Today in History: May 3, Oklahoma City struck by historic tornado.
In 1937, Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, 'Gone with the Wind.'
In 1948, the Supreme Court, in Shelley v. Kraemer, ruled that covenants prohibiting the sale of real estate to Blacks or members of other racial groups were legally unenforceable.
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In 1979, the Conservative Party ousted the incumbent Labour government in British parliamentary elections. Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher would become the first female UK Prime Minister the following day.
In 1986, aboard the longshot horse Ferdinand, Bill Shoemaker became the oldest jockey to win the Kentucky Derby at age 54.
In 1999, the Bridge Creek–Moore tornado struck the Oklahoma City metropolitan area, causing 41 deaths and nearly 600 injuries. The tornado's top wind speed of 321 miles per hour was the highest ever recorded on earth.
In 2003, the 'Old Man of the Mountain,' a 40-foot-tall granite outcropping in Franconia, N.H., that bore the resemblance of a human face in profile, collapsed despite decades of preservation efforts.
In 2015, two gunmen were killed by a SWAT team in Garland, Texas, after they opened fire outside a purposely provocative contest for cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.
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In 2016, in a stunning triumph for a political outsider, PresidentTrump all but clinched the Republican presidential nomination with a resounding victory in the Indiana primary election that knocked rival Ted Cruz out of the race.
In 2018, a federal grand jury in Detroit indicted former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn on charges stemming from the company's diesel emissions cheating scandal. (Under Germany's constitution, he could not be extradited to the US to face charges.)
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14 minutes ago
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‘We've lost the culture war on climate'
President Donald Trump's latest climate rollback makes it all but official: The United States is giving up on trying to stop the planet's warming. In some ways, the effort has barely started. More than 15 years after federal regulators officially recognized that greenhouse gas pollution threatens 'current and future generations,' their most ambitious efforts to defuse that threat have been blocked in the courts and by Trump's rule-slicing buzzsaw. Wednesday's action by the Environmental Protection Agency would extend that streak by wiping out a Biden-era regulation on power plants — leaving the nation's second-largest source of climate pollution unshackled until at least the early 2030s. Rules aimed at lessening climate pollution from transportation, the nation's No. 1 source, are also on the Trump hit list. Meanwhile, the GOP megabill lumbering through the Senate would dismember former President Joe Biden's other huge climate initiative, the 2022 law that sought to use hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives to encourage consumers and businesses to switch to carbon-free energy. At the same time, Trump's appointees have spent months shutting down climate programs, firing their workers and gutting research into the problem, while making it harder for states such as California to tackle the issue on their own. The years of whipsawing moves have left Washington with no consistent approach on how — or whether — to confront climate change, even as scientists warn that years are growing short to avoid catastrophic damage to human society. While the Trump-era GOP's hardening opposition to climate action has been a major reason for the lack of consensus, one former Democratic adviser said her own party needs to find a message that resonates with broad swaths of the electorate. 'There's no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,' said Jody Freeman, who served as counselor for energy and climate change in President Barack Obama's White House. 'We've lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement." It's a strategy Freeman admitted she was 'struggling' to articulate, but one that included using natural gas as a 'bridge fuel' to more renewable power — an approach Democrats embraced during the Obama administration — finding 'a new approach' for easing permits for energy infrastructure and building broad-based political support. As the Democratic nominee in 2008, Obama expressed the hope that his campaign would be seen as 'the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.' But two years later, the Democrats' cap-and-trade climate bill failed to get through a Senate where they held a supermajority. Obama didn't return to the issue in earnest until his second term, taking actions including the enactment of a sweeping power plant rule that wasn't yet in effect when Trump rescinded it and the Supreme Court declared it dead. Republicans, meanwhile, have moved far from their seemingly moderating stance in 2008, when nominee John McCain offered his own climate proposals and even then-President George W. Bush announced a modest target for slowing carbon pollution by 2025. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin contended Wednesday that the Obama- and Biden-era rules were overbearing and too costly. 'The American public spoke loudly and clearly last November: They wanted to make sure that all agencies were cognizant of their economic concerns,' he said when announcing the rule rollback at agency headquarters. 'At the EPA under President Trump, we have chosen to both protect the environment and grow the economy.' Trump's new strategy of ditching greenhouse gas limits altogether is legally questionable, experts involved in crafting the Obama and Biden power plant rules told POLITICO. But they acknowledged that the Trump administration at the very least will significantly weaken rules on power plants' climate pollution, at a moment when the trends are going in the wrong direction. Gina McCarthy, who led EPA during the Obama administration, said in a statement that Zeldin's rationale is "absolutely illogical and indefensible. It's a purely political play that goes against decades of science and policy review." U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were virtually flat last year, falling just 0.2 percent, after declining 20 percent since 2005, according to the research firm Rhodium Group. That output would need to fall 7.6 percent annually through 2030 to meet the climate goals Biden floated, which were aimed at limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution. That level is a critical threshold for avoiding the most severe impacts of climate change. Those targets now look out of reach. The World Meteorological Organization last month gave 70 percent odds that the five-year global temperature average through 2029 would register above 1.5 degrees. The Obama-era rule came out during a decade when governments around the world threw their weight behind blunting climate pollution through executive actions. Ricky Revesz, who was Biden's regulatory czar, recalled the 'great excitement' at the White House Blue Room reception just before Obama announced his power plant rule, known as the Clean Power Plan. It seemed a watershed moment. But it didn't last. 