#federal programs

Excerpt from this story from Anthropocene Magazine:

U.S. states can decarbonize on their own for about the same price as a federal-led effort to reduce emissions by the same amount, according to a new study. The findings underline that a “coalition of the willing” could not bring the country to net-zero emissions on its own. But they also represent a hopeful vision of how climate action in the U.S. could continue despite Trump Administration rollbacks.

The Biden Administration pursued ambitious decarbonization policies via the Inflation Reduction Act and other initiatives, while the Trump Administration has taken a very different approach to climate policy. The situation highlights the volatility of national-level climate action in the United States, even as the American public broadly supports developing alternative energy sources, and urgent action is needed to avoid locking in fossil fuels with new infrastructure.

Enter “climate federalism,” a concept that casts U.S. states as laboratories not just of democracy but of climate action. In theory, this bottom-up approach might be more effective and durable than top-down action. In the new study, researchers sketch out what it might look like in practice.

“Ultimately the most important takeaway here is that state-led action can achieve substantial emission reductions, even without federal support, but that the world looks very different from one where there is federal coordination,” says study team member Jeremiah Johnson, an environmental engineer at North Carolina State University. “This has some important implications, not just for those states that choose to participate, but also for those who don’t.”

Johnson and his colleagues identified 23 U.S. states that are most likely to pursue net-zero emissions by 2050, based on the number of climate policies currently on the books as well as their overall political leanings. They fed publicly available energy system data into a computer model to estimate the cost of decarbonization and predict the green technologies that the states would likely turn to in their efforts.

Action by this group of states could reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by about 46% by 2050, the researchers report in the journal Nature Communications. The researchers then used the same model to explore what federally coordinated action to reduce national emissions by the same amount would look like.

Federal led climate action would be about 0.7% cheaper than state action, the researchers found. “We were surprised [the state-led] emissions reductions would be achieved at costs comparable to federal actions,” Johnson says. Since only about half of U.S. states were expected to pursue net-zero emissions, “we expected to see this considerably push up the costs of achieving deep decarbonization.”

However, the mix of green technologies that would be used in a state-led decarbonization effort would be different from the federally coordinated one. The state-led effort would lean heavily on green manufacturing technologies to decarbonize industry, while the federal approach would rely more on clean energy such as solar and wind power.

The net-zero states would likely rely on electrification to reduce emissions from transportation and industry, as well as direct air capture to neutralize residual emissions. They might also purchase more electricity from neighboring states, leading to the potential for “emissions leakage.” In the state-led scenario, “we observed substantial new electricity exports from the Great Plains states into the Upper Midwest while those exporting states increased fossil fuel-based use,” Johnson says. “This would undercut the efforts of net-zero states unless their policies are designed to address this.”

Improve disabled American's financial stability with S.4102 - SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act

In the words of David Goldfarb on behalf of the Arc of the United States, "…we enthusiastically endorse S. 4102, the SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act, which would raise the amount of savings a Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipient can keep for the first time in over thirty years. The mission of the Arc is to promote and protect the human rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and actively support their full inclusion and participation in the community throughout their lifetimes.

"SSI provides an extremely modest cash benefit, a maximum of $841 a month in 2022, for certain individuals with disabilities and older adults. In March 2022, nearly 7.6 million people: 4.3 million working-age individuals with disabilities; 1 million children with disabilities; and 2.3 million older adults relied on the program.

"Many individuals with IDD rely on the SSI program. In 2017, SSA estimated that approximately 19% of working-age SSI recipients possessed an intellectual disability. For many people with IDD, SSI is their only source of income without which they could become institutionalized or homeless.

"Unfortunately, the benefit’s low, outdated resource limit of $2,000 for individuals/$3,000 for couples does not allow people to save for emergencies, such as a leaky roof, car repair, or other unexpected expense. To make matters worse, the $2,000 limit does not adjust for inflation every year, and it has remained the same since 1989.

"The SSI Savings Penalty Elimination Act would significantly improve the lives of SSI recipients, including people with IDD, by raising the asset limit to $10,000 per individual/$20,000 per couple. The legislation also adjusts that number for inflation every year, a critical element in 2 today’s inflationary environment. This will allow SSI beneficiaries to use their own savings to address needed emergencies when they arise.

"Thank you again for this critical legislation."

Truly his letter is phenomenal and applicable to many American citizens. I hope you too appreciate his mastery of diction, his compassion for his fellow American, and the truth in his words.

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Due to the fact this bill is written by an idiot most news sources aren't 100% clear on what it will affect. Although no matter how its taken, many goverment funded programs and loans are under attack. Stay vigilant and stay afloat as well as you can during this horrendous time.

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