TBR News April 4, 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. April 4, 2017: “The rising sea levels on the east coast of the United States are a reality but the way this issue is handled in the media is a fiction.

They have to admit to rapidly rising waters but either claim the land is sinking (which it isn’t) or that flooding will happen in 60 years and superior American technology will raise all the cities and towns up in the air and save us all.

All of this is dim-witted wishful thinking.

Genuine scientists, not the fake ones invented by the media, all agree that the huge ice caps at both end of the planet are melting at a rapidly increasing rate and given the mass of extant ice, a massive flooding is expected within the next five years, not distant decades hence.

And mixed in with the fictional sinking land, we hear wailing about the imperative to stop global warming. The causes range from cow flatulence to excessive use of sewing machines but no one really knows the causes. We do, however, know the effects.

There are millions of people living in areas that will be flooded and there are millions of mortgaged homes that the greedy banks will never let go of and the useless government in Washington, and in state capitols, can do nothing about this but pray to God all of it happens when they are safely retired somewhere with all their bribe money.

The sheep bleat and the wolves listen.

And if the sheep living in the flood zones don’t move to Iowa, they will drown.”

Table of Contents

• Petersburg attacker was likely born in Kyrgyzstan
• Many Turkish diplomats, soldiers seeking asylum in Germany
• 4 governors ask Trump admin to chill out on marijuana enforcement
• Democrats’ Vow to Filibuster Ensures Bitter Fight Over Gorsuch
• Putin Derangement Syndrome Arrives
• How Netanyahu’s dirty tricks squad targets boycotts
• Miami’s fight against rising seas

St. Petersburg attacker was likely born in Kyrgyzstan

Preliminary information indicates a 22-year-old Kyrgyz-born man was behind the deadly bombings in St. Petersburg, authorities in Kyrgyzstan said. He was reportedly caught on security cameras in the city’s metro.

April 4, 2017

DW

Officials in the former Soviet state identified the suspected terrorist on Tuesday as Kyrgyzstan national Akbarjon Djalilov.

“It is probable that he acquired Russian nationality,” a spokesman for the country’s security services told the AFP news agency.

According to a St. Petersburg news outlet Fontanka, Djalilov has lived in the Russian city for over six years. He was recorded by the metro surveillance system around the time of the Monday bombing that killed 14 people and injured 49 others in a likely terror attack. The authorities are also searching for his car, a Daewoo Nexia.

No terror organization immediately claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack. There were conflicting reports about the bomber surviving the twin blasts.

Authorities said that foreign nationals were among the casualities.

‘Standing up to the worst of threats’

The 5-million population city of St. Petersburg declared a three-day mourning period starting on Tuesday, with flags flying at half mast.

At the same time, the locals celebrated the subway driver who managed to drive the train to the next stop, despite the explosion, helping survivors evacuate.

The 50-year-old Alexander Kaverin appeared on state television, saying that he had simply followed the instructions.

“We have already had explosions and smart people developed smart instructions,” Kaverin said. “At that moment there was no time to be afraid, it was time to work,”

The attacks showed it was “impossible” to destabilize Russia with terror, said Vladimir Vasilev, the leader of the ruling “United Russia” party group in the Russian parliament.

“The Russian society demonstrated its capability of standing up to the worst of threats,” he said.

Even after the metro was shut down, “there was no panic among the citizens, and the city authorities decided to offer other means of city transport free of charge,” he added.

Lavrov urges joint action

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with Kyrgyz colleague Erlan Abdyldayev to discuss the Monday incident. Russia’s top diplomat thanked the Bishkek government for their solidarity and said that the attack “once again shows the importance of stepping up joint efforts to combat this evil.”

In turn, Abdyldayev said there was no excuse for terrorism.

“Terror has no nationality and no borders, and we need to stand together when fighting it,” he said.

The predominantly Muslim nation of Kyrgyzstan is a close ally of Moscow and hosts a Russian military airbase.

On Tuesday morning, the authorities once again closed the subway station Sennaya Ploshchad, one of the stations targeted in the attack, after receiving an anonymous bomb threat. It was given the “all clear” signal later in the day, after no suspicious objects were found. The subway system is now back to normal.

Many Turkish diplomats, soldiers seeking asylum in Germany

April 3, 2017

by Joseph Nasr

Reuters

At least 262 Turkish diplomats and army personnel have applied for asylum in Germany since a failed July coup that Turkey blames on supporters of a U.S.-based cleric, a spokeswoman for the German Interior Ministry said on Monday.

The number of Turkish citizens seeking asylum in Germany rose dramatically after the failed coup and Turkey has warned its NATO ally to reject applications from soldiers it suspects of having links to exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen.

Annegret Korff, a German Interior Ministry spokeswoman, said 151 applicants had diplomatic passports and 111 had no-fee passports, which are issued by governments to military personnel and other civil servants who are on official travel assignments.

She did not specify whether the 262 also included diplomats’ families, who would also have diplomatic status.

“Those figures are not actually statistically sound because they are based on the voluntary statements of the asylum applicants,” Korff told a regular government news conference, suggesting the real number could be higher.

Tensions are running high between the two NATO allies ahead of a referendum in Turkey next month that proposes expanding the powers of President Tayyip Erdogan. Germany infuriated Turkey by cancelling several campaign rallies by Turkish ministers on German soil, drawing accusations from Turkey of “Nazi” tactics.

The German government said in December that 5,166 Turkish citizens had applied for asylum in the first 11 months of last year, compared with 1,767 applications received in the whole of 2015. Some 80 percent of the applicants were ethnic Kurds.

Turkish Defence Minister Fikri Isik urged Germany in January to reject asylum applications from 40 mostly high-ranking former soldiers suspected by Ankara of having links to the coup.

Following the July 15 coup, Turkey has arrested more than 40,000 people and sacked or suspended more than 100,000 in the military, civil service and private sector

(Reporting by Joseph Nasr; editing by Ralph Boulton)

 4 governors ask Trump admin to chill out on marijuana enforcement

April 4, 2017

RT

Governors in four states that have legalized marijuana in some form have written a letter to two Trump administration officials requesting they consult with states before making any changes to regulatory and enforcement systems for the drug.

The independent governor of Alaska joined the Democratic governors of Colorado, Oregon and Washington to write a letter to US Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Monday, asking them to continue the Obama administration’s hands-off policy towards enforcing federal marijuana laws in states that have okayed medicinal or recreational use.

“We understand you and others in the administration have some concerns regarding marijuana,” the governors wrote. “We sympathize, as many of us expressed apprehensions before our states adopted current laws.”

Governors Kate Brown (D-Oregon), John Hickenlooper (D-Colorado), Jay Inslee (D-Washington) and Bill Walker (I-Alaska) signed the letter. Colorado became the first state to legalize pot in January 2014, with Washington beginning sales six months later. Alaska joined the party in February 2015, and Oregon legalized marijuana in July of that year.

Since then, four other states ‒ California, Maine, Massachusetts and Nevada ‒ as well as the District of Columbia have all legalized recreational pot use, while another 13 have decriminalized it. A total of 28 states and DC allow for medicinal marijuana.

