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Some of the warmest places in Texas, where rolling power outages are occurring across the chilly state, are inside cars and trucks parked in the driveway of a home without electricity.

Note how it’s not just the turbines. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/frozen-wind-farms-were-just-a-small-piece-of-texas-s-power-woes

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/2/15/2016164/-Biden-approves-federal-disaster-assistance-as-winter-storm-batters-Texas?detail=emaildkre2

ince the election, Fox News has seen their ratings plummet. However, at the same time, smaller and more extreme right-wing media outlets, such as Newsmax and Trump's favorite, OANN, have seen a rise in viewers. We are starting to get a glimpse of what post-Trump right-wing media will look like, and it's worse than one can imagine. One would expect that media outlets like Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN, would go from being Trump's top defender to being Biden's loudest critic, but currently they are echoing and defending the conspiracy theories of QAnon. These right-wing media outlets have been a catalyst in the spread of disinformation. All of them feeding their audiences Trump's lies about the election being stolen, building up to the attack on the Capitol a few weeks ago. An attempt to prevent the certification of Joe Biden's victory, and allow Donald Trump to stay in power despite the results of the election and the will of the people. The influence of these right-wing media outlets is frightening. A poll from late December shows that even though 83% of Americans are concerned about the spread of false information, 39% of Americans believe that there is a "deep state" that tried to undermine Trump. There is a clear need for independent, progressive media, like Daily Kos. We deliver news you can do something about, providing our readers with the facts, independent analysis, and the tools to take immediate and effective action to make change. --Daily Kos Email

greenverden

Water at critically low levels across Turkey after lack of rainfall leads to most severe drought in a decade

leepacey

biden signed a whole bunch of executive orders today, all of which aiming to undo damage done by trump. i’m by no means a fan of biden, he’s a centrist at best and has a history of sexual assault and i despise how he’s pushing for “unity” instead of accountability right now, BUT here’s the full list of executive orders, because a little good news is good for you sometimes (but mostly because the news sites with this stuff are behind paywalls):

Completely abolishing the “Muslim ban” travel ban, which had blocked travel to the US from several Muslim-majority and African countries

Restarting visa processing for people from the affected countries from the travel ban, and focusing on “addressing the harm caused to those who were prevented from coming to the US because of the ban”

Reinstating ties with the World Health Organization (after Trump withdrew the US’s membership and funding last year) and making Dr. Anthony Fauci the head of the American WHO delegation

Rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement and ordering federal agencies to start reinstating more than 100 environmental regulations that were weakened/rolled back by Trump

Stopping the Border Wall construction and immediately terminating the national emergency declaration that allowed Trump to redirect billions of dollars to the wall

Revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline’s construction

Overturning Trump’s executive order that had stopped federal agencies, contractors, and other institutions from holding diversity and inclusion training

Immediately ending Trump’s 1776 Commission, a committee that aimed to give American students “patriotic” history lessons, which were widely criticized by historians and civil rights leaders as being “racist lies” and “nationalist propaganda” that whitewashed history and greatly downplayed how bad slavery was

Protecting the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) and keeping Dreamers (people who were brought to the US as children) from being deported

Extending the national ban on evictions

Overturning a Trump executive order that had pushed “aggressive efforts” to find and deport immigrants

Blocking the deportation of Liberians, a group Trump had targeted specifically

Reversing the rollbacks to vehicle emissions standards

Designating Susan E. Rice as the leader of a “robust, interagency” effort requiring all federal agencies to make “rooting out systemic racism” central to their work, and requiring federal agencies to submit detailed reports on equity in their ranks within 200 days

Reinforcing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to require that the federal government does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, a policy that reverses actions by Trump’s administration

Undoing Trump’s orders that slashed the size of several national parks (Trump had wanted to auction off parts of national parks and protected land, primarily to oil companies) and halting the oil and natural gas leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Restoring the directorate for global health security and biodefense at the National Security Council, a group Trump had disbanded, and requiring social distancing. A mask mandate would be met with significant legal opposition, but this order also requires masks on all federal property and by all federal employees

And lastly: immediately freezing all of Trump’s recent regulations he’d tried to sneak in at the last minute, so that the new administration can examine them much closer

also, this wasn’t an executive order, but in case anybody missed it: biden also chose rachel levine, a transgender jewish woman, as the assistant health secretary! from what i’ve seen, rachel seems great and has done a lot of good as pennsylvania’s health secretary, so that’s very exciting

With Australia's largest city facing 50-degree-plus summers, experts say its suburbs must be radically redesigned and rebuilt in order to remain liveable.

