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The Senate Finance Committee has promised senators that their tax break proposals will be kept secret until 2064.

sage: I read this article as being a moot point in the very near future with the imminent arrival of the global financial reform and NESARA. This just seems to be another last ditch effort by the powers-that-were to retain some sort of secret control.

By Jeanne Sahadi, CNN Money – July 25, 2013

http://tinyurl.com/ppzu9kh

Tax reform is apparently so treacherous for senators these days that they require the utmost protection from the public — half a century’s worth.

The leaders of the Senate Finance Committee last month asked senators to submit written proposals detailing tax breaks they’d like to see preserved once the tax code is reformed and explain why. The point was to help inform committee leaders in their efforts to craft a tax reform bill.

The request apparently wasn’t embraced, and the committee has now promised skittish senators that their proposals will be kept secret for 50 years.

A memo sent out on July 19 promised to mark all submissions “COMMITTEE CONFIDENTIAL. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION. DO NOT COPY. These materials may not be released to the public from the National Archives or by the Finance Committee prior to December 31, 2064.”

What’s more, the memo said that in addition to the committee’s chairman and top Republican, only 10 staffers would be authorized to see the proposals. Only two digital copies of them would be made. Each would be saved on a secure, password-protected server. Paper copies would be kept in locked safes.

The only way a proposal could be made public before Dec. 31, 2064, is if it “has been modified in such a manner that it could not potentially identify the source of a submission.”

It’s not clear who made the decision to offer the “committee confidential” designation, but a committee aide said it was “done to alleviate the concerns of senators.”

The same aide said “the 50-year rule is the practice for all congressional committees and generally covers oversight and investigative materials and related work product, as well as all nomination materials.”

That’s news to congressional scholar Thomas Mann, who said he’s never heard of the practice and said it sounds “gimmicky.”

“It’s one thing if they wanted to have some closed hearings for a general discussion before proceeding to an open mark-up. That would be constructive,” Mann said.

But by treating the proposals as confidential it means a senator can argue for a tax break on paper but then attack it publicly if that suits his political interests.

And Mann doesn’t see how that pushes the debate forward because at some point senators will have to stand up and be counted.

“Plenty of things are classified. But this is different. This is a normal public policy thing,” Mann said. “If something then gets included in a package, the member is either going to be for it or against it.”

So, how many written proposals has the Finance Committee received so far? No one’s saying.

In a sign of how swiftly and extensively climate change is reshaping the Arctic environment, a new study has found that the region’s mighty boreal forests — stands of mighty spruce, fir, and larch trees that serve as the gateway to the Arctic Circle — have been burning at an unprecedented rate during the past few decades. The study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the boreal forests have not burned at today’s high rates for at least the past 10,000 years, and climate change projections show even more wildfire activity may be to come.

The study links the increase in fire activity to increased temperatures and drier conditions in the region, which is driving wholescale changes in the massive forests that encircle the northern portion of the globe.

A heavy smoke plume from a boreal forest fire.
Credit: NASA

Wildfire activity in the boreal forest biome, which is also known as taiga, plays a crucial role in the globe’s carbon budget, since these forests represent nearly 10 percent of the planet’s land surface and contain more than 30 percent of the carbon that is stored on land, in plants and soils. Globally, the boreal forest covers 6.41 million square miles, forming a ring along and just below the Arctic Circle.

Increased burning in recent years has meant that more stored carbon has been freed from these ecosystems, which acts as a feedback, leading to more global warming, and hence more wildfires. In addition, the black carbon, or soot, emitted from the fires can land on snow and ice in the Arctic, hastening melting.

Alaska has seen a significant increase in wildfire activity in recent years, which has been linked to the effects of a warming climate, including warmer, drier summers with greater thunderstorm activity. So far this year, Alaska has seen 451 wildfires (not all of them in the boreal forest), which have burned 1.3 million acres, the most of any state in the country.

The new study found that while global warming is likely to lead to even greater wildfire activity in the coming decades, vegetation changes as a result of such fires may keep a lid on the magnitude of the surge in wildfire activity, as apparently occurred during the so-called “Medieval Warm Period” between about 800 to 1400 AD.

For the study, researchers used charcoal records from 14 lakes in the Yukon Flats of interior Alaska, which is one of the most flammable parts of the boreal forest biome, to infer changes in the wildfire regime during the past 10,000 years. Scientists employ charcoal records as a “proxy” indicator of past wildfire activity, in much the same way that other climate researchers have used tree rings to study drought history.

