The islands face several difficulties with power. Generating electricity with fossil fuels in Puerto Rico is expensive, since coal, gas and petroleum have to be imported by sea, which ratchets up their price. Once installed, solar panels plus battery storage are much cheaper, and about 80,000 Puerto Rican households have put in the panels.

Even more motivating than the high price of fossil fuels is the destruction wrought by hurricanes Maria (Sept. 2017) and Fiona (Sept. 2022). After Maria many families had no electricity for a couple of months, or even six months and more in some instances. People just can’t trust the islands’ grid, and they are hedging their bets on it by buying solar panels and household batteries such as the Powerwall.

Then President Trump famously neglected Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and at one point contemptuously threw toilet paper in their direction at a news conference. No wonder they are determined to get off the electric grid and become free of the constraints of people such as Trump.

The IEEFA points out, “There are now more than 400 megawatts of solar and rooftop storage systems connected to the grid in Puerto Rico, with approximately 2,000 more connected each month. The [household] systems now represent a greater part of the island’s electricity consumption than solar energy at the utility scale.”

Dan Avery at CNET explains that putting up the solar panels, however, entails a substantial up front cost of $10,000 to $12,000, which most Puerto Rican families cannot afford. Some families can afford to buy them on time, and the solar companies offer such deals, but at an average annual income of only $21,000, most Puerto Rican families cannot afford to buy panels even on time. In the continental US, the 33% tax credit from President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act has helped impel people to get the panels. Many Puerto Ricans, however, don’t pay federal taxes, so they can’t get the rebate.

Government subsidies will be required to allow most people to adopt solar plus battery, even though that combination is cheaper than importing coal or fossil gas. Timothy Gardner at Reuters reports that Congress appropriated $1 billion to provide rooftop solar panels to Puerto Ricans, and that Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm wants to ensure this aid helps the most vulnerable. The $1 billion will put panels on 50,000 homes, but that leaves 350,000 which will still need it. The population of Puerto Rico is estimated at 3.2 million.

In 2022, Gardner says, Puerto Rico installed 163 MW of solar capacity, putting it in the top half of US states and territories for renewable energy.

Avery at CNET observes, “In January 2022, there were 42,000 homes and businesses with solar-plus-battery projects in Puerto Rico, more than eight times the number before Irma and Maria. This summer, that number is nearing 80,000.”

The good news is that both panels and batteries are falling in price because of technological advances, and there is every reason to think that Puerto Ricans will continue their solar insurrection. Solar plus batteries allow people to gain independence from the grid. If it advances fast enough, it may even lead to lots of cord-cutting from the utilities with their vulnerable above-ground poles and wires. The latter are especially vulnerable to climate change phenomena such as fiercer hurricanes, flooding, and wildfires. Some may even cause wildfires, as in Maui.

Puerto Rico is not only forging its own energy path, it may be telling those of us on the mainland what our future is likely to be.

First, let us consider why Eliyahu is not probably very serious in making a parallel between Palestinians and Puerto Ricans.

The United States was founded as a Republic, but like the French Third Republic it has sometimes also had an imperial dimension. Its old empire has either become states, in the Southwest, Alaska and Hawaii, or remains composed of “territories,” of which there are 16. Puerto Rico is one of the sixteen, though it is typically called a “commonwealth.”

Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico can’t vote for national offices like president, senator or congressman. That is the point of the Jewish Power proposal– they want to rule over Palestinians but not let them have the vote. But note that Puerto Ricans do vote for a governor of the islands, who serves a four-year term, and a legislature. Again, I doubt Jewish Power would let Palestinians vote for a Palestinian Parliament and Palestinian governor.

Puerto Ricans have United States citizenship and passports. Puerto Ricans, being citizens, can freely move to the mainland USA at will. They can just jump on a plane and rent an apartment anywhere they like. If they do so, they magically gain the right to vote for national offices. Puerto Ricans living in New York or New Jersey or Florida have all the legal voting rights of their American neighbors. Their Puerto Rico drivers license is, or should be, as acceptable as any state’s. It is only when they are in Puerto Rico that they can’t vote for president or Congress.

