The World Is on Fire, and Joe Manchin Still Doesn’t Think the Issue Is Climate Change

On Thursday, conservative Senator and infamous fossil fuel baron Joe Manchin was asked about the northern wildfires that have left a third of America enveloped in health-threatening smog.

And Manchin answered in Manchin fashion, telling HuffPost reporter Igor Bobic that “everything is a factor” when asked whether climate change helps exacerbate wildfires. He parroted the conservative talking point that better management of forest lands is needed (true, but not even remotely enough to deal with the disasters we’re facing).

“Climate change is global climate... Most of the pollution today is coming from Asia,” Manchin added.

The notion is a common conservative talking point: Why should the United States curtail its emissions if China and India emit so much? The point is faulty for a few reasons, some logical, some philosophical.

For one, the United States emits a whopping 14.86 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per person. China’s is almost half that, at 8.05; India’s is even lower, at 1.93.

For another, whatever happened to the United States being a global leader? The castle on the hill? A driver of progress, a role model for other countries to aspire towards? It’s remarkable how a movement so fixated on patriotism, on flaunting supposed national excellency, is so quick to shrug off the possibility of whipping the world to collaborate together in pursuit of our basic common interest of the survival of the planet.

The obvious contradiction is similarly evident in the conservative ideology’s self-assured reverence of “responsibility.”

If members of the American conservative movement were fiscally responsible, they would identify the astronomical cost of environmental degradation, perennial disaster response, and wildlife, food, and water system devastation, and respond accordingly. If they were personally responsible, they would have the humility to identify the actors liable for such destruction, and excise them from power and influence—rather than just throwing blame to other countries. If they were interpersonally responsible, perhaps they’d get the stones to remove themselves from associating with such a movement that led us to today in the first place.

Manchin may pretend that his more conservative proclivities are some nod towards reasoned, thoughtful responsibility (as opposed to self-interest in how financially implicated he himself is in fossil fuels). But even with that self-purportion, there simply is no responsibility in the conservative movement, personally, or otherwise. Only a philosophy built on responsibility towards each other—those you know, and those you perhaps never will—will be sufficient to meet the challenges of the day.

Until such a day, the haze of our time will only grow thicker.

Is smoke okay or is it bad and also Canada’s fault? Those are a few of the weighty ideas Fox News has wrestled with over the last week in attempting to craft a response to the United States’ worst-ever day of wildfire pollution.

Wednesday night, Fox News host Laura Ingraham invited general-purpose reactionary Steve Milloy, whose career includes stints shilling for the tobacco and coal industry, to weigh in. “Look, the air is ugly, it’s unpleasant to breathe and for a lot of people they get anxiety over it,” Milloy said. “But the reality is just that there’s no health risk.”

“There’s nothing in them,” Milloy said of the haze still blanketing the East Coast. “They have no effect. EPA has all this testing on real-life human beings, it shows no effect. This is total junk science.” (Junk Science is also the name of his blog.)

If you look at the actual research, of course, a key problem with wildfire smoke is precisely those tiny particles (PM2.5) small enough to infiltrate lungs and even bloodstreams. As Jeva Lange reported for Heatmap, these can indeed be deadly:

The link between elevated PM2.5 particle concentrations and increased mortality can be dramatic. The aforementioned international study on wildfire-related PM2.5 and daily mortality found that “all-cause mortality” — that is, deaths that aren’t accidents — increases by 1.9%, cardiovascular mortality by 1.7%, and respiratory mortality by 1.9% with every bump of 10 micrograms of pollutant per one cubic meter of air. If New York’s PM2.5 concentration averages, say, 75 micrograms over three days this week (the concentration roughly expected for an average AQI of 150), that would mean people of all ages are 12% more likely to die than they otherwise would be. 

