The great share buyback scam

From The Hartmann Report

My radio/TV program and my daily Substack newsletter, Hartmann Report, together are a small business. The only way I can increase my income from that business is by increasing the advertising revenue to the show, getting more people signed up for the newsletter, or both.

Build the business, in other words. Do the hard work every day. Keep my “customers” informed and thus happy: add value through research and share what I learn along the way.

It used to be that way with big business as well — companies grew in value because of good management and continual reinvestment in people, facilities, and product — until Ronald Reagan adopted neoliberalism and rewrote the rules of business.

Southwest Airlines passengers, for example, are today lamenting lost time with loved ones, lost luggage, and lost money spent on hotels, airline reroutes, and rental cars.

They missed weddings and funerals, spending time with family, and some confronted life-threatening situations as luggage-packed medications went missing and dialysis appointments had to be skipped.

All, apparently, so senior executives at Southwest and their morbidly rich investor cronies could get billions richer.

Here’s how it works.

If you’re the CEO of Southwest Airlines, or most any publicly traded corporation, there are two main ways you can increase your own compensation. They are:

1. Build the company: Invest in workers and technology. Open new routes. Provide better service to passengers. Upgrade your planes so people will want to fly with you. Pay your people better to build employee retention.

2. Use company profits to buy back and retire Southwest stock.

According to corporate watchdog Accountable.US, most of the evidence suggests the immediate predecessor to Southwest’s new CEO chose door number two as often as possible.

But how and why does it happen that CEOs and senior executives make a pile of money when they direct their own corporation to buy back its stock out of the marketplace?

And how did this manipulation of stock prices ever get decriminalized after being illegal for a half-century?

Imagine you’re the CEO of Acme Airlines, a company valued at $10 billion. The company has issued a billion shares of stock that are currently trading at $10 a share ($10 x 1 billion shares = $10 billion).

As the CEO, you’re not only paid a salary, you also have the two typical forms of “stock incentives” modern corporations give their senior executives.

The first is “performance compensation,” meaning as the price of the stock goes up you get bonuses and/or an increase in your pay. The second is that you’re partly compensated with stock or stock options (the right to buy stock at a predetermined typically low price).

If you can increase the share price of Acme Airline’s stock, you not only get a big bonus for hitting your “performance” target, but the stock you hold or can buy at a fixed (lower) price also increases in value. You get rich(er)!

But let’s also say that you’re not interested in building Acme as a way of increasing the stock price: that’s a lot of work and takes years. You want big bucks fast.

So, you simply direct your company to go into the marketplace, to the stock exchange where Acme is traded, and buy up, say, a hundred million shares.

The company is still worth $10 billion, the value of all the planes, landing slots, goodwill, corporate buildings, and assets: none of that has changed.

You haven’t added a single customer or paid a single flight attendant, mechanic, gate agent, or pilot an extra penny. You haven’t improved service or widened the seats in the planes to get in new customers. All you’ve done is use $1 billion in company profits to buy a hundred million shares at $10 each and “retire” them.

But now that the company has bought and retired a hundred million shares, instead of there being a billion shares in circulation there are only 900 million, even though the company is still worth just $10 billion.

As a result of your directing Acme to do that “share buyback,” every share that still exists is worth roughly 10% more because there are 10% fewer of them.

Which means the piles of shares you’ve gotten in compensation are now worth 10% more, too. And because the stock price went up, you’ll be getting a nice “performance” bonus at the year’s end.

This used to be a crime called “stock price manipulation” and was one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s and Congress’ early targets when they went after the Wall Street crooks who brought us the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s.

Congress created the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1934 and FDR put Joe Kennedy (JFK’s father) in charge of it; Kennedy ironically told my old friend the late Gloria Swanson that he was chosen because, she told me, FDR had wisecracked that, “It takes a crook to catch a crook.”

Kennedy, knowing how the game worked, outlawed stock buybacks as one of his first official acts.

But in 1982 President Reagan endorsed this very form of corporate corruption as part of his new neoliberal Reaganomics agenda, decriminalizing it for the first time in almost a half-century.

