Thursday night's vice presidential debate was heavy on both theater and substance. Shortly after the MSNBC panel gave Joe Biden high marks for his combative debating persona, MSNBC contributor Ezra Klein fact-checked the policy substance of Paul Ryan's response. Regarding both the economic recovery and his own record on Medicare and Social Security, Klein said, Ryan just didn't have his facts straight.

For example, Klein said, Ryan misled when he claimed that the economy had gotten worse under the Obama administration. The Republican candidate advanced that claim when talking about Biden's home town of Scranton, Pa.

"Do you know what the unemployment rate in Scranton is today?" he said. "It's 10%. You know what it was the day you guys came in? 8.5%. That's how it's going all around America."

"In fact, that's just completely not true," Klein said. The nationwide unemployment has not risen since Obama took office. "In January 2009, unemployment was 7.8%; today, nationally, it's 7.8%. So it went up, and it came back down. And if you go from February of 2009, which is the first full month of Barack Obama's presidency, it was above 8% already. So it is actually lower than when Obama entered office."

Ryan, Klein said, was trying to suggest that there was no recovery. But in fact, "we are having a slow recovery, but it is a recovery, and things are getting better."

Klein also fact-checked Ryan's insistence that he and Romney were "not going to jeopardize" Medicare and Social Security. Debate moderator Martha Raddatz replied that Ryan had "stood with [President George W.] Bush on privatization" of Social Security.

"It wasn't just that Paul Ryan stood with Bush on privatization," said Klein. "He actually stood well to the right of Bush on privatization." In fact, he said, Peter Wehner—a member of Bush's own economic team—called Ryan's privatization plan "irresponsible."

Ryan "continued to promote different forms or privatization throughout the next decade," Klein added.

"If you saw what happened to George W. Bush with Social Security," summarized MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, "if you liked that, buckle up."

Alan Diaz / AP

An Olive Garden restaurant is shown in Hialeah, Fla., Thursday, Sept. 6, 2012.

Darden Concepts, Inc.—the umbrella corporation behind Red Lobster and Olive Garden, among other chain restaurants—is experimenting with hiring more part-time staff in order to offset the cost of implementing the Affordable Care Act. Rich Jeffers, a spokesperson for Darden, said the company was working on finding the "optimal mix" for satisfying the law's requirements while "address[ing] the cost implications of the Affordable Care Act."

"We're not moving people from full time to part time," said Jeffers. Instead, Darden has been "bringing on more people in part-time roles" in the restaurants they've opened since February, when the experiment began. The question the experiment is supposed to answer, he said, is, "Can we continue to deliver our brand experience with more part-time?"

If the experiment is a success, the company overall could come to rely more on part-time workers. Those new employees would likely not enjoy the same health benefits that all employees currently do. "Today we offer health care to all of our employees," said Jeffers. But under the Affordable Care Act, which sets minimum standards for the health care being provided, "we can't offer that."

Conservative and libertarian commentators have argued that the cost of the Affordable Care Act to employers would compel them to lower wages and hire more part-time employees. Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said as much in his July preview statement regarding hearings on the consequences of the law.

Saru Jayaraman, the director of Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United, alleged that Darden was using the Affordable Care Act as a mere pretext to cut back on labor costs. "Maybe they want to portray that that's the cause of the issue, but it really isn't," she said. As In These Times reported in July, ROC has been engaged in a multi-city campaign against Darden for months over charges of wage theft, grueling hours, unpaid overtime, and even racial discrimination.

Jayaraman also said that Darden was wrong to claim it had not cut hours for full-time employees. "Since we've started the campaign we've received messages ... from workers saying similar things saying their hours are being cut, their positions are being cut," she said.

CNBC reports that Darden has been working to cut labor costs for years. In fact, in the past three years, the company has managed to whittle labor costs down from 33 percent of sales to 31 through policies like asking servers to handle more tables at once, and instituting a "tip sharing" policy, "meaning waiters and waitresses share their tips with other employees such as busboys and bartenders."

The Economic Policy Institute's health policy research director Elise Gould said that pivoting to a greater reliance part-time labor would also reduce costs, with or without the Affordable Care Act in place. "When I think about the incentives that firms have to have part-time versus full-time workers, there are already plenty without the ACA," she said. For example, many companies have increased their reliance on part-time work since the recession because they can give part-timers fewer benefits, such as retirement benefits.

