Why bananas as we know them might go extinct (again) By Jacopo Prisco,

 Fifty years ago, we were eating better bananas.

They tasted better, they lasted longer, they were more resilient and didn’t require artificial ripening. They were – simply put – a better fruit, because they belonged to a different species, or cultivar in banana parlance.

It was called Gros Michel and it remained the world’s export banana until 1965. 

 

That year, it was declared commercially extinct due to the Panama disease, a fungal disease that started out from Central America and quickly spread to most of the world’s commercial banana plantations, leaving no other choice but to burn them down.

The banana industry was in deep crisis, and had to look for alternatives. It settled with the Cavendish cultivar, which was deemed an inferior product but carried the distinction of being immune to the disease. It was quickly adopted by banana growers worldwide.

Today, the Cavendish is a universal foodstuff, much like a Big Mac: supermarket bananas are pretty much identical anywhere you buy them.

That’s because they have nearly no genetic diversity – the plants are all clones of one another. The Cavendish is a monoculture, which means it’s the only variety that most commercial growers plant every year. Which is also why it is now under threat itself, from a new strain of the Panama disease. And once it infects one plant, it can infect them all.

Fifty years on, one of the most popular commercial foods in the world is once again under threat. 

 

A threat to Africa

There are hundreds of banana varieties in the world, but the Cavendish alone accounts for nearly the totality of exports.

“Starting in the late 1980s, banana growers realized more diversity was needed to prevent the problem from happening again. They were begging their bosses for it, but it never happened,” Dan Koeppel, author of the book “Banana: The fate of the fruit that changed the world,” told CNN. 

 The disease now has a different name, “Tropical Race 4,” and it started out in Malaysia around 1990, but it’s otherwise very similar to the one that wiped out the Gros Michel: “It’s caused by a really common type of fungus called Fusarium, which was probably already in the soil there. A single clamp of contaminated dirt is enough to spread it like wildfire, and it can be transported by wind, cars, water, creating an infection wherever it goes,” explained Koeppel.

“Everyone who’s ever had athlete’s foot knows how hard it is to get rid of a fungus.”

The pathogen affects the plant’s vascular system, preventing it from picking up water.

Since its “second coming,” TP4 has spread to South-east Asia, then across thousands of miles of open ocean to Australia and finally, in 2013, to Africa. 

 “Its recent discovery in the Middle East and in Nampula, Mozambique, indicates that the disease is spreading and threatening bananas worldwide,” George Mahuku, Senior plant pathologist for the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, told CNN.

“It’s a serious threat to livelihoods and food security in the Nampula province, country and the continent, should it spread. In Africa, bananas are critical for food security and income generation for more than 100 million people,” he added. 

 

Not just the Cavendish

Even though the disease appears to have spread to just two plantations in Mozambique, the impact on the local economy is already severe: “The disease has already cost Matanuska, the company that owns the plantations, about $7.5 million. A total of 230,000 plants have been affected and destroyed. At the current rate of infection, the farm is losing 15,000 plants per week, translating to $236,000 per week,” said Mahuku.

With Matanuska contributing over $1.5 million per month to the local economy, the potential loss of livelihood is very real.

Mahuku’s job is to coordinate efforts to slow down the disease, prompting collaboration from around 20 African countries: “The East and Central Africa region has over 50% of its permanent crop area under banana cultivation. That’s around half of the African total, with an annual production of 20.9 million tonnes valued at $ 4.3 billion. Bananas are an indispensable part of life in this region providing up to one fifth of the total calorie consumption per capita. If TR4 were to spread into this region, the effects would be unimaginable.” 

 Many of these bananas are not Cavendish, but local varieties, or “village bananas,” and they are also under threat from the disease: “Preliminary results from evaluation of nine East African Highland bananas and plantains revealed that they can be infected with TR4. Only one cultivar remained disease free after eight months,” said Mahuku.

There is also an issue of consumer trust associated with the discovery of the disease, according to Joao Augusto, a plant pathologist working with IITA in Mozambique: “One of the biggest threats is the negative perception that the rest of the world may have on perceived risk of the African banana. Although the spread of the pathogen through the fruit is almost nil, possible rejection of African banana exports could seriously damage the banana business in Africa.” 

 Can it be stopped?

The disease is not more virulent than the one that killed the Gros Michel, but it’s spreading because the bad practices from 50 years ago are still in place: “The banana industry is in denial about this, and standard agricultural quarantines like fencing the crops and cleaning the equipment are not enough,” added Koeppel.

The only solution would be to burn the plantation down and start over, but with a different crop. Restarting with bananas doesn’t work because the fungus stays in the soil. 

 That, however, means the end of the business: “I understand growers don’t want to throw the towel,” Koeppel noted.

In Africa, a 12-month emergency project funded by FAO is underway to tackle TP4, and Mahuku is optimistic that the disease can be contained to the areas where it has been observed: “To achieve this, financial resources are needed, otherwise inaction due to lack of resources will be catastrophic, especially for small farmers who depend on bananas for their livelihoods,” he said.

According to Augusto, there aren’t many options to effectively control the disease: “It cannot be eradicated, but it can be limited if a wide range of strong preventive and mitigation initiatives are put in place and rigorously implemented. In countries where the disease is endemic, the banana growers have learned to live with it.” 

 Ultimately, history could well repeat itself and prompt banana growers to look for a new alternative. There is no good candidate at the moment, but hybrids and GMOs are being considered.

The disease is not the only problem, though. Just as the Cavendish is under attack from the pathogen, local varieties are under attack from the Cavendish: “India had about 600 varieties, but over the past two decades the Cavendish has pushed out and replaced many of those. And when you replace a varied multiculture with a monoculture, if a disease happens, you’re in trouble: nature comes back and bites you,” said Koeppel.

“Monoculture to me is just as much a disease as TP4,” he added. 

 While diversity has been embraced by most other vegetable and fruit industries, the Cavendish – called “the hotel banana” in India – is still the only banana in town in most export markets.

Hopefully its dominance won’t lead to its downfall. 

 

 

 

Trump Testified That He Was Scared He Was Going to Be Killed by a Flying Pineapple Ryan Bort

There are few things Donald Trump loves more than skirting accountability in court. But even the former president wasn’t able to avoid sitting for a deposition in a case brought by protesters who allege they were attacked by his security outside of Trump Tower ahead of the 2016 election.

 The deposition was conducted last October, but excerpts released this week reveal that Trump swore under oath that he did not order his security detail to attack the protesters. They also reveal that he is afraid of fruit.

