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Humans have fought over food and the means of producing it for 20,000 years, as rock art in Australia shows. Food, water and land scarcity are primary drivers in two thirds of modern conflicts today. Indeed, many people seem to have forgotten that the primary German war aim in World War II was to take farmland from the Soviets and put German farmers on it. It is very likely that controlling the Ukraine’s bountiful and reliable food bowl is among Putin’s main aims also. In the short run this is imposing hunger and even starvation on hundreds of millions of people far beyond Europe. 

Spreading hunger in turn snowballs into government failures, civil wars and refugee tsunamis around the world – as it did in 2008 when a shortfall in Ukrainian grain exports led to revolutions in three Arab countries. Already, a third of a billion people – equal to the entire population of Europe – leave their homes each year, either as refugees or economic migrants, to seek better lives in countries which seem more stable and food secure. War will add to the flood.

While Congress is flailing—moving from one near government shutdown to another—crucial legislation that supports our communities lies in limbo.

That includes the Farm Bill, a vital legislative package responsible for funding everything from farm subsidies and SNAP benefits to international food aid, the urgency to assist war-torn countries, combat rising hunger, and protect our farmlands.

Such considerations warrant decoupling biodiversity loss from climate change, because the former has been consistently subsumed by the latter as a mere effect. Biodiversity loss is a distinct environmental crisis with its own unique syndrome of causes, consequences, and solutions—such as restoring habitats, creating protected areas (“biodiversity parks”), and practicing sustainable agriculture. The sixth extinction. The repercussions of biodiversity loss are potentially as severe as those anticipated from climate change, or even a nuclear conflict. For example, according to a 2015 study published in Science Advances, the best available evidence reveals “an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way.” This conclusion holds, even on the most optimistic assumptions about the background rate of species losses and the current rate of vertebrate extinctions. The group classified as “vertebrates” includes mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and all other creatures with a backbone. The article argues that, using its conservative figures, the average loss of vertebrate species was 100 times higher in the past century relative to the background rate of extinction. (Other scientists have suggested that the current extinction rate could be as much as 10,000 times higher than normal.) As the authors write, “The evidence is incontrovertible that recent extinction rates are unprecedented in human history and highly unusual in Earth’s history.” Perhaps the term “Big Six” should enter the popular lexicon—to add the current extinction to the previous “Big Five,” the last of which wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the concept of biodiversity encompasses more than just the total number of species on the planet. It also refers to the size of different populations of species. With respect to this phenomenon, multiple studies have confirmed that wild populations around the world are dwindling and disappearing at an alarming rate. For example, the 2010 Global Biodiversity Outlook report found that the population of wild vertebrates living in the tropics dropped by 59 percent between 1970 and 2006. The report also found that the population of farmland birds in Europe has dropped by 50 percent since 1980; bird populations in the grasslands of North America declined by almost 40 percent between 1968 and 2003; and the population of birds in North American arid lands has fallen by almost 30 percent since the 1960s. Similarly, 42 percent of all amphibian species (a type of vertebrate that is sometimes called an “ecological indicator”) are undergoing population declines, and 23 percent of all plant species “are estimated to be threatened with extinction.” Other studies have found that some 20 percent of all reptile species, 48 percent of the world’s primates, and 50 percent of freshwater turtles are threatened. Underwater, about 10 percent of all coral reefs are now dead, and another 60 percent are in danger of dying. Consistent with these data, the 2014 Living Planet Report shows that the global population of wild vertebrates dropped by 52 percent in only four decades—from 1970 to 2010. While biologists often avoid projecting historical trends into the future because of the complexity of ecological systems, it’s tempting to extrapolate this figure to, say, the year 2050, which is four decades from 2010. As it happens, a 2006 study published in Science does precisely this: It projects past trends of marine biodiversity loss into the 21st century, concluding that, unless significant changes are made to patterns of human activity, there will be virtually no more wild-caught seafood by 2048. Catastrophic consequences for civilization. The consequences of this rapid pruning of the evolutionary tree of life extend beyond the obvious. There could be surprising effects of biodiversity loss that scientists are unable to fully anticipate in advance. For example, prior research has shown that localized ecosystems can undergo abrupt and irreversible shifts when they reach a tipping point. According to a 2012 paper published in Nature, there are reasons for thinking that we may be approaching a tipping point of this sort in the global ecosystem, beyond which the consequences could be catastrophic for civilization. As the authors write, a planetary-scale transition could precipitate “substantial losses of ecosystem services required to sustain the human population.” An ecosystem service is any ecological process that benefits humanity, such as food production and crop pollination. If the global ecosystem were to cross a tipping point and substantial ecosystem services were lost, the results could be “widespread social unrest, economic instability, and loss of human life.” According to Missouri Botanical Garden ecologist Adam Smith, one of the paper’s co-authors, this could occur in a matter of decades—far more quickly than most of the expected consequences of climate change, yet equally destructive. Biodiversity loss is a “threat multiplier” that, by pushing societies to the brink of collapse, will exacerbate existing conflicts and introduce entirely new struggles between state and non-state actors. Indeed, it could even fuel the rise of terrorism. (After all, climate change has been linked to the emergence of ISIS in Syria, and multiple high-ranking US officials, such as former US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and CIA director John Brennan, have affirmed that climate change and terrorism are connected.) The reality is that we are entering the sixth mass extinction in the 3.8-billion-year history of life on Earth, and the impact of this event could be felt by civilization “in as little as three human lifetimes,” as the aforementioned 2012 Nature paper notes. Furthermore, the widespread decline of biological populations could plausibly initiate a dramatic transformation of the global ecosystem on an even faster timescale: perhaps a single human lifetime. The unavoidable conclusion is that biodiversity loss constitutes an existential threat in its own right. As such, it ought to be considered alongside climate change and nuclear weapons as one of the most significant contemporary risks to human prosperity and survival.