Indeed, the number of involuntary part-time workers in the overall workforce increased sharply right after the beginning of the recession. In December 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported [PDF] on a sharp rise in "involuntary part-time work"—that is to say, work done by people who would prefer to be in full-time jobs but were unable to find any. As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, "Part-time jobs now account for 6 percent of all jobs, double their share before the Great Recession." Restaurant work in particular is disproportionately part-time; by Jeffers' own admission, "our overall workforce today is 75 percent part-time," even before Darden sees the results of its experiment.

A recent study [PDF] by the Urban Institute found that the law's provisions, once they all go into effect, would only increase large business' overall spending by 4.3 percent. However, Jeffers argued that there are too many unanswered questions about how the bill will be implemented. "What we don't know is how are we going to address the requirements for part-time employees, and we just don't have enough information," he said. When asked what additional information Darden needed, he added, "What are the regulations? What does it look like?"

Katie Niebaum, a spokesperson for the National Restaurant Association, echoed Jeffers' concerns about uncertainty. "We have known for some time that the mechanics of the law are very difficult for the industry," she wrote in an email. "As restaurateurs look to 2014, they are evaluating various options for implementing the law, while many of the regulations/details remain unknown."

But Jayaraman suggested that major restaurant chains make similar arguments when confronted by any new regulation. "This is nothing new," she said. "Every time there's some kind of new regulation, they try to get the industry in particular exempted." As an example, she pointed to industry's success in securing a federal minimum wage for tipped service employees of only $2.13 before you factor in tips.

"It has nothing to do with the actual setup of this industry," she said. "It has to do with the power of the lobby."

The Romney campaign has long been notoriously evasive when it comes to questions from the press. But even by Mitt Romney's exacting standards, Nickelodeon's Kids Pick the President special doesn't seem like a tough interview. So why did his campaign tell Nickelodeon that he would not be participating in the special?

"The half-hour special gives both candidates' biographies, then shows their answers to questions solicited from kids all over the country," said host Lawrence O'Donnell on Tuesday's The Last Word. One illustrative question, asked by a hard-hitting young boy during the 2008 presidential election, was: "Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. When you were a kid, what was your favorite costume?"

"We don't ever know, really, why" candidates withdraw from the special, said Kids Pick the President host Linda Ellerbee, "because we don't talk to the candidate. We talk to the candidate's staff. And we began talking to the Romney staff six months ago, in April, and they were very encouraging. ... And then, something happened, we don't know what, but all of a sudden it was, 'He can't fit it into his schedule.' And that's all they would ever say."

Since 1992, the nominees of both major parties have appeared in the special every election cycle, except for during the 2004 race. At the end of each special, children vote for who they think should be president; according to Ellerbee, her pint-sized audience has accurately predicted the outcome of every presidential election except for 2004.

Jonathan Alcorn / Reuters

Diana Huffman holds a sign in support of striking Walmart workers protesting unsafe working conditions and poor wages outside a Walmart store in Pico Rivera, California, October 4, 2012.

Commentary

Though some conservatives have challenged the credibility of Friday's jobs report, the official Republican Party line seems to be that the numbers are accurate. But while Republican leaders such as Reince Priebus and John Boehner admit that unemployment dropped in September, they argue that the jobs being created aren't good enough.

"While there is positive news in today’s report, job creation is far too slow and the unemployment rate is far too high," said Speaker Boehner in a statement, adding that "millions of Americans remain jobless, underemployed, or have simply given up looking for work. Wages are stagnant."

RNC Chair Priebus echoed Boehner's line in his own statement on the jobs report, saying, “Too many Americans are still struggling for work in today’s economy, and for too many families, the last four years has seen declining wages and increasing costs.”

Members of the conservative media and think tank infrastructure agree. James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute writes that the jobs report was "terrible," in part because, "When you take inflation into account, wages are flat to down." And the editorial board of the Washington Examiner writes that the increase in low-wage, low-skill work proves, "America isn't doing well at all under Obama's leadership."

Conservatives are half-right: Even as America has recovered some of its lost jobs, wages continue to stagnate or even shrink, despite a very modest bump in September's preliminary job numbers. What the above right-wing figures fail to mention, however, is that wage stagnation has persisted in the United States for decades. As the Economic Policy Institute points out in the latest edition of The State of Working America, "Productivity grew 80.4 percent between 1973 and 2011, when, as noted, median worker pay grew just 10.7 percent." However you feel about President Obama's economic policies, they are unlikely to have done very much damage to the wages of workers in the 70s. Instead, wages have suffered in thanks in large part to policies which the Republican Party still vigorously supports: namely, keeping the minimum wage low and suppressing the power of unions.