 The partial transcript includes several pages of the former president discussing the potential that various produce items would be hurled at him during a speech. Trump had been asked to confirm whether he told people during a Feb. 2016 rally in Iowa to “knock the crap” out of anyone they see “getting ready to throw a tomato.” Trump confirmed he made the comment, although he said it was partially in “jest” and that the comment was directed to the audience, not to his security. “It was very dangerous,” Trump said.

 Trump then claimed “we had a threat” that people were going to throw fruit at him, and that they were “going to hit hard.”

“And you get hit with fruit, it’s — no, it’s very violent stuff. We were on alert for that,” the former president said, noting that “it’s worse than tomato, it’s other things also,” but that the tomato is also “very dangerous.”

“You can get killed with those things,” Trump added.

 Trump listed some of the things that could have been worse than a tomato after he was asked whether he would expect his security to “knock the crap out of” someone they thought was about to throw a tomato. “Well, a tomato, a pineapple, a lot of other things they throw … I think they have to be aggressive in stopping that from happening,” he testified. “Because if that happens, you can be killed if that happens.”

Trump later added that bananas were also a threat

 

On The Trail: The era of big government Republicanism by Reid Wilson

Republican governors and legislators have embarked on new campaigns to restrict the rights of their constituents and punish those who voice dissent, flexing the power of government run by a party that once pledged to keep government out of private life.

On issues ranging from transgender rights to cross-border trade and private business decisions related to the coronavirus pandemic, Republican lawmakers have advanced measures this year that insert government into many facets of American life.

Twenty-six years after a Democratic president declared an end to the era of big government, that era is back — but now it’s being driven by the Republican Party.

  “As the right moves into post-liberalism and away from what traditionally has been defined as conservative, it is much more comfortable with wielding state power to own the libs,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, vice president of political studies at the Niskanen Center and author of “Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party.” “They would say the state is the only major institution in American life that conservatives now control — they have to make full use of whatever power is available to them.”

Legislatures in Alabama approved measures barring doctors from providing medical care to transgender youth, over the objections of every major medical association in the country. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued an order classifying the provision of gender-affirming care — including the use of puberty-delaying hormones — as child abuse.

 Supporters of those measures focus on — and, in one recent case in Michigan, even fundraise off of — gender-affirming surgeries, glossing over provisions that would restrict a doctor from prescribing common medicines for treatment.

Lawmakers in two states have sought to ban people from seeking treatment in other states: An Idaho bill that died in the state Senate would have made a felon of anyone who helped a transgender child travel out of the state to seek treatment. A Missouri lawmaker has proposed a similar penalty for those who help women obtain an abortion in another state.

 Republican opponents of abortion access have long carved out exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest, or that endanger the life or health of the mother. Measures dropping exceptions for rape or incest have passed in Oklahoma and New Hampshire this year; the Utah Republican Party has proposed eliminating exceptions for the health of the mother in its official platform. The Oklahoma measure makes it a felony to perform an abortion.

 Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) last month signed legislation that will bar teachers from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity in front of young children, a bill opponents call the “Don’t Say Gay” law. Officials in other states, led by Texas Gov. Abbott (R) and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R), say they will make a similar measure a priority when legislators reconvene next year.

When the Disney Corporation voiced its opposition to the Florida law, the Republican-controlled legislature voted to punish the company by eliminating its special tax district  — which may have the unintended consequence of providing Disney a massive tax break at a cost borne by Florida taxpayers

Abbott, playing on fears of a tidal wave of migrants poised to cross the southern border, offered his own big-government plan to add new checks on cargo coming into his state. Eight days of inspections cost Texas consumers and businesses an estimated $4.3 billion in lost revenue and turned up no drugs and no undocumented immigrants.

Historians say it is not uncommon for parties to alter their views on government intervention when it suits their purposes. Eric Foner, a political scientist at Columbia University and author of “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men,” a history of the ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War, said the era marked a similar shift among Southern Democrats.

 “Before the Civil War Democrats advocated limited government. Yet when it came to protecting and expanding slavery they insisted on vigorous federal action — for example the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the strongest federal intervention in the states of the entire era,” Foner wrote in an email.

Other Republicans showed no qualms about the exercise of federal power. Kabaservice, of the Niskanen Center, pointed to Theodore Roosevelt, who used the Sherman Antitrust Act to break up Standard Oil and J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Company.

 More recently, Republican presidents who dared stray from small-government orthodoxy were attacked as apostates. George H.W. Bush suffered the slings and arrows from the libertarian right when he signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law in 1990. His son, George W. Bush, called himself a “compassionate conservative” — and took heat from Republicans who opposed a Medicare expansion measure that bitterly divided his own party.

Today’s Republican Party is more influenced by former President Trump, whose ideological inconsistencies have never troubled his most ardent fans and imitators. Trump never offered a paean to limited government, if power could be used to punish blue states and political opponents.

 Kabaservice said he saw parallels between the recent Republican exercises in power and the McCarthy era, when conservatives like William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell “approved of McCarthyism because they saw it as a template for a much more thoroughgoing government repression of dissent,” Kabaservice said in an email.

“They wanted to use the state as an instrument of coercion to enforce social conformity, to regulate and control human behavior, and to drill into Americans the principles of duty, order, obedience and authority,” he wrote.

 Rick Wilson, the onetime Republican strategist-turned-Trump critic, said Trump revived the clash between small-government conservatism and the inclination of those who hold power to exercise it.

“Trump’s natural leanings toward authoritarianism merged with the post-libertarian moment of conservatism. As nationalism and populism replaced it, the argument against using the power of the state for ideological ends became weaker and weaker,” Wilson said. “I fear that once the demon is out of the pentagram, it’s hard to put it back.

 

 

 

Pa. Senate primmary ( Republicans)

 Seems like the fat cats are coming for Pennsylvania voters.  On Mondays debate one of the biggest moments happened about 2 minutes in… when the moderators’ very first question to frontrunners David McCormick and Dr. Oz was why voters should support them when they haven’t even lived in Pennsylvania.

 That’s right — the PA Republican primary is a race between a millionaire from New Jersey + a millionaire from Connecticut. (Or as another candidate on their stage put it, “the two tourists”. As for the others, well lets just say they are not hurting for money.

You have to ask yourself what do they have in common with the average person from Pennsylvania?

They try to to sell you tax cuts that only make them richer.  Beware of the snake oil.

 

Firearms overtook auto accidents as the leading cause of death in children April 22 by Dustin Jones NPR

For decades, auto accidents have been the leading cause of death among children, but in 2020 guns were the No. 1 cause, researchers say.

Overall firearm-related deaths increased 13.5% between 2019 and 2020, but such fatalities for those 1 to 19 years old jumped nearly 30%, according to a research letter in New England Journal of Medicine.