Sessions is a staunch opponent of marijuana, and reportedly once joked that he thought members of the Ku Klux Klan were “okay, until he learned that they smoked marijuana.” At the end of February, the Trump administration signaled a crackdown on the recreational use of the drug even in states where it is legal.

“The president understands the pain and suffering that many people go through who are facing especially terminal diseases and the comfort that some of these drugs, including medical marijuana, can bring to them,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said at the time, noting that a 2011 federal appropriations rider allows for states to legalize medicinal marijuana. “There is a big difference between that and recreational marijuana… That’s a very, very different subject.”

The National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA) applauded the letter, saying it was a proactive approach that was in line with the Trump administration’s priorities of putting Americans back to work and keeping drug cartels out.

“There is no denying that regulated cannabis businesses are preferable to underground markets dominated by gangs and cartels,” NCIA Executive Director Aaron Smith said in a statement. “The regulated markets are creating jobs, generating tax revenue, and taking marijuana sales off the streets. The Trump administration should be working with the states to ensure the regulated markets are functioning properly and safely, not working against the states to shut them down.”

The governors called on the new administration to adhere to the 2013 Department of Justice Cole Memorandum, which they described as “indispensable” because it provides “the necessary framework for state regulatory programs centered on public safety and health protections.”

Instead of challenging state laws legalizing pot use or enforcing federal laws in those states, the DOJ would shift its focus on enforcing and prosecuting violations of eight priority areas, which include the prevention of marijuana distribution to minors, transportation across state lines where it is illegal as well and the prosecution of criminal organizations that do not have a permit to sell pot.

“Overhauling the Cole Memo is sure to produce unintended and harmful consequences,” the governors wrote. “Changes that hurt the regulated market would divert existing marijuana product into the black market and increase dangerous activity in both our states and our neighboring states.”

They also asked the Trump administration not to change the related Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) guidance, which the governors said would make financial institutions less willing to provide services to marijuana-related businesses.

This would force industry participants to be even more cash reliant, posing safety risks both to the public and to state regulators conducting enforcement activity,” they wrote. “The Cole Memo and FinCEN guidance strike a reasonable balance between allowing the states to enact reasonable regulations and the federal government’s interest in controlling some of the collateral consequences of legalization.”

Courts have increasingly sided with states over the DOJ when it comes to prosecuting marijuana offenses. In August, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ‒ which covers Alaska, California, Oregon and Washington, among other states ‒ ruled that the federal government cannot prosecute medical marijuana users and growers in the states that have legalized it. Last March, the Supreme Court declined to wade into a dispute between neighboring states over Colorado’s legalization.

Democrats’ Vow to Filibuster Ensures Bitter Fight Over Gorsuch

April 3. 2017

by Matt Flegenheimer

The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats on Monday secured the votes necessary to filibuster the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, presaging a bitter confrontation this week that threatens to further unravel a chamber where bipartisanship and decorum have eroded for years.

The show of solidarity from the minority came as Republicans advanced Judge Gorsuch’s nomination in the Judiciary Committee, clearing the way for his consideration on the Senate floor.

Republicans vowed Monday to confirm him by the end of the week. The implication was not subtle: If they must change longstanding rules to bypass the filibuster, elevating President Trump’s selection on a simple majority vote, they will not hesitate.

“We have no alternative,” Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, said alongside his Judiciary Committee colleagues after a party-line vote, 11 to 9.

It was the beginning of what both parties consider a seminal week on Capitol Hill, likely to fundamentally reshape the way the Senate conducts its business.

Though lawmakers have long deployed the filibuster — a procedural device that allows for continued debate to block or delay a vote — to suit their circumstances, Supreme Court confirmations have been viewed as another matter, insulated at least somewhat from the body’s most partisan passions.

Under current rules, Republicans cannot break the filibuster if fewer than 60 senators vote to move the nomination to an up-or-down Senate vote. That would require eight Democrats to join the 52-seat Republican majority. As of Monday evening, only four Democrats had announced support for an up-or-down vote.

Judge Gorsuch’s fate will depend on whether Republicans follow through on plans for the so-called nuclear option, as Mr. Trump has urged, to circumvent the filibuster for a Supreme Court pick.

“The Republicans are free actors,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said Monday, urging a withdrawal of the nomination if Judge Gorsuch cannot earn 60 votes. “They can choose to go nuclear or they can sit down with Democrats and find a way forward that preserves the grand traditions of this body.”

Such was the theme of Monday’s proceedings: a series of meditations on grand traditions, a resignation to their imminent demise and an insistence that the other side was to blame.

During the committee vote, senators took turns lamenting the state of the institution they serve, although none pledged to buck their own party on either the Democratic filibuster or the Republican push for a rule change.

What comes next, it appears, is a slow-motion dismantling of senatorial standards and practice, scheduled for demolition over several days.

“This is a new low,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, said of the likely filibuster, “but not entirely surprising.”

Of course, Democrats identify Mr. McConnell as the chief purveyor of new lows. From the beginning, the Gorsuch nomination has been shadowed, in large measure, by Judge Merrick B. Garland, whom President Barack Obama nominated in March 2016 after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia the month before. Mr. McConnell led Republicans in refusing to even consider the nomination during a presidential election year.

But Democrats insist that their opposition to Judge Gorsuch is not about payback. They have cited his record on workers’ rights and his degree of independence from Mr. Trump and conservative groups like the Federalist Society, among other concerns.

Perhaps no member sounded as pained on Monday as Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and the Senate’s longest-serving member.

He first argued that the treatment of Judge Garland had convinced Judge Gorsuch that “this committee is nothing more than a partisan rubber stamp,” allowing the nominee to evade straightforward questions during his hearings.

Mr. Leahy suggested that Mr. McConnell had no qualms about “forever damaging the United States Senate.”

And he wondered aloud how the Capitol had become so unrecognizable to him, after 42 years.

“I cannot vote solely to protect an institution when the rights of hard-working Americans are at risk,” Mr. Leahy said. “Because I fear that the Senate I would be defending no longer exists.”

Republicans have in turn faulted Democrats for what they call two escalations of hostilities: a series of filibusters against judicial nominees under President George W. Bush and a vote in 2013, when Democrats controlled the Senate, to bar filibusters for the president’s appeals court and executive branch nominees. That shift left the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations untouched.

Supporters of Judge Gorsuch have appeared incredulous that the Senate — whose members approved Justice Scalia unanimously and did not use a filibuster for even some fiercely contested nominees like Justice Clarence Thomas — could come undone over a judge they view as plainly qualified and uncontroversial.

“It’s pathetic,” Mr. Hatch said, “that they’re so stupid that they picked somebody of his quality and ability” to oppose.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the committee’s chairman, accused Democrats of searching in vain for credible reasons to vote against “a judge’s judge.”

Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, pressed the case that Judge Gorsuch’s nomination carried a “superlegitimacy” because voters last year knew that the next president would get to fill the seat. (Before the election, he had suggested trying to leave the seat open indefinitely if Hillary Clinton won.)

Yet even some Republicans who planned to support a rule change if necessary said they worried about what would come of it.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, predicted that a simple-majority threshold for Supreme Court confirmations would lead to the elevation of future judges who are “more ideological, not less.” Every Senate race, he added, would effectively become a referendum on the Supreme Court.

