhile, Türkiye is conducting airstrikes, drone strikes, and artillery fire as part of a new offensive by its “Syrian National Army” proxy against Rojava, the Kurdish enclave in northeastern Syria.

Israel launched a much broader bombing campaign than Türkiye or the United States, with about 600 airstrikes on Syria during the first eight days after Assad’s fall. Without waiting to see what new government may emerge, Israel methodically destroyed Syria’s military infrastructure to ensure that the country would be as defenseless as possible in the face of its expanded military occupation and future airstrikes.

Israel claims its expanded occupation of Syrian territory is a temporary move to ensure its own security. But throughout the history of Israel, land grabs like this have usually turned into long-term illegal annexations, such as those in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the Golan Heights.

Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Russia, and the United Nations have all joined the global condemnation of this new Israeli assault on Syria. Geir Pedersen, the U.N. Special Envoy to Syria, called Israel’s military actions “highly irresponsible,” and U.N. peacekeepers have removed Israeli flags from newly occupied Syrian territory.

The Saudi Foreign Ministry reiterated that the Golan Heights is an occupied territory, and said that these actions confirmed “Israel’s continued violation of the rules of international law and its determination to sabotage Syria’s chances of restoring its security, stability, and territorial integrity.”

The United States became the only country in the world to recognize Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights under the first Trump Administration in 2019. President Joe Biden’s failure to reverse Trump’s recognition of the illegal Israeli annexation is part of his disastrous legacy in the Middle East.

Israel’s actions confront the world with the age-old question of what to do about a country that systematically ignores and violates the rules of international law. At the foundation of the U.N. Charter is the agreement by all countries to settle their differences diplomatically and peacefully, rather than by the threat or use of military force.

In its “war on terror,” including its wars on Iraq and other countries, the United States flagrantly and systematically violated the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions, the bedrock of post-World War II international law. A fundamental principle of all legal systems is that the powerful must be held accountable as well as the weak and the vulnerable. A system of laws that the wealthy and powerful can ignore cannot claim to be universal or just.

Today, our system of international law faces exactly this problem. The presumption by the United States that its overwhelming military power permits it to violate international law with impunity has led other countries—particularly U.S. allies, but also Russia—to apply the same opportunistic standards to their own behavior.

In 2010, an Amnesty International report on European countries that hosted CIA “black sites” called on U.S. allies in Europe not to join the United States as another “accountability-free zone” for war crimes. But now the world is confronting a U.S. ally that has not only embraced the U.S. presumption that dominant military power can trump the rule of law, but doubled down on it.

The Israeli government refuses to comply with international legal prohibitions against deliberately killing women and children, seizing foreign territory, and bombing other countries. Shielded from international accountability behind the power of a U.S. veto in the U.N. Security Council, Israel thumbs its nose at the world’s impotence to enforce international law, confident that nobody will stop it from using military force wherever and however it pleases.

U.S. responsibility for Israel’s lawlessness is compounded by the conflict of interest in its dual role as both Israel’s military superpower ally and weapons supplier, and as the supposed mediator of the lopsided “peace process” between Israel and Palestine since the 1990s. The failures and inherent flaws of this process discredited the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the eyes of most Palestinians and led to the Hamas electoral victory in 2006. Since then, instead of deferring to intervention by the United Nations or other neutral parties, the United States has guarded its monopoly as the sole mediator between Israel and Palestine, and has used this position to grant Israel total freedom of action to commit systematic war crimes. If this crisis is ever to end, the world cannot allow the United States to continue in this role.

While the United States bears a great deal of responsibility for this escalating and expanding crisis, U.S. officials remain in collective denial over the criminal nature of Israel’s actions and their own instrumental role in supporting Israel’s crimes. Plus, the systemic corruption of U.S. politics severely limits the influence of the majority of Americans who support a ceasefire in Gaza. Pro-Israel lobbying groups are able to buy the unconditional support of U.S. politicians and attack those few who stand up to them.

But everyday Americans are finding ways to call for a ceasefire and for the enforcement of both U.S. and international law. Members of CODEPINK, Jewish Voice for Peace, and various Palestinian American, Arab American, and other activist groups are showing up in Congressional offices and hearings every day; constituents in California are suing two members of Congress for funding genocide; students are calling on their universities to divest from Israel and U.S. weapons makers; activists and union members are identifying and picketing companies and blocking ports to stop weapons shipments to Israel; journalists are rebelling against censorship; U.S. officials are resigning; people are going on hunger strikes; and others have even committed suicide in protest.

An international movement to end the genocide is making progress, but it is excruciatingly slow compared to the appalling human cost and the millions of Palestinian lives at stake. Many countries are increasingly willing to resist the political pressures and propaganda tropes that have successfully muted international calls for justice in the past.

The U.N. General Assembly has passed resolutions for a ceasefire in Gaza, an end to the post-1967 Israeli occupation, and for Palestinian statehood. The General Assembly’s tenth emergency special session on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict under the Uniting for Peace process has been ongoing since 1997. This process permits the General Assembly to take action to restore peace and security when the Security Council fails to do so.

The General Assembly should urgently use its “Uniting For Peace” powers to turn up the pressure on Israel and the United States. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has provided the legal basis for stronger action, ruling that the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories Israel invaded in 1967 is illegal and must end, and that the massacre in Gaza appears to violate the Genocide Convention. Fourteen other countries have intervened with the ICJ to support South Africa’s Genocide Convention case against Israel.

By the time the court issues a final verdict on its genocide case, millions may be dead. The Genocide Convention is an international commitment to prevent genocide, not to just pass judgment after the fact. Since the United States is preventing the Security Council from acting, the U.N. General Assembly has the authority to impose an arms embargo, a trade boycott, economic sanctions, a peacekeeping force, or to do whatever it takes to end the genocide.

When the U.N. General Assembly first launched its campaign of sanctions against apartheid South Africa in November 1962, not a single Western country took part. Many of those same countries will be the last to do so with regard to Israel today. But the world cannot wait to act for the blessing of complacent wealthy countries who are themselves complicit in genocide.