There was a time, not that long ago, but well after medical science and common sense were both clear on the matter, when lawmakers and paid experts would stand up in public and state under oath, with utter conviction and no visible sign of shame, that there was no evidence whatsoever linking cigarettes to lung disease. They were laughed at and scorned in later years, but because of the money spread generously by big tobacco, they persisted long past their due date. Today, the same kinds of shills and the same pseudo-science comes from the mouths of fossil fuel apologists, one of whom was just appointed by Trump to head the EPA:

“I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,” [Scott] Pruitt, the newly installed EPA administrator, said on the CNBC program “Squawk Box. But we don’t know that yet,” he continued. “We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

His comments represented a startling statement for an official so high in the U.S. government, putting him at odds not only with other countries around the globe but also with the official scientific findings of the agency he now leads.

• How dishonest is Trumpkin Scott Pruitt?

Note his phrasing: He’s saying that disagreement about the amount of human-caused warming means CO2 is not the primary driver of warming. That’s like saying, “I don’t know if there’s a traffic jam at the corner of Main and 1st street or Main and 2nd, therefore cars don’t exist.”

• Hatred of science and knowledge in general is a common feature in authoritarian and nationalist governments. ISIS destroyed priceless ancient artifacts and torched irreplaceable books and scrolls during their terror-filled reign in Mosul.
• Veggies in space!

 Mark Watney (played by Matt Damon) survives by fertilizing  Martian soil with his feces, slicing up potatoes, and planting  the cuttings in the soil. This eventually grows him enough food  to last hundreds of days. But farming on Mars may not remain sci-fi fantasy for very long:  The NASA-backed  "Potatoes on Mars" project just grew tubers in Mars-like  conditions, suggesting that Watney's feat might actually be  possible.

President Obama instituted the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule to make it harder for companies with egregious labor law violations to get government contracts. You can guess what’s happening now, right? Republicans don’t think labor laws should count as laws and they certainly don’t think breaking those laws should get in the way of a company’s profits, so they’re killing that worker protection. With good reason, according to their twisted and immoral logic:

Hours before the Senate vote on the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released a staff report that says that 66 of the federal government’s 100 largest contractors have at some point violated federal wage and hour laws. Since 2015, the report says, more than a third of the 100 largest OSHA penalties have been imposed on federal contractors.

Warren criticized the Republican-led effort during a speech on the Senate floor moments before the vote. “Instead of creating jobs or raising wages,” she said, “they’re trying to make it easier for companies that get big-time, taxpayer-funded government contracts to steal wages from their employees and injure their workers without admitting responsibility.”

Exactly. And they’re not ashamed, which tells you something about these people.

This is the 488th edition of the Spotlight on Green News & Views (previously known as the Green Diary Rescue) usually appears twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Here is the March 8 Green Spotlight. More than 26,610 environmentally oriented stories have been rescued to appear in this series since 2006. Inclusion of a story in the Spotlight does not necessarily indicate my agreement with or endorsement of it.

OUTSTANDING GREEN STORIES

ARodinFan writes—There is Always Free Cheese in a Mousetrap: “Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) issues a Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rating the condition and performance of pubic bridges, dams, airports, flood protection levees, roads, water and sewer systems, waterways and transit systems in the familiar form of a school report  card—assigning letter grades based on the physical condition and the need for investment to maintain or improve these assets.   The report card was issued today and once again the news isn’t good.  The ASCE once again rates our overall infrastructure at dismal D+ — with 4.5 trillion dollars in improvements needed to maintain and improve those aging systems  www.infrastructurereportcard.org. [...] Supporting T*rump’s infrastructure plan is bound to come at a steep price.  It will no doubt be larded with misleading ‘public-private partnerships’ that will convert public assets to private toll facilities — some of them owned by anonymous foreign corporate interests (who of course are free to exercise their constitutional rights as ‘people’ to give unlimited campaign contributions).”

Keith Pickering writes—A detailed reply to Scott Adams on climate science: “In a recent blog posting, cartoonist Scott Adams (drawer of "Dilbert") took climate scientists to task for his own failure to understand how climate science (and as it turns out, science in general) works. Actually, I quite sympathize with Scott. He clearly spends a lot of time reading "fake news" on climate skeptic websites, and that takes so much of his time that reading real science just gets crowded out. Like Talking Barbie used to say, "Math is hard!" And  science is even harder, especially when there are vast reams of fossil-fuel-funded nonsense non-science out there, deliberately designed to fool the gullible. And those booby-traps really do trap quite a few boobies. Scott starts by telling us he's not a scientist, but that he accepts the scientific consensus on climate change. Then he spends the next 20 paragraphs telling us why he doesn't really accept the scientific consensus.”

