Progressives made clear they have no intention of backing down to the party establishment after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on Friday threatened to cut off funds to firms and strategists that support primary challengers against incumbents.

"The DCCC can do anything it wants to try to prevent the next generation of Democrats from taking power. They will not succeed," Sean McElwee—co-founder of Data for Progress, which is recruiting progressives to oust conservative Democrats—said in a statement.

The new policy was included in the DCCC's list of vendor hiring standards, which state that the organization "will not conduct business with, nor recommend to any of its targeted campaigns, any consultant that works with an opponent of a sitting member of the House Democratic Caucus."

According to National Journal, which first reported the policy change, "Democrats involved in crafting the standards intend for them to bolster members across the ideological spectrum, from the fiscally conservative Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas to the progressive Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota—both of whom could be subject to contested primaries."

But progressives argued that the ostensibly neutral rule will disproportionately harm grassroots organizations looking to replace right-wing Democrats with bold figures like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), who both ousted incumbent Democrats in primaries last year....

Economists and progressive experts responded with exasperation and unease on Friday after President Donald Trump said he will nominate right-wing commentator Stephen Moore to the Federal Reserve, the gatekeeper of the nation's economy.

....Whispers that Moore, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation who advised Trump's 2016 campaign, might join the central bank had been circulating online since late Thursday. In a tweet on Friday, the president called him "a very respected Economist."

Concerned economic and political commentators decried Moore as "a famous idiot" who "has proved deeply impervious to facts."

Several critics also pointed out that Moore was among the "principal architects of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback's massive tax cuts, and their predictions that those tax cuts would spur an 'immediate' Kansas economic boom have proved strikingly inaccurate."...

....Indigenous history, in particular, demonstrates that we don’t need to assume an eternal antagonism between humanity and nature. We can change how we relate to the world, the specific form of our engagement with the planet.

As Pascoe argues, Aboriginal people collectively controlled their metabolism with nature, using custom, culture and law to regulate burning, hunting, planting and other forms of labour.

The colonists replaced that ancient system with a capitalist agriculture driven by the imperatives of individual enrichment.

As a result, as Eric Rolls explained in A Million Wild Acres, “thousands of years of grass and soil changed in a few years”, and the parklike meadows vanished.

Crucially, the incredibly rapid destruction wasn’t the consequence of population pressures or industrialisation in a still very small and underdeveloped colony.

What mattered was an economic shift: the destruction of a system that carefully regulated the human metabolism with nature, and the implementation of a system that rewarded those who looted the environment for individual gain.

Indigenous history shows there’s nothing inevitable about the environmental carnage being unleashed now....

....After twenty years of climate diplomacy, oil firm BP last year reported that the non-fossil share of the energy mix is no different to what it was in 1998. In the face of climate change’s existential threat, we are standing still. This is because a market economy will continue to produce fossil fuels, even in the face of a hothouse earth, if left to its own devices.

Environmental good news in most cases has come from non-market intervention. We have all but solved the challenge of ozone depletion thanks not to the market or giving up our fridges or hair spray, but thanks to regulation. Likewise we have regulation, as well as public sector infrastructure, and state shepherding of innovation—the allegedly inefficient sin of “picking winners”—for the success stories of elimination of acid rain and the 7 percent global increase in tree cover over the last thirty-five years.

This is why the Green New Deal, with its focus on robust public sector planning and action instead of market tweaks is so important. California’s emissions trading is less responsible for that state’s greenhouse gas reductions than its classic command-and-control regulations, and the largest single emissions reduction in North America came from the decision by fiat of the Ontario government to shutter all nineteen of its coal-fired generating units.

....We need to use our vast productive resources to better ends — and through politics we can do just that. And as technology allows us to move to a discussion of what sort of planning instead of whether planning, true democratic control of planning both at the enterprise and government level must be the non-negotiable foundation of our vision.

[....]

Labour members have launched a grassroots campaign to push the party to adopt a radical Green New Deal to transform the UK economy, tackle inequality and address the escalating climate crisis.

The group, inspired by the success of the Sunrise Movement and the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the US, is calling on Labour to commit to radical action to decarbonise the UK economy within a decade.

A spokesperson for the group, called Labour for a Green New Deal, said: “Climate change is fundamentally about class, because it means chaos for the many while the few profit....

A newly-leaked audio recording reveals that oil and gas executives in a private meeting were "giddy" with laughter in the summer of 2017 as they rejoiced over the "unprecedented access" they were being given to the highest levels of the Trump administration, boasting about their ability to have closed-door meetings with top officials and the ascendance of their own industry colleagues to some of the most powerful seats of government....

ExxonMobil faces losing its lobby privileges at the European parliament after the company failed to show up for the first hearing into climate change denial.

ExxonMobil would become only the second multinational – after Monsanto – to lose access to MEPs, parliamentary meetings and digital resources if it loses a high-level vote expected by the end of April.

The oil giant publicly supports the Paris agreement but has drawn the ire of scientists, academics and environmentalists, who accuse it of peddling climate misinformation.

The ban request is being submitted by the Green MEP Molly Scott Cato. She said: “This is the company that denied the science, despite knowing the damage their oil exploitation was causing; which funded campaigns to block action on climate and now refuses to face up to its environmental crimes by attending today’s hearing. We cannot allow the lobbyists from such corporations free access to the corridors of the European parliament. We must remove their badges immediately.”...

The largest five stock market listed oil and gas companies spend nearly $200m (£153m) a year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change, according to a new report.

Chevron, BP and ExxonMobil were the main companies leading the field in direct lobbying to push against a climate policy to tackle global warming, the report said....

....While many countries appear to be already reducing carbon emissions and moving towards an energy transition, Africa’s coalfields are open for business. Along with a few Asian countries (Indonesia, Vietnam and Bangladesh in particular), our continent continues to be an El Dorado for the coal cheerleaders and big business determined to carry on its coal-onisation. New plants are being planned from South Africa to Senegal, from Kenya to Mozambique, as well as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Côte d’Ivoire. Most of them are co-financed by the African Development Bank, on whose board sit members of African, European, North and South American and Asian governments.

This is the case for the coal-fired power plant projects in Bargny (in the suburbs of Dakar, Senegal), San-Pédro (Côte d’Ivoire), Lamu (Kenya), or the Thabametsi power station in Limpopo province, South Africa, near the border with Botswana.

The situation is pretty similar for the oil industry, a source of energy that continues to attract investors in Africa, a continent that accounts for 8% of global production, with 7.5m barrels a day. Despite the drop in the price of oil over the last five years, new players are added yearly to the list of majors companies, such as Total, Shell, Exxon, BP and Eni.

In Uganda, for example, a new field will be exploited, the fruit of the cooperation between Total, the Chinese company CNOOC, and the British company Tullow Oil. Perenco, a French-British company, has just set up in Gabon and DRC and plans to produce half a million barrels a day. In February 2019, Total announced the huge offshore discovery of gas-condensate and light oil in South Africa, which could contain 1bn barrels of total resources.

Even though Africa is estimated to produce just 4% of global carbon emissions – compared to 80% by the most industrialised countries (G20), it is the continent that pays the highest price. For us, climate change is not a future risk, it’s already a reality evident in wrecked families, lands and livelihoods, and hopeless children and young people who have no choice but to seek a future by migrating.

Everywhere on the continent, communities fear losing their land as each season hits one country after another with exceptional floods, unexpected storms and increasingly long droughts. Fauna and flora reserves have been running out, access to water has become a privilege, and extreme weather events have become more numerous and left families without homes or livelihoods....