It's not exactly a scenario, but my thinking is that Trump is cutting immigration and taking steps that will lead to less of population being in the workforce right at the moment when the age distribution in the United States is at peak old fuck. Whatever happens is likely to suck enough that if there are fair elections, it won't be repeated.
"This is going to suck worse for some of the people who caused it than it is for me" isn't exactly optimistic but I find it cheering.
I'm not totally following. Cutting immigration will exacerbate peak old fuck and make 2026 elections more likely to swing towards throwing the bums out?
No, I mean that cutting immigration in the current demographic situation is going to make it hard to fill jobs without raising wages and that there will be rising shortages of needed things due to lack of labor. I think much of the vote for Trump was owners worried about rising labor costs and retired people about inflation.
Improvements happen surprisingly fast - as recently as 2010, this graphic would have been mostly red and orange, and 40% coal:
https://grid.iamkate.com/
I keep perversely wishing for a recession. Which I know I've said here before. But I feel like unless the country panics over the economy, we won't wake up from this.
I guess my optimism is that the recession will have less of an impact on me than on the modal Trump voter.
I don't have a favorable detailed scenario for the US at the moment, but zooming out:
In 2006, Gallup polled as much of the world as it could: "Is your city or area a good place to live for gay or lesbian people?" 21% yes, 54% no.
2023, same survey question: 52% yes, 39% no.
1. Trump* induces stagflation. I think we're basically there already:
a. You had persistent ~2% inflation going into 2025.
b. It looks as if ~10% tariffs on basically everything will stick.
c. The federal budget will be highly inflationary (because it'll be Republican, and because your national financing costs are rising and will only go up).
d. Businesses and households will shift from spending to saving.
e. (Less certain) Trump will remove some fraction of immigrant labor from an already tight labor market.
2. Trump fails, by sheer incompetence, to seize power permanently. This is the rosiest-tinted part; but OTOH he's already done exactly this once already.
3. Because (1), Republicans lose at least the presidency in 2028.
4. All this gets you is a rinse and repeat 4 years later.
*And other factors. Electricity shortages,** bird flu, drought in cattle country.
**Chatter about this centers on LLM*** datacenter demand only some of which will materialize,**** but AIUI you're undersupplied regardless; and that was before Trump killed new renewable installations (which stop immediately, while TPP/NPP replacements are years to decades away).
***I want to say "LLM" because I hate "AI", but am not sure it's accurate. Please advise, thank you.
****TBC, IMO "some" will still be a lot. But ~3 years out (i) the models' demand for computing will have changed, in ways IDK and IDK if anyone knows; (ii) the hardware will be significantly more power-efficient (iii) the financing available for capex will have changed (I'm guessing a gradual shrinkage, but anyone's guess. I'd happily bet on a Coreweave bankrupty, frex.).
It seems to me the best case scenario involves
1) Trump governing badly enough that everybody notices. (This seems likely.)
2) But not getting millions of people killed or making things so bad that the next administration gets blamed for not magically fixing it.
3) Pushing the envelope on norms/lawlessness so hard that even squishes agree Something Must Be Done.
4) But also failing to completely break the Constitution.
And that gets us to a narrow Democratic trifecta in 2028 that eliminates the filibuster, passes real democracy and anti-corruption reforms and throws a big chunk of the Trump administration in jail.
It's worth noting we got close to all three in 2020... Covid was too much of a disaster for (2) and the squishes convinced themselves they could let things slide this one time for (3). I think another Jan 6-type event gets us to Something Must Be Done For Real (and I think another Jan 6-type event is extremely likely).
(Aside: The tragedy of this era is that everyone agrees (off the record, of course) Something Must Be Done But Ideally By Someone Else.)
LLM is when it's text. Current "AI" includes image and video generators - maybe these can all be called "generative models"? But then there's other stuff called AI that is none of those.
I don't think "AI" datacenters are going to have a macro impact on energy.
