Trump voters hurt most by Trump policies, new study finds – ThinkProgress

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Failure to stop business-as-usual global warming will deliver a severe economic blow to Southern states, a recent paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds.

Remarkably, this ground-breaking study, “Temperature and Growth” concludes that “under the business-as-usual scenario, the projected trends in rising temperatures could depress U.S. economic growth by up to a third.”

As the Wall Street Journal summed up the findings: “Climate Change May Deeply Wound Long-Term U.S. Growth.”

The study focused on the impact of high temperatures in productivity and found that rising temperatures have their biggest negative economic impact in the summer — but that it’s not just outdoor work like farming and construction that suffers. Using historical data, the authors showed that the finance, retail, and real estate sectors also get hit hard during the hottest summers.

The authors note that a scenario of low CO2 emissions would sharply reduce the economic harm. But such a scenario requires far more aggressive action than the world embraced in the Paris Climate Accord.

In reality, the Trump administration’s policies — to abandon the Paris climate deal while working to gut both domestic climate action and coastal adaptation programs — make the worst business-as-usual scenarios for climate change more likely while undermining any efforts to prepare for what’s coming.

Significantly, the researchers from the University of North Carolina, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank found that “the temperature effects are particularly strong in states with relatively higher summer temperatures, most of which are located in the South.”

The estimated summer impact “for the ten warmest states is about three times as large as their whole-country counterpart.” This means those ten states would be economically devastated in the coming decades.

The study ranks the states by average summer temperature. The top ten, in order, are: Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Arizona. Besides all being in the south, they all also voted for Trump.

We’ve long known the southern U.S. would be hit the hardest by climate change. Back in 2011, the nation’s top climate scientist, James Hansen (then at NASA), warned “If we stay on with business as usual, the southern U.S. will become almost uninhabitable.”

And earlier studies have found that rising temperatures would hit worker productivity hard in peak summer months globally. For instance, a study done in 2013 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that “heat-stress related labor capacity losses will double globally by 2050 with a warming climate.”

NOAA found that business-as-usual policies cut labor capacity in half during peak months by century’s end.

Individual labor capacity (%) during annual minimum (upper lines) and maximum (lower lines) heat stress months. RCP8.5 (red lines) is our current emissions path. CREDIT: NOAA

But the Richmond Fed study is the first to focus specifically on this country: It’s “the first in the literature to systematically document the pervasive effect of summer temperatures on the cross-section of industries in the U.S.”

So it’s the first study to document that Trump’s climate policies will hit the states that voted for him the hardest.

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Trump climate policies will slam red states’ economic growth, major study finds – ThinkProgress

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Failure to stop business-as-usual global warming will deliver a severe economic blow to Southern states, a recent paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond finds.

Remarkably, this ground-breaking study, “Temperature and Growth” concludes that “under the business-as-usual scenario, the projected trends in rising temperatures could depress U.S. economic growth by up to a third.”

As the Wall Street Journal summed up the findings: “Climate Change May Deeply Wound Long-Term U.S. Growth.”

The study focused on the impact of high temperatures in productivity and found that rising temperatures have their biggest negative economic impact in the summer — but that it’s not just outdoor work like farming and construction that suffers. Using historical data, the authors showed that the finance, retail, and real estate sectors also get hit hard during the hottest summers.

The authors note that a scenario of low CO2 emissions would sharply reduce the economic harm. But such a scenario requires far more aggressive action than the world embraced in the Paris Climate Accord.

In reality, the Trump administration’s policies — to abandon the Paris climate deal while working to gut both domestic climate action and coastal adaptation programs — make the worst business-as-usual scenarios for climate change more likely while undermining any efforts to prepare for what’s coming.

Significantly, the researchers from the University of North Carolina, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank found that “the temperature effects are particularly strong in states with relatively higher summer temperatures, most of which are located in the South.”

The estimated summer impact “for the ten warmest states is about three times as large as their whole-country counterpart.” This means those ten states would be economically devastated in the coming decades.

The study ranks the states by average summer temperature. The top ten, in order, are: Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Arizona. Besides all being in the south, they all also voted for Trump.

We’ve long known the southern U.S. would be hit the hardest by climate change. Back in 2011, the nation’s top climate scientist, James Hansen (then at NASA), warned “If we stay on with business as usual, the southern U.S. will become almost uninhabitable.”

And earlier studies have found that rising temperatures would hit worker productivity hard in peak summer months globally. For instance, a study done in 2013 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that “heat-stress related labor capacity losses will double globally by 2050 with a warming climate.”

NOAA found that business-as-usual policies cut labor capacity in half during peak months by century’s end.

Individual labor capacity (%) during annual minimum (upper lines) and maximum (lower lines) heat stress months. RCP8.5 (red lines) is our current emissions path. CREDIT: NOAA

But the Richmond Fed study is the first to focus specifically on this country: It’s “the first in the literature to systematically document the pervasive effect of summer temperatures on the cross-section of industries in the U.S.”

So it’s the first study to document that Trump’s climate policies will hit the states that voted for him the hardest.

