LET’S START OFF WITH SOME GOOD ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS FOR ONCE

A couple of bright spots about climate change, coming from the corporate world (of all places).

Firstly, BP anounced last week that they were intending to become a carbon-neutral company by 2050, which given that they are the sixth-largest oil and gas company in the world is fairly significant. They stated at their annual investor event that they believe global oil demand has peaked already and plan to replace their oil revenues with clean electricity from renewable sources - primarily wind and solar.

It isn’t significant enough, to be clear. Achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 is twenty years too late by any reasonable timeline at this point, and BP in particular among oil companies has a history of greenwashing themselves whenever possible to try to avoid political consequences for their actions. But when corporate news like this breaks, it’s best to think of it as an additional accelerant on a slope we need to descend as quickly as possible: the next oil company to announce net carbon neutrality will aim for 2045, perhaps, and then one aiming for 2040, and this all happening as auto manufacturers start chasing truly competitive electric cars (which is already happening)…

Similarly, Wal-Mart’s announcement two days ago that it will reach zero emissions by 2040 (without purchasing offsets, to boot) and its specific subplans of reaching that goal (100% renewable energy powering facilities by 2035, electrifying all vehicles and moving to low-impact refrigerants by 2040) is best thought of as another accelerant, even if - again - their dates aren’t ambitious enough, because their dates will eventually be adjusted by availability and cost. If it gets cheaper to retrofit everything faster, they’lll retrofit faster, and Wal-Mart announcing this means that you suddenly have a lot of push for green technology in areas of the United States where green technology has traditionally not been popular or accessible or both, and that will make other companies green themselves faster as well.

Remember, Wal-Mart isn’t announcing all of this because it’s run by virtuous and good people: after all, the Waltons are selfish horrible bastards. Wal-Mart is doing this because moving to renewable energy will save it a ridiculous amount of money even before any penalty payments are incurred - say, penalty payments inflicted by governments pricing carbon. Penalty payments of those sorts, widely implemented, will only speed up the decarbonization of the corporate world.

As an addendum: later the same day as Wal-Mart’s announcement, PepsiCo announced it’s going to be zero-carbon in its USA operations by 2030 and globally by 2040. There are going to be a lot more of these announcements over the next year, and the scales are going to get more radical as time progresses.

OKAY TIME FOR THE BAD PART

Man, things have really accelerated towards bad in the United States over the past couple weeks, haven’t they?

Setting aside Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death for the moment (don’t worry, I’ll get to it), the past couple of weeks have seen a sharp turn and acceleration towards abuse of executive power. In the past few days alone, Donald Trump’s administration has banned the FDA from signing new rules and has assigned all powers of the FDA and other health agencies to the Secretary of Health and Human Services (Alex Azar, a Trump loyalist), which means the White House now effectively has total control over, for example, vetting and approval for coronavirus vaccines. (Trump has of course promised a vaccine for public use before the election in November.)

Trump’s Justice Department also designated New York City, Portland and Seattle as “anarchist jurisdictions” because those cities have not agreed to allow federal troops to come in and crack protestor heads, and the designation apparently allows the executive to cut off those cities from federal funding for any programs they might benefit from. (Which basically blows big holes in their operating budgets: New York City alone gets $7 billion in federal money every year.) It’s hard to view this as anything other than punishing Democratic-run jurisdictions for failing to cooperate with Trump’s preferred method of dealing with protesters, which almost certainly involves body counts.

And then, yes, there’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, which is awful not just because she was extremely important as both a lawyer and a justice, but because now we get to deal with the likelihood of her being replaced with Amy Coney Barrett, a nigh-pychotic right-winger who utterly refuses to recognize laws as secular, before the election takes place. There has been of course a lot of “how hypocritical” comments from people who were around in 2016, when Republicans demanded to a one that the Proper Thing To Do was to delay the nomination of the Supreme Court justice to replace Antonin Scalia until after the election, but pointing this out is really sort of besides the point because people who operate solely on the basis of power dynamics, rather than principle, don’t give a shit if they’re hypocrites or not. (Which they most certainly are, but only on a surface level given their obviously cynical justifications. They aren’t hypocrites at all if you assume that their only core belief is that they should always be in charge.)

