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President Bidens approval rating is hovering under forty-percent, raising concerns over how the numbers will impact the performance of Democrats this fall. FiveThirtyEight has tracked President Bidens approval rating at 38.4 percent, just under the level of support for Donald Trump had when he left office.

Donald Trump has yet to announce his candidacy but if reports are correct, and he does plan to run again, we could see the two face off again in 2024. Many Republicans running across the country have incorporated the idea that 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. In a recent poll by Quinnipiac University, only fifteen percent of voters said that this would make them more likely to vote for a candidate. More than third of respondents said that this would have no impact on their decision to vote for a candidate, which is a bit shocking.

It could be that the approval rating of the president is falling because of the high levels of economic uncertainty. The same Quinnipiac poll found that only thirty-six percent of respondents believed that the president had a lot of power to control inflation. Interestingly sixty-five percent of Republicans were on this opinion, whereas only ten percent of Democrats agreed that the president has the power to lower prices.

It is important to note that low approval does not necessarily equal poor electoral performance.

Just because someone does not approve of the job a leader is doing does not mean that they would not vote for them. The conversation on polling tends to conflate these two types of questions.

Congress after all, has an approval rating of just sixteen percent, yet ninety-three percent of Congressional incumbents were reelected in 2020. Does this mean that voters approve of their own Congressperson, but dislike others? No, not necessarily. It could be that people vote based on the options they have and that because special interests and dark money groups have such an outsized influence in electing certain candidates, Congress does not always act to support the needs of the people.

Similarly, with regard to the president --a low approval rating for Joe Biden now does not mean that voters wont turn out in 2024should he chose to run again.

When former-President Trump left office, his disapproval rate stood at fifty-seven percent, with 38.6 percent of the public supporting him. The highest approval rating Trump had while in office was in April 2020 which could relate to his handling of the pandemic in its earliest phase. In April, Congress passed the CARES Act which distributed the first round of stimulus checks and bolstered unemployment benefits for the more than twenty-million workers who lost their jobs.

However, a few short months later, Donald Trumps approval rating took a nose dive to its lowest point in his presidency as he left office --in part as a result of the events on January 6th.

When former-president Obama was elected, he entered office with a historic approval rating of sixty-four percent. However, with the impacts of the financial crisis led this level of support to began to fall. Aside from a few peaks in popularity, the majority of Obamas term, the disapproval rate was above fifty percent. However, unlike Donald Trump, he left office with a net positive approval rate.

George W. Bush, the first president to be elected in the twenty first century did so by losing the popular vote but winning electoral college. This impacted his approval rating when he entered the White House as some were not so convinced by the legitimacy of his election. Bush began his first term with an approval rating of forty-six percent. However, after the 9/11 attacks, his approval rate skyrocketed to over eighty percent. These numbers gave him quite a cushion for his remaining years in office. However after the economic crisis his approval rating did fall under fifty percent, only to increase slightly before leaving office.

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What are the lowest approval ratings of recent US presidents? Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush - AS USA

On June 30, the Supreme Court decided that the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama had overstepped its authority by creating the Clean Power Plan that would force the U.S. to transition from coal to cleaner sources of electricity. A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, the court concluded inWest Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency.Congress, however, has failed to address climate change in decades and is unlikely to do so any time soon.

Even though the Clean Power Plan never took effect, the shift away from coal is happening far more quickly than the Obama administration predicted. EPA Administrator Michael Regan has promised to build on that progress despite the court ruling, noting that coal plants pollute the air, water and land in various other ways and that the agency will still require them to clean up their act. Many of those plants will shut down rather than pay to install pollution controls. The decision does constrain what we do, but let me be clear it doesnt take us out of the game, Regan told thePBS NewsHourin early July. We still will be able to regulate climate pollution.

To Earthjustice lawyer Jenny Harbine, though, the EPAs talk of its response to the Supreme Court ruling rings a bit hollow. Harbine is currently representing environmental groups that are fighting the agency in court in a case involving coal plants and pollution.

