White House asks for extra $12 billion for wars overseas

By Scott Maucione | @smaucioneWFED November 11, 2016 4:19 pm

The White House is requesting an extra $11.6 billion from Congress to fund Defense Department and State Department operations against Islamic State militants and for troops in Afghanistan.

Congress has been expecting a request from the Obama administration since this summer when the President announced 8,400 troops would stay in Afghanistan through 2017. That is 3,000 more than initially expected.

The request asks for $5.8 billion for the Defense Department and $5.8 billion for the State Department.

Read the latest news about the incoming administration on our Tracking the Transition page.

 

State Department funds will support the counter-Islamic State strategy, strengthen embassy security and respond to relief and recovery needs.

“This plan reflects the evolving nature of our military campaign against ISIL and our efforts in Afghanistan. It funds initiatives based on recommendations by our commanders, reviewed by [Joint Chiefs of Staff] Chairman [Gen. Joseph] Dunford and myself and approved by the President, that will hasten the defeat of ISIL and make our nation more secure,” Defense Secretary Ash Carter said in a Nov. 10 statement. “Swift passage of this plan will help the Department of Defense and our partners in the U.S. government and around the world protect this nation, and I urge Congress to support it.”

The reaction from Congress is mixed so far.

House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) said he is reviewing the request in a Nov. 10 statement. He added that “the amount still does not accommodate the increased pace of operations against [the Islamic State] and does nothing to begin addressing the readiness crisis. It is time to put politics aside and provide our men and women in uniform the resources actually required, not just what is politically expedient.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R. Ariz.) has not yet released a statement on the request. A spokesman from his Democratic counterpart Ranking Member Jack Reed (D-R.I.), said Reed is reviewing the supplemental and is supportive. He added that the request will be a “good test case of whether Republicans are interested in policy or just politics.”

Center for Strategic and International Studies senior fellow Todd Harrison said the request is right on track with what he expected DoD’s operations to cost.

…(read more).

Ocean warming called ‘greatest hidden challenge of our generation’

Ocean warming is expected to change the distribution of some commercial fish stocks. Here, a man is fishing in the Atlantic ocean off of southern Spain.  Credit: Jon Nazca, Reuters

September 06, 2016 · 6:45 PM EDT By Carolyn Beeler

Melting glaciers and bleached corals: We hear about them a lot when it comes to the effects of global warming on our oceans.

But other impacts aren’t so visible — like whole species of fish, seabirds and turtles moving to live in cooler waters closer to the poles.

These changes are highlighted in a new report released this week by the International Union for Conservation of Nature that calls ocean warming “the greatest hidden challenge of our generation.” The report was authored by 80 contributing scientists from a dozen countries, and was released during an international conservation summit in Honolulu.

The findings were stark: The ocean acts as a shield against global warming, absorbing much of the heat and carbon dioxide emitted by humans. Since the 1970s, more than 90 percent of Earth’s greenhouse-related heating has been absorbed by the oceans, according to the report.

If it weren’t for the oceans, the authors of the report say Earth’s atmosphere would have warmed nearly 100 degrees since 1955.

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Trump to scrap Nasa climate research in crackdown on ‘politicized science’

A Nasa Earth photo shows the Bruckner and Heim glaciers where they flow into the Johan Petersen fjord in southeastern Greenland. Photograph: Jeremy Harbeck/AFP/Getty Images

Oliver Milman in New York  @olliemilman  Wednesday 23 November 2016 00.00 EST

Trump to scrap Nasa climate research in crackdown on ‘politicized science’

Donald Trump is poised to eliminate all climate change research conducted by Nasa as part of a crackdown on “politicized science”, his senior adviser on issues relating to the space agency has said.

Nasa’s Earth science division is set to be stripped of funding in favor of exploration of deep space, with the president-elect having set a goal during the campaign to explore the entire solar system by the end of the century.

2016 locked into being hottest year on record, Nasa says

This would mean the elimination of Nasa’s world-renowned research into temperature, ice, clouds and other climate phenomena. Nasa’s network of satellites provide a wealth of information on climate change, with the Earth science division’s budget set to grow to $2bn next year. By comparison, space exploration has been scaled back somewhat, with a proposed budget of $2.8bn in 2017.

Bob Walker, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said there was no need for Nasa to do what he has previously described as “politically correct environmental monitoring”.

“We see Nasa in an exploration role, in deep space research,” Walker told the Guardian. “Earth-centric science is better placed at other agencies where it is their prime mission.

“My guess is that it would be difficult to stop all ongoing Nasa programs but future programs should definitely be placed with other agencies. I believe that climate research is necessary but it has been heavily politicized, which has undermined a lot of the work that researchers have been doing. Mr Trump’s decisions will be based upon solid science, not politicized science.”

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China to Trump: Wise men don’t sneer at climate change | Public Radio International

A cloud casts a shadow onto a dried-up lake located in outback Australia in this aerial picture taken on Dec. 13, 2015. Australia’s extreme weather means farmers rely heavily on climate change forecasts to mitigate the impact of bushfires, cyclones and droughts.

Credit:  David Gray/Reuters

China and the United States don’t need to go to war to destroy civilization as we know it.

They just need to keep pumping the skies full of carbon dioxide for 75 more years, slowly turning much of the planet into a wasteland.

