Luckovich toon: Kindred Souls

Fossil Fuels Need to Stay Unburned to Meet Climate Target

Most known reserves of fossil fuels will need to stay unburned to stop temperatures rising beyond a United Nations target that seeks to curb climate-change dangers.

About 531 billion metric tons of carbon have been emitted by burning oil, coal and gas, cutting down forests and making cement since 1750, the UN said today. Capping greenhouse gas output at 840 billion tons gives a 50 percent chance of meeting the UN target of restraining warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), it said in its first such estimate.

“This gives you an indication of the space that’s available to us in terms of how much greenhouse gases we can emit to have a chance of stabilizing the Earth’s climate,” Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said today in an interview in Stockholm.

The data suggest the bulk of known fuel reserves will need to stay in the ground to meet the limit. Reserves reported by listed companies, or a quarter of the total, equate to 762 billion tons of carbon-dioxide emissions, said a report this year by the London School of Economics’ climate research unit and nonprofit Climate Tracker Initiative. That amount of CO2 contains 208 billion tons of carbon.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-27/fossil-fuels-need-to-stay-unburned-to-meet-climate-target.html

Krugman: Plutocrats Feeling Persecuted

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 26, 2013

Robert Benmosche, the chief executive of the American International Group, said something stupid the other day. And we should be glad, because his comments help highlight an important but rarely discussed cost of extreme income inequality — namely, the rise of a small but powerful group of what can only be called sociopaths.

For those who don’t recall, A.I.G. is a giant insurance company that played a crucial role in creating the global economic crisis, exploiting loopholes in financial regulation to sell vast numbers of debt guarantees that it had no way to honor. Five years ago, U.S. authorities, fearing that A.I.G.’s collapse might destabilize the whole financial system, stepped in with a huge bailout. But even the policy makers felt ill used — for example, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, later testified that no other episode in the crisis made him so angry.

And it got worse. For a time, A.I.G. was essentially a ward of the federal government, which owned the bulk of its stock, yet it continued paying large executive bonuses. There was, understandably, much public furor.

So here’s what Mr. Benmosche did in an interview with The Wall Street Journal: He compared the uproar over bonuses to lynchings in the Deep South — the real kind, involving murder — and declared that the bonus backlash was “just as bad and just as wrong.”

You may find it incredible that anyone would, even for an instant, consider this comparison appropriate. But there have actually been a series of stories like this. In 2010, for example, there was a comparable outburst from Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman of the Blackstone Group, one of the world’s largest private-equity firms. Speaking about proposals to close the carried-interest loophole — which allows executives at firms like Blackstone to pay only 15 percent taxes on much of their income — Mr. Schwarzman declared, “It’s a war; it’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/opinion/krugman-plutocrats-feeling-persecuted.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130927&_r=0

Goodwill Fires &Presses Felony Charges Against employee For Giving Discounts To poorest

By Jonathan Vankin, Fri, September 27, 2013
Goodwill Industries says its mission is to help people, but sometimes there’s a limit on how much good will is enough.

When an employee at Goodwill’s store in Naples, Fla., started handing out freelance discounts to the shops poorest customers, Goodwill not only fired the young man, the company called the cops and now has him up on felony theft charges.

"I wasn't actually stealing,” 19-year-old Andrew Anderson told TV station WBBH. “Goodwill is a giving and helping company, so I took it upon to myself to be giving and helping because I feel people deserve it.”

Anderson worked behind the counter at the Naples Goodwill outlet. He would often see the community’s poorest people come into the store, looking to buy clothes but with only a few bucks to their name.


more

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/goodwill-fires-presses-felony-charges-against-andrew-anderson-19-giving-discounts-stores

Friday TOON Roundup 5 - Pope

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Friday TOON Roundup 3 -Economy and Food Stamps

Friday TOON Roundup 2 -G-Dope

Friday Toons: Pablum Cruz

Gov. Beshear of Kentucky: "Get over it ... and get out of the way so I can help my people."

My State Needs Obamacare. Now.
By STEVE BESHEAR
Published: September 26, 2013

FRANKFORT, Ky. — SUNDAY morning news programs identify Kentucky as the red state with two high-profile Republican senators who claim their rhetoric represents an electorate that gave President Obama only about a third of its presidential vote in 2012.

So why then is Kentucky — more quickly than almost any other state — moving to implement the Affordable Care Act?

Because there’s a huge disconnect between the rank partisanship of national politics and the outlook of governors whose job it is to help beleaguered families, strengthen work forces, attract companies and create a balanced budget.

It’s no coincidence that numerous governors — not just Democrats like me but also Republicans like Jan Brewer of Arizona, John Kasich of Ohio and Rick Snyder of Michigan — see the Affordable Care Act not as a referendum on President Obama but as a tool for historic change.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/opinion/my-state-needs-obamacare-now.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130927&_r=1&