Opinion
'Justified' actor Nick Searcy asked us not to call him a 'Teabagger,' 'Ultra-Con,' or 'Bigot' in this headline
This is an actual e-mail sequence that we just had with Nick Searcy, a longtime character actor in Hollywood who is currently playing Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal Art Mullen in Justified. Nick has been in movies (Fried Green Tomatoes, Castaway) and plenty of television series (Easy Money, Seven Days).
We reached out to him once we noticed what a wild Twitter feed Nick has. Below, we've collected some highlights just from the last couple of days, where he calls atheists "pussies" and generally talks like your typical unhinged Internet troll, rather than a Peabody Award-winning actor. But hey, he was endorsed by Rush Limbaugh last year, so he has that going for him.
We thought, since he was so outspoken and rained down invective on people who disagreed with him on Twitter, that Nick might be up for an interview...
RAW: Hey, Nick. I just noticed what a no-holds-barred Twitter feed you have. What a riot. I'd love to do a short piece about you. Got time for a chat?
SEARCY: Frankly, I don't think I trust your website, after looking at it.
RAW: I'm going to put up some of your tweets and let them speak for themselves. I was just curious about what it's like to be an outspoken conservative in Hollywood. It would be great to have your actual response to that.
SEARCY: Are you going to headline it "Teabagger" or "Ultra-con" or "Bigot"?
RAW: How would you describe yourself in your own words?
SEARCY: Not playing. Go back to your hit pieces on Christianity and decent Americans who disagree with you.
Ah well. That's disappointing. We'll let Nick speak for himself in a sampling of his tweets from yesterday and today...
This weekend was rough. I think I took on the entire Juvenile International Atheists Club, one shit-eater at a time. @bitmaelstrom
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014100s of years from now, classes on our Twitter feeds will be taught by leftists, who will call us "fascist."@ChrisLoesch @AdamBaldwin
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014Oh well. I've got the goddamned World Asskissing 20something Atheist Buttbuddy Convention to worry about. @Todd__Kincannon @AdamBaldwin
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014What true gutless anonymous atheist pussy acts this way? Oh that's right, ALL of them. @GodlessTwat
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014I always listen when a shiteating segment in the Human Anonymous Atheist Centipede comments on my eating habits.@Scrivener3 @SunbeamTiger66
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014I am on television, and immensely googleable, you ignorant asshole. Now: WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU, anonymous internet Pussy? @lackingbelief
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014Whenever I need to know more about how to be godly, I ask a shit-eating anonymous atheist ass like @lackingbelief! @SP4RT4N360 @FanOLiberty
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014Do you often type "lol" after shit you type that no one on Earth would find funny? That's why I'm rich and your life sucks! @Ravens_Claws
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014Talked to @FXNetworks_PR today about coming events & they said, "You get more tweets than anyone. Congrats!" @monsterhunter45 @GodlessTwat
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014There is nothing like being coached in godliness by a chickenshit anonymous atheist twitter pussy who doesn't believe in God! @DeepSearch17
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014Wow, that sounds so profound. I'll bet a fat chick would really swoon if you said something like that to her. @Brimshack @DeepSearch17
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014I can't, @Atheistican, because the audience,writers,&critics all love me, &they send me big fucking checks. @efilnikcufecin7 @lackingbelief
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014You should see my house, no-lister. You would shit your envious anonymous athiest leftist pussy panties and cry. @CoolsomeXD @Atheistican
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014I go to the gun range, boxing class, spin class, &Anonymous Leftist Twitter Douchebag Slapping Class for my therapy, whiner. @RobbieGorlick
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 17, 2014By the way, How many Gutless anonymous Polish internet pussies does it take to screw in a light bulb? @UltraAtheistPL @SecularSurfer
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014Actually, it is seriously, I believe, what they long for. They want to be slaves to an Almighty State. They crave asskissing. @Khornishman
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014It is not split. It is dead. A @GOP that does not full-throatedly embrace a conservative like @SenTedCruz is simply useless. @jimpook @GOP
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014ROMNEY DID NOT WIN BECAUSE HE WOULD NOT FIGHT. @jimpook @GOP @SenTedCruz
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014Let's not relive this debacle. But let's REFUSE to let the @GOP force us to accept a losing moderate in 2016. @jimpook @salpie @SAMROD2935
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014Call me a racist again! My adopted son of a different race finds that hilarious! @UltraAtheistPL @SecularSurfer
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014That's why we are shooting season 5 and guaranteed season six, LOSER. @4wardHaze @Curt_Ames @AJam3013
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014You can always tell who the liberal is. He's the one making "gay" jokes while he calls you a racist. @FraksMe @thom_roland @Curt_Ames
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014Don't need your support, fat ass! Season 6 guaranteed! YOU SHOULD SEE MY HOUSE! @Curt_Ames @pray_for_life @Markooo70 @SecuLawyer
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014That's because ignorant fat asses like you are not worth arguing with. And you're an easy target, you know, because you'e WIDE. @Curt_Ames
— Yes, Nick Searcy! (@yesnicksearcy) February 18, 2014And here's a fun thing Nick did about working out. He's a card.
How to tell a Mexican from a Muslim: A guide for the panicky American
When we saw that the good people of Pocatello, Idaho were panicked about the prospect of a Mexican diner being turned into a local Islamic center, we knew we had to come to their aid.
“I get very fearful, because I live close to this place,” said a local resident with the unfortunate name of Rev. Jim Jones, when the people of Pocatello were given the chance to speak up.
We understand the good reverend's worry. How, for example, are the white folks of Pocatello -- who make up 90 percent of the town -- going to tell the long-suffering Mexicans among them from the new arrivals, the Muslims of various Middle East nations who are settling American towns and want places to gather like a local Islamic center?
We turned to our old friend Gustavo Arellano, editor of OC Weekly and author of the long-running column, "Ask a Mexican," to help us out.
And the first thing he pointed out is that the pale folks of potato country are going to have a very, very difficult time.
"I think it's almost impossible. The old joke is that Saddam Hussein was everybody's tío, because all of our uncles looked like Saddam. The mustache, the bushy hair. He could have been your Tío Gabriel or Tío Jesus," Gustavo told us in a telephone conversation.