Perhaps that’s why one top Chinese official is implying that one of America’s best-known climate change deniers — GOP nominee Donald Trump — is not leadership material.

China and America are the world’s two biggest emitters of climate-changing gases. For years, they’ve struggled to cooperate on preventing a global warming crisis.

But today, thanks to painstaking diplomacy, both agree to a global pact designed to limit the worst horrors of global warming. Whether the US upholds that pact, however, depends on choices Americans make next week on election day.

Asked how China would work with a potential Trump-led White House on global warming, Beijing’s top climate change negotiator said that a “wise political leader” would embrace policy in line with “global trends.”

“If they resist this trend, I don’t think they’ll win the support of their people,” Xie Zhenua told Reuters. “And their country’s economic and social progress will also be affected.”

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Trump’s Energy, Climate Plans Will Put America First Again | The American Spectator

November 25, 2016, 12:05 am

Bad news for the 10,000 climate bureaucrats who recently vacationed in Marrakesh.

Donald Trump’s election as the next president of the United States has left liberal environmental activists and international climate bureaucrats reeling. Just one of the many examples of the widespread depression expressed by environmentalists appeared in a recent issue of the Washington Post in which Steven Mufson and Brady Dennis lamented, “Trump comes into office with a plan to toss out most of what President Obama achieved on energy and the environment.”

President Barack Obama seemed committed to prostrating America before the world for the nation’s alleged climate sins, punishing the United States for its success and economic ascendancy. He regularly put international treaties and non-treaty agreements ahead of the U.S. Constitution he swore to uphold and defend. He has attempted to saddle the country with crippling climate policies that would foster a great transfer of wealth from poor taxpayers and ratepayers in America to wealthy, politically connected green-energy business people and rich, corrupt politicians both in the United States and in developing countries on the other side of the world.

Obama’s climate policies caused significant pain: high unemployment in coal country; rising electric bills and diminished oil and gas production, royalties, and lease payments from federal lands. And despite all the problems associated with his climate change crusade, Obama’s own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, Gina McCarthy, testified before Congress in July 2015 these policies would do nothing to prevent warming or sea-level rise and acknowledged they were enacted to display the United States’ alleged international leadership on climate issues.

President-elect Trump pledges to put America’s interests, its workers, and fealty to the Constitution ahead of foreign or moneyed interests. Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and vowed to “cancel” the United States’ participation in the Paris climate agreement, which Obama promoted heavily as an essential part of the world’s fight against climate change. In addition, Trump has committed to scrapping the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, its signature effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and he says he’ll review and possibly reverse EPA’s determination carbon dioxide is a pollutant endangering public and environmental health — the so-called “endangerment finding.”

Reversing the endangerment finding in and of itself would end the legal justification of a range of climate regulations. In the process, it would also end radical environmental activists’ ability to use the courts to impose climate policies on an unwilling public.

Before the election, Trump said he’d cut EPA’s budget dramatically and review all EPA regulations, eliminating many of them because “over-regulation presents one of the greatest barriers to entry into markets and one of the greatest costs to businesses that are trying to stay competitive.”

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Donald Trump: A True Narcissistic Sociopath (Full)

NWBOXING 247

Published on Oct 31, 2016

Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump (Like Clinton) Has Many Skeletons In The Closet, and it ain’t pretty. #SUBSCRIBE

Why Africa’s Great Green Wall matters

Climate Home

Published on Nov 25, 2016

Noam Chomsky Harvard University 2016 November Kennedy School Institute of Politics

Helmet Cam Network

Published on Nov 22, 2016

Noam Chomsky Harvard University 2016 November Kennedy School Institute of Politics

Noam Chomsky ~ Manufacturing Consent

noam chomsky 2016

Published on Nov 23, 2016

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, proposes that the mass communication media of the U.S. “are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion”, by means of the propaganda model of communication.[1] The title derives from the phrase “the manufacture of consent,” employed in the book Public Opinion (1922), by Walter Lippmann (1889–1974).[2]

Chomsky credits the origin of the book to the impetus of Alex Carey, the Australian social psychologist, to whom he and co-author E. S. Herman dedicated the book.[3] Four years after publication, Manufacturing Consent: The political Economy of the Mass Media was adapted to the cinema as Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992), a documentary presentation of the propaganda-model of communication, the politics of the mass-communications business, and a biography of Chomsky.

Tracking progress – From Paris COP21 to Marrakech COP22

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Published on Nov 16, 2016

http://www.fao.org/climate-change

This video features the progress achieved by five initiatives over the last year in making agriculture more climate resilient. The sector is a priority area for climate change adaptation worldwide. Launched at the Paris Climate Conference, the five initiatives are:
Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture Programme
Life Beef Carbon
SAVE FOOD
Promotion of Smart Agriculture towards Climate Change and Agro-ecology Transition in West Africa
4 pour 1000: Agricultural Soils for Food Security and the Climate

This 6-minute video, in English with French subtitles, was produced by FAO for the Agriculture and Food Security Action Event, part of the Global Climate Action Agenda, at the Marrakech Climate Change Conference 2016. Led by France and Morocco, the Global Climate Action Agenda seeks to boost cooperative action between governments, cities, businesses, investors and citizens to cut emissions rapidly, help vulnerable nations adapt to climate impacts and build a more sustainable future.

Read more
http://www.fao.org/climate-change/int…