Breaking Down The Witchers Mid-Season 3 Cliffhanger Ending

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the first five episodes of The Witcher season 3.

Following a year-and-a-half hiatus, The Witcher is back for a highly-anticipated new season that will mark Henry Cavill’s final outing as titular monster-hunter Geralt of Rivia before Liam Hemsworth takes over the lead role of the popular fantasy series. Netflix dropped the first five episodes of the show’s third season on Thursday, setting viewers on a crash course for the release of the final three installments on July 27.

Season 3 opens with Geralt, Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra), and Princess Cirilla “Ciri” of Cintra (Freya Allan) testing the bonds of their makeshift family as they travel the Continent attempting to fend off a myriad of threats while Ciri continues training to hone her magic and defend herself.
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But with everyone from the rogue fire mage Rience (Sam Woolf) to the elven queen Francesca (Mecia Simson) to Nilfgaardian emperor Emhyr “The White Flame” var Emreis (Bart Edwards)—who we now know is actually Ciri’s believed-to-be-dead father Duny—hunting for Ciri, Geralt, and Yennefer soon decide they’re going to need some reinforcements to protect their ward.

While Geralt attempts to track down Rience, Yennefer escorts Ciri to the magical academy Aretuza to meet with her mentor Tissaia (MyAnna Buring), hoping that the rectoress will be able to help teach Ciri to control her powers. As it comes to light that a much older and more powerful mage is not only pulling Rience’s strings but is also responsible for the disappearance of a number of half-elven Aretuza novices, Yennefer proposes holding a Conclave of Mages to unite the Brotherhood, the organization that governs the Continent’s magic users, and the rulers of the Northern Kingdoms in the coming war against Nilfgaard, and suss out the mysterious figure who’s really behind these evil deeds.

And how better to kick off the Conclave than with a glamorous ball.

How does part one of The Witcher season 3 end?

Believing that Stregobor (Lars Mikkelsen), a mage with a history of experimenting on young girls and hating elves, is their prime suspect, Geralt and Yennefer formulate a plan to bring the wizard’s treason to light. While Geralt and Istredd (Royce Pierreson) create a distraction at the ball, Yennefer sneaks into Stregobor’s office and breaks into his safe, finding a hoard of items belonging to the kidnapped novices as well as the missing Book of Monoliths, an old elven tome that supposedly “holds the key to traveling between spheres.”

But exposing Stregobor and getting him arrested is a bit too easy.

Following ominous conversations with both Redanian spymaster Dijkstra (Graham McTavish) and Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu), the powerful mage romantically involved with Tissaia, during which Geralt is told that he must pick a side in the battle to come, Geralt and Yennefer put the missing pieces of the puzzle together and realize that Vilgefortz is the true villain at work and wants Ciri for his own gains.

While Yennefer stays behind to try to locate Tissaia and warn her about Vilgefortz, Geralt exits the room to the sounds of screaming and suddenly finds a knife pressed to his throat by Dijkstra. “Should have chosen a side, witcher,” Dijkstra tells him.

Although Vilgefortz’s ultimate motives remain unclear, in Andrzej Sapkowski’s books on which The Witcher is based, the mage is a central antagonist who gives Geralt a serious run for his money in his quest to protect Ciri.

“Our villain has been playing a very long game. A very long game—decades,” showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich told Netflix’s Tudum in April. “[The writers have] obviously known who the villain was since the moment we started writing season 1. So the writers have also been playing a very long game, and there have been scenes and actions in the past where a character will seem to do something that is well out of character, or that’s not who the fans believe he or she actually is.”

source https://time.com/6291411/the-witcher-season-3-part-1-ending/

How Prigozhins Rebellion Exposes Putins Weakening Grip

The astonishing rebellion of former convict and “troll factory” owner Yevgeny Prigozhin on June 23 and 24 has unveiled the brittle foundations beneath the surface of Russia’s power structures. The stifled revolt has shed light on the growing confusion and lack of assertiveness of Russia’s perennial leader, President Vladimir Putin. Although the illusion of his omnipotence has not been entirely shattered, the carefully constructed image of unity and strength within the regime is starting to show cracks.

Putin has long used the Wagner Group as a counterbalance to the military and assumed that Prigozhin, who was completely dependent on his patronage and state resources, could never pose a political threat to him. Despite gradually being distanced from Putin and his inner circle, the outspoken businessman managed in recent months to accumulate significant political capital as a counter-elite populist. While professing full loyalty to Putin and fervently supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Prigozhin lambasted the military top brass in charismatic recruitment pitches across Russia, press conferences with war bloggers, and obscenity-laden Telegram rants. Prigozhin’s exploits in the war, especially his significant contributions to the capture of Bakhmut, enhanced his sense of privilege and emboldened his decision to rebel when he felt cornered.
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Prigozhin’s clumsy, reckless mutiny was neither a blatant power grab nor an attempt to overthrow the regime. Instead, it was born out of desperation. The clash between Prigozhin and the military leadership—Russian Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov—had been escalating for a while, but Putin appeared reluctant to intervene. The feud reached a tipping point after Prigozhin overtly challenged the rationale for the war, accused the army of trying to sabotage the Wagner Group, and impulsively started his “march for justice.” Recognizing his impending ouster from Ukraine and struggling to sustain the “private military company” amid the state apparatus turning against him, Prigozhin aimed to capture Shoigu and Gerasimov, draw Putin’s attention, and force discussions on the preservation of his lucrative enterprise. However, the insurrection unfolded into a crisis and exposed that Putin, long-regarded as Russia’s unshakable strongman, is increasingly hesitant and misinformed.

Fierce internal strife and deadly turf battles among elites often happen in Russia, but they rarely spill out into the open. Putin seems to have underestimated Prigozhin’s growing brazenness and burgeoning popularity among the angry pro-war “ultra-patriotic” camp and the military rank and file in Russia, who see him as a kind of folk hero taking on the establishment. Despite receiving multiple warnings that Prigozhin was getting too erratic, the Russian president sat idly by as the maverick tycoon crusaded against the defense chiefs. Putin’s apparent disengagement in the lead up to Prigozhin’s shocking stunt presents a vivid picture of an aging autocrat increasingly detached from the realities of his power structures, unable to mediate disputes within his ranks, and failing to prevent internal power struggles from spiraling out of control.

Read More: What Comes After Putin’s Rule in Russia

Prigozhin’s audacious move elicited a surprising degree of paralysis in decision-making within the regime. There was a discombobulated response from the military and security services, and government officials were mainly silent, waiting for a clear signal from Putin. The Wagner Group seized Rostov-on-Don, the logistical hub and nerve center of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, and came close to reaching Moscow without encountering much resistance. Russia’s chief propagandists, such as RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, were curiously silent. Some bureaucrats and oligarchs scrambled to leave Russia or depart from Moscow in the midst of the chaos. While elites in Russia were predominantly aligned against Prigozhin and believed he “went mad,” their reluctance to act decisively without explicit direction from the Kremlin exposed a significant vulnerability of Putin’s ruling style, which distributes power based on personal loyalty rather than institutional stability.