So in other words, Mossy and I agree except I think in the best case we get to my conclusion and not their (4).
I want to say "LLM" because I hate "AI", but am not sure it's accurate. Please advise, thank you.
"Machine learning" is the most accurate general term but it's quite gone out of fashion.
Resisting fashion is basically my entire thing. ML it is.
I really expected my massive personal privilege to insulate me and my family from Trumpism -- and it mostly has -- but I've had two kids (out of two) lose job opportunities because of the federal cuts, and it has to be unhealthy to be as angry as I am all the time.
Ah, but we were asked to provide optimism. I'm not sure I can improve on the original post.
the worst case scenario also generally doesn't come true
That seems like a pretty glass-half-full reading of history. I remember when Network was an over-the-top satire, and now I wish our public sphere could ascend to the Network level of absurdity.
But I want to work with you here! The question I've been asking for years is, "What is the Right's Stalingrad going to be?" At what point will the overreach become so extreme that history will turn irrevocably against Trump?
4 and 6 aim to answer that question, and I'm hopeful. I also take some comfort in Trump's genuine aversion to military conflict when American lives are at stake -- so maybe we won't get a nuclear war. (Optimism!)
But okay, for real optimism, I'll point to the impressive outperformance of Democrats in low-turnout elections.
NBC asserts that in special elections since Trump's victory, Democrats have outperformed Harris's margin by 11.5 points on average. But if I'm reading the source material correctly, this is out of date. The actual figure now seems to be 15.5%.
(But the one election NBC wasn't counting -- the 90% move on May 20 in the Brooklyn, NY State Senate District -- looks like a weird outlier.)
What does it all mean? I don't know. But I'm optimistic!
I assume Republicans will at least lose the House in 2026. (The Senate map is ugly again.) How much that matters depends, I guess, on how all the current legal challenges to rule by decree end up.
9 and 10 are better explained than my point in terms of the economic process. But my optimism isn't just that the economy in going to shit the bed. Trump voters want to hurt others and would be perfectly happy with a big recession if it improves their economic status relative to their outgroups and employees. I think that part is going to fail and that a tighter labor market will hurt them more than they are willing to bear.
What a surreal world, when so many are genuinely hoping for destruction of the least lucky, even if it fucks over their own life. Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
It feels like the senate map is always unlucky. Like it's a bad map, we sometimes eke out unexpected wins, and they're always vulnerable.
Sometimes we work very hard to elected a guy who turns out to be a fucking tool.
17 to 6.1.
I don't mean to engage in both-sidesism, and I'm not inclined to make excuses for the evil fucks who made Trump president again. But I really do understand where they are coming from. I empathize.
My country has been vandalized and defiled. Some of the people who brought this about will be hurt as a result. I ain't gonna boohoo about that, even if it costs me, too. In this, I am like them.
As the wise man said: I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this any more.
It feels like the senate map is always unlucky. Like it's a bad map, we sometimes eke out unexpected wins, and they're always vulnerable.
Yeah, that's been true for the last 16 years (more or less).
At this point my optimism is for a technological solution to some big problems. I think we're in this weird grey area in which renewables are improving fast and will significantly improve the climate change picture, but it's unclear whether it will be fast enough . . .
I also keep hearing that biotech is looking promising, and might produce improvements for both health care and being able to produce some things much more efficiently (that's very handwavy; I haven't followed closely enough to know where the most likely breakthroughs will be).
I am very curious to see what's going to happen with "AI." I don't have a prediction but I think it will genuinely have a major impact.
My guess on AI is that we are seeing the e-pets.com phase of AI and that there will be a big crash before we get the Chewy phase.
For a moment, I considered the possibility that it might be edifying to have a weekly post with the theme "Here is the best thing that happened this week." But I'm pretty sure that , for awhile, the most positive occurence in any given week is going to be contained in a court ruling, and the thrust of the good news will be, "Trump was forestalled from destroying something for a bit."