The Biden administration is defending a Trump-era rollback of an Obama rule that would have required the large coal-fired power plants in Utah to install widely used pollution-control devices. The Huntington and Hunter power plants have long contributed to the haze shrouding the skies over the states national parks including Arches, Bryce, Canyonlands and Capitol Reef and its wilderness areas.

After The Supreme Court decided the EPA under President Obama had overstepped its authority by pushing a nationwide transition from coal to cleaner sources of electricity, EPA Administrator Michael Regan said, The decision does constrain what we do, but let me be clear it doesnt take us out of the game.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Its really hard to see the administration issue press releases about how theyre adopting a multi-pollutant strategy to address greenhouse gases and know this very low-hanging fruit is sitting there in the state of Utah, Harbine said. Im frustrated because I know that there is such an urgent need to make progress now, and shutting down the biggest polluters is the first step in doing that. When I hear the administration expressing similar urgency, I can't square it intellectually with the decision that theyve made in Utah to defend an illegal Trump-era rollback.

An EPA spokesperson told High Country News that the agency would not comment due to pending litigation. But Matt McPherson, a spokesman for Utahs Department of Environmental Quality, said that requiring the plants to install the equipment was not necessary to meet the reasonable progress requirements of EPA's regional haze rules and is not a cost-effective strategy to control regional haze.

EVEN AS THE EPA resists taking action in Utah, it has a wide range of regulations already on the books or currently planned that are aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It has proposed rules limiting methane emissions from oil and gas facilities and is targeting vehicle tailpipe emissions. The Supreme Court ruling expressly leaves the EPA with the authority to regulate pollution from the electricity sector as long as it doesnt order plants to switch from coal to renewable energy the way it would have under Obamas plan.

Regan said that his agency also plans to tighten regulations that would force power plants to clean up pollution in many cases, an expensive undertaking. He made it clear that he hopes that the owners of coal-fired power plants will decide to close dirty facilities rather than spend the money to clean them up. Theyll see its not worth investing in the past, Regan said.

In Colorado, Xcel Energy recently agreed to close its Comanche coal plant in Pueblo, the states single largest emitter of carbon, by 2031. And Gov. Jared Polis said the Supreme Courts ruling will not slow his states plans to shut down all its remaining coal-fired power plants as it rapidly shifts to wind and solar energy. We have already locked in the closure of Colorado's coal plants no later than 2031, because they produce the highest-cost electricity, Polis said in a statement. Colorado utilities are already on a path to meet or exceed 80% renewable energy by 2030.

Then-Colorado State Representative Dominique Jackson and State Senator Angela Williams high-five after Governor Jared Polis signed the Climate Action Plan to Reduce Pollution (HB19-1261) into law at a community solar garden in Arvada, Colorado, in 2019.

Joe Amon/The Denver Post via Getty Images

Economics are playing a critical role here. Cheap, abundant natural gas, the rise of renewables and a crackdown on dirty coal by the EPA and some states have all combined to drive utilities away from coal, reducing carbon pollution from the electricity sector by a third, more than a decade earlier than EPA thought the Clean Power Plan would. Even after an uptick in coal use in 2021, the United States used only about half as much coal to produce electricity as it did 15 years earlier. Meanwhile, renewable energy has overtaken coal as a source of electricity.

The electric utility sector is shifting away from coal regardless, said Amanda Shafer Berman, who as a senior attorney for the Justice Department defended Obamas Clean Power Plan in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals D.C. Circuit in 2016. There are trends that are resulting in a shift of electric generation to cleaner sources anyway, and I dont think this decision is going to slow that down.

The Supreme Courts ruling has given the EPA a better idea of what kind of climate regulations are likely to withstand future court challenges. Maybe the Supreme Court did them a favor, said Pat Parenteau, a law professor at Vermont Law and Graduate School. If the EPA had gone back to anything like the Clean Power Plan, this court would have killed it anyway.

