In this post I’m going to ask you to contribute to this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive — because the journalism business is brutal at the moment and your contribution is really important to our future. That’s the gist. If that’s enough, awesome: click right here. You have our deep appreciation.
If you’d like to hear a bit more about the why, here goes.
Have you noticed how a week doesn’t seem to go by without another online news outlet closing its doors? The TPM Journalism Fund has been the critical difference that’s saved us from that fate. So it’s really important.
Last year I told you our unique brand of punch-above-our-weight investigative reporting was even more necessary today than in the past. The success of last year’s drive allowed us to make key decisions that resulted in our big Meadows Texts exclusives from last December, our big early stories on George Santos and, just recently, our exclusive about an influential neo-Nazi working as a congressional staffer.
We want to do more of that, and we can. But we need your help.
What makes this year’s drive particularly critical is that we have a large number of one-time expenses coming due in a single year — the bulk of which is tied to retrenchments we made early in the pandemic. Those were key strategic decisions that have put us on a firmer footing for the future. But the costs come due this year.
That’s why we’ve set an ambitious but necessary goal of $500,000 for this year’s drive. If we succeed it will get us through this year on a solid footing and keep us investing in breaking important stories. We want to keep moving forward, not back. But we need your help to do that.
Thank you for reading. If you would like to contribute, here’s the link. Again, you have our deep appreciation and thanks.
No surprise. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is now taking credit for the latest migrant trafficking stunt in which the state of Florida found a group of migrants in Texas and — apparently under false pretenses — drove them from Texas to New Mexico and then put them on a chartered private jet for a flight to Sacramento after which they were dropped off without warning or preparation at a church in the California state capital.
DeSantis is also proposing a kind of red-state bund which would coordinate running its own immigration policy in defiance of federal law and apparently coordinate trafficking schemes to blue states.
Mike Pence has been tip-toeing around actually criticizing Donald Trump ever since his former boss convinced a hoard of his supporters to bust into the United States Capitol and try to overturn the 2020 election, and to call for Pence to be murdered while they were at it.
His 2024 campaign announcement wasn’t all that different.
Two of the co-founders of the ultra-conservative “parental rights” organization Moms For Liberty appeared on Facebook Wednesday to fire back — and solicit donations — after the Southern Poverty Law Center named them an “extremist group” in its annual report.
I want to draw your attention to a few scattered facts about Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which has been telegraphed for months and which may now be beginning in earnest.
As you’ve likely heard, CNN CEO Chris Licht was fired today, not so much because of that headline-grabbing Atlantic article but because of a string of failures and reverses which might have simmered and percolated for a few months longer if a minor-defenestratory masterpiece had not wrapped them together with a bow in a way that was impossible to ignore. Of course, it’s part and parcel of being a big-shot media executive to go out in a blaze of glory, or ignominy, as the case may be. Nothing new there. What stands out is that Licht appears to have essentially zero supporters as he free falls to his end.
The White House put out a memo Tuesday evening warning that Republicans are once again coming after Social Security and Medicare, despite members loud pledges not to during President Biden’s State Of The Union speech this year.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
Meadows Is Making Trump Sweat
As the publisher of The Meadows Texts project, we don’t have to tell you that former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows occupies a unique position in both of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s probes.
He’s a potential target in the Jan. 6 investigation, and he was one of Trump’s representatives to the National Archives, which could be relevant in the Mar-a-Lago probe. Either way, Meadows is a key witness in both investigations.
The NYT first reported yesterday that Meadows has now testified to the grand jury, though it wasn’t clear in which probe. ABC News later reported that Meadows testified in both the Jan. 6 and the MAL probes.
At some level this isn’t surprising. News outlets had pieced together from fragments of public records that a federal judge back in March had ordered Meadows to testify to the grand jury in the Jan. 6 probe, and the DC Circuit affirmed that order in April.
Still, the fact of Meadows testimony in both investigations has to strike fear in Trump World, where Meadows’ recent low profile has raised fears that he’s cooperating with Smith, which would pose a serious threat to Trump.