It turns out there are many similarities that make it tough to decide, on sight, if a person is from Guanajuato or Riyadh.
"The hijab? My grandmother never went out of her house without a veil. That's what women used to do. Look at the Virgin Mary -- I don't think I've ever seen her hair in my life," Gustavo points out.
"And did you know 'Guadalupe' is not a Spanish word? It's mixed from Arabic and Latin. Virgen de Guadalupe literally means 'Virgin of the Wolf River.' And have you noticed that she's standing on a crescent? That's a big symbol for Islam," he adds. "Oh yeah. We're brothers from another madre, absolutely."
Even the most obvious differences seem to disappear when you look closer, Gustavo points out. "We have pork via al pastor, and they have lamb and beef via shawarma, even though it's the exact same meal."
But if Mexicans and Muslims have a lot of things in common, Americans do think of them differently.
"Americans have at least made their peace with Mexicans. They know we're taking over. But I think the only thing Americans have accepted from Muslims is hummus," he says. "Other than that we're indistinguishable. We both remain America's biggest threats."
So if Idahoans are going to have a tough time deciding if the person they meet on the street is from, say, Jordan, or from Culiacán, we asked Gustavo if there was a simple question they could ask to quickly tell the difference.
"They should ask, 'Will you eat refried beans?' Muslims won't eat it because it has lard, from pork," Gustavo answered.
That is golden. It should work every time. So, good folks of Pocatello, calm your fears, and be ready to ask your neighbors if they eat refried beans. Because there's nothing like peace of mind.
[Image: Logo for Gustavo Arellano's OC Weekly column, "Ask a Mexican."]
Is it time to join the Preppers? How to survive the climate-change apocalypse
We are getting close to what might be called The Noah Scenario. Last month was the wettest January in Britain since records began in 1767. So far this month has been no different, and the Met Office expects the wind and rain to continue until March. Climate change may be a gradual process, but people who live on the Somerset Levels or the banks of the Thames are getting a very sudden education in the value of arks.
It's unlikely that these floods will be the last such catastrophe, or the worst. Climate scientists expect bigger and more frequent extreme weather events throughout the coming century – not just wind and rain, but droughts as well. Nor is weather the only danger: pandemic flu, nuclear weapons, antibiotic resistance, environmental catastrophe and chronic food shortages could also offer dire threats to civilisation as we know it. You might not want to panic just yet, but you might decide that it is time to join the "preppers" – people who are secretly preparing to abandon modern life when the apocalypse, in whatever form, does arrive.
When do I abandon my home?
When you have no choice. When soldiers are on your street, your neighbours have begun to steal from you and plague-sufferers are camped in your drive – or perhaps slightly before all that. Preppers have a catch-all term for this moment: the SHTF scenario, in reference to the day when the Shit finally does Hit The Fan.
"It would be the last resort for me," says Steve, a 57-year-old prepper from Essex, who runs ukpreppersguide.co.uk. "Some people seem to think it's the first thing to do. The moment something happens, they grab their rucksack and off they go and live in the wild – but if you've ever tried that, it really isn't easy. Where I am at the moment, I probably have enough provisions to survive for about nine months. That doesn't include going out and getting your own food."
When the moment comes, however, you may not have much warning, so it is important to keep what preppers call a "bug-out bag" ready at all times. Ideally, you'd leave at night, when you won't be followed. "The idea behind leaving your home is to get away from danger," Steve explains, "which means getting away from everybody and going under the radar, off-grid, so you can't be found – then just survive for however long is needed before you can come back to civilisation."
Should I move to Cumbria?
If you're worried about rain, Suffolk is Britain's driest county. But there you'll have to worry about the sea instead. Next driest is Bedfordshire, although it is also quite an expensive place to buy a house, while society still functions, so Nottinghamshire or Northamptonshire might be better if you're surviving on a budget. Be sure to have plenty of water butts in any of these places.
Alternatively, it might be simpler to live somewhere wet, but higher up. Each outbreak of catastrophic flooding brings with it a quieter outbreak of people feeling smug on hills, which never flood, and offer a good defensive position should you come under attack from hordes of wet, hungry or diseased people. Cumbria, Wales and the Western Highlands are some of the wettest parts of the UK. They are also very hilly, not too expensive, and reasonably remote from population centres, which makes them perfect for your purposes.
A quick word on the windiness of hills. This can be a good thing, allowing you to generate your own electricity if you put up a turbine. If you are worried about storm damage, however, then you will want to give thought to exactly where your house should be. "Our prevailing weather comes from the west," explains Nicola Maxey from the Met Office, "so if you're on the east side of a hill you're going to be protected from the prevailing winds." Thus located, with several months of food, electricity and water-purification supplies, your house should be a good place to wait for calamity to pass.
What should I take?
This is the most-discussed question of all among preppers, and you'll find many packing lists for bug-out bags online. Water, fire and light, hunting and survival tools, food and cooking equipment, medical supplies, maps, communications, clothing, shelter, weaponry, miscellaneous useful items and the bag itself are the major categories for consideration, which should give you an idea of how much you have to buy, pack and think about. As always, the trade-off is between having all the equipment you need and being able to carry it. If you're going alone, that makes things harder, although a group is harder to feed.
"Any bug-out bag should be equipped with at least seven days' food in the form of MREs – that's dehydrated Meals Ready to Eat," says Steve. "It's a bit like Pot Noodles, but on a more advanced level. It's very easy to take a week's supply. But along with that you're going to need methods to trap and snare animals, and potentially to shoot them. We're not allowed many firearms in this country, but even a basic catapult will help."
You'll also have to consider secrecy, which, after all, is the whole point of the exercise. For instance, you should avoid lighting fires to cook your food because they will make you visible. Instead, you are better off taking a small alcohol stove. When it comes to what you'll live in, caves are good. The trouble is there aren't enough of them, so you'll need to bring a tent, and learn to camouflage it. Over time you may want to build a larger and more comfortable shelter around that, although it is also an advantage to stay mobile.
