The Dictatorship
My bountiful backyard garden is a scary Thanksgiving sight
When I picked a brilliant red cherry tomato off my backyard vine and enjoyed the burst of sweet flavor, I knew it was a guilty pleasure. That’s because it was Nov. 20, and I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The tomato I tasted is a cherry bomb of climate change.
The internet is peppered with reports from places like Milwaukee, Chicago and Detroit of peppers and tomatoes still growing on the cusp of Thanksgiving.
I’m not the only one feeling this. The internet is peppered with reports from places like Milwaukee, Chicago and Detroit of peppers and tomatoes still growing on the cusp of Thanksgiving. A radio personality in New Jersey posted pictures of bell peppers he picked Nov. 18, a late-season harvest that he said “rings alarm bells.”
New England’s November Garden of Eden has alarmed me for some time. In December 2001, I wrote a column in The Boston Globe about my Thanksgiving Day backyard harvest of cilantro, jalapeño peppers and eggplant. I gave it a tongue-in-cheek dateline of “Atlanta, Mass.,” as Massachusetts was projected to have the climate of Richmond, Virginia, or Atlanta by 2090. I doubted back then that anyone would be freaked out by the freakish harvest “when most of us like it warm.”
It was also the first of Republican President George W. Bush’s eight years in office. By thenhis administration had already rejected the Kyoto climate treaty. It would eventually censor the Environmental Protection Agency from directly tying warming to human activities and from warning the public how fast the planet was heating up. The oil man turned president kept the nation out of the global fight against climate change with the claim that he first needed to see “sound science.”
The years since have been a yo-yo. President Barack Obama signed the Paris climate accords, only for President Donald Trump to withdraw from them. President Joe Biden rejoined the treaty, but Trump getting elected again all but assures another withdrawal from the global stage, even though the United States is, by far, the world’s largest emitter per-capita of the carbon dioxide emissions fueling global warming.
And regardless of whether we do or don’t sign international climate treaties, our commitment to the global fight against climate change falls insultingly short of the need.
At the just-concluded COP29 in Azerbaijan, the world’s richest nations, cowed by the smothering smog of nearly 1,800 oil and gas lobbyists, offered a paltry $300 billion a year in climate finance to help developing nations withstand the damage, death and impoverishment from climate change. What Biden hailed as “a historic commitment” looks more like a continuing betrayal. The Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance said in 2022 that the contribution should be $1 trillion a year.
All the while, the cherry tomato bombs keep going off.
Last year was Earth’s warmest year on recordand this year is on track to be hotter still, according to the World Meteorological Organization. And this month in the Northeast, a historic drought set us up for a record number of November wildfires and/or record numbers of wildfire red flag warnings.
In Massachusetts, wildfires were burning from the Blue Hills recreational lands south of Boston all the way out to Great Barrington in the Berkshires. On Nov. 9 in New York City, I smelled smoke in the Bronx and Manhattan. There were brushfires in local city parks, including Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and fires across the Hudson River in New Jersey.
Referring to the bad smell, Desi Yvette, a 36-year-old Brooklyn resident, told The New York Times, “I thought maybe there was a fire nearby, but I didn’t hear any sirens.”
You won’t hear any sirens from the federal level when Trump returns to the Oval Office. Trump’s pick to run the Energy Department, fracking executive Chris Wright, says, “There is no climate crisis” and that claims there’s been “no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts or floods despite endless fear mongering of the media, politicians and activists.”
Trump’s pick to run the Energy Department, fracking executive Chris Wright, says, “There is no climate crisis.”
To the contrary, last year’s Fifth National Climate Assessmentassembled by scientists across the government, said extreme events are “becoming more frequent and severe.” Though the average number of tornadoes has remained stable, evidence is mounting that they’re increasing in power and becoming more common in the eastern United States.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. last year had a record 28 weather and climate disasters that cost at least $1 billion. This year is already in second place, at 24. In the 1980s, the nation averaged 3.3 such events a year, in adjusted dollars.
In announcing North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum to run the Interior Department, Trump boasted in an email that regulatory actions on public lands will be driven by a “‘DRILL BABY DRILL’ approach.” In picking former Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York to run the EPA, Trump said Zeldin will make “swift deregulatory decisions” that will “unleash the power of American businesses.”
Trump certainly took the leash off oil, gas and chemical companies in his first term, rolling back more than 100 environmental regulations. He packed the Supreme Court with justices who continued to defang the EPA tooth by tooth even after he was booted from office in 2020.
The high court, with Justice Samuel Alito leading the chargedramatically limited the authority of the agency from regulating carbon emissions from power plants, blocked a “good neighbor” rule meant to stem the spewing of fossil fuel emissions across state borders and ended the “Chevron” deference to government agencies and their scientists and career analysts in disputes where the law is ambiguous.
The mentality behind the rulings is summed up by a speech Alito gave to the Claremont Institute in 2017. “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,” Alito said. “Carbon dioxide is not harmful to ordinary things, to human beings, or to animals, or to plants. It’s actually needed for plant growth.”
That gets back to my tomatoes. According to the EPAthe carbon dioxide in our atmosphere has helped lengthen growing days in the contiguous 48 states by more than two weeks since the beginning of the 20th century, with most of the rise beginning in the 1970s.
Like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, Alito would say take a bite and be happy. Never mind that the heavenly taste is due to the hell of global warming stripping the Earth naked.
Derrick Z. Jackson
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Union of Concerned Scientists fellow in climate and energy at the Center for Science and Democracy. A former columnist for The Boston Globe, he’s the co-author of “Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock.”