Putin waited for more than nine hours after he was briefed about the “attempted armed rebellion” to give a televised address accusing Prigozhin of “treason.” It took Putin another ten hours to reach a surprising deal with the mercenary boss, reportedly closing a criminal investigation into his mutiny, exiling him to Belarus, and dissolving his mercenary operations in Ukraine. Putin had lost control of the situation, sending shockwaves through the state. Russia’s power brokers eventually rallied behind Putin, but notably, only after the uprising ended, underlining the crucial role of Putin’s active engagement in securing elite solidarity.

Notwithstanding his latest setbacks, Putin remains the centripetal force holding the Russian state together. His authority, albeit increasingly questioned, continues to be the central mechanism by which political stability is maintained. It is Putin who sets the national agenda and ultimately holds the reins of Russia’s power dynamics. In the wake of the upheaval, the regime is making a concerted effort to show elite consolidation and project the image of an unwavering, united front supporting an indispensable statesman.

The Kremlin has orchestrated a series of set piece events in recent days aimed at rewriting the narrative of the insurrection and demonstrating normalcy. Putin vowed to “take decisive action” and applauded the “civic solidarity” of the people. Talking heads in Russia are currently painting Prigozhin out to be a “traitor”, thanking Putin for his “strength and wisdom” in resolving the crisis with minimal bloodshed, praising him for averting “complete chaos and a civil war.” Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov argued that Russia will come out “stronger” after the incident. Russians usually feel more comfortable aligning themselves with prevailing narratives espoused by Putin’s propaganda machine than confronting negative information and difficult news stories. Putin maintains approval ratings at around 82%, and although his public approval is derived more from apathetic obedience than sincere allegiance, the pervasive belief that there is no alternative to his rule remains intact—at least for now.

The Kremlin’s relentless repression of dissenters may intensify, promoting an atmosphere of fear and stoking greater fatigue and helplessness to stand up to the regime. The uprising is already being called a “crash test of loyalty” in Russia, and purges of alleged Wagner Group conspirators seem to have begun in the military. Following intense speculation about his presumed involvement in the mutiny, the whereabouts of Russian army general and Commander of the Aerospace Forces Sergey Surovikin are currently unknown. Putin may become more brutal and paranoid as the intrigues surrounding the incident are further unraveled.

The rebellion does not suggest a sudden plunge into political volatility in Russia, but it serves as a stark reminder that Putin is not infallible. He has outlived many predictions about his demise before, but the system he built is becoming more fragile as the war goes on. The key question moving forward is whether Putin can manage to restore the perception of his ironclad rule or whether the failed gambit of Prigozhin will serve as a catalyst for more severe domestic challenges threatening the survival of the regime.

source https://time.com/6291676/prigozhins-rebellion-exposes-putins-weakening-grip/

How Putin Cannibalizes Russian Economy to Survive Personally

Nearly 18 months into the Russian invasion of Ukraine now, amidst last week’s failed coup attempt, battlefield setbacks, and global diplomatic condemnation, Putin is coming under increasing strain to finance his increasingly-expensive war—and there’s a history lesson for how this will all end.

Far from the prevailing narrative on how Putin funds his invasion, Putin’s financial lifeline has his merciless cannibalization of Russian economic productivity. He has been burning the living room furniture to fuel his battles in Ukraine, but that is now starting to backfire amidst a deafening silence and dearth of public support. That is far from the prevailing narrative on how Putin funds his invasion. Ample western commentators posit that Putin is pulling in billions from trade to finance the invasion thanks to high commodity prices, weak western sanctions, and sanctions evasion.
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But energy prices across both oil and natural gas are now cheaper today than before the invasion, as are grain, wheat, lumber, metals, and practically every commodity that Russia produces. Amidst lower commodity prices across the board, thanks in part to the effective G7 oil price cap, Russia is now barely breaking even on oil sales with unwanted Russian Urals oil trading at a persistent discount but continuing to flow in ample volumes – exactly as it was designed. In short, the world has now largely replaced Russian supplies so commodity exports are no boon to a desperate Russia right now.

It is often overlooked that Putin is funding his invasion of Ukraine not only through marginal commodity exports or trickles of sanctions evasion but through the cannibalization of Russia’s productive economy. As an extractive authoritarian dictator with state control over 70% of the economy, Putin will never really run out of money since he can always pull the authoritarian equivalent of finding money under the couch, or pull a schoolhouse bully act and shake down kids (i.e. oligarchs) for their lunch money at recess time.

Read More: The Failed Russian Mutiny and What Happens Next

Putin has levied draconian “windfall taxes” on basically anything that moves. Many thought last year’s record $1.25 trillion ruble windfall tax on Gazprom and certain other Russian state owned businesses was a one-time occurrence, but Putin has only doubled down and ordered more windfall taxes in the months since, raising trillions of rubles more from companies and oligarchs alike. Likewise, first Putin resorted to levying onerous taxes on both companies and people leaving Russia after the invasion before he dropped all pretense and just started indiscriminately seizing money and property instead.

Similarly, Putin has abandoned all pretense of responsible fiscal policy, running record budget deficits, printing record amounts of money out of thin air, forcing Russian banks and individuals to buy near-worthless Russian debt, and drawing down Russia’s hundreds of billions in sovereign wealth funds, mortgaging away Russia’s future. No wonder disenchanted elites such as oligarch Oleg Deripaska are reduced to complaining to the press while across Russia, labor strikes are taking place with increasing frequency in a throwback to 1917 amidst already disastrous labor shortages.

Some, like Deripaska, even argue that Putin’s shakedowns are hurting the Russian economy even worse than western sanctions – which are already causing entire sectors of the Russian economy to implode, as we’ve shown before. And on top of sanctions, with over 1,000 western companies leaving Russia practically overnight, already Russian consumers are hard-pressed to find erstwhile staples, ranging from consumer electronics to automobiles.

Amidst such undisguised plundering of the Russian economy, stripping it down for war toys, it is perhaps no surprise that Prigozhin’s failed putsch this past weekend revealed no lost love for Putin domestically from the Russian populace and elites. After all, not only did military leaders and civilians alike passively wave columns of Wagnerites through checkpoint after checkpoint on the road from Rostov to Moscow without a shred of resistance; even Putin’s own regional governors were lethargic in their response, and even now, a whopping 21 of them have yet to express any support for Putin. Ironically, the only group of Russians who rushed to Putin’s defense with any genuine enthusiasm prior to Belarusian President Lukashenko’s diplomatic intervention were brigades of Chechens who sped to Moscow and Rostov, led by Putin’s longtime ally and newly-minted selfie-pal Ramzan Kadyrov.