Experts caution that any EPA plan to regulate carbon dioxide from power plants would probably end up in court anyway, resulting in years of delay. The trouble is there are still a lot of states that will challenge the next rule that comes out of EPA, whatever it is, said Berman, a partner at Crowell & Moring, a large private law firm with offices around the globe. A suite of the red states will challenge it, and any greenhouse gas regulation will again get mired in litigation.

Thats where the EPAs multipronged approach comes in. In a March speech, Regan ticked off a list of responses, including a good neighbor rule requiring power plants and industrial polluters in 26 states to reduce air pollution in downwind states. The agency would also tighten and expand an existing rule to include Nevada, Wyoming and Utah and California. And the EPA is planning tighter regulations for mercury and other toxic emissions from coal plant exhausts, coal ash waste and toxic releases into waterways.

The cumulative effect of all these other tighter standards are really going to put more coal plants out of business, Parenteau said. The question is: What are they going to be replaced with? Probably gas, in a lot of places.

Generating electricity with gas instead of coal reduces greenhouse gas emissions by about half. But natural gas is mostly methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas, and a lot of methane leaks when companies drill, process and transport it. The EPA is working on a rule to cut those emissions, too.

Even so, replacing coal with gas would not achieve Bidens goal of reaching 100% carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035.

PacifiCorp's Hunter power plant releases steam as it burns coal outside of Castle Dale, Utah.

George Frey/AFP via Getty Images

But environmental activists say Regan could force some of the biggest power plants in the country to close by rejecting requests from at least six plants, including the Coal Creek plant in North Dakota, that want to continue operating their outdated coal ash waste systems indefinitely. The EPA has yet to respond to those requests. In the meantime, the plants keep using their outdated systems.

If he denied (the plants), we would likely see them retire, said Bruce Nilles, executive director at Climate Imperative, a foundation working on climate change solutions. If you push them, they will close.

An agency spokesperson said the EPA is working to respond to the requests, which can include thousands of pages of documentation, and that it will publish its decisions as soon as possible.

A coalition of groups sued the EPA in April, after 34 states failed to meet a requirement to submit plans showing how they would improve visibility at national parks and wilderness areas, as required by the regional haze rule. The groups called on the agency to reduce emissions and lock in retirement dates for big polluters.

This is the rule that Obamas EPA was enforcing when it required PacifiCorp to install pollution equipment on its Huntington and Hunter plants, the first- and third-largest carbon emitters in Utah.PacifiCorp has argued that the tremendous costs of installing the equipment are unreasonable, citing coal plants across the country that had closed rather than install similar pollution controls.

By defending Trumps rollback, the Biden administration is allowing PacifiCorp to avoid a choice that could make significant progress towards our shared goals of averting climate catastrophe, Harbine said.

Its inexcusable. This is the first and easiest thing the administration should have done to tackle air pollution in the West, she said. We expect constant pushback from industry on things like this. It simply cant be the case that EPA folds when it feels pressure. The EPA has to stick to its guns and make the decisions necessary to achieve the pollution reductions we need as a public to move forward.

Elizabeth Shogren is a freelance journalist based in Arlington, Virginia, and HCNs former D.C. correspondent.

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at [emailprotected] or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

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The EPA has more options to rein in climate change than you think - High Country News

It's Malia Obama's birthday!

Former first lady Michelle Obama took to Instagram Monday to not only say "Happy Fourth of July" to her followers but to also celebrate her daughter, who turned 24 years old.

Malia Obama and Michelle Obama attend President Barack Obama's farewell address in Chicago, Jan. 10, 2017.

Bloomberg via Getty Images, FILE

Her Instagram post features an adorable throwback photo of her and Malia when she was a baby.

"Happy birthday, Malia," Obama wrote in the caption. "24 years ago, this day became extra special when your wonderful spirit arrived in this world. I'm so proud of the beautiful, caring, and driven young woman you've become. I love you so, so much! Love, your Mommy."

Malia's dad, former President Barack Obama also celebrated his daughter's birthday with a sweet throwback photo of them together when Malia was a baby.

