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Did Ted Cruz Just Give Donald Trump A Lock on the Nomination?

I recently noted that a reasonable prediction indicates that Trump could enter the Republican National Convention a mere 8 delegates short of a lock. (See this.) But now, Ted Cruz may have changed that math a bit, by announcing that Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential running mate. She was one of the least popular of the candidates when she was running as one of the clowns in the GOP clown car earlier this year. One could even argue that she wasn't merely unpopular, but did so much damage to her own credibility among the Republican voters that she left the race in the negative popularity…

The New Climate Alliance

Screw the so-called Federal Government, once part of a great democracy, now a great joke run by an insane clown and his posse. Most of the hard work in the energy transition needs to be done at the levels of the state and the individual anyway. So, with Trump taking the so-called Federal Government, which most of us now recognize as illegitimate and an annoyance at best as is slowly disappears bit by bit and becomes nothing other than a way to transfer tax money to rich people (until we stop paying our taxes), let's just get on with saving civilization, the planet, our children, and all that…

Immigrant rights are under attack, what public health should do to fight back

By Jonathan Heller President Trump’s 100 day plan includes deporting 2 million undocumented residents from the US. The plan represents a massive increase in scale and speed of deportations. Trump says he will focus on deporting undocumented people with criminal records. With fewer of them in the US now as a result of President Obama’s policies, Trump has already expanded the definition of who is a ‘criminal’ to include people who are merely charged or suspected of committing crimes. Being in the US without documents may become a ‘criminal’ act. Sensitive locations, like schools and clinics,…

Don't worry, Trump's hyperbole is meaningless. Right?

Look In case the point is not clear, read: Trump’s anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and he was merely using this language as bait to catch masses of followers, and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is ready to make a political move. A sophisticated commenter credited Trump with peculiar political cleverness for laying emphasis and over-emphasis on racist and sexist rhetoric, saying “You can’t expect the masses to understand or appreciate your finer real aims. You must feed the masses with cruder morsels…

Trump is going to lose the Iowa Caucus, and here's why

As of 8:45 or so PM: Cruz 28.9 Trump 25.6 Rubio 20.8 I'm privileged to live in Minnesota, which is Iowa's neighbor and thus not so different from Iowa, except our college football teams are better. And it isn't just the corn, but also, the caucus. We do that here too. Our caucus system is similar enough to Iowa that one can have a sense of what goes on over the border just with some local experience. So let me tell you a story. I volunteered one day to help out a friend with a local campaign. The idea was to show up at the local VFW post and engage in a caucus to determine a DFL (that's…

Who will win the presidential race?

I've made my first stab at a prediction for the electoral college outcome for the US Presidential race, 2016. I use a roughly similar methodology as I did to accurately predict most of the Democratic primaries. However, since primaries are different from a general, the methodology had to be adapted. For the primaries, I eventually used this methodology. I used results form prior primaries to predict voter behavior by ethnicity, in order to predict final behavior. That worked because primaries are done a few states at a time, and because all the people being modeled were Democrats. It turns…

Various comments and current news

For some reason, Facebook is not posting reliably and I will not abide writing paragraphs that the Internet sucks into oblivion! So, I have a few thoughts I'll put here and try to link to. Rebecca Otto for Governor Let's start with Rebecca Otto, who just gave a great talk at the DFL (that's what we Minnesotans call "Democrats") Environmental Caucus meeting. Rebecca is running for Governor, and we need her to win. I've written a bit about that (see: Rebecca Otto: by far the strongest and most progressive candidate for Minnesota Governor in 2018), and some time over the next week or so I'…

After GOPcare collapse, how will Trump administration respond?

Many of us breathed sighs of relief on Friday when House Speaker Paul Ryan announced the withdrawal of legislation to roll back the Affordable Care Act. The bill, the American Health Care Act, would have resulted in 24 million people losing insurance and $880 billion less for Medicaid over the next 10 years -- while giving an $883 billion tax cut targeted to the wealthiest. At town hall meetings and over the phones, members of Congress heard from constituents urging them to leave the ACA’s coverage expansions in place. Yet the bill’s defeat doesn’t mean that the idea of healthcare coverage…

A case study in fake news: Did the FBI raid the CDC based on the CDC whistleblower's allegations?