Lest you think it improbable that modern CEOs would do this, as it’s so obviously corrupt and harmful to the company itself, consider this headline from the corporate watchdog group Accountable.US:

“Southwest Cancellation Crisis Follows Execs’ Choice to Reward $5.6B to Shareholders Instead of Investing in Infrastructure”

As their press release lays out:

“Government watchdog Accountable.US called the airline’s cancellation crisis a problem of its own making after slashing its workforce by over 1,400 in 2021 and choosing to spend $5.6 billion on stock buybacks in the 3 years leading up to the pandemic rather than making investments in infrastructure to be better prepared for extreme weather events like this week…”

This Reaganomics neoliberalism scam has made America’s corporate CEOs and stock speculators among the wealthiest people in the world, while keeping down wages and benefits for everybody else. It’s hurt the competitiveness of American business.

It started with Reagan’s putting John Shad— the Vice Chairman of the monster investment house E.F. Hutton — in charge of the SEC, which regulates monster investment houses.

Shad wasted no time in deregulating stock buybacks, instituting in 1982 what’s now known as “Rule 10b-18” that made stock buybacks explicitly legal for the first time since 1934.

Since then, share buybacks have become the most personally profitable business scam CEOs and senior executives can run against their own employees, companies, and communities.

When Reagan and Shad made this change in 1982, the average compensation of CEOs was around 30 times that of their average employee. CEO’s often lived in the same communities as their workers, or in a just slightly more upscale part of town.

Today CEO compensation is between 254 and 1000 times the average employee, depending on the industry, and CEOs live in palatial estates with servants’ quarters, yachts, and private jets; much of that increase in their annual income is the result of their companies’ repeatedly executing stock buybacks over the past 40 years.

Corporate CEOs call this “maximizing shareholder value” and claim it’s how capitalism is supposed to work.

As more and more CEOs got in on the scam since Reagan legalized it in the 1980s, it’s come to account for much of the 40-year explosion in the price of publicly traded stocks.

Investors don’t complain because they’re making out well, too (and 84 percent of all stock in America is owned by the top 10 percent).

It’s also why so much of America’s corporate infrastructure is rotting, from leaking methane from oil rigs to toxic spills from chemical factories to industrial waste being discharged into our environment instead of being cleaned up.

After all, why spend money on improving the company — or even on routine maintenance and safety — when you can personally cash in just as effectively by simply using your company’s revenues to engineer a stock buyback scheme every year?

As William Lazonick wrote for The Hill in 2018:

“Most recently, from 2007 through 2016, stock repurchases by 461 companies listed on the S&P 500 totaled $4 trillion, equal to 54 percent of profits. ... Indeed, top corporate executives are often willing to incur debt, lay off employees, cut wages, sell assets, and eat into cash reserves to ‘maximize shareholder value.’”

You’d think that if a company’s stock was going up in value that would indicate it is doing well and could even pay its employees better.

In fact, the CEOs of companies need cash to do these buybacks, and to get that cash they often lay off workers and even cut back on their main business just to enrich themselves and their senior executives.

As Emily Stewart wrote that same year for Vox:

“The thing is, when companies are investing in stock buybacks and dividends, they’re spending money they could use on something else.

“The Roosevelt Institute in May released a report estimating that Walmart, for example, could boost hourly wages to more than $15 an hour with the $20 billion it was using for a buyback. A separate study from the Roosevelt Institute released in July found that companies spent nearly 60 percent of net profits on buybacks from 2015 to 2017.

“It estimated that with the money allocated to buybacks, companies such as Lowes, CVS, and Home Depot could give each of their workers a raise of at least $18,000 a year [on top of their current income!].

“Harley-Davidson in February announced a nearly $700 million stock buyback plan just days after saying it would close a plant in Kansas City. Wells Fargo is spending $25 billion on buybacks and is at the same time laying off workers in multiple states.”

Share buybacks have replaced growing a business as the main way CEOs jack up their compensation to buy a new mega-yacht or ski chalet in Switzerland. And its just as much of a scam today, and just as destructive to working people and our nation, as it was in 1929 when it helped crash the market.

Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been shouting about this from the rooftops for decades. Hillary Clinton brought it up in her 2016 campaign for president, something that no doubt cost her some CEO support.

At the time, Financial Times US National Editor Ed Luce wrote, in an article titled Hillary’s War on Quarterly Capitalism:

“The case for reforming shareholder capitalism is strong. The level of US investment [in actual business activity] is at its lowest since 1947. Last year, according to Goldman Sachs, S&P 500 companies spent more than $500bn on share buybacks. This year it is expected to hit $600bn.”

That was in 2015. Just so far this year:

Macys bought back 28.9% of their shares spending $2 billion they could have otherwise used to expand the business or raise workers’ pay.

Chesapeake Energy bought back 20.6% using $2 billion.

Diamondback Energy spent $4 billion to buy back 17.9 percent of their own shares.

For Morgan Stanley it was 14.8% of shares at a cost to the company of $20 billion.

The entire list — hundreds of billions in share buybacks just this year — is on this Marketbeat site.

When the biggest oil companies in America reported record profits this year, ripping off American drivers with sky-high gas prices, Reuters reported on April 29:

“Exxon earlier this year more than doubled its projected buyback program to $30 billion through 2022 and 2023. Shell said it would buy back $6 billion in shares in the current quarter, while Chevron boosted its annual buyback plans to a range of $10 billion to $15 billion, up from $5 billion to $10 billion.

“Exxon shares rose 4.6% to $96.93. Chevron shares rose almost 9%, closing at $163.78.”

CNBC reports:

“Apple started to pay quarterly dividends and repurchase its shares in March 2012. Since then and through last summer, Apple has spent over $467 billion on buybacks, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, which calls the iPhone maker the ‘poster child’ for share buybacks.”

Facebook, which apparently doesn’t have enough cash to hire people to keep Nazis off their platform, has made its top stockholder, Mark Zuckerberg, the richest millennial in America in part through share buybacks, announcing in their third quarter 2021 earnings report:

“We repurchased $14.37 billion of our Class A common stock in the third quarter and had $7.97 billion remaining on our prior share repurchase authorization as of September 30, 2021. We also announced today a $50 billion increase in our share repurchase authorization.”

Democratic politicians have been working for years to try to end this corrosive practice. Senator Tammy Baldwin wrote in a 2015 letter to the SEC’s chair:

“Stock buybacks use profits to purchase a company’s own stock instead of investing in the worker training, research, or innovation necessary to promote long-term growth. ... In the past, this money went to productive investments in the form of higher wages, research and development, training, or new equipment. Today, cash is being extracted from companies and placed on the sidelines. Buybacks are now undermining the stock market’s role in capital formation.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren noted:

“Buybacks create a sugar high for the corporations. It boosts prices in the short run, but the real way to boost the value of a corporation is to invest in the future, and they are not doing that.”

In 2019, Senators Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer co-authored an article for The New York Times in which they told America:

“Between 2008 and 2017, 466 of the S&P 500 companies spent around $4 trillion on stock buybacks, equal to 53 percent of profits. An additional 40 percent of corporate profits went to dividends. When more than 90 percent of corporate profits go to buybacks and dividends, there is reason to be concerned.

“First, stock buybacks don’t benefit the vast majority of Americans. That’s because large stockholders tend to be wealthier. Nearly 85 percent of all stocks owned by Americans belong to the wealthiest 10 percent of households. Of course, many corporate executives are compensated through stock-based pay. So when a company buys back its stock, boosting its value, the benefits go overwhelmingly to shareholders and executives, not workers.”

Pointing out that share buybacks inflate the wealth of the top 10% of Americans who own most of this nation’s stocks — increasing inequality — while generally screwing the people who work for those companies, they added:

“[W]hen corporations direct resources to buy back shares on this scale, they restrain their capacity to reinvest profits more meaningfully in the company in terms of R&D, equipment, higher wages, paid medical leave, retirement benefits and worker retraining.”

Small businesses like mine and millions of others across this nation can’t engage in this sort of manipulation to seemingly pull money out of thin air. Large businesses shouldn’t be able to, either.