UPDATE: This uproar resolved itself:

A South Boston veterans council, facing withering criticism, reversed course Friday and extended an unconditional invitation to the group of gay veterans it had barred from marching in the St. Patrick’s Day parade.

The move clears the way for OUTVETS, a group of LGBT veterans, to march in the March 19 parade with its rainbow banner and logo, a point of contention that the Allied War Veterans Council had cited when it voted Tuesday to reject the organization.

Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker and Boston mayor Martin Walsh announced they would skip the city's annual St. Patrick's Day Parade after organizers blocked an LGBTQ veterans group called OutVets from marching. Liam Stack writes:

In a statement, the mayor encouraged the public to do the same.

“I will not tolerate discrimination in our city of any form,” Mr. Walsh said. “I will not be marching in the parade unless this is resolved. Anyone who values what our city stands for should do the same.”

Mr. Baker said it “doesn’t make any sense” to exclude the group.

“If veterans’ groups aren’t allowed to march in that parade for whatever reason, then I’ll probably do something else,” he told reporters on Wednesday.

The board of the parade organizers voted 9 to 4 to block the group's participation, prompting the parade's chief marshal, Dan Magoon, to step down from his position. Though the event doesn't explicitly ban LGBTQ groups, the code of conduct dictates that sexual orientation shouldn't "in any way" be advertised or displayed.

Bryan Bishop, the founder of OutVets, said parade organizers told him on Wednesday night that a small rainbow patch that has been part of the group’s logo since 2014 was found to be in violation of that rule. “My jaw just dropped on the floor,” he said.

The group wore the very same jackets in 2015 and 2016, but apparently this year it was deemed too flagrant. But as the boycotts started pouring in Thursday, event organizers planned an emergency meeting Friday to discuss the decision.

What's the one thing you hear all the time from Republicans about Obamacare, and why they want to get rid of it? It's some variation of this, from Trump himself, back in January: "You have deductibles that are so high that after people go broke paying their premiums, which are going through the roof, the health care can’t even be used by them because their deductibles are so high."

Here's a nifty interactive gizmo from The New York Times that demonstrates that's really not the case. At all. Here's the message:

Of the more than 90 percent of Americans who have health insurance, most get it from their job or the government. Premium growth has been low for those groups in the last few years.

The remainder buy their own insurance either through the Obamacare marketplaces or directly from an insurance company. Republicans who want to repeal the Affordable Care Act say this group has seen a rise in premiums.

But 85 percent of the people buying insurance through the marketplaces receive federal subsidies, which generally shield them from premium increases. This leaves just the remaining marketplace customers, and those who buy insurance directly, affected by the increases.

These two groups account for 3 percent of all Americans.

So, yeah, a relative very few people are actually affected by Obamacare plan premium increases, which isn't news. What is news is that the way Republicans are replacing subsidies with tax credits means that the shield those customers have in the form of subsidies is shrinking, substantially. So a lot more people are going to experience a lot bigger premium hikes in the future.

Oh, and deductibles? Yeah, they’re way too high. Is Trumpcare doing a damned thing about that? No.

At Juanita Jean’s of Texas, Juanita Jean Herownself writes—What? She Thought They Did This Crap Sober?

In the State of Maine in the United States of America a newly elected Democrat, Moira Walsh, was in for a surprise.

She told the local radio station that members of the legislature have  “file cabinets full of booze.”

She also let us know that they recently took shots on the floor of the House of Representatives to celebrate Dominican Republic Independence Day.

Walsh says the drinking blows her mind and it’s “outrageous” that you can’t drive after two beers “but you can make laws that affect people’s lives forever when you’re half in the bag.”

Just half?  Hell Honey, you ought to come to Texas.  We do it fully bagged here.

Late on Friday, a federal district court finally issued its long-awaited ruling in the lawsuit over Texas’ Republican-drawn congressional map shown at the top of this post (see here for a larger version). The court delivered a major victory for voting rights when it struck down several districts for violating the Voting Rights Act and the Equal Protections Clause, holding that several districts were illegal racial gerrymanders. This ruling could result in a new map being used in the 2018 elections that would contain additional districts where Latino voters could elect their candidate preference, and Democrats could consequently gain seats.