WASHINGTON, Jan 25 (Reuters) - An effort by Republican U.S. lawmakers to reallocate $18 billion in climate-friendly agriculture funding under President Joe Biden's signature climate law would shift money away from programs that primarily benefit farmers in Republican-leaning states, a Reuters analysis found.

The Inflation Reduction Act money, earmarked for U.S. Department of Agriculture-designated "climate-smart" farm practices, is intended to support Biden's agriculture climate agenda, which relies heavily on storing carbon in the soil and lowering emissions through sustainable farming techniques.

Levie’s remarks fly in the face of what has become a standard position among Silicon Valley’s AI elites like Sam Altman. “Yes, regulate us!” they say. But Levie notes that when it comes to exactly what the laws should say, the consensus falls apart. “We as a tech industry do not know what we're actually asking for,” Levie said, “I have not been to a dinner with more than five AI people where there's a single agreement on how you would regulate AI.” Not that it matters—Levie thinks that dreams of a sweeping AI bill are doomed. “The good news is there's no way the US would ever be coordinated in this kind of way. There simply will not be an AI Act in the US.”

Levie is known for his irreverent loquaciousness. But in this case he’s simply more candid than many of his colleagues, whose regulate-us-please position is a form of sophisticated rope-a-dope. The single public event of TechNet Day, at least as far as I could discern, was a livestreamed panel discussion about AI innovation that included Google’s president of global affairs Kent Walker and Michael Kratsios, the most recent US Chief Technology Officer and now an executive at Scale AI. The feeling among those panelists was that the government should focus on protecting US leadership in the field. While conceding that the technology has its risks, they argued that existing laws pretty much cover the potential nastiness.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) risks leaving the Senate at the end of the year with a big question mark hanging over her almost three-decade career in Washington.

As the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, she is waging her third and final fight over the farm bill, which sets agriculture and nutrition policy every five years, yet she may retire with the latest package stuck in limbo.

A clash between Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Chief Justice John Roberts is igniting a partisan fight over the Supreme Court as the justices move forward with a politically-charged docket during an election year.

Schumer stepped onto a political landmine when he warned that two conservative justices would “pay the price” if they voted against abortion rights, earning a rare rebuke from Roberts who called the comments “dangerous.”

While the Supreme Court may have historically been able to act as political cover for the President and/or Congress, that is not true in a world post-Bush v. Gore. The Court is seen today as a politicized body, and especially now that we are in the era of the Roberts Court, with a Chief Justice hand picked by the President and approved by the Congress, it is highly unlikely that Court action will not, at least to some extent, be blamed on and/or credited to the President and Congress. The Court can still get away with a lot more than the elected branches since people don't understand the technicalities of legal doctrine like they understand the actions of the elected branches; this is, in part, because the media does such a poor job of covering legal news. Nevertheless, it is preposterous to argue that the Court is entirely insulated from politics, and equally preposterous to argue that Bush and the Congress would not receive at least a large portion of the blame for a Court ruling that, for whatever reason, received the attention of the public.

Conde Nast chief executive Roger Lynch has warned that “many” media companies could go out of business in the time it would take for litigation against generative AI companies to pass through the courts.

He instead urged US Congress to take “immediate action” by making a simple clarification that publishers should be compensated for the use of their content in the training and output of generative AI tools and that licensing deals must be struck for onward future use.

The Intellectual Property (IP) Clause, also known as the “Patent and Copyright Clause” refers to Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution, which grants Congress the enumerated power "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." It is a foundational document establishing intellectual property rights in the United States, replacing the patchwork of state-law protections that existed in the Articles of Confederation period.