The problem with growth in renewables is that energy demand is scaling up right alongside it, so even as renewables become a larger percentage of the grid we aren't emitting any less. I don't know what kind of technical advance would actually dent this.
Ok, hear me out.
Optimistic scenario:
Wall Street gets tired of him crashing their indices and pulls their money from Trump.
People start to recognize the federal government has been supporting them all along, which they mistook for baseline conditions.
Thiel/Vance get tired of waiting and make a move on Trump. It doesn't succeed but turns MAGA off the billionaires.
MAGAland media start a lot of infighting. Some start to lean away from senile Trump in favor of Don Jr.
It becomes clear that Dems are likely to win by quite a lot in 2026, so Trump cancels the election.
The people rise up! This was the unendurable thing. There are weeks of street conflicts and talk of a general strike. It almost sounds plausibly effective. Like a breaking dam, even normies and regular media start to float ideas about overhauling the American government.
None of it matters. Trump dies peacefully in his sleep after fucking Lara Loomer. Vance assumes office and we all talk about crisis averted. It seems likely that there will be elections in 2028 because Vance is a weak VP.
I don't even have the satisfaction of him dying wedged on the toilet and choking on his own vomit?
You did ask for optimism but I could only reach so far.
Best case scenario is a meteor strike during a Cabinet meeting. You guys make everything so complicated.
Here, have some good news https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3lqakltu23s2y
Optimistic but realistic takes?
1. Trump dies. Doesn't really matter how for these purposes. His cult of personality falls apart. As soon as Vance tries to do something Trumpish it blows up in his face. In the short term the country reverts to Bush-era problems, and in the long term demographic changes finally accomplish what we've been hoping they would for 20+ years and put the nail in the coffin of the Republican coalition.
2. America slumps into corrupt authoritarianism, but not the genocidal, imperialist kind made famous by Hitler, just something more like Franco's Spain that only hurts its own people. Also, it'll be really corrupt, and that'll get in the way of the deliberate cruelty a bit. The optimistic thing is, governments in Europe and Japan could be at their nadir now, get a lot better, take over America's role in world politics, and do a better job of it. It's totally possible that global warming and Russian and Chinese imperialism can be solved/prevented/mitigated better without the US's involvement than with.
3. The Supreme Court seems to be saying they're fine with right-wing corrupt authoritarianism in general but they aren't particularly loyal to Trump in particular. That's not enough for him. He demands total fealty. Law-and-order Republicans and MAGAts could destroy each other while doing comparatively little damage to American institutions.
I realize none of those would qualify as optimistic a year ago, and I'm glossing over a lot in general. But everything's relative.
30: Think bigger, heebie. Wedged on the toilet and choking on Barack Obama's vomit.
Think Herod the Great, with a penis exploding into worms.
I can't think about that, I'm pondering this:
Just in: Texas' former solicitor general has left the AG's office amid sex misconduct allegations and a lawsuit outlining his apparent, months of detailed disclosures to colleagues about his sexual obsession with watching an asteroid anally rape the agency's No. 2 attorney in front of his kids.
I am being dead serious. Judd Stone allegedly talked about this asteroid fantasy so often that the agency's No. 2, Brent Webster, discussed it with him and, later fearing for his and his family's safety, consulted with other top officials in the AG's office.
CORRECTION: Judd Stone is not accused of outlining his asteroid rape fantasy over the course of months, as I wrote. Rather, he allegedly disclosed his asteroid rape fantasy in "excruciating detail" over a "long period of time" during a meal with federal judges, governor staff and NGO workers.
None of it matters. Trump dies peacefully in his sleep after fucking Lara Loomer.
It would also be okay if that fucking Laura Loomer died first.
40 let's leave that for the coroner to decide
Also in the car just now, I heard on the news that Texas is banning cities from having voluntary gun buyback programs. Every little detail in the world is designed to make me sick with rage, isn't it.
I'm not saying these programs were the most effective thing ever. I just hate the constant snuffing out of any attempt to make the world better.