Armed with two Masters degrees and a J.D., Milloy has spent much of his career flitting around as a mercenary for whatever death-dealing industry will have him, defending the honor of various killer smogs. Milloy spent years working to amplify tobacco industry-friendly talking points that the harms of cigarette smoke were overblown. That included his time as executive director of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, or TASCC, which at one point sought to “assist Phillip Morris in its targeted state and national efforts” by “questioning the validity of scientific studies.” 

Milloy’s defense of tobacco smoke in some cases sounded a lot like his defense of wildfire smoke yesterday. While still getting funding from Philip Morris, Milloy wrote for Fox that secondhand smoke was simply “annoying to many nonsmokers. That is the essence of the controversy and where the debate should lie—the rights of smokers to smoke in public places versus the rights of nonsmokers to be free of tobacco smoke.” 

Like fellow travelers who defended cigarettes, Milloy has long since moved on to attacking climate science and policymaking. He’s spent no shortage of time proffering shareholder resolutions to get companies to stop talking about climate change. TASCC got $40,000 from ExxonMobil between 2000 and 2003. The company also gave $50,000 to the Free Enterprise Action Institute, another body registered to Milloy’s Maryland address, Mother Jones reported. He went on to serve on Donald Trump’s transition team, and since 2020 has been a member of the Heartland Institute’s Board of Directors.  

When I met him briefly at a Heartland conference in 2019, Milloy lamented that oil companies like ExxonMobil had gotten too scared to fund truth-telling climate skeptics like himself. As he once told The New Yorker, after all, “Wealth is what makes people happy, not pristine air, which you’ll never get.”

The January 6 committee may have closed up shop when the GOP took over the House, but that doesn’t mean that Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who was its chairman, has stopped scouring the landscape for targets. On Thursday, Thompson, the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, called on Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari to resign, citing deleting “business” texts on a government-issued phone and bungling an investigation into deleted Secret Service text messages.

Why would a Democrat go after an IG in a Democratic administration? Maybe because Cuffari is a Trump administration holdover whose resume includes a stint as a policy adviser to Republican Governors Jan Brewer and Doug Ducey of Arizona. Oh—and because the texts he deleted may have had to do with the whereabouts and movements of Secret Service agents on Jan. 6.

Last July, Cuffari admitted that the Secret Service, which currently falls under the purview of DHS, conspicuously deleted text messages on January 5 and January 6. Those messages would have been valuable to the Jan. 6 committee. Not long after Cuffari’s admission, members of Congress learned that Cuffari and his team actually knew that the texts were deleted—and had known for months, without notifying congressional investigators.

If anything, the call by Thompson and Congressman Glenn Ivey, the ranking member of the subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability, has been measured and reserved. It’s taken them this long to demand that someone else have Cuffari’s job despite the mounting evidence against the inspector general. Earlier this week Thompson and Ivey introduced the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Transparency Act aimed at addressing “years of troubling reports calling into question the quality, effectiveness, and transparency of the DHS Office of Inspector General’s oversight activities as well as its management,” according to a press release.

Keep in mind that this isn’t just any old inspector general job. DHS covers border security, immigration, the Secret Service, and cyber security, among other topics. Whoever runs oversight over that agency is in an enormously important and influential position. Cuffari’s tenure satisfied, to some extent, Donald Trump’s agenda. Thompson’s moves suggest that Cuffari’s conduct is still in line with the Trump administration’s values. Thus the push to get Cuffari out as soon as possible. 

“Your apparent violations of Federal criminal laws and your mishandling of key investigations within DHS have undermined any confidence in your ability to carry out your duties,” the two Democratic lawmakers wrote in a letter publicized on Thursday. “We must restore credibility to the OIG in order to have independent oversight and accountability within DHS. Your resignation is the necessary first step.”

It’s amazing it’s taken this long for Democrats to make these calls.

Tim Scott has positioned himself as the Republican most serious about police and civil rights reform. But it turns out he may have sabotaged a (very moderate) police reform bill he and Senator Booker worked on in 2021, perhaps in preparation to run for president.