“This is going to haunt the Senate, it’s going to change the judiciary, and it’s so unnecessary,” Mr. Graham said after the vote.

Though some Democrats have expressed concerns, in public and private, about pushing ahead with a filibuster, they are also aware of their political hand: The party’s progressive base has called on lawmakers to oppose Mr. Trump at every turn, reminding them of the extraordinary dynamics at play.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, linked his vote opposing Judge Gorsuch, at least in part, to the current investigations into connections between Mr. Trump’s orbit and Russia.

“It is about the constitutional crisis that may well be looming,” he said, arguing that Judge Gorsuch had not demonstrated sufficient independence from Mr. Trump. Mr. Blumenthal added that the prospect of the Supreme Court needing to enforce a subpoena against the president was “far from idle speculation.”

Even lighter fare on Monday could not coax consensus from committee members. At one point, Mr. Grassley asked the senators how they would like to manage their lunch schedule: a half-hour break for everyone or an uninterrupted hearing with senators peeling off one by one to eat.

The room appeared split. “Could the majority cater this lunch?” asked Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota. A few Republicans raised their hands to convey a desire to keep going.

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the committee’s top Democrat, smiled slightly, her hands clasped. The committee, she said quietly, could not even agree on lunch.

Putin Derangement Syndrome Arrives

Whatever the truth about Trump and Russia, the speculation surrounding it has become a dangerous case of mass hysteria

April 3, 2017

by  Matt Taibbi

Rolling Stone

So Michael Flynn, who was Donald Trump’s national security adviser before he got busted talking out of school to Russia’s ambassador, has reportedly offered to testify in exchange for immunity.

For seemingly the 100th time, social media is exploding. This is it! The big reveal!

Perhaps it will come off just the way people are expecting. Perhaps Flynn will get a deal, walk into the House or the Senate surrounded by a phalanx of lawyers, and unspool the whole sordid conspiracy.

He will explain that Donald Trump, compromised by ancient deals with Russian mobsters, and perhaps even blackmailed by an unspeakable KGB sex tape, made a secret deal. He’ll say Trump agreed to downplay the obvious benefits of an armed proxy war in Ukraine with nuclear-armed Russia in exchange for Vladimir Putin’s help in stealing the emails of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and John Podesta.

I personally would be surprised if this turned out to be the narrative, mainly because we haven’t seen any real evidence of it. But episodes like the Flynn story have even the most careful reporters paralyzed. What if, tomorrow, it all turns out to be true?

What if reality does turn out to be a massive connect-the-dots image of St. Basil’s Cathedral sitting atop the White House? (This was suddenly legitimate British conspiracist Louise Mensch’s construction in The New York Times last week.) What if all the Glenn Beck-style far-out charts with the circles and arrows somehow all make sense?

This is one of the tricks that keeps every good conspiracy theory going. Nobody wants to be the one claiming the emperor has no clothes the day His Highness walks out naked. And this Russia thing has spun out of control into just such an exercise of conspiratorial mass hysteria.

Even I think there should be a legitimate independent investigation – one that, given Trump’s history, might uncover all sorts of things. But almost irrespective of what ends up being uncovered on the Trump side, the public prosecution of this affair has taken on a malevolent life of its own.

One way we recognize a mass hysteria movement is that everyone who doesn’t believe is accused of being in on the plot. This has been going on virtually unrestrained in both political and media circles in recent weeks.

The aforementioned Mensch, a noted loon who thinks Putin murdered Andrew Breitbart but has somehow been put front and center by The Times and HBO’s Real Time, has denounced an extraordinary list of Kremlin plants.

She’s tabbed everyone from Jeff Sessions (“a Russian partisan”) to Rudy Giuliani and former Assistant FBI Director James Kallstrom (“agents of influence”) to Glenn Greenwald (“Russian shill”) to ProPublica and Democracy Now! (also “Russian shills”), to the 15-year-old girl with whom Anthony Weiner sexted (really, she says, a Russian hacker group called “Crackas With Attitudes”) to an unnamed number of FBI agents in the New York field office (“moles”). And that’s just for starters.

Others are doing the same. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, upon seeing the strange behavior of Republican Intel Committee chair Devin Nunes, asked “what kind of dossier” the Kremlin has on Nunes.

Dem-friendly pollster Matt McDermott wondered why reporters Michael Tracey and Zaid Jilani aren’t on board with the conspiracy stories (they might be “unwitting” agents!) and noted, without irony, that Russian bots mysteriously appear every time he tweets negatively about them.

Think about that last one. Does McDermott think Tracey and Jilani call their handlers at the sight of a scary Matt McDermott tweet and have the FSB send waves of Russian bots at him on command? Or does he think it’s an automated process? What goes through the heads of such people?

I’ve written a few articles on the Russia subject that have been very tame, basically arguing that it might be a good idea to wait for evidence of collusion before those of us in the media jump in the story with both feet. But even I’ve gotten the treatment.

I’ve been “outed” as a possible paid Putin plant by the infamous “PropOrNot” group, which is supposedly dedicated to rooting out Russian “agents of influence.” You might remember PropOrNot as the illustrious research team the Washington Post once relied on for a report that accused 200 alternative websites of being “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season.”

Politicians are getting into the act, too. It was one thing when Rand Paul balked at OKing the expansion of NATO to Montenegro, and John McCain didn’t hesitate to say that “the senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin.”

Even Bernie Sanders has himself been accused of being a Putin plant by Mensch. But even he’s gotten on board of late, asking, “What do the Russians have on Mr. Trump?”

So even people who themselves have been accused of being Russian plants are now accusing people of being Russian plants. As the Russians would say, it’s enough to make your bashka hurt.

Sanders should know better. Last week, during hearings in the Senate, multiple witnesses essentially pegged his electoral following as unwitting fellow travelers for Putin.

Former NSA chief Keith Alexander spoke openly of how Russia used the Sanders campaign to “drive a wedge within the Democratic Party,” while Dr. Thomas Rid of Kings College in London spoke of Russia’s use of “unwitting agents” and “overeager journalists” to drive narratives that destabilized American politics.

This testimony was brought out by Virginia Democrat Mark Warner. Warner has been in full-blown “precious bodily fluids” mode throughout this scandal. During an interview with The Times on the Russia subject a month back, there was a thud outside the window. “That may just be the FSB,” he said. The paper was unsure if he was kidding.

Warner furthermore told The Times that in order to get prepared for his role as an exposer of 21st-century Russian perfidy, he was “losing himself in a book about the Romanovs,” and had been quizzing staffers about “Tolstoy and Nabokov.”

This is how nuts things are now: a senator brushes up on Nabokov and Tolstoy (Tolstoy!) to get pumped to expose Vladimir Putin.

Even the bizarre admission by FBI director (and sudden darling of the same Democrats who hated him months ago) James Comey that he didn’t know anything about Russia’s biggest company didn’t seem to trouble Americans very much. Here’s the key exchange, from a House hearing in which Jackie Speier quizzed Comey:

SPEIER: Now, do we know who Gazprom-Media is? Do you know anything about Gazprom, director?

COMEY: I don’t.