If Palestinians were actually to be treated like the US treats Puerto Ricans, a Palestinian family from Nablus could just pick up and go live in Tel Aviv if they could afford an apartment there. They could vote in the next election for any party they liked in parliament. They could run for office. You could have a Palestinian Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the Knesset, whose mother was born in Ramallah, say, just as Alexandria’s mother Bianca was born in Puerto Rico.

So is Eliyahu proposing that Palestinians should all be given Israeli citizenship? And would they then be able to pick up and move from Gaza and the West Bank to Israel proper? After all, the Puerto Ricans do the exact equivalent. And would Palestinians living in Israel proper get the right to vote for the Knesset or Israeli parliament? Again, that is the Puerto Rican model that Eliyahu says he is invoking.

If you know anything at all about the Puerto Rican model, you know that it would never be adopted in full for Palestinians by the Israeli fascists. The only thing they like about it is the idea of people living under US sovereignty without the right to vote for national office. But the model is much more complex than that and implies all sorts of rights for inhabitants of the “territory” that the extremist right wing would never actually be willing to proffer the Palestinians.

The other thing to say is that while declaring the Palestinians under Israeli rule as just like Puerto Ricans in America might be a good propaganda ploy for the ears of the US right wing, it is shameful.

Puerto Rico is essentially a colony, and while its 3.2 million inhabitants are American citizens they do not enjoy all the rights enumerated in the constitution, the way they would if they were an incorporated state.

That is shameful. It is shameful that they can’t vote for congress or the presidency.

Members of Congress hope to reintroduce legislation that aims to allow a plebiscite in Puerto Rico. They would get to vote on whether they want to become an independent country, or they want to become a state of the US, or whether they want to become a sovereign nation in free association with the US.

Nicole Acevedo at NBC explains the third option: “Places such as Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands have a sovereignty with free association with the U.S. These are technically independent nations bound to the U.S. by a treaty governing diplomatic, military and economic relations.”

She quotes Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) as saying of the proposed legislation, “What we agree on, passionately, is that America ought not to be a colonial power.”

So the Jewish Power Party is seeking a status for Palestinians that is not actually analogous to that of Puerto Ricans. And invoking a Puerto Rican model is anyway shameful, and the US congress recognizes the shame and is trying to move to a new and more just model.

Even supporters of Israel like the Biden administration do not try to justify the current situation, in which Palestinians are stateless and without rights and daily under attack by squatter vigilantes. They talk about transitioning to a two-state solution where Palestinians have a state in which they have citizenship.

This “Puerto Rico” suggestion is just another contemptible propaganda ploy, attempting to find a way to make the deplorable colonization of the Palestinians sound palatable to the outside world. That jig is up.

The women of Vieques, an island off the east coast of Puerto Rico, have been on the front lines of the generations-long struggle for peace and justice to end the havoc wrought by U.S. foreign policy on their island, in their homes, and on their bodies.

As a Caribbean island, Puerto Rico has suffered massive damage in this century from hurricanes, which are becoming more intense and more destructive as the oceans heat up. Perhaps the worst was Hurricane Maria in 2017. That is, hurricanes have been a fact of life in that region for a very long time, but they are getting stronger. The jury is still out about whether global heating will make them more frequent. That it is making them more devastating, however, is not in question.

Hurricanes are fed by warm water beneath them, and the warmer the water, the heavier the winds. Also, warm water causes water vapor to accumulate in the air above it, so that when hurricanes arise they dump heavier rain on land. Fiercer winds and more flooding are a recipe for disaster on an island.

Alas, the situation is going to get worse, possibly much worse. Some climate scientists have become dissatisfied with the current Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which only goes up to a “5,” whereas they feel that Maria was a category 6. We could see 7, too, unfortunately.

