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Saturday, July 12 at 10 AM
You are invited to the CCL National call.
The speaker will be Jenn Tyler, VP of Government Affairs, who will share her insights into what we’re lobbying for on Capitol Hill this month, the political context of those asks, and why it makes such a difference that we show up by the hundreds from all over the country.
Please join here.
Then, at 11 AM, join the
Marin and Sonoma CCL chapters here.
We'll continue the discussion of the political context of our lobbying efforts in light of the budget bill just passed by Congress. There will be ample time for all to participate, as we know a lot of folks are, to put it mildly, not happy. We'll also discuss the next item, actions Californians can take to address our high electricity rates to promote emissions reduction.
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Action Alert for Marin CCL Chapter members from Climate Future California:
California's electric rates are nearly twice the national average.
Please take 3 minutes to urge the California legislature to help reduce them. Our online letter campaign is easy, and we would be grateful if you could then notify your networks (friends, family, etc.) Anyone in California can participate.
We are asking our California State legislators, Marin Asm. Damon Connolly and Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, to direct the use of $2.5 billion of cap and trade revenue (funds from polluters) to reduce electric rates for California households. By reducing electric rates, we can accomplish three important goals:
- Address affordability issues for California households, especially lower income families
- Accelerate the electrification of transportation (electric vehicles) and buildings (heat pumps, induction cooking, etc.), essential for meeting CA's climate goals
- Build support for CA's climate policies, including the State's cap and trade program (carbon pricing)
We are aiming for a thousand letters and are hoping that you can help us get there.
Thanks for considering this important action!
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Communist takeover of America?
No, worse, it's the iron fist of a heat dome,
but physics does not negotiate.
NASA Earth Observatory
June 24, 2025
The start to summer 2025 was difficult to ignore for tens of millions of people in the United States. A heat dome brought several days’ worth of scorching daytime temperatures, coupled with high humidity and warm nights, to many central and eastern states. New temperature records were set in Minnesota, Maryland, Vermont, and many places in between.
The U.S. isn't alone in extreme heat. It's happening all over the planet.
See Climate Change and the Escalation of Global Extreme Heat from Climate Central. It's the extremes that count, more than the averages.
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Meanwhile...
Republican War on Science Goes Full Scorched Earth
"Ignorance is Strength." -- George Orwell, 1984
You've seen these graphs:
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(CNN) The Trump administration’s budget shuts down the laboratory atop a peak in Hawaii where scientists have gathered the most conclusive evidence of human-caused climate change since the 1950s.
The Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawaii has measured atmospheric carbon dioxide, which — along with other planet-warming pollution — has led directly to climate change, driving sea level rise, supercharging weather and destroying food systems.
The president’s budget proposal would also defund many other climate labs, including instrument sites comprising the US government’s greenhouse gas monitoring network, which stretches from northern Alaska to the South Pole.
But the Mauna Loa laboratory is the most prominent target of Trump’s climate ire, as measurements that began there in 1958, showing CO2’s steadily upward march as human activities have emitted more and more of the planet-warming gas each year.
The curve produced by the Mauna Loa measurements, one of the most iconic charts in modern science, is known as the Keeling Curve, after Charles David Keeling, the researcher who painstakingly collected the data. His son, Ralph Keeling, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, now oversees collecting and updating that data.
The Trump administration envisions eliminating all climate-related research work at NOAA, as had been proposed in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for overhauling the government.
This Is Not Cool
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THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICAN SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
Dr. Monica Ghandi in conversation with
Dr. Michael Baker, M.D.,
Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (ret)
TUE, JUL 15 / 5:30 PM PDT,
110 The Embarcadero
San Francisco, CA 94105
Dr. Ghandi is professor of medicine and associate chief in the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).
Dr. Michael Baker is a semi-retired general and trauma surgeon who served his country in uniform for 30 years. In his role as a Navy officer, he had experience in operational medicine, combat deployments, medical intelligence, and strategic planning. He retired with the rank of rear admiral.
Research funded by the federal government has been crucial in many of the defining technologies of our time: the internet, A.I., CRISPR, Ozempic, and the mRNA vaccines first used widely in the COVID pandemic, to name but a few.