SPEIER: Well, it’s a – it’s an oil company.

(Incidentally, Gazprom – primarily a natural-gas giant – is not really an oil company. So both Comey and Speier got it wrong.)

As Leonid Bershidsky of Bloomberg noted, this exchange was terrifying to Russians. The leader of an investigation into Russian espionage not knowing what Gazprom is would be like an FSB chief not having heard of Exxon-Mobil. It’s bizarre, to say the least.

Testimony of the sort that came from Warner’s committee last week is being buttressed by news stories in liberal outlets like Salon insisting that “Bernie Bros” were influenced by those same ubiquitous McDermott-chasing Russian “bots.”

These stories insist that, among other things, these evil bots pushed on the unwitting “bros” juicy “fake news” stories about Hillary being “involved with various murders and money laundering schemes.”

Some 13.2 million people voted for Sanders during the primary season last year. What percentage does any rational person really believe voted that way because of “fake news”?

I would guess the number is infinitesimal at best. The Sanders campaign was driven by a lot of factors, but mainly by long-developing discontent within the Democratic Party and enthusiasm for Sanders himself.

To describe Sanders followers as unwitting dupes who departed the true DNC faith because of evil Russian propaganda is both insulting and ridiculous. It’s also a testimony to the remarkable capacity for self-deception within the leadership of the Democratic Party.

If the party’s leaders really believe that Russian intervention is anywhere in the top 100 list of reasons why some 155 million eligible voters (out of 231 million) chose not to pull a lever for Hillary Clinton last year, they’re farther along down the Purity of Essence nut-hole than Mark Warner.

Moreover, even those who detest Trump with every fiber of their being must see the dangerous endgame implicit in this entire line of thinking. If the Democrats succeed in spreading the idea that straying from the DNC-approved candidate – in either the past or the future – is/was an act of “unwitting” cooperation with the evil Putin regime, then the entire idea of legitimate dissent is going to be in trouble.

Imagine it’s four years from now (if indeed that’s when we have our next election). A Democratic candidate stands before the stump, and announces that a consortium of intelligence experts has concluded that Putin is backing the hippie/anti-war/anti-corporate opposition candidate.

Or, even better: that same candidate reminds us “what happened last time” when people decided to vote their consciences during primary season. It will be argued, in seriousness, that true Americans will owe their votes to the non-Putin candidate. It would be a shock if some version of this didn’t become an effective political trope going forward.

But if you’re not worried about accusing non-believers of being spies, or pegging legitimate dissent as treason, there’s a third problem that should scare everyone.

Last week saw Donna Brazile and Dick Cheney both declare Russia’s apparent hack of DNC emails an “act of war.” This coupling seemed at first like political end times: as Bill Murray would say, “dogs and cats, living together.”

But there’s been remarkable unanimity among would-be enemies in the Republican and Democrat camps on this question. Suddenly everyone from Speier to McCain to Kamala Harris to Ben Cardin have decried Russia’s alleged behavior during the election as real or metaphorical acts of war: a “political Pearl Harbor,” as Cardin put it.

That no one seems to be concerned about igniting a hot war with nuclear-powered Russia at a time when both countries have troops within “hand-grenade range” of each in Syria other is bizarre, to say the least. People are in such a fever to drag Trump to impeachment that these other considerations seem not to matter. This is what happens when people lose their heads.

There are a lot of people who will say that these issues are of secondary importance to the more important question of whether or not we have a compromised Russian agent in the White House.

But when it comes to Trump-Putin collusion, we’re still waiting for the confirmation. As Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters put it, the proof is increasingly understood to be the thing we find later, as in, “If we do the investigations, we will find the connections.”

But on the mass hysteria front, we already have evidence enough to fill a dozen books. And if it doesn’t freak you out, it probably should.

How Netanyahu’s dirty tricks squad targets boycotts

April 4, 2017

by Jonathan Cook

The National Opinion

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed cohorts of Israel loyalists in the United States by video link last week at the annual conference of Aipac, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. They should, he said, follow his government’s example and defend Israel on the “moral battlefield” against the growing threat of the international boycott divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. In Mr Netanyahu’s simple-minded language, support for Palestinian rights, and opposition to the settlements, is equivalent to “delegitimisation” of Israel.

The current obsession with BDS reflects a changing political environment for Israel.

According to an investigation by the Haaretz newspaper last month, Israeli agents subverted the human rights community in the 1970s and 1980s. Their job was to launder Israel’s image abroad. Yoram Dinstein, a professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, led the local chapter of Amnesty International, the world’s most influential rights organisation of the time, running it effectively as a wing of Israel’s foreign ministry.

Mr Dinstein’s interference allowed Israel to falsely characterise the occupation as benevolent while presenting the Palestinians’ liberation struggle as terrorism. The reality of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians rarely reached outsiders.

Israel’s task is harder five decades on. The human rights community is more independent, while social media and mobile phone cameras have allowed Palestinians and their supporters to bypass the gatekeepers.

In the past few days, videos have shown an Israeli policeman savagely beating a Palestinian lorry driver, and soldiers taking hostage a terrified eight-year-old after he crossed their path while searching for a toy.

If concealment at source is no longer so easy, the battle must be taken to those who disseminate this damning information. The urgency has grown as artists refuse to visit, universities sever ties, churches pull their investments and companies back out of deals.

Israel is already sealing itself off from outside scrutiny as best it can. Last month it passed a law denying entry into Israel or the occupied territories to those who support BDS or “delegitimise” Israel.

But domestic critics have proved trickier. The Israel government has chipped away at the human rights community’s financial base. Media regulation has intensified. And the culture ministry is cracking down on film productions that criticise the occupation or government policy.

But the local boycott movement is feeling the brunt of the assault. Activists already risk punitive damages if they call for a boycott of the settlements. Transport minister Yisrael Katz threatened BDS leaders last year with “civil targeted assassination”. What did he mean?

Omar Barghouti, the movement’s Palestinian figurehead, was arrested last month, accused of tax evasion. He is already under a travel ban, preventing him from receiving an international peace award this month. And Israeli officials want to strip him of his not-so “permanent” residency.

At the same time, a leading Israeli rights activist, Jeff Halper, founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, was detained by police on suspicion of promoting BDS while leading activists on a tour of an illegal settlement.

These are the first signs of the repression to come. The police minister, Gilad Erdan, has announced plans for a database of Israelis who support BDS, to mirror existing spying operations on BDS activists overseas. The information will help a “dirty tricks” unit whose job is to tarnish their reputations. Mr Erdan also wants a blacklist of companies and organisations that support boycotts. A law passed in February already shames the few companies prepared to deny services to the settlements, forcing them publicly to “out” themselves.

Why is Israel so fearful? Officials say the immediate danger is Europe’s labelling of settlement products, the first step on a slippery slope they fear could lead to Israel being called an apartheid state. That would shift the debate from popular boycotts and divestment by civil society groups to pressure for action by governments – or sanctions.

The inexorable trend was illustrated last month when a United Nations commission found Israel guilty of breaching the international convention on the crime of apartheid. Washington forced the UN secretary-general to repudiate the report, but the comparison is not going away.