Puerto Rico is a neglected territory of the United States. The people are U.S. citizens. The dollar is the legal currency. They vote in presidential elections, though they have no congressional representatives or senators. It is an in-between place, neither state nor colony. Because the currency is the strong U.S. dollar and because the island is bound by federal law, the Puerto Rican government cannot offer companies sweetheart deals to move there very easily, in contrast to, say, the Dominican Republic. The population is rapidly declining and is already down to 3.2 million (at most; some estimates are lower) off of a high of 3.8 million twenty years ago.

The Jones Act requires that anything Puerto Rico imports from a US port be carried on a ship built and flagged in the US, which raises the costs of some of the island’s imports and even prevents it from receiving some goods at some times without a special waiver. After Maria a diesel ship not flying the stars and stripes that had loaded up at a US port was not allowed to offload at Puerto Rico.

The electricity grid in Puerto Rico is among the worst in the United States, being old and ramshackle and apparently kept together with chewing gum and masking tape.

Take what I have to say about this with a grain of salt, since I’m no engineer. But in my view this custom of having power lines above the ground is just going to have to end in the face of the looming mega-storms we are summoning by burning gasoline, coal and fossil gas.

After Maria, Jonathan Gatehouse at the CBC explains, the government brought in LUMA Energy, half-owned by a Canadian company, to run Puerto Rico’s grid and attempt to update its electrical system. The 15-year contract is worth $2 billion. Call me a pessimist, but it seems obvious to me that some megastorm in the not too distant future is going to knock down all those electricity poles they are erecting or restoring. As it is, Gatehouse reports that Puerto Ricans aren’t exactly impressed with LUMA’s progress in getting and keeping the lights back on.

That is why the FEMA/DOJ study is so important. It finds that Puerto Rico gets a lot of sunlight for solar panel electricity generation. In fact, “Renewable energy potential in Puerto Rico significantly exceeds total energy demand now and through 2050,” it says.

Scientists are discovering that solar farms and agriculture complement one another, so the study recommends “agrovoltaics,” which can up the amount of renewable energy while not interfering with getting the crops in. Likewise, it recomments community solar. That is defined by the USG as “any solar project or purchasing program, within a geographic area, in which the benefits of a solar project flow to multiple customers such as individuals, businesses, nonprofits, and other groups.”

Gatehouse describes how some Puerto Rican businesses are already moving to community solar.

But the big takeaway from my point of view in the study is this: “Smaller renewable resources spread across the power system could recover faster from disruptive events than the current system, which consists of fewer and larger power plants.”

Bingo! Solar plus battery systems that can make people relatively independent of the grid are the way to go. The evidence so far, by the way, is that rooftop solar panels can survive hurricanes if the house on which they are installed does.

So here’s the problem. Puerto Ricans are by mainland standards poor, with a median household income of $21,967 per year. Rooftop solar costs at least $10,000 on the island. So few can afford to go in that direction, even with the $7500 tax credit. The Powerwall or other battery would be another $11.500.

So maybe some restaurateurs or factory or workshop owners could benefit, but not most people.

You kind of wish the government had given out the $2 billion to people to get solar panels and batteries with rather than to a company that would try to fix up the old-style centralized power plants and their above-ground electrical lines.

But maybe when the final report comes out, and if the Democrats win big in 2024, some resources can finally be directed at Puerto Rico that would actually improve the situation, and people’s lives.

( Cronkite News) – WASHINGTON – The House censured Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Prescott, Wednesday and stripped him of his committee assignments as punishment for a violent cartoon he posted that appeared to show him killing a liberal Democratic member and threatening the president.

Gosar, speaking to the full House, said he does “not espouse violence toward anyone” and repeated his insistence that the video was intended as a critique of Biden administration immigration policy – an issue he said he will not stop speaking out on.

But Democrats said that the House had to take a stand against members “joking about murdering each other, and the president,” and that failure to do so would lead to actual violence, like the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.