The luxury option would be to to buy one of the many decommissioned bomb shelters or observation posts that come on to the market from time to time, or perhaps just your own bit of tunnel. Some, such as the Dartmoor observation post that sold for £17,400 in September 2012, are little more than a buried cupboard. Others, such as the Burlington Bunker in Wiltshire, are vast complexes capable of housing several thousand people. That went on sale in 2005, and was probably out of your price range. Having bought a bunker, it will of course need to be stocked up with several months' supplies, and perhaps its own bug-out bag in case you have to leave. Don't forget some boardgames and a psychiatrist.
Will I have to live in the woods?
Think carefully about where to go, and give yourself several options. You'll need a piece of land – perhaps only a few acres – where you can hide and find enough to eat and drink. In the UK, it is difficult to hide in open country, so woodland is good. "Anywhere that's secluded, that's probably the key to survival," Steve says. "Get as far away from people as possible, and stay there. Don't make yourself known. I've got two areas I go to that are less than five acres. Two forests absolutely full of wildlife, with a stream running along. If you can get near a river, you can fish."
Another thing to bear in mind is the time of year. In the winter, food may well be scarce and water more abundant; in the summer, the reverse, so you may want to prepare an option for each season. You also need to consider how you'll get there. One location may be perfect, but if you're relying on petrol and roads, in the SHTF scenario it may be inaccessible. Give yourself at least one location you can walk to.
As practice for keeping themselves hidden, or just for the buzz, some people engage in an activity called "stealth camping". Essentially this means sneaking into places they are not allowed to be, staying the night and leaving again without ever being detected. If you've bought your own bunker, obviously you don't need to bother with this. Just make sure the hatch is strong, and that you can get there.
Could I disembowel a rabbit?
Getting the equipment and supplies is one thing, but being ready to use them is another. Steve regularly visits his planned bugging-out locations without any food or water, and practises living off the land for several days. "It really is surprising what a culture shock it is to go away for a week with nothing," he says. "It's not a jolly. A lot of people are armchair preppers. They'll get the equipment and they'll read the book, but they won't go out and practise. But that really is the key to being prepared – making sure you can do what you think you can do."
Can you, for instance, shoot a rabbit, skin it, field-dress (ie disembowel) it, and cook it, perhaps in the rain, with just a pocket knife? Can you set traps for fish? Do you even know what wildlife is in your chosen area, which offers the most meat, and which is easiest to catch? Do you know how to tell whether or not water is safe to drink? If you make yourself ill by doing any of these things wrongly, are you medically skilled enough to treat yourself? Can you mend your clothes, or your radio, or your tent? Most of these skills are not difficult to master, they just need "practice, practice, practice", according to Steve.
Should I take my family (and could I eat them)?
This is tricky, because even starting the conversation is a point of no return. "One of the key elements is not telling anyone that you're a prepper," Steve says, which is why he won't share his surname. "If every man and his dog knew, and then if there was a disaster, they'd all just say: 'Don't worry. We'll go round there. Steve's got it all.'"
On the other hand, survival is much easier in a group. You can carry more, and do more. What's important, however, is that everybody shares your vision and is equally dedicated, so the team does not disintegrate. "You don't want any hangers-on," says Steve. "Someone who is skilled medically is a big plus. Someone who's mechanically minded, someone who can cook and hunt and fish – several people with different skills is ideal."
So who can you trust? If you can trust your family, take them, but perhaps make a contingency plan for which one you'll all eat first, and discuss it in secret with the others. (You might also make another plan about who'll be eaten second, and discuss this with whoever's left. If no one discusses eating anyone with you, distrust them all.) If your family includes any young children you are not prepared to eat then your chances of success are more or less zero, but you're probably accustomed to that feeling.
Remember that shared planning as a group also means shared practice. Each person should focus on their special skills, but make sure that everybody is on top of the basics. "I drag my wife with me sometimes," Steve says. "She doesn't necessarily like it, but off we go. She doesn't mind eating a nice bit of fresh rabbit, but she certainly doesn't like the idea of skinning it or anything like that."
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
['Burning Globe Earth (West Hemisphere)' on Shutterstock]
How fear beat the UAW in Tennessee
On Friday, a three-day election process ended when Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tenn., voted against joining the United Auto Workers (UAW) 712 to 626. Coming into the vote, both sides knew what was at stake — the union drive was a direct threat…
Shia LaBeouf's #IAMSORRY exhibit shows he's the ultimate Internet and media troll
LaBeouf has gone from plagiariser to 'performance artist' in a matter of weeks. He's an ultimate internet and media troll
Harvard Business School should do a case study on Shia LaBeouf. He's gone from plagiariser to credible artist in a matter of weeks. The former child actor for Disney has more credibility now than in his decade-plus TV and bad action film career, and it's all thanks to his trolling spree involving the media, the internet, the entertainment industry, and now, the art world.
LaBeouf is is in the midst of a widely publicized #IAMSORRY exhibit in Los Angeles through Sunday. Wearing a paperbag on your head has never seemed so clever.
The press fascination began in December after it became known LaBeouf plagiarized a well-known graphic novel word for word and scene for scene in his directorial debut. But instead of disappearing in shame, he upped his bizarre antics – continued plagiarizing, weird tweets, skywriting, and now, paper-bag wearing act. Whether or not you buy his latest argument that this is all just "performance art", it's a winning strategy. Coverage from the likes of The Los Angeles Times and Time magazine has shifted the conversation from vilifying him for his serial plagiarism to "look at how eccentric he is!" and "Is he having a breakdown?" He's even being compared to award-winning actor Joaquin Phoenix.
It should come as a surprise to no one that his latest effort, #IAMSORRY, is not a complete LaBeouf original. It resembles Marina Abramovic's infamous 2010 MoMa exhibit "The Artist is Present". Unlike the plagiarized film HowardCantour.com, however, #IAMSORRY is more inspired than a direct copy. There are enough differences between the two that Abramovic didn't think they're related (she did call the whole #IAMSORRY spectacle "manipulative" when asked about it).
LaBeouf's version of "The Artist is Present" has him wearing tuxedo and a paper bag over his head and crying continuously in front of a single gallery-goer without making a sound. Before entering the exhibition, the viewer is allowed to pick an object significant to LaBeouf's life from a table – examples include a Transformers figure, a whip, a bowl of angry tweets directed at LaBeouf – to bring into their meeting with the actor. Lines to get into #IAMSORRY have wrapped around the block all week, with some gleefully waiting to berate the actor.
