October, 25 2022, 11:11am EDT
Vote Climate U.S. PAC Releases Unprecedented Statewide and National Climate Change Voter's Guide
Find Statehouse Incumbents Governors, U.S. House and U.S. Senate Incumbents and Challengers And Support or Opposition to Roe v. Wade
WASHINGTON
Today Vote Climate U.S. PAC releases our updated 2022 Congressional and Gubernatorial, plus a statewide Voter's Guide, making Vote Climate U.S. PAC the only website in the country to provide a climate change Voter's Guide for candidates for Statehouses (partial), Governors, U.S. House, U.S. Senate all in one convenient, user friendly site, making it a unique, unprecedented resource. (Always click the green + button to the left of the candidate's name, for detailed research and sources.)
For the first time in 2022, voters will also be able to use Vote Climate U.S. PAC's Voter's Guide for Governor, U.S. House and U.S. Senate to see if a candidate supports Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. The right to choose safe and legal abortion is a fundamental, human right and is the hottest voting issue of the mid-term elections.
"On June 24, 2022 the U.S. Supreme Court took away American women's essential right to bodily autonomy when they overturned Roe v. Wade. Just like climate change, the inevitable compulsory pregnancy that results from losing access to abortion, poses an existential threat to Americans. It threatens women's lives and health, imposing crippling economic hardships on them, their partners, and their families. Unwanted pregnancies and births stress the environment, driving climate change and related weather extremes. Now with our Voter's Guide, Americans can elect pro-choice candidates," said Karyn Strickler, President of Vote Climate U.S. PAC.
We are the only website in the country that gives incumbent and challenger for every Governor, U.S. House and U.S. Senate seat a Climate Calculation, a score ranging from Climate Hero to Climate Zero, helping Americans to vote climate. Like most Voter's Guides, we score incumbents on pivotal climate votes in Congress. But Vote Climate U.S. PAC is the only organization that goes well beyond votes to assess incumbent's position: what do candidates say about the issue; leadership: what do they do; and putting a fee on carbon polluters. (For more details see our 2022 U.S. House and U.S. Senate - Incumbents Scoring Criteria and U.S. House and U.S. Senate - Challenger Scoring Criteria.)
Our incumbent Governor's Voter's Guide also looks at their climate plan. We want to see: support for using 100% renewables by 2030; keeping fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas) in the ground; support for zero human-made, greenhouse gas emissions by 2050; and support for at least one of four particular types of carbon dioxide removal, not carbon capture and sequestration," said Strickler. (For more detail see our Scoring Criteria for Incumbent Governors and Scoring Criteria for Gubernatorial Challengers.)
The following categories from 2020, analyzing the politics of climate change, will also be updated and coming soon:
* Climate Heroes: Incumbents and Challengers Who Rated 100%
* Climate Zeroes: Incumbents and Challengers Who Rated 0 %
* Best to Worst Individual Incumbents and Challengers on Climate Change
* Overall Average Climate Comparisons by Political Party
* Overall Average Climate Comparisons by Swing Districts
* Overall Average Climate Comparisons by Region and Party.
"Voters want to prioritize the issue of climate change and reproductive choice in the voting booth. Our Voter's Guides help every American to vote climate in the halls of Congress and the Governor's mansion. Americans can also find out where their statehouse representatives stand on climate change. In fact, if used as intended to create a large, climate-action majority in every office in the land, our Voter's Guides will revolutionize the politics of climate change," according to Strickler.
Vote Climate U.S. PAC works to elect candidates to get off fossil fuels, transition to clean, renewable, energy and reduce carbon pollution by putting a fee on carbon, in order to slow climate change and related weather extremes.
LATEST NEWS
Violent Arrest of Emory Professor Spotlights Brutality of Police Crackdown on Campus Protests
"To sustain this level of blind support for Israel, the U.S. must erode its own democracy," said one foreign policy expert. "And that is what we see happening on U.S. campuses now."
Apr 26, 2024
Emory University economics professor Caroline Fohlin approached several police officers who were holding a student down on the ground on Thursday and demanded an explanation—but by the end of the day videos of her own arrest became some of the most widely circulated images of the rapidly spreading anti-war movement on college campuses across the U.S.
As she knelt down to ask the university officers, "What are you doing?" another law enforcement agent grabbed her arm and pushed her away before repeatedly ordering her to "get on the ground."
"Stop it!" Fohlin yelled before the officer pushed her to the ground and called for more police to help subdue her.
Fohlin then screamed, "Oh my God!" as the police pushed her down and told the police that she was a professor at the university as they held her on the ground.
Fohlin's arrest—after which she was detained for 11 hours and then charged with "battery of a police officer"—came a week after Columbia University suspended more than 100 students for setting up an encampment in solidarity with Gaza, where more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed by the U.S.-backed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) since October, and allowed police to arrest them. The mass arrests only served to galvanize students and faculty at Columbia and at dozens of other schools, with more than 400 peoplebeing detained so far.