'I thought that it was going to be a more linear path forward,' he said. 'That linear path forward has not materialized. And that is disappointing.' Opponents who have long argued that such regulations would wreck the economy while doing little to curb global temperature increases have traveled the same road in reverse. Republican West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey said he felt dread when Obama announced the Clean Power Plan in 2015. Then the state's attorney general, he feared the rule's focus on curbing carbon dioxide from power plants would have a 'catastrophic' impact on West Virginia's coal-reliant economy. 'It was really an audacious and outrageous attempt to regulate the economy when they had no power to do so,' said Morrisey, who led a coalition of states that sued the EPA over Obama's proposal. 'You can't take the actions that they were trying to take without going to the legislature.' Meanwhile, Congress has become harsher terrain for climate action. In May, House Republicans voted to undo the incentives for electric cars and other clean energy technologies in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, the nation's most significant effort to spur clean energy and curb climate change. That same week, 35 House Democrats and Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) crossed the aisle and voted to kill an EPA waiver that had allowed California to set more stringent tailpipe pollution standards for vehicles to deal with its historically smoggy skies. California was planning to use that waiver to end sales of internal combustion engine vehicles in 2035, a rule 10 other states and the District of Columbia had planned to follow. The Supreme Court has added to the obstacles for climate policy — introducing more existential challenges for efforts to use executive powers to corral greenhouse gas emissions. In its 2022 decision striking down the Obama administration's power plant rule, the court said agencies such as EPA need Congress' explicit approval before enacting regulations that would have a 'major' impact on the economy. (It didn't precisely define what counts as 'major.') In 2024, the court eviscerated a decades-old precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, which had afforded agencies broad leeway in how they interpret vague statutes. Many climate advocates and former Democratic officials contend that all those obstacles are bumps, not barriers, on the tortuous path to reducing greenhouse gases. They say that even the regulatory fits and starts have provided signals to markets and businesses about where federal policy is heading in the long term — prodding the private sector to make investments to green the nation's energy system. One symptom is a sharp decline in U.S. reliance on coal — by far the most climate-polluting power source, and the one that would face the stiffest restrictions in any successful federal regulation to lessen the electricity industry's emissions. Coal supplied 48.5 percent of the nation's power generation in 2007, but that fell to 15 percent in 2024. Last year, solar and wind power combined to overtake coal for the first time. 'Regulation has served the purpose of moving things along faster,' said Janet McCabe, who was deputy EPA administrator under Biden and ran EPA's Office of Air and Radiation during Obama's second term. 'The trajectory is always in the right direction.' Freeman, who is now at Harvard Law School, said federal regulations plus state laws requiring renewable power to comprise portions of the electricity mix helped justify utility investments in clean energy. That, in turn, accelerated price drops for wind and solar power, she said. Clean energy advocates point to those broader market shifts, calling a cleaner power grid inevitable. 'There are people in each of these industries who wouldn't have taken the climate problem seriously and cleaner technology seriously, and invested in it, if it weren't for the pressure of the Clean Air Act and the incentives that more recently had been built into the IRA,' said David Doniger, senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. 'So policy does matter, even when it's not in a straight line and the implementation is inadequate.' But even if those economic trends continue — an open question given the enormous new power demand from data centers — it will not bring the U.S. closer to cuts needed to keep the world from overheating, multiple climate studies have concluded. And the greatest chunk of the emissions decline since 2005 comes from shifting coal to natural gas, another fossil fuel, which fracking made cheap and abundant. Biden's power plant rule, now being shelved by Trump's EPA, would have imposed limits on both coal-burning power plants and future gas-fired ones, requiring them to either capture their greenhouse gases or shut down. Staving off regulations may well keep coal-fired power plants running longer than anticipated to meet forecast demand growth, belching more carbon dioxide into the air. The Trump administration has even sought to temporarily exempt power plants from air pollution rules altogether and is trying to use emergency powers to prevent coal generators from shuttering. Without federal rules that say otherwise, power providers would also be likely to add more natural gas generation to the grid. Failing to curb power plants' pollution, scientists say, means temperatures will continue to rise and bring more of the floods, heat waves, wildfires, supply chain disruptions, food shortages and other shocks that cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars each year in property damage, illness, death and lost productivity. 'I don't think the economics are going to take care of it by any means,' said Joe Goffman, who led the Biden EPA air office. 'The effects of climate change are going to continue to be felt and they're going to continue to be costly in terms of dollars and cents and in terms of human experience.' Some state governors, such as Democrats Kathy Hochul of New York and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, have vowed to go it alone on climate policy if need be. But analyses have shown state actions alone are unlikely to achieve the greenhouse gas reductions at the scale and speed needed to avoid baking in catastrophic effects from climate change. The Sierra Club, for example, has helped shutter nearly 400 coal-fired units across the U.S. since 2010 through its Beyond Coal campaign, which has argued the economic case against fossil fuel generation in front of state utility commissions. While Joanne Spalding, the group's legal director, said it can continue to strike blows against coal with that strategy, she acknowledged that 'gas is a huge problem' — and left no doubt that the Trump administration's moves would do damage. 'Given what the science says about the need to act urgently, this will be a lost four years in the United States,' she said.