The revelations come from Ben Terris’s new book The Big Break, in which he traces efforts between the two cross-the-aisle Black senators to work together and craft a police reform bill. In 2021, Scott’s office told Booker’s that if they could get some support from police organizations, they “would be able to get enough Republicans to pass the thing,” Terris writes. And soon, Senator Booker reached a police reform package that did indeed earn potential support from two police organizations—the Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police—so long as Republicans could agree to the same text they had seen.

Booker’s team took the bill to Scott’s office.

But shortly after Scott’s office received the bill, a copy was curiously leaked to the National Sheriffs’ Association. Then, Terris writes, “With the Sheriffs’ Association as a shield, Scott rejected the offer. Even though the bill would have added millions of dollars to police department budgets, he accused Democrats of wanting to ‘defund the police,’ something that almost no one in Congress had been saying for months.”

The turn of events came as a surprise to Booker’s team. “It made [them], and other Democrats, pretty sure that Scott hadn’t been serious about passing legislation for quite some time… In fact, there were some on Booker’s team who had come to believe that Scott didn’t want to have a police reform bill weighing him down if he ever decided to run for president.”

Scott’s office did not respond to The New Republic’s request for comment.

In 2020, Scott did introduce his own police reform bill, called the JUSTICE Act, crafted in the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd by Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin and Breonna Taylor by Louisville police officers Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankinson, and Myles Cosgrove.

That bill actually did threaten to defund the police, if local departments were found not to be compliant with policies like banning chokeholds, stopping no-knock warrants for drug cases, and eliminating racial profiling practices.

“Our bill says that we will defund the departments if they don’t ban chokeholds,” Scott said in a Facebook live event in June 2020.

The bill failed after it met opposition, in part because it didn’t deal with qualified immunity, which protects officers from being held accountable for violence or misconduct against the people they’re supposed to protect.

Fast forward years later, and police are indiscriminately arresting and even murdering people protesting police brutality and environmental degradation; killing a migrant worker who just wanted to finish his shift after being fired; and arresting journalists covering protests against the brutal murder of a homeless person.

Meanwhile, last month, Scott joined all his Republican colleagues, and eight Democrats and independents, in voting to overturn Washington, D.C.’s police reforms that would have banned chokeholds and made body camera footage of officer-caused deaths, or serious uses of officer force, more accessible to the public.

Such is the spineless legacy Scott apparently brings to his almost-certain-to-lose presidential campaign.

Pablo Manríquez contributed reporting to this story.

The House is taking a pass on probing a Biden administration child labor scandal. Here’s the reason why.

One of the more Gothic recent developments in the Republican Party is its positioning itself as the party of child labor. In February, The New York Times handed congressional Republicans, practically on a silver platter, a camera-ready Biden administration scandal: About 100 migrant children in 20 states “described [performing] jobs that were grinding them into exhaustion” in flagrant violation of child-labor laws. The Times followed up in April with a report blaming the situation on ineffective coordination between the Labor Department, the Health and Human Services Department, and the Biden White House. The Labor Department reported a 37 percent increase in child-labor violations in 2022. Surely House Republicans would set aside their investigations into various phony Biden administration scandals and shift their attention to this very real one.

It didn’t happen. It fell this week to the senior Democratic member of the House Education and Labor Committee, Bobby Scott, to write a letter to GOP committee chair Virginia Foxx urging her at long last to schedule a hearing on “the illegal employment of children in unsafe conditions.” Scott released the letter to the press Thursday afternoon.

Why won’t Foxx reach for this low-hanging fruit? Partly because, as Scott notes, it would spotlight inadequate funding for federal agencies like the Labor Department’s wage and hour division and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and Republicans prefer to starve those agencies. But mostly Foxx is resisting because Republicans are pressing hard at the state level to deregulate child labor. More than a dozen state legislatures have introduced such bills, and four states—New Hampshire, Arkansas, New Jersey, and Iowa—have enacted them. That’s liable to come up in a congressional hearing on the scourge of child labor. Better to take a pass.