The researchers found that recent wildfire activity exceeded the range of natural variability during the past 10,000 years, which they attributed to climatic warming during the past few decades and “the legacy effect” of the Little Ice Age, which occurred from about 1350 to 1850 AD, and brought cold and wet conditions to Alaska that encouraged the growth of trees and plants in the boreal forests. Such vegetation is now serving as fuel for wildfires.

“The ecosystems in this ecoregion appear to be undergoing a transition that is unprecedented” in the past 10,000 years, said Feng Sheng Hu, a coauthor of the study and a plant biologist at the University of Illinois. “We think this transition may occur in other boreal regions in the decades to come,” he said via email.

Most climate projections show that wildfire frequency, size, and severity are likely to increase as the northern climate becomes warmer and drier than it is today. Studies show that there may be a fivefold increase in annual area burned during the 21st century in Alaska and Western Canada, for example.

Already, the boreal forest biome has seen some of the most rapid and largest amount of warming of anywhere on earth, with a significant decline in the number of days with extremely cold temperatures, and increases in summertime overnight low temperatures and the length of the frost-free season.

Map with the boreal forest biome, also known as taiga, highlighted in green.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

This summer has beenexceptionally warm in Alaska, with the state recording its fourth-warmest June on record. Fairbanks has seen more days with a high temperature of 85°For higher than anytime since records began there in 1930, with an unusually high number of days with a low temperature above 60°F as well.

However, the study suggests that the increase in future burning may not be quite as significant as the projections show, because of vegetation changes set in motion by the fires themselves. According to the study, the tree species that have moved into recently-burned parts of the boreal forest have tended to be less flammable deciduous species. This vegetation change, the study found, could exert a negative feedback on future wildfire severity and frequency. From their charcoal records, the researchers found that this dynamic likely played out during the Medieval Warm Period, when climate conditions were similar to what they are today across interior Alaska.

“. . . Deciduous trees are prevalent in our study area today because of the extensive burning over the past few decades. This vegetation change will probably lead to diminished burning,” Hu told Climate Central. “However, the magnitude of climate warming within this century is projected to be greater than anything that has occurred over the past 10,000 years. So, even deciduous forests could become flammable,” he said.

Although the study did not directly address the carbon cycle, other research has shown that increased forest burning as a result of warming will be a bigger factor driving the release of stored carbon from the boreal forest than the more direct impacts that climate change will have on the carbon cycle, such as through changes in the rate at which soils can absorb atmospheric carbon. And the boreal forest is becoming more flammable at the same time as another key Arctic biome, the tundra, is as well. One massive tundra fire in Alaska in 2007 emitted 2.1 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere, about equal to the amount of carbon that the Arctic typically absorbs in a year,according to a 2011 study.

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The worldwide impacts of a rapidly warming Arctic could cost the global economy an estimated $60 trillion, nearly equal to the entire global economy in 2012, according to a new study. That report, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, is the first to analyze the potential economic costs of rapid Arctic warming.

The study bluntly warns that the tendency for policymakers to focus solely on the benefits of an increasingly open Arctic Ocean — like increased mining, oil and gas drilling, and maritime shipping — misses the longer-term “economic time bomb.” The Arctic region, the study said, is “pivotal” to the functioning of the global climate system, and disrupting it will not come cheaply.

The Coast Guard ice breaker Healy seen here clearing the path for another ship.
Credit: U.S. Coast Guard.

“Estimates are that the economic benefits of Arctic shipping and oil exploration will be four orders of magnitude less than the additional costs analysed here,” co-author Peter Wadhams, a professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge, told Climate Central.

The Arctic has been warmingtwice as fast as lower latitudes, and the region plays a key role in regulating the Earth’s climate system, since the bright white land and sea ice reflects an enormous amount of incoming solar energy back to space, and the Arctic Ocean helps drive global ocean currents. As sea ice and land ice melt, they expose darker surfaces below, and those surfaces absorb more solar energy, leading to warming. This process, through which Arctic warming feeds upon itself and accelerates, is known as Arctic amplification.

Last year saw the most extensive loss of Arctic sea ice ever recorded in the 34-year satellite history. When the melt season finally ended in late September, the Arctic Ocean managed to hold onto less than half of the average sea ice extent seen during the 1979-to-2000 period. So far this summer, sea ice has remained above the level of the 2012 record melt, but not by much. The past six years have had the six smallest sea ice extents since 1979, and sea ice volume has also declined precipitously.