It’s time to declare the 42-year Reagan Revolution’s neoliberal experiment a failure, and outlaw the share buybacks that are one of its most visible markers. Joe Kennedy knew what he was talking about when he criminalized them, even if he was a crook.

A first step toward restoring vitality to America’s business sector and providing much-needed funds to return America to our position as the world’s innovator — with the world’s most prosperous middle class, as we were before Reagan’s introduction of neoliberalism — is to once again outlaw stock buybacks.

Source: CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978

Why are people surprised that the young are turning away from capitalism to socialism?  Why the astonishment when politicians like Trump get elected, when Brexit gets voted for, when extreme Right politicians do so well?  If we want to save our democracies, we must rein in capitalism.

The GQP agenda

 

Pop goes the weasel

By Daryl Cagle 

Two years before the great crash

Extreme inequality tends to be followed by economic catastrophe, social chaos and war.  The huge inequality of the 1920s worsened the Great Depression and, as the depression spread round the world, led to the rise of Hitler and right-wing parties in other countries.  

Alex Jones, crisis actor

 By Michael de Adder

I'll take those three

 By Matt Davies

The rental crisis

 Neo-liberalism maintains that the private sector does everything better than the public sector, that the smaller government is, the better, and that the government should never run deficits. This has meant that much of the burden for achieving economic growth has defaulted from fiscal policy (deficit spending) to monetary policy. This has driven down interest rates over several decades, which has made housing more expensive.

But the 'small government' mantra means that not enough subsidised housing has been built. And since government policy is about favouring the rich, we have both negative gearing and reduced capital gains tax on investment assets held for more than a year, which drives up house prices.

These toxic policies are supposed to 'increase growth' and this extra income/GDP is supposed to 'trickle down' to the poor. And yet, in the countries most wedded to neo-liberalism, average wages in real terms have not risen for a long time: a decade in Australia, 15 years in the UK and 3 decades in the US. Even though real GDP has risen. All the incremental wealth created has gone to the top 10%.

Neither main party in Australia wants to fundamentally change this system. Which is why the votes for the two main parties (treating the Nationals as just a faction within the LNP) have fallen from 95% in 1975 to 75% now. This steady worsening in income and wealth inequality gives the people who have lost out no stake in our democracy, so they end up voting for extremist parties and individuals. In response, the Right weaponizes hatred: the world's problems are not due to neo-liberalism or the obscene greed of millionaires and billionaires but to 'Mexicans', 'Blacks', 'gays', 'trans ppl', 'wokeness' (whatever that is), 'Jews', 'Muslims', and eating too much mashed avocado. No one would knowingly vote for policies which siphon wealth up to the richest. So the Right shifts the blame, and newspapers owned by the super rich deflect and lie to make sure right-wing parties remain in office, and right-wing ideas appear 'logical'.

And the result of these pernicious policies is that the most vulnerable end up living in their cars, and the rich call the police to move them on. And no one in power will do anything about it.

Sometimes one can't compromise

 

Vanilla ISIS

 A cartoon by Nick Anderson

A field guide to protest

A cartoon from Adam Zyglis

Unhinged

From The BBC.

Exxon knew--and so did coal

Source: DemonTattler, Santa Fe's high school student magazine

From Grist:

“Exxon knew.” Thanks to the work of activists and journalists, those two words have rocked the politics of climate change in recent years, as investigations revealed the extent to which giants like ExxonMobil and Shell were aware of the danger of rising greenhouse gas emissions even as they undermined the work of scientists.

But the coal industry knew, too — as early as 1966, a newly unearthed journal shows.

In August, Chris Cherry, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, salvaged a large volume from a stack of vintage journals that a fellow faculty member was about to toss out. He was drawn to a 1966 copy of the industry publication Mining Congress Journal; his father-in-law had been in the industry and he thought it might be an interesting memento.

Cherry flipped it open to a passage from James R. Garvey, who was the president of Bituminous Coal Research Inc., a now-defunct coal mining and processing research organization.