If #IAMSORRY's success is based purely on press and attendance, it's already hit that benchmark. More importantly, the performative piece itself is actually credible as a piece of art. The continued controversy surrounding LaBeouf provides a relevance and context for the show, and there's a real interactive element, with some journalists and fans literally touching LaBeouf by holding his hand as he cries or reacts. Some admit to crying with him.
As art, #IAMSORRY poses interesting questions on the nature of celebrity and what it means to be an actor. Is LaBeouf actually listening to what gallery guests have to say? Is he sincere in his crying, or is he just acting? (In one video of LaBeouf being yelled it, it looks like he is wearing beige ear plugs.) That important question didn't stop actor Keegan Allen from calling #IAMSORRY "a beautiful piece of self-reflection" on his Instagram and urging his 1.2m Twitter followers to go see it.
At its most basic, art asks the viewer to feel, which #IAMSORRY fulfills by eliciting strong emotions from those in attendance. Andrew Romano at The Daily Beast wrote about his experience alone with LaBeouf after going in a second time:
In the moment after I took that picture, I actually felt something real. Something strange and complex. Something like sympathy ... there was more going on in those few seconds than in a lot of contemporary art. LaBeouf's look-at-me internet penance ritual had become an actual moment between actual people.
A British journalist working for the Independent also went in twice because, according to New York Magazine's Vulture, he didn't think he "did it right the first time". As for the Vulture writer, he describes the experience as "surreal" and found his voice was "so tremulous" immediately after leaving LaBeouf's presence. Kate Knibbs at the Daily Dot found #IAMSORRY "genuinely disturbing", and "felt like I was further dehumanizing someone whose humanity I'd discounted". Of the long line of people waiting to get inside, Knibbs writes, "we were torturers, waiting patiently to emotionally poke a troubled man".
LaBeouf's debut art exhibit has even been parodied by another former child actor Jerry O'Connell. In this digital remix age, being parodied is an important requirement to labeling anything viral or famous, especially anything one wants to deem art. By parodying #IAMSORRY, O'Connell has further legitimized it as a work of art, and by getting in on the media frenzy, O'Connell ensures the continued publicity of the original. As O'Connell told Buzzfeed:
Everyone's talking about it, whether you want to call it art or a real apology, it's hilarious.
The real connections people think they are having with LaBeouf inside #IAMSORRY might very well be fake, but that doesn't matter because as an art piece it is working: people are actually discussing the exhibit as a bonafide work of art., which is more than you can say about pretty much everything else LaBeouf has done to date.
So kudos, Shia, you can stop wishing on a star now.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
The Old Testament's made-up camels are a problem for Zionism
There are 21 references to camels in the first books of the Bible, and now we know they are all made up.
Some of them are quite startlingly verisimilitudinous, such as the story of Abraham's servant finding a wife for Isaac in Genesis 24: "Then the servant left, taking with him 10 of his master's camels loaded with all kinds of good things from his master. He set out for Aram Naharaim and made his way to the town of Nahor. He made the camels kneel down near the well outside the town; it was towards evening, the time the women go out to draw water."
But these camels are made up, all 10 of them. Two Israeli archaeozoologists have sifted through a site just north of modern Eilat looking for camel bones, which can be dated by radio carbon.
None of the domesticated camel bones they found date from earlier than around 930BC – about 1,500 years after the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis are supposed to have taken place. Whoever put the camels into the story of Abraham and Isaac might as well have improved the story of Little Red Riding Hood by having her ride up to Granny's in an SUV.
How can you tell whether a camel skeleton is from a wild or tamed animal? You look at the leg bones, and if they are thickened this shows they have been carrying unnaturally heavy loads, so they must have been domesticated. If you have a graveyard of camels, you can also see what proportion are males, and which are preferred for human uses because they can carry more.
All these considerations make it clear that camels were not domesticated anywhere in the region before 1000BC.
Lidar Sapir-Hen and Erez Ben-Yosef, the scientists who carried out the research, point out that the domestication of camels was hugely important economically, because they made trade possible over much larger regions of the Arabian peninsula. But that is not what has provoked excitement about their claim.
Obviously it has upset fundamentalists. Everyone else has known for decades that there is even less evidence for the historical truth of the Old Testament than there is for that of the Qur'an. But the peculiarly mealy-mouthed nature of the quotes they gave the New York Times (which is not much concerned with the feelings of Christian fundamentalists) shows where the real problem is.
The history recounted in the Bible is a huge part of the mythology of modern Zionism. The idea of a promised land is based on narratives that assert with complete confidence stories that never actually happened. There are of course other ways to argue for the Zionist project, and still further arguments about the right of Israelis to live within secure boundaries now that the country exists. But although those stand logically independent of the histories invented – as far as we can tell – in Babylonian captivity during the sixth century BC, they make little emotional sense without the history. And it is emotions that drive politics.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
[Smiling camel looking in lens on Shutterstock]
The 'pause' in global warming is not even a thing
All signs point to an acceleration of human-caused climate change. So why all this talk of a pause?
The idea that global warming has "paused" or is currently chillaxing in a comfy chair with the words "hiatus" written on it has been getting a good run in the media of late.
Much of this is down to a new study analysing why one single measure of climate change – the temperatures on the surface averaged out across the entire globe – might not have been rising quite so quickly as some thought they might.
But here's the thing.
There never was a "pause" in global warming or climate change. For practical purposes, the so-called "pause" in global warming is not even a thing.
The study in question was led by Professor Matt England at the University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre.
England's study found that climate models had not been geared to account for the current two decade-long period of strong trade winds in the Pacific.
Once the researchers added this missing windy ingredient to the climate models, the surface temperatures predicted by the models more closely matched the observations – that is, the actual temperature measurements that have been taken around the globe. England explains the study in this YouTube video.
England told me:
Global warming has not stopped. People should understand that the planet is a closed system. As we increase our emissions of greenhouse gases, the fundamental thermal dynamics tells us we have added heat into the system. Once it's trapped, it can go to a myriad of places – land surface, oceans, ice shelves, ice sheets, glaciers for example.
