Hasta La Gadget!

Since its inception, SpaceX has been working toward developing reusable rockets. From a fiscal standpoint, the move makes a tremendous amount of sense: Not having to pay tens of million dollars to build a new first stage booster every time you launch is cost-effective, and would make launches a hell of a lot easier as…

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In a 900-word op-ed focused on abortion and the way politicians speak about abortion, the words “woman” and “women” each appear just once.

Surprising, right? You might think that it would be difficult to engage in an extended discussion about abortion without acknowledging the people who have abortions. But lo and behold, author, professor and former priest Thomas Groome managed to do just that in an op-ed for the New York Times. 

Groome argues that “Democrats must stop being the abortion party” if they want to appeal to Catholic voters and win elections. But in doing so, he essentially ignores the very women that vote for Democrats ― in part because they need access to reproductive care, and want to see their elected officials recognize and fight for that right. 

The op-ed treats abortion as a political talking point that should be pushed to the side and spoken about in hazy, moral terms in order to avoid alienating people who would prefer that abortions didn’t exist. And yet it’s women, especially low-income women and women of color, who make up a significant portion of the base of the Democratic party and suffer the consequences when anti-abortion policies (which Republicans tend to champion) are implemented. 

One need look no further than the respective major party platforms to see what a stark contrast there is between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to reproductive rights. The 2016 Democratic platform states that Democrats “believe unequivocally, like the majority of Americans, that every woman should have access to quality reproductive health care services, including safe and legal abortion ― regardless of where she lives, how much money she makes, or how she is insured.” It also commits to repealing the Hyde Amendment, which restricts federal Medicaid coverage for abortion services, disproportionately impacting low-income women. On the other hand, the 2016 GOP platform proclaims support for 20-week abortion bans, and declares that Republicans “will not fund or subsidize healthcare that includes abortion coverage.”

Groome is right that a strong commitment to protecting American women’s legal right to access abortion care may alienate some voters ― even those who at one time voted for Democratic candidates. But the point of winning elections isn’t simply to win them.

Ostensibly, winning an election is about getting to enact a specific vision of governance ― hopefully one that its champions truly believe will make life better for the people they are governing. And as research has shown, for women, access to safe abortion care literally means better life outcomes. Curtailing that access has the opposite effect. Abortion access is both an economic and health imperative for many women, something that Groome’s column completely sidesteps. 

After a loss like the one that Democrats experienced during the 2016 presidential election, it makes sense to expect Democratic leaders to examine their tactics and rethink their messaging. And Groome’s point that Democrats should actively highlight the way that progressive policies (i.e. access to sex ed and contraception) actually lead to a decrease in unplanned pregnancies, and therefore abortions, is a good one. But to insist that Democrats backtrack their support of safe abortion access because a specific religious group feels uncomfortable with the stance assumes that religious beliefs should hold the same weight as a person’s right to make decisions about their own medical care.

Would we expect the Democratic party to make a similar concession to appease voters who oppose marriage equality or the rights of transgender children on religious grounds? I certainly hope not. Treating issues that fundamentally impact people’s lives as pieces in a game of political chess is a far more morally tenuous position than insisting that Roe v. Wade is the law of the land.

As a person who will never need to access an abortion, perhaps Groome is not the best person to speak on the issue. And yet across the board in 2017, as a recent report from the Women’s Media Center shows, men still dominate the coverage of reproductive rights, both as reporters and as expert sources.

When it comes to reproductive issues, the voices that should be heard most loudly are those of women and gender non-conforming people who needed or might need access to abortion care in the future. Those are the people who political leaders should listen to when crafting their positions, messaging and policy proposals.

If the only way for Democrats to win elections is to turn their backs on the needs and lived experiences of the Americans who vote for them, then there’s a lot more the party needs to rethink than its stance on abortion. 

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Years of war have left a generation of Syrian youth with limited access to education. Their schools have been bombed and many of them have been displaced by an ongoing civil war that shows no signs of letting up soon. An estimated 200,000 or more Syrians who were in college before and during the conflict are now in “an educational limbo,” according to Teach For America.

A group of young American activists is working to make a dent in that figure. Over the last year, their “Books Not Bombs” initiative has inspired U.S. students to petition their university administrations to establish scholarships for Syrian students impacted by the war. Thanks to their efforts, student chapters of the organization have formed at nearly 200 schools, and a handful of universities have set up funds to help Syrian scholars continue their studies.

But the project hit a potential roadblock in recent months, when President Donald Trump issued two attempts at an executive order to ban visas issued to individuals from several Muslim-majority countries, including Syria. Both orders have been challenged in court, and on March 15, a federal judge in Hawaii placed a nationwide hold on key aspects of Trump’s second shot at a travel ban.

The orders had already unleashed chaos and confusion, though, for refugees and travelers from the affected countries. But Shiyam Galyon, campaign coordinator for Books Not Bombs, is optimistic about the organization’s potential to make an impact.