"Happy Birthday, Malia! No matter how sophisticated, accomplished, beautiful, and gracious a young woman you've become -- you'll always be my baby," he wrote in an Instagram post. "And I will always be here to lift you up."

Malia Obama graduated from Harvard University in 2021. In March, Donald Glover told Vanity Fair that the 24-year-old is a writer for his new Amazon series, potentially titled "Hive."

"She's just like an amazingly talented person," Glover said. "She's really focused, and she's working really hard."

"I feel like she's just somebody who's gonna have really good things coming soon," he added. "Her writing style is really great."

Previously, Malia Obama interned on Lena Dunham's "Girls" and at the Weinstein Company. She was also a production assistant on Halle Berry's CBS sci-fi drama series "Extant."

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Michelle and Barack Obama celebrate Malia Obama's birthday - ABC News

A former Treasury secretary on Friday predicted that the risk of a 2022 recession is increasing and revealed the one thing that might dampen inflation.

The risks of a 2022 recession are significantly higher than I would have judged six or nine weeks ago, Larry Summers, who was also former President Barack Obamasdirector of the National Economic Council,told Bloomberg in an interview published Friday. A months-long recession would tamp down inflationary pressures, he also predicted.

If the economy did go into recession in the next six to nine months, then youd probably see a reduction in inflationary pressures, Summers remarked.

The Department of Labor recently said that year-over-year inflation rose 8.6 percent in May, the highest figure seen since the early 1980s. The price pressures prompted the Federal Reserve to increase interest rates to levels not seen in 20 years.

From the start of 2022, a growing number of economists and corporate executives have signaled they believe a recession could occur sometime this year or in the next several years. And a growing number of analysts say that the United States is already in one.

The stock market has had its worst year in 2022 since 1970 as concerns are mounting about whether inflation could curb economic growth. In the past six months, the benchmark S&P 500 index dropped 20.6 percentage points while other major American indexes have similarly plunged.

We think we are in a recession, Cathie Wood, CEO of asset management firm Ark Invest, told CNBC on Tuesday, adding there is a big problem out there [with] inventories and that its an increase of which Ive never seen this large in my career. Ive been around for 45 years.

Economist and gold salesman Peter Schiff wrote this week that the United States will face an economic crisis worse than the so-called Great Recession of 2008, saying that President Joe Bidenwill soon be forced to admit that Americas red hot economy has actually been in a recession all year.

Later in Fridays interview, Summers claimed he thinks central banks like the Fed will be able to reduce inflation. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell recently said he wants to see rates drop to 2 percent.

The notion that its not going to be possible for central banks to achieve low inflation and meet their inflation targetsthat would not be an idea that I would subscribe to, Summers told Bloomberg. It may be more difficult, it may require them to be resolute, but I dont think theyre going to be unable to meet their inflation targets.

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Jack Phillips is a breaking news reporter at The Epoch Times based in New York.

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Obama-Era Economic Director Reveals What Will Bring Down Inflation - The Epoch Times

By The OBSERVER Newsroom

The Obamas are in the Bay Area. Portraits of the nations first Black president and former first lady, Barack and Michelle Obama, are on display thanks to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Smithsonians National Portrait Gallery.

The portraits will be on view at the de Young museum from June 18 to August 14. San Francisco is the only stop in Northern California on the portraits nationwide tour.

The portraits were created by contemporary artists Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, the first African American artists commissioned by the Smithsonians National Portrait Gallery to paint official presidential portraits. The installation also includes an eight-minute video featuring the curator and artists discussing the historical and artistic significance of the portraits.

Kehinde Wileys portrait of former President Barack Obama and Amy Sheralds portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama are groundbreaking American portraits that speak to the sense of hope and possibility that the Obamas inspire, said Tom Campbell, Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Both Wiley and Sherald are artists who work within the genre of Western portraiture painting, while actively expanding and critiquing artistic conventions that have traditionally defined representations of power, Campbell continued.