England explained how the winds help the ocean to absorb heat into the thermocline – that's roughly the area between 100 metres and 300 metres deep. He says once the trade winds drop – which is likely to come within years rather than decades – then the averaged surface temperatures will rise sharply again.
Media outlets across the world have extensively covered England's paper. National Geographic told us the study revealed how the heat had been "hiding" in the oceans.
Over at the ABC, we were told the paper gave an explanation for "a pause in global warming" and that "over the past 15 years the rate of global warming has slowed - and more recently almost stalled."
On The Conversation, we had "Global warming stalled by strong winds driving heat into oceans".
Even though these reports spoke in detail about the complexity of the research (England feels the coverage generally has been very good), they could inadvertently cement the idea that global warming has in some way stopped, when it hasn't.
But this is almost unavoidable. You can hardly blame journalists and commentators for repeating the phrase that "global warming is in a hiatus" when the offending word is in the title of the scientific paper itself (Recent intensification of wind-driven circulation in the Pacific and the ongoing warming hiatus).
Andrew Bolt, News Corporation Australia's in-house climate science mangler, could not hide his excitement that Professor England apparently now "admits" that global warming has stopped.
Yet when it's all put into context, practically all the signs show the impacts of human-caused climate change are trending dramatically in the wrong direction – just as they have been for several decades.
Sea Level Rise
When the salty water of the oceans heats up, it expands, pushing sea level higher. If ice that's attached to land – such as the two major ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica – melt, they also add to the water in the ocean, further pushing up sea levels. Melting glaciers also add to sea level rise.
So what's been happening while global warming was apparently having a holiday?
Here's a chart from Australia's CSIRO science agency showing sea level rise in recent decades. The drop you can see around 2011 was actually down to water being temporarily stored on the Australian land mass following the major flooding and rainfall event that year.
Melting cryosphere
The cryosphere – the Earth's icey areas – obviously don't think much of the notion that global warming might have stopped.
A study last year in the journal Science looked at glaciers in all regions of the world. The study found that the world's glaciers were melting at a rate of 259 billion tonnes a year between 2003 and 2009.
What about the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, which together hold about 99 per cent of the world's fresh water?
Between 1992 and 2001, ice was melting from the two main ice sheets at a rate of about 64 billion tonnes a year, according to the latest IPCC assessment of the science.
From 2002 to 2011, the ice sheets were melting at a rate of about 362 billion tonnes a year – an almost six-fold increase. What was that about a pause in global warming?
Climate change impacts
People suffering in extreme heatwaves, droughts and flooding, I would argue, don't stand there muttering: "At least the average global temperature on the earth's surface is 0.2C less than some climate models thought it would be."
During this lovely comfortable hiatus when we're told by some that global warming has stopped and so we can all stop being such worry pots, what else has been going on?
Australia has experienced its hottest year on record after the most widespread heat wave on record. The risk of bushfires is on the rise.
The UK is experiencing extreme flooding – again.
Even if we do want to look at globally averaged temperatures, the "hiatus" has given the world its hottest decade since records began in 1850.
We could go on and on.
Not so much a "pause" as a "fast forward"
A decade ago, the world was talking about limiting the rise in global temperatures to 2C to avoid dangerous impacts from climate change.
Now, during a time when we are supposed to have been in a "hiatus", almost nobody thinks that guardrail is achievable.
Now, the talk is of 3C or 4C or higher.
Temperatures on the surface - measured by thermometers and then averaged out across the world - is not the problem defence agencies around the world fear could destabilise entire regions.
So what really caused the pause in global warming? I think there might be four possibilities.
1. Was it headline writers and journalists who, out of necessity, sometimes need to strip nuance and context from their stories?
2. Was it climate science deniers who repeated the "no global warming" mantra so often it started to infect even the rational people?
3. Was it the internet?
4. Was it a crack squad of fairies who secretly changed the laws of physics so the earth doesn't warm after you have pumped 1,407 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution?
Nah! While some thought climate change was on "pause" the reality is that the world's big fat fingers have been stuck on the fast-forward button.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
Slavery: just a 'regrettably inevitable' aspect of business?
Politicians have been hesitant to tackle the issue for fear of upsetting business. What will it take for business leaders themselves to play a more central role in addressing slavery?
I recently saw a talk given by Charmian Gooch of Global Witness in which she noted the difficulties campaigners faced in the 1990s working for transparency in the oil industry's financial transactions. In 1997 a demand for such accountability was regarded as hopelessly naive. And yet by 2013 two-thirds of the oil industry is covered by such financial transparency.
Anti-Slavery International has often been accused of similar naivety, particularly in our demands that the world seek new ways of doing business, ways that regard the use of forced labour and child slavery as totally unacceptable rather than regrettably unavoidable.
Modern-day slavery isn't distant to us, we are all implicated, whether we want to be or not. We all carry mobile phones which contain the element coltan. Coltan is only available from mines in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) rife with slavery and child labour. The clothes on our backs are similarly polluted. The cotton harvest in Uzbekistan, which feeds the production of many garment manufacturers is brought in each year by the forced labour of children. The mills that spin such cotton into thread in southern India are often run on the enslavement of girls and young women.
The situation is equally bad in the factories of Delhi in north India where children are routinely employed to do embroidery work. Police often raid such factories, not to resuce the children though, but rather to extract bribes from the owners.
The manslaughter, enslavement and torture of vulnerable workers in the global south, many of them children, to produce goods for the high streets of the global north is a result of business' ceaseless search for cheap production, scarce commodities or both.
Companies do social auditing of supply chains, but this is often a dubious practice. It has not led to any noticeable improvements. At best the approach is a blunt tool with only a relatively small number of inspections signalled early enough to the factories, leaving time forabuses can be covered up or temporarily discontinued until the audit is passed. At worst the approach can be corrupted with auditors filing reports of clean bills of health on factories in which abuses are commonplace. In too frequent instances the woeful and tragic inadequacy of ethical auditing has been exposed by lethal fires in factories that had been given clean bills of ethical health.
