Tag Archives: climate & energy

Colorado climate activists’ latest tactic: fake news

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Colorado climate activists’ latest tactic: fake news

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Sweltering heat means 25,000 more babies are born early every year

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Sweltering heat means 25,000 more babies are born early every year

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Paris Agreement targets need to be 5 times stronger to actually work

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Paris Agreement targets need to be 5 times stronger to actually work

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When wildfires sweep through California, who gets left behind?

Over the past several days, 16 different wildfires have forced hundreds of thousands of Californians to evacuate their homes. Millions have gone without power for days, and more will experience planned outages as Pacific Gas and Energy, the state’s bankrupt power utility, scrambles to make sure its power lines don’t spark yet another wildfire.

The wildfire crisis, one that is expected to get worse in the Golden State in the coming years as the full effects of climate change kick in, illuminates a glaring disparity. When fires rip through a community, its most vulnerable members — the old and sick, domestic workers, construction workers, and incarcerated folks — get left behind. Stories emerging from the fires this year shed unflattering light on the way America treats its poor, old, and working class when climate catastrophe comes knocking.

On Monday, as the Getty Fire was tearing through Los Angeles, the L.A. Times reported on a housekeeper named Carmen Solano who showed up to work in Brentwood, one of the wealthiest areas in L.A., to find that the owners of the house had evacuated hours earlier. They failed to notify her that the neighborhood was under mandatory evacuation.

The Times also spoke to a police officer who said that, when he told many of the laborers he saw working in Brentwood that day that they needed to leave, they told him, “I have to finish.” Some who knew about the fire still made the commute because they couldn’t afford to miss a day’s wages. Fifty-year-old gardener Chon Ortiz mowed lawns while people evacuated around him on Monday, even though the owners hadn’t asked him to come to work. “If they say I have to evacuate, I will,” he told the Times’ Brittny Mejia in Spanish. “But I need to work.”

Poor residents in Northern California, where 200,000 people had to evacuate this week and 2 million are still without power, are facing similarly dire straits. When Governor Gavin Newsom traveled to a mobile home park in American Canyon on Saturday, a woman with a pulmonary heart condition told him that she didn’t have the money to stock up on the medication she needed before the power got shut off at her pharmacy. Her insurance wouldn’t cover refills until her current supply ran out, so her only option was to pay out of pocket. “You could get it if you have the money,” Constantine said. “But I can’t afford that right now. It’s a month’s rent.”

Perhaps no one is more marginalized during wildfire season than incarcerated firefighters. These firefighters get the same training and endure the same dangerous conditions as the state’s wildland firefighting department, CAL FIRE. But they only get paid around $1 an hour, and when they’re done fighting fires, they’ll go back to prison.

Since 1983, at least six of these incarcerated firefighters have died on the job. A new bill introduced in the California state legislature last month would allow prisoners to find careers in firefighting after they’re released, but it’s been met with resistance from the state’s biggest firefighters union.

Lest we forget the gaping disparity between those with means and those without in the fiery West right now, a growing number of rich people are hiring private firefighters to protect their property, the New York Times reports. One company near Sacramento offers “on-call” services for homes in Northern California and Eastern Washington. The price? Up to $3,000 per day. Welcome to the pyrocene, where we’ve set everything on fire and only some of us have the means to stay safe.

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When wildfires sweep through California, who gets left behind?

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What’s driving California’s emissions? You guessed it: Cars.

California received plenty of praise back in 2016 when it hit its target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions four years ahead of time. But the Golden State’s progress has slowed, according to a report out Tuesday from a nonpartisan research center. California is now on track to hit its 2030 goal in 2061. Three whole decades late.

The biggest problem: California’s beloved cars.

“This is a sobering report,” said F. Noel Perry, a California investor who founded the center behind the report, Next 10. “We are at a very important point: California is going to need major policy breakthroughs and deep structural changes if we’re going to meet our climate goals.”

What happened? Over the last three years, California has reduced emissions at a rate of only 1.15 percent. At that pace, it would take a century for the state to zero-out carbon emissions. But a law ex-Governor Jerry Brown signed in 2016, requires the state to reach zero emissions by 2050. Since falling behind, the state would need to step up emissions reductions to 4.51 percent every year, according to the report.