Researchers analyzed data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that there were a record 45,222 firearm-related deaths in the U.S. in 2020. 

 Patrick Carter, one of the authors of the research letter and co-director of the University of Michigan's Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention, said about 10% of those deaths — 4,357 in total — were children.

Studies have shown that firearm violence increased during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, according to the research letter, the reason behind the increase in child deaths attributed to guns is unclear.

For decades prior to 2020, motor vehicle accidents were the leading cause of death among children. Carter tells NPR that the reason the two have swapped places is a "tale of two stories."

 "Firearm deaths we haven't made much progress on, in fact it increased in recent years. And we have had a decrease in moto vehicle deaths," he said. 

 

According to a separate study, motor vehicle crashes were the leading cause of child deaths for more than 60 years. But over time, cars have become safer and driver education has improved. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and others have pushed for better child safety in cars, taking a scientific approach to the problem, Carter said.

"We can do the same thing with firearms. We just haven't been able to do that in the same amount of years yet," he said. "It takes time to figure out what the underlying issues are with the problem and then finding the solutions."

 The figures between adults and children and firearms are almost an inverted image of each other. For adults, 65% of gun related deaths are attributed to suicide, while 30% are homicides and about 2% come from accidental discharges, Carter said. For children, 65% of firearm deaths are homicides and 35% are categorized as suicide, he said.

And though mass shootings, which have drastically increased over the past 30 years, are clearly part of the problem, the vast majority of kids are killed by guns in smaller, day-to-day incidents.

 Most commonly what makes the news is these horrific mass shootings, but they are a small aspect of the overall problem," Carter said. "The smallest portion are the mass shootings. ... it's these daily deaths that are occurring making up the totality of what we are seeing."

 

 

The Green-Energy Culture Wars in Red States: Another thing holding back our transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy By Ronald Brownstein

The battle over the nation’s energy future has become another front in the escalating cultural and political confrontation between what America has been and what it is becoming.

The states that are most deeply integrated into the existing fossil-fuel economy, either as producers or as consumers, tend also to be the places that are most resistant to, and separated from, the major demographic, cultural, and economic changes remaking 21st-century American life.

 These fossil-fuel-reliant states are nearly all among those moving most aggressively to restrict voting, abortion, and LGBTQ rights; to ban books; and to censor what teachers and college professors can say about race, gender, and sexual orientation. The majority of them rank near the bottom among the 50 states in the share of their residents who hold four-year college degrees, are foreign-born, or work in occupations tied to the new digital economy, according to census figures. Industry marketing figures show they tend to rank near the bottom of the 50 states in adoption of electric vehicles and near the top in their reliance on gas-guzzling pickup trucks. Most of them have larger populations of white voters who identify as Christian and rely heavily on blue-collar work in the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: production of energy and other natural resources, manufacturing, and agriculture. 

 This convergence of fossil-fuel dependence, cultural conservatism, and isolation from the most dynamic modern industries captures how comprehensively the two parties are divided by their exposure to, and attitudes about, the changes reshaping America. It also shows how difficult it will be to establish any consensus for national action to accelerate the shift from fossil fuels to clean energy sources, despite the mounting evidence that climate change threatens all regions of the country (and the world).

 

 The irony is that the energy transition may represent the best chance for the states most reliant on fossil fuels to benefit from the new sources of economic growth. Although the fossil-fuel-reliant states (with Texas and Ohio as the most conspicuous exceptions) are almost all peripheral today to the digital revolution creating massive wealth, many of them are already leaders in the production of clean energy, especially wind and solar power. Yet their political leaders, in what I’ve called the “brown blockade,” are generally fighting the policies that would accelerate the growth of those emerging industries—such as the tax incentives for clean energy in the sweeping Build Back Better economic plan that has been blocked by opposition from Joe Manchin and every Republican senator.

 “This messaging that deploying electric vehicles or transitioning toward wind and solar and other clean-energy technologies will be damaging to economies in Republican states is a misconception,” Lindsey Walter, the deputy director of Third Way’s Climate and Energy Program, told me. Last year Walter co-wrote a detailed study on how a shift away from fossil fuels would affect the states. Replacing fossil fuels with lower-carbon energy sources, she said, will create “a tremendous amount of jobs in Republican states.”

 The federal Energy Information Administration calculates one of the most comprehensive benchmarks of states’ integration in the existing fossil-fuel economy. It measures how much carbon each state emits from its energy sector per dollar of economic activity within its borders. That captures both the states that are big producers of fossil fuels—including oil, natural gas, and coal—and those that are big consumers of it, usually because they depend more heavily on fossil fuels for producing electricity and/or rely on industries with large carbon footprints, particularly manufacturing and agriculture.

 The 19 states that top the EIA’s latest rankings—for the most carbon emitted per dollar of economic output in 2018—present a singular profile. They begin with Wyoming, West Virginia, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Alaska at the top of the list and then extend across the South (including Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas), the heartland (including Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska), and the Mountain West (Montana, New Mexico). Conspicuously absent are states along either coast or in New England.

 All of these 19 fossil-fuel-reliant states, except for New Mexico, voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. Republicans now hold 33 of their 38 Senate seats—with the two in New Mexico, Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and Jon Tester in Montana as the sole remaining Democrats. (By comparison, President Joe Biden won all 16 states with the lowest carbon emissions per dollar of economic output, primarily states along the two coasts, and Democrats hold all of their Senate seats except that of the Republican Susan Collins in Maine.) Republicans hold unified control of their governorship and state legislature in 15 of these 19 states, while in Kansas, Kentucky, and Louisiana, Republicans control the legislature but a Democrat holds the governorship. New Mexico is the only state among them where Democrats control all the levers of state government.

 The political leadership in these states has opposed most efforts to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy sources. Fourteen of these states, for instance, have joined in a lawsuit (led by West Virginia) now before the Supreme Court that could undercut the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions. The Texas state comptroller this month sent a letter to nearly two dozen financial institutions threatening to exclude them from state business under a new law barring contracts with companies that disinvest in the fossil-fuel industry. The Republican senators from these states have also uniformly opposed proposals to limit carbon emissions, such as a clean-electricity standard to phase out carbon-emitting electricity.

 The most important exception to this pattern is that many congressional Republicans have backed tax credits to encourage deployment of wind and solar power. “It’s very easy to cast a broad brush, but in the very recent times, we have had Democrats and Republicans in this environment come together to support real and meaningful things,” Heather Zichal, the CEO of the American Clean Power Association, the leading trade group for companies in that industry, told me. Still, all Senate Republicans are opposing the Build Back Better Act’s more sweeping incentives, which energy analysts agree could enormously accelerate the development of those sources. Instead, most of them have called for increasing domestic production of oil and gas, especially because gasoline prices have spiked since the Russian invasion of Ukraine affected global energy markets.