200 years ago, business played a central role in the movement to end the trans-Atlantic slave trade, sometimes acting against what was perceived to be in Britain's best economic interests because it couldn't stomach the atrocities visited on other human beings to derive those economic advantages.
In the face of the contemporary globalising systems of slavery most politicians seem caught like deer in headlights, terrified of doing anything meaningful to tackle the issue for fear of upsetting business. The political world seems averse to the idea that the state should regulate business. Today it seems rather that politicians believe that business should tell them how they should be regulated. The failure of business leaders, with a few honourable exceptions, to advocate for measures that might actually cause reductions in forced labour feeds this craven political inertia.
And so one of the most vital questions of the struggle against slavery is: what will it take for business to take a more central role in ending these violations?
Many continue to believe the myth that slavery is a thing of the past. There seems to be an increased acceptance by many of slavery and child labour practices as some regrettably inevitable aspect of international business in a globalising economy.
We have proposed businesses to adopt a proactive approach in supply chains, seeking to identify slavery and put in place the measures to end it, rather than waiting for some third party to act on abuses. This approach has been adopted by some in the cocoa sector including the US company Mondelez with its newly published child labour policy.
We have proposed government establish extra-territorial legislation to clarify business responsibilities for their supply chains and be plain about what they will be held accountable for. This would be in keeping with the philosophy behind the UK Bribery Act, which provides extra-territorial legislation to tackle a problem that is also systemic, international in scope and which individual voluntary initiatives are unlikely to be sufficient to the challenge.
However it currently seems that even more modest proposals such as compulsory reporting on the risks of slavery in supply chains may be opposed by many international business leaders, chagrined at the prospect of additional regulation.
The routine use of slavery in many of the supply chains that supply our high streets implicates us all in the crime of slavery. This will remain the case until leaders from business and politics refuse to tolerate this situation any further and regulate and legislate against it in the face of whatever opposition vested interests might pose.
Aidan McQuade is the director of Anti-Slavery International. Follow @the_mcquade on Twitter. Aidan will be speaking at the Guardian's Global Supply Chains Summit on the 11 April 2014. The event aims to encourage understanding and engagement by business and investors with forced labour and trafficking in supply chains. Apply to attend here.
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Philip Seymour Hoffman is another victim of extremely stupid drug laws
Philip Seymour Hoffman's death was not on the bill.
If it'd been the sacrifice of Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber, that we are invited to anticipate daily, we could delight in the Faustian justice of the righteous dispatch of a fast-living, sequin-spattered denizen of eMpTyV. We are tacitly instructed to await their demise with necrophilic sanctimony. When the end comes, they screech on Fox and TMZ, it will be deserved. The Mail provokes indignation, luridly baiting us with the sidebar that scrolls from the headline down to hell.
But Philip Seymour Hoffman? A middle-aged man, a credible and decorated actor, the industrious and unglamorous artisan of Broadway and serious cinema? The disease of addiction recognises none of these distinctions. Whilst routinely described as tragic, Hoffman's death is insufficiently sad to be left un-supplemented in the mandatory posthumous scramble for salacious garnish; we will now be subjected to mourn-ography posing as analysis. I can assure you that there is no as yet undiscovered riddle in his domestic life or sex life, the man was a drug addict and his death inevitable.
A troubling component of this sad loss is the complete absence of hedonism. Like a lot of drug addicts, probably most, who "go over", Hoffman was alone when he died. This is an inescapably bleak circumstance. When we reflect on Bieber's Louis Vuitton embossed, Lamborghini cortege it is easy to equate addiction with indulgence and immorality. The great actor dying alone denies us this required narrative prang.
The reason I am so non-judgmental of Hoffman or Bieber and so condemnatory of the pop cultural tinsel that adorns the reporting around them is that I am a drug addict in recovery, so like any drug addict I know exactly how Hoffman felt when he "went back out". In spite of his life seeming superficially great, in spite of all the praise and accolades, in spite of all the loving friends and family, there is a predominant voice in the mind of an addict that supersedes all reason and that voice wants you dead. This voice is the unrelenting echo of an unfulfillable void.
Addiction is a mental illness around which there is a great deal of confusion, which is hugely exacerbated by the laws that criminalise drug addicts.
If drugs are illegal people who use drugs are criminals. We have set our moral compass on this erroneous premise, and we have strayed so far off course that the landscape we now inhabit provides us with no solutions and greatly increases the problem.
This is an important moment in history; we know that prohibition does not work. We know that the people who devise drug laws are out of touch and have no idea how to reach a solution. Do they even have the inclination? The fact is their methods are so gallingly ineffective that it is difficult not to deduce that they are deliberately creating the worst imaginable circumstances to maximise the harm caused by substance misuse.
People are going to use drugs; no self-respecting drug addict is even remotely deterred by prohibition. What prohibition achieves is an unregulated, criminal-controlled, sprawling, global mob-economy, where drug users, their families and society at large are all exposed to the worst conceivable version of this regrettably unavoidable problem.
Countries like Portugal and Switzerland that have introduced progressive and tolerant drug laws have seen crime plummet and drug-related deaths significantly reduced. We know this. We know this system doesn't work – and yet we prop it up with ignorance and indifference. Why? Wisdom is acting on knowledge. Now we are aware that our drug laws aren't working and that alternatives are yielding positive results, why are we not acting? Tradition? Prejudice? Extreme stupidity? The answer is all three. Change is hard, apathy is easy, tradition is the narcotic of our rulers. The people who are most severely affected by drug prohibition are dispensable, politically irrelevant people. Poor people. Addiction affects all of us but the poorest pay the biggest price.
Philip Seymour Hoffman's death is a reminder, though, that addiction is indiscriminate. That it is sad, irrational and hard to understand. What it also clearly demonstrates is that we are a culture that does not know how to treat its addicts. Would Hoffman have died if this disease were not so enmeshed in stigma? If we weren't invited to believe that people who suffer from addiction deserve to suffer? Would he have OD'd if drugs were regulated, controlled and professionally administered? Most importantly, if we insisted as a society that what is required for people who suffer from this condition is an environment of support, tolerance and understanding.
The troubling message behind Philip Seymour Hoffman's death, which we all feel without articulating, is that it was unnecessary and we know that something could be done. We also know what that something is and yet, for some traditional, prejudicial, stupid reason we don't do it.