Israel supporters in the United States have taken Mr Netanyahu’s message to heart. Last week they unveiled an online “boycotters map”, identifying academics who support BDS – both to prevent them entering Israel and presumably to damage their careers.

For the moment, the Israeli-engineered backlash is working. Western governments are characterising support for a boycott, even of the settlements, as anti-Semitic – driven by hatred of Jews rather than opposition to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. ­Anti-BDS legislation has passed in France, Britain, Switzerland, Canada and the US.

This is precisely how Mr Netanyahu wants to shape the “moral battlefield”. A reign of terror against free speech and political activism abroad and at home, leaving Israel free to crush the Palestinians.

On paper, it may sound workable. But Israel will soon have to accept that the apartheid genie is out of the bottle – and it cannot be put back.

Miami’s fight against rising seas

Just down the coast from Donald Trump’s weekend retreat, the residents and businesses of south Florida are experiencing regular episodes of water in the streets. In the battle against rising seas, the region – which has more to lose than almost anywhere else in the world – is becoming ground zero

April 4, 2017

by Amanda Ruggeri

BBC News

The first time my father’s basement flooded, it was shortly after he moved in. The building was an ocean-front high-rise in a small city north of Miami called Sunny Isles Beach. The marble lobby had a waterfall that never stopped running; crisp-shirted valets parked your car for you. For the residents who lived in the more lavish flats, these cars were often BMWs and Mercedes. But no matter their value, the cars all wound up in the same place: the basement.

When I called, I’d ask my dad how the building was doing. “The basement flooded again a couple weeks ago,” he’d sometimes say. Or: “It’s getting worse.” It’s not only his building: he’s also driven through a foot of water on a main road a couple of towns over and is used to tiptoeing around pools in the local supermarket’s car park.

Ask nearly anyone in the Miami area about flooding and they’ll have an anecdote to share. Many will also tell you that it’s happening more and more frequently. The data backs them up.

It’s easy to think that the only communities suffering from sea level rise are far-flung and remote. And while places like the Solomon Islands and Kiribati are indeed facing particularly dramatic challenges, they aren’t the only ones being forced to grapple with the issue. Sea levels are rising around the world, and in the US, south Florida is ground zero – as much for the adaptation strategies it is attempting as for the risk that it bears.

One reason is that water levels here are rising especially quickly. The most frequently-used range of estimates puts the likely range between 15-25cm (6-10in) above 1992 levels by 2030, and 79-155cm (31-61in) by 2100. With tides higher than they have been in decades – and far higher than when this swampy, tropical corner of the US began to be drained and built on a century ago – many of south Florida’s drainage systems and seawalls are no longer enough. That means not only more flooding, but challenges for the infrastructure that residents depend on every day, from septic tanks to wells. “The consequences of sea level rise are going to occur way before the high tide reaches your doorstep,” says William Sweet, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The flooding would be a challenge for any community, but it poses particular risks here. One recent report estimated that Miami has the most to lose in terms of financial assets of any coastal city in the world, just above Guangzhou, China and New York City. This 120-mile (193km) corridor running up the coast from Homestead to Jupiter – taking in major cities like Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach – is the eighth most populous metropolitan area in the US. It’s also booming. In 2015, the US Census Bureau found that the population of all three counties here was growing – along with the rest of Florida – at around 8%, roughly twice the pace of the US average. Recent studies have shown that Florida has more residents at risk from climate change than any other US state.

It has more property at risk, too. In Miami-Dade County, developers had 1.6 million sq ft (149,000 sq m) of office space and 1.8 million of retail space under construction in the second quarter of 2016 alone. Sunny Isles Beach, home to 20,300 people, has eight high-rise buildings under construction; swing a seagull in the air, and you’ll hit a crane. As you might imagine, the value of development in this sun-soaked part of the country is high, too. Property in Sunny Isles alone is now worth more than $10 billion. Many of the wealthiest people in the US reside in Florida, including 40 billionaires on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans; on a recent week, the most expensive real estate listing in the US was a $54 million mansion in Palm Beach.

Despite his history of referring to climate change as a “hoax” and his recent rollback of emissions-slashing initiatives, President Donald Trump is one of these property owners with a stake in the issue. The president frequently visits his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, 75 miles (121km) north of Miami, which is itself an area experiencing flooding from high tides. There also are six Trump-branded residential buildings in Sunny Isles, one of which still provides the president with income, and a Trump-branded condominium complex in Hollywood.

Look beyond all the glass and steel, though, and – despite the federal government’s sidelining of the issue – there’s another thrum of activity. It’s the wastewater treatment plant constructing new buildings five feet higher than the old ones. The 105 miles (169km) of roads being raised in Miami Beach. The new shopping mall built with flood gates. The 116 tidal valves installed in Fort Lauderdale. The seawalls being raised and repaired. And the worried conversations between more and more residents every year about what the sea-rise models predict – and what to do about it.

The communities aren’t short of solutions. “Nobody’s doing better adaptation work in the country than south Florida,” says Daniel Kreeger, executive director of the nonprofit Association of Climate Change Officers. But the question isn’t whether this work will save every community: it won’t. Even those tasked with making their cities resilient admit that, at some point in the future, certain areas here will no longer be “viable” places to live. Rather, the challenge is to do enough to ensure that the economy as a whole continues to thrive and that tourists still come to enjoy the sun, sand – and swelling sea.

It’s a challenge that many officials and experts are determined to meet. Getting there, though, requires a shift in how everyone from mayors to taxpayers, insurers to engineers, property developers to urban planners thinks about their communities – and the everyday decisions that shape them. The eyes of the world are on them: if one of the richest communities on the planet can’t step up, what hope is there for everyone else?

“If the science is correct on this – which it is going to be – the question is, ‘How extreme are the implications?’” says Kreeger. “We are literally going to have to rewrite how businesses function, and how cities are designed. Everything’s going to change. And that’s particularly going to be exacerbated in coastal communities.

“This would be no different than if I came to you and said ‘Hey, in 40 years, gravity’s going to change. I can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to be. But let’s assume roughly between 50% and 80% stronger or weaker than it is now.’ You’d look around and say ‘Shoot, what’s that going to affect?’

“And the answer is: it affects everything.”

Sea level rise is global. But due to a variety of factors – including, for this part of the Atlantic coast, a likely weakening of the Gulf Stream, itself potentially a result of the melting of Greenland’s ice caps – south Floridians are feeling the effects more than many others. While there has been a mean rise of a little more than 3mm per year worldwide since the 1990s, in the last decade, the NOAA Virginia Key tide gauge just south of Miami Beach has measured a 9mm rise annually.

That may not sound like much. But as an average, it doesn’t tell the whole story of what residents see – including more extreme events like king tides (extremely high tides), which have been getting dramatically higher. What’s more, when you’re talking about places like Miami Beach – where, as chief resiliency officer Susanne Torriente jokes, the elevation ranges between “flat and flatter” – every millimetre counts. Most of Miami Beach’s built environment sits at an elevation of 60-120cm (2-6ft). And across the region, underground infrastructure – like aquifers or septic tanks – lies even closer to the water table.