Sorry for the length. I got a bit carried away this morning...
H-G identifies a particular ennui that has settled over the progressive / liberal / Democratically inclined world, and wonders what an optimistic future world would look like, or what one might hope for, should the best come to fruition.
I have to start out by saying that the first president that I ever voted for was James Earl Carter. His first time! As well as his second time. But as a kid in Jr. High, Nixon was prez, and I wore a button with the Democratic donkey and the words "Vote Democrat!" I knew then and I've always felt that way. I identify as a Progressive!
I've noticed a disturbing trend in my time on Earth: Republicans tend to come into office at most any political level and break things that had been working, making life and the world worse for all but a select (already wealthy) few, who tend to personally do quite well, while Democratic administrations are often left to clean up that mess while doing what they can to bring heath, wealth, and prosperity to more people. They often have their own messes to deal with on top of that other challenge, but in general they try to make the lives of more people somewhat better, both at home and abroad. I've also noticed that one side seems to be repeatedly more corrupt than the other., with active corruption displayed, tolerated, dismissed, and overlooked by Republicans in general, (after all, it's not a bribe if it's done in the open, and what the President (sic) does on his own time is his own affair, and by the way, don't forget to "donate" at the digital currency app / bribe funnel on your way out. So after my 2/3rds of a century as a born American citizen and my almost 50 years as a voter, I think that I come by my opinions / feelings pretty honestly.
To answer the question of what is the best that we can / could / should hope for, or what does an optimistic future look like, I have some opinions, cranky old boomer that I am.
I think that the best times that we as a country and world have experienced during this, as well as the previous century was either during that same Jimmy Carter's single term, or during the eight years of the Obama administration. Some of the things that happened while Democrats have been in power in both the legislative and executive branches were bad, and some were mistakes, but a lot of it is right wing fury stirring up people to hate people who aren't them, to be afraid of persons of darker hue than yourself, as that increases rage and engagement, and therefore profits. There's always something that happens during any president's watch that are outside of their control (COVID anyone?) The 4 years of the Carter administration coincided with my 4 years in the service in the U.S. military, and during that time there were mostly no wars, and we achieved at least the beginning of a recognition of our effects on the planet, a movement towards a more peaceful world, and yet secure on offense and defense, but not really interventionist.
I think that's where you start when you start to think of an optimistic future. Until then, the Orcs are in control. I'd hope that we collectively see how they choose to run things when they are in charge. Maybe give the liberal side a try? Just to see how it goes? That might be a good starting place. We could add health care for all not attached to employment status. Guaranteed basic income. A return to a time when Republicans claimed they were for low taxes, small government, and strong defense, while not wanting to check girl and women's genitals to see if they are "proper sex," while being tongue deep in everybody's business and inflammatory social issues that are intended to not solve problems but to rile, distract, and numb the mob, as they run on emotional platforms that low information types just lap up. We used to be able to openly hate black people, but that became (by federal law) socially unacceptable, so let's switch hate targets now to scapegoat gays. Oops, now that gays are more or less acceptable, let's hate on the people who don't conform to our sexual or gender expectations. The Dems are coming for your guns! Commies and other leftists (see what they did there?), you know, people who read, or who have more exposure to other people in the world outside of their immediate family, the so called "Monkey Sphere." The Right's current "Traditional Values" (tm) probably don't include you.
In a better world I'd like to see fewer persons with too much, and none with too little. If you take the top thousand earners out of the American worker's average income, the rest of us are living on less than 36K$ per year. That isn't enough for food and housing for any kind of family group in the world's "most prosperous" country. I'd like to see a world with no crime, no want, with fewer people in prisons, less homelessness, no preventable diseases, strong teeth and clean water and air so that life is fit and healthy to live. Parks at national, state, city, and county levels, so that we can remember what non-cities Used to look like. Spending a LOT less on the toys of War, and intervention, and killing or supporting those who do, and instead spending at least SOME of that money (the so-called "Peace Dividend") to make the lives of people who are and aren't us just a little bit better. Being a strong, fair, and able leader on the world's stage, the "Shining City on the hill" where we, as a county, live the values that we purport to espouse, and supporting those who also think this way, instead of a speed bump on the way to this imagined better place. A place that pays for better education for those who wish it and that leaves the damn libraries alone. Support of the arts and sciences, with a Federal set of standards on so many things, like air travel safety, veteran's care, and to tell us if some food is contaminated, or that the weather in your area is about to get real bad real soon, or that long term climate change will kill us all if we don't change our ways, and to be able to take measurements and take records so that we can see the "progress" that we've made against global warming. But I won't be around to deal with it. Not me. No kids, no offspring to further overcrowd the planet. You. And Your kids.
Good Government costs money, but Government at any level, shouldn't be expected to operate as a business. Businesses can go OUT of business, but that's not a thing that government should do.
So what is the Purpose of society, and therefore of Government, and what should we (you) hope for? The idea is that we gather some collective list of things that we support and wish to encourage and support and pay for with even a fraction of our total resources, with control systems that advance scientific, medical, and social improvements, ideas and products that improve the lives of more people, everywhere, and that we couldn't accomplish on our own, or even everybody we know within our own "Monkey Sphere", while also providing for REAL collective common defense. I'd like to see a world where there's money to do good things while also checking against the Fraud, Waste, and Abuse that always turns out to be associated with progressive / liberal policies.
Oh, yeah, one final set of thoughts: Stop the Wars! Eat the Rich! And as I used to say at the end of my radio show, "Remember, friends don't let friends vote for Republicans!" That's my first take on what a better world would look like.
Is "raped by an asteroid" a fantasy I'm supposed to find familiar or comprehensible? I try to be sex positive but I don't think I'm on board with that.
As a former biologist, I know that "asteroid" has two meanings - either an orbiting space rock or a starfish. I merely mention this.
If you take the top thousand earners out of the American worker's average income, the rest of us are living on less than 36K$ per year.
This made me curious to check average earnings, and this is a useful dataset (note that it is specifically full-time workers so it excludes a lot of people).
For example, looking at people with Some college or associate degree (but no Bachelors) working full time:
10th percentile: $32,864/yr *
20th Percentile: $41,912
40th percentile: $56,992
60th percentile: $80,548
90th percentile: $114,244
Compare people working full time with an advanced degree
10th percentile: $49,400
20th percentile: $70,928
40th percentile: $101,972
60th percentile: $151,580
90th percentile: $225,264
* The chart shows weekly earnings; I've multipled everything by 52 to get yearly.
Who talks about average income when discussing the typical person's welfare anyway? We've mostly been using median in my lifetime, I assume out of exactly that concern about upper-end skewing - and the super-rich don't show up much in economic stats to begin with, unless you use PCGDP. But I continue to be wary of devoting too much time responding to someone who doesn't sign any name to their comment.
Compare people working full time with an advanced degree
Does a Master's degree count? Because it appears that I should be making more.
The Court of International Trade comes through for heebie!
26 notwithstanding, this is the best thing to happen this week!
Y'know, surprisingly I don't have a good guess as to who wrote 44.
48 is kind of startling as to how unambitious I evidently am.
Prediction thread from a lifetime ago:
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_18803.html#2203922
Just barely, but a win is a win. Unless TACO applies here too.
Not clear there's a real rupture yet. Musk is talking up his differences as damage control, but he hasn't actually left.
He's tweeted that his time as a special fed is at an end, is what prompted me to search the archives. May his toadies soon be prosecuted.
"If you take the top thousand earners out of the American worker's average income, the rest of us are living on less than 36K$ per year."
Not only is this not true, it should be immediately, instinctively obvious to everyone that it cannot possibly be true. It's the sort of thing people pass round to each other on social media and accept without any critical thought because it sounds right to them, given their preconceptions, like "23% of the budget goes on foreign aid" or " one in three people in New York is a foamboyantly gay man who works in the musical theatre business".