“What is so hard about saying that saying that this is wrong?” asked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., the member who appears to be slain in Gosar’s video. She criticized GOP leaders who used Wednesday’s debate to attack Biden administration policies because they “cannot bring themselves to say that issuing a depiction of murdering a member of Congress is wrong.”

“This is not about me or Representative Gosar, but this is about what we are willing to accept,” she said.

But Republicans accused the Democratic majority of employing a double standard, overlooking questionable speech by their own members while rushing to take action against Republicans – what Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called “rules for thee but not for me.”

The resolution passed 223-207 along mostly party lines, with just two Republicans – Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois – joining 221 Democrats voting for censure. All 207 “no” votes were from Republicans.

A screen grab of the tweet by Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Prescott, after it was flagged by Twitter for violating its rules about “hateful conduct” but before it was taken down entirely last week. The video had received more than 3.3 million views by that point. (Photo by Cronkite News)

The censure resolution came after Gosar posted a 90-second video to his official House social media accounts on Nov. 7 that was a doctored version of the anime cartoon “Attack on Titan,” in which humans defend themselves and their cities against man-eating giants.

In Gosar’s version, his face and those of other House conservatives, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., are superimposed on the sword-wielding soldiers while Ocasio-Cortez and President Joe Biden have been pasted on the titans. The cartoon shows Gosar’s character slashing the neck of Ocasio-Cortez, killing her, and lunging at Biden with swords drawn before the video cuts off.

It also shows Border Patrol agents rounding up migrants, videos of whom appear to be splattered with blood. In between those videos the words drugs, poverty, gangs, murder and more flash on the screen.

The video was flagged by Twitter for violating its “hateful content” rules. But it was left up – with a warning – because Twitter determined it was in the public interest to remain accessible, a fact noted by Gosar on the House floor Wednesday.

“Last week, my staff posted a video depicting a policy battle regarding amnesty for tens of millions of illegal aliens. This is an enemy,” Gosar said. The cartoon “directly contributes to the understanding and discussion of the real-life battle” over border policy, he said.

Gosar said he pulled the video down on Nov. 9 not because it was threatening but “out of compassion for those who generally felt offense.” By that time, it had been viewed more than 3.3 million times.

It brought a firestorm of criticism from Democrats, who called for everything from Gosar’s expulsion to demands that McCarthy revoke his committee assignments. The censure resolution was introduced last week and sent to the House Ethics Committee, but was pulled back suddenly for Wednesday’s floor vote.

Republicans said McCarthy did reach out to Gosar, who appeared before the GOP conference Tuesday and “explained the video in question.”

“He also reiterated that he doesn’t endorse violence, and that he didn’t intend his video to be viewed as an endorsement of violence. As far as I’m concerned, I think that should have been the end of the matter,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., of the Tuesday meeting. But he said those events were “lost in the rush to … condemn Congressmen Gosar.”

No Republican defended what Cole described as the “provocative” video, but they complained that in the Democrats’ rush to vote, Gosar was not being given a chance to defend himself in the Ethics Committee.

Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Prescott, refused to apologize for a cartoon video that appears to show him attacking and killing a liberal House member and the president. The House censured Gosar for the video, which he says is a statement about the fight over immigration policy. (File photo by Pat Poblete/Cronkite News)

They also said that committee assignments have always been left to party leaders, and warned that the tables could be turned if Democrats lose control of the House next year. Gosar was on the Natural Resource and the Oversight and Reform committees.

But Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said serving on committees is a privilege for members and “when somebody encourages violence against a member, they should lose that privilege.”

It was the second time this year the House has censured a member and stripped committee assignments. In February, the House did the same to Greene, citing a series of statements and social media posts in which she endorsed violence against specific Democrats.

There are few practical consequences from censure, which can pass on a simple majority vote and merely requires that the targeted member stand before the full House while the censure resolution is read. Gosar was backed by a handful of GOP members as he presented himself to be censured Wednesday.