On a nearly two-hour tour of Fort Lauderdale’s adaptation strategies, the city’s head of sustainability, Nancy Gassman, points out incremental differences in elevation: slight rolls in the sidewalk or paving that usually go unnoticed. “That might seem weird that I’m pointing out a couple of feet difference,” she says. “But a couple feet in south Florida – it’s time. Elevation is time for us.”

Not only are sea levels rising, but the pace seems to be accelerating. That’s been noted before – but what it means for south Florida was only recently brought home in a University of Miami study. “After 2006, sea level rose faster than before – and much faster than the global rate,” says the lead author Shimon Wdowinski, who is now with Miami’s Florida International University. From 3mm per year from 1998 to 2005, the rise off Miami Beach tripled to that 9mm rate from 2006.

An uptick also happened between the 1930s and 1950s, says Wdowinski, making some question whether this is a similar oscillation. But that’s probably wishful thinking. “It’s not necessarily what we see now. This warming of the planet has been growing for a while,” he says. “It’s probably a different process than what happened 60 years ago.”

“Can we definitely say it’s the ocean warming?” says Sweet, who has authored several sea-level rise studies. “No. But is it indicative of what we’d expect to see? Yes.”

Modelling specific future scenarios is difficult – partly because scientists are still collecting and analysing data, partly because there are so many variables. What if the US or China reverses its trend on stabilising emissions? What if a major volcano erupts? What if a glacier melts more quickly than expected? But enough credible projections have been done to put together a range of scenarios that researchers are confident about.

One graph compiled in 2015 by the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, a non-partisan initiative that collates expertise and coordinates efforts across Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach counties, is especially revealing (see below). At the bottom is a dotted green line, which rises slowly. Before you get optimistic, the footnote is firm: “This scenario would require significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in order to be plausible and does not reflect current emissions trends.” More probable is the range in the middle, shaded blue, which shows that a 6-10in (15-25cm) rise above 1992 levels is likely by 2030. At the top, the orange line is more severe still, going off the chart – to 81 inches (206cm) – by the end of the century.

But as more data comes in, even the worst-case estimates may turn out to be too low: for example, researchers recently discovered that ice is melting more rapidly than expected from both Antarctica and Greenland, plus gained a better understanding of how melting ice sheets actually affect sea-level rise. “The unlikely scenarios are now, all of a sudden, becoming more probable than they once were thought to be,” says Sweet.

The most dramatic impacts may not be felt for 50 or 100 years. But coastal communities are already experiencing more storms and extremely high tides known as king tides. In the same study, Wdowinski found there were a total of 16 flood events in Miami Beach from 1998 to 2005. From 2006 to 2013, there were 33.

Although the timing of king tides results from the positions of the Sun, Moon and Earth, rising seas heighten their effect. At extreme high tides, water levels have surged to an inch below the Intracoastal Waterway, says Jennifer Jurado, Broward County’s chief resiliency officer. “Once that’s breached, you’re open to the ocean – the supply of water is endless. The system is really at capacity. These are flood conditions, even with just the high tide and supermoon… You see men in business suits trying to trudge through water.”

Even without floods, the rising water table affects everything. The cities here are built on porous limestone. The water doesn’t just come over seawalls; it seeps up from beneath the streets. Nearly 90% of the drinking water in south Florida comes from aquifers, and these are finding their fresh water pushed further and further inland as the salt water exerts more and more pressure. Take Hallandale Beach, a small city of just under 40,000 residents. Saltwater already has breached five of the eight freshwater wells that the city draws from, says Vice Mayor Keith London. And around a quarter of Miami-Dade residents use septic tanks. If these don’t remain above the water table, the result could be thoroughly unpleasant.

Another issue is beach erosion. Florida’s sand may be one of its biggest draws for tourist dollars, but it, too, is vulnerable: though sand never stays put, rising sea levels and worsening storms mean the need to replenish is intensifying. A massive town-by-town project is currently underway; Miami Beach (which, famously, was manmade from the start) just wrapped up its 3,000ft (914m) section, to the tune of $11.9 million.

Of course, another part of the problem is that south Florida is built on a swamp. “The only reason we live here is we learned how to drain it, we learned how to kill mosquitos, and we created air conditioning,” says Jim Murley, chief resilience officer for Miami-Dade County. Residents cut canals to drain inland areas, using the fill to raise the land and build properties. These canals are now open doors for tidal flooding and storm surge. They also cut down mangrove forests and levelled sand dunes – both natural barriers to flooding.

“There is going to need to be a very serious conversation about how we deal with this,” says George Vallejo, the mayor of North Miami Beach. “The development that has happened here over the last 40 or 50 years has not been helpful to this situation. We’ve paved over a lot of the Everglades, we’ve paved over a lot of greenage.

“We’ve done a lot of things that, in retrospect, we would have done differently, knowing what we know now.”

That’s the bad news. But there’s good news, says Gassman, whose no-nonsense demeanour and doctorate in marine biology (with a focus on coastal ecosystems) makes her particularly convincing. “That’s all if nothing changes. I think that’s another thing that the public doesn’t necessarily understand: the predictions that they’re hearing, time and time again, are if we do nothing. But we’re not doing nothing.”

That’s point one. Point two is that the topography of the area isn’t quite what you’d expect. She brings out a map of Fort Lauderdale dotted with squares of purple and orange. Purple means an area is likely to be underwater at 2ft (61cm) of sea level rise; orange means it’s possible. A surprisingly small amount of the map is splashed with colour. And the at-risk areas – which are mostly by the bay, not the ocean – aren’t where you might think. “It’s not the whole city,” she says. “While there are problems in some areas, we’ll have to adjust, but these areas are not in places you’d expect – and we’ll have time to address some of these issues.”

Not every community might be so lucky. Play the inundation game with Noaa’s perversely addictive mapping tool in Hollywood, just 10 miles (16km) south of Fort Lauderdale, and you’ll find that the same 2ft (61cm) rise could put streets and most properties of an entire square-mile swathe underwater – not insignificant for a city measuring just 30 sq miles (78 sq km). (Hollywood also has its own intervention programme underway, including the installation of 18 flap gates to keep seawater from coming up through the drainage system). Still, it’s a good reminder that the problem, as overwhelming as it seems, can be broken down into smaller pieces.

Which is exactly what Gassman and others are trying to do. Touring the city with Gassman is to see it in an entirely new way: not just a city of graceful mansions and pretty canals, but of seawalls that are leaking or too short, fire hydrants that are made of iron (“a fundamental, emergency-based infrastructure that’s made out of a material that’s potentially corrosive from saltwater”), drains that are overflowing and electrical boxes that need to be raised.

See, those cars are disappearing from view,” she says, pointing to the dip in the road in front of us. We turn onto Isle of Capri Drive. “Look what’s happening. Look how far I’m going to go down. This area floods all the time.”

Fort Lauderdale is dubbed the Venice of America. That’s supposed to be because of its 165 miles (266km) of canals, but recent flooding has made the nickname more on the nose than residents would like.

For both Fort Lauderdale and other communities across south Florida, the main problem is drainage. The systems here were designed to let stormwater drain into the ocean when it rains. Because homes and gardens are higher than the crown of the road, the streets flood first in a storm, by design. Water runs into the storm drain and is piped into the ocean or waterways that lead there.

