Inside Cory Booker’s Plan To Disrupt ‘Business As Usual’ On The Senate Floor
Monday March 31^st, 2025 at 8:59 PM

TPM – Talking Points Memo

A member of the U.S. Senate took the floor at 7:00 p.m. on Monday evening — and he doesn’t plan on leaving it any time soon. In a text message to TPM, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said he was about to begin speaking for as long as he could stand.

“I am disrupting business as usual,” Booker told TPM. “I am not allowing us to just carry on with the expected order of the Senate.”

Booker’s decision to break from standard procedure — after an unrelated procedural vote on a Trump nominee — was motivated by the unusual threat to the country President Trump represents. His office provided TPM with an embargoed copy of his opening remarks in which Booker outlined the stakes as he sees them and his reasons for speaking and holding the Senate floor “for as long as I am physically able,” beginning Monday evening.

“These are not normal times in our nation. And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate,” Booker plans to say, according to the prepared remarks the senator’s office shared with TPM. “The threats to the American people and American democracy are grave and urgent and we all must do more to stand against them. Generations from now will look back at this moment and have a single question — where were you?”

In the prepared version of his opening remarks, Booker goes on to point to Trump’s unprecedented wave of firings across the federal government and his attacks on American institutions including the press and major law firms.

“I rise tonight because to be silent at this moment of national crisis would be a betrayal, and because at stake in this moment is nothing less than everything that makes us who we are,” Booker said.

After delivering those opening remarks, Booker plans to deliver a multi-part presentation on the ways he thinks Trump is harming the country. The senator plans to start with letters from his constituents.

Booker apparently has a lot of material. His office said Booker’s move to commandeer the Senate floor is modeled after a filibuster on gun control Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) held in 2016. Murphy’s filibuster lasted for just shy of 15 hours. Booker stood with Murphy for hours during that filibuster. This time around, Murphy plans to be there supporting Booker.

The current record for the longest speech in the history of the Senate is held by the late segregationist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina who spent 24 hours and 18 minutes filibustering against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Rules for marathon speeches require members to continuously speak and to remain on the floor, which raises difficult logistical questions, including about bathroom breaks.

In his texts to TPM, Booker said Murphy and other supporters may help him save his voice by asking questions during his extensive presentation.

“Senators can come in and ask me questions. For other senators, including in Strom Thurmond’s speech, this was to give them a break. Some questions would last many minutes,” Booker said.

However, Booker indicated that he has no plans for anyone to “relieve” him. He also doesn’t expect another senator to follow once he can no longer continue.

“I doubt someone will then pick up and keep going — hard given rules of procedure to do that,” Booker said.

Booker has a history of this kind of disruptive activism. He began his career in Newark, New Jersey, a city about an hour west of Manhattan. As a councilman and, later, as mayor there he drew national attention with a blend of early social media savvy and hands-on politics that included hunger strikes, moving into a tent outside a public housing project, shoveling snow, and even saving a woman from a burning building. He was elected to the Senate in 2013 and mounted a White House bid in 2020.

This marathon speech comes amid widespread protests over Trump’s actions during his first two months and change in office. Some of the frustration has been aimed at Democrats, particularly after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and a handful of other Senate Democrats voted to advance a Republican spending bill earlier this month, helping Republicans pass legislation to avert a government shutdown. Booker referenced the anger from voters in the prepared version of his remarks.

“Our constituents are asking us to acknowledge that this is not normal, that this is a crisis,” Booker said. “So I am going to stand here until I no longer can. I am going to speak up.”

In a video posted on Instagram hours before his speech began on Monday, Booker framed the current Trump era as an “AMERICAN moment” that calls for protest. He also referenced his past activism including an incident in 2017 where he and the late Civil Rights icon and congressman John Lewis conducted a livestreaming sit-in on the Capitol steps as Republicans were trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

“When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to stand up, to do something, to say something, and find a little way to get in the way and make a little noise,” Lewis said during their stream.

Booker and Lewis were eventually joined on the steps by other senators and a crowd of supporters. The GOP push to end Obamacare was ultimately unsuccessful after three of their senators voted with the Democrats.

Years later, in an interview, Booker described the sit-in as “moral suasion” where he and Lewis attempted to physically show allies and other elected officials where they stood.

While his desire to morally sway and stir is once again apparent in this planned marathon speech against Trump, in his texts to TPM Booker said he did not consider it to be an act of civil disobedience.

“That invokes a history which I reverse and am truly humbled by,” Booker wrote. “There is no risk here of my arrest, no chance of a beating or other physical attack. I am not breaking any official rules (at this point).”

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acdha

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Big banks predict catastrophic warming, with profit potential - E
Monday March 31^st, 2025 at 9:26 PM

E&E News Articles

Top Wall Street institutions are preparing for a severe future of global warming that blows past the temperature limits agreed to by more than 190 nations a decade ago, industry documents show.