There is a historical pattern here. Of the two major Russian revolutions over the past century, both were undergirded by debilitating economic woes caused partially by military overreach and struggles on the battlefield. After all, wars are never cheap: economic analysts estimate that sustaining its military efforts costs Russia at least $1 billion a day, and it surely didn’t help that Putin sunk billions in not only the Wagner Group but also Prigozhin’s other companies. Likewise, World War I drained Tsar Nicholas II’s coffers prior to his abdication in 1917, when Russia was wracked by over 100 labor strikes amidst widespread famine, exacerbated by both forced conscription as well as returning military veterans. And prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the escalating costs of the Cold War combined with low oil prices and severe recession undermined the Soviet economy from within. Losing wars seems to go hand-in-hand with economic morass and regime change in Russia.

For over a year, we have been saying that the Russian economy was imploding despite claims of Russia’s economic resilience. That resilience is nothing but a Potemkin façade, sustained not through genuine economic productivity but rather through shaking down the entire country for pennies to direct towards war.. Putin can continue to sustain his invasion of Ukraine this way, but in doing so, continues to rip off his own people. In avoiding outright economic collapse by mortgaging Russia’s future, he grows more unloved by his people and is thus increasingly weakened. Economic decay is never the only cause of regime collapse; but nor should it be ignored as a demonstrated potent force in bringing down tyrannical regime after tyrannical regime, especially amidst military overreach.

Historian Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners reminds us that the evil of the Third Reich triumphed through the complicity of average Germans through their complacency. We now see Russians’ willing complacency with the murderous autocratic Putin.

source https://time.com/6291642/putin-cannibalizes-russian-economy/

The Intersex Community Is Fighting for Every Body

When I first moved to Texas in 2016, I never expected it’d be here that I’d come out as intersex. I certainly never thought that would’ve happened in a Senate hearing, divulging details about my body and medical history most of my family didn’t even know to a bunch of conservative legislators. I told them that I was born with physical traits—external sex anatomy, internal reproductive organs, hormones, and chromosomes—that didn’t fit neatly into the binary “male” or “female” options on a birth certificate. And I shared that very personal fact with a government chamber full of total strangers because the “bathroom bill” they were pushing not only discriminated against the trans community, but also completely ignored the existence of intersex folks like me.
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The day that bill died in June 2017, something new was born within me: The confidence to share my truth with the world and the conviction that the whole world needed to hear my story—our story. Since then, I haven’t stopped showing up (at the State Capitol and on stages across the globe) to raise awareness of the inequity we face. Similarly to what the trans community has experienced, though, increased visibility can be a double-edged sword. At first, only the wrong people listened to me—or the right ones listened, those tasked with serving their constituents, but they intentionally received and parroted the wrong message.

As I shouted about the involuntary surgery that sterilized me, an operation to remove the internal testes that didn’t “match” my external “female” genitalia, Gov. Greg Abbott and the former Texas Attorney General heard me loud and clear. They then translated the alarm bell I was sounding for intersex kids into a battle cry against trans youth; they used arguments of forced sterilizations and the neglect of gender-nonconforming children not to help me and others like me, but rather to hurt people I also care about. Despite hearing my desperate calls for a life raft—one of affirmative consent, so that all human beings might decide for themselves the form their body might take—they instead unleashed a deluge of misinformation that has since swept the nation.

Read More: What Trans Visibility Gave Me

The same bills that seek to block gender affirming care for transgender Americans, cropping up in state legislatures across the country, contain loopholes that allow the same surgeries and hormones to be forced onto intersex children without our having any say in the matter. As journalist Carter Sherman wrote in their piece for VICE, “Republicans have compared gender-affirming health care to child abuse and Nazi war crimes. But they’re more than happy to let doctors perform surgeries on intersex children.”

This all proves that the authors of these bills seek not to shield children from harm but rather to eradicate those that don’t fit their cis-heteropatriarchal paradigm. Texas Republicans took my plea for protection and warped it into propaganda—and it’s time to set the record straight.

I’ll start by clarifying here what should seem obvious: Both trans and intersex kids must be at the decision-making table when determining the course of our futures. And we deserve to live freely as who we are in any and all spaces—from restrooms to sports pitches. But despite comprising roughly 2% of the world’s population, intersex people are usually left out of any conversation on LGBTQIA+ rights. Even media coverage of anti-trans bills that also target our bodies remove any evidence of the identities we were born with and the intersex community at large. We are, quite literally, erased from the coverage of our own erasure.

This exclusion is, unfortunately, something we’ve long been accustomed to. Our identity is stamped out the moment we leave the birth canal and bolstered each day thereafter, as intersex people are left off most forms for data-collection or even a drop-down menu to purchase a plane ticket. This calculated effort to shove us into one of the categories society is more comfortable with is reinforced through medically unnecessary and non-consensual surgeries that force our bodies to fit neater onto a piece of paper, rather than editing the piece of paper to accommodate the reality of human diversity.

We are told it’s easier to hide our truth from the world than it would be to change the hearts and minds of those who fear difference; the box we’re pushed into then takes the form of a closet that many of us never find our way out of. Most of us reside deep in the shadows of shame and stigma, until there’s a critical mass of us living “out” and it feels safe for the rest of us to do so, too.

But we are very much here—everywhere—including Texas. Our stories matter, regardless of whether or not our “representatives” acknowledge them. And while we have been playing defense against a hateful, misinformed agenda, our offensive push for rights and recognition of the truth is stronger.

For example, as an intersex person, I have not been able to find endocrinologists, gynecologists, or even primary care doctors who can meet my needs since moving here. So in 2023, Texas Health Action and I partnered to launch the nation’s first ever competent care for intersex adults through their Kind Clinics in cities across the state. Given that one of the patients we surveyed while crafting this care-offering routinely flies to Japan to access a proficient provider, this is life-changing support for our community.

Beyond overhauling a cluster of clinics, we’ve been working to systematically improve care outside the realm of sexual wellness. The Austin City Council passed a local resolution to craft a public education campaign for not just doctors of intersex kids, but also for parents to work with their own children and make better-informed decisions than my parents were equipped to make. The City Council is also working on a budget amendment to fund it later this summer. (This policy is based on one that passed in New York City and has since scaled statewide.)

And that’s just in Texas. In 2022, President Biden’s historic executive order last Pride Month committed to end conversion therapy; it also mandated a year-long report by Health and Human Services to identify “promising practices for advancing health equity for intersex individuals”. This was the first ever federal policy to formally address and endeavor to assist our community.

