Hasta La Gadget!

Mole — n. “A spy who achieves over a long period an important position within the security defenses of a country.”

Even Vladimir Putin’s former employer, the KGB, probably never dreamed that it could make a Russian agent president of the United States, but Putin is coming close to achieving that greatest infiltration in the history of espionage.

The evidence is growing by the day that Donald J. Trump is totally beholden to Russia. If elected, he would become the greatest mole in history.

As a piece by David Frum in The Atlantic points out:

For a candidate with few consistent views on anything, this adds up to a very clear picture. Joined with other evidence of Trump’s deep personal business obligations to people in the Putin ruling circle, and his campaign leadership’s long-standing involvement with the former pro-Putin authoritarian leader of Ukraine, the picture becomes even more troubling–even sinister.

Trump refuses to release his tax returns, using the absurd excuse that he is under audit. There are many possible reasons for why he wants to hide his financial records, such as that he is not worth nearly as much as he claims and that he gives virtually nothing in charitable contributions. But it seems highly likely that the biggest reason why he refuses to release his tax returns is that they show his deep financial ties to Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies.

“I have ZERO investments in Russia,” Trump tweeted on July 26. Like most of what comes out of his mouth and from his tiny fingers typing tweets, this is a bold-faced lie. And the flow of money in the other direction–loans from Russians to keep Trump’s empire afloat–are likely far greater.

Trump is ready to do Putin’s bidding by undermining NATO and virtually inviting him to invade the Baltic nations.

Trump doesn’t lie like a rug; he lies like a Russian agent

After asserting in November, “I got to know him [Putin] very well,” Trump now says, “I have nothing to do with Russia, nothing to do, I never met Putin, I have nothing to do with Russia whatsoever.”

Trump doesn’t lie like a rug; he lies like a Russian agent.

In his already-infamous news conference yesterday, Trump said, “I’m not going to tell Putin what to do. Why should I tell Putin what to do?” The real issue is whether Putin is–or will be if the Republican nominee becomes president–telling Trump what to do.

The Deafening Silence of Republican “Patriots”

Imagine what all Republicans would be saying if a Democrat had such a record of allegiance to a foreign power.

Why isn’t the party of fear afraid of putting a Russian mole in the White House?

When will Republicans put patriotism above party and denounce this evil and extremely dangerous man? When will they, at the very least, demand that he release his tax returns so we can see if he is a potential Russian agent?

{Robert S. McElvaine, who teaches history at Millsaps College, is the author of ten books and is completing a new book, “The Times They Were a-Changin’–1964: The Year ‘The Sixties’ Began.”}

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When people talk about American swimmer Mark Spitz, they also talk about the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. It was there that Spitz achieved new world records in each of his events, becoming the first Olympian to take home seven gold medals at the Games (a record since broken by Michael Phelps, who took home eight golds in Beijing).

But the 1972 Summer Olympics was also where something tragic happened. In the early morning hours of Sept. 5, Palestinian terrorists invaded Olympic Village, where the athletes stayed. The eight heavily armed men broke into the unit occupied by the Israeli competitors and took Israeli hostages in what would become a brutal deadly attack.

As people around the world watched the situation unfold on television, Spitz, who is Jewish, had the terrifying perspective of being on the ground in Munich in the midst of the chaos.

“I don’t think anybody knew what was happening at the time,” Spitz says. “Then, all of a sudden, there was this lockdown.”

He continues, “I was with the U.S. Olympic officials when they were part of the press conference and [someone] did an interview with me about winning the seven gold medals ― then we noticed on the monitors, there was a guy that came out on a balcony, that had some kind of hat on.”

As everyone now knows, that man was one of the Palestinian terrorists, part of the Black September Organization. Upon invading the building, the terrorists quickly killed an athlete and a coach who tried to fight back.

“They killed two people. One of them, they threw over the balcony,” Spitz says.

Nine other Israeli hostages were at the mercy of the terrorists. By the time the ordeal was over, a total of 12 people had been killed: six Israeli coaches, five Israeli athletes and one West German police officer. (Five of the eight terrorists were also killed during a gunfight with police.)

Looking back on the horrific events of that Olympic Games, Spitz remains stunned by the experience and the tragic loss of his fellow Olympians and their coaches.

“It was kind of like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I was there and I can’t believe what happened,’” he says.

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I am not a passionate Hillary supporter. I voted for Obama twice and would again if he were on the ballot. But, she is certainly qualified and prudent to a fault and not likely to bomb Toronto because Justin Trudeau dissed Melania on Twitter. Certainly, she is not nearly as big a liar as Donald Trump, who can’t even keep his fibs straight. (Full confession: I would vote for Charlie Manson before Trump.)

But I was genuinely and somewhat unexpectedly moved by the DNC program last night leading up to the thrilling nomination of the first woman to run for President by a major political party. I would have been equally thrilled if that woman had been Nikki Haley, who I have come to admire greatly over the past couple of years of living in South Carolina. She represents the heart and soul (and diversity) that the Republicans need if they’re ever going regain a national presence in the New America. But, I digress.