Between 2010 and 2019, more than 350 drugs were approved in the United States, and virtually all of them could trace their roots to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Now this administration is endangering our health by cutting funds to academic medical centers. Moreover, there are threats to Medicaid, as well as ongoing cuts to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Many universities have paused hiring due to the uncertainty at the NIH and are curtailing graduate programs. Biotech investors are warning of a contraction in medical innovation. NIH grants have been terminated on ideological grounds, which have resulted in clinical trials shutting down. Global health programs worldwide have been cut.
This deserves serious discussion. Come to the live, in-person only event. Video to follow. More info here.
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THE NEW DARK AGE
by Adam Serwer
The Atlantic, May 27, 2025
The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself.
The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.
Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack. Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.
These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.
If you're concerned about the decimation of US science, education and progress, read more here.
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US science is being wrecked, and its leadership is fighting the last war
June 4, 2025
WASHINGTON, DC—The general outline of the Trump administration's proposed 2026 budget was released a few weeks back, and it included massive cuts for most agencies, including every one that funds scientific research. Late last week, those agencies began releasing details of what the cuts would mean for the actual projects and people they support. And the results are as bad as the initial budget had suggested: one-of-a-kind scientific experiment facilities and hardware retired, massive cuts in supported scientists, and entire areas of research halted.
And this comes in an environment where previously funded grants are being terminated, funding is being held up for ideological screening, and universities have been subjected to arbitrary funding freezes. Collectively, things are heading for damage to US science that will take decades to recover from. It's a radical break from the trajectory science had been on.
That's the environment that the US's National Academies of Science found itself in yesterday while hosting the State of the Science event in Washington, DC. It was an obvious opportunity for the nation's leading scientific organization to warn the nation of the consequences of the path that the current administration has been traveling. Instead, the event largely ignored the present to worry about a future that may never exist.
Read about the spineless capitulation of America's leading scientific institution here. You're not going to like it.
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But wait! There's more!
With hurricane season brewing, Pentagon stops sharing satellite weather data
The Defense Department is cutting off weather forecasters from data gathered by its special satellites that can "see" through the clouds, a move experts say could deprive hurricane researchers of key information as hurricane season kicks into gear.
"It's just going to make researchers have to work even harder to get to the results," said Jill Trepanier, a hurricane climatologist and chair of Louisiana State University's department of geography and anthropology.
The "permanent" cutoff puts a stop to the distribution of all data collected by three military-run satellites, according to a notice release June 25 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.
The satellites are equipped with unique tools to peer beneath cloud cover and capture microwave images that forecasters can't get anywhere else. Their infrared sensors capture images over an area of 1,600 nautical miles, beaming down information twice every day.
Unbelievable. Read more at USA Today.
| | Watch this 3 minute message from Dr. James Hansen, the "grandfather of climate change awareness." | | Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed? (Answer: No.) | | |
Worth Repeating:
The Tipping Points of Climate Change — and Where We Stand | Johan Rockström
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Should your climate anxiety level need to be further jolted into the stratosphere, tolerate 18 minutes with this world renowned scientist, who explains why earth scientists are "getting nervous" to say the least.
He demonstrates that climate and other environmental tipping points are already here, that the changes are accelerating, buffering systems are weakening, we are way behind and about to lose control....
But there is still hope that if we act really fast we might be able to stabilize Earth's climate in a habitable zone, a great reason to finally harness the enormous power of the global energy economy by deploying CCL's (and the US economics profession's) proposed carbon fee, dividend and border carbon policy to forcibly apply the brakes on fossil fuel demand -- thus supply and emissions -- before it's too late. It's not the only thing we must do, but it's essential. Focus on demand reduction by raising the price in a way people will tolerate --by governments not keeping the revenue -- rather than focusing on throttling supply, which may be inexhaustible if suppliers are motivated to drill deep enough.
Watch it here
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Do Not Miss This Series!
If you've already seen it, watch it again. You'll then understand how we got into this mess -- Denial, Doubt and Delay -- and what it will take to get us out: Massive popular political pressure supporting robust solutions that this industry and their agents will inevitably oppose.
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You're invited, but...
This is how one behaves inside The Capitol:
Make an appointment. Business attire recommended. Bring nothing that even looks like a weapon.
Long live Democracy.
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Prepared by Peter G. Joseph, M.D.
Peter.Joseph@cclvolunteer.org
Apologies for cross postings.
If you know someone who would like to be added to this distribution list, please suggest they join CCL.
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