Climate unintended consequences: The Olympic Games, which start at the end of this week in Paris, were supposed to be some of the most environmentally friendly in the organization's history. The organizers had opted out of supplying air conditioning for athletes' rooms in the Olympic Village as a means of reducing the event's environmental footprint. Just one issue: Nobody wanted that, and many of the teams will in fact be bringing their own A.C. units.
The event organizers had constructed an Olympic Village equipped with geothermal in-floor cooling systems. But highs in Paris at the end of July/beginning of August average about 79 degrees Fahrenheit during the day; most major competitors have decided the in-floor tech won't cut it and that their athletes need real A.C.
Earlier this month, The Washington Post compiled a list of the top 20 largest competing nations; of the eight that replied to this inquiry, all of them planned on bringing their own portable A.C. units for their athletes. One of the nations that has not responded yet—China—is likely to follow suit, as roughly half of the world's total A.C. units are used in China.
"According to the International Energy Agency, fewer than 1 in 10 households in Europe has air conditioning, and the numbers in Paris are lower than that," reports NBC News. "The study said that of the 1.6 billion AC units in use across the globe in 2016, more than half were in China (570 million) and the United States (375 million). The entire European Union had around 100 million." So it's a bit of a cultural difference. But it's still incredibly rich that the organizers' environmental efforts will be sabotaged to such a degree, and you have to wonder what the total environmental toll of shlepping massive A.C. units halfway across the globe to use temporarily in the Olympic Village will be (though some teams do intend to procure the units in France).
"It's a pity," said Georgina Grenon, the Paris 2024 director of environmental excellence, in response to The Washington Post's question about other countries making less environmentally conscious choices. Still, organizers touted their plan to transform the Olympic Village into apartments for some 6,000 Parisians following the games and say the geothermal cooling tech will be used for years to come.
Locked out of the debates: The first presidential debate will be this Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., despite high polling, will be excluded from the stage.
Normally, the Commission on Presidential Debates hosts the presidential showdowns (and chooses which candidates qualify for inclusion). This time, however, CNN is hosting, moderated by anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. As is tradition in American politics, which seems so frequently filled with antipathy toward non–major party candidates, the highly polling third candidate—RFK Jr.—will be excluded from the stage, per CNN's rules.
The network set a requirement that a candidate's name must appear on enough ballots nationwide to plausibly be able to win 270 electoral votes. The candidates must also reach 15 percent in four national polls selected by CNN in order to qualify.
RFK Jr. does not qualify for the first (having secured ballot access in just California, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Minnesota, Oklahoma, and Utah so far, though another dozen states could also end up putting his name on the ballot) yet comes quite close to the second: He's been hovering at around 9 or 10 percent, even cracking 15 in some polls (including one of CNN's very own).
By keeping Kennedy off the debate stage, CNN is depriving viewers of the opportunity to see both Donald Trump and Joe Biden taken to task for the COVID-19 policies they supported—lockdowns that deprived kids of their educations, mask mandates that ended up being almost entirely pointless, funerals and weddings conducted via Zoom, padlocked playgrounds and skate parks filled in with sand, not to mention stunning levels of government spending that sank our economy into deep inflation from which we still haven't fully recovered. We need more people challenging the political duopoly, not fewer. But leave it to the major parties and major networks to fear competition; all incumbents fear competition when they can sense they're in decline.
Scenes from New York: The weed crackdown is underway. Unauthorized dispensaries and bodegas have, for the last year or so, outnumbered licensed shops 20 to one, but New York's law enforcement and regulators have now decided to take action. Signs like these are commonplace, and represent a stunning admission on the part of the pot regulators: They totally botched the legal weed rollout by doling out a paltry number of licenses to applicants on the basis of "diversity" and "equity" but disallowing the vast majority of shops to obtain legal licenses. (More from Reason's Jacob Sullum.)
QUICK HITS
- "New polling from Fox News shows a seven-point swing in President Joe Biden's favorability among independents: They prefer Biden by 9 points, a reversal from May, when they favored Trump by 2 points," reports Politico.
- "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said intense fighting with Hamas will soon be paused and some forces redeployed to the north of the country, where violence is escalating with Lebanon-based Hezbollah," reports Bloomberg.
- "Did anyone ever hear of Dana White?" Trump asked, referring to the UFC president, during a speech at a conference in Washington on Saturday. "I said, 'Dana, I have an idea. Why don't you set up a migrant league of fighters and have your regular league of fighters, and then you have the champion of your league—these are the greatest fighters in the world—fight the champion of the migrants.' I think the migrant guy might win; that's how tough they are. He didn't like that idea too much." He also talked up how he would "begin the largest deportation operation in American history" if elected to a second term.
- Over 1,300 people died this month while attempting to complete their hajj to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia.
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