From Bernie’s thrilling call for voice acclamation to Hillary’s glass ceiling breaking goodnight, the nomination looked and felt like the America I have known and loved. Not perfect, but optimistic and forward looking. Yes, there are problems. There have always been problems. Anybody remember World War II, the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, the very stupid Iraq war which destabilized the Mideast, the near Depression of 2008? And, yes, there is too much disparity in income, enabled mainly by the trickle-down nonsense of the Republican Party and by a Democratic Party that has become entirely too cozy with Wall Street. I sincerely hope that Trump and Sanders are the wakeup calls that both parties needed to refocus themselves on the people who vote them into office.

But, let’s be real. There is no apocalypse now. It’s just the entertainment media industry trying to scare the bejesus out of us to sell us more Viagra and Preparation H. Muslims are not lurking under anybody’s bed or infiltrating the White House. Mexicans are not pouring over the border and stealing jobs from white Americans. Crime is way down over the last 20 years. We have the strongest economy in the world.

For me, one of the most inspiring moments of the DNC was the testimony of Lauren Manning, perhaps the most severely burned survivor of 9/11 who woke up one morning to find Senator Hillary Clinton sitting by her hospital bedside —  a Hillary who never stopped coming to see her or calling to see how she was doing or trying to be helpful. That tells me more about Hillary Clinton’s character than all of the fake Benghazi and email nonsense put together. There are dozens of stories of Hillary’s quiet very public support for New Yorkers in the wake of 9/11. I was there on that terrible day and for years after, and I can tell you that at no point did Donald Trump do jack for anybody other than himself.

The other high point for me was Bill Clinton’s ramble down memory lane in which he brilliantly outlined the focus on helping people that has animated Hillary’s life. If there is a more skilled politician on the planet, we haven’t seen him or her. He has magnetism and charisma to burn (which is great for a politician but less comforting for wives).

I interviewed him once in Little Rock during his first stint as governor and said to the photographer I was working with “This guy is going to be president someday.” Everybody knew he was a a hound dog but that Hillary was his soulmate, the real love of his life, and that she was the one woman who could match him intellectually and push him to great heights. She made Bill Clinton better than he could ever have been without her.

Of course, she stood by him through the Monica business. She loved him and knew that he loved her. And she had an investment. If men of that generation, which is also mine, had been dumped for having a roving eye, most of the men over 60 that I know would have been divorced multiple times.

Those of us of a certain age have come a long way with Bill and Hillary. Their story is the back story of many of us from the Vietnam generation. In 1968, we were the Bernie Bros. By the 1990s, when Bill was president, we had become triangulating American Express card revolutionaries. We forgot what we were fighting for and for whom. As insufferable as many of them are, the Sanders army reminded us of our younger, more idealistic selves. I like to think there is some of that ’60s revolutionary spirit left. Hillary may be my generation’s last chance to get it right.

A version of this post originally appeared on Medium.

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By Will Tucker
This story first appeared on our Viewpoints blog and Ecosystem Marketplace

Let’s preface this post with an indisputable fact: buying carbon offsets isn’t going to solve climate change. No one (outside of the climate denial camp) disputes that avoiding climate catastrophe will require a deep decoupling of the economy and greenhouse gas emissions. But when Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace (EM) surveyed companies that buy carbon offsets, it found that they’re using carbon markets to accelerate this deep transformation, rather than to create a green-tinted perpetuation of the status quo.

So, keeping that in mind – and parking our prejudices at the door – it’s time to take a fresh look at offsetting and how it can strengthen corporate strategies to reduce carbon emissions. Where better to start than with these eight oft-recycled misconceptions about the practice:

Myth 1: Companies that buy offsets are just buying their way out of their obligations

We hear this one all the time, but our research shows something completely different: namely, that those companies that do buy offsets are doing so as part of an overall carbon-management strategy, and they’re mostly using offsets to either tackle emissions they can’t eliminate internally or to create an internal “price on carbon” that focuses attention on emissions and accelerates reductions. Among businesses tracked in EM’s newest report, 88% of voluntary offset buyers and 92% of compliance buyers have formally adopted emissions reduction targets. In 2014, the 314 businesses that engage in offsetting invested more than US$42 billion in emissions reduction activities, surpassing the combined investment of the 1,522 companies who did not engage in offsetting (US$41 billion). In fact, companies that included offsetting in their carbon management strategy typically spend about 10 times more than the typical company that didn’t offset. Contrary to the “greenwashing” narrative, it appears as though using offsets is increasingly the hallmark of a company that’s leading on climate action rather than bringing up the rear.

Myth 2: Offsetting is niche or arcane

Actually, a lot of prominent consumer-facing brands use offsetting, including household names like General Motors, Delta Air Lines, and Microsoft, all of whom were among the top five buyers on the voluntary market in 2014. They’re hardly alone: of the nearly 2,000 companies who publicly disclosed data to CDP last year, 248 (17%) invested in projects to reduce carbon emissions outside of their immediate operations, purchasing the equivalent of 39.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (MtCO2e) in 2014. (See the list of top-20 buyers from 2012-2014 here.)