Currently, the federal minimum wage is set at the absurdly low rate of $7.25 per hour. An employee working 40 hours a week on minimum wage without taking any time off would earn $15,080 per year—before taxes, that is. That's slightly below the federal poverty line for a household of two. Nor was it always like that; if the minimum wage had kept up with inflation since it was first passed in the late 60s, reports the National Employment Law Project [PDF], it would be $10.55.

Research suggests that raising the minimum wage could ameliorate stagnation even for workers making over $7.25 an hour. A study [PDF] of three cities by the Center for Economic Policy Research found evidence to "support the view that a citywide minimum wages can raise the earnings of low-wage workers, without a discernible impact on their employment." Similarly, in a recent letter to Congress, top economists including Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and former Labor secretary Robert Reich argued that "nearly 9 million workers whose wages are just above the new minimum would likely see a wage increase through 'spillover' effects, as employers adjust their internal wage ladders."

Though Democrats perennially suggest raising the minimum wage—most recently to $10 an hour—congressional Republicans almost uniformly oppose any increase, claiming that it would kill jobs and hurt small businesses. As the dollar inflates, their stonewalling means the real value of the minimum wage is certain to drop even further. Mere stonewalling, however, is nothing compared to the Republican Party's ongoing attack on unions.

As the Economic Policy Institute's Lawrence Mishel writes, "the ongoing erosion of unionization" has played a key role in driving down American wages. (Between 1973 and 2011, union density more than halved, going from 26.7 percent to 13.1.) Other studies have corroborated EPI's findings. According to the New York Times, a 2011 report published in the American Sociological Review found that "the decline of organized labor held down wages in union and nonunion workplaces alike." Managers of nonunion work places, the argument goes, had to raise wages in periods of high union density to avert the threat of organizing campaigns in their own companies.

The list goes on. Mother Jones' Kevin Drum makes much the same point in a 2011 essay about the decline of the labor movement, citing the respected historian Kim Phillips-Fein. In the influential 1984 book What Do Unions Do? Harvard economists James Medoff and Richard Freeman even went so far as to write, "Everyone 'knows' that unions raise wages. The questions are how much, under what conditions, and with what effects on the overall performance of the economy?"

There are many factors that contributed to the half-century decline of the labor movement, but suffice to say that Barack Obama's policies are not among the most important ones. Indeed, though the Democrats are surely far from blameless, it is the Republican Party which has most aggressively suppressed union power in recent decades. America's 23 "right-to-work" states—states where unions are forbidden from requiring all members of a union shop to pay dues—are overwhelmingly Republican. The 2012 GOP Platform goes so far as to call for a national right-to-work law. Furthermore, it is Republican governors like Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kasich who have led the charge in try to roll back public employee collective bargaining rights.

The GOP's modern anti-union stance has its roots as far back as the beginning of the Reagan administration. President Reagan's 1981 battle with the air traffic controllers union (Patco) is widely regarded as a turning point in American labor relations. When Reagan successfully ended a Patco strike by threatening to fire 13,000 employees, writes historian Joseph A. McCartin, he "undermined the bargaining power of American workers and their labor unions" by chilling their willingness to strike. That, according to economist Mark Thoma, was "the beginning of the end for unions in the US."

With all that in mind, it's more than a little odd to hear the Republican Party bemoan the state of American workers' wages. The party has done more than any single other institution in the United States to engineer that wage stagnation through their crackdown on organized labor. Though President Obama has a tense relationship with the labor movement at best, he did not create the conditions which led to their decline and the commensurate drop in wages. If Republicans want a party to blame, they had best look in the mirror.

In Mitt Romney's speech Monday at the Virginia Military Institute, he vowed that as president he would "recommit America to the goal of a democratic, prosperous Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the Jewish state of Israel." But that promise is out of step with what he said in remarks at a private fundraiser in May.

In the same leaked video in which Romney made his infamous remarks about the "47 percent," he is heard saying, "I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel." The only way forward in the crisis, he argues, is to "sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it."

"He almost literally said 'kick the can down the road,'" said host Alex Wagner on Monday's NOW with Alex Wagner.