Mean eaenings in the US is about 60k and there are about 150 million or so working people - the rest are children, unemployed or retired. So the total income of all US workers is 9 trillion.
For the factoid to be true, the total income of all us workers excluding the top thousand would have to be 150 million times 34k which is 5.1 trillion.
The top thousand would have to have an average annual income of 3.9 billion dollars each. Not wealth; income.
There are less than a thousand billionaires in the US, and a billionaire, of course, is someone with a billion in net worth.
Don't get your beliefs about the world from memes on Twitter involving anime characters.
"Foamboyantly" is not a typo, how could you think that, it is a deliberate neologism to convey a sense of joyful effervescence.
58 he's cucked Stephen Miller. There's also rumors of a group sex thing involving Musk, the Millers, Bari Weiss and spouse, and Ira Glass that both Tooze and Chotiner have been hinting they have knowledge of.
My skin just crawled all the way out of the house and into the back yard.
Meanwhile, Scotus decides Trump can capriciously fire anyone, except Fed governors, because keep the courts and the currency, let the rabble take the rest subtle constitutional jurisprudence.
in the long term demographic changes finally accomplish what we've been hoping they would for 20+ years and put the nail in the coffin of the Republican coalition.It's folly like this that leaves me, even at my most strenuously optimistic, at "rinse, repeat".
Expect kiddiepron in your twitter feed.
https://www.ft.com/content/205568fa-8a99-424c-9fb3-191087adc8bd
My only Stephen Miller anecdote is that I know someone who went to the same school and synagogue as him, and she once remarked with a snort "this profile says that Stephen Miller was a 'divisive presence' in his synagogue. That's not true at all. Everyone hated him."
27: another way to see the situation is that this is what a tipping point looks like. PV and other renewables will only grow and in doing so displace other generating sources; partly because the penny is dropping everywhere that this is a much better route to energy security, and partly because they're just cheaper. The cost of PVs in particular has dropped massively, and there aren't many places on the planet that you can't use them. This same economics of decarbonisation should apply elsewhere: once some technological capacity has stopped being first choice for a while - how to build a coal plant boiler, or a two stroke scooter engine, for example - it's unlikely to attract further investment; the cost of re-tooling, etc. Yes, it will take a while for some ICE production line in Indonesia to shut down.
On Trump: he's pretty much done, by the looks of it. I mean, he'll linger on, but it does look fairly clear now that there is - after all - enough US institutional resistance / stickiness to stop him going full autocrat (even if he were mentally capable of pulling that off, which I very much doubt). On longer term prospects for US democracy; don't know, but needs a bit of a health check to say the least.
67: also, US CO2 emissions are indeed falling, having peaked in 2006. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country?country=~USA
On a similar theme, if you want some real optimism, Chinese emissions seem to have peaked: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-chinas-co2-emissions-into-reverse-for-first-time/
2006 is the year I bought a Jeep that gets 19 mph on the highway. Probably unrelated.
Anyway, saying "Trump is done" is pretty much how we got the fucker back in office and obviously wrong.
2006 is the year I bought a Jeep that gets 19 mph on the highway.
It's one of those ones from the Flintstones where you stick your feet out the bottom and paddle it along.
I'm dubious about those Chinese numbers, because I notice that the chart is a very small slice of time - just since 2016. If you look at the long-term graph there's no sign of the kind of slowing you'd expect before emissions start to drop, and that you see in other countries whose emissions have started dropping.
Those charts are endlessly fascinating to play with. As recently as 1990, Europe was putting out almost twice as much GHG every year as the United States - 8 billion tCOE vs 5 billion. That's all those coal power plants, I suppose. By 2000 they're equal on 6 billion each - I think that's Europe shutting down loads of filthy ex-Soviet empire coal plants, while the US continues on trend. And then from 2000 onwards they are pretty much in lockstep - almost the same emissions every year, declining at the same speed, while China just goes all-out to warm the planet.