It is not clear whether the vote will hurt Gosar politically, but one analyst said it is sure to give him a bigger presence on the national scene.

Given Gosar’s heavily Republican district, it is “difficult to see how this censure and the resulting media attention could do much damage in a general election” for Gosar, said Jacob Rubashkin, a reporter and analyst for Inside Elections.

“The best possible outcome for Gosar politically is that this elevates his star among the far right of the Republican Party and allows him to tap in to a similar donor network that Marjorie Taylor Greene has,” Rubashkin said.

“Whether that translates into the same kind of dominant fundraising and media presence is an open question, but it certainly is a possibility given the recent precedents,” he said.

Ulysse Bex, News Reporter, Washington, D.C., expects to graduate in May 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. Bex, who has interned with Ouest France and written for Basket Infos, is working in the Washington Bureau.

Via Cronkite News

—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

MSNBC: “AOC Calls For Censure Vote Of Rep. Gosar After He Shared Violent Anime Video”

Trump seems to me to have some form of dementia, which would account for why he keeps saying strange things like that his father was born in a very nice place in Germany. Fred Drumpf was born in New York City in 1905 and later changed his name to Trump because of anti-immigrant (anti-German) sentiment during World War I.

So there are some ways that you can tell that Puerto Ricans are Americans.

1. Puerto Rico came to be part of the United States because on July 25, 1898, the US invaded the island, and then annexed it via the Treaty of Paris on April 11, 1899. (Sam Erman, “Meanings of Citizenship in the U.S. Empire: Puerto Rico, Isabel Gonzalez, and the Supreme Court, 1898 to 1905,” Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer, 2008), pp. 5-33.)

2. As early as 1904, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Isabel Gonzales that Puerto Ricans could not be excluded by immigration authorities, inasmuch as they were not aliens (Gonzales v. Williams, 1904). This ruling was a baby step toward accepting that the island, having been annexed from Spain by the US congress, was no longer alien to the US. (Sam Erman).

3. The Jones Act of 1917 recognized Puerto Ricans as US citizens. Because Puerto Rico itself is a commonwealth rather than a state, Puerto Ricans residing in Puerto Rico cannot vote for president.

4. Charles R. Venator-Santiago writes, “In 1934, Congress introduced a territorial form of birthright citizenship permitting the children of Puerto Ricans born in the island to acquire U.S. citizenship at birth.”

5. Since Puerto Ricans are full citizens, when they move to the mainland and reside in a state, they can vote for president, just like any other citizen of the US resident in that state. I have an educated guess for whom they are not voting in 2020.

6. Since 1952, even Puerto Ricans residing in Puerto Rico have had a representative in the House of Representatives, a non-voting “resident commissioner.” Other countries don’t typically have representatives in Congress, though there is a nagging doubt that Mitch McConnell actually views the Kremlin as his constituency.

7. Puerto Rico has introduced a bill to become a state by 2021. We don’t usually let foreign countries become states.

—-

Bonus video:

The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder: “Trump’s Dopey New Spokesperson Doesn’t Know Puerto Rico Is Part Of U.S.”

A year on, Joannelly Cruz and her mother Gloria Martinez are in a homeless shelter, part of a generation of Puerto Ricans struggling to rebuild shattered lives on the US mainland.

AFP/File / Ricardo ARDUENGO. Hurricane Maria wreaked devastation on Puerto Rico, pictured two days after the storm hit in September 2017, forcing thousands to flee the island.

But they have no plans to return to their Caribbean home.

“I think coming here was the best thing to do,” says Joannelly, 16, reflecting on the catastrophe unleashed as the storm wiped out infrastructure and brought chaos rarely paralleled in US history.

But life is hardly a cake walk in New York, where mother and daughter share a bed in a small room with no access to a kitchen. Their belongings lie scattered on a table which doubles as Joannelly’s homework desk.

“It was a tough adjustment,” she said. “It is kind of difficult to sit and do my homework in such a cramped environment, but I managed.”

She and her mother hope to be considered for subsidized housing soon.