The court struck down several districts where Republicans had either diluted Latino voting strength so that Anglo candidates could win, or where Republicans had packed Latino voters to prevent them from electing their candidate choice in neighboring seats. A redrawn map could consequently see considerable changes to the invalidated 23rd District, which spans from El Paso to San Antonio, the 27th, which covers Corpus Christi and Victoria, and the 35th, which stretches from Austin to San Antonio, along with neighboring seats. Such adjustments could subsequently see a Latino Democrat oust Republican incumbents in the 23rd and 27th.

The judges additionally faulted Republicans for abusing race when drawing districts in the greater Dallas area, but did not specifically indicate that they would require Republican legislators to draw a new district to elect a Latino candidate. Plaintiffs will undoubtedly press the court to impose such a requirement when they argue for the appropriate remedy. Indeed, Daily Kos Elections itself has previously demonstrated how Republicans could have drawn another seat that would elect Latino voters’ candidate choice in Dallas at the expense of an Anglo Republican, in addition to making the aforementioned GOP-held 23rd and 27th heavily Latino.

Preet Bharara, one of the best-known United States Attorneys, a man well-reputed for his anti-corruption work, said he would not resign as he and 45 other federal prosecutors were asked to do by Attorney General Jefferson B. Sessions III Friday. Bharara implicitly dared Pr*sident Trump to fire him. And that is what has now happened. 

Bharara met under friendly circumstances with the pr*sident in Trump Tower last month. And in November, a week after the election, Trump gave him a personal thumbs-up for staying in the job. Not that whiplash is unfamiliar to those people having any dealings with the regime.

Last May, Bharara was the subject of a long feature in The New Yorker, which noted:

As the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara runs one of the largest and most respected offices of federal prosecutors in the country. Under his leadership, the office has charged dozens of Wall Street figures with insider trading, and has upended the politics of New York State, by convicting the leaders of both houses of the state legislature. Last week, Bharara announced charges against a hundred and twenty alleged street-gang members in the Bronx, in what was said to be the largest gang takedown in New York history.  [...]

Before Bharara became known as the scourge of insider trading—a 2012 Time cover story called him the “top cop” of Wall Street—he gained attention for the cases he did not bring against the financial industry. He took office in 2009, at the height of the mortgage crisis, and the Southern District, along with the Justice Department, in Washington, conducted investigations of the major firms and individuals involved in the financial collapse. No leading executive was prosecuted. Bernie Sanders, the Presidential candidate, says in his stump speech, “It is an outrage that not one major Wall Street executive has gone to jail for causing the near-collapse of the economy. The failure to prosecute the crooks on Wall Street for their illegal and reckless behavior is a clear indictment of our broken criminal-justice system.”

In a conversation in his office, Bharara rejected the critique. Without going into specifics, he said that his team had looked at Wall Street executives and found no evidence of criminal behavior. 

Today, The New York Times reported:

Mr. Bharara, whose office is overseeing a case against a top aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and an investigation into people close to Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City, has told several people that he did not hand in a resignation on Friday, as he was ordered to do by the acting deputy attorney general, Dana Boente.

He also does not intend to do so over the weekend, he said in conversations with associates, a move that could force the hand of the Trump administration.

So far, he is the only one of the 46 federal prosecutors asked to resign indicating that being fired is the only way they will leave their posts.

The White House once again spent the week cleaning up a mess of the pr*sident's own making. After Donald Trump leveled a wild accusation last weekend about his predecessor abusing his executive powers by ordering an illegal wiretap, White House aides scrambled to make sense of it. None of his surrogates said they believed Trump, only that he had access to information that they didn't and therefore his claim could have basis in fact. Except that just three days after Sarah Huckabee Sanders hit the Sunday shows to reassure viewers that Trump may well have been the target of an FBI investigation, Press Secretary Sean Spicer made a special declaration at the end of Wednesday's White House briefing.

"I just want to be really clear on one point, which is there's no reason that we have to think that the President is the target of any investigation whatsoever," he said. "I think that’s a very important point to make.”

Oh, so maybe Trump Tower wires weren't tapped after all? The abrupt 180 came just minutes after Spicer insisted that an investigation of the claim move forward when he was asked if Trump was the target of a counter-intelligence operation.

“I think that's what we need to find out. There's obviously a lot of the concern," he responded.