From national politics to international media, 2023 has seen a swell of support that might help wash away the misinformation that has drowned out our voices and buoy our identity into the mainstream. A documentary, Every Body, chronicling our movement’s struggle over the past three decades, has just released—the first movie ever highlighting intersex existence to achieve nationwide theatrical distribution.

One of the film’s subjects, River Gallo, explains that media representation is necessary to help establish our existence in the common cultural vernacular, which will pave a pathway to enacting the sweeping legislative changes needed to keep our community safe from harm. But lifting our voices into media prominence isn’t enough to keep us safe. Sean Saifa Wall, another subject of the film, reminded me that the counter-efforts targeting intersex and trans kids are waged by a well-coordinated network of groups promoting “gender exploratory therapy”—a new form of conversion therapy, focused on enforcing a “norm” around gender and sex rather than sexuality. This means that, in addition to representation, we also can’t give up our own political advocacy efforts until real policies are in place to protect us.

In 1993, Cheryl Chase founded the Intersex Society of North America to “end shame, secrecy, and unwanted genital surgeries for people born with an anatomy that someone decided is not standard for male or female.” Thirty years after our movement took shape, our message is being amplified and the shame and misinformation that obscured the truth about our community is beginning to dissipate. In the struggle to achieve body autonomy for all, the intersex community demands that everybody deserves the right to decide what’s right for their own body, intersex people included. If our current trajectory continues—and if we pick up enough allies along the way—I have hope we might celebrate that reality together in a future Pride month to come.

source https://time.com/6291609/intersex-community-every-body-essay/

While Texas Heats Up Its Climate Denying Politicians Seek Federal Help

Audacity. Effrontery. Temerity. Whatever word you choose, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and the state’s two senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, are setting the new standard for chutzpah when it comes to juggling climate adaptation with denial and promotion of fossil fuels.

Texas is now in the third week of a record-setting heat wave, exacerbated by climate change, but Abbott and the legislature are doing everything they can to slow the shift to renewables and promote fossil fuels. And, despite their dismissal of the threat of global warming, Abbott, Cornyn, and Cruz have been lobbying vigorously for the federal government to pay the lion’s share of hugely expensive coastal defenses to protect Galveston and surrounding areas from sea level rise and mega storms associated with climate change.
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From sea level rise and hurricanes, to extreme heat, Texas is one of the most threatened states in the U.S. when it comes to the impacts of climate change. It ranked first in the number of billion dollar disasters per year since 2001, and a 2020 analysis by ProPublica and The New York Times of America’s 3,000 counties revealed that, of the 135 counties deemed most at risk from a changing climate, 24 are in Texas. In that group is Harris county, the third most populous county in the United States.

To adapt, the state must build up its defenses. And ever since a plan to bolster coastal defenses around Galveston was first developed following the $30 billion damage inflicted by Hurricane Ike in 2008, Abbott, Cornyn, and Cruz have been trying to get federal help to fund the massive infrastructure project. In total, Texas politicians are looking to the federal government to shoulder the lion’s share of over $60 billion in estimated costs for better storm and flooding infrastructure projects (including bolstering a sea wall and wastewater tunnels) resulting from a threat they’ve been actively ignoring—and making worse.

Read more: Texas Could Be the World’s Clean Energy Capital—If It Wants to Be

Over the years, many of Texas’s leading politicians have denied the overwhelming science that humans—and the burning of fossil fuels—is to blame for rising global temperatures. Cruz, for example, asserted in a 2015 Senate hearing on climate change that carbon emissions had made the planet “greener” than it once was. And while Cornyn acknowledges that it’s a threat, last August he voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s climate bill (in essence voting against funding climate change adaptation projects outside of Texas), and in 2021 he dismissed advocacy for climate action and renewables as a “cult.”

Not just that, they have fought for policies that will likely exacerbate the problem. In March, Abbott vowed to “…exclude renewables from any revived economic incentive program,” and introduced five bills that would lower support for wind and solar projects and, worse, force renewable energy to subsidize fossil fuel expansion. (Of course, it should be acknowledged that the mayors of Texas’s biggest cities are well aware of the climate threat. Houston’s mayor, Sylvester Turner, for example, is chair emeritus of Climate Mayors, an association of mayors organized to promote climate action.)

In order to strengthen Texas’s infrastructure in the face of climate change, the state must raise and extend the sea wall that protects Galveston from hurricanes and storm surges. Estimated to cost over $34 billion, this would be the most expensive project in the history of the Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for overseeing these types of civil works projects around the country. And Abbott, Cruz, and Cornyn want all U.S. taxpayers—not just Texas residents—to foot most of this bill. In January, President Biden signed The National Defense Authorization Act, greenlighting the project, but it’s still not clear how the funding will be divided between the federal government and Texas.

Meanwhile, Texas politicians are eyeing the Army Corps to pick up the tab for a series of underground drainage tunnels proposed as a way to protect Houston from floods such as those following Hurricane Harvey. The estimated price tag? $30 billion.

Read more: Texas Leaders’ Plan to Fight Power Outages Ignores Clean Tech

Galveston’s 17 ft.-tall seawall was built after a hurricane in 1900 (immortalized in Erik Larson’s book, Isaac’s Storm) flooded the city, killing 6,000 people. The first 3 mile-long section of the seawall was completed in 1904, and it was gradually extended over the next 59 years to its final length of 10 miles. Its designers expected that it would protect the city forever, a reasonable expectation in the early 20th century, as, at that time, sea level had been relatively stable for thousands of years. As New York City learned during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, however, coastal defenses that had withstood 100 years of storm surges weren’t up to the added impact of sea level rise and higher winds associated with climate change. In the case of Sandy, a 1-ft. contribution from sea level rise in a 14 ft. storm surge was enough to flood the subways for the first time, inflicting $5 billion in damage on the mass transit system, and $19 billion in damage to the city as a whole.

In the case of Galveston, the storm surge from Hurricane Ike overtopped parts of the sea wall in 2008. The storm also produced a 22 ft. surge in Sabine Pass, located about 62 miles to the east. There’s no doubt that the storm was a harbinger rather than a never-to-be-repeated anomaly. This region of the Gulf Coast has seen the fastest sea level rise on the planet: some 2 ft. in the last hundred years. Ground subsidence due to over-pumping of groundwater for cities and various industries has also exacerbated sea level rise here.