Parts of Victoria and NSW are sweating through an extreme heatwave that started sweeping across Australia's southeast on Saturday.

This may seem like just a good excuse to go to the beach, but as the planet warms and summers become longer and less bearable, heatwaves are coming to represent an existential threat to Australian suburbs.

Already, heat kills more people in Australia than any other natural disaster, including floods, cyclones and bushfires.

Now, faced with the prospect of 50-degree-plus summers, experts say highly urbanised parts of Australia may become unliveable within decades.

The race is on to re-imagine, redesign and rebuild the Australian suburb.

Car parks may be ripped up and planted with trees and greenery, houses retro-fitted with insulation, roads painted to reflect rather than absorb heat, and supermarkets and even whole suburbs built underground to reduce cooling costs.

One centre of these efforts is Western Sydney, home to more than 2.5 million people.

In this floodplain of closely packed houses, heat pools on islands of black bitumen and collects on sun-baked concrete.

The mercury gets close to 50 degrees Celsius here in summer — and that's just the ambient air temperature. The radiant heat from bitumen carparks can push 80C. The surface temperature of playground equipment has been measured at 100C. Since 2019, all 33 Sydney councils have been funding a climate adaptation program that has identified heat as the number-one climate threat to Sydneysiders."We are not yet building a city that's really equipping our people to survive and adapt extreme heat," says Beck Dawson, who heads the Resilience Sydney program."If the community doesn't have access to things to make themselves cool we effectively have a very large oven occurring across the Western Sydney plains."The scale of the emerging threat is different to anything we've faced before."When Penrith hit 48.9CA taste of that future came on January 4, 2020, when Sydney — surrounded by bushfires — was struck by a heatwave that broke temperature records.In the suburb of Penrith at the foot of the Blue Mountains, the mercury hit 48.9C, making it one of the hottest places in the world on that day.At her nearby practice in Blacktown, GP Kim Loo prepared for the worst."It's a sense of dread," Dr Loo says about the days of forecast high temperatures."I have isolated patients who are near poverty or the working poor who are frightened about power prices.""I've got quite a lot of patients with heart failure, respiratory failure and little kids with asthma." In Sydney, the most expensive suburbs are also the coolest — the harbour and coastal areas are often 10C cooler than inland.The highest temperatures are usually recorded in low socio-economic areas with a high proportion of people who are vulnerable to heat, including the elderly, those who are socially isolated, and those on pensions who cannot afford to run the A/C."Air con is so important because [when temperatures rise] over 35C fans just don't cut it, but running the air con is so expensive," Dr Loo says."Many of my patients cannot afford it. I advise them to go to shopping centres."Parts of Western Sydney may be 'abandoned'On a hot night in Blacktown, the 24-hour Kmart is a hub of social activity: people linger until it's cool enough outside to go home to sleep.The ad hoc reliance on shopping centres to keep cool illustrates the scale of Western Sydney's emerging heat problem, says Ms Dawson."We're putting one million more people into Western Sydney and they're not all going to fit into Kmart on the fourth day of a heatwave," she says.But most of the really vulnerable people, she says, suffer through the really hot days in silence — they stay inside and keep the curtains drawn.A project called Sweltering Cities is surveying residents to hear what it's like to live, work and travel around Western Sydney on days of extreme heat.The responses so far paint a scary picture, says Emma Bacon, who's running the survey."The amount of people who use the word 'dread' with me about summer is shocking," she says."Overwhelmingly, they're saying political parties should have policies to address the heat in the city."The CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology estimate the average number of days over 35C in Western Sydney could increase by up to five times by 2090.Put another way, Western Sydney will have an extra month of days over 35C by 2090.Mattheos Santamouris, a professor at UNSW and a globally recognised expert on building cooler cities, believes that without action to help residents adapt to hotter summers, "many places" in Western Sydney will be abandoned over the next 20 to 30 years. To understand why this may be the case, Professor Santamouris says it is first necessary to consider Western Sydney's geography.The desert to the west acts like an open oven door, blasting hot air at the suburban sprawl. Sea breezes help cool the city, but only reach as far as the edge of Parramatta.Combined with climate change, high-density development and clearing of the tree canopy, the westernmost suburbs are getting alarmingly hot."If we don't apply a very radical agenda for the next years, most people will move towards the coast where the sea breeze may help a lot," Professor Santamouris says.Public life, he predicts, will shift to air-conditioned malls. He's noticed this happening already in Darwin "where the main commercial street is not visited at all."Resilience Sydney's Beck Dawson believes Western Sydney will remain habitable, but people will have to live there in very different ways to what they do now.She suggests daily heat-risk rating system, similar to the one used for bushfires, could be introduced."When we get to extreme heat we have to respond as if it's an emergency," she says.Dr Loo is less confident. From her medical practice at the frontline of climate change effects, she foresees a future of rapidly escalating health costs due to summer heat."With the number of hot days we have within Western Sydney — if we don't have adequate adaptation — Western Sydney is not going to be liveable," she says. Taking action on heatAction on heat takes two forms: mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation is reducing the ambient air temperature itself (through planting trees or using heat-reflective