[Note: The proprietor of the website has responded by e-mail. See Comment #37.] Now that the unreal has become real, I was just thinking how weird it is that I've never actually blogged about a phenomenon that directly contributed to the election of Donald Trump. I'm referring to the phenomenon known now as "fake news." Now, by "fake news," I do not mean sloppy reporting. I do not mean biased reporting. I do not even mean a type of article that many crank websites publish in which a real news story (often with other news stories) is used as jumping-off point for pseudoscience and conspiracy…

Hillary Clinton is "medically unfit to serve" as President and Donald Trump has narcissistic personality disorder: Stop this uninformed medical speculation about the candidates!

I’ve been debating whether to write about this for a while now, given that the first article that I noticed about it was first published a week and a half ago. Part of the reason for my reluctance is that it would be too easy for politics to be dragged into this more than I generally like. Of course, I don’t make a secret of my political leanings, but I usually don’t go out of my way to be an explicitly political blogger. I do, however, frequently write about areas where science and medicine intersect, and when I do I always come down on the side of science and rationality. This brings us to…

Trump touts racial segregation, antisemitism, lewd behavior, at Boy Scout rally

If you give your children over to the Boy Scouts for a day or two, they may do something to them akin to abuse. This happened. The Boy Scouts knew what they were getting into when they invited Donald Trump to speak at their national event. They even posted warnings for the troop leaders and scouts, on their blog. As a unit leader or staff member, you can help make the president’s visit a success by ensuring that any reactions to the president’s address are, as we state in our Scout Law, friendly, courteous, and kind. This includes understanding that chants of certain phrases heard during the…

The Orderly Transition of Twitter

I'm not sure this has happened before, and most people are unaware, so I thought a quick note was in order. If you were previously following the President of the United States on Twitter, when it was Barack Obama, you followed @POTUS. Twitter has created an account called @POTUS44, which is for President Obama. You are now automatically following that handle. Twitter redesignated @POTUS to apply to President Trump, and left all of the President Obama followers on that account as well. So, you are now following President Trump at @POTUS. The same applies, in parallel, to the First Lady and…

The Truth About Syria and Obama

In case you were wondering, Trump is telling you lies. Syria is run by a horrible dictator. He is the kind of dictator that makes you want to bring back assassination of foreign leaders. The idea of putting him down is hardly an extreme one, once you know what he does and has done. There was a moment in time, in 2013, when Obama tried to stand up to Assad, but failed to push back when Assad pushed him. Assad read the US system better than most foreign dictators do, it seems. You see, in the United States, a president can't just go to war. Congress authorizes war. Once that authorization…

UCS tallies assaults on science during Trump’s first six months

Members of the public health community are aware of many of the ways the Trump administration and the 115th Congress are hindering and reversing evidence-based actions for public health – from an executive order requiring agencies to scrap two regulations each time they create a new one to advancing legislation that would make it harder for EPA to obtain and use the most up-to-date science in its work. With so many threats to public health arising each month, it can be hard to catch all of them, though. The Union of Concerned Scientists has performed a tremendous service by producing the…

Trump may be 9 delegates short of a lock

UPDATE May 26th 2016 Moments ago, Donald Trump's delegate count effectively went above the number needed to guarantee the nomination at this summer's Republican National Convention. As reported by NBC, "Donald Trump now has the support of 1,238 delegates — just a hair above the 1,237 threshold needed to clinch the Republican presidential nomination" UPDATED The update includes adding actual delegate counts for races so far, recognizing that for Pennsylvania this means only 17 delegates out of 54, even though he won there, because Pennsylvania is strange. Also, some other revisions. This…

The reason Hillary Clinton has cinched the nomination

This is an excellent moment to revel in the complexity of life, and argument, and to appreciate the value of the honest conversation. A candidate is the presumed nominee when she or he obtains the required number of pledged delegates to be at 50% plus a fraction in the total pledged delegate count. This is because a candidate must have a true majority to win the nomination when the delegates are all counted up at the convention, and the pledged delegates are required to cast their lot with the candidate they are pledged to, assuming that candidate exists at the time of the convention.…