“There is evidence that the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is increasing rapidly as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels,” wrote Garvey. “If the future rate of increase continues as it is at the present, it has been predicted that, because the CO2 envelope reduces radiation, the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere will increase and that vast changes in the climates of the earth will result.”

“Such changes in temperature will cause melting of the polar icecaps, which, in turn, would result in the inundation of many coastal cities, including New York and London,” he continued.

Cherry was floored.

“It pretty well described a version of what we know today as climate change,” said Cherry. “Increases in average air temperatures, melting of polar ice caps, rising of sea levels. It’s all in there.”

In a discussion piece immediately following Garvey’s article, Peabody Coal combustion engineer James R. Jones noted that the coal industry was merely “buying time” before more air pollution regulations came into effect. “We are in favor of cleaning up our air,” he wrote. “Everyone can point to examples in his own community where something should be done. Our aim is to have control that does not precede the technical knowledge for compliance.”

While Peabody Energy, the largest private-sector coal company in the world and the largest producer of coal in the U.S., now acknowledges climate change on its website, it has been directly and indirectly involved in obfuscating climate science for decades. It funded dozens of trade, lobbying, and front groups that peddled climate misinformation, as The Guardian reported in 2016.

As recently as 2015, Peabody Energy argued that carbon dioxide was a “benign gas essential for all life.”

“While the benefits of carbon dioxide are proven, the alleged risks of climate change are contrary to observed data, are based on admitted speculation, and lack adequate scientific basis,” the company wrote in a letter that year to the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

At the heart of big coal’s denial campaign was Fred Palmer, who served as Peabody’s senior vice president of government relations from 2001 to 2015. In 1997, Palmer founded the Greening Earth Society, a now-defunct industry front group that argued that burning fossil fuels was good for the planet. The group was based in the same office as the Western Fuels Association, a consortium of coal suppliers and coal-fired utilities that Palmer also ran.

“Every time you turn your car on and you burn fossil fuels and you put CO2 into the air, you’re doing the work of the Lord,” Palmer told a Danish documentary team in 1997. “That’s the ecological system we live in.”

Asked for comment, a Peabody spokesperson told HuffPost:“Peabody recognizes that climate change is occurring and that human activity, including the use of fossil fuels, contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. We also recognize that coal is essential to affordable, reliable energy and will continue to play a significant role in the global energy mix for the foreseeable future. Peabody views technology as vital to advancing global climate change solutions, and the company supports advanced coal technologies to drive continuous improvement toward the ultimate goal of near-zero emissions from coal.”

Palmer, who did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment, continues to carry the torch. He now works as an energy policy adviser to The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank whose climate denial is so severe that even ExxonMobil abandoned funding it and its climate denial efforts a decade ago. In 2011, leaked memos showed that the institute paid contrarian scientists like Craig Idso, founder of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, $11,600 a month to promote carbon dioxide as beneficial to the environment.

The group sits at the heart of a broader right-wing misinformation network funded in large part by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, both Republican mega-donors who backed President Donald Trump and financed projects such as Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, the data firm considered key to Trump’s 2016 win. Palmer’s daughter, Downey Magallanes, was a top policy adviser at Trump’s Interior Department before joining oil giant BP in September 2018.

[Read more here]

Climate change: a timeline

Bans

Oz consumer sentiment plunges

Not a pretty picture.  Even among L/NP Coalition voters, whose confidence jumped after the election results, the boost to confidence has waned.

The fall in sentiment this month is troubling as it comes against what should have been a supportive backdrop for confidence. The last month has seen a further 25bp interest rate cut from the RBA, the Federal government’s tax package pass through Parliament, more signs that the Sydney and Melbourne housing markets are stabilising and even some more improvement in the US-China trade dispute. Despite these positives, Australian consumer confidence has fallen to a two year low. 

The main driver continues to be deepening concerns about the outlook for the Australian economy and prospects for family finances. The index components show the biggest decline in the sub-index tracking expectations for the ‘economy, next 12 months’ which slumped 12.3% to be down 16.4% since May to its lowest level in four years. Longer term expectations for the economy were also pared back sharply, the ‘economy, next 5 years’ sub-index falling 6.7%.