This clause gave Congress the power to enact legislation governing patents and copyrights. For patents, the clause gave Congress the power to grant inventors exclusive rights to their discoveries, allowing inventors to recoup their investment, and capitalize on their research.

“Congressional Responses to Judicial Decisions,” William & Mary Law School Scholarship Repository, https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2671&context=facpubs

Congress may also respond to a Supreme Court decision by reenacting a statute that the Court struck down. For example, Congress strongly disagreed with the Court's 1918 ruling that the commerce power could not be used to regulate child labor (Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U. S. 25 1 [19 18]). The very next year, Congress sought to make use of an alternative power (the taxing power) to enact child labor legislation . Again, the Supreme Court struck the statute down (Child Labor Tax Case, 259 U.S. 20 [1922]). In 1938, after the Court's composition had changed, Congress again based child labor legislation on commerce clause legislation that a unanimous Court upheld (United States v. Darby, 312 U.S. 100 [1941]).

It still might be supposed that courts roving about enforcing an expanding body of international legal norms might be especially dangerous in the American context because of the unusually high levels of independence and power that U.S. courts enjoy as a coequal and (on some accounts) unaccountable branch. The potential for courts to derange the nation's foreign policy might seem to be commensurately greater. But it is far from clear that this is so. True, the structure of governmental power and the extensive autonomy of courts in the United States may still seem exotic and hard to imagine in much of the world, especially in China and many of the other authoritarian regimes that have been the foci of human rights litigation. But that does not mean that foreign governments and their leaders fail to comprehend the U.S. structure. It does not mean that they view court decisions as of a piece with U.S. foreign policy as articulated by the executive branch or Congress because they see courts as agents of the political branches (as they arguably are in China and many ATCA target countries). Nor does it mean that they view judicial opinions as on par with legislative or presidential pronouncements because they view courts as the equal of the political branches in foreign policy (as a highly simplistic version of American constitutional law and politics might suggest). Indeed, these two imaginable foreign views of U.S. courts are contradictory. Moreover, there is considerable evidence that the PRC has a reasonably accurate and sophisticated understanding of U.S. separation of powers principles. In these circumstances, it is unwarranted and unwise - and would unnecessarily constrain and [*546] undermine the political branches' conduct of foreign policy - to accept at face value statements from foreign governments (including notably China) that exaggerate opportunistically their incomprehension of U.S. separation of powers law, and that express shock and offense at judicial decisions (or, for that matter, congressional expressions of opinion that do not become law) and that purport to construe them as expressions of the foreign policy positions of the American government. 211

Q: Does the growth of AI necessitate the changing of existing laws in this domain?

A: Congress may need to consider updates to copyright laws to address the use of copyrighted material in training AI models. … The use of copyrighted material without proper authorization raises concerns about infringement and the rights of content creators.

By contrast, opt-out systems reverse the general principle of copyright law that copyrighted works should be reproduced or disseminated only with the prior approval of the copyright owner. It has become clear, however, that opt-out systems might serve the objectives of copyright law in some compelling circumstances if appropriately tailored and fairly administered, and if created with oversight from Congress. One potential optout system is a form of licensing known as extended collective licensing. Extended collective licensing allows representatives of copyright owners and users to mutually agree to negotiate on a collective basis and then to negotiate terms that are binding on all members of the group by operation of law. It has the potential to provide certainty for users and remuneration for copyright owners (for example in mass digitization activities) but would provide some control to copyright owners wanting to opt out of the arrangement.

Courts have affirmed the fact that fundamental changes like this are the domain of Congress because Congress is designed to weigh the equities of the public interest and to craft broadly applicable policies. A court, by contrast, must apply the facts and law as it finds them. This is why the Supreme Court noted in Eldred v. Ashcroft that “it is generally for Congress, not the courts, to decide how best to pursue the Copyright Clause’s objectives,”108 and why Judge Chin, in rejecting the proposed settlement between Google and a class of authors and publishers, said that “the establishment of a mechanism for exploiting unclaimed books is a matter more suited for Congress” than the courts.109 Among the questions Congress could consider are what kinds of uses might benefit from opt-out regimes (e.g., certain kinds of uses in higher education, certain kinds of library access), and what the actual terms and opt-out mechanisms should entail.

N.D.Ga. 1986. Action against the Postal Service, although an independent establishment of the executive branch of the federal government, is an action against the "Federal Government" for purposes of rule that plaintiff in action against government has right to jury trial only where right is one of terms of government's consent to be sued; declining to follow Algernon Blair Industrial Contractors, Inc. v. Tennessee Valley Authority, 552 F.Supp. 872 (M.D.Ala.). 39 U.S.C.A. 201; U.S.C.A. Const.Amend. 7.--Griffin v. U.S. Postal Service, 635 F.Supp. 190.--Jury 12(1.2).