The two paintings present a striking contrast to the formality of earlier presidential portraits and images of first ladies. Wiley placed a seated President Obamagazing forward to capture the viewers attentionagainst a backdrop of flowers with special significance in the life of the President and his family. Included are chrysanthemums as the official flower of Chicago; jasmine, which pays homage to the sitters birthplace and upbringing in Hawaii; and purple African lilies, which are native to Kenya. Sherald depicted the former First Lady against a light-blue background in a contemplative pose. Her dress, by Milly designer Michelle Smith, carries meaning as well, referring to both the modernist traditions of abstract art and the traditional patterned quilts of the Gees Bend community in Alabama.

Through the presentation of these now-iconic works by Wiley and Sherald, the exhibition contemplates how portraiture has given visual form to ideas of power, identity, status, and legacy throughout history. At the de Young, the roughly life-size portraits will be presented in a gallery adjacent to the museums American Art collection.

The first Black artists commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint official portraits of a President and First Lady, Wiley and Sherald have throughout their careers consistently addressed the lacunae of Black representation in Western art history, using portraiture to explore complex issues of identity that transcend the individual pictured. The Obama Portraits are rendered in the artists signature styles.

Sherald is an artist based in the Greater New York area whose work documents contemporary African American experience in the United States through arresting, otherworldly portraits. In 2016, Sherald was the first woman and first African American to receive first prize in the triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition held by the Smithsonians National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Sherald has also received a 2019 Smithsonian Ingenuity Award.

Kehinde Wiley, was born in Los Angeles, but is a New York City and Senegal-based artist well known for creating vibrant, large-scale paintings of contemporary African Americans in the tradition of European portraiture. Wiley typically portrays people of color posing as famous figures in Western art. Through this practice, he challenges the visual rhetoric of power that is dominated by elite White men. In 2019, Wiley established Black Rock, a multidisciplinary artist-in-residence program in Dakar, Senegal.

The Obama Portraits are part of the National Portrait Gallerys collection, which holds the nations only complete collection of portraits of U.S. presidents that is accessible to the public. The Portrait Gallery began commissioning presidential portraits in 1994, with George H.W. Bush. It commissioned its first portrait of a First Lady in 2006, with Hillary Rodham Clinton. Originally a five-city endeavor, which commenced in Chicago on June 18, 2021, The Obama Portraits Tour was extended by popular demand to include two additional cities with presentations by the de Young museum in San Francisco, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2022.

There are a number of public programs planned in conjunction with the exhibit. On Sat., June 18: Opening Day Celebration from 12 noon to 3:00 p.m. Celebration includes live music by cellist/vocalist Mia Pixley, dance performances from Kimberly Olivier and a free portrait session.

On Sat., June 25: Power and Creativity in Portraiture with First Exposures from 10:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Immerse yourself in the power of portraiture with First Exposures, a nationally recognized youth photography mentoring program in the San Francisco Bay Area. View the 28-year retrospective of youth work focusing on portraiture and participate in a pop up portrait studio inspired by the Obama Portraits with First Exposures alumni.

On Sat., July 30: Art, Fashion, Activism with Youth Art Exchange from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Enjoy an exclusive viewing of art and fashion inspired by the themes of the Obama Portraits Tour. Hear from youth activists at the forefront of social justice.

On Sat., August 6: Poetry and Storytelling with 826 Valencia and Oakland Poet Laureate from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Listen to powerful poems written by Bay Area youth in response to the Obama Portraits and works from the museums permanent collection and learn unique ways of expression.

The Obama Portraits Tour tickets will be free on June 18 and 19, on a first-come, first-served basis. Limit 4 per family, space is limited. Free admission to The Obama Portraits Tour is underwritten by Google.

The de Young is open Tuesday-Sunday, 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. The Obama Portraits is included in general admission to the de Young museum, with free admission for San Francisco Bay Area residents every Saturday.

For more, please visit deyoungmuseum.org. For more on the Portrait Gallery and the full tour schedule, visit npg.si.edu/obamaportraitstour.

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The Obamas Visit SF Bay Area As Part of Tour - Sacramento Observer