“Regardless of what happens with the visa issue ― which students have been struggling with even before the travel ban ― there are already an estimated 2,500 resettled Syrian students who are already here in the U.S.,” Galyon told The Huffington Post, referencing a number provided by the Institute of International Education. The funds set up through Books Not Bombs can help these scholars too, she said.

Books Not Bombs is an initiative of Students Organize for Syria, a human rights organization with chapters at dozens of campuses around the country. The group aims to inspire student activists to fight for education for displaced Syrians. These young activists are passing campus-wide resolutions and calling on their universities to either set up scholarships or offer tuition fee waivers for Syrian scholars.

One of the group’s main aims is to encourage more and more universities to join IIE’s Syria Consortium, which provides a database for Syrian scholars to easily find and apply for scholarships. As members of the consortium, universities publicize that they have opportunities for Syrian students, either through specific initiatives or by advertising their already-existing international student scholarships. 

The University of Southern California joined the consortium last year and established scholarships for up to five Syrian graduate students and one undergraduate student. This year, Books Not Bombs activists at USC also worked in conjunction with the Graduate Student Government to set up an emergency fund to help undocumented and immigrant students. The fund, announced in early March, allocates $20,000 in emergency aid for students affected by Trump’s policies to apply for and renew their visas. 

Chris Lo-Records, a USC graduate student who also serves as campus coordinator for Books Not Bombs, said the group doesn’t have a political agenda apart from fighting for “universal access to education.”

“Our universities are international places where people from all walks of life and religious backgrounds and national origins come together and make contributions that are incredibly vital to the country and to the world,” he told HuffPost. 

The United States has a long history of offering sanctuary to refugee students. In the 1930s and ‘40s, an influx of scholars fleeing to the U.S. from Nazi persecution were able to continue their studies and make major contributions to the fields of science, engineering and art.

The struggle for education is one many young Americans likely never encounter, Galyon said. “I think a lot of Americans in their 20s might agree that education was something we took for granted. I know I did,” she said. “I never had to struggle for education, and as a result I don’t think I ever really understood why education was such a lifeline.”

But Galyon, who is Syrian American, has family members who have been displaced due to the conflict. She has cousins who may never be able to seek out educational opportunities in the U.S. under Trump, she said.

Galyon argued the crisis in Syria has served to awaken young Americans to the human rights violations taking place around the globe. It and other major conflicts have galvanized young activists, many of whom are Muslim women. Of Books Not Bombs’ 25 active student leaders, a majority of them are Muslim women, Galyon said.

“They’re all brilliant young women growing up in a time where their own human rights are under attack,” she told HuffPost.

Galyon noted that there’s nothing particularly new about Muslim women engaging in activism and social justice, but their voices are becoming more prominent largely thanks to social media and greater news coverage. “People shouldn’t be surprised to see that a campaign like this is being lead by Muslim women,” Galyon said. “And they should expect a lot more of it.”

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On March 24, a kid reporter impressed college basketball coach Frank Martin at a post-game conference with a question he’d never heard in his many years of coaching.

Max Bonnstetter, a 13-year-old reporter for Sports Illustrated Kids, attended the post-game conference after the South Carolina Gamecocks’ win over Baylor. During the conference, Bonnstetter asked Frank Martin, South Carolina’s coach, whether he valued technique or attitude more in his players when he teaches defense. Martin was clearly impressed.

“First of all, a lot of respect to you,” Martin said. “That’s a heck of a question. I’ve been doing this a long time and that’s the first time anyone has ever asked me that. That’s a heck of a question. Attitude comes first.”

Footage of the exchange between Max and the coach has been retweeted thousands of times. Aside from a few reporters complaining about a kid attending the conference, Max has received a lot of positive feedback online.

According to VICE Sports, Max turned 13 earlier this month and began writing for Sports Illustrated Kids last year. His Twitter account, which currently has more than 1,900 followers, shows that he has interviewed several athletes and offered commentary on many sporting events.

There’s no doubt we’ll be seeing more of this kid’s byline.

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Robert Murray, owner of the world’s largest private coal company, said this week that he’s told President Donald Trump he can’t single-handedly revive the coal business.

“Can the coal industry be brought back?” Murray ― a major Republican donor who asked to move a court date last year so he could attend Trump’s formal nomination at the Republican National Convention ― told The Columbus Dispatch in an interview published Sunday. “The answer is, I’ve suggested to President Trump that he temper his expectations.”

Murray’s remarks were published just two days before the White House released its long-awaited executive order on energy and climate change, a move that Trump has promised will “save our coal industry.”

“The miners are coming back,” the president told a rally in Louisville, Kentucky, last week.

But the evidence suggests coal will continue to shrink, particularly in the regions most devastated by the industry’s decline.

The executive order slated to be signed at 2 p.m. on Tuesday will sound the death knell for the Clean Power Plan, a sweeping Obama-era regulation meant to slash carbon emissions from the utility sector by putting limits on coal- and natural gas-fired power plants and encouraging use of renewables like wind and solar.