[Read more here]

Interest rates are so low that rate cuts are no longer very stimulatory.  However, the L/NP right-wing coalition government, wedded to the Chicago school ideology on taxes and the deficit, refuses to take any fiscal action which will stimulate growth—except to cut taxes on the rich.  (Do these right-wing parties learn nothing from the experiences of right-wingery in other countries?)  The coal price is plummeting because China is slowing, plus world utilities are switching away from coal.  The iron ore price is soaring because of the collapse of a tailings dam in Brazil.  But this will surely not last—unless we get a runaway world economic boom.  Which we won't.

In Australia, there is a compulsory contribution to your "super" (retirement) fund, taken from your salary each month, and invested in the fund of your choice.  This is set at 9% of wages/salaries, and this amount is included in the calculation of personal savings.  The published savings ratio is way below 9%, which means that the savings ratio of take-home pay is negative.  This means that consumers are running down savings or running up debt.  Neither is sustainable, and frankly, with collapsing consumer sentiment, neither will continue.  Not good.

You do this ..... you get this

You do this:

There is no way you can write the sentence, “The treasurer of Australia, Scott Morrison, came to question time with a lump of coal on Thursday,” and have that sentence seem anything other than the ravings of a psychedelic trip, so let’s just say it and be done with it.

Scott Morrison brought coal into the House of Representatives. A nice big hunk of black coal, kindly supplied by the Minerals Council of Australia.

“This is coal,” the treasurer said triumphantly, brandishing the trophy as if he’d just stumbled across an exotic species previously thought to be extinct.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said, soothingly, “don’t be scared.”

No one was afraid, or scared. People were just confused. What was this fresh idiocy?

You get this:

A third fish kill has occurred near Menindee on the Darling River overnight after temperatures plummeted following days of hot weather.

The latest fish kill follows an incident on 6 and 7 January in which hundreds of thousands of native fish, including Murray cod, golden perch and bony bream died around the Menindee weir.

There was also another mass kill before Christmas.

“This is likely worse than the last time,” said local Graeme McCrabb, who on Monday morning was down at the water’s edge at the back of the township, above Weir 32.

“I’ve just picked up a 50cm golden perch, and there are tens of thousands of little bony bream, dead.

“There are fish all around me just gasping for breath,” he said.

Never has it been more obvious that the Right would rather the Earth was destroyed than give up their pet obsessions and their corruption.

Oz's Rabid Right denialists

Via JPratt27:

Red-hot planet

Source

From the Washington Post:

All-time heat records have been set all over the world during the past week. 

From the normally mild summer climes of Ireland, Scotland and Canada to the scorching Middle East, numerous locations in the Northern Hemisphere have witnessed their hottest weather ever recorded over the past week.

Large areas of heat pressure or heat domes scattered around the hemisphere led to the sweltering temperatures.

No single record, in isolation, can be attributed to global warming. But collectively, these heat records are consistent with the kind of extremes we expect to see increase in a warming world.

Read the whole article.  The number of new records is large, and the temperatures in places like Scotland just extraordinary.

What will it take to persuade the Right that they have been wrong about global warming?

Slowing tropical cyclones very bad news

Hurricane Harvey caused $126bn of damage. Image: By Jill Carlson (jillcarlson.org), via Wikimedia Commons

A report from Climate News Network:

Tropical cyclones are moving more slowly. As temperatures rise, the pace at which a hurricane storms across a landscape has slowed perceptibly in the last 70 years. But the slowdown means each hurricane has more time to do more damage and deliver more flooding.

“Tropical cyclones over land have slowed down 20% in the Atlantic, 30% in the northwestern Pacific and 19% in the Australian region,” said James Kossin, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s national centres for environmental information.

“These trends are almost certainly increasing local rainfall totals and freshwater flooding, which is associated with a very high mortality risk.”

He reports in the journal Nature that thanks to atmospheric warming as a consequence of the profligate combustion of fossil fuels in the last century, the summer tropical circulation has slowed and, along with it, hurricane and typhoon speeds. Overall, since 1940, cyclone movements have slowed by 10%; over some land areas, they have slowed much more.