And then there is Houston, just up the Houston Ship Channel from Sabine Pass. The city’s most recent problem is not storm surge, but flooding caused by rainfall. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey dumped up to 60 inches of rain on some of its suburbs and inflicted $125 billion damage on surrounding Harris County. The rainfall was so extreme because Harvey lingered over the area for days. It’s part of an increasing climate trend of slower, wetter, more-intense storms: Hurricane Florence moved at the pace of a leisurely jogger once it hit Texas’s coast in 2018, followed by Hurricane Sally in 2020, Ida in 2021, and Ian in 2022. And earlier this year, on April 12, 2023, a tropical system parked itself over Fort Lauderdale for 12 hours, drowning the city in 25.91 inches of rain.

Houston has multiple plans to defend itself against future floods, including the more than $30 billion proposed system of underground storm-water tunnels to speed rainwater to the ship channel now in the phase of feasibility studies. Naturally, Harris Country is going to look to the Army Corps of Engineers to cover most of the bill if they go ahead. Problem is, the Corps has a lot of such proposals coming at it, and its current backlog is many times its annual budget.

Texas politicians seem to believe that voters around the country are eager to subsidize climate change adaptation projects in a state whose leaders are doing their best to make the problem worse. Texas is the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the U.S., twice the amount produced by California. If Texas were a country it would be the eighth largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world.

But regardless of whether U.S. taxpayers pick up the tab for saving Texas’s coast and cities, Texans are going to see their climate-related costs rise in the form of increased insurance premiums and energy costs for cooling homes during worsening and more frequent heat waves. Of course, that assumes that the power grid can keep up with the increased need for cooling as climate change intensifies (and if the grid holds up, it’s in part because of the contribution of those renewables that Abbott is trying to penalize). That grid is already straining as Texas is in the third week of a record-shattering heat wave. A few more such weather extremes, and perhaps Texas voters will begin to think about electing leaders who recognize the gravity of the threat.

source https://time.com/6291179/texas-climate-impacts-and-science-denial/

Here Are the 10 New Books You Should Read in July

The lazy days of summer are upon us, which means plenty of leisure time—making this month the perfect opportunity to dive into a great, absorbing book. This July, a crop of new reads promise to provide an enriching escape, whether you’re looking for something a little spooky and mysterious or a lighter beach read. From Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special, a delicious coming-of-age romp through Andy Warhol’s Factory studio to Dwyer Murphy’s The Stolen Coast, a thrilling heist novel set in a beach town overrun with unsavory characters, to Beth Nguyen‘s heartfelt memoir Owner of a Lonely Heart, about the complexities of motherhood, there’s an option for every reader.
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Here are the best new books to read this July.

How to Love Your Daughter, Hila Blum

What is the harm we’re capable of doing in the name of love? That’s the question at the heart of Hila Blum’s How to Love Your Daughter, which is translated from Hebrew by Daniella Zamir. Centering on the bittersweet ruminations of Yoella, a mother who is estranged from her only child Leah—who left home at 18 and now has two daughters of her own—the novel considers the challenges, joys, and occasional heartbreak of motherhood.

Buy Now: How to Love Your Daughter on on Bookshop | Amazon

Nothing Special, Nicole Flattery

In Nicole Flattery’s debut novel, Nothing Special, a lonely but plucky teenage girl comes of age while working at Andy Warhol’s infamous studio, known as the Factory. The novel, which follows Flattery’s 2019 short story collection, Show Them a Good Time, follows Mae, a 17-year-old high school dropout with a tumultuous home life who becomes a typist for Warhol. Mae’s work consists of answering Warhol’s infamous silver telephone and documenting the conversations and antics of the artist, his muses, and his star-studded crew, a routine based on the real-life recordings of day-to-day life at the Factory that uncredited typists transcribed at Warhol’s behest, which later became his 1968 book, a, A Novel. Immersed in the notorious scene of the Factory and the rampant cultural shifts of the Swinging Sixties, Mae begins to discover the person she wants to be.

Buy Now: Nothing Special on on Bookshop | Amazon

Immortal Longings, Chloe Gong

Chloe Gong is best known as a YA author, but now she’s making her adult debut with Immortal Longings, a sultry and gripping fantasy epic novel about star-crossed lovers who must choose between power and love. Inspired by Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, the novel is about Princess Calla, a reluctant royal with anarchist beliefs who will stop at nothing to bring down the crown and its corruption—even if that means murdering her own family. Calla’s final step to topple the monarchy comes down to a set of gladiatorial games. What she doesn’t bargain for is striking a deal with—and unexpectedly falling for—her opponent, a reality that will put all her plans in jeopardy.

Buy Now: Immortal Longings on on Bookshop | Amazon

The Vegan, Andrew Lipstein

By all accounts, Herschel Caine, the protagonist of Andrew Lipstein’s The Vegan, has got it made: he’s a hedge fund manager who’s about to make it big, he has a beautiful wife, and he owns a townhouse in Brooklyn’s wealthy Cobble Hill neighborhood. But when a lapse in judgment leads to him playing a potentially fatal prank during a dinner party at his home, Caine begins to reevaluate his life as he knows it. Wracked with guilt and remorse, he’s inexplicably drawn to every animal he encounters—a neighborhood dog, a bird on the street, the two lizards he adopts from a pet store. Caine’s sudden affinity for animals also comes with a lifestyle change: he can no longer stomach the taste of meat and becomes a vegan. His seeming renouncement of vice has far-reaching consequences: he’s now bent on reforming the corruption in the stock trading that was going to make him obscenely rich. But, ever the finance bro, Caine now considers his path on the straight and narrow an asset—and he’s going all in.

Buy Now: The Vegan on on Bookshop | Amazon

Silver Nitrate, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The magic of cinema meets the dark arts in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Silver Nitrate, a neo-noir thriller that dabbles as much in film lore as it does in the occult. For Montserrat and Tristán, two best friends on the fringes of Mexico City’s horror film scene in the 1990s, it seems like a big break is impossible—until they befriend Abel, a legendary yet reclusive director, who is convinced that his unfinished film is cursed. Although the trio sets out to break the curse and complete the film, their efforts soon spin into a surreal and supernatural chain of events that defy even their wildest dreams.

Buy Now: Silver Nitrate on on Bookshop | Amazon

The Stolen Coast, Dwyer Murphy

In The Stolen Coast, Dwyer Murphy’s thriller of a crime novel, the sleepy, seedy Massachusetts beach town where protagonist Jack Betancourt lives is a destination for unsavory characters. Betancourt knows them well—he’s a fixer of sorts, in the same line of business as his former spy father, helping vagrants and thieves vanish when trouble strikes. But things get personal when his ex-flame Elena, a lawyer whose hands are less than clean, rolls back into town and back into Jack’s life after nearly a decade away. Elena has returned to take on a heist of epic proportions, but she needs Jack’s help to pull it off.