In contrast, Romney's Monday speech criticized President Obama for not aggressively pursuing a negotiated resolution. "On this vital issue, the President has failed, and what should be a negotiation process has devolved into a series of heated disputes at the United Nations," he said. "In this old conflict, as in every challenge we face in the Middle East, only a new President will bring the chance to begin anew."

Newsweek's Megan McArdle said she was "in agreement with 'Secret Romney.'" "We've now had how many presidents who have tried to solve [the Israeli-Palestinian conflict]?" she said. "Basically everyone since Carter has tried to sit down and do this. No one has managed, so I tend to assume that probably the next president—whether it's Barack Obama again or Mitt Romney—is probably not going to do it."

During Wednesday's presidential debate, Mitt Romney said that the Obama administration has invested $90 billion into green jobs, and that half of the companies receiving that money have subsequently gone out of business. On Sunday's Up with Chris Hayes, host Chris Hayes graded both those claims false.

"Never mind that $90 billion hasn't even been spent yet," he said. "Never mind that only about $34 billion of it was allocated for that kind of clean energy business loans, and never mind the Energy Department has only approved $16 billion worth of those loans. Never mind the Romney campaign said later he was only talking about businesses that got those loans in the first year, and never mind that only three businesses actually went under. Forget all that, and you are still left with the fact that the most government will be on the hook for those businesses that went under is an estimated $600 million."

"Or, roughly equal to half of $90 billion," Hayes added wryly.

Though Romney is widely regarded as the victor of the first presidential debate, NPR reports that he's "getting dinged more ... by the fact checkers" (in part because he "made more factual assertions"). MSNBC contributor Ezra Klein said Romney often attempted to hide within "pockets of vagueness" throughout the debate.

The pundit consensus seems to be that Romney won the first presidential debate in terms of style, but according to MSNBC contributor Ezra Klein, he fared poorly when it came to policy.

"Romney managed to sound very specific on issue after issue," said Klein during MSNBC's Thursday night post-debate coverage. But he said the Republican candidate's claims didn't add up.

Take Romney's tax proposals. "He's said from the very beginning, I've got this big tax cut plan, but I'm not going to pay for it, I'm just not going to say how," said Klein. Romney repeated a similar claim throughout the debate, while saying that he could not reveal all of his plan because he had to negotiate some of the provisions with Congress.

"The idea that he's going to go back later and negotiate only the hard parts ... seems kind of unlikely to me," MSNBC's Rachel Maddow added.

On health care, too, Romney avoided revealing all of his plan, instead saying that he had a "lengthy description" available elsewhere. But his actual health care plan, Klein said, is 396 words—"about half the length of a normal op-ed column."

"The debate kind of felt to me like an inversion of what we've seen thus far on the campaign," said Klein. He said that usually Obama comes across as the candidate with specific policy proposals, while Romney is criticized for his vagueness. However, Klein added, Romney did not actually get much more specific during the debate—he was just "able to hide in those pockets of vagueness he created."

President Obama is going into the 2012 general election's first debate with a strong advantage on most issues, says MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, but he still has some challenges ahead of him. Less than an hour before the debate Wednesday, she argued that the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows Obama to be vulnerable on issues related to the economy.

The president, she pointed out, has a massive, nineteen point advantage on Romney when it comes to who voters trust to look out for the middle class. But Romney leads by three when voters are asked about who'd better handle the economy in general.

"There's this huge disconnect between Mr. Obama's best number with voters and one of his worst numbers," she said. "Which is that, President Obama has so far not been able to persuade people to connect these two ideas, right? He has not been able to persuade people that doing right by the middle class, where he does great, actually is the way you fix the economy."

Making that case in the debate, Maddow said, "is Mr. Obama's real challenge: To turn the advantage he has with the middle class into a broad appreciation that what is good for the middle class is also what the economy needs full stop."

As a professional film critic, Salon's Andrew O'Hehir is used to watching bad movies. But sometimes a movie surpasses bad and becomes even less than the sum of its parts. On Monday's The Cycle, O'Hehir argued that Won't Back Down, a controversial new movie starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Viola Davis is such a film. The movie isn't just bad, he said; it's bad anti-union propaganda.

"This movie is a somewhat cleverly packaged, not all that cleverly packaged kind of Trojan Horse," he said, which is "really just trying to convince you that the teachers union is responsible for everything that's wrong with American education."