The American Association of University Professors called the arrest "antithetical to the mission of higher education."
"Our institutions exist to foster robust exchanges of ideas and open dialogue in service of knowledge and understanding," said the group. "Sometimes that includes open dissent. Peaceful campus protests should never be met with violence."
Foreign policy expert Trita Parsi suggested that Fohlin's arrest was among the on-campus incidents that have strained the Democratic Party's argument that "democracy is on the ballot in November."
"To sustain this level of blind support for Israel, the U.S. must erode its own democracy. And that is what we see happening on U.S. campuses now," said Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, sharing a video of police tasing an Emory student who was already being held down on the ground.
Emil' Keme, a professor of English and Indigenous studies at Emory, toldDemocracy Now! on Friday that the scene on campus resembled "a war zone," especially after university and Atlanta police deployed tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse protesters.
"I started feeling the tear gas, and I held arms with some people," he said. "We were being pushed back out of the encampment. And the student I was holding arms with, she was then arrested and the next thing I knew I was on the floor and I was being arrested."
Writer Abdullah Shihipar said Emory president Gregory Fenves—and all university administrators who have allowed the arrest of students who have peacefully protested, including several who have unilaterally altered school codes in order to ban protests—should resign.
"It has been a disgusting and embarrassing week for higher education," said Shihipar.
The crackdown on Emory students and faculty came a day after Texas state troopers descended on the University of Texas at Austin campus, some on horseback, and clamped down on a student walkout there, arresting more than 50 protesters.
Also on Thursday, students at Indiana University and Ohio State University (OSU)—where more than 30 and a dozen students were arrested, respectively—reported seeing snipers stationed on the rooftops of campus buildings, which an Ohio State representative denied.
The Biden administration has not directly addressed the protests or their demands since Monday, when President Joe Biden suggested the nationwide student uprising is "antisemitic."
"The use of state violence against peaceful protestors is unacceptable," said Sara Haghdoosti, executive director of Win Without War. "Police batons deployed against students calling for peace in Gaza are not a source of safety on campus, nor are they a bulwark against antisemitism. They hurt people, impinge on fundamental liberties, and serve an extreme right-wing agenda that threatens Jews, Muslims, and the right to protest across the country. University leaders and government officials must take steps to protect students exercising their right to protest, not enlist police to attack them."
"Antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry are on the rise and serious issues nationwide, including on college campuses," continued Haghdoosti. "The people endangered by these scourges deserve better than to be the targets of cynical political ploys or to be used as excuses for violent repression. No one is made safer by police violence, and politicians who say otherwise are only attempting to sow division for their own reprehensible ends. What we need from our leaders right now is to de-escalate, permit protests, and not allow state violence against people exercising their fundamental rights."
Irene Khan, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, said Thursday that the protests spreading across the U.S. and internationally are a sign that "the Gaza crisis is truly becoming a global crisis of the freedom of expression."
"Legitimate speech must be protected," Khan said Thursday, "but, unfortunately, there is a hysteria that is taking hold in the U.S."
"We must not mix [antisemitism] up with criticism of Israel as a political entity, as a state," she added. "Criticizing Israel is perfectly legitimate under international law."
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'We Are Alive, But We Are Not OK': Gaza Doctors Detail Horrific Toll of Israeli Assault
"Our suffering is being live-streamed, but the world watches in silence. We have been failed."
Apr 26, 2024
Healthcare workers in the Gaza Strip have witnessed firsthand the appalling toll of Israel's war, treating badly wounded patients and amputating limbs without anesthesia, delivering babies condemned to starvation by the Israeli blockade, and enduring repeated attacks on overwhelmed medical facilities.
Such horrors have had devastating physical and psychological consequences for doctors living and volunteering in Gaza, including hundreds of staffers for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders.
On Friday, MSF published unnerving testimony from several members of its staff, including Dr. Ruba Suliman, who works at the Indonesian Field Hospital in Rafah, an overcrowded city in southern Gaza that Israeli forces are preparing to invade.
"There is constant noise from the drones, which never leave us. Sometimes it's really hard to sleep," said Suliman, whose family was displaced by Israel's assault. "I have this moral obligation to help people around me and I have this other obligation to save my kids."
"We are alive, but we are not OK," she said. "We are tired. Everybody here is devastated."
MSF also published a video Friday featuring an interview with Dr. Audrey McMahon, a psychiatrist who recently returned from Palestine.
The video begins with screenshots of a series of text messages McMahon received from an unnamed colleague in Gaza.
"I feel lost," the messages read. "I don't have a home. My home and my city were destroyed... Our suffering is being live-streamed, but the world watches in silence. We have been failed."