 Manchin has echoed those calls, repeatedly insisting that the instability caused by the invasion shows the importance of producing more domestic fossil fuels. At a recent energy-industry conference in Texas, Manchin disparaged the idea of rapidly shifting away from gasoline-powered cars and trucks toward electric vehicles, the latter of which the Biden administration is hoping to promote. “I’m very reluctant to go down the path of electric vehicles,” Manchin said. “I’m old enough to remember standing in line in 1974 trying to buy gas—I remember those days. I don’t want to have to be standing in line waiting for a battery for my vehicle, because we’re now dependent on a foreign supply chain, mostly [from] China.” Although Manchin insists that he supports the Build Back Better plan’s climate provisions—a package of more than $500 billion in tax incentives—he continues to block the overall bill, which has left it in limbo. More recently, he joined all Senate Republicans to block a Biden nominee to the Federal Reserve Board, Sarah Bloom Raskin, who has advocated for greater scrutiny of financial institutions’ exposure to climate-change-related risks.

 Almost all of the states fighting the energy transition are expressing equally intense resistance to social change. In effect, they are fighting the future on both fronts.

 Seven of the most fossil-fuel-reliant states, for instance, have already approved laws barring transgender girls from participating in high-school (and in some cases college) sports; the Oklahoma legislature last week approved such a bill as well, and Missouri and Kansas are still considering similar measures. In three other states, the governor (including two Republicans and one Democrat) has vetoed such a bill after the legislature approved it.

 About half of these states—most aggressively Texas, Iowa, and Montana—have passed laws making it harder to vote. Likewise, eight of them have acted through legislation or administrative action to restrict how teachers can talk about race or gender in the classroom, and some of the others are still considering such proposals. (West Virginia also passed similar restrictions at the very end of its session, but legislative officials determined that the state Senate voted on the bill literally seconds after the session’s expiration.) Thirteen of these states have laws on the books that will ban or severely restrict abortion access if the Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court overturns the Roe v. Wade decision this summer, as many expect.

 Mark Muro, a senior fellow and the policy director at the Brookings Metro think tank, says the widespread adoption of these policies across the fossil-fuel-reliant states will likely deepen their exclusion from the digital industries driving much 21st-century economic growth. Though there are nodes of digital employment in several of the heaviest carbon-emitting states (particularly Ohio and Texas), 16 of them finished in the bottom 23 when Brookings Metro ranked states by the share of their workforce employed in technology jobs.

 The core problem for these states, Muro notes, is that most of them tend to lack the well-educated workers who are, in essence, the crucial raw material for not only internet, computing, and communications firms but also advanced manufacturing. Muro says that the torrent of culturally conservative legislation across the fossil-fuel-reliant states (and GOP-controlled states more broadly) adds another barrier to tech companies pursuing significant expansions in them. “They want to decentralize somewhat, but they are very concerned about how this plays with the people they are trying to hire,” Muro says. Companies, he adds, “need to make sure the talent is not put off” by these restrictive social policies.

 Ironically, one emerging 21st-century industry in which the fossil-fuel-reliant states have established a beachhead is clean energy. Recently released data from the American Clean Power Association found that many of those states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Iowa, were among those that saw the largest installations in 2021 of solar, wind, and other renewable-energy capacity. Oklahoma this month brought on line the largest wind farm ever built at one time in North America. Walter noted that Third Way’s study found that whereas oil, gas, and coal resources are concentrated in relatively few places, more states are positioned to benefit from a low-carbon energy mix because wind, solar, and water resources are more widely distributed.

 Devashree Saha, a senior associate at the World Resources Institute, told me most economic models project that, overall, the transition from a fossil-fuel to a clean-energy economy will create more jobs than it destroys in energy-related sectors. But she and other experts such as Zichal and Walter all pointed out that even with wind and solar rapidly growing in many fossil-fuel-reliant states, there’s no guarantee the new jobs will entirely offset the old in every state; for instance, because electric vehicles have fewer parts and require less time to assemble, the shift toward them might reduce employment in the Rust Belt states that now dominate the auto industry. In the transition from one energy economy to the next, “there might be a mismatch of geography; there might be a mismatch of timing,” Saha said. “Given all these constraints, we need to be very deliberative and strategic in terms of our policies” to ensure that the states now most reliant on fossil fuels share in the opportunities associated with the transition to more renewable sources.

 The bipartisan infrastructure bill that Biden signed last year included several provisions designed to channel jobs in the clean-energy economy toward places that would be hurt by diminished reliance on fossil fuels, such as coal communities. The now-stalled Build Back Better plan contains further incentives to steer that investment, though those haven’t been sufficient to overcome the opposition from Republicans representing the fossil-fuel states, or Manchin.

 That resistance underscores the extent to which the energy transition has been woven into the larger struggle over the country’s direction between what I’ve called the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation” and the competing Republican “coalition of restoration.” The loud demands for more domestic oil and gas drilling since Russia invaded Ukraine, and the fierce opposition to any regulation of carbon emissions, show how a low-carbon future has become just another count in the indictment Republicans use to convince their voters that Democrats want to uproot America from its deepest traditions and transform it into something unrecognizable. Belittling increased reliance on electric vehicles or wind-generated electricity (which Trump repeatedly, almost obsessively, mocked) becomes another way for conservatives to argue that they are defending “real” Americans against “elitists” who allegedly disdain their values and want to control their lives—the same arguments they are marshaling to support censoring how teachers talk about race and gender or to block transgender girls from competing in school sports.

 Operating in Trump’s long shadow, Republicans are betting more heavily on that case than ever (as evidenced by the torrent of socially conservative legislation advancing since 2020 in red states). But the underlying economic realities may make it difficult for them to force the energy debate into a culture-war prism indefinitely.

 

 

 

 

Republican Sen. Mike Lee: Hands caught in the conspiracy jar

GOP senator tries (and fails) to defend anti-election scheme

Utah's Mike Lee tried to offer a defense of his efforts to help overturn the 2020 election. It really didn't go well.

 

It’s been nearly a week since CNN first released text messages Republican Sen. Mike Lee sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the days and weeks following the 2020 elections. The private messages, which the senator probably never expected to reach the public, paint a highly unflattering picture.