But as the temperature goes up, the capacity of the atmosphere to hold moisture increases – by at least 7% with each degree Centigrade. That means a tropical cyclone – a whirling system of terrifying winds bearing huge quantities of water – has both more water, and more time to drop it over land.

And Dr Kossin cites the example of Hurricane Harvey which in 2017 dumped more than 1.25 metres of water on Houston, Texas and the surrounding countryside in just five days. Devastating floods displaced 30,000 people, and 89 died. Economic losses were assessed at more than $126bn.

[Read more here]

$126 billion!!!!  And the denialists still maintain that it's "too expensive" to reduce carbon emissions.  The effects of global warming are being felt right now.  We don't have to wait for decades to go by to feel the impact of climate change.  All that will happen is that the effects will just get worse.  Start slashing emissions now, world, before it's too late.

Air pollution inside cars

Air pollution inside cars is 9 to 12 times as bad as it is outside cars.  And it's bad enough there.

Source

Children are at risk of dangerous levels of air pollution in cars because exposure to toxic air is often far higher inside than outside vehicles, a former government chief scientific adviser has warned. 

Prof Sir David King, writing for the Guardian, says walking or cycling to school would be much better for children’s health. The warning comes as the UK government faces a third legal defeat for failing to tackle the country’s illegal levels of air pollution. Air pollution is known to damage children’s developing lungs but recent research also indicates it harms children’s ability to learn at school and may damage their DNA. 

“Children sitting in the backseat of vehicles are likely to be exposed to dangerous levels [of air pollution],” said King. “You may be driving a cleaner vehicle but your children are sitting in a box collecting toxic gases from all the vehicles around you.” 

“The best thing for all our health is to leave our cars behind,” said King, who now advises the British Lung Foundation. “It’s been shown that the health benefits of walking and cycling far outweigh the costs of breathing in pollution. If more drivers knew the damage they could be doing to their children, I think they’d think twice about getting in the car.” 

A range of experiments, some as far back as 2001, have shown that drivers inside vehicles are exposed to far higher levels of air pollution than those walking or cycling along the same urban routes. 

Prof Stephen Holgate, an asthma expert at Southampton University and chair of the Royal College of Physicians working party on air pollution, said there was enough evidence to tell parents that walking and cycling exposes their children to less air pollution than driving. 

“It is nine to 12 times higher inside the car than outside,” he said. “Children are in the back of the car and often the car has the fans on, just sucking the fresh exhaust coming out of the car or lorry in front of them straight into the back of the car.”

[Read more here]

I have to say I didn't know this.  

I'm all in favour of more walking and cycling.  But even if you walk or cycle you are still exposed to nitrogen dioxide (not to be confused with nitrous oxide, N2O) and various extremely unhealthy particulates.  Plus if you cycle you have a much higher risk of accident than if you are driving a car (that's why I stopped cycling--the risks were just too high)  And sometimes you simply have to use your car, especially in cities where public transport is bad.  Whatever work-arounds we try, the truth is that petrol(gasoline)/diesel cars, lorries, and busses don't just emit carbon dioxide, they emit other toxic muck, which kills people.  

The solution is obvious: electric vehicles (EVs).  But it's a collective solution, because it's not enough for you to replace your ICE car with an EV, if everybody else continues to use their filthy petrol or diesel cars and lorries.  Yes, at the margin we can make a small difference.  But we're still breathing in everybody else's toxic waste and getting sick because of it.  We have to act as a society to get rid of ICE vehicles, by regulation and tax incentives.  The problem is that the Right equates "collective" with "socialist", and refuses to act.  

The good news (the topic for my next post) is that the cost of electric cars is falling so fast that within 5 years they will be cheaper than ICEs.  So even if the Right drags their feet, the car fleet will start to get cleaner.  But it will still take time: average car life is around 10 or 11 years, so even when 100% of new car sales is made up by EVs, it will take a decade after that point for the whole car fleet to be pollution free, unless we offer owners of worn-out old ICEs an incentive to swap their cars for EVs.  For me, and for everybody's health, a 100% EV fleet can't come soon enough.