Trump calls for a year in jail for flag burners

... and loss of citizenship, which may amount to be thrown out of the country. Flag burning may be obnoxious to many, but it is a constitutionally protected act, as long as it is your flag and you do it outside. Presumptive President Elect Donald Trump has called for severe penalties for flag burners: https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/803567993036754944 By the way, if you strip someone of their citizenship, and you do throw them out of the country, it is possible that they will have no way to go or no way to get there. Once they are no longer US citizen, they can be tossed into a…

Trump's "Black Supporter" is from Defunct Florida Murder Cult

"Unwitting Trump embraces black supremacist cultist support" This story is precious. Here's the thing. Michael the Blackman (that's his name), the black guy who stands or sits behind Trump at many of his rallies, tells us that Hillary is the financier of slavery. We know this because Hilary's name is Hillary Rodham Clinton. Rodham is the descendants of Rothschild, and her biggest donor is a Rothschild. So, Rothschild - Rockefeller - JP Morgan. See? The financiers of slavery. See? The supporters of Clinton are the Canaanites. The ones you've seen in the night clubs, with the black…

Why Trump Won And How To Fix That For Future Elections

Donald Trump is the president elect of the United States. Why? Trump did not win because he is widely liked. He is NOT widely liked. A very small number of Americans voted for Trump, and this number was magnified by the conservative-state-favoring electoral college, and most of those who did not vote for him not only don’t prefer him, but find him truly abhorrent. During the campaign, and over his 70 year long life, Donald trump has done or said myriad things each of which is fully disqualifying to be a candidate for president. These deplorable things are, of course, the reason he won this…

Third GOP Presidential Debate: Who won, who lost?

The big loser in this debate was CNBC. The network chose to not let anyone who was not a subscriber see the debate live. Then, apparently, the moderators trivialized the debate and annoyed the debaters, who then attacked CNBC and the press in general. Then, today, when we look at the news stories about the debate, there are hardly any. Nobody seems to really care what happened last night. Another loser was Ben Carson. I've come to think of the online unofficial polls as useful to indicate overall opinions, and to show how those opinions change (we can discuss another time why this is a…

How Science Can Resist Trump

The March for Science, in April, may be a June to September romance between academia and and political activists, but prior experience in Canada suggests we are in it for the cold hard winter. A conservative government in the land of the maple leaf took wide ranging action to shut down and control science and science communication. The populace became outraged, and the politicians were put on ice. The fight continues, and it looks like the position of science in Canada will end up more secure than it ever was before. Don't mess with Canadian scientists and the citizens that respect them.…

When Did it Become a Big Joke to Run For President?

On Morning Joe today, Mike Barnicle asked Libertarian Presidential candidate Gary Johnson what he would do about Aleppo. Johnson's reply was, “What is Aleppo?” We're done here. Johnson should withdraw from the race, go home, and never show his face in public again. When did running for President become a big joke? When did it become something you do on a whim, just because? The Libertarian Party is receiving more attention than usual this year since they have a superficially serious ticket, and since the two main candidates are unpopular. Turns out, though, that Johnson has managed to…

President Trump appears poised to betray the antivaccine movement again. Suckers.

As I mentioned yesterday, at NECSS I gave a talk, Whither the antivaccine movement in the Age of Trump? At the time, I only knew the identity of one of the most important public health figures appointed by President Donald Trump, and that's Scott Gottleib, the man appointed to be FDA Commissioner. As I noted when his name first came up as a candidate for this position, antivaxers weren't going to like it. Why? One reason is because Gottlieb is the ultimate pharma shill, if such a thing exists. Another reason is that he is very pro-vaccine. This amuses me when I consider the high hopes…

Open letter to President Trump from prison-released coal baron Blankenship

Former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship is using his first few days out of federal prison to make outlandish assertions about the Upper Big Branch disaster. In an open letter to President Trump dated May 15, Blankenship appeals to the President: “We share relentless and false attacks on our reputation by the liberal media.” The letter is posted on Blankenship’s website in which he calls himself “American Competitionist.”  He urges President Trump to: “put aside the media’s false claims about me and help me expose the truth of what happened at the Upper Big Branch (UBB) coal mine in West…

The most important single act you can carry out period.