• Caroline Lucas, the Green MP for Brighton, is petitioning for an inquiry into UK drug laws: sign here.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
Janet Yellen and I were taught to revere capitalism. But it's a failing system
The growing disconnect between the Fed's policies and people's lives means we need to start exploring economic alternatives
Janet Yellen, the United States' Federal Reserve's new Chair, and I were graduate economics students around the same time at Yale University. The professor who shaped the macroeconomics we learned was James Tobin. He taught us to be Keynesian economists: that is, to accept capitalism as the sole object and focus of our studies, to celebrate it as the best possible system, and to preserve it against its own serious faults. Keynesian economics teaches that to secure capitalism's blessings requires systematic government intervention in the workings of the economy.
Yale doctorates during those years certified that we had learned how the monetary and fiscal policies offered by Keynesianism comprised the government's optimum tools of economic intervention. Central banks (in the US, this meant the Federal Reserve) would administer monetary policy. This meant manipulating the quantity of money in circulation and interest rates. Legislatures and executives would administer fiscal policies, namely, manipulating tax rates and government expenditures. The goals of both monetary and fiscal policies would be to prevent private capitalism's instability (its recurring swings between sharp upturns and downturns), or at least to ensure the downturns were short and shallow (unlike the long and deep 1930s Great Depression that inspired Keynes's work).
Successive Chairs of the Federal Reserve sought to manipulate the nation's monetary system to those ends, so far as possible. Whatever their party affiliation (Bernanke is a Republican, while Yellen is a Democrat) they coordinate their monetary policies with the fiscal policies pursued by the sitting president and Congress. Indeed, policy differences have been limited and rarely arose among them in their shared quest to manage capitalism's inherent and immensely costly instability. Thus, from the standpoint of economics, the two parties are better understood as two wings of one capitalist party in the US sharing virtually dictatorial political influence.
The Federal Reserve has needed to "manage" the monetary system also by bailing out collapsed financial firms on occasion, and much of the entire industry since 2007 (at an historically unprecedented clip costing trillions). Nor did the Fed ever prevent capitalism's cycles. The official downturn counter/measurer, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), lists a dozen capitalist swoons since the end of the Great depression: on average, one every five years.
What the Fed claims is that its interventions likely made downturns less awful than they might have been. Bernanke the Republican Fed Chair aimed for that, Yellen the Democrat agreed as Vice-Chair, and now she will continue to aim for that as the new Chair. If ever the phrase "same-old, same-old" applied, it does so in this non-event of musical Chairs at the Fed.
Thus, after Yale, Janet Yellen and I took different paths in our approaches and experiences working within US capitalism. Ever the liberal Democrat, she endorses capitalism despite its cyclical and colossal waste of resources and the human tragedy this imposes across the globe. No courses at Yale troubled Yellen or myself with any analyses of how exploitation lies at the core of capitalist production. We were never taught that the majority of industrial workers produce more value for employers than what employers pay them. We were prevented from encountering arguments examining how this idea of "more" (or, in economic terms, of a surplus) contributed fundamentally to the systemic inequalities that define capitalist societies.
No irritating Marxism was allowed to disturb our deep, or the unquestioned political tranquility that professors embedded in Yale's graduate economics curriculum. The celebration of the free competitive market, although often extended rhetorically to the free marketplace of competing ideas, was suspended in the case of Marxian concepts and analysis of capitalist economies. The latter was systematically excluded at Yale, as at most US universities then and ever since. No free marketplace of ideas there.
Like Bernanke, Yellen will do her job as best as she can. No thought about alternatives to capitalism will likely occur to her. She and the Fed's board of governors will consider no policy responses to the current system's grotesque flaws and injustices that entail changing the system. No free marketplace of competing ideas at the Fed either. She will, like her predecessors, transfer the deep political conservatism of her graduate economics education in the US to her policies.
Critics have attacked the Fed since its inception a century ago because of its structural (and extraordinarily cozy) entwining of government regulation and the banking industry it presumably regulated. Just as important, however, are the conceptual continuities between mainstream economics as academic discipline and as governing policy ideology. What threatens those continuities now is the emerging dissent to mainstream academia and the widening disconnect between the Fed's policy universe and most people's lives.
The global capitalism into which Janet Yellen and I graduated with new PhDs in the 1970s proceeded ever since to illustrate growing inequality of income and wealth across and within most economies, which has contributed to mounting social unrest, conflict, wars, and unspeakable social tragedies. Since 2007, the global economic meltdown has reminded everyone of capitalism's vulnerability to the kinds of economic catastrophes that marked the 1930s. Gradually before and quickly since 2007, interest in Marxian and other critiques of capitalism and in socialist as well as other alternative economic systems has been rekindled.
Yellen and I had the same economics education and have experienced the same global capitalist development since, yet we have responded very differently. The same systems generated contradictory outcomes. Capitalism's dysfunctions have led me to appreciate and independently learn what Marxian economics has to teach me, outside of Yale's mainstream economics. Yellen and her cohorts avoided and bypassed all that.
Convinced that we can do better than capitalism, many have analyzed the incipient alternatives emerging from capitalism's deficiencies, such as cooperatives, workers' self-directed enterprises and others. For us, Occupy Wall Street represents a powerful surge against capitalism, yet another sign of the waning tolerance for a system that Yellen will try to preserve.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2014
Excuse me, but we shouldn't be moving on from West Virginia's chemical spill
Authorities in West Virginia declared the water of 300,000 residents affected by last month's chemical spill safe to drink on 14 January, just five days after the incident. Since then, a few things have happened. Stop me if you've heard them before (but I doubt you have).
1. On 15 January, the Centers for Disease Control issued a statement advising pregnant women to ignore the state's OK.
2. On 17 January, Freedom Industries, the owner of the plant involved, filed for bankruptcy, a move calculated to protect them from the financial consequences of the spill.
3. On 21 January, Freedom Industries admitted the presence of a second toxic chemical in the spill, a proprietary mixture of polyglycol ethers known as PPH.
4. On 29 January, a member of the state's water quality board told a panel that he could "guarantee" residents are still breathing fumes from that formaldehyde.