“Since we’re homeless by accident, they should put us in priority to get housing,” Martinez says, anxious about a precarious future for her daughter with no safety net, and no certainties at all.

– Indifference –

Hurricane Maria, which made landfall on September 20, killed 2,975 people in Puerto Rico, according to a government-commissioned study, knocking out power and drinking water supplies, and causing $90 billion in damages.

The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the body in charge of post-disaster aid, initially covered evacuees’ hotel costs but that program ended in May, triggering court rulings that kept it in place through the summer. Knowing it would end, many moved into shelters.

AFP/File / Ricardo ARDUENGO. Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, leaving nearly 3,000 dead and causing $90 billion in damage.

A spokeswoman for the City of New York told AFP officials expected to see some 700 Puerto Ricans in homeless shelters going into the anniversary of the disaster.

Government-sponsored, long-term shelter is not available to Puerto Ricans relocated to the mainland — an option offered to previous hurricane survivors on the continental US.

Latino Justice, an organization leading a class action suit against FEMA, said that the policy violates the evacuees’ constitutional rights.

“We argue that it is FEMA’s responsibility to provide for those individuals,” Natasha Bannan, an attorney with the lobby group, told AFP.

Many see FEMA’s response as a proof of a passive, indifferent attitude toward Puerto Rico from the administration of US President Donald Trump.

“They don’t understand the gravity of the situation we lived through,” said Sofia Miranda, a 44-year-old former insurance broker and evacuee.

– ‘Emotional crisis’ –

FEMA had offered to fly residents back to the island free-of-charge until August 30. Of the thousands displaced, just 500 or so accepted the offer, the agency said.

Miranda, who shares a room with her mother and son, is determined to stay, but says life in the shelter is taking its toll.

“As of now I’m in limbo. I haven’t been told if I’m eligible for housing, nor if I can stay in this shelter. I haven’t been able to sleep,” she told AFP.

Rafael Barreto, an evacuee in New York since last November who does community work, spoke of the lingering psychological trauma weighing on displaced Puerto Ricans dealing with fresh stresses in their new home.

“There is an emotional crisis here after leaving this disaster. When there is strong wind, a lot of us here have flashbacks,” he told AFP.

Meanwhile Leonell Torres, a clinical psychologist who has counseled displaced individuals, explained that each relocation was in itself a traumatic event that could act as a trigger.

“There is a misconception that being here is a guarantee for being healthy,” he said.

In a report released on its website this summer, FEMA admitted to not being adequately prepared to handle the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, to being understaffed and to taking longer than expected to deliver supplies.

“Everything has been very complicated, frustrating, and the majority was thinking that because we are American citizens we would not be treated differently,” said Barreto.

Featured Photo: GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File / SPENCER PLATT. Many Puerto Ricans in New York City blame the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for what they see as a weak response to Hurricane Maria.

In his visit to the island after the hurricane struck, Trump was insufferable. He said that the death toll was low compared to Katrina at New Orleans in 2005, which killed 1400. (The new estimates mean that Maria killed twice as many Americans. Puerto Ricans are American citizens.) He also castigated the victims for messing up the US budget.

In the end, the GOP Congress did nothing special in the way of aid appropriations for Puerto Rico. So luckily Trump wasn’t inconvenienced after all.

But the same GOP Congress found $1.5 trillion in tax cut giveaways to the billionaire class in February. Apparently slashing government revenue (which is equivalent to raising taxes for services on the non-billionaires) and embarrassing the budget that way is OK, as long as the super-rich are happy.

The intensity and longevity of Hurricane Maria was boosted by climate change. Putting billions of tons of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere every year causes the oceans to warm up. Hurricanes are caused by warm water, and the hotter the water the stronger and longer the storm. Increased water vapor in the air, associated with climate change, also causes the rains after landfall to be much heavier.