materials), while adaptation aims to soften the impact of high temperatures (such as building houses with insulated roofs and double-glazed windows).So far, NSW Government efforts to mitigate the extreme heat of future summers has focused on increasing the tree canopy across Greater Sydney by planting one million trees by 2022.Explore Mt ResilienceRead moreDiscover a town built to survive and adapt to extreme weather on your mobile in AR.But though these programs are worthwhile, they are not enough on their own to counter the rising heat, says Professor Santamouris.He's calculated that planting five million trees would only decrease the maximum temperature in Western Sydney by 1 to 1.2 degrees.In some scenarios, he said, trees can even make the city hotter.Once trees get too dry, they draw water from their leaves into their trunks, so that they no longer have a cooling effect on air temperature. This can be countered with irrigation, but millions of trees would require a lot of water."Just planting a number of trees will not solve the problem," Professor Santamouris says. "We need to have much more radical solutions."Radiating heat into outer spaceOne simple solution is to use more light-coloured building materials that reflect rather than absorb heat.Trials have shown that painting road surfaces with heat-reflective paint can keep them at least 10C cooler than untreated sections.Widespread use of these cool materials could reduce the ambient air temperature in Western Sydney by 1.5C, Professor Santamouris calculates.Next-generation "super-cool" materials could double that figure.These materials, called photonics, radiate heat at a frequency of infrared that, rather than being absorbed by the atmosphere and bouncing back, sends the heat into space. They can be applied as paint or a spray-film for plastics and even wood to stay up to 10C cooler than the ambient temperature."We expect them to be ready in the next few years," Professor Santamouris says. But even these high-tech materials are no match for the impact of climate change, he says.The reduction in temperature through mitigation will be mostly cancelled out by the projected increase in ambient temperature."Given that, mitigation is not enough," Professor Santamouris says.A city of parks and underground bunkersThat leaves adaptation: reducing the impact of the heat.Sebastian Pfautsch, an urban heat expert at Western Sydney University, proposes replacing the model of runaway suburban sprawl with one that prioritises green space.He's calculated that in some Western Sydney's suburbs, 80 per cent of the surface area is sealed with roads, pavements, car parks buildings and other kinds of construction that trap heat.That figure, he says, needs to get down to 25 per cent."If you don't want to have urban development where you increase the temperature then you can only achieve that where you're the covering area with two portions open space and one portion of closed space," he says. To do this, he says, houses and shops need to be built largely underground, which has the added advantage of making them easier to cool.Another option is to house people in high apartment blocks surrounded by vast areas of parkland."We need to build up or build down," he says."This may sound utopian but it is a necessary type of progressive thinking in hot areas."A large shopping centre built underground can bring its cooling cost down by 95 per cent."Other ideas include retro-fitting homes with insulation and air-conditioners as well as providing cheap renewable energy.Renters or people without access to suitable roof space could purchase or lease solar panels in a centralised array, with the electricity generated credited to the customer's electricity bill.Such "solar gardens" are already operating in regional NSW, with customers in Western Sydney. Then there are plans to better forecast and track heat.Several Western Sydney councils have commissioned Dr Pfautsch to install thousands of temperature readers to map the eddies and flows of heat in their area.The Bureau of Meteorology has introduced a national three-day heatwave forecast and is also working on a "heatwave predictability map" that it hopes will better inform Australians about the severity and duration of each heatwave as it rolls in. A separate project led by Emergency Management Australia aims to draw on survey data to identify the locations of people who are most vulnerable to heatwaves.These national initiatives and high-tech solutions are welcome, Ms Bacon says, but there also many simple things that can be done right away."We still have bus stops that are uncovered," she says."Bus stops aren't an expensive piece of infrastructure."Progress is being made, but slowlyDr Pfautsch points out that poorly insulated houses with heat-absorbing black roofs are still being constructed in great numbers out west. Unsuspecting buyers chasing the Australian Dream are being locked into decades of sweltering heat."When it comes to development itself, I cannot say that I see any change," Dr Pfautsch says."How long can we afford to build these hotboxes that will at least be there for 30 to 60 years?" Progress is being made, but slowly, says Ms Dawson of Resilience Sydney.She points to the publicly funded Cool Suburbs program to develop a tool to help developers and planners better consider urban heat mitigation measures.None of these building design programs are mandatory for developers to use."As our building communities are getting used to what matters and what the community priorities are — they will respond," Ms Dawson says."I'm confident that a lot of the building industry will come up with fantastic ideas."The solutions to heat require co-operation between many stakeholders, including developers, planners and different levels of government, she says."It really reminds of the 1980s, when there was a really big change in the building code for cyclones."That change was precipitated by Cyclone Tracy, which levelled Darwin.Ms Dawson says Sydney's heatwave equivalent of this natural disaster will be a string of days of record-breaking heat combined with high levels of humidity."When we have one of those events, it'll be a very dangerous disaster across the city," she says."I really hope we don't have to wait for that event to galvanise the scale of action that we need."