Next 10

Next 10’s report, the California Green Innovation Index, shows that the state has plucked most of the low-hanging fruit, mainly by cleaning up electricity production. California’s next challenge is the tougher job of eliminating climate pollutants from transportation, industry, and homes, and offices. And, yes, all of those cars.

Passenger vehicles alone produce nearly a third of California’s emissions, more than all of the electric plants, livestock, and oil refineries in the state put together. Vehicle ownership has reached an all-time high, as has the total miles that Californians are driving. Moreover, “even in climate conscious California we’ve seen a consumer preference shift to favor SUVs and light trucks,” said Adam Fowler of Beacon Economics, which prepared this report for Next 10.

Next 10

Since early 2017, more than half the new passenger vehicles Californians bought were SUVs and trucks.

Another big, related problem is housing. California’s economy is booming, but cities haven’t built the homes needed by all the new workers. That’s forcing more people into suburbs far from public transportation. The report found that the percentage of people choosing public transit “declined substantially throughout most of California between 2008 and 2018.” Failure to build housing is doubly bad because new buildings are much more efficient in terms of insulation,climate control, and energy efficiency. Every new home even gets solar panels.

“This is one of the gnarliest challenges,” Perry said. “How do we reduce commute times and how do we build denser housing?”

It’s not all bad news. California continues to prove it’s possible to cut carbon emissions while the economy expands. From 2016 to 2017, California’s economy per capita grew 3.1 percent while each person’s emissions decreased.

And the authors said that the state still deserves a lot of credit. “California policies have made appliances more efficient, renewable energy cheaper, and given cars better gas mileage all across the country,” Perry said.

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What’s driving California’s emissions? You guessed it: Cars.

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Some economics nerds just realized how much climate change will cost us

A bunch of economists just put down their calculators and concluded that we should act on climate change sooner rather than later. Really.

For decades, economists have suggested that the government should charge a fee on every ton of carbon dioxide that gets emitted, giving companies a bottom-line incentive to change their polluting ways. The conventional wisdom is that we’d ease into it, starting with a low price — say, $40 per ton — and gradually ramp it up over time.

But according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that prevailing wisdom is backwards. The authors argue that a carbon tax should start out steep, above $100 per ton (and potentially above $200 per ton), rise higher for a few years, and then slowly fall over the next few centuries as people get the whole climate crisis thing under control.

Such a high price would encourage countries and businesses to clean up their act much faster. Part of the reason is that we need to make up for lost time. The implication is that the United States and most governments have waited so long to put a price on carbon that a milder approach just doesn’t make much sense.

“To me the most surprising result of the research was how quickly the cost of delay increases over time,” said Robert Litterman, a risk management expert who used to work for Goldman Sachs, in a statement accompanying the study. His team found that if the world procrastinated on a carbon price by just one more year, the damages from climate change would climb an additional $1 trillion. Waiting 10 years would put the price tag at $100 trillion. In other words, the time to act was yesterday (or, like the 1980s).

No one knows exactly how much our planet is going to heat up in the coming decades. The degree of nightmarishness depends on the amount of greenhouse gases we send into the atmosphere and how quickly and ferociously the planet responds with feedback loops that accelerate warming. The euphemism for this is “uncertainty.”

Because studying the climate is a risky business, the researchers borrowed a model from the world of finance, which is hyper-focused on measuring risk (hello β). Their unconventional model considered the damage climate change would bring to agriculture, coastal infrastructure, and human health in the future. Their takeaway: For something as high stakes as the climate crisis, governments should be trying to avoid the worst outcome at all costs.

“We need to take stronger action today to give us breathing room in the event that the planet turns out to be more fragile than current models predict,” said Kent Daniel, a professor at Columbia Business School, in the statement.

The researchers aren’t the first to recommend this “start high, decrease later” approach to implementing a carbon tax, nor are they the first to propose such a steep price. A landmark report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year suggested that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels would take an array of tough climate policies, including a carbon price of at least $135 per ton by 2030, and perhaps as high as $5,500 per ton.

Around the world, carbon prices are either nonexistent or simply not cutting it. Though more than 40 countries have implemented some sort of carbon price, including Canada, Mexico, and Switzerland, their prices are generally considered too low to be very effective.

Even though old-school Republicans and even some oil companies have publicly called for a nationwide carbon tax, it’s not like voters are clamoring for it. Measures have failed in otherwise environmentally-friendly states such as Washington and Oregon in recent years. No carbon tax exists in the United States, though California and a group of