As we’ve discussed, the Utahan appears to have engaged in an indefensible plot against his own country’s democracy, partnering with Donald Trump’s team to explore ways to reject American voters’ verdict. Lee invested time and energy into a fake-electors scheme; he touted the work of radical lawyer John Eastman; he personally tried to plot with state legislators; and he practically volunteered to be a puppet for the White House, pleading for a script from which to read.

 Making matters worse, the Republican lawmaker did all of this in secret, and appears to have misled journalists about his actions.

It reached the point yesterday that Sen. Mitt Romney told reporters, in reference to his home state colleague, “From what I’ve seen so far, I don’t think Sen. Lee has done anything illegal.”

As a rule, it’s not a great sign when, in the midst of a scandal, a politician’s ally feels compelled to say the controversy at hand probably doesn’t include criminal activity — at least “so far.”

In recent days, Lee hasn’t said much about the matter, and has even been filmed pretending not to hear questions about his actions.

 Late yesterday, however, the Republican finally spoke to the Deseret News on the record. The good news is, Lee said quite a bit about the controversy. The bad news is, the senator’s comments weren’t exactly persuasive.

Sen. Mike Lee says the text messages he sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows after the 2020 election don’t signal advocacy for overturning the results in favor of Donald Trump. In his first interview since CNN last week revealed dozens of his texts to Meadows, the Utah Republican told the Deseret News in an interview Wednesday his only goal was to figure out Congress’ role in a presidential election and sort through theories the Trump campaign pursued to challenge the outcome.

 Remember, Lee has had nearly a week to come up with a compelling explanation for his actions. It does not appear that he spent that time wisely.

For example, the senator told the newspaper, “He knows that when I said things like ‘Tell me what we ought to be saying,’ what I was just trying to figure out was ‘What is your message?’ He knows me well enough to know that that doesn’t mean I will do your bidding, whatever it is.”

 For goodness’ sake, Lee literally texted the Trump White House, “Please give me something to work with. I just need to know what I should be saying.” Two days later, the senator again texted, “Please tell me what I should be saying.” Later that day, he added, “There are a few of us in the Senate who want to be helpful.”

 This wasn’t a senator encouraging Meadows to come up with a message for others; this was a senator awaiting instructions.

In the same 45-minute phone interview with the Deseret News, the newspaper asked whether President Joe Biden was elected in a free and fair election. Lee hedged, conceding that the Democrat was chosen by the electoral college, but failing to concede that the 2020 race was legitimate.

The senator went on to tell the newspaper that he grew “alarmed” in the days leading up to the Jan. 6 certification vote when he learned that the fake-electors scheme hadn’t “blown over.” That appears to be at odds with the texts that show Lee telling Meadows on Jan. 4, “I’ve been calling state legislators for hours today, and am going to spend hours doing the same tomorrow. I’m trying to figure out a path that I can persuasively defend.... We need something from state legislatures to make this legitimate and to have any hope of winning.

 Also on Jan. 4, Lee texted, “I’ve been spending 14 hours a day for the last week trying to unravel this for [Trump].”

Yesterday, however, the senator told the Deseret News he was merely calling legislators and election officials to figure out what was going on, since he couldn’t get answers from the Trump campaign about “ever-changing rumors.” Lee added, “At no point in any of those was I engaging in advocacy. I wasn’t in any way encouraging them to do that. I just asked them a yes or no question.”

In order for a defense to be effective, it has to be plausible. This fails that test.

 Broadly speaking, there have been two dimensions to the scandal: Lee worked on a scheme to overturn the election and he appears to have been dishonest about his actions. If the senator thinks yesterday’s interview put the latter to rest, he’s going to be disappointed.

 Steve Benen

Mitch & Kevin: History will not judge you well!

 

'I've Had It With This Guy': GOP Leaders Privately Blasted Trump After Jan. 6

Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin

Thu, April 21, 2022, 8:27 AM

In the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol building, the two top Republicans in Congress, Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Mitch McConnell, told associates they believed President Donald Trump was responsible for inciting the deadly riot and vowed to drive him from politics. McCarthy went so far as to say he would push Trump to resign immediately: “I’ve had it with this guy,” he told a group of Republican leaders.

But within weeks both men backed off an all-out fight with Trump because they feared retribution from him and his political movement. Their drive to act faded fast as it became clear it would mean difficult votes that would put them at odds with most of their colleagues

 I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference,” McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, told a friend.

 

 The confidential expressions of outrage from McCarthy and McConnell, which have not been previously reported, illustrate the immense gulf between what Republican leaders say privately about Trump and their public deference to a man whose hold on the party has gone virtually unchallenged for half a decade.

The leaders’ swift retreat in January 2021 represented a capitulation at a moment of extraordinary political weakness for Trump — perhaps the last and best chance for mainstream Republicans to reclaim control of their party from a leader who had stoked an insurrection against American democracy itself.

 This account of the private discussions among Republican leaders in the days after the Jan. 6 attack is adapted from a new book, “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future,” which draws on hundreds of interviews with lawmakers and officials, and contemporaneous records of pivotal moments in the 2020 presidential campaign.

McConnell’s office declined to comment. Mark Bednar, a spokesman for McCarthy, denied that the Republican leader told colleagues he would push Trump to leave office. “McCarthy never said he’d call Trump to say he should resign,” Bednar said.

 No one embodies the stark accommodation to Trump more than McCarthy, a 57-year-old Californian who has long had his sights set on becoming speaker of the House. In public after Jan. 6, McCarthy issued a careful rebuke of Trump, saying that he “bears responsibility” for the mob that tried to stop Congress from officially certifying the president’s loss. But he declined to condemn him in sterner language.

In private, McCarthy went much further.

 On a phone call with several other top House Republicans on Jan. 8, McCarthy said Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 had been “atrocious and totally wrong.” He faulted the president for “inciting people” to attack the Capitol, saying that Trump’s remarks at a rally on the National Mall that day were “not right by any shape or any form.”

During that conversation, McCarthy inquired about the mechanism for invoking the 25th Amendment — the process whereby the vice president and members of the Cabinet can remove a president from office — before concluding that was not a viable option. McCarthy, who was among those who objected to the election results, was uncertain and indecisive, fretting that the Democratic drive to impeach Trump would “put more fuel on the fire” of the country’s divisions.

 But McCarthy’s resolve seemed to harden as the gravity of the attack — and the potential political fallout for his party — sank in. Two members of Trump’s Cabinet had quit their posts after the attack and several moderate Republican governors had called for the president’s resignation. Video clips of the riot kept surfacing online, making the raw brutality of the attack ever more vivid in the public mind.

On Jan. 10, McCarthy spoke again with the leadership team and this time he had a plan in mind.

The Democrats were driving hard at an impeachment resolution, McCarthy said, and they would have the votes to pass it. Now he planned to call Trump and tell him it was time for him to go.

