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Hey, happy Earth Day! Who wants to talk about climate change?

Yeah, okay, fair, I kinda figured the answer to that would be "ugh do we have to?" What if I told you I have good news though? Good news with caveats, but still good news.

What if I told you that since the Paris Agreement in 2015, we've avoided a whole degree celsius of global warming by 2100, or maybe more?

Current projections are 2.7C, which is way better than the 3-5C (with a median of 3.7C) we were expecting in 2015. It's not where we want to be - 1.5C - but it is big, noticeable progress!

And it's not like we either hit 1.5C and avoid all the big scary consequences or fail to hit 1.5C and get all of them - every tenth of a degree of warming we avoid is going to prevent more severe problems like extreme weather, sea level rise, etc.

This means that climate change mitigation efforts are having a noticeable impact! This means a dramatically better, safer future - and if we keep pushing, we could lower the amount of global warming we end up with even further. This is huge progress, and we need to celebrate it, even though the fight isn't over.

It's working. Keep going.

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Jenny Holzer for Wall Street Journal Magazine photographed by Annemarieke van Drimmelen (2022)

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Excerpt from this story from the LA Times:

A litter of Rottweiler puppies and their mother were saved from a fiery death in the Park fire thanks to a determined member of the Butte County Sheriff’s Office, officials said.

The rescue is one of the few silver linings to the Park fire in Northern California. The blaze had burned almost 390,000 acres as of Wednesday morning and was still only 18% contained, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The dogs, two adult Rottweilers and their four puppies, were left in a truck that had broken down on the side of the road, left behind by residents who were evacuating the blaze near Campbellville in Butte County, the Sheriff’s Office said.

The truck’s owner was not able to take the dogs, but provided the location of the vehicle to the Sheriff’s Office. Because of the fire, rescuers could not immediately get to the dogs’ location.

On Saturday, days after the dogs were abandoned, Trevor Skaggs, a member of the sheriff’s search-and-rescue team, flew to the area in a helicopter to find the dogs.

After landing, Skaggs ran more than a mile to the location where the dogs were reported to be. Though the adult male Rottweiler had died, Skaggs found the mother and puppies still alive in the truck — “tired and very thirsty” — according to the Sheriff’s Office.

Skaggs’ wife, Christina, told the San Jose Mercury News that Skaggs is a vegan and ultra marathoner and that he ran from the helicopter to where the dogs were. Skaggs was familiar with Rottweilers because his first dog was a Rottweiler, she said.

Once he found the dogs, Skaggs sang to them and was able to persuade the mother, and then the puppies, to trust him, his wife said.

Skaggs gave the animals water and fed them a few bites of his granola bar and then got the animals to follow him back more than a mile to the helicopter.

Video provided by the Sheriff’s Office shows the puppies and the mother trailing behind Skaggs as he led them back to the helicopter.

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via

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The launch of Apollo 16 on April 16, 1972.

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the palestinian olympic team in paris 🇵🇸

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“One of the strongest feelings I remember from my childhood is, precisely, of being humiliated; of being knocked about by words, acts, or situations. Isn’t it a fact that children are always feeling deeply humiliated in their relations with grown-ups and each other? I have a feeling children spend a good deal of their time humiliating one another. Our whole education is just one long humiliation, and it was even more so when I was a child. One of the wounds I’ve found hardest to bear in my adult life has been the fear of humiliation, and the sense of being humiliated. Every time I read a review, for instance — whether laudatory or not — this feeling awakes. To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure.”

— Ingmar Bergman; Interviews with Ingmar Bergman by Stig Bjorkman

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Frédéric Chopin

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Vivienne Rohner by Brianna Capozzi for D la Repubblica

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Adit Priscilla | © Txema Yeste

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By Jake Johnson

Common Dreams

July 1, 2024

"In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law," warned Justice Sonia Sotomayor. "With fear for our democracy, I dissent."

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled along ideological lines on Monday that former President Donald Trump is entitled to "absolute immunity" for "official acts" taken while he was in office, a decision that liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned makes any occupant of the Oval Office "a king above the law."

Writing for the majority in the 6-3 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts declared that Trump "may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts."

But Sotomayor countered in her dissent that the majority distorted the concept of core constitutional powers "beyond any recognizable bounds," effectively granting Trump the sweeping immunity he demanded as he faces charges for attempting to subvert the 2020 presidential election in a failed last-ditch bid to remain in power.

"When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority's reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution," Sotomayor wrote. "Orders the Navy's SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Immune, immune, immune."

"In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law," the justice added. "With fear for our democracy, I dissent."

The New York Timesnoted that the high court "has remanded the case to the federal district court judge overseeing the matter, Tanya Chutkan, to determine the nature of the acts for which former President Trump has been charged—which are unofficial ones he undertook in his personal capacity and which are official ones he undertook as president."

The high court's ruling, which came after months of delays, all but forecloses the possibility of Trump facing trial for election subversion charges before the November presidential contest. The progressive advocacy group MoveOn said the conservative supermajority's decision to punt the case back to the lower court makes the justices "complicit in Trump's plan to delay any legal accountability until after the election."

Two of the court's right-wing justices— Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—faced calls to recuse from the case but rejected them.

"Donald Trump incited the deadly January 6 insurrection and the MAGA Supreme Court continues to do everything in their power to stop him from facing accountability for attempting to overthrow our government," said Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn Political Action. "Nobody is above the law, especially not Trump. MAGA extremists in Congress and the courts have made it clear there will be no checks or balances on Trump and the only hope for American democracy is the people coming together to defeat him in November."

Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president at Public Citizen, added in a statement that "Trump versus the United States is a fitting name for this case."

"There is no better way to characterize Trump's attempt to upend the Constitution and rule of law as we know it," Gilbert said. "Today's ruling is a blow to U.S. democracy. But it's not a final blow by any means. Trump can and should still be held accountable for his role in the violence on January 6 in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election and stop a peaceful transfer of power."

In an amicus brief submitted in April, Public Citizen noted that the president "has no specific, constitutionally assigned role in the conduct of presidential elections," making "any assertion that a president's authority empowers him to conspire to overturn the result of a valid election and retain power beyond his term in office... absurd."

"Accepting a view of the outer limits of presidential authority that would sweep in a conspiracy to overturn an election and remain in office unlawfully would have exceptionally broad implications and threaten severe damage to our constitutional democracy," the group warned.

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"People assume that in the 50 years since the first Earth Day we've made no progress. That we're in a worse position now than we were in the 1970s, that there's no point in environmental action," [...] Quite the opposite is true. Climate-friendly advances that would have seemed impossible even 10 years ago are now commonplace. And three times in the past 50 years humanity has faced--and fixed--massive, man-made global environmental issues.

The fight isn't won yet, but don't forget that we have made enormous progress.

We would be in a much, much worse position if it wasn't for all the incredible work of environmental activists who came before us, most of whose names and contributions we will never know. They are the reason that we have a fighting chance now, and we owe it to them to pick up their banner and keep running.

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The New Yorker, Klaas Verplancke