In the film, Gyllenhaal and Davis play a single parent and a public school teacher, respectively, who fight an intransigent teachers union boss in order to stage a parental takeover of their local school through what's called a "parent-trigger" law. The film was produced by Walden Media, the same production company behind the pro-charter school documentary Waiting for Superman. Critics such as education professor Rick Ayers have also accused that film of being anti-union.

"I'm not against charter schools in principle," said O'Hehir. "I think there are a lot of things to talk about there. But when you're talking about this agenda, I think something very specific is at stake."

In his review of Won't Back Down for Salon, O'Hehir was even more withering, calling the film "simpering, pseudo-inspirational pap, constructed with painful awkwardness and disconnected from any narrative plausibility or social reality. Our two appealing leads beam and glow at each other with an almost hostile brilliance, while supporting stereotypes stand around them delivering on-the-nose platitudes."

But regardless of the movie's merits—or the merits of its pro-parent-trigger message—both movie and policy seem to enjoy at least some bipartisan support. Education activist Michelle Rhee screened the film at both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, and Democrats appear to be divided on its message.

That said, bipartisan appeal has not translated into box office success.

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

California Gov. Jerry Brown looks on during a news conference at Google headquarters on September 25, 2012 in Mountain View, California.

The domestic workers rights movement suffered a significant legislative defeat on Sunday when California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, vetoed that state's proposed Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. The law would have mandated that all of California's estimated 200,000 domestic cleaners, health care workers, private cooks and child care professionals receive regular meal breaks and pay for overtime.

Brown indicated his support for domestic worker protections in general, but said the bill left "unanswered questions" about enforcement and a potential increase in the cost of domestic labor. Jill Shenker, field director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), dismissed those concerns. "We've been working with the families and employers of domestic workers all along the way, who feel there are absolutely solutions to the affordability question and ways to make the bill work," she told Lean Forward.

The New York legislation, which was signed into law by Democratic Gov. David Paterson in November 2010, mandates that employers pay overtime to workers who have worked more than 40 hours in a week and institutes a number of protections against unfair labor practices like withheld pay or sexual harassment. "In short," wrote Demos fellow Sharon Lerner, "people who hire domestic workers now have to behave like regular employers."

While Shenker said the NDWA was "very disappointed," with Brown's veto, "organizing over the long haul is nothing new for domestic work."

Many of the NDWA's 35 nationwide affiliates continue to organize around local concerns. Domestic worker groups in San Francisco and Houston are organizing around allegations of employee wage theft, and their New York City migrant workers center affiliate is running a campaign against domestic worker trafficking.

Affiliates in Illinois and Massachusetts, Shenker said, are contemplating state-level campaigns for a New York-style bill of rights, but "there are so many factors around organizing sponsors, and all kinds of things, so I don't want to say for sure that something's happening."

Workers in domestic services have typically enjoyed fewer protections than other workers. California Domestic Worker Coalition director Andrea Mercado said this trend "is really the legacy of racism and discrimination in our country."

Both the 1935 National Labor Relations Act and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act radically expanded worker protections in the United States but specifically withheld those protections from domestic workers and agricultural laborers. (The latter bill was amended in 1974 to cover domestic work.) Workers in both of those industries were predominantly African-American, and they were excluded from the laws as a concession to Southern segregationists. Today, according to a 2010 report [PDF] by the Excluded Workers Congress, 95 percent of America's 1.8 million domestic workers are "female, foreign born and/or persons of color."

Securing legal protections for those 1.8 million workers presents challenges unlike those facing other industries. Because domestic workers tend not to gather together in large workplaces under a single employer, they usually cannot bargain collectively with management.

"Domestic workers are working with individual employers behind closed doors, and often have multiple employers," said Shenker. She also noted that the relationship between domestic employees and their employers was often far more informal and intimate than in a typical workplace.

"For domestic workers, the employer-employee relationship is not one people think about in terms of a traditional factory—labor and the boss," she said. "There's a lot of intimacy and love that's at play in an employment relationship, and in domestic worker organizing our approach has really been shaped by that truth."

Shenker said part of the Alliance's organizing strategy has involved partnering with employers and "recognizing the mutuality of that relationship." She said that the California campaign had seen "strong partnership with employers and people with disabilities," the latter of whom might require home care.

Indeed, Shenker's account of the NDWA's strategy strongly emphasized community coalition building, particularly with farm workers and immigrants rights communities—two other groups that have historically been excluded from legal work protections. On the same day that Brown vetoed the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, Shenker noted, he also vetoed a bill that would have required employers to provide farm workers with adequate access to water and shade from the sun.