“What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and nobody should defend it,” he told the group

 McCarthy said he would tell Trump of the impeachment resolution: “I think this will pass, and it would be my recommendation you should resign.”

He acknowledged it was unlikely Trump would follow that suggestion.

McCarthy spent the four years of Trump’s presidency as one of the White House’s most obedient supporters in Congress. Since Trump’s defeat, McCarthy has appeased far-right members of the House, some of whom are close to the former president. McCarthy may need their support to become speaker, a vote that could come as soon as next year if the GOP claims the House in November.

 But in a brief window after the storming of the Capitol, McCarthy contemplated a total break with Trump and his most extreme supporters.

During the same Jan. 10 conversation when he said he would call on Trump to resign, McCarthy told other GOP leaders he wished the big tech companies would strip some Republican lawmakers of their social media accounts, as Twitter and Facebook had done with Trump. Members such as Lauren Boebert of Colorado had done so much to stoke paranoia about the 2020 election and made offensive comments online about the Capitol attack.

 We can’t put up with that,” McCarthy said, adding, “Can’t they take their Twitter accounts away, too?”

McCarthy “never said that particular members should be removed from Twitter,” Bednar said.

Other Republican leaders in the House agreed with McCarthy that the president’s behavior deserved swift punishment. Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the second-ranking House Republican, said on one call that it was time for the GOP to contemplate a “post-Trump Republican House,” while Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the head of the party’s House campaign committee, suggested censuring Trump.

Yet none of the men followed through on their tough talk in those private conversations.

 n the following days, McCarthy heard from some Republican lawmakers who advised against confronting Trump. In one group conversation, Rep. Bill Johnson of Ohio cautioned that conservative voters back home “go ballistic” in response to criticism of Trump, demanding that Republicans instead train their denunciations on Democrats, such as Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden.

“I’m just telling you that that’s the kind of thing that we’re dealing with, with our base,” Johnson said.

 When only 10 House Republicans joined with Democrats to support impeaching Trump on Jan. 13, the message to McCarthy was clear.

By the end of the month, he was pursuing a rapprochement with Trump, visiting him at Mar-a-Lago and posing for a photograph. (“I didn’t know they were going to take a picture,” McCarthy said, somewhat apologetically, to one frustrated lawmaker.)

McCarthy has never repeated his denunciations of Trump, instead offering a tortured claim that the real responsibility for Jan. 6 lies with security officials and Democratic legislative leaders for inadequately defending the Capitol complex.

 In the Senate, McConnell’s reversal was no less revealing. Late on the night of Jan. 6, McConnell predicted to associates that his party would soon break sharply with Trump and his acolytes; the Republican leader even asked a reporter in the Capitol for information about whether the Cabinet might really pursue the 25th Amendment.

When that did not materialize, McConnell’s thoughts turned to impeachment.

On Monday, Jan. 11, McConnell met over lunch in Kentucky with two longtime advisers, Terry Carmack and Scott Jennings. Feasting on Chick-fil-A in Jennings’ Louisville office, the Senate Republican leader predicted Trump’s imminent political demise.

 “The Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us,” McConnell said, referring to the imminent impeachment vote in the House.

Once the House impeached Trump, it would take a two-thirds vote of the Senate to convict him. That would require the votes of all 50 Democrats and at least 17 Republicans in the Senate — a tall order, given that Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2020 had ended with just one Republican senator, Mitt Romney of Utah, voting in favor of conviction.

 But McConnell knew the Senate math as well as anyone and he told his advisers he expected a robust bipartisan vote for conviction. After that, Congress could then bar Trump from ever holding public office again.

The president’s behavior on Jan. 6 had been utterly beyond the pale, McConnell said. “If this isn’t impeachable, I don’t know what is,” he said.

In private, at least, McConnell sounded as if he might be among the Republicans who would vote to convict. Several senior Republicans, including John Thune of South Dakota and Rob Portman of Ohio, told confidants that McConnell was leaning that way.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, privately told the leaders of several liberal advocacy groups that he believed his Republican counterpart was angry enough to go to war with Trump.

“I don’t trust him, and I would not count on it,” Schumer said of McConnell. “But you never know.”

Schumer was right to be skeptical: Once the proceedings against Trump moved from the House to the Senate, McConnell took the measure of Republican senators and concluded that there was little appetite for open battle with a man who remained — much to McConnell’s surprise — the most popular Republican in the country.

 After Trump left office, a new legal argument emerged among Senate Republicans, offering them an escape hatch from a conflict few of them wanted: It was inappropriate to proceed with impeachment against a former president, they said. When Sen. Rand Paul, a fellow Kentuckian, proposed a resolution laying out the argument, McConnell voted in favor of it along with the vast majority of Senate Republicans. He didn’t ascend to power by siding with the minority, he explained to a friend.

In February, McConnell voted to acquit Trump even as seven other Senate Republicans joined with Democrats to muster the largest bipartisan vote ever in favor of conviction in a presidential impeachment trial. Anxious not to be seen as surrendering to Trump, McConnell went to the Senate floor after the vote to deliver a scorching speech against the former president.

 But McConnell went mostly silent about Trump after that point. He avoids reporters’ questions about the former president and only rarely speaks about Jan. 6. In a Fox News interview in late February 2021, McConnell was asked whether he would support Trump in 2024 if the former president again became the GOP nominee for the presidency.

McConnell answered: “Absolutely.”

© 2022 The New York Times Company

 

 

McCarthy's Ukraine claims are too deceitful to be laughable By Ja'han Jones

The Republican Party is waging an all-out assault on history and memory. 

While there’s justifiable worry about the GOP’s attempts to erase factual accounts of history from school textbooks, there’s a parallel effort to gaslight and mystify Americans about recent happenings, as well. The GOP’s attempt to clean its blood-stained hands after effectively backing then-President Donald Trump’s notorious pressure campaign against Ukraine in 2019 is just the latest example of this shameless revisionism.

 House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., appeared on "Fox News Sunday" and performed what can best be described as a stand-up routine disguised as a sympathetic, pro-Ukraine rant as the country fends off Russia’s invasion. 

“This is going to get stronger and rougher, and what really needs to happen is — Ukraine is not asking for American men and women to fight; all they’re asking for is the weapons to defend themselves,” McCarthy said.

 Then he hit us with the punchline: “If we would have taken those actions earlier instead of waiting till after Russia invaded, they probably never would’ve invaded, had we done that sooner.”

The claims would be laughable if they weren't made in such bad faith.