The big banks’ acknowledgment that the world is likely to fail at preventing warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels is spelled out in obscure reports for clients, investors and trade association members. Most were published after the reelection of President Donald Trump, who is seeking to repeal federal policies that support clean energy while turbocharging the production of oil, gas and coal — the main sources of global warming.

The recent reports — from Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and the Institute of International Finance — show that Wall Street has determined the temperature goal is effectively dead and describe how top financial institutions plan to continue operating profitably as temperatures and damages soar.

“We now expect a 3°C world,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote earlier this month, citing “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts.”

The stunning conclusion indicates that the bank believes the planet is hurtling toward a future in which severe droughts and harvest failures become widespread, sea-level rise is measured in feet rather than inches and tropical regions experience episodes of extreme heat and humidity for weeks at a time that would bring deadly risks to people who work outdoors.

The global Paris Agreement, from which the U.S. is withdrawing under Trump, aims to limit average temperature increases to well below 2 degrees Celsius. Scientists have warned that permanently exceeding 1.5 degrees — a threshold the world breached for the first time last year — could lead to increasingly severe climate impacts, such as the demise of coral reef ecosystems that hundreds of millions of people rely on for food and storm surge protection.

Morgan Stanley’s climate forecast was tucked into a mundane research report on the future of air conditioning stocks, which it provided to clients on March 17. A 3 degree warming scenario, the analysts determined, could more than double the growth rate of the $235 billion cooling market every year, from 3 percent to 7 percent until 2030.

“The political environment has changed, so some of them are conforming to that,” Gautam Jain, a former investment banker who is now a senior research scholar at Columbia University, said of Wall Street’s increasingly dire climate projections. “But mostly it is a rational business decision.”

The new warming estimates come as heat-trapping gases continue to rise globally and as international commitments to limit the burning of oil, gas and coal that’s responsible for the bulk of emissions have stalled. Meanwhile, megabanks like Wells Fargo are backsliding on their previous climate pledges and exiting from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a United Nations-backed group that encouraged members to slash their emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.

Morgan Stanley, which in October watered down its climate-related lending targets, declined to comment.

Betting on potentially catastrophic global warming is both an acknowledgment of the current emissions trajectory and a politically savvy move in the second Trump era, according to Jain.

“Nobody wants to be seen as going against” the administration’s pro-fossil-fuel energy policy, he said. “These banks are businesses, so they have to look at the risk that they have in their portfolio and the opportunities that they see in the most likely environment.”

‘Recalibrate targets’

Morgan Stanley’s frank assessment of the air conditioning market follows a trade association briefing in February in which industry officials argued that the financial sector needs a coordinated messaging campaign to regulators, investors and the public that the Paris targets are no longer within reach — and banks should not be expected to pursue them.

“The world is not on track to limit temperature rise below 2°C — and limiting warming [to] 1.5°C is almost certainly unachievable,” the Institute of International Finance wrote in bolded text, citing analyses from the energy research firm the Rhodium Group and the Climate Action Tracker, an environmental collaborative.

“Financial institutions need to recalibrate targets to reflect that 1.5°C are no longer suitable as strategic goals,” the briefing said. “Reputational concerns may arise in the absence of an aligned view amongst stakeholders on how such processes should be handled, and what criteria may need to be applied.”

The banking industry can support the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy but capital will only move “at scale when the economics make sense,” Mary Kate Binecki, a spokesperson for the Institute of International Finance, said in an email. The institute represents about 400 members from more than 60 countries, including JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley.

JPMorgan, the world’s most valuable bank, has been describing to investors how it evaluates climate risks in a detailed report published annually since 2022. At that time and in subsequent reports, the bank said it vets investments using “baseline” scenarios that assume global warming of 2.7 degrees to more than 3 degrees by the end of this century.

In JPMorgan’s most recent report, released in late November, CEO Jamie Dimon outlined the bank’s commitment to financing a global transition to cleaner energy. But he also hinted at the role Trump and other political leaders could play in slowing climate progress.

“Constructive government leadership and policy is also necessary, particularly on taxes, permitting, energy grids, infrastructure and technological innovation,” Dimon said in a foreword to the report.

A JPMorgan spokesperson emphasized that, while the bank stress tests its investments using a variety of potential climate scenarios, it remains committed to zeroing out its emissions by 2050, in line with the Paris Agreement.

Wall Street knows how to run the numbers, and right now the smart money expects warming to exceed 2 degrees, explained Jain, the former investment banker.

“These guys are not making assumptions out of the blue,” he said. “They are following the science.”

Correction: An earlier version of this report misstated when JPMorgan published its first climate report. The initial edition ran in 2019, was included in its broader environmental, social and governance reports for a couple of years, and then became a standalone publication again in 2022.

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acdha

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sarcozona

19 minutes ago

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Dark times ahead

Epiphyte City

Big banks predict catastrophic warming, with profit potential - E
Monday March 31^st, 2025 at 8:37 PM