Though Brown's veto was a setback for the movement, Mercado predicted that domestic workers rights would only become a more urgent concern in the years to come. "We know that this industry is growing, and that with the aging of the baby boomer population this country is going to have unprecedented need for more and more caregivers," she said. 

Shenker further argued that many of the issues affecting domestic workers are becoming increasingly relevant to other industries. "More and more work across the country is looking more and more like domestic work," she said, citing the growing number of workers who work at home, have multiple employers, and do their work on a contract basis.

Mona Eltahaway, the Egyptian-American journalist who was arrested after defacing what she said was an Islamophobic advertisement, described her actions as "civil disobedience" on Sunday's Up with Chris Hayes.

"I don't think we should be quiet, or silent, or bullied into silence in the face of racism and hate," she said, explaining her decision to spray pink paint onto a controversial New York City subway advertisement last week. Eltahaway added that she had expected her arrest.

The text of the offending subway ad reads, "In the war between civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad." Eltahaway argued that this message "conflates being Arab and Muslim with being against Israel and being with Jihad." The ad belongs to right-wing blogger and activist Pamela Geller, who has a long history with accusations of racism and Islamophobia.

While Up host Chris Hayes agreed with Eltahaway about the content of the ad, he questioned her decision to deface it. "There's a great Internet phrase called 'Don't feed the trolls,'" he said. "And this is great wisdom that I try to take in my life, which is when someone tries to basically get a rise out of you with idiocy, just don't rise to the bait. And this seemed to me like this was an exercise in feeding the trolls. So why did you decide to do this?"

"This ad is more than idiocy," Eltahaway replied, pointing out that the ad would be viewed by millions of people, and had to be considered in the context of the 9/11 attacks.

This is not the first time Geller's "savage" ad has appeared in the news. In July, her organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, had to sue the Metropolitan Transit Authority in order to get the ad placed. The M.T.A. has since approved new guidelines for advertising, saying that "viewpoint" ads on the subway will need to include disclaimers saying the M.T.A. does not endorse their content.

Ismail Taxta / Reuters

An aerial view shows Seyidka settlement for the famine stricken, internally displaced people in Berkulan near Somalia's capital Mogadishu, September 6, 2011.

A new report by the Spanish nonprofit DARA estimates that without swift action climate change and carbon pollution could claim 100 million lives by the year 2030. The 342-page report—the second edition of DARA's Climate Vulnerability Monitor—estimates that 5 million people already die per year due to the consequences of carbon pollution, such as smoke inhalation, hunger, and diarrhea. That annual death toll is estimated to rise to 6 million within the next two decades.

"In worst cases, not solving climate change could render large areas of the planet unsuitable for human existence outdoors," write the authors of the report. Though nobody will be spared the consequences of a warming globe, the report argues that developing countries will suffer the most. "Lacking any responsibility for climate change," it says, "the low-emission country group nevertheless experiences approximately 40 percent of all its economic losses, and over 80 percent of all climate change-related mortality."

The Climate Vulnerability Monitor was commissioned by the Climate Vulnerable Forum, an international organization of 20 countries who say their citizens bear the brunt of climate change's consequences. The chair of the Forum is Bangladesh, which the report says "has committed never to exceed the average per capita emissions of the developing countries." The report's advisory panel includes prominent United Nations officials, the former presidents of Chile and Costa Rica, and Jeffrey Sachs, the director of Columbia University's Earth Institute.

The report urges a swift response to climate change, arguing that long-term security and economics demand a move away from the carbon economy. "Even for the skeptically minded, the argument for switching to safer, less damaging energy sources can be justified on the account of the heavy costs of the prevailing carbon-intensive means," reads the report. Its authors project that the United States "will lose more than 2 percent of its GDP by 2030" due in large part to the consequences of climate change.

In response, the report suggests a kitchen sink approach: firm commitments to earlier environmental treaties and a variety of energy alternatives, "such as wind, solar, tidal or geothermal power." Concerted action is needed, the report's authors write, from policy makers, investors, and private citizens. "Despite the complexity of the topic," they write, "ignorance is no excuse for inaction, and indifference can be tied to complicity. ... Civil society groups, communicators and people of all kinds in positions of public influence or authority within their communities ... should find no further obstacles in taking a stand on climate change."