John Kerry:

NASA:

Senator Barret's 22-tweet thread on the Massachusetts CIimate Road Map, starts here:

Sec. Buttigieg:

Senator Kelly:

There Are No Borders in a Climate Crisis

Greenhouse gases will still sail right across even the biggest, most beautiful wall.

By Bill McKibben @ NewYorker.com, March 31, 2021

The “crisis” at the border is dominating the news, and, as my colleague Jonathan Blitzer has written, the immediate focus is on the political battle to prevent Joe Biden from passing meaningful immigration reform. But this might also be a moment for thinking about what globalism means in a world where borders ultimately can’t offer protection against the most serious threats.

To give an example: owing in part to climate change, there was a record hurricane season last year, with the last two storms, Eta and Iota, striking Central America. As Nicole Narea explained in a recent article in Vox, the Northern Triangle countries—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—have been afflicted by climate-induced drought for a decade, leaving 3.5 million people facing food insecurity, but the floods from those two storms produced even more savage damage. Twelve hundred schools were damaged or destroyed; forty per cent of corn crops and sixty-five per cent of the bean harvest were lost. As a percentage of G.D.P., the damage is greater than that done by the worst storms ever to hit the United States, yet the people of these countries did comparatively little to cause the climate crisis—whereas the four per cent of us who live in this country have produced more greenhouse gases than the population of almost any other nation. So there’s really no way to pretend that migrants arriving at our southern border have no claim on America. Honduras could have built the biggest, most beautiful wall on its northern border, and our CO2 would still have sailed right across it.

And it’s not as if this is an isolated case. As early as 2017, according to the organizers at climate-refugees.org, sixty per cent of displaced people around the world were on the move because of “natural” disasters, not civil conflict. In the past six months, according to the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, about eighty per cent of displacements have been the result of disasters, “most of which are triggered by climate and weather extremes.” As Axios reported last week, using a projection model created by the Times, ProPublica, and the Pulitzer Center, “migration from Central America will rise every year regardless of climate change,” but, “in the most extreme warming scenarios, more than 30 million migrants would head toward the U.S. border over the next 30 years.”

There’s a rough analogue emerging right now around access to covid-19 vaccines. The U.S. and other rich countries are stockpiling more doses than they need. This is morally dubious; unlike with climate change, we didn’t actively cause other countries’ health crises, but it’s hard to make a case that the people living through them need inoculations any less than we do. It’s also epidemiologically dangerous: if we allow the virus to continue to ravage poorer nations, new variants will keep emerging and keep crossing into privileged ones. “As long as the virus continues to circulate anywhere, people will continue to die, trade and travel will continue to be disrupted, and the economic recovery will be further delayed,” the head of the World Health Organization said recently. According to the Times, for example, “even under the best of circumstances,” just thirty per cent of the population of Kenya will be vaccinated by mid-2023 [....]

Nice example why people don't trust what institutions and governments say on the topic:

Ran across only cause Ret. Gen. Russell Honore retweeted it

I dunno what the heck Kamala Harris is doing here in what is obviously Chicago (isn't she supposed to be doing Immigration czar work?) talking about water issues, but she is. And there's a bunch of interesting cynical replies to this tweet by The Hill of it. Replies which do show there are a lot of passionate people about the issue all around:

Possibly be related to infrastructure, i.e. rebuilding the city water system? (A reminder that Chicago does not have a water supply problem, though it could have a treatment or delivery problem, as they have Lake Michigan.)

Made me realize she has a bad habit of doing a condescending simplistic preachy SPIN thing. (Could be she does it when she's not well prepared? I see those pols and dignitaries standing behind as reacting like it's torture that they have to be there.) I don't think of Joe as doing that, and that's one of the things I always liked about him as a politician. Scares me for his health.

In any case I would like to point out: she's not talking about policing or crime or guns, fancy that.

just a reminder of how Californians best not get too high and mighty about  theTexas energy supply situation: