January, 12 2022, 04:41pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Doug O’Malley, Director, Environment New Jersey Research & Policy Center, domalley@environmentnewjersey.
Hannah Read, Environment America Research & Policy Center Federal Clean Energy Advocate, hread@environmentamerica.org
Josh Chetwynd, Deputy Director, Media Relations, jchetwynd@
Biden Administration Goes Big on Offshore Wind With NY Bight Lease Auction
Action will open up 480,000 acres off Sandy Hook & Jersey Shore coastlines to offshore wind.
WASHINGTON
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced Wednesday that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) will hold a wind energy auction on Feb. 23 for more than 480,000 acres in the New York Bight. This will be the first offshore wind energy auction under the Biden administration.
The auction will allow offshore wind developers to bid on six lease areas - the most areas ever offered in a single auction, according to BOEM's Final Sale Notice. Leases offered in this sale, which are located off the Jersey Shore, ranging from off Sandy Hook to Long Beach Island and could be as far out on the Outer Continental Shelf as 70 miles off the coastline, could result in 5.6 to 7 gigawatts of offshore wind energy. That would be enough energy to power more than 2 million homes. As offshore wind technology continues to advance, these areas will create the potential for clean renewable offshore wind power close to the energy demands of the greater New Jersey region.
Secretary Haaland was joined by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul in outlining their shared vision for developing a robust offshore wind domestic supply chain that will deliver benefits to residents, including underserved communities, in New Jersey, New York and the surrounding region.
Environment New Jersey Research & Policy Center is Environment America Research & Policy Center's state partner in the Garden State.
Environment New Jersey Research & Policy Center Director Doug O'Malley issued the following statement on the announcement:
"New Jersey has long led the nation on offshore wind initiatives and is now poised to expand its role. The potential this clean energy goldmine off the Jersey Shore provides could be a game changer. Unlocking this swath of area in the New York Bight is pivotal to not only reaching Gov. Murphy's goal of 7,500 megawatts of offshore wind by 2035 but also going beyond that. We have more than enough wind blowing off the Jersey Shore to meet our current and future electricity needs, and we should be thinking big on how to power our state with clean energy to meet the 50% renewable energy by 2030 mandate.
"Clean renewable energy is the solution our state and country desperately needs. As extreme weather events become more common and our coastline becomes ever more vulnerable, it's clear the time is now to turn away from fossil fuels and toward the promise of offshore wind. With the potential to power 2.6 million homes here in the Garden State, these lease areas stand to revolutionize how New Jerseyans get their power. This collaboration aims to serve as a model for future engagement and continues to cement the reality that the United States - and New Jersey - needs to lead on offshore wind to mitigate climate change's impacts. We urge the Murphy administration to build on this collaboration and continue its leadership making New Jersey the national leader on offshore wind."
Hannah Read, Environment America Research & Policy Center's federal clean energy advocate issued the following response:
"The U.S. coastlines are chock-full of clean renewable offshore wind just waiting to be harnessed, and with each new project or lease, America is one step closer to realizing the benefits of using it to power our lives. With offshore wind alone, the Atlantic region could produce almost four times as much electricity as that part of the country used in 2019. This enormously abundant resource will be a difference-maker for our energy system, fostering resiliency and a healthier future for generations to come. Holding these leases is a crucial progression towards accomplishing the Biden administration's national goal to reach 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, and it's exciting to see the pieces start falling into place."
With Environment America, you protect the places that all of us love and promote core environmental values, such as clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and clean energy to power our lives. We're a national network of 29 state environmental groups with members and supporters in every state. Together, we focus on timely, targeted action that wins tangible improvements in the quality of our environment and our lives.
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Warning of 'Unprecedented Risks,' Scientists Say Mirror Bacteria 'Should Not Be Created'
"Our analysis suggests that mirror bacteria could broadly evade many immune defenses of humans, animals, and plants," according to a group of 38 scientists, including multiple Nobel Prize winners.
Dec 13, 2024
Dozens of scientists are calling in no uncertain terms for a halt on research to create "mirror life," particularly "mirror bacteria" that could "pose ecological risks" and possibly cause "pervasive lethal infections in a substantial fraction of the plant and animal species, including humans."
The group of 38 scientists, who include Nobel laureates and other experts, addressed research into "mirror life"—mirror-image biological molecules—in a piece of commentary published in the journal Science published Friday, which accompanied a technical report that was released earlier in December.
One of the scientists, synthetic biologist Kate Adamala at the University of Minnesota, was working on creating a mirror cell but "changed track last year" after studying the risks, according to the Guardian.
"We should not be making mirror life," she told the outlet. "We have time for the conversation. And that's what we were trying to do with this paper, to start a global conversation."
To that end, the authors of the commentary plan to convene discussions on the risks of mirror life and related topics in 2025, with the hope that "society at large will take a responsible approach to managing a technology that might pose unprecedented risks."
The ability to create mirror life is likely over a decade away and would require sizable investment and technical progress, meaning the world has the opportunity to "preempt risks before they are realized," according to the scientists.
When broken down into simple terms, mirror life sounds like something out of science fiction. All the biomolecules that constitute life have a "handedness" to them—"right-handed" nucleotides make up DNA and RNA, and proteins are formed from "left-handed" amino acids.
"So when we're talking about mirror-image life, it's kind of like a 'what if' experiment: What if we constructed life with right-handed proteins instead of left-handed proteins? Something that would be very, very similar to natural life, but doesn't exist in nature. We call this mirror-image life or mirror life," explained to Michael Kay, a professor of biochemistry at University of Utah's medical school.
Some scientists like Kay are interested in the medical possibilities of mirror-image therapeutics—which Kay says holds potential for treating chronic illness in a more cost-effective way—but both he and the authors of the recently published commentary are concerned about the potential threats posed by mirror bacteria.
"Our analysis suggests that mirror bacteria could broadly evade many immune defenses of humans, animals, and plants. Chiral interactions, which are central to immune recognition and activation in multicellular organisms, would be impaired with mirror bacteria," according to the scientists.
Essentially, as Kay puts it, it’s unlikely that mirror bacteria would be subject to the same constraints as regular bacteria, such as the human immune system or antibiotics.
The scientists warn that further developing this research could open a Pandora's box: "Unless compelling evidence emerges that mirror life would not pose extraordinary dangers, we believe that mirror bacteria and other mirror organisms, even those with engineered biocontainment measures, should not be created."
The authors argue that scientific research with the goal of creating mirror bacteria should not be allowed, and that potential funders should not support work related to mirror bacteria.
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In Wake of Killing, UnitedHealth CEO Admits 'No One Would Design a System Like the One We Have'
One critic said UnitedHealth Group chief executive Andrew Witty should "resign and then dedicate every dollar he has to dismantling the current system brick by brick and building one based on public health in its stead."
Dec 13, 2024
UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty wrote in a New York Times op-ed Friday that the for-profit U.S. healthcare system "does not work as well as it should" and that "no one would design a system like the one we have," admissions that came as his industry faced a torrent of public anger following the murder of UnitedHealthcare's chief executive.
Witty declared that his firm, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare and the nation's largest private insurer, is "willing to partner with anyone, as we always have—healthcare providers, employers, patients, pharmaceutical companies, governments, and others—to find ways to deliver high-quality care and lower costs."
But critics didn't buy Witty's expressed commitment to reforming an industry that his company has helped shape and profited from massively. Witty was the highest-paid healthcare executive in the U.S. last year, and 40% of the private insurance industry's total profit since the passage of the Affordable Care Act has flowed to UnitedHealth Group.
"It is (barely) true that UnitedHealth didn't design the U.S. system of corporate insurance, which kills tens of thousands of people a year through denial of care," Alex Lawson, executive director of the progressive advocacy group Social Security Works, told Common Dreams. "But they certainly have perfected it and turned it into a medical murder apparatus at industrial scale. They not only block all attempts to change the system in the direction of public health, they bribe and bully with their billions in blood money to make it even crueler."
"Andrew Witty is the high priest of the temple to Moloch and Mammon, murder and money," Lawson added. "And there is no way for him to wash his hands of it, except perhaps to resign and then dedicate every dollar he has to dismantling the current system brick by brick and building one based on public health in its stead."
"Medicare for All is the only proposal on the table capable of delivering universal, continuous coverage for everyone, while also securing the efficiency and savings only possible through the elimination of private insurance."
While publicly pledging to cooperate with reform efforts, Witty has defended his company's care denials in private and urged his employees not to engage with media outlets in the aftermath of Thompson's murder.
Contrary to Witty's depiction of his company in his Times op-ed, UnitedHealth has historically been an aggressive opponent of reform efforts aimed at mitigating the harms of for-profit insurance and building public alternatives. The Leverreported in 2021 that UnitedHealth Group "held a webinar to pressure its rank-and-file employees to mobilize against efforts in Connecticut to create a state-level public health insurance option."
At the national level, UnitedHealth has spent over $5.8 million this year lobbying the federal government, according to OpenSecrets.
Witty, who was born in a country with a public healthcare system, did not detail the kinds of reforms he would support in his op-ed Friday, but it's clear he would oppose a transition to a single-payer system such as Medicare for All, which would effectively abolish private health insurance and provide coverage to all Americans for free at the point of service—and at a lower total cost than the status quo.
In a column for The Nation on Friday, writer Natalie Shure argued that "the appalling amount of resources and energy we put into maintaining the existence of health insurance is wasted on an industry with no social value whatsoever."
"You could eliminate every one of these corporations tomorrow and build a system without them that works better, for less money, and with less hassle," Shure wrote. "Other countries already have systems like this. Medicare for All is the only proposal on the table capable of delivering universal, continuous coverage for everyone, while also securing the efficiency and savings only possible through the elimination of private insurance."
"None of that means that murder is justified or useful," Shure added. "But anger can be. Some politicians, from Bernie Sanders, to Elizabeth Warren, to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have begun to make public statements ascribing the reaction to Brian Thompson's murder to widespread fury over the health insurance industry. The next step is to harness it, and to build something new."
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Why Can't We Fund Universal Public Goods? Blame the Tax-Dodging Billionaire Nepo Babies
"In 2024, these billionaire families used their enormous wealth to make record-breaking political contributions to secure a GOP trifecta," reads a new report.
Dec 13, 2024
The children of the richest families in the U.S. are well-known for spending their vast wealth on frivolous luxuries—constructing a replica of a medieval church on their acres of property, in the case of banking heir Timothy Mellon, or starting a brand of T-shirts described by one critic as "terrible beyond your wildest imagination," as Wyatt Koch, nephew of Republican megadonors Charles and David, did.
But a report released by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) on Thursday shows how "billionaire nepo babies" don't just waste their families' fortunes. They also benefit from "a rigged system" that allows them to "pass that wealth down over generations without being properly taxed–often without being taxed at all."
In addition, the heirs of the country's biggest fortunes spend vast sums "to elect politicians who protect their unearned wealth and manipulate the country's economy in their favor," said ATF.
Along with Mellon and Koch, the report profiles Samuel Logan of the Scripps media dynasty; Nicola Peltz-Beckham, daughter of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz; Gabrielle Rubenstein, whose family has made its fortune in private equity; and President-elect Donald Trump's son, Eric Trump.
The nepo babies are part of a small group of billionaire families in the U.S. who benefit from tax loopholes that ensure little of their immense wealth ever goes to benefit the public good.
At least 90 billionaires have passed away over the last decade, leaving their beneficiaries $455 billion in collective wealth.
But according to ATF, "$255 billion (56%) of that amount was likely entirely exempt from the capital gains tax because of a special break called 'stepped up basis.'"
"Trump and his allies in Congress are doing their donors' bidding by rigging the system in their favor and pushing a $4 trillion giveaway to wealthy elites and giant corporations."
Without loopholes included the stepped up basis tax cut, the current estate tax on billionaires and centimillionaires would yield enough revenue to fund universal childcare, preschool, and paid family leave for U.S. workers, with hundreds of billions of dollars left over, according to ATF's report.
The wealthy heirs profiled in the report and their families are some of the Republican Party's top donors—contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to candidates including Trump in the hopes of securing even more tax cuts.
Mellon, for example, is Trump's "biggest supporter, giving $140 million to a pro-Trump PAC in 2024 alone," reads the report.
A previous analysis by ATF found that as of late October, just 150 billionaire families had spent $1.9 billion on the 2024 elections.
As the Center for American Progress found earlier this year, Trump's plan to extend the tax cuts that he pushed through in 2017 would cost $4 trillion over the next decade.
"The vast wealth inherited by centuries-old billionaire families is staggering. While these heirs and their billions go undertaxed, enormous sums are squandered on lavish mansions, private jets, and vanity projects instead of funding crucial public investments," said ATF executive director David Kass. "In 2024, these billionaire families used their enormous wealth to make record-breaking political contributions to secure a GOP trifecta. Now, Trump and his allies in Congress are doing their donors' bidding by rigging the system in their favor and pushing a $4 trillion giveaway to wealthy elites and giant corporations—all while advocating for cuts to vital programs that working and middle-class Americans depend on."
The report calls for Congress to pass "proven, pragmatic proposals to unrig the tax system that enjoy high levels of popular support," such as the Ultra Millionaire Tax Act that was proposed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) this year. The bill would tax fortunes between $50 million and $1 billion at 2% and wealth above $1 billion at $1 billion.
The small tax on enormous wealth would generate "a whopping $3 trillion over 10 years," said ATF.
The estate tax could also be "restored so that it can play a meaningful role in promoting fairness and equal opportunities" through the passage of the For the 99.5% Act, which was introduced in 2023 by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.).
Under the bill, the estate tax exemption would be lowered to $7 million per couple and the current 40% flat rate would be replaced with a sliding scale that would charge higher rates as a family's wealth grows.
"None of these tax reforms would impoverish the ultra wealthy, nor even inconvenience them in any meaningful way–but they would reduce the concentration of wealth that is so corrosive to society," reads the report. "At the same time, they would raise trillions of dollars that could be used to reduce inequality and improve the lives of families that can only dream of the kind of security and opportunity enjoyed by the nation’s richest clans."
"And if rich families ever did need to tighten their belts a bit to pay their taxes," the report continues, "the economizing might begin by reducing the flow of money funding the extravagant lifestyles of America's Billionaire Nepo Babies."
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