 McCarthy’s comments came days after the Biden administration announced $800 million in additional military aid to help Ukraine fight Russia. In total, the administration has authorized more than $3 billion in military aid for Ukraine, according to USA Today. The Republican's remarks also came without any acknowledgement whatsoever about his role — and his party’s role — in destabilizing Ukraine before Russia’s invasion even began. 

 Trump deciding to withhold military aid from Ukraine shortly before trying to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into digging up dirt on Biden in 2019 signaled to Russia that U.S. politics was fractured on diplomatic issues. Trump deserved to be impeached for that — not just because it was an antidemocratic power grab, but because, as foreign affairs experts have said, his actions gave Russia permission to wage an attack on Ukraine without fear of a coordinated U.S. response.

 McCarthy voted not to impeach Trump over the delayed Ukraine aid, which was eventually released, so his gripe over perceived delays in sending Ukrainians weapons now rings hollow. But this line of attack has become common in the fact-averse Republican Party. Other GOP lawmakers who also opposed Trump’s impeachment — from Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — have issued similar hypocritical statements condemning the Biden administration for so-called delays.

 GOP lawmakers are looking for image rehabilitation here. Their pro-Ukraine act is an attempt to alter the public’s memory, paper over their dear leader’s clear disdain for the country’s independence and distract from the party’s complete lack of credibility.

 

From Trump 2020 to 'Don't Say Gay,' GOP leadership wastes millions of taxpayer dollars Jill Lawrence, USA TODAY

 

Whether you love their goals or hate them, Republicans are wasting your money and mine by constantly filing or provoking lawsuits that are often impossible to win.

From president on down, conservative culture wars, voting wars and election wars are costing untold millions – maybe even billions. And for what? Scoring political points?

Republicans in Texas and 17 other states lost their bid to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory and keep former President Donald Trump in power. He and his allies pursued dozens of baseless voter fraud claims and sought useless audits and reaudits of the secure and legitimate 2020 election.

 State leaders are getting sued for trampling some parents’ rights (such as criminalizing medical care for transgender kids) and giving other parents dictatorial rights (such as what can and can’t be said in the classroom).

Trump dialing down the rhetoric?: LOL! The mountebank of Mar-a-Lago is worse than ever.

They are defending constitutionally suspect limits on protests, racially-biased voting restrictions, harsh abortion laws that ignore Roe v. Wade, and edicts limiting how schools and private companies deal with the coronavirus.

 Don't say 'gay' or 'masks required'

On top of all that, Republicans have triggered an investigation that's "among the most wide-ranging and most complex” ever undertaken by the Justice Department, according to Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. That would be the investigation into Trump supporters' deadly attack on Jan. 6, 2021, on the U.S. Capitol, the first time in American history that presidential power was transferred violently instead of peacefully.

 Black Lives Matter: Grand Rapids police shooting shows why cops should avoid minor traffic stops

And costs keep rising. Last week, authorities nearly doubled the estimate for Capitol repairs from $1.4 million to $2.7 million. And the Justice Department recently requested an extra $34 million in its 2023 budget for “Capitol Prosecutions,” including 80 new attorneys

.Nearly 800 people have been arrested, and hundreds more could still be charged

 Republican-run states are also running up the taxpayer tab. Here are some examples:

►Lawsuits filed by Trump and his state allies trying to overturn the 2020 election. They lost 61 out of 62 cases, but taxpayers in states such as Pennsylvania were still out millions of dollars.

►Audits, or “fraudits,” of vote totals in swing states that went for Biden. Arizona's GOP Senate has spent more than $1 million in taxpayer dollars for the surreal Maricopa County audit, and Maricopa residents had to pay $3.2 million to replace compromised voting machines. Counties in Pennsylvania and New Mexico are still enmeshed in 2020 reviews, and a Wisconsin probe may grow more expensive. Efforts in Georgia and Michigan fizzled, but not before taking up time and money.

 ►Voter restrictions. As of 2016, Texas taxpayers had spent $3.5 million defending the nation’s strictest voter ID law. The law was finally changed in 2017, but more recent restrictions are still being challenged there and elsewhere. The Brennan Center for Justice says it is tracking 71 voting cases, including at least 47 filed last year in 15 states and at least 10 cases in six states so far in 2022

 ►LGBTQ issues. The ACLU and others have sued Texas, Arkansas and Alabama over laws that make it a crime for parents or doctors to help transgender children get medical care. States are also being sued over laws that exclude transgender children from sports teams. Florida was sued three days after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the "Parental Rights in Education" law, also known as “Don’t Say Gay,” curbing what teachers can say about gender identity and sexual orientation.

►COVID-19 bans and mandates. Florida banned most public health responses by schools and businesses. Courts have struck down mask mandates in some states, and they're under challenge in others. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration withdrew its vaccine-or-test requirement for large workplaces after the Supreme Court put it on hold

 Ballpark cost: Tens of millions or more

What is the price tag for all this? We may never know. But here's one indicator: The Associated Press found that, from 2011 to 2017, under two terms of Florida Gov. (now Sen.) Rick Scott, taxpayers had spent $19 million in expenses and fees on lawyers who won their lawsuits against the state (including more than $1 million in a case about whether doctors could discuss gun safety with patients) and $237 million on outside lawyers the state hired to defend itself.

Lawsuits and taxpayer spending on them are continuing apace under DeSantis.

Another sign of litigious times is the frequency of multistate lawsuits coordinated by state attorneys general. There were 76 filed in George W. Bush’s eight years and 78 in Barack Obama’s eight years. But in Trump's single four-year term, there were “at least 156,” according to Ballotpedia, which uses the State Litigation and AG Activity Database to track suits involving multiple states.

 Republicans can't erase diversity or history, but they're trying so hard it hurts

Is this the beginning of the end for Trumpism or the Republican Party?

Democrats obviously get sued (conservative challenges to the Affordable Care Act and environmental regulations come to mind), and they're part of the reason for the hike in Trump-era lawsuits. That’s because Republicans are doing things that I and many others view as illegal, unconstitutional, immoral and dangerous – for individuals and U.S. democracy.

 We shouldn't need an exact calculation to recognize that too many Republicans are wasting too many taxpayer dollars on quests to end abortion, suppress Black voting and history, undermine public health protections, damage families that don’t fit “Father Knows Best” sitcom fantasies, and overturn free and fair elections by any means necessary – even a violent attack on the seat of government.

If you want more of that, put Congress in Republican hands in November.

If these objectives anger or sicken you, or you’d simply prefer your tax dollars to be spent in more constructive ways, you’ll need to get fired up and vote. Because handing power to a party like today’s GOP simply guarantees more endlessly expensive days in court.