This is it. Don't mess this up. It isn't that common that a single event can have a cascading effect on so many things. And if it does, such an event would not be that likely to have an entirely negative effect on all it touches. But, the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States would be such an event. Therefore, in turn and in opposition, your vote this November 8th matters as much as his presidency would matter. So, you must vote. (And please remember to NOT VOTE FOR TRUMP. That's the point. Do not vote for Trump.) Also please, make sure that if you intend to vote for a…

In which I am compared to Donald Trump by a pro-quackademic medicine activist...again!

John Weeks has long been an activist for alternative medicine—excuse me, “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or, as it’s more commonly referred to these days, “integrative medicine.” Despite his having zero background in scientific research or the design and execution of experiments and clinical trials, for some bizarre reason in May he was appointed editor of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (JACM). It didn’t take him long at all to use his new post to launch a nasty broadside against CAM critics in general (such as yours truly) and those who criticized a…

Occupational Health News Roundup

At the Guardian, Krithika Varagur interviewed workers inside the Indonesian factory that manufactures clothing for Ivanka Trump’s fashion line, finding poverty wages, anti-union intimidation and unreasonably high production targets. The story includes interviews with more than a dozen workers, who asked that details about their identities be changed to avoid being fired. Varagur writes: Alia is nothing if not industrious. She has worked in factories on and off since leaving her provincial high school, through the birth of two children, leading up to her current job making clothes for brands…

Donald Trump, The Presidency And Political Dysentery?

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Billionaire Donald Trump's recent announcement that he is considering running for President of the United States in 2012 has, if anything, generated a lot of media buzz. Could he apply his business acumen to become an effective national and global leader? Meredith Vieira's interview with Donald Trump on the "Today Show" this morning provided another example of his braggadocio and revealed some disturbing and, yes, provocative {by design?} criticism of President Obama. Mr. Trump's comments reminded me of a line from…

Scientists join case against Trump’s 2 for 1 regulatory order

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) filed an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit against one of President Trump’s deregulatory efforts. Executive Order 13771 (EO) requires an agency to rescind two regulations for each one it wants to adopt, and have the action's combined incremental costs total no more than $0, regardless of the benefits. When the President announced it in January 2017, I called it the "one step forward, two steps back" edict. A lawsuit filed in February by Public Citizen, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Communications Workers of America argues that the EO…

Broadcast Media Dropped The Climate Change Ball in 2016 UPDATED

Media Matters has an amazing and rather depressing report out on the way broadcast media in the US covered climate change. I'm going to give you a handful of bullet points that reflect only some of the results of this detailed study, then you go read it. Bottom line: Coverage in 2016 was a fraction of the previous year, even though there was more climate change news in 2016 than most years ever have. ABC covered climate change for a total of six minutes during the entire year of 2016 None of the major networks discussed the climate related consequences of a Clinton vs. a Trump presidency…

H.R. McMaster is New NSA

Going from Flynn to McMaster feels like going from Beetle Bailey to Jack Ryan. But I don't know much about him. He is, importantly, full of degrees and the author of Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, based on his PhD thesis. How do we do from a marginal Putin stooge/Russian asset/whateverthefuck to a highly qualified and possibly super ethical choice in one fell swoop? How does someone like McMaster accept an appointment like this if there isn't something wrong with him? I do have a hypothesis to explain part of this: Trump…

Phyllis Schlafly Is Dead

You may have heard the name, you may have an idea of who she was. This recent item on the Rachel Maddow show (long, but worth every second) puts her in context. Watch it: Schlafly was one of the key architects of the modern right wing movement. She is one of the worst people in the world, at least in the context of American society and politics. She pretty much single handedly a) defeated the Equal Rights Amendment and b) managed the propaganda campaign that makes a lot of otherwise not-too-stupid people think, even today that the ERA is a bad idea. She was a white supremacist who urged…

"Biological imperatives trump laws."