#heat #climate change adaptation

Southern India will likely experience increased flooding while southeastern Africa and Madagascar will suffer from worsening drought.

The president signed two executive orders Friday aimed at lessening the economic fallout from the pandemic.

In Greece, a recent high-profile court ruling and policy change mark momentous human rights victories for migrants and children.

The United States is not just in crisis, it’s in crises. Within hours of taking office, President-elect Joe Biden plans to begin taking action on those crises, using executive power to put a big down payment on the priorities he campaigned on. And,...

Daily Kos jan 21, 2021

McConnell's obstruction of Biden's agenda has already begun

The Bernie Sanders inauguration meme went viral, and it's worth enjoying

'HOOYAH!' Deadly attack on Capitol has retired Navy warfare operator all but jumping for joy

Daily Kos relies on thousands of grassroots donations to make ends meet. Please support independent, progressive media by starting a monthly recurring contribution of $3 today.

'Don't do it': McCarthy explicitly warns that attacking other members is putting them in jeopardy

'Trump will go down as a total failure': Proud Boys jump off the MAGA Train

Cartoon: Q-mocracy

White House press secretary Jen Psaki holds first press briefing, and it's so very normal

Trump is gone but his enablers still remain in Congress. Donate $1 now to take back each of these key Republican Senate seats in 2022.

