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The year the U.S. became the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas

The year the U.S. became the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas

Inside Climate News reports: When environmentalists look back on 2022, they might remember it as the year the United States finally passed a major climate change law. Some advocates worry, however, that this significant victory is being undermined by a long-term trend that accelerated while that law—the Inflation Reduction Act—was being negotiated. In the first half of the year, the United States became the world’s top exporter of liquified natural gas, or LNG. Then, in September, crude oil exports hit…

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Ukraine is in the headlines now. But a whole new world of conflict is about to erupt

Ukraine is in the headlines now. But a whole new world of conflict is about to erupt

Simon Tisdall writes: It was a good year to bury bad news – and bad deeds – as a clutch of dictators, assorted killers and repressive or anti-democratic regimes can testify. In Myanmar, Yemen, Mali, Nicaragua, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and Afghanistan, to name a few crisis zones, egregious abuses and unrelieved misery attracted relatively scant, perfunctory international scrutiny. The main reason for 2022’s blinkered perspectives is, of course, Ukraine, Europe’s biggest conflict since 1945. This is not to say…

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Capitalism excels at innovation but is failing at maintenance

Capitalism excels at innovation but is failing at maintenance

Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel write: Innovation is a dominant ideology of our era, embraced in America by Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Washington DC political elite. As the pursuit of innovation has inspired technologists and capitalists, it has also provoked critics who suspect that the peddlers of innovation radically overvalue innovation. What happens after innovation, they argue, is more important. Maintenance and repair, the building of infrastructures, the mundane labour that goes into sustaining functioning and efficient infrastructures,…

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The price of weapons assistance: Ukraine pays in blood to convince Western allies

The price of weapons assistance: Ukraine pays in blood to convince Western allies

Eesti Ekspress reports: In November 2021, a group of EU ambassadors gathered in the government quarter of Kyiv. The US and UK ambassadors took the podium to discuss what their respective country’s intelligence was saying. Most was already public knowledge. A small part wasn’t. The latter was already known to the diplomat who convened the meeting: Head of the Delegation of the EU to Ukraine Matti Maasikas. He was convinced that war would erupt sooner or later. When I ask…

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These lies about climate change just wouldn’t die in 2022

These lies about climate change just wouldn’t die in 2022

USA Today reports: There was a time – a recent time – when concern about the environment was relatively bipartisan, not a cultural flashpoint. A Republican, President Richard Nixon, established the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. In the 1980s and 1990s, bipartisan majorities voted to strengthen the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, led by a Republican – Rhode Island’s Sen. John Chafee. Those days are gone, and today a wide range of misleading statements and outright lies…

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Exiled chief rabbi says Jews should leave Russia while they can

Exiled chief rabbi says Jews should leave Russia while they can

The Guardian reports: Moscow’s exiled chief rabbi says Jews should leave Russia while they still can, before they are made scapegoats for the hardship caused by the war in Ukraine. “When we look back over Russian history, whenever the political system was in danger you saw the government trying to redirect the anger and discontent of the masses towards the Jewish community,” Pinchas Goldschmidt told the Guardian. “We saw this in tsarist times and at the end of the Stalinist…

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Corruption: A charity tied to the Supreme Court offers donors access to the justices

Corruption: A charity tied to the Supreme Court offers donors access to the justices

The New York Times reports: In some years, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. does the honors. In others, it might be Justice Sonia Sotomayor or Justice Clarence Thomas presenting the squared-off hunks of marble affixed with the Supreme Court’s gilded seal. Hewed from slabs left over from the 1930s construction of the nation’s high court and handed out in its magnificent Great Hall, they are a unique status symbol in a town that craves them. And while the ideological…

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Evidence of Trump’s criminal tax evasion offers the best case yet for putting him in prison

Evidence of Trump’s criminal tax evasion offers the best case yet for putting him in prison

David Cay Johnston writes: Don’t let the cynics who know little about our tax system trick you into thinking there was nothing all that new or important in the six years of Donald Trump’s taxes released Friday by the House Ways and Means Committee. In fact, even if some of it was previously teased by the committee, the dump includes a cornucopia of information that affects your wallet—including powerful evidence of criminal tax evasion. Among other things, Trump’s tax returns make a strong…

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The ‘red wave’ washout: How skewed polls fed a distorted election narrative

The ‘red wave’ washout: How skewed polls fed a distorted election narrative

The New York Times reports: Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat, had consistently won re-election by healthy margins in her three decades representing Washington State. This year seemed no different: By midsummer, polls showed her cruising to victory over a Republican newcomer, Tiffany Smiley, by as much as 20 percentage points. So when a survey in late September by the Republican-leaning Trafalgar Group showed Ms. Murray clinging to a lead of just two points, it seemed like an aberration. But in…

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The Webb Telescope is just getting started

The Webb Telescope is just getting started

The New York Times reports: So far it’s been eye candy from heaven: The black vastness of space teeming with enigmatic, unfathomably distant blobs of light. Ghostly portraits of Neptune, Jupiter and other neighbors we thought we knew already. Nebulas and galaxies made visible by the penetrating infrared eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope, named for James Webb, the NASA administrator during the buildup to the Apollo moon landings, is a joint project of NASA, the European…

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Brazil’s Lula picks Amazon defender for environment minister

Brazil’s Lula picks Amazon defender for environment minister

The Associated Press reports: Brazil´s President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced Thursday that Amazon activist Marina Silva will be the country´s next minister of environment. The announcement indicates the new administration will prioritize cracking down on illegal deforestation even if it means running afoul of powerful agribusiness interests. Both attended the recent U.N. climate conference in Egypt, where Lula promised cheering crowds “zero deforestation” in the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest and a key to fighting climate change, by…

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From climate exhortation to climate execution

From climate exhortation to climate execution

Bill McKibben writes: There are about a hundred and forty million homes in the United States. Two-thirds, or about eighty-five million, of them are detached single-family houses; the rest are apartment units or trailer homes. That’s what American prosperity looks like: since the end of the Second World War, our extraordinary wealth has been devoted, above all, to the project of building bigger houses farther apart from one another. The great majority of them are heated with natural gas or…

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Zelenskyy’s secret call to McConnell puts squeeze on oligarchs

Zelenskyy’s secret call to McConnell puts squeeze on oligarchs

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports: The day before Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy swept into the United States and delivered an impassioned speech to Congress, he made a quiet phone call to one of the country’s most powerful Republicans: Mitch McConnell. Among his urgent requests: convince the Senate minority leader to help turn over the seized fortunes of Russian oligarchs — including the proceeds of their yachts, planes and mansions — to help rebuild the Ukraine president’s devastated country. Two days later,…

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Putin, unaccustomed to losing, is increasingly isolated as war falters

Putin, unaccustomed to losing, is increasingly isolated as war falters

The Washington Post reports: When Vladimir Putin visited Minsk last week to discuss deepening cooperation, a sarcastic joke by his host, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, seemed to ring all too true. “The two of us are co-aggressors, the most harmful and toxic people on this planet. We have only one dispute: Who is the bigger one? That’s all,” Lukashenko said. As Putin approaches New Year’s Eve, the 23d anniversary of his appointment in 1999 as acting Russian president, he appears…

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