At least, that’s what is supposed to happen. With sea levels now often higher than the exits to the run-off pipes, saltwater is instead running up through the system and into the streets. To make matters worse, when the sea gets even higher, it can breach the seawall, flood people’s yards and flow down to the road – where it stays.

Since 2013, Fort Lauderdale has been installing tidal valves to deal with the problem. Each of the one-way valves, which allows stormwater through but not saltwater, looks like a big rubber tube and can be attached inside the storm drains. Gassman pulls one out to show me. “If you stick your hand in there and push a little bit, see how it opens?” I do. “Right there, you were fresh water. Now you’re about to be salt water.” She flips the valve around. I push: sure enough, it’s a no-go.

In some areas, the valves alone have been enough. But there’s a catch: the floodwater still can’t leave if the tide is above the level of the outflow pipes. That happened early on at one of the first places they installed a valve, Gassman says. A king tide came over the tops of the seawalls, flooded the street – and then remained higher than the outfall. “The valve wouldn’t open. So the roads stayed flooded 24/7,” she says. “We have had complaints that the valves aren’t working. But no. The valves are working.”

Despite the limitations of the valves, it doesn’t take an engineer to figure out that raising seawalls would fix flooding that resulted from high sea levels, if not from rain. But until recently, Fort Lauderdale had a height requirement for seawalls that was a maximum, not a minimum – for aesthetic reasons. Though some now do specify a minimum height, enforcement remains difficult. A new seawall runs from $600 to $2,000 for a linear foot; adding a 12in (30cm) cap costs about $60 per foot. For the average homeowner, a seawall measures 75-100ft (23-30m). “How are you going to force everyone to put in money?” asks Gassman.

It turns out you can’t, at least for now. Last year, Fort Lauderdale proposed that everyone should be made to raise their seawalls to a certain height by 2035. Thanks to opposition from the public, the proposal failed. Instead, property owners are required to keep their seawalls in a state of good repair. Someone can be reported to the authorities if their seawall is breached by the tide, but the specific new height requirement only kicks in if someone came to ask for the permit – which is required to do significant repairs, or to build a new wall. And Fort Lauderdale makes an interesting test case: if costs seem prohibitive in this relatively well-off area, it’s not going to work in south Florida’s less affluent communities – some of which also are suffering from similar flooding.

Despite Fort Lauderdale’s best efforts, seawalls here remain a patchwork of heights and states of repair. At Cordova Road, Gassman and I look over the finger isles pointing into the Stranahan River. Across the road from the marina, one house has bright-green grass: it’s new, put down after a flood last spring swamped their property with salt water.

Gassman points to an older house on the corner. Their seawall is about a foot lower than their neighbour’s. “That foot of difference allows water to run over their property and flood the road,” she says. “That one property, if we could fix that seawall, we could reduce a lot of flooding, right here.”

It’s not just residents who need to make changes. The city also owns a seawall along this stretch; it, too, was breached recently. Replacing the nearly half-mile stretch could cost up to $5 million. But getting the funds is just the first challenge. The end of the seawall meets a bridge. If you raise the seawall two more feet, what do you do with that bridge to protect it? And what about the docks that residents are currently allowed to have here, all of which will have to be re-done? “The people that live here want a solution and they want it now,” says Gassman. “But there’s both a public and a private cost. And changing one piece of infrastructure starts to domino into needing to change all sorts of things.”

As well as seawalls, cities are investing in pumps. Many have put pump stations in the worst-hit neighbourhoods. But only Miami Beach has adopted an integrated, major pumping system as part of an aggressive overall defence strategy. Starting in 2013, the programme – which Torriente estimates will cost between $400 and $500 million – is multi-pronged. Pump stations have sprouted across Sunset Harbour, an industrial-turned-hip neighbourhood on the barrier island’s bay side, and are moving south.

Roads are being raised, too, sometimes by up to 2ft (61cm), to an elevation which the Southeast Florida Climate Compact’s projections put as a likely sea level height around 2065. Seawalls are being raised to a new minimum – something that residents in Miami Beach were more amenable to than in Fort Lauderdale. The city also is requiring that all new properties build their first floor higher.

It’s an ambitious agenda. And it’s one that’s working. Areas where roads have been raised and pumps installed have been much drier. But, as Gassman noted, it’s not enough to change one piece of infrastructure without changing everything else. In this case, what happens when you raise a road without raising all of the properties around it? Water can go into the properties.

That’s not supposed to happen when the pumps work. But they can fail. Antonio Gallo’s Sardinia Enoteca Ristorante is one of a number of businesses that have found their ground floors are now below the current road and sidewalk height. Last year, the pumps failed to kick in after a brief period of rain; the restaurant flooded, with diners stuck inside. When Gallo went to file his insurance claim, it was turned down. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), which runs a national flood insurance programme for at-risk business and property owners like Gallo, anything below street level is considered a basement. Until Fema changes their policy, that includes all of the businesses now below the raised streets. Miami Beach is working closely with Fema to get not only Gallo’s situation, but the general basement classification, re-assessed.

Miami Beach’s efforts are the most aggressive. But resilience also can be built into existing projects. A lot of public infrastructure is built to last for at least 50 or 75 years, and that means planning for what the world will look like then. This is where the Compact’s range of scenarios comes in handy. If you’re laying down something easily replaceable, like a sidewalk, you could build for one of the more optimistic scenarios. An airport? It’s a good idea to go for a higher-risk scenario.

Murley, the chief resilience officer of Miami-Dade County (the county’s first), points to a 4,200ft-long (1280m) tunnel that runs from the Port of Miami to highway I395. Opened in 2014, its main objective was to re-route lorries that previously went through downtown Miami. But the tunnel was also given a huge gate that, in a hurricane, drops down to seal it at both ends. “That’s an example of resilience. We wouldn’t have built that 10 years ago,” says Murley. “We would have built the tunnel, but it would have had an open front. We might have had sand bags.”

A larger-scale example of built-in resilience is going on at the Central District Wastewater and Treatment Plant on Virginia Key, a barrier island where Biscayne Bay and the ocean meet, just east of downtown Miami. It is one of three wastewater treatment plants run by the largest utility in Florida, which serves 2.3 million of the county’s 2.6 million residents. Like the other two, it sits right by the water.

The plant already had a $500 million project on the go, making changes to comply with new Clean Water Act requirements. But because parts of the facility are expected to last 75 years or more, resilience to higher sea levels and storm surge has been baked into the design. Analysts ran what would be needed in a worst-case scenario: a category five hurricane during a king tide, with maximum rainfall. “What the results told us was that we ought to be building stuff at 17-20ft (5-6m) above sea level on the coast. Our current facilities, by and large, range from 10-15ft (3-4.5m),” says Doug Yoder, deputy director of Miami-Dade’s water and sewer department. The new design standards prioritise building at those elevations first for parts of the plants that convey flow – like the electrical wiring and pumps. “At least we won’t have raw sewage flooding the streets,” says Yoder.

Private developers will need to think about these issues, too. According to the non-partisan research organisation Risky Business, current projections put between $15 billion and $23 billion of existing Florida property underwater by 2050. By the end of the century, that leaps to between $53 and $208 billion.