The order will lift a temporary moratorium put in place last year on coal leases on federal lands. It also does away with federal guidelines directing agencies to factor climate change into policymaking, and disbands a team tasked with calculating the “social cost of carbon,” which the previous administration pegged at $36 per ton of carbon dioxide.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump rebuked his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton’s $30 billion plan to retrain miners in economically depressed Appalachia for new careers, vowing instead to bring back the high-paying jobs of decades past. Trump’s promises ignited in the coal industry what The Washington Post describes as “flickering signs of life.” Coal prices have doubled since last year. Rail car deliveries of coal soared 16 percent this year. Coal company stocks surged. Peabody Coal, the country’s biggest coal producer, announced plans to pull itself out of bankruptcy next month.

Yet those gains seem merely cosmetic when you consider the long-term outlook for coal.

The coal business and its political allies accused former President Barack Obama of waging a “war on coal” ― that is, pursuing a set of policies meant to punish an industry that once fueled transcontinental railroads and powered most homes in America. It’s easy to blame whatever administration is in office during a time of industrial decline. It’s easier still to point the finger at the first president to make a top priority of addressing man-made global warming. But while the Obama-led policy pivot toward clean energy may have helped dim investors’ view of coal, market forces are actually to blame for the uptick in layoffs and bankruptcies.

Even Murray recognizes the severity of the situation. In 2014, the man known as the “last king of coal” told an industry conference: “If you think it’s coming back, you don’t understand the business. Or you’re smoking dope.”

The decline in demand is twofold.

On the domestic side, natural gas devoured the U.S. electricity market as utility companies converted to a cleaner-burning fuel made cheap by advances in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. In 2002, the U.S. added more than 3,571 miles of pipeline to carry natural gas, supporting a surge in use of the fuel to produce electricity. By 2016, natural gas overtook coal as the top source of electricity. The loss signaled a slow-moving catastrophe for coal, which saw its zenith in the mid-1970s, when Congress responded to an oil embargo crisis by giving the industry a decade-long monopoly on new power plants in an effort to wean the U.S. off energy imports. Faced with real competition from a cleaner-burning fuel, coal lost utilities’ favor.

And coal had already been in decline. In 1985, the industry employed 177,000 people. By the end of 2008, when George W. Bush was still president, that number had fallen to 86,000. It was down to 56,000 last year. But coal’s steepest slump in recent memory came in 2012, when Chinese demand tapered off.

It’s there, on the foreign side, that coal was dealt its most devastating blow. The industry bet big on China continuing to buy huge amounts of U.S. coal to fuel its rapid construction of power plants and its seemingly unlimited appetite for steel smelting. In 2012, though, the Chinese economy began to slow. By that point, the country had become so notorious for air pollution that companies started selling bottled air in its smog-choked cities. A year later, coal consumption in the country peaked. Chinese demand fell by 3 percent in 2014, and dipped another 4 or 5 percent the year after, according to the Sightline Institute, a think tank. In 2016, coal consumption in China fell by 4.7 percent year over year, and its share of the country’s energy mix fell by 2 percent to 62 percent, the National Bureau of Statistics of China reported.

U.S. exports of coal mirrored that decline. Data released earlier this month by the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that in 2016, coal exports fell for a fourth consecutive year to 60.3 million short tons, less than half the record volume shipped overseas in 2012. Demand doesn’t seem likely to come roaring back in China, either. In January, China canceled 103 new coal-fired power stations as commits to spending $380 billion on renewables over the next four years. And China already has a surplus of its own coal miners. A subsidiary of China National Coal Group, the third-largest coal mining company in the world, recently announced plans to lay off 4,000 workers by the end of the year.  

To be sure, the coal industry has reason to be excited ― but those reasons have almost nothing to do with the new administration. Last year, the U.S. became a net exporter of natural gas, and prices are forecast to rise this year and next as supplies are shipped overseas. As a result, coal production is on track to inch up slightly in 2017 and 2018 as coal regains a sliver of the electricity sector.

In Appalachia, where exhausted mines drive extraction costs up, coal production is actually slated to decrease 3.3 percent by 2018.

But the gains would go almost entirely to Western coal-producing states such as Montana and Wyoming, where it’s cheaper to mine. Production in the West is expected to rise from 407 million short tons last year to 443 million short tons in 2018, according to data from the EIA. In the interior coal region ― which consists of Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and part of Western Kentucky ― coal mining is projected to climb from 150 million short tons to 152 million short tons over the same period.

But in Appalachia, where exhausted mines drive extraction costs up, coal production is actually slated to decrease 3.3 percent, from 183 million short tons in 2016 to 177 million short tons in 2018.

These are market trends that were already happening before Trump’s win in November. Moreover, the White House’s proposed budget would actually hurt voters who abandoned the Democratic Party to hand Trump victories in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee, in part because of his vow to bring back coal jobs.

Trump has suggested slashing funding to the Appalachian Regional Commission and the Economic Development Administration, two programs that provide aid to communities devastated by the loss of coal jobs.

“I am disappointed that many of the reductions and eliminations proposed in the President’s skinny budget are draconian, careless and counterproductive,” Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), a firm Trump ally from a coal-mining district, said in a statement. He added that the programs help “reduce poverty rates and extend basic necessities to communities across the Appalachian region.”

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