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Kelly Finds Himself in a Familiar Place in the Trump White House: Eyeing the Exits

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While several current and former officials said they had not heard the chief of staff call his boss “an idiot,” as NBC News reported on Monday, many said that Mr. Kelly had given the impression over many months that he did not hold the president in high regard. He speaks as if he sees himself as the lone bulwark against potentially dangerous decisions by the commander in chief, they say. And whether he used the word or not, they added, the story itself could serve to accelerate his departure.

Yet Mr. Trump, always averse to confrontation, has continued to keep Mr. Kelly in his role, while increasingly steering around him on matters large and small. One person close to the White House said that it will be up to Mr. Kelly to end his tenure, since Mr. Trump knows how damaging it would be to dismiss a four-star Marine general.

The result is that Mr. Kelly now finds himself in the position where several others who have worked for Mr. Trump have landed: aware that their jobs have become close to untenable, looking for ways to cauterize the wounds to their reputations and knowing that it is only a matter of when — not if — they will have to leave.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Kelly’s deputy, Zachary D. Fuentes, defended his boss and insisted he was the victim of unfounded attacks.

“He’s never called the president an idiot, he’s never called the president unhinged, and the idea that a Marine would ever tolerate somebody disrespecting the commander in chief like that is unthinkable,” said Mr. Fuentes, who has taken the unusual step of talking to reporters on the record this week to push back against the reports.

“He’s been smeared,” Mr. Fuentes said of Mr. Kelly, adding, “I don’t understand why people want to see him go.”

As for the relationship between Mr. Kelly and Mr. Trump, he said: “They’re on great footing. Their relationship is as strong as ever.”

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But the White House communications staff, which normally rushes to deny or sidestep rumors that Mr. Trump is angry with or on the brink of firing an underling, has been quiet. It allowed a statement that Mr. Kelly issued on Monday, and the protestations of his closest aide, to serve as the only substantial on-record comment in response to the NBC story.

“I spend more time with the president than anyone else, and we have an incredibly candid and strong relationship,” Mr. Kelly said in the statement, circulated to the White House press pool. “He always knows where I stand, and he and I both know this story is total BS.”

The next day, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press secretary, tried to put the best face on the relationship, telling reporters that both Mr. Trump and Mr. Kelly were “very happy with his position that he currently holds.”

But Chris Whipple, the author of “The Gatekeepers,” a history of White House chiefs of staff, has a different view of the relationship. “It’s like a really bad marriage, but maybe for now both people have decided they’re just going to try to muddle through,” he said. “Trump is just tired of having a chief of staff, and has this delusion that he would somehow be more effective unchained.”

Mr. Whipple described Mr. Kelly as suffering from what he called the “Don Regan syndrome,” a reference to Ronald Reagan’s ill-fated chief of staff. Like Mr. Kelly, Mr. Regan would often say things that revealed a disdain for his boss, once famously comparing his job to that of a shovel brigade whose task was to walk behind a herd of elephants cleaning up their mess.

“He’s arrogant, he’s been imperious and he’s politically out of his depth,” Mr. Whipple said of Mr. Kelly. “That’s all coming back to bite him now.”

Some officials said the NBC story appeared to be part of a calculated effort by Mr. Kelly’s detractors to damage him in Mr. Trump’s eyes, perhaps to prod the president to take the step he has so far resisted of firing his chief of staff.

Mr. Kelly’s hold on the White House staff has certainly weakened, tarnishing his reputation and overshadowing his efforts to bring order and discipline to the West Wing.

The scandal surrounding the departure in February of Rob Porter, the staff secretary who resigned under pressure amid allegations of spousal abuse, left a lingering bitter taste among aides, some of whom felt that Mr. Kelly had botched his response and been dishonest about his own role in the episode. Among those who came away angry with Mr. Kelly were Jared Kushner — whose high-level security access he revoked as part of tightened security clearance procedures in the scandal’s aftermath — and Ivanka Trump.

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More recently, he has left some aides with unclear job descriptions in place while declining to fill key roles. He has targeted some people who were close to Mr. Trump during the campaign as potential problems, and tried to limit their influence. That has included people within the West Wing as well as those on Mr. Trump’s ever-present evening phone call list, such as Corey Lewandowski, the first 2016 campaign manager who was fired before the convention.

Mr. Lewandowski and David Bossie, the deputy campaign manager, both traveled with Mr. Trump to Michigan on Saturday. And the looming midterm elections — for which Mr. Kelly has no instinctive feel — provide Mr. Trump with added incentive to listen to other voices.

Mr. Kelly’s insistence on an identifiable chain of command in the White House — one of the first things he tried to establish when taking the job last summer — has given way to the creation of new fiefs.

Larry Kudlow, Mr. Trump’s new director of the National Economic Council, has a direct line to the president, as does John R. Bolton, his newly installed national security adviser, who was not Mr. Kelly’s preferred candidate for the role. Mr. Bolton has been seeking to build his own empire, hiring staff members who may have been considered problematic before.

Mr. Kelly, for his part, is sanguine about how little control he has over how the president chooses to spend his time. At a breakfast event last week for Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, Mr. Kelly marveled that Mr. Trump had spent a long time the day before on the phone with Bill Belichick, the New England Patriots coach, talking about the status of Tom Brady, the star quarterback, according to two people familiar with his remarks, one of whom was present.

“It was, to begin with, the most dysfunctional White House in modern history, and now it’s worse,” Mr. Whipple said. “Without an empowered White House chief of staff, you can’t execute policy.”

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