"Biological imperatives trump laws." Quick ... who said that? Evil Darwinist? Nazi eugenicist? Liberal professor? Nope to all three. Answer is Orson Scott Card - sci-fi hack, proponent of guiltless genocide, and anti-Darwinist - in a screed against gay marriage. One is left wondering whether rape is OK to Card - after all, spreading your seed is one of those "biological imperatives". Longer Card: How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy…

How The Press Created FrankenTrump and Ruined Civilization

Why is America the Greatest Country in the World? Diversity and opportunity. And freedom. Lots of freedom, freedom is great. I can tell you, I know freedom and I know we have lots of it, more than any other country. And diversity, we've almost got that under control too. But seriously ... If you are like me, the tirade eventually given by the protagonist in the following clip was already formulating in your head for the first two minutes of this scene, and when it spilled out (in a form better than you or I would have managed), you were like "Yeah. Go baby!" (Or words to that effect.) It is…

A destructive executive action for global health

President Trump’s callous and short-sighted executive order restricting US entry for refugees and travelers from certain countries is rightfully getting a lot of attention, but it risks overshadowing another destructive thing he did for global health during his first week in office: reinstating and expanding the Mexico City Policy, also known more descriptively as the global gag rule. Trump’s adoption of this policy is even more reprehensible than it was for his Republican predecessors, for two reasons: First, he has broadened its scope so it appears to cripple not only family planning, but…

Trump Won. What Next?

Remember those clowns a few weeks ago? The scary clowns? I think they were trying to tell us something. Did you know that 235,248,000 people are eligible to vote in the United States? Fewer than 120,000,000 of those people bothered to show up to vote this year, and turnout was considered high. Of those, about half, or one quarter of the voting population, elected a clown as our leader, because the clown promised to take steps to ensure a continued white majority in the United States. That’s what happened in my world last night. What happened in your world? Between the bouts of…

‘Vaccines are safe. Vaccines are effective. Vaccines save lives.’

The anti-vaxxers were out again this week, spreading misinformation and debunked science about an intervention that’s saved millions of lives and prevented immeasurable human suffering. It’s unconscionable. That person is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who — to repeat — is not a doctor, not a scientist, not a public health practitioner, not an expert in vaccinology. Regardless, he told the press earlier this year that President Trump had asked him to chair a vaccine safety commission, even though the country already has one of those — it’s called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and…

Will 2016 see a landslide in the POTUS election?

No. Many many people, well intended, smart people, keep talking about the rout, the landslide, that will happen. They may be basing this on the new trend started by FiveThirtyEight and picked up by the New York Times and others of deriving a probability statement about the race. But when you see something like "87%" for Clinton in such an estimate, that does not mean that Clinton will get 87% of the votes. It means that it is very likely that Clinton will get 270 or more electoral votes. There is, for example, a zero chance that Clinton will get a single electoral electoral from Montana,…

Focus on one thing, do not be distracted by anything else. Oh look tacos!

I don't use clickbait titles very often, but this was one, because I want to talk to people who think that nine out of ten things that the collective known as Donald Trump, his white house staff, and the Republicans in Congress do is a distraction from ... whatever. Yes, distractions can happen, but most of what happens is not a distraction. The Trump administration is incapable of that much forethought and planning. When Trump throws trans people under the bus, telling that is a distraction is YOU throwing trans people under the bus. Here are some examples of the distraction meme playing…

Go Tell It On The Grocery Store

The press helped elect Donald Trump. The mainstream press loved itself that false balance, giving absurdly pseudo-even coverage to whatever tripe might be spewed by willfully ignorant conservatives. So, screw them, and we await their apology. Meanwhile, the tabloid press has made its own contribution to the problem. Part of that is impressing on so many minds such crazy crap that a large percentage of Americans (apparently about one half of the actual voters) will believe anything. Or, perhaps, simply don't care about what is real and what is not. People are looking for things to do to…

The Republican Path To Victory in 2016 is Assured

I have no idea why so many smart people are saying that anything that happened over the last few days changes this election, or destroys the Republican Party. Pay attention, people. that is not what is happening. The Republican Party has become the party that harbors racism, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, hate, politically expedient willful ignorance about all things science, classism, anything anti-PC, and dedicated service to the demands of the wealthiest Americans. Most of that comes from the Tea Party the rest comes from the elite in the party. In this way, the Republican Party…

Trump's EPA pick will make Obama regret his environmental overreach?