Buy Now: The Stolen Coast on on Bookshop | Amazon

Owner of a Lonely Heart, Beth Nguyen

In her second memoir, Owner of a Lonely Heart, Beth Nguyen (who has also written under the name Bich Minh Nguyen) ponders the nuances of motherhood and the many forms it can take. Focusing on her relationship with her own mother, whom she was separated from as an infant after the author and her father fled Saigon for the U.S. during the Vietnam War, Nguyen considers the complexities of her connection to the woman who birthed her but became a stranger to her for nearly two decades. Nguyen also traces her own journey to motherhood and reflects on the many women who shaped her throughout her life. Fiercely compassionate, the memoir is a remarkable reflection on how we define mothers and daughters, Americans and so-called foreigners, and the true meaning of family.

Buy Now: Owner of a Lonely Heart on Bookshop | Amazon

When Crack Was King, Donovan X. Ramsey

With When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era, Donovan X. Ramsey seeks to reframe the narrative surrounding the crack cocaine epidemic of the ’80s and ’90s by telling its history through the voices of the community who survived its racist myths and devastating consequences. Drawing on intensive research and the stories of four individuals whose lives were indelibly shaped by the drug and its criminalization, Ramsey provides much-needed critique on not only drug policy past and present, but also the system that it upholds, urgently interrogating who it protects, who it punishes—and why.

Buy Now: When Crack Was King on on Bookshop | Amazon

Crook Manifesto, Colson Whitehead

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead returns to Harlem with Crook Manifesto, a sequel to 2021’s thrilling Harlem Shuffle. Centering once again on Ray Carney, the furniture store owner and sometimes fence of stolen goods who’s mostly renounced his illegal side hustle, the novel follows Carney and his family’s efforts to survive amid the racial tensions and political tumult of the city in the early ’70s. Organized in three parts, the book moves through vignettes that reference everything from Blaxploitation films to rampant fires that ravaged uptown Manhattan. The result is a stunning, sobering depiction of an important chapter in New York City’s history.

Buy Now: Crook Manifesto on on Bookshop | Amazon

Birth Control, Allison Yarrow

Consider Allison Yarrow’s Birth Control: The Insidious Power of Men Over Motherhood a searing indictment of modern medicine, its patriarchal roots, and its harrowing consequences for people who experience pregnancy and childbirth. Drawing on extensive research, interviews with experts, and an original survey of 1,300 mothers, this deeply researched work traces the history of misogyny and racism in medical care when it comes to birthing bodies, from past to present. From male doctors overtaking midwives during the 19th century to the shortcomings of contemporary medical practices and procedures, Yarrow highlights the urgent need to reform the way we think about pregnancy and birth, making the case for better maternal health care as a human right.

Buy Now: Birth Control on on Bookshop | Amazon

source https://time.com/6290346/best-books-july-2023/

Watch One Year Of Carbon Emissions Take Over The Planet

It’s hard to miss something that weighs 37 billion tons—especially when it’s all around us. Thirty-seven billion tons is the amount of fossil-fuel-related carbon dioxide humans release into the atmosphere every year. We see the damage it does everywhere—from heat waves to floods to droughts to wildfires and more. But the CO2 itself? Entirely invisible. Until now.

In a striking new video, NASA has made visible the production—and, in some cases, absorption—of human-produced carbon dioxide for the entirety of the year 2021. Over that period, the CO2 in the atmosphere rose by 2.13 parts per million (PPM), marking the eleventh year in a row in which the increase exceeded 2 PPM. The most dramatic takeaway from the video is the outsized role the northern hemisphere plays in the global spread of greenhouse gasses, compared to the far less blameworthy south.
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Space agency scientists drew the data for their video partly from observations made by weather satellites, including NASA’s GOES-17, the European Union’s Meteosat, and Japan’s GMS. Other information came from Earth-based monitoring of known greenhouse gas emitters—industrial areas in the developed world in particular, but also smaller contributions made by, say, the burning of crop waste in Africa. This data was fed into NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System (GEOS), a computer-modeling tool that can turn raw information into eye-popping imagery—and in this case GEOS worked stunningly.

The model assigned four colors to the video it produced: orange represents fossil fuel emissions, red represents burning biomass, green represents land ecosystems, and blue represents the ocean.

Read more: The Selfish Case for Climate Justice

The video unspools over the course of the year and it is not until June that the south is truly shrouded in the north’s emissions. It takes that long partly because the equator operates as sort of an atmospheric berm, with hot air rising from the earth’s midline slowing north-south circulation. Ultimately, however, those billions of tons of carbon dioxide blow past this natural stop sign and cover the south as badly as the north.

For the first half of the year, before they’re obscured by CO2, Australia, Africa, and South America appear to flicker on and off from green to a neutral gray. That represents plant life absorbing carbon dioxide during the day and releasing it in a sort of vegetable respiration at night. The crop fires in Africa are visible too, and while these are relatively small contributors of CO2, they build up over time, because if the land is not fully replanted each season, it can alter the overall ecosystem’s ability to sequester atmospheric carbon.

If there is any good news in both the data and the video, it’s that not all of the CO2 tonnage humans pour into the air stays in the air. About half of the emissions are taken up by the land and the oceans, which act as carbon sinks, entraining the greenhouse gas and preventing it from accelerating climate change even further. The bad news is that there’s at least another 37 billion tons coming this year—and next year and the year after that. Until humans break their fossil-fuel habit, the planet will continue to choke on the results.

Read more: There is No Climate Justice Without Racial Justice

source https://time.com/6291042/nasa-video-carbon-emissions/

Why Some People in Thailand Become Monks After Committing Crimes

What was supposed to be an informative fire drill at a school in Thailand last week turned deadly when a fire extinguisher exploded, killing one student and injuring about 10 others at Bangkok’s Rachawinit School. While the accident has sparked concerns about the safety of fire extinguishers used in the classroom as others seek accountability for the student’s death, some at the heart of the tragedy are atoning in a characteristically Thai way: becoming monks for a little while.

At the 18-year-old boy’s funeral on Tuesday, four firefighters involved in the fire drill were seen sporting shaved heads and dressed in saffron robes, kneeling on the ground with their palms pressed together.
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The carbon dioxide canister had been sitting under the hot sun when it exploded and metal scraps struck the victim, police said. Three officials responsible for the fire drill are set to face charges of negligence, local media reported.

Enrolling into monkhood may seem like a novel way of making amends, but the practice has become commonplace in Thailand, especially among people who have caused harm in public ways. For Buddhists, becoming a monk is a maximal way to convey sincerity and apology. But some worry that these reflexive ordinations are increasingly being used as a cure-all to bad behavior, further tainting the reputation of Buddhism, which has already been in decline after years of scandals.

