The Weekly Sift

This morning’s featured post will shift away from national politics and look at an environmental problem: the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake, which is expected to break records this summer and endanger a larger ecosystem. Longer-term, Salt Lake City could face arsenic storms as the wind picks up poisonous dust from the exposed lake bed.

That’s worth attention in its own right, but even more alarming is what it says about America’s unwillingness to deal with looming climate disasters: So far, state and local governments are barely doing anything to curb development or discourage water use. Unlike global climate change, the shrinking lake is immediate, local, and amenable to simple policy changes, if only the public could muster the will to tackle the problem. “if we can’t save the Great Salt Lake,” Paul Krugman asks, “what chance do we have of saving the planet?”

That post should appear before 10 EDT. The weekly summary has two more 1-6 committee hearings to cover, as well as Juneteenth, the faltering Senate gun compromise, and the right-wing media’s new both-sides-do-it distraction: Jane’s Revenge, a pro-choice “terrorist” group that so far is mostly imaginary. It’s the new antifa, and you can expect to hear it blamed for almost anything in the next few months.

We’ll all need something to laugh at after that, so I’ll close with a completely over-the-top Danish commercial for the bus service. The summary should post noonish.