Meadows attorney George Terwilliger, a real attorney with subject-matter expertise who is a former No. 2 at DOJ, issued the following statement: “Without commenting on whether or not Mr. Meadows has testified before the grand jury or in any other proceeding, Mr. Meadows has maintained a commitment to tell the truth where he has a legal obligation to do so.”
I guess where Meadows is not legally obligated to tell the truth, all bets are off?
What To Look For In A MAL Indictment
Andrew Weissmann and Ryan Goodman offer a checklist for any MAL indictment.
How Many???
A tidbit from the NYT on the DC grand jury investigating the Mar-a-Lago documents case (emphasis mine): “Among those who have appeared before the Washington grand jury in the past few months or have been subpoenaed by it, people familiar with the investigation said, are more than 20 members of Mr. Trump’s Secret Service security detail.”
Trump Aid Spotted At Miami Courthouse
Since news first broke that Special Counsel Jack Smith is running a federal grand jury in south Florida, we’ve had more questions than answers, but now CNN has spotted Trump spox Taylor Budowich going into the federal courthouse in Miami this morning to testify to the grand jury there investigating the MAL case. Budowich had attorney Stanley Woodward in tow.
Florida Confirms It’s Behind Migrant Flights To California
Despite being under the threat of criminal prosecution in Texas for flying migrants to Martha’s Vineyard last year, Florida has admitted it’s behind the new round of migrant flights from Texas to Sacramento. California officials are also threatening criminal investigation for the stunt backed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).
Federal Judge Blocks Florida Ban On Transgender Care For Minors
AP: “A federal judge temporarily blocked portions of a new Florida law championed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis that bans transgender minors from receiving puberty blockers, saying in a Tuesday ruling that gender identity is real and the state has no rational basis for denying patients treatment.”
A Josh Kovensky joint on how the GOP plays the long game on its biggest canards, mistruths, and deceptions – and how that’s coming home to roost now with its current faux scandal of the month. You have to understand how this works to effectively combat it.
Santos Loses Bid To Conceal Donors
A judge ruled that the identities of the donors who co-signed Rep. George Santos’ $500,000 bond must be made public, but he gave Santos a few days to file an appeal first. Santos has heroically claimed he’d rather be detained ahead of trial than cough up the names of the donors.
In which Tucker Carlson says that the first Jewish president of Ukraine is "sweaty and rat like, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of Blackrock." https://t.co/oqCcSvM0I2
This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Climate change is remapping where humans can exist on the planet. As optimum conditions shift away from the equator and toward the poles, more than 600 million people have already been stranded outside of a crucial environmental niche that scientists say best supports life. By late this century, according to a study published last month in the journal Nature Sustainability, 3 to 6 billion people, or between a third and a half of humanity, could be trapped outside of that zone, facing extreme heat, food scarcity and higher death rates, unless emissions are sharply curtailed or mass migration is accommodated.
The research, which adds novel detail about who will be most affected and where, suggests that climate-driven migration could easily eclipse even the largest estimates as enormous segments of the earth’s population seek safe havens. It also makes a moral case for immediate and aggressive policies to prevent such a change from occurring, in part by showing how unequal the distribution of pain will be and how great the improvements could be with even small achievements in slowing the pace of warming.
“There are clear, profound ethical consequences in the numbers,” Timothy Lenton, one of the study’s lead authors and the director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter in the U.K., said in an interview. “If we can’t level with that injustice and be honest about it, then we’ll never progress the international action on this issue.”
The notion of a climate niche is based on work the researchers first published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, which established that for the past 6,000 years humans have gravitated toward a narrow range of temperatures and precipitation levels that supported agriculture and, later, economic growth. That study warned that warming would make those conditions elusive for growing segments of humankind and found that while just 1% of the earth’s surface is now intolerably hot, nearly 20% could by 2070.
The new study reconsiders population growth and policy options and explores scenarios that dramatically increase earlier estimates, demonstrating that the world’s environment has already changed significantly. It focuses more heavily on temperature than precipitation, finding that most people have thrived in mean annual temperatures of 55 degrees Fahrenheit.
Should the world continue on its present pathway — making gestures toward moderate reductions in emissions but not meaningfully reducing global carbon levels (a scenario close to what the United Nations refers to as SSP2-4.5) — the planet will likely surpass the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting average warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and instead warm approximately 2.7 degrees. That pathway, which accounts for population growth in hot places, could lead to 2 billion people falling outside of the climate niche within just the next eight years, and 3.7 billion doing so by 2090. But the study’s authors, who have argued in other papers that the most extreme warming scenarios are well within the realm of possibility, warn that the worst cases should also be considered. With 3.6 degrees of warming and a pessimistic climate scenario that includes ongoing fossil fuel use, resistance to international migration and much more rapid population growth (a scenario referred to by the U.N. as SSP3-7), the shifting climate niche could pose what the authors call “an existential risk,” directly affecting half the projected total population, or, in this case, as many as 6.5 billion people.
The data suggests the world is fast approaching a tipping point, after which even small increases in average global temperature will begin to have dramatic effects. The world has already warmed by about 1.2 degree Celsius, pushing 9% of the earth’s population out of the climate niche. At 1.3 degrees, the study estimates that the pace would pick up considerably, and for every tenth of a degree of additional warming, according to Lenton, 140 million more people will be pushed outside of the niche. “There’s a real nonlinearity lurking in there that we hadn’t seen before,” he said.
Slowing global emissions would dramatically reduce the number of people displaced or grappling with conditions outside the niche. If warming were limited to the 1.5 degrees Celsius targeted by the Paris accords, according to a calculation that isolates the effect of warming, half as many people would be left outside of the optimal zone. The population suffering from extreme heat would be reduced fivefold, from 22% to just 5% of the people on the planet.
Climate research often frames the implications of warming in terms of its economic impacts, couching damages in monetary terms that are sometimes used to suggest that small increases in average temperature can be managed. The study disavows this traditional economic framework, which Lenton says is “unethical” because it prioritizes rich people who are alive today, and instead puts the climate crisis in moral terms. The findings show that climate change will pummel poorer parts of the world disproportionately, effectively sentencing the people who live in developing nations and small island states to extreme temperatures, failing crops, conflict, water and food scarcity, and rising mortality. The final option for many people will be migration. The estimated size of the affected populations, whether they’re 2 billion or 6 billion, suggests an era of global upheaval.
According to the study, India will have, by far, the greatest population outside of the climate niche. At current rates of warming, the researchers estimate that more than 600 million Indians will be affected, six times more than if the Paris targets were achieved. In Nigeria, more than 300 million citizens will be exposed, seven times more than if emissions were steeply cut. Indonesia could see 100 million people fall out of a secure and predictable environment, the Philippines and Pakistan 80 million people each, and so on. Brazil, Australia and India would see the greatest area of land become less habitable. But in many smaller countries, all or nearly all the land would become nearly unlivable by traditional measures: Burkina Faso, Mali, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Niger. Although facing far more modest impacts, even the United States will see its South and Southwest fall toward the hottest end of the niche, leading to higher mortality and driving internal migration northward.
Throughout the world, the researchers estimate, the average person who is going to be exposed to unprecedented heat comes from a place that emitted roughly half the per capita emissions as those in wealthy countries. American per capita emissions are more than twice those of Europeans, who still live a prosperous and modern existence, the authors point out, so there is ample room for comfortable change short of substantial sacrifice. “The idea that you need the level of wasteful consumption … that happens on average in the U.S. to be part of a happy, flourishing, rich, democratic society is obviously nonsense,” Lenton said.
Each American today emits nearly enough emissions over their lifetime to push one Indian or Nigerian of the future outside of their climate niche, the study found, showing exactly how much harm Americans’ individual actions can cause (1.2 Americans to 1 future person, to be exact). The lifestyle and policy implications are obvious: Reducing consumption today reduces the number of people elsewhere who will suffer the consequences tomorrow and can prevent much of the instability that would otherwise result. “I can’t — as a citizen of a planet with this level of risk opening up — not also have some kind of human and moral response to the figures,” Lenton said. We’ve all got to deal with that, he added, “in our own way.”
I was just reading this article in Roll Call and it contained this passage. It’s not at all surprising but still worth stepping back and absorbing for its sheer magnitude.