Americans experienced the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, DC, of September 11, 2001, as an act of war by a small guerrilla group of terrorists. The Bush administration parleyed public outrage into two major wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) and multiple small wars, all part of its “Global War on Terror” (GWOT). If you count the money we’ll spend over their lifetimes to care for wounded veterans of this war, it probably cost $6 trillion.

But the climate catastrophe of Maria was not greeted in the same way. First, the Washington DC elite announced the death toll as unrealistically low. Presumably because Puerto Ricans are Spanish-speaking Americans, their deaths did not preoccupy our newspapers of record day after day the way the 9/11 victims did.

The US government announced no new initiative at all to tackle the problem of global heating, caused by humans burning gasoline, coal and natural gas. Indeed, the president of the United States and most senators and congressmen from his party deny that humans are causing climate change.

It would be as though the Bush administration announced that al-Qaeda only killed a handful of people on 9/11, and then sat back and did nothing, arguing that al-Qaeda does not really exist and no one can be sure they caused the Twin Towers to collapse.

French Environment minister Nicolas Hulot resigned Tuesday, saying that the planet earth is becoming a sauna and biodiversity is evaporating and yet there is no sense of urgency in the French government.

If Mr. Hulot thinks the French political elite is sanguine about climate change, he should try talking to American Republicans.

Apparently we can see a large US territory flattened and nearly 3000 citizens killed, and yawn and pretend it did not happen or we don’t know why hurricanes are becoming more destructive.

We need a global war on climate change (GWCC). It turns out our elites vastly overestimated the importance of terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11, and put way more resources into combating it than can be justified by the actual danger (Americans are much more likely to die from falling in their bathtubs than from terrorism). In contrast, as our century wears on, the likelihood of them being killed or harmed by climate change is much greater.

—

Bonus video:

CBS News:
Puerto Rico suffered much higher death toll from Hurricane Maria

Puerto Rico suffered with electricity outages for months, with millions of Americans living in the dark, in a way that would have been unacceptable anywhere on the mainland (need I specify, the White mainland?) People died from lack of access to health care, from lack of rescue services. Some 80% of the agricultural crop was wiped out. Trump never offered debt relief, and called off the US military aid effort way early. Puerto Ricans are not, let us say, his base.

When Donald Trump visited Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria flattened the island, whose inhabitants are American citizens, you could have cut the condescension with a knife. Puerto Rico’s emergency, requiring billions in response and reconstruction aid, the president said, was most inconvenient given the Federal government’s budget woes. The annual Federal budget deficit had actually shrunk enormously under Barack Obama, and Trump has now created a gargantuan crisis by massive tax cuts for the billionaire class, which will cost $1.5 trillion he said the government didn’t have. What he meant was that the government did not have the money for the public, only for the 1%.

Trump was also typically sadistic in that rather than sympathizing with the catastrophe that had struck some 3.3 million Americans, he seemed gleeful that the death toll as then reported was small, presumably because it meant he would not have to exert himself unduly. He said,

“if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous — hundreds and hundreds of people that died — and you look at what happened here with, really, a storm that was just totally overpowering … no one has ever seen anything like this.”

“What is your death count?” [he asked Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló]. “17?”

Roselló: “16.”

“16 people certified. Sixteen people versus in the thousands. You can be very proud of all of your people and all of our people working together. Sixteen versus literally thousands of people. You can be very proud. Everybody watching can really be very proud of what’s taken place in Puerto Rico.”

That the death statistics are in the thousands and not 16 is no surprise. The surprise is that only ten percent died in the actual storm, and many lives could have been saved in the aftermath by better governance.

The other surprise is that the new death estimate was not front page news and is not at the top of Google News or news aggregation sites.

What is?

Roseanne Barr’s firing over Islamophobic and racist remarks (with the racist remarks getting most of the attention rather than the Islamophobic ones).

Many on social media, as I mentioned yesterday, are flabbergasted by this inequity.

They are right to be.

—

Bonus video:

CNN: “Study: Puerto Rico hurricane death toll near 5,000”