But many developers aren’t thinking to 2050 or 2100. Their focus is on the time from construction to sale. In a hot real estate market like south Florida, where a lot of investors are foreign or periodic visitors, that timeframe is far shorter – a few years at most.

Until regulations enforce common building standards, few private developers are likely to adopt resilient designs. “I think it’s very hard for a developer or builder to do something the code or government doesn’t require in their zoning or building code,” says Wayne Pathman, a Miami-based land use and zoning attorney and the chairman of the new City of Miami Sea Level Rise committee.

One exception is Brickell City Centre, a $1 billion, 9-acre complex of stores, restaurants, offices, condominiums and hotel in Brickell, a corner of downtown Miami filled with cranes and skyscrapers. Developed by Hong Kong-based Swire Properties, the complex is sleek and airy – and, says Chris Gandolfo, vice president of development for Swire’s US operations, resilient. “Starting years ago, Swire was progressive in its thinking on rising tides,” he says.

Gandolfo ticks off some of the adaptation strategies that were used: building higher than the current flood plain; flood gates that can seal off the underground car park; an elevated seawall. It also has sustainable features like green roofs, native plants and what the developers have dubbed a “climate ribbon” – a walkway that captures the bay winds to cool the structure and lower energy costs, and works as a cistern to re-use rainwater for irrigation. “We may not make immediate returns,” Gandolfo says. “But I think it’ll have long-term returns.”

All of this puts a catch-22 at the heart of south Florida’s development. The state levies no personal or business income taxes and has a low corporate income tax, meaning property taxes provide a major source of revenue. But unless it is managed very carefully, new development brings new challenges.

“Every one of these buildings that goes up expands your vulnerability and magnitude of risk,” says Kreeger. “On the flip side, you’re not getting help from the state, because the state legislature and governor are in total denial about climate change. So you’re bringing in money today which is going to help you. But you’re also bringing a bigger problem tomorrow.”

Thinking about any of this is a relatively new trend. Although scientists began speaking about sea level rise for several decades, the topic only saw real traction among local governments and businesses a few years ago.

Part of the reason is that the issue was being ignored by so many others. Most officials say that the Compact, signed in 2010, has been a major driver in helping local governments collect the data they need and coordinate together on what to do about it – and it was signed after the realisation that, despite concrete problems that had to be solved today, state, federal and international governments weren’t doing what was needed to address them.

The Florida governor is a climate change sceptic and has directed attention away from the issue. Former employees have said they even were told not to utter the phrase “climate change”. Ignoring the issue now appears to pervade the highest levels of US government: the new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief doubts whether carbon dioxide plays a primary role in climate change, while President Trump recently signed an executive order overturning emissions-slashing regulations. Draft versions of the White House budget propose cutting the EPA budget by 31% and employee numbers by 20%, as well as steep cuts to Noaa – including 26% of the funds from its Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and entirely eliminating the Sea Grant programme, whose Florida section brings together 17 different universities to study sea level rise challenges and solutions.

Local governments are forging on, but such circumstances make the challenge even greater. With budgets that run in the tens of millions, not billions, local governments already need to be fiscally creative. Meanwhile, planning depends on up-to-date data – there’s no point in raising seawalls if you don’t know how high they need to be. And some of the most reliable projection scenarios, as well as sea level rise data, is gathered from Noaa.

Yet the impact from these changes won’t stop at party lines. Even President Trump’s family isn’t immune. Three feet of sea level rise – which the range of predictions put together by Compact estimates is likely to happen within the next 60 years – will flood Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or Republican commissioner when a neighbour calls you and tells you that their lawn is flooded,” says Gassman. “The water doesn’t care about politics. The water goes where the water goes. And someone who has a flooding problem that’s impacting their quality of life or their property values, they don’t care what flavour their politician is. What they care about is that the city is thinking about it, and that they’re planning to do something about it.”

Some of the communities in south Florida doing the most to adapt to the effects of sea level rise are doing so largely because of public pressure. In 1993, Miami-Dade put together its first plan to reduce carbon emissions. Hardly anyone came out for the committee hearing, Yoder says. Fast-forward to 2015: a hearing on the county’s budget was dominated by one resident after another asking why the county wasn’t doing more about sea level rise.

So much so, in fact, that the county decided to hire Murley, its first resilience officer. One of his immediate tasks was to look into getting onto the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities programme. Accepted cities receive funding and tailored guidance on how to make themselves adaptable to future challenges, from high unemployment to earthquakes and sea-level rise.

Greater Miami is just at the start of the process, Murley says. But he’s not the only one hoping that the resources made available will help guide the area far into the future. When I try to get in touch with the commissioners or mayor of Sunny Isles, I get a call back from Brian Andrews, a crisis PR consultant. He says sea level rise is something the city is aware of, but that “we’re waiting for the county” to gather data and send guidelines for an action plan. “They’re getting millions and millions from the Rockefeller Foundation for this,” he says. “We’re a little city. We couldn’t do it on our own.”

Despite how awareness of the issue has grown in some communities – particularly those, like Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale, that have seen the most flooding – it’s still common for sea-level rise to get shunted to the end of the list of priorities. “As an elected official, when I go knock on doors, resiliency and sea level rise is never discussed,” says Esteban Bovo, chair of the Miami-Dade County Commission. “It’s never talked about. It’s crime, how much we’re going to invest in police, how much we’re going to invest in traffic, how much we’re going to invest in public safety, libraries – those are the topics of conversation.”

Later, I find myself playing with the Noaa sea-level tool again. I zoom in on Sunny Isles. At 1ft, the low-lying mangrove swamps of the Oleta River State Park, just over the water, are submerged and the wooded backyard of the Intracoastal Yacht Club disappears. At 2ft, the St Tropez Condominiums and the newly-built Town Center Park are underwater, as are many shops around 172nd Street. At 3ft, things start to get serious. Blue blots out the entire shopping plaza and the Epicure Market. At 4ft, the entire west side of Sunny Isles is uninhabitable. At 6ft, it’s gone. Only the spine near the beach – where my father lives – remains.

It’s easy to look at Compact’s range of estimates and think that, since a 3ft or 4ft rise may remain fairly far off, everything will be fine for a few more generations. But it’s not. With public infrastructure – from fresh water to flushing toilets to roads – woven between communities, if just one area gets affected, others may suffer. Meanwhile, resilience is only one piece. As shown by the Compact chart’s steep orange line, if emissions continue to rise, adaptation will become increasingly difficult – if not impossible. And unlike raising seawalls or installing tidal valves, that, of course, can’t be controlled by a community or region alone. “Climate change mitigation to reduce greenhouse gases is a global issue and has to be dealt with globally,” says Gassman. “Adaptation to the inevitable effects of climate change is a local issue.”

Later, peering out the window as my plane takes off over Miami, I no longer see the dense green squares of the city’s western edge, the sharp skyscrapers downtown and the surprisingly slender line of barrier islands. Instead, I see what might be lost. From here, the ocean looks vast.

But as the plane climbs, I remind myself that human innovation was enough to drain the swamp and make Florida what it is today. It was great enough to get me here, 15,000ft in the air. And it just might be enough to save what I see below.