Read More: Meet the Legendary Warrior Monk Passing on the Secrets of Kung Fu and Buddhism

The ceremony on Tuesday, known as buat na fai, or “ordainment before the pyre,” was a way for the firefighters to show regret for the accident that killed the student in Bangkok. Two of the boy’s classmates also took part in the religious ceremony at the funeral.

While traditionally this ritual is reserved for blood relatives of the deceased, it is sometimes expanded to those who are not family members, Katewadee Kulabkaew, a scholar of Thai Buddhism, tells TIME. “In practice, Thai monasteries will let anyone to buat na fai for a few days, a week, or a few months, given that the deceased’s family is consensual,” she says.

There’s a low barrier to entering and leaving monkhood, and many in Thailand choose to get ordained as monks for a variety of reasons—but usually to “make merit,” a Buddhist practice of accumulating good karma.

“Traditional Buddhist teaching says that ordination is the greatest merit (which can be transferred to the dead in afterlife), but it cannot absolve one’s sins. As a result, funerary ordination is indeed an act of compensation rather than redemption,” says Katewadee. “In order to show the society that you are tremendously sorry, caring, or deeply grateful for the deceased, you do your best by making the greatest merit for them.”

When a young soccer team was successfully extricated from a Thai cave in 2018 after a rescue operation that gripped the world, the boys were ordained as novice monks and spent over a week living at a Buddhist temple, to fulfill a prayer that their families made in exchange for their safe return as well as to honor a volunteer diver who died while saving them.

“Their lives will change now,” a local official told reporters at the time. “This experience will help them to appreciate their parents and give them a taste of Dhamma.”

Somparn Promta, a lecturer of philosophy at Mahachulalongkorn University, tells TIME that it’s common practice for people to seek ordination as Buddhist monks for a limited time after causing harm to others, as a way to “show their moral responsibility” and “make merit for those who are harmed by them.”

“This kind of ordination usually takes a short time. Normally about seven days,” he says. “It would help the persons who harm others to feel good both with themselves and those who are harmed.”

In 2019, a wealthy businessman was ordained as a monk after making headlines for killing two people while drunk driving. He also agreed to pay 45 million baht ($1.26 million) in damages to the victims’ families.

But getting ordained doesn’t automatically come with public forgiveness. Last year, in another road accident that sparked national outrage, a young policeman hit and killed a woman while speeding on his motorcycle. Days after the crash, both he and his father entered monkhood to make merit for the victim, but the move did little to stop public anger from boiling over. The incident sparked heated discussions about the city’s road safety and reckless drivers. The 21-year-old cop was also pressured to exit monkhood after just three days, after the public raised concerns that he was not fit to be a monk.

“Many Thais are obsessed with the idea that merit-making can compensate for when they have erred, as if crimes and merit making are transactional,” a Bangkok Post columnist wrote days after the deadly road accident.

“This attitude does more harm than good to society, as it reinforces a notion that anyone—from individuals to government officials and politicians—can trade away their karmic debt through public displays of contrition yet continue to repeat those same illegal or immoral acts.”

In recent years, the reputation of monks has taken a hit in Buddhist-majority Thailand, where most men are required to live as a monk temporarily at some point in their lives. Some criminals are known to take refuge in monkhood as they lay low from the outside world. Meanwhile, reports of monks engaging in criminal activity—ranging from money laundering to drug trafficking and even murder—have further eroded public trust in the clergy.

But for this week, public sentiments appear to sympathize with the firefighters who have now become—at least temporarily—novice monks. On social media, their ordination was met with support and condolences, with many seeing the case as an unfortunate accident more than a tragedy caused by negligence.

“I would like to congratulate the four people who were ordained for the younger brother,” one Facebook user commented. “I wish [the victim] will rest in a better world.”

source https://time.com/6291127/thailand-monkhood-crimes-merit-firefighters-student-death/

House GOP Plans to Ramp Up Hunter Biden Inquiry After July Arraignment

A week after Hunter Biden reached a plea deal on misdemeanor tax charges, Republicans in Congress are making clear they are not done with the President’s son. Fresh off an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower alleging that Biden received special treatment from the Justice Department, House Republicans are planning a new chapter in their investigation, which could possibly stretch into 2024 as the presidential campaign ramps up.

According to sources familiar with the matter, House GOP leadership is waiting for Hunter Biden’s arraignment, scheduled for July 26, as it prepares for a multi-pronged investigatory effort spearheaded by three committees: the Judiciary Committee, the Oversight Committee, and the Ways and Means Committee.
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The panels are “pursuing a thorough investigation into this misconduct to deliver the transparency and accountability that the American people demand and deserve,” its three chairs—Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, James Comer of Kentucky, and Jason Smith of Missouri—said in a statement Wednesday.

The new phase of the inquiry stems from testimony provided last week to the Ways and Means Committee by Gary Shapley, an IRS official who supervised the agency’s role in the investigation. Asserting whistleblower protections, he claimed that Attorney General Merrick Garland prevented the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney overseeing the inquiry from bringing more charges against the President’s son. Both Garland and the prosecutor, David Weiss, have strenuously denied the allegations and have rebutted any accusations of bias. And the DOJ said when announcing the agreement, without elaboration, that the “investigation is ongoing.” Sources say that House Republicans are likely to call Weiss to testify on the matter in the coming months.

Shapley, a 14-year IRS employee, also told lawmakers the Justice Department denied requests from prosecutors to examine text messages in which Hunter Biden allegedly used his father as leverage to pressure a Chinese company to pay him. “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled,” Hunter Biden texted the CEO of a Chinese fund management company in 2017, according to testimony from Shapley. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden told reporters he wasn’t with his son during the exchange six years ago, when the elder Biden was no longer Vice President and not yet elected President.

Be that as it may, many Hill Republicans see the latest revelations as an opportunity to expand and accelerate an investigation that has been at the center of the conference’s agenda since assuming a slim majority in January but that has so far failed to deliver anything that incriminates the President. At the very least, they can hunt for evidence to determine whether Garland’s or Shapley’s account is true.

Read more: How Hunter Biden’s Scandals Compare to Those of Trump’s Family Members

Democrats argue that the latest iteration of the Hunter Biden probe is a cynical attempt to damage the President’s reputation going into his reelection bid. “This is just typical presidential year political theater and not serious oversight work,” a former Democratic congressional investigative counsel tells TIME, who requested anonymity because they still do work with the government. “The more media attention that a whistleblower seeks, in my experience, the less credible they’ve typically been.”

It’s an argument shared by other veterans of official Washington, including Ronald Weich, former assistant attorney general for legislative affairs and chief counsel to former Senators Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy. “I do not think this is an appropriate subject for congressional oversight, at least at this time,” he tells TIME.