Green infrastructure helps cities with climate change. So why isn't there more of it? Lauren Sommer NPR

Federal agencies are beginning to hand out billions of dollars in infrastructure spending, the largest investment ever made in the country's water system. Much of it will go to improving pipes, drains and stormwater systems. But some scientists and urban planners are pushing to fund projects that are better adapted to the changing climate.

Instead of just gray infrastructure, supporters say the answer is green.

Green infrastructure, whether it's large rain gardens or plants along a street median, has the same purpose as big storm sewers: to manage large amounts of water that can build up during heavy rains. Plants and soil absorb and slow runoff from rainstorms, while a stormwater drain captures water that runs down a street gutter and diverts it underground into pipes. 

 On a hotter planet, storms are getting more intense, and rainfall is often heavier. Flooding is on the rise in many cities. Stormwater systems are being increasingly overwhelmed by extreme rainfall. In the Northeast, the heaviest storms produce 55% more rain today compared to 1958. Last year, dozens of people drowned there when the remnants of Hurricane Ida flooded basements, streets and cars. 

 Still, most cities face major backlogs in maintaining the aging gray infrastructure they already have, amounting to billions of dollars nationwide. In the rush to secure federal funding to fill that void, some worry that green infrastructure will be left by the wayside.

"What good is a pristine road that's flooded?" says Marccus Hendricks, assistant professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Maryland. "Elevating the priority of green infrastructure and stormwater systems is critical."

 How rain gardens help stormwater systems in storms

Downtown Oakland, like a lot of major cities, is mostly a hardscape of concrete. Still, on one block, the sidewalk is lined with a long strip of native California plants.

"I feel so great looking at this," says Joshua Bradt, a project manager for the San Francisco Estuary Partnership. "I love that the plants are alive. They seem to be thriving."

Bradt helped bring this rain garden to life, part of a $4 million dollar project to add green infrastructure to a major thoroughfare in the east San Francisco Bay Area. 

 When rain storms hit, the water is funneled into the rain garden from the street and sidewalk. As it soaks into the soil, it prevents that water from rushing to the stormwater drain on the corner.

In big storms, that alleviates the pressure on the stormwater system, since those drains and pipes can only handle so much water at once based on their size. When storm drains are overwhelmed, water pools in the street and can inundate buildings.

Bradt says even small rain gardens can make a difference in slowing the runoff that causes flooding. They also have the added benefit of filtering runoff to improve water quality. 

 

Cities struggle to get green infrastructure built

Green infrastructure can also help when it's not raining. Summer heat waves are often more dangerous in cities, because concrete absorbs and radiates heat in what's known as the "urban heat island" effect. Plants and parks can provide much needed cooling.

"If they were on every corner, it would make a tremendous difference," Bradt says. "The reality is that a lot of city departments are already overwhelmed, and this is a hard ask."

While both gray and green infrastructure require upfront funding for construction, green infrastructure also requires ongoing maintenance to keep the plants healthy and clean up litter. Even if cities can secure funds to build the projects, maintenance generally isn't included. They face adding that to their annual budget, which can turn out to be a hurdle for doing green infrastructure.

 In addition, the most cost-effective time to build green infrastructure projects is when cities are already doing road or construction work. But because the projects are often managed by different departments, coordination doesn't happen.

"It's becoming more standardized and definitely more accepted," Bradt says. "However, I will say there just is not yet a mass movement towards this, because of how institutionalized and siloed infrastructure management and investment is."

 

Bigger storms are already overwhelming cities

Whether cities spend on gray or green infrastructure, a hotter climate is adding huge costs to their budgets.

"Our challenge with climate change is that we're seeing these big events," says Lauren McPhillips, a water engineering professor at Penn State University. "We're seeing massive amounts of water that we need to be able to control."

Across the U.S., millions of miles of pipes and stormwater infrastructure stretch below city streets. Most are decades-old, designed for the storms of last century.

Even today, cities lack updated rainfall data that reflects how storms are getting more intense. That means they're still building new projects without climate change in mind. 

 Federal officials with the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration say the agency hopes to begin the process of creating new rainfall forecasts next year. Still, that information isn't likely to be ready in time for cities to use it for the new wave of federally funded infrastructure projects.

Planning for heavier downpours means building larger stormwater systems, but replacing miles of pipes and upsizing existing infrastructure is far more expensive than cities can afford. Experts say green infrastructure can reduce the need to replace as much gray infrastructure. If rain gardens absorb some of the runoff, stormwater pipes don't need to be as large. 

 That makes green infrastructure potentially more cost-effective. A New York City study looked at using a combination of gray and green infrastructure in one neighborhood in Queens and found that using gray infrastructure alone would be twice as expensive.

Still, a handful of rain gardens won't be enough to prevent flooding, experts warn.

"The challenge is that we need this at scale," McPhillips says. "And especially in these older cities that have built out a lot of hard surface and have gotten rid of the ability for soils to naturally soak in rain, we have a lot to get back to correct for those issues."

Flooding is especially problematic in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, which generally have fewer parks and where the infrastructure is often more neglected 

 "The fact that the majority of communities of color lack sufficient green space compared to their white majority counterparts – that is still a problem," says Fushcia-Ann Hoover, who works on green infrastructure at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "And so I think that green infrastructure does provide a possible solution.

 

As infrastructure spending begins, green projects could be just a "stepchild"

Over the next five years, the Environmental Protection Agency will give states more than $11 billion for water infrastructure projects through the Clean Water State Revolving Fund. In March, the EPA released guidance encouraging those funds be used in disadvantaged communities and that states take climate change into account.

"Most cities think about the green and the gray separately, but really the power is integrating these two things," says Radhika Fox, assistant administrator for the EPA's Office of Water.

Still, under guidance from Congress, only 10 percent of the funding must be spent on green infrastructure or water efficiency projects. The last time the government provided a big infusion of infrastructure funds in 2009 the requirement was for 20 percent of projects to be green. 

 The EPA also emphasized that states have discretion and flexibility to spend the funds as they see fit. The Biden Administration has already gotten pushback from Republicans about encouraging states to consider climate change in spending infrastructure dollars. In February, top Republicans sent a letter encouraging states to ignore similar guidance from the Department of Transportation.

"It does put states in the driver's seat in terms of identifying and working with communities within their borders to find infrastructure projects," Fox says.

The need to repair and upgrade gray infrastructure may take priority over green projects in many communities. In 2020, municipal utilities faced a funding shortfall of $8.5 billion, according to a study from the Water Environment Federation. 

 "Stormwater systems, green infrastructure and other systems that are tied to the climate crisis have been a stepchild to the types of systems we pay attention to," Hendricks says.