Myth 3: Offsetting is expensive

Ultimately, offsets should be expensive to reflect the true cost of climate change, and companies that internally price carbon often do set their internal prices high to focus attention on the issue, but the average offset on the voluntary market sold for just $3.3/tonne of CO₂ equivalent last year. Even when the average price was more than double that value, it still fell significantly under the internal per-tonne price on carbon adopted by many companies: 120 of these businesses reported a median internal price of $18/tonne to CDP last year. Over time, the price of offsets should rise to reflect the cost of dealing with carbon emissions, but that’s not an added cost imposed on us randomly; it’s an existing cost being properly reflected. For now, however, offsets are cheap – too cheap.

Myth 4: Offsetting is too cheap to incentivize real change

This is true for now, but that’s a question of policy, and not of product. So far, nearly all governments introduce caps on overall greenhouse gas emissions, and as those caps lower in accordance with the Paris Agreement, the price of allowances (issued by governments to permit emissions up to the level of the national cap) and offsets (created by entities that actively reduce emissions) should rise – unless, of course, emissions drop so far and fast that the problem is resolved.

Myth 5: Offsets come from a land faraway, from nebulous projects

Legitimate carbon offsets come from projects and are rigorously verified by third parties in accordance with recognized carbon standards, and many companies choose to buy from offset-generating projects close to home. Among voluntary offset transactions reported with geographical details in 2014, about a quarter involved a buyer purchasing offsets from the same location as its corporate headquarters. This practice is especially prevalent in North America, exemplified by the purchasing habits of companies like TD Bank and Waste Management Inc. The EM report speculates that brands buy offsets close to home in order to demonstrate impact to their consumers and bolster their “social license to operate” in a country or region.

Myth 6: Offsetting does not directly address emissions

Unlike the allowances used in cap-and-trade markets, offsets always represent real removals of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or avoided emissions somewhere in the world, and carbon standards require that developers demonstrate “additionality,” which means they have to show that the emission reduction wouldn’t have happened without the project. What’s more, EM’s newest report found that 79 companies are generating offsets within their own operations or supply chains by reducing emissions above and beyond regulatory requirement and economic incentives. L’Oreal, for example, distributes efficient, cleaner-burning stoves to women in Burkina Faso who boil the shea nuts used in its cosmetics products. Those stoves reduce emissions by reducing the need to chop trees, thereby saving forests, and they also reduce the health hazards of indoor smoke.

Myth 7: Offsetting barely makes a dent

Well, this one might be sort of true, but that’s partly because global emission reduction agreements have yet to take effect, and also because offsets are designed to be part of an overall reduction strategy and not a substitute for one. Companies surveyed in the report typically offset less than 2% of their total emissions, usually because they’re using offsets to compensate for just one segment of that total, like employee travel or the carbon footprint of a single product. Even the small percentage, however, represents a tangible impact on the climate – the over 140 MtCO₂e in offsets reported to CDP in 2014 had the equivalent impact of taking 30 million cars off the road for a year. As more companies sign on to the Science Based Targets Initiative, the percentage of emissions they address may go up.

Myth 8: Offsetting isn’t scalable because there simply isn’t enough demand

So far, the vast majority of companies that offset do so voluntarily, because there’s no law telling them they have to. That’s already changed in places like California, where companies are using offsets to help meet up to 8% of their emissions reduction obligation under the state’s cap-and-trade system, and it will continue to change around the world as emissions trading ramps up under the Paris Agreement. Buyers in these nascent compliance markets disclosing to CDP reported purchasing nearly 27 MtCO2e in offsets in 2014. As industrial emissions drop, project developers are waiting with bated breath to see how things shake out in the aviation sector, where the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is determining rules for a Market-Based Mechanism (MBM) to help airlines achieve carbon-neutral growth starting in 2020.

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Seven almonds. That’s all President Barack Obama was said to have eaten every night before bed, according to a recent New York Times profile on the night-owl-in-chief.

“Michelle [Obama] and I would always joke: Not six. Not eight,” Sam Kass, Obama’s former personal chef, was quoted as saying in the post. “Always seven almonds.”

It seems this was a case of the writer taking the joke too literally.

Obama clarifies the issue to the Today Show’s Savannah Guthrie in the video above:

“One night, [Michelle and Sam] were talking about me and teasing me about how disciplined I was that I didn’t have potato chips or I didn’t have a piece of cake. And this is when Michelle said, ‘Yes and he just has seven almonds. That’s it,’ to really drive home the point that I needed to loosen up a little bit. And Sam relayed this joke to the New York Times in the article, and somehow it was relayed as if I was counting out these seven almonds. And all my friends were calling up and saying this seems a little anal; this is kinda weird. I had to explain to them ― no, this was a joke.”

As Obama food news goes, this isn’t quite as Earth-shattering as when he involved himself with the Times’ guacamole and pea debate of 2015, which coincidentally went viral exactly one year and one day before the Times’ almond profile on the president was published.

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