5. On 30 January, Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, a Democrat, asked the company in charge of that region's water supply for another 20 truckloads of bottled water – on top of the 13 truckloads they already donated.
This may prove prescient. On 31 January, Freedom Industries reported a second spill. But not to worry, they assured the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), "None of the stuff got into the river." DEP itself was less-than-clear on what happened, one official telling the Charleston Gazette:
It's kind of like a lot of the piping up there … It's got some groundwater in it. We don't know where it is coming from.
On a related note: 1 February brought the news that the DEP never reviewed Freedom Industries' pollution prevention plans in the first place.
This seems like juicy stuff to me. Yet the story, as the national media sees it, is over. On Friday, MSNBC killed a segment with activist Erin Brockovich on the topic in order to devote more airtime to Chris Christie's traffic problems.
To anyone that follows environmental news, this arc is familiar: A human-interest story with an environmental pollution angle breaks through the media chatter. Cable news outlets roll clips of distraught residents. Footage the damage unspools (with or without stomach-turning images of dead or injured wildlife). There is a news conference of dubious utility. Investigative reporters find evidence of previous infractions of safety and environmental regulations. Politicians declare the need for hearings and more strict enforcement. Volunteers show up to help. Sometimes there's a concert.
Then we move on. We move on despite the fact that the chemical leak was, in some ways, an improvement on the status quo for West Virginians: at least the residents knew there were questions about the water piped into their homes. Most of the time, most West Virginians simply live in the toxic aftermath of the daily release of not-quite-as-verifiably deadly chemicals. The mix of air, water, and soil pollution that is a matter of course in coal mining counties means that children born in those areas have a 26% higher risk of developing birth defects than those born in non-coal-mining counties. That's not from drinking water that's been declared contaminated, that's from drinking water, breathing air, and playing on ground they've been told is safe.
The underlying crisis behind most environmental tragedies is the part of the story that we rarely hear about. Our attention is shifting away from chemical spill, as it has from mine collapses and explosions, from oil spills, and, often, from natural disasters as well. Ironically, it's natural disasters – the ones with the least tangible connection to the actions of specific individuals – that manage to sustain the most interest among the national media. I am pretty sure this is because no one lobbies on Hurricane Sandy's behalf. Tornados are not considered to be good Sunday talk show guests.
That the coal industry spends upwards of $14m a year for the past four years on lobbying efforts – not including the $14m they spent just last year on direct contributions to campaigns – partially explains why our attention is so fleeting. It also explains why the disasters are so bad.
The latter consequence stems from a distressingly simple pattern of cause and effect: for 200 years, and most particularly during the last two decades, the coal industry (and the energy lobby in general) has been as much, if not more, effective and industrious in its influence on politicians than it has been in generating electricity.
Our country has grown a vast and complex regulatory and financial support system for cheap, dirty energy: tax breaks, loopholes and the like. Researchers estimate that if Americans has to pay the real cost for each kilowatt-hour, factoring in hidden costs to communities' health, economy, ecology, we would pay three times as much than we do today. The energy lobby's approach to influence peddling, on the other hand, has systematic elegance of a see-saw: They put money into politicians' pockets, and they get legislative favors back. Indeed, it has been 38 years since Congress passed any law that had a substantive impact on the use of toxic chemicals. To put that in context: in 1975, we were still using asbestos in our walls, you could smoke on airplanes and the food packagers did not have to report or monitor pesticide residue levels on fresh produce.
I have a more tenuous explanation for the transient and vague concern of political reporters over environmental matters. I believe it probably has something to do with how terrified most of us are of science, which is full of numbers and big words.
I should emphasize that many reporters do fantastic work in this field. And by "many" I mean about a dozen. Two days after the Freedom Industries spill, the New York Times announced that it was dismantling its environmental reporting team; that left 15 dedicated environmental reporters among the nation's top five papers. Some context: across the industry and worldwide, the Society for Environmental Journalists has 1,400 members. Last year, almost twice that many reporters attended the Conservative Political Action Conference alone – I was one of them.
CPAC attracts journalists primarily because it's considered an early indicator presidential horserace odds; I wish we pundits would bring to science the same intrepid attitude we have toward reporting on those fuzzy facts. Indeed, the same certainty with which pundits cite poll numbers could be applied to scientific findings with even more confidence – journal studies are peer-reviewed and designed to have reproducible results. That polls can be wrong, or the mood of the electorate shift rapidly, is simply acknowledged with a wink: "The only poll the matters is the one on Election Day." In the world of scientific investigation, and for environmental studies in particular, every day is Election Day: you can see the proof of their conclusions all around you.
When it comes to the West Virginia chemical leak, one might suppose that the Washington Beltway has insulated the chattering class from the stink: not just the because of the bubble of self-absorption the Beltway represents, but because of the sheer distance between West Virginia and Washington DC. It's about a five-hour drive. New Jersey is just an hour closer, but the shared obsession with process politics (and Bruce Springsteen) makes it seem like next door.
Still, West Virginia is closer than DC reporters might think, and its toxic water may yet wind up in the ice that clinks during Washington cocktail parties. Many of the chemicals that coal production sloughs off into the air, water, and land are heavy metals. They don't decompose with time and instead migrate and accumulate; what was in West Virginia's soil can eventually contaminate suburban Arlington's rain.
Last month, the supreme court heard arguments about an Environmental Protection Agency regulation designed to address just that: the "Cross-State Air Pollution Rule", which is exactly what it sounds like. At issue is the way the EPA apportions clean-up and directs policy changes; in the federally designated "Ozone Transport Region", a select group of states whose power-plants causes other states' to fail federal air-quality standards would have to submit to the EPA's authority in fixing the problem.
The rule was successfully challenged by "upwind" states at the appellate level and the Supreme Court's predilection is unusually inscrutable: With Justice Alito having recused himself, it's possible that the decision will end in a tie between its traditionally left and right wings. In the case of a tie, the appellate decision will stand.
At the time, Governor Tomblin celebrated the appellate court's ruling: "It's time for Washington to stop trying to tell us how to run our coal mines," he said. He meant "the White House," not Washington, of course. Because in Washington, they still don't care.
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