Via someone else (Gavin, perhaps?; his tweet is relevant) - I certainly don't read The Hill regularly - comes Trump's EPA pick will make Obama regret his environmental overreach by evil arch uber-villain Patrick Michaels. A quick search shows me not having much to say about PM; I seem to have left that to Eli (but that was waay back in 2006); there's also Tim Lambert, who certainly isn't keen; and I side-swipe PM in 2013 over some silly sea level graph. Anyway, the piece can be taken as an indication of what PM thinks the Trump administration is likely to do, though there is no suggestion of…

Pro-Science Gets Organized

Outrage at Donald Trump has coalesced around several political loci, including women's rights, immigration, environmentalism, and scientific endeavor at large. As Trump threatens to roll back regulations and de-fund universities, Mark Hoofnagle points out that science has always been political, increasingly so in an age when politicians control huge sums of money devoted to basic research. Despite major discoveries funded by taxpayer dollars, Mark says scientists have failed "to explain the benefits of basic science to the public and to our representatives in government, and failed to defend…

Deepak Chopra castigates Donald Trump for not being reality-based. Another irony meter explodes.

I’m sure that most of you watched the Presidential debate on Monday night, just as I did. Over the years, these debates have always always painful for me to watch, given the candidates’ tendency to answer the question they want to answer rather than the question actually answered; to find ways to spew prepackaged talking points into answers, whether they’re related to the question or not; and, above all, to see how much spin they can get away with. Particularly annoying is when they pander to their base with particularly brain dead bon mots. Candidates from both parties do it, of course, but…

Republican Donors Might Run A Third Party Candidate

They even have a short list of candidates. Unfortunately, the only available copy of the secret internal report on running a third party candidate has the list blacked out (see above). According to Scott Bland at Politico: Conservative donors have engaged a major GOP consulting firm in Florida to research the feasibility of mounting a late, independent run for president amid growing fears that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination. ... “All this research has to happen before March 16, when inevitably Trump is the nominee, so that we have a plan in place," a source familiar with…

Enough Is Enough

Steve Schmidt, bless his pointy Republican head, makes a very important point here. And to underscore the point, let me ask you this: How do we go from having an "election" to having a "president elect"? The process is actually a bit subtle and somewhat more complicated than one might think. Election day happens, but there is no "president elect" in any official, constitutional, way, for a very long time thereafter. Though this can vary, the first possible date that we will have a "president elect" in the current election cycle is on January 6th, 2017. Not before. Of course, what really…

Hawking radiation

I must admit I only wrote this post because I thought the title would be amusing. Was I right? Time will tell. Via a variety of sources some of whom I ignored, I find the great physicst saying President Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris climate change accord could lead humanity to a tipping point, "turning the Earth into Venus."1 That, as we all know, is bollocks. Or in JA's more measured terms, "I don't believe such hyperbole is useful". Don't mince your words, man, you'll never get onto a high-status Red Team that way. My Hawking claim-to-fame is that I was cycling over the Garret…

In the age of Donald Trump, vaccine policy is becoming politicized, with potentially deadly consequences

Back in December, I took note of the vaccine situation in Texas. First, I pointed out how a new article by Peter Hotez, MD, a pediatrician at Baylor University, had sounded the alarm that the number of schoolchildren with nonmedical exemptions to the Texas school vaccine mandate had skyrocketed by 19-fold over the last 13 or 14 years. As if that weren't alarming enough, I discussed the resident antivaccine groups in Texas, who had become quite active. I thought that that was probably all I would write about Texas for a while. Silly me. Texas is fast turning into a series of its own, much as I…

Let them eat cake

Stay classy, Trump administration. Details here.

Trump Lied

I got a letter from a Minnesota-based teacher who is getting inundated by students asking questions about Paris. Many of those questions are dogwhistles (the students do not realize that) indicating that they've been getting their information from Trump supporters, or so I can confidently guess. (The school is in an area where many voted for Trump.) Here's my response. Short version: he lied about everything. Most people in Minnesota who have asthma have it because of coal plant generated pollution. Shutting down the coal plants is a primary step in reducing climate change. So, even…