They call themselves 'Patriots': Trump’s scheme for a new third party rooted in far-right extremism

As nation faces white supremacist threats, Hawley blocks quick confirmation of Biden's DHS nominee

This was pretty special

Trump hands out 143 last minute pardons, but doesn't appear to have tried to grant a 'self pardon'

Sign if you agree: No Muslim ban EVER again!

Here's a roundup of reactions to that inauguration that happened today

Inauguration Day had me bracing for impact

President Biden hits the ground running with a list of rapid-fire executive orders

Add your name in support of her historic nomination: I stand with Deb Haaland.

'My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over'

How Ossoff and Warnock ran up the score to turn Georgia blue and flip the Senate

An Inauguration Day that looked like America, in pictures

ICYMI: Here are the top stories of the week so far:

Cartoon: The end of an error

'I'm about to puke': QAnon followers finally sickened by their own toxic sludge

CEO of MyPillow cries persecution about losing major retailers

The Daily Kos Recommended email includes our most read and widely shared stories from Daily Kos staff and our community. Want to write your own stories? Log in or sign up to post articles and comments on Daily Kos, the nation's largest progressive community. Follow Daily Kos on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Thanks for all you do, The Daily Kos team

To create the kind of change voters want to see in our democracy, the Biden administration and Congress must pass HR1— the For the People Act. The For The People Act is a once in a generation democracy reform package to expand and protect voting rights, get big money out of politics, and hold elected officials accountable for corruption. If Americans are ever going to see progress on the policy issues we care about, we must have a democracy that responds to the needs and priorities of voters - not wealthy donors and corporate interests. Together, we can build the support we need to transform our democracy into one that truly represents the American people. It starts with us.

Daily Kos email Jan 21, 2021 https://actionnetwork.org/letters/sign-and-send-the-petition-demand-the-senate-pass-hr-1-and-rebuild-our-democracy?source=2021HR1_DK&redirect=https%3A%2F%2Fsecure.actblue.com%2Fdonate%2Fdkdemocracy2021%3Frefcode%3D20210114SWHR1&link_id=1&refcodeEmailReferrer=email_1051042&can_id=a24ef39eae2fd488e37b532557755672&email_referrer=email_1051042&email_subject=take-the-power-from-corporations-and-give-it-to-the-people-action-needed

The Fracking Ban Act introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would ban fracking nationwide by 2025. This new legislation will immediately prevent federal permits from being issued for new fracking, new pipelines, new natural gas or oil export terminals, expanded fracking, and other oil and gas infrastructure. Fracking for oil and gas would become illegal on and offshore in the United States.

Daily Kos email Jan 21st, 2021

Joe Biden has only been president for 24 hours, and Senators Josh Hawley and Mitch McConnell are already throwing roadblocks in the way of his progress. McConnell is refusing to give Democrats their committee chairs unless they agree to protect the filibuster rule he used to help block more than 400 bills last year alone.1 Hawley—the same senator who raised his fist in solidarity with the Capitol Building insurrectionists—is attempting to block Biden’s nominee for head of the Department of Homeland Security.2 We can’t afford another four years of Republicans using procedural rules to kill legislation and nominations. If we’re going to see the progress America needs right now, the Senate’s first order of business must be killing the filibuster. But there are Senate Democrats who want to keep this outdated procedural rule. Demand Progress is mobilizing the grassroots to fight by flooding Senate offices with calls and emails, as well as working on the inside, pressing senators to stand strong and do the right thing by ending the filibuster. This is a critical moment, and we need your help to get this campaign underway. Can you help?

Demand Progress email 1/21/2021

currentclimate

Deep waters in the Southern Ocean are warming faster than previously known, which may speed the melting of parts of the Antarctica.

As the next blockbuster science report on cutting emissions goes to governments for review, critics say it downplays the obstructive role of fossil fuel lobbying

#ipcc

currentclimate

Rising emissions will drive longer and hotter lake heatwaves, which have been linked to the mass die-off of fish, scientist says

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