People aren't doing much about greenhouse gases from agriculture

"Aren't doing much" is probably an understatement.

Half the states in the country have no greenhouse gas reduction goals, which makes it hard to see how the United States is going to reach its economywide target of a 50% reduction below 2005 emissions levels by 2030.

“It’s purely a political decision, right?” said Steven Hall, an associate professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Organismal Biology at Iowa State University. “If there’s no political will to advocate for such goals, it’s not going to happen absent market-based approaches or voluntary efforts.”

The Environmental Protection Agency has been tracking greenhouse gas emissions since 1990. Over that time, the energy and industrial sectors have slashed their combined emissions by nearly 35%, according to an analysis by The Gazette and Investigate Midwest of the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Inventory Data Explorer.

The agriculture and transportation sectors each went up more than 6% between 1990 and 2020, but transportation is poised to plummet as more electric cars hit the roads. Modern agriculture, heavily dependent on fossil fuels and nitrogen fertilizer, doesn’t have a solution on the horizon. - Investigate Midwest

AI weapons "summit" was a joke

This whole issue is getting far too little attention.

When delegates from 50 countries met in the Netherlands (last) week to discuss the future of military artificial intelligence, human rights activists and non-proliferation experts saw an opportunity. For years, rights groups have urged nations to restrict the development of AI weapons and sign a legally binding treaty to restrict the use of them over fears their unrestricted development could mirror last century’s nuclear arms race. Instead, the results of what could have been a historic summit were only “feeble” window dressing, the rights groups said.

After two days of in-depth talks, panels, and presentations produced by around 2,500 AI experts and industry leaders, the REAIM (get it?) summit ended in a non-legally binding “call to action” over the responsible development, deployment and use of military AI. The attendees also agreed to establish a “Global Commission on AI.” That might sound lofty, but in reality, those initiatives are limited to “raise awareness” about how the technology can be manufactured responsibly. Meaningful talks of actually reducing or limiting AI weapons were essentially off the table. - Gizmodo

States look to make the greedheads start to pay up

Yeah, a tough row to hoe, making this happen. But it would be so sweet, in a multitude of ways.

The super-rich have done phenomenally well over the course of the pandemic. Since March 2020, U.S. billionaires have increased their wealth by 50% and the world’s 10 richest men — led by Tesla founder and Twitter owner Elon Musk—doubled their fortunes in the same period.

Now, a coalition of state lawmakers from California, New York, Washington, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota and Hawai’i have announced a coordinated effort to increase taxes on their wealthiest residents.

The push is part of a new effort called Fund Our Future and is supported by the State Revenue Alliance — a group that coordinates political campaigns around tax justice — and SiX Action, a wing of the nonprofit State Innovation Exchange, which provides support to state legislators working to pass progressive policies. - In These Times

The anti-labor/industrial complex

New tactics are being used in contemporary union-busting and worker exploitation.

Deterring unions in the workplace has become a veritable cottage industry — though perhaps that phrase is inappropriately diminutive for a sector which brings in hundreds of millions annually.

The Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) offers some rare insight into these operations. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimated that total spending on the union-busting industry amounts to at least $340 million a year. However — because “loopholes in the law’s reporting requirements allow consultants and law firms [to] avoid reporting their work” — a full accounting is currently impossible.

It’s no surprise that the business lobby opposes even this limited disclosure. Corporate interests like the Chamber of Commerce, joined by the American Bar Association (ABA), are seeking to shoot down an Obama-era proposal for a “persuader rule” under the LMRDA, which would require disclosure of funds spent on anti-union consultants who advise management behind the scenes. Experts in legal ethics say that the lobbyist claims of First Amendment violations are unfounded, and that the ABA’s real interest is in protecting a lucrative legal niche. - Truthout

The Colorado River is drying up, and the repercussions could be big

Though I'll note that much of the ag production could be shifted elsewhere, if this country would quit wasting resources on corn ethanol.

It was called Boulder Dam in February 1935 when it began holding back the Colorado River to form the gigantic reservoir of Lake Mead. The foundations of irrigation-driven economic development—a dream of entrepreneurs since the 1890s—had been laid. Now, however, a relentless drought that has drained this and other reservoirs to record lows could turn that dream into a nightmare for the 40 million people and all the other creatures who rely on the river, which irrigates 6 million acres of farmland. About 80% of the water goes to agriculture.

The officials of seven states charged with allocating how much of this reduced water will flow to whom cannot agree. They’ve blown past two deadlines for letting the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation know what they’ve decided. The bureau had warned that if the states didn’t collectively set the reductions themselves by the most recent deadline, Jan. 31, it would do the divvying. Those cuts may amount to one-third or more of existing allocations. - Daily Kos

Somehow stopping the military-industrial complex

It's one of the great socio-political questions of our time, though it's rarely treated as such in mainstream discourse.

Yet I also urge antiwar forces to see more than mendacity or malice in “our” military. It was retired general and then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower, after all, who first warned Americans of the profound dangers of the military-industrial complex in his 1961 farewell address. Not enough Americans heeded Ike’s warning then and, judging by our near-constant state of warfare since that time, not to speak of our ever-ballooning “defense” budgets, very few have heeded his warning to this day. How to explain that?

Well, give the MIC credit. Its tenacity has been amazing. You might compare it to an invasive weed, a parasitic cowbird (an image I’ve used before), or even a metastasizing cancer. As a weed, it’s choking democracy; as a cowbird, it’s gobbling up most of the “food” (at least half of the federal discretionary budget) with no end in sight; as a cancer, it continues to spread, weakening our individual freedoms and liberty.

Call it what you will. The question is: How do we stop it? - TomDispatch

Bad maps could hurt broadband initiative

This is a complex and challenging effort, and as always bad data isn't helping.

(January 13) was a major milestone in the process of moving $42.5 billion from the federal government to states to distribute mostly to rural areas to build new, modern Internet access networks. January 13th marked the deadline for error corrections (called challenges) to the official national map that will be used to determine how much each state will get.

As an organization that has worked in nearly all 50 states over the past 20 years on policies to improve Internet access, we spent the last few weeks struggling to understand what was actually at stake and wondering if we were alone in being confused about the process. Despite the stakes, almost no expert we talked to actually understood which challenges – if any – would fix errors in the map data before it was used to allocate the largest single federal broadband investment in history.

This article will explore what is going wrong with the distribution of that $42.5 billion, the mapping process, and continued failure of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to show competence in the broadband arena. And it offers ways to fix these important problems as every jurisdiction from Puerto Rico to Hawaii feels overwhelmed by the challenge. - ILSR