Political leaders in such a situation will have reason to support or, at minimum, tolerate the active exercise of judicial review. In the American context, the presidency is a particularly useful site for locating such behavior. The Constitution gives the president a powerful role in selecting and speaking to federal judges. As national party leaders, presidents and presidential candidates are both conscious of the fragmented nature of American political parties and sensitive to policy goals that will not be shared by all of the president’s putative partisan allies in Congress. We would expect political support for judicial review to make itself apparent in any of four fields of activity: (1) in the selection of “activist” judges, (2) in the encouragement of specific judicial action consistent with the political needs of coalition leaders, (3) in the congenial reception of judicial action after it has been taken, and (4) in the public expression of generalized support for judicial supremacy in the articulation of constitutional commitments.

Although it might sometimes be the case that judges and elected officials act in more-or-less explicit concert to shift the politically appropriate decisions into the judicial arena for resolution, it is also the case that judges might act independently of elected officials but nonetheless in ways that elected officials find congenial to their own interests and are willing and able to accommodate. Although Attorney General Richard Olney and perhaps President Grover Cleveland thought the 1894 federal income tax was politically unwise and socially unjust, they did not necessarily therefore think judicial intervention was appropriate in the case considered in more detail later (Eggert 1974, 101– 14). If a majority of the justices and Cleveland-allies in and around the administration had more serious doubts about the constitutionality of the tax, however, the White House would hardly feel aggrieved. We should be equally interested in how judges might exploit the political space open to them to render controversial decisions and in how elected officials might anticipate the utility of future acts of judicial review to their own interests.

The outline of this revised research agenda, begins by looking at a 1993 article written by Mark Graber challenging the countermajoritarian difficulty paradigm. Graber's observations point to the importance of studying systemic transformations, such as the evolution of judicial supremacy. Using historical case studies on abortion, the Dred Scott controversy, and anti-trust issues to study perceived incidents of judicial independence, he contends that scholars who seek to justify independent judicial policymaking, even in the face of believed democratic deficiencies, misunderstand and inaccurately represent the relationships between justices and elected officials. By looking at the dialogues between these parties it becomes apparent that judicial independence, when it actually occurs, is often exercised at the invitation of elected officials, and in the absence of any expressed majoritarian choice, in order to resolve political controversies that elected officials cannot or do not want to resolve themselves. Hence the counter-majoritarian difficulty can be more appropriately characterized as the “non-majoritarian difficulty.”33

According to Graber, where crosscutting issues divide a lawmaking majority an invitation is often tacitly but consciously issued to the Court by political elites to resolve the political controversy that they themselves are unwilling or unable to address, thereby “foisting disruptive political debates off on the Supreme Court.”34 Graber writes that “elected officials encourage or tacitly support judicial policymaking both as a means of avoiding political responsibility for making tough decisions and as a means of pursuing controversial policy goals that they cannot publicly advance through open legislative and electoral politics.” 35 Furthermore, political and electoral advantages can accrue by ducking these tough questions and sending them on to be settled by the Court. Graber explains that elites (including the executive) can benefit from passing the political buck to the Court in multiple ways. Party activists can be redirected to focus on legal action in the courts, thereby reducing pressure on mainstream politicians who wish to maintain a more politically viable moderate stance. Voters can be redirected to focus any ire they might have over policy outcomes on the Court. Politicians can take responsive positions on judicial decisions that may make for a good sound bite but really require no politically accountable action on their part. Finally, political compromise between the legislature and the executive might be had under the table of Court policymaking. 36 This is an impressive set of political benefits that can stem from a practice of judicial supremacy that creates a Court equipped with the interpretive authority and legitimacy to make controversial public policies. Graber's article, then, highlights the perversion of political accountability that can possibly occur where everyone in the system, the public included, accepts and expects interpretive authority to reside with the courts.

The federal government of the United States is the centralized body established by the . The federal government has three branches: the , , and . Through a system of or "checks and balances", each of these branches has some authority to act on its own, some authority to regulate the other two branches, and has some of its own authority, in turn, regulated by the other branches.[citation needed] In addition, the powers of the federal government as a whole are limited by the Constitution, which leaves a great deal of authority to the individual states.

4 -- used as a function word before a noun or a substantivized adjective to indicate reference to a group as a whole <the elite>

Definition of the word “resolve,” given by Webster is “to express an opinion or determination by resolution or vote; as ‘it was resolved by the legislature;” It is of similar force to the word “enact,” which is defined by Bouvier as meaning “to establish by law”.