Weich, now the dean of the University of Baltimore Law School, emphasizes that an IRS whistleblower could turn to the inspector general of either the Treasury Department or the Justice Department. “Running to Congress should not be the first avenue for a whistleblower,” he says. “And Congress should not be interfering in ongoing criminal investigations or prosecutions. I think the fact that he went to Congress suggests that this has more of a political motive.”

Another former high-level government official expressed skepticism over the complaints. “Whistleblowers frequently have agendas that explain their coming forward—sometimes the agendas are personal; in this day and age, they are increasingly political,” Michael Bromwich, a former federal prosecutor and Department of Justice Inspector General during the Clinton Administration, emails TIME. “Whistleblowers should not be dismissed out of hand, but their allegations also shouldn’t be treated as the gospel truth until fully vetted and tested.”

In the days since they released Shapley’s testimony, House Republicans have cited it as further material to pursue impeachment proceedings against Garland—an idea promoted by the likes of right-wing firebrands Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. On Monday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy signaled a willingness to consider the measure. “If the whistleblowers’ allegations are true,” he tweeted, “this will be a significant part of a larger impeachment inquiry into Merrick Garland’s weaponization of DOJ.”

But for Democrats, the forthcoming proceedings, however they may play out, are poised to amount to more of a stunt than a serious investigation into alleged wrongdoing. “Merrick Garland has a pretty long track record,” says the former congressional counsel. “I find it pretty implausible that he would stake his career on trying to protect Hunter Biden.”

source https://time.com/6291109/hunter-biden-house-gop-irs/

The Climate Rifts Biden and Modi Couldnt Heal

Listening to President Biden and his Indian counterpart Prime Minister Narendra Modi talk last week, it would be easy to think the two countries were leading partners tackling climate change. The pair touted their biggest climate domestic policies, and announced a slew of new collaborations to cut emissions.

“With this visit, we’re demonstrating once more how India and the United States are collaborating on nearly every human endeavor,” said Biden, including on “the global clean energy transition and tackling climate.”

But reading between the lines reveals a challenging rift. During his visit to Washington, Modi said that India is the only G20 country to meet the climate commitments made in the talks leading up to the Paris Agreement. And he noted the “talk” about financial support, saying that “some countries” had contributed without mentioning the U.S. (which by almost any measure hasn’t met its international climate obligations). “India has not caused any problems to the environment,” Modi said. “However, we are playing a leading role.”
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For his part, Biden acknowledged that the U.S. had “caused damage” with its development over the last 300 years but cited the Inflation Reduction Act as evidence that the country is righting a wrong.

The veiled tension may have been indiscernible to the untrained eye, but it is of critical importance. Working together on climate change serves both country’s interests, not to mention the global community’s. But India is, with good reason, adamant that the world not lose sight of the west’s responsibility for the climate change we’re experiencing today—and keen to highlight the developing world’s need for further support to meet climate goals.

The U.S., on the other hand, wants to portray itself as the global climate leader, but doesn’t have the best hand of cards to play. Yes, the U.S. passed a nearly $370 billion climate law to support a domestic clean-energy renaissance, but the political dynamics in Washington don’t give much room to fully address demands from countries like India.

The result is a tricky diplomatic situation with a seemingly unbridgeable historical context, and yet officials from both countries realize that they need to at least try. To what degree they succeed will shape the climate fight for decades to come.

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution a century and a half ago, the U.S. has generated 20% of all emissions put into the atmosphere, far more than any other country. India developed much more slowly. The country was colonized during the Industrial Revolution, stymying its growth, and a series of economic policy decisions after independence are thought to have kept the country relatively poor. As a result, the country has contributed just 4% of emissions despite its enormous size.

That history comes up over and over again in climate diplomacy. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol gave developing countries an emissions dispensation for just that reason. In the negotiations that led to the Paris Agreement, the country demanded more finance from its developed counterparts. Today, as India’s emissions are poised to surge, its leaders consistently remind their counterparts that they haven’t contributed all that much to the problem and need industry to fuel their growth.

At the same time, Modi has set bold targets for renewable energy deployment, albeit without committing to phasing out the country’s coal industry. Officials across the political spectrum have emphasized that the country won’t get ahead of the market to take on the cost of addressing climate change. Lawmakers I’ve spoken with say consistently that their constituents are more concerned with ensuring a stable power supply than addressing climate change. “It’s very easy to say ‘move away from coal,’” Mahua Moitra, a Member of Parliament in India, told me last month at an event I moderated at the University of Chicago. But “it’s a little more of a tightrope walk for us because we have to deal with energy needs.”

Amitabh Kant, the Indian official charged with shepherding this year’s G20 summit in India, articulated the country’s nuanced position to me in December at his office in Delhi. He repeated the oft-cited history: “India has not contributed much to climate change, and has only taken up 1.5% of the global carbon space.” But despite that, he said, the country could lead the transition: “It has the size and scale. It has the climatic conditions.”

The key, he told me, is for the market to change. That would mean a global push for renewable energy pushing the cost of green technologies down, making them more economical. Greater availability of capital and lower costs to finance renewable energy projects in India would also help, as would favorable trade relations that could give India a market to export the green products it manufactures.

The U.S. could play a key role delivering on all of those objectives, but the Biden administration’s ability to deliver is limited. The Inflation Reduction Act will push down the cost of clean energy technologies globally, but the law has also rankled Indian policymakers who are upset with its pro-U.S. subsidies, which they say have hurt India’s industry and chances of growing its own clean energy economy. It’s “the most protectionist act ever drafted in the world,” Kant told me. U.S. financing for clean energy projects in India could help, but is limited. In 2021, Biden promised more than $11 billion to help developing countries with their climate efforts, a small sum compared to the scale of the challenge; Congress has yet to allocate that money.

None of which makes for a good sound bite in discussions with India. Instead, the administration has sought to rally the private sector and multi-lateral development banks—most importantly the World Bank—to provide India with the capital it needs. Last week, the U.S. and India said they would create “investment platforms” to help private capital find renewable energy projects in India. “There’s a real unity within the administration of wanting to get the banks to do more lending, more engagement on climate, and to help leverage private sector deployment of the trillions of dollars,” John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, told me earlier this year.

At the University of Chicago event, Vinay Chawla, senior advisor for climate finance at the U.S. State Department, said that the two countries could also focus on aligning strategic government investments so that both countries benefit from each other’s commitments to clean energy. “Coordinating industrial policy between countries like the United States and India is a real opportunity to tackle climate change and find the investment opportunity,” he said.

These steps may help move the U.S.-India climate relationship in the right direction, but without a dramatic acceleration there will be no escaping the enormous historical and political context in conversations between the two countries. At best, that’s a distraction. At worst, it’s a serious impediment that could throw global climate efforts off track.

source https://time.com/6289126/the-climate-rifts-biden-and-modi-couldnt-heal/