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20 minutes ago
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Senedd members tackle ‘existential crisis' for democracy
Senedd members called for urgent action to tackle the "existential crisis" of abuse, harassment and intimidation faced by politicians on social media. Plaid Cymru's Adam Price, the first out-gay man in his party to be elected to national office, warned prejudices based on sex, race and sexual orientation have been reinvigorated. He told the Senedd: "It is getting worse by the day, and it really represents an existential crisis for our democracy and our society." Mr Price said: "For our democracy to be effective, it has to be diverse. "Diversity trumps ability. "It's a piece of evidence in social science." The former Plaid Cymru leader called for a focus on representation of trans women and men, a community "under siege," to ensure their voices are heard in the Senedd. Mr Price highlighted harmful comments below news stories involving him in recent weeks. "That certainly won't deter me and I hope it won't deter anyone else," he said. "But we've got to do something about it collectively, haven't we?" Labour's Hannah Blythyn expressed concerns that Wales could go backwards in terms of equality of representation at the next Senedd election. Ms Blythyn told Senedd members: "I very much made an active decision when I had the opportunity to stand in this legislature because of the make-up – that there were more women here, that it was more representative." Jane Hutt, Wales' social justice secretary, acknowledged the rise of abuse, harassment and intimidation towards politicians, candidates and campaigners. She outlined voluntary diversity and inclusion guidance for political parties which aims to ensure democratic bodies are truly representative of all the people of Wales. Ms Hutt said safety costs will be exempt from spending limits for Welsh elections. Conservative Altaf Hussain warned guidance on equal representation risks crossing a dangerous line. He said: "Equality of access cannot come just by bureaucratic diktats or targets." Plaid Cymru's Sioned Williams said progress on underrepresentation of women in politics has slowed, warning the voluntary guidance was published "far too late." "Wales belongs to everyone," she said. "Everyone must have a voice in our nation's future."
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34 minutes ago
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New Nuclear Plant to Power Six Million British Homes
Weeks after Germany decided to reverse course and 're-embrace' nuclear power following their supreme idiocy on the matter, the UK government announced on Tuesday that it would invest 14.2 billion pounds (US$19.3 billion) to build a new nuclear plant in the southeast of England. The move was revealed by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero as part of its broader spending review, which will lay out priorities for the next four years. The new plant, named Sizewell C, will be located in Suffolk county, and is predicted to create around 10,000 jobs during construction, according to a government statement. Once operational, it will create enough electricity power roughly 6 million homes. "We need new nuclear to deliver a golden age of clean energy abundance, because that is the only way to protect family finances, take back control of our energy, and tackle the climate crisis," said Energy Minister Ed Miliband. "This is the government's clean energy mission in action, investing in lower bills and good jobs for energy security." As the Epoch Times notes further, the UK has also been tapping up new investors to fund the construction of Sizewell C, but no new partners were mentioned in the announcement. Neither the total cost of construction nor a date for expected completion has been announced. Sizewell C was originally an EDF Energy project but is now majority-owned by the British government, with EDF Energy a minority shareholder. EDF Energy is the British arm of Électricité de France (EDF), which is wholly owned by the French state. The UK government's stake was 83.8 percent and EDF's stake was 16.2 percent at the end of December, EDF's financial results showed in February. Sizewell C would be just the second new nuclear plant built in Britain in more than 20 years, after another EDF project, Hinkley Point C, which was first announced in 2010. Hinkley Point C, based in Somerset, southwest England, has been beleaguered by delays and budget overruns and is currently expected to come online in 2029. Sizewell C would be the third power station built on the site after Sizewell A and Sizewell B, both of which are currently in the process of being decommissioned. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero also announced that it had picked Rolls-Royce SMR to build Britain's first small modular reactors (SMRs). About 2.5 billion pounds ($3.4 billion) of government funds will be dedicated to the SMR program over the next four years, in a bid to get one of Europe's first small-scale nuclear industries going. SMRs are usually around the size of two football fields and composed of parts that can be assembled in a factory, making them quicker and cheaper to build than conventional plants. The moves by Britain come amid a renewed interest in nuclear power across Europe, sparked by spiraling energy costs due to the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, which is hampering the continent's supply of natural gas. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a keynote speech in August 2024 that the European Union needed more nuclear power. By More Top Reads From this article on