Ginsburg’s death makes it extremely likely, as an aside, that the Affordable Care Act is going to be struck down in the very near future. The Supreme Court is set to hear another one of the almost-entirely baseless objections to the program one week following the election. If Ginsburg isn’t replaced, the numbers mean that the program will most likely be struck down; there are five conservatives on the Court and three liberals, and even if John Roberts crosses sides to vote in favour of the ACA, a tie at the Supreme Court level means that the lower court’s ruling stands, and in this case the lower court ruling is a circuit court decision that strikes down the ACA. And if a sixth conservative justice is nominated, the ACA is almost certainly toast.

In short, all of this means that the only hope of the ACA surviving is that Neil Gorsuch suddenly has a change of heart about the ACA, which is fairly unlikely, and that in turn means that when the ACA is struck, Medicare and Medicaid revert back to their smaller forms and pre-existing condition regulations are struck down so that all health insurance plans revert back to refusing to pay people for their cancer treatment because they got a hangnail or something.

And that’s only the ACA! Wait until that 6-3 Supreme Court gets their hands on abortion rights, or voting rights, or gay rights, or labour rights. It’ll be a new Gilded Age - which is probably why a lot of Democrats, even the usually pretty tepid centrist ones, are suddenly talking about retaliating with Supreme Court expansion if the Republicans actually do this. Which they should absolutely do: Supreme Court reform is vastly overdue anyway.

MI’KMAQ TONIGHT

Right now the current Shittiest Thing Happening To First Nations People In Canada is, surprisingly, not our ongoing failure to provide numerous First Nations bands with clean drinking water, and when that is the case you know it’s pretty goddamn bad.

(A brief memo to non-Canadians who might be reading this: Canadian racism against our indigenous peoples is brutal and longstanding and ongoing and wide-ranging. We are not just a cuddly bunch of people who are terribly polite all the time. We can be our own brand of unspeakably shitty.)

The Mi’kmaq nation (the spelling varies depending on who you ask, incidentally; I’m using the most common one, but depending on who you ask it may well not be the right one) is a group of subtribal groups living in the Atlantic/Maritime provinces of Canada. Because they’re in the Maritimes, that means before white people showed up and made things lots worse for them, a large part of their life and culture revolved around fishing.

The Mi’kmaq’s treaty rights, which they negotiated in the 18th century, include the right to fish for “a moderate livelihood” (per a Supreme Court case from about twenty years ago). The question of what constitutes a “moderate livelihood” is of course one of debate. Mi’kmaq argue that it means “for food, and ceremonies, and to provide a reasonable income.” White people who fish for a living, on the other hand, take issues with the bit where the Mi’kmaq make money from fishing. They especially take issue with the Mi’kmaq being allowed to fish out of the commercial fishing season (which the Mi’kmaq can do because their fishing rights aren’t governed by statute).

In recent weeks, they have been taking issue with the Mi’kmaq on this issue by refusing to sell them fuel and fishing supplies, assaulting Mi’kmaq fishermen, and even attacking their boats and trying to sink them. There’s a whole heap of eliminationist rhetoric on Facebook - because of course there is - and the government agencies that should be stepping in, particularly the RCMP, are doing little or nothing to stop any of this.

Needless to say, the Mi’kmaq are in no way the villains here. Their fishing capacity is tiny compared to commercial fisheries (which, incidentally, break fishing laws and regulations all the time, so let’s not pretend the fisheries in any way have a point). The Mi’kmaq fish little enough that they can practice traditional conservation methods (like throwing back individual egg-bearing live fish). The amount of time they fish outside of the commercial fishing season is only a couple of months at most. And the Mi’kmaq communities that rely most on fishing income are unsurprisingly the poorest Mi’kmaq communities in Canada, precisely because they do not fish that much overall.

This is Goliath whining about David.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

I’ve started playing PLANET COASTER, which is a worthy successor to the rollercoaster park design games of the 1990s and early 2000s. Actually designing a successful rollercoaster is, it turns out, pretty hard to do, but when you get it done it really does give you a major feeling of accomplishment.

See you soon.