72: it gets 19 mph on the higgway. No wonder it's not moving very fast, it'll be acquiring mass as it goes.
78: Going by what he posts is a mug's game, historically.
He wasn't working in the federal government on a full-time schedule even at peak. He was just sticking his oar in and getting dotcommisars assigned and perhaps occasionally throwing himself into a brief project. The government's lawyers have been denying he has any position of authority at all. As long as he can still put his oar in and his people are still in place, his having or lacking a nebulous advisor title doesn't make much difference.
61 I forgot to add that Ezra Klein and presumably Annie Lowrey were also involved in that
Kind of puts that whole Journolist thing into new perspective
Is there a Vox explainer on polycules?
There was something intimated with Klein and other personalities I've mostly blocked out, but I think you might be merging together different polycule stories. I doubt the Klein one extends to the Millers, even chain-wise.
I certainly don't find speculations about sexual relations between right wing assholes to be optimistic takes.
I hate to say it, but I guess I kind of agree with the Supreme Court's NEPA decision today. Review of the environmental impacts of building a short rail line that's going to be used to transport oil probably isn't the right forum for deciding whether the whole project of using oil ought to be reconsidered. The concurring opinion is the better way, yes, but I can see why the majority decided to swing for the fence on this.
Maybe our resident NEPA haters will be satisfied -- after all, the range for spurious challenges has narrowed considerably. Or maybe the fact that some potential for spurious challenges remains will continue to fuel their outrage.
82: Hopefully in the next month, CEQA will be brought into a whole new realm of jurisprudence. In the proposal by Wiener that Newsom has pledged to get into the budget (which takes effect July), the threshold for preparation of an EIR will be not the current "a fair argument can be made to support a conclusion [of environmental impact requiring a full report], even if other conclusions could also be reached" but "there is substantial evidence on the record that the project is more likely than not to have a significant effect on the environment."
SB 607 makes another change that slightly parallels the Supreme Court's decision, making the scope of the report more tailored to the impact found. "For the approval of a proposed project that would otherwise be exempt from CEQA... but for a single condition, as defined, [this bill would] limit the application of CEQA to the effects upon the environment that are caused solely by that single condition."
Meant to cut off the bolding after the first instance of the word "condition."
83 What does 'on the record' mean? What safeguards are there to police dishonest developers who fail to disclose impacts? By definition the 'record' here is before any EIR has been done.
The record of information gathered by the public agency. Typically extensive.
So, could one go to a public hearing and read evidence into the record?
I presume so, yes. It would need some bona fide source to be considered.
And when an agency is working on a Negative Declaration or Mitigated Negative Declaration (the alternatives to full EIR), the public does get notified.
The most optimism I can come up with at the moment is a pretty low level:
- Media starts reporting things that Trump does or says that are obviously lies or just plain absurd on their face as the lies and absurdities that they are: no, the US is not in a national emergency; no, yelling 'fentanyl' in a crowded briefing room doesn't create a national emergency; no, the US is not currently under invasion by a foreign power, etc.
- Effective sanctions against Trump admin lawyers for the shit they've been pulling
- A few decades from now, reparations for the people being sent to prisons outside of the US, and for the people who will be sent to whatever new domestic concentration camps that they manage to build
- Democrats stop talking about Biden's age. I can't muster the optimism to imagine mainstream media and/or Republicans will stop.
I've said before and I'll say again, anyone talking about Biden or Schumer instead of Musk or Vance should be shunned by polite society.
Biden, yes. Schumer, well, infighting is an issue but there has to be some space to talk critically about our current legislative leaders, for cripes' sakes.
Trump's Attacks Have Helped Heal a Deeply Divided Harvard https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/27/us/trump-attacks-unify-divided-harvard.html?unlocked_article_code=1.K08.kK4k.r6bvkusYP3bL&smid=url-share
Here's some optimism -- maybe Trump's attacks can bring more of the not-so-bad people together!