The U.S. military on Wednesday carried out new strikes in Iran, shooting down four attack drones and targeting a ground control station. The military stated both the drones and ground facility posed a threat to the Strait of Hormuz, a U.S. official said in a statement to MS NOW.
The official said the ceasefire agreement remains in effect and described the U.S. military actions as intended to maintain the ceasefire.
“Today, U.S. Central Command forces shot down four Iranian one-way attack drones that posed a threat around the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. forces also struck an Iranian ground control station in Bandar Abbas that was about to launch a fifth drone. These actions were measured, purely defensive, and intended to maintain the ceasefire,” the official said in the statement.
At least three explosions were heard east of Bandar Abbas, a port city in Iran along the Strait of Hormuz, The New York Times and CNN reported, both citing Iranian state media. The explosions briefly activated Bandar Abbas’ air defense systems, Fars News Agency, a media outlet affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, reported early Thursday local time.
The latest strikes come amid an unstable ceasefire agreement between the U.S. and Iran.
Speaking at a Cabinet meeting at the White House earlier Wednesday, President Donald Trump said Iran wants “very much to make a deal” but “they haven’t gotten there,” adding that Iran was “negotiating on fumes.”
“We’re not satisfied with it, but we will be,” Trump said. “Either that or we’ll have to just finish the job. Their navy is gone … their air force is gone, everything’s gone. And they’re negotiating on fumes. But we’ll see what happens. Maybe we have to go back and finish it, maybe we don’t.”
On MondayU.S. Central Command said in a statement that the U.S. carried out “self-defense” strikes on missile launch sites and boats in southern Iran in order “to protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces.” That same day, Trump said in a Truth Social post that negotiations with Iran were “proceeding nicely!”
Julia Jester covers politics for MS NOW and is based in Washington, D.C.
Carla Herreria is an editor for MS NOW’s breaking news and liveblog team. She was previously a senior assignment editor at HuffPost.
President Donald Trump’s racist policy of welcoming white South Africans while excluding refugees from other countries is back in the spotlight after his administration raised its refugee ceiling — to bring in more white people.
Trump increased the refugee admissions ceiling by 10,000 for this year to allow more white South Africans to come into the country, a signed presidential determination reviewed by Reuters showed.
The document, dated May 21, said white South Africans of Afrikaner ethnicity face an emergency situation due to the “incitement of racially motivated violence” by the government and political parties in the majority-Black country.
The document, found herecites an “unforeseen emergency refugee situation” that doesn’t actually exist. Trump and his allies have pushed false claims that a “white genocide” is occurring, but South Africa’s government — and even advocacy groups representing the country’s white Afrikaner minority — have rejected the claim.
Reuters reported that the increased refugee limit is now 17,500 — and that only three non-South African refugees have been admitted into the U.S. this fiscal year. Reuters previously reported that the administration wanted to bring in 4,500 white South Africans immigrants per montha number that I noted mirrors the number of white German refugees the Ku Klux Klan wanted to welcome to the United States a century ago — when its members were popularizing xenophobic slogans like “America First” and launching campaigns of racist terror against people of color.
It’s noteworthy here that white supremacists have latched on to racist conspiracy theories, such as the “replacement theory,” saying that there is some kind of plot to replace white Americans with nonwhite people, particularly foreigners. In reality, what’s actually underway is the exact opposite: a government effort to deport nonwhite people in America — including people who have lived in the U.S. for years — while Trump’s regime takes steps to import white people, and as some conservatives fret over white birth rates.
It’s hard to imagine the klan itself wouldn’t approve of this policy.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
Amid the Republican Party’s ongoing assault on Black peopleDemocrats are borrowing a tactic from 20th-century civil rights activists and putting corporate America on notice.
On Tuesday, the Congressional Black Caucus said it sent a letter to more than 200 companies and business organizations, urging them to oppose the GOP’s push to eliminate majority-Black districts after the Supreme Court’s Callais v. Louisiana decision, which effectively permitted racist gerrymandering.
In 2021, the companies sent a letter to Congress in support of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, saying the legislation was needed to guard against racial discrimination and voter suppression. Signees on that letter included AppleDell and Googlewhose executives have since aligned themselves with President Donald Trump’s regime.
“Many corporations spoke clearly during that moment about the importance of protecting democratic participation, defending civil rights, and advancing racial equity,” the CBC’s letter reads. “Today, those commitments are being tested.”
The letter presses the companies to issue statements condemning the GOP’s push to dilute Black voters’ power, as well as information on corporate political spending. The pressure campaign follows the CBC’s public call for student-athletes to boycott public universities in states where Republicans have taken action against majority-Black voting districts.
Meanwhile, 16 Democratic state attorneys general sent a letter last week to three donor-advised funds urging them to lift restrictions on donations to the Southern Poverty Law Centeran anti-racist organization known for helping law enforcement officials take down white supremacist extremist groups. The charity-based arms of Fidelity and Vanguard, as well as a company called Donor Advised Charitable Giving, imposed the restrictions after the Trump administration’s baseless indictment of the SPLC. I recently wrote about how Trump allies have used these charges to downplay and outright deny the existence of racist extremismas well as spread lies about liberals being responsible for groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
This scrutiny of corporate America and its acquiescence to the MAGA movement has me thinking of a conversation I had with the Rev. Al Sharpton and the “Morning Joe” crew last week. During our chat, Sharpton warned that companies that align themselves with Trump’s war on diversity do so at their own risk, because Democrats could take steps in the future to hold these companies to account.
These letters show a strong interest among Democrats in pressuring companies that appear to be propping up, or placating, the rise of what many people see as Jim Crow 2.0.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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