Oops. That must have been the moment it dawned on the White House brainiacs that asserting Trump Tower had been wiretapped inherently implicated Trump in potential wrongdoing. Just think about that—it took them three days of talking themselves into that corner to see where they were leading the public, and in fact, demanding that investigators go.

Republicans could very well lose life-long voters come 2018 and beyond, thanks to Trumpcare. Check out North Carolinian John Thompson, "a pro-life, evangelical Christian and a Republican voter for 28 years:"

[Cancer] has no party affiliation. It struck Thompson after he lost his job and his insurance in 2013. As he fought cancer and worked to find another job, the GOP leadership in the General Assembly slashed his unemployment benefits.

“Obamacare saved my life,” Thompson said at a “Save My Care” rally in Greensboro on Wednesday.

Thompson said he feels betrayed by the party he has supported for most of his life.

“For 40 years, I paid my taxes, worked to support my family, gave to my church, and I contributed to my community,” Thompson said. “But in my hour of need, when my back was against the wall, in the richest country in the history of the universe, where was the GOP for me? If it was up to those guys, and they could have done to Obamacare then what they’re getting ready to do to it now, shoot, I’d probably be laying dead in a ditch somewhere today.”

As Joan McCarter pointed out earlier, Trumpcare will disproportionately hit older, rural voters—folks just like Thompson. While speakers at the rally earlier this week “acknowledged that the [ACA] needs to be adjusted and improved,” they don’t want it repealed, and they sure as hell don’t want it replaced with Trumpcare:

Becoming pr*sident doesn’t mean Donald Trump has changed his ways: he’s still stiffing the contractors who work on his construction projects. The Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.’s Old Post Office Building is perhaps Trump’s highest-profile recent project, but the attention focused on it hasn’t made the Trump Organization pay its bills. Five contractors have sued for a total of nearly $5 million in nonpayment, including Freestate Electric, a union employer that talked to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers about the suit:

“We’ve only filed three [mechanics’ liens] in the past decade, so, this is not usual for us,” said Tim Miller, executive vice president at Freestate’s parent company, AES Electric. “I want to make clear that this is not political. Whether it is Trump, or somebody you never heard of, we did a good job, at an agreed upon price and we want to be paid for it. We’d rather be talking about what an excellent job our employees did on a complex project than doing this.”

Freestate has paid its workers and vendors, so it is bearing the brunt of Trump’s habit of not paying his contractors. Anticipating his usual claim that he didn’t pay up because he wasn’t satisfied with the quality of the work, they noted that:

General contractor Lend Lease nominated Freestate for a Washington Building Congress Craftsmanship award for the lighting they installed, an award they won. So, Miller said, there is no question about the quality of the work they did, just whether they should be paid for it.

And while there were cost overruns, they were a direct result of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign:

The lawsuit claims that the $2 million in unpaid costs were incurred after the general contractor, Lend Lease, requested an acceleration of work so the hotel would be ready for a series of Trump presidential campaign events.

In order to meet the deadlines for the Sept. 12 soft opening, Freestate says they had crews on site seven days per week, 12 to 14 hours per day for nearly 50 consecutive days. The “soft opening” was scheduled for September 12th, and without Freestate’s additional manpower, this date would not have been met. The official Oct. 26 “Grand Opening” was scheduled, according to the lawsuit, “to provide an opportunity for positive press coverage for Mr. Trump's presidential campaign.”

Trump doesn’t live up to his own hype on almost anything, but he is truly a tremendous grifter.

The office of Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency-hating chief of the EPA, was deluged with phone calls Friday over his numbskull remarks about carbon dioxide and climate change. So many calls, in fact, that they jammed the office’s main phone line. 

The calls came in response to Pruitt’s telling CNBC on Thursday that carbon dioxide isn’t a “primary contributor” to climate change:

"I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see," he told CNBC's "Squawk Box."

"But we don't know that yet. ... We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis."

That view contradicts his stance in his written responses to questions from senators at his confirmation hearings in which he said the EPA administrator has an “important role when it comes to the regulation of carbon dioxide.”

His comment on CNBC, of course, was classic climate science denial, version #4, in which the denier implicitly or explicitly concedes that climate change is happening but not because of human activity. This is usually attached to a line saying “the climate is always changing” so what’s happening now is no different from what’s always occurred in the Earth’s existence. Deniers of version #1 claimed that climate change wasn’t happening at all. Indeed, as recently as five years ago, some deniers—many of them paid shills—claimed that Arctic ice was not dwindling.