McMahon said that while doctors are "trained to see blood" and other things that "would be hard to see for most people," what they've witnessed over the past six months "is extremely distressing and disturbing for any human being who would see it."
"They've been seeing people coming missing one or many limbs, dismembered children, and women and men in acute extreme pain," said McMahon. "In the beginning we had no more supplies, and so some amputations were done without any painkillers or sedation, which is beyond imaginable."
"Some doctors, some medical staff, received their own people—their own family or extended family," she continued. "Having to witness that and treat your own people adds another layer of something potentially very, very traumatic."
More than 480 healthcare workers are among the more than 34,000 people who have been killed by Israel's military assault, which has almost completely destroyed Gaza's healthcare system—a major war crime. Not a single hospital in the territory is fully functional, and mass graves were recently discovered at two of the enclave's largest medical complexes, both of which Israeli forces reduced to ruin.
In a briefing to the United Nations earlier this year, MSF secretary-general Christopher Lockyear said that "there is no health system to speak of left in Gaza."
"Israel's military has dismantled hospital after hospital," said Lockyear. "What remains is so little in the face of such carnage."
Amparo Villasmil, an MSF psychologist who worked in Gaza in February and March, said Friday that "when we say that there is no safe place in Gaza today, we are not just talking about the shelling."
"There isn't even a safe place in people's minds," said Villasmil. "They live in a state of constant alert. They can't sleep, they think that at any moment they are going to die; that if they fall asleep, they won't be able to react quickly and run away, or protect their family."
Villasmil described finding a fellow psychologist in Gaza "leaning his head on his knees" and "on the verge of tears," telling her "how exhausted he was."
"He asked me what he was supposed to do, where he should go, and when this war would stop," said Villasmil. "I had no answers to give him."
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Amid Israeli Bombs, Bullets, and Blockade, Gazans Now Face Suffocating Heat
"The tent feels like it's on fire," said one young refugee mother. "It's so hot you can't bear it, especially with young children."
Apr 26, 2024
Just a few months ago, Palestinian children exposed to the elements amid Israel's genocidal assault on of Gaza were dying of hypothermia. Now they're facing potentially deadly heat as temperatures soar to over 100°F in the embattled strip, where hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced people are sweltering in tents and other makeshift shelters.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) warned Friday that "unexpected blistering temperatures across Gaza have added to the daily misery faced by the enclave's people and sparked new fears of disease outbreaks amid a lack of sufficient clean water and waste disposal."
"It is so hard. It's a heat that I can't describe."
Although there was a repsite Friday, temperatures in Gaza have soared as high as 108°F in recent days, and it's not even May yet. During the hotter summer months, the mercury can soar to over 120°F. Even with air conditioning and refrigeration during less trying times, Gazans often struggled with the summertime heat.
Now those luxuries are gone, replaced by suffocating heat, privation, and the ever-present threat of death or injury from Israeli bombs and bullets as the approximately 1.5 million people sheltering in Rafah brace for an impending invasion.
Many refugees are sheltering in structures made from heat-trapping agricultural greenhouses.
"The tent feels like it's on fire," Maryam Arafat, a young mother of three, toldThe New York Times earlier this week as her infant daughter screamed in discomfort. "It's so hot you can't bear it, especially with young children."
Gaza City refugee Mustafa Radwan told U.N. News that "it is like living in a greenhouse, no one can tolerate living inside."
Arafat and Radwan are but two of the approximately 2 million Palestinians forced from their homes by Israel's relentless bombardment and invasion of Gaza following the October 7 attacks.
Day after day, refugees are forced to wait in long lines for water and other necessities. Safe drinking water is particularly hard to find. Ice is nonexistent.
"Everything is a queue, everything is suffering in displacement," lamented Radwan.
Arafat said: "Everything has become difficult in this world. There is no water."
The scorching heat only adds to the misery. So do recent decisions—trees that were chopped down in the cold months for heating and cooking fuel are no longer there to provide shade as spring marches into summer.
Warmer temperatures also bring insects, some of which carry diseases.
"We can't sit outside and we can't sit inside the tent," Fadwa Abu Waqfa, another mother of three living in a tent in Rafah, told the Times. "It is so hard. It's a heat that I can't describe."
Dr. Ahmed Hanouda, director of a pop-up clinic in the Mawasi area of the devastated southern city of Khan Younis, told U.N. Newsthat "with the onset of summer, difficulties increase from water scarcity and overcrowding, leading to the spread of infectious diseases, skin sensitivities, lice, and other illnesses."
"We are, of course, trying to address these problems and provide services to the displaced people under these challenging circumstances based on the available resources," Hanouda added. "We look forward to offering better services and providing better facilities in the coming days."
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