The new study focuses on one potential impact of Arctic warming in particular — the release of methane gas, which is a potent global warming agent, from frozen deposits known as “methane hydrates,” located beneath the East Siberian Sea. Studies have projected that as the ocean temperatures warm in response to the loss of sea ice, some of the methane will be released into the atmosphere. Methane is a more potent, but shorter-acting, global warming gas when compared to carbon dioxide (CO2).

For the Nature study, researchers calculated the average global economic consequences of the release of 50 gigatonnes of methane over the course of one decade — from 2015 to 2025 — from thawing undersea permafrost. They found that the costs would vary between $10 trillion to $220 trillion, depending on the emissions reductions that are put in place during the same period for other greenhouse gases, such as CO2.

The mean estimate of $60 trillion is close to the estimated value of the entire global economy in 2012, which was $70 trillion, the study said.

The economic model used in the study, which is an updated version of the model used in the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, found that the costs of Arctic warming overwhelmingly outweigh the potential benefits.

To arrive at their economic impact estimates, the researchers ran the integrated assessment model 10,000 times under two different emissions scenarios, out to the year 2200.

The study found that the “methane pulse” would add an extra 15 percent of the average total projected cost of climate change impacts, which are about $400 trillion in total.

Read more

Racist? Steve King Defends His Illegal Immigrant Stereotypes as 'Objective Analysis'

Rep. Steve King of Iowa's new-found obsession of railing against the hordes of muscle-bound Mexicans he says are bringing drugs into the country has been strongly condemned. This has prompted King to just-as-strongly defend it. He can't help it. After all, he himself has been on the border and seen the sinewy scourge. His comments are merely "an objective analysis."

RELATED: Bringing Up the Boston Bombing Seems to Work for Opponents of Immigration

Or, anyway, that's what he told Laura Ingraham on her radio show this morning, as Think Progress reports. He was there to again defend comments he made to Newsmax over the weekend, in which he declared that for every immigrant supporter of the DREAM Act who was valedictorian, "there's another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert."

RELATED: Opponents to Immigration Reform Are Running Out of Options

He has seen them.

"That description comes from many days down on the border, riding and sitting with the border patrol and without them at night, no night vision, watching the shadows come across the border, picking people up personally with my hands, unloading illegal drugs out of a vehicle with a false bottom under the truck,” he told Ingraham. “I mean this is a personal experience and I sit there at night and border patrol agents would come to me one at a time in their civil clothes and talk to me clandestinely…This description is the description from that kind of experience."

ThinkProgress has the full audio, in case you don't really believe he said it. King has indeed made several visits to the border, if his press releases offer an indication: in April 2006, February 2007, July 2009, and February 2011. That 2006 visit appears to be the one most likely to have resulted in his hands-on experience above, though his press release is quite a bit lighter on details. Does this constitute "many days down on the border"? You be the judge.

RELATED: How Much Does the House Hate Immigration?

There are no mentions in his press releases of King having attended any college or high school graduations to hear the valedictorians, so it's still not clear how he developed that 100-to-1 ratio. Also, it is generally recommended that one not consider anecdotal evidence to be indicative of broader trends. As a wise man once said from the floor of the House of Representatives:

It's been a very rare thing over the 10-plus years I have been here to see anybody stand up and admit, 'I was was wrong. What you said changes my position. What I learned changes my position.' No, there are too many egos involved in this Congress for that to happen very often.

That statement was made yesterday, by one Steve King. Speaker John Boehner clearly wishes King would set ego aside and change his position — having King's inflammatory position in the news day after day after day isn't making Boehner's sales job on immigration reform any easier.

RELATED: Steve King Wants to Protect the Border from Cantaloupe-Sized Calves

But Republican Iowans don't care. As the Des Moines Register reports, they don't care what Boehner thinks. And they don't care about King's comments, either.

“Even though the comments are racist inasmuch as he apparently assumes the vast majority of Hispanic immigrants are inherently criminal, voters here are used to these kinds of comments from King, and probably wouldn’t recoil unless he were to begin using racial epithets — which he has the sense not to,” said David Wiltse, an assistant professor of political scienceat Briar Cliff University in Sioux City.

That's the line King can't cross. He needs to make sure there's an insurmountable wall on that border.

RELATED: Steve King Says You Only Need a 'Brain' to Know He's Right About Immigrant Drug Mules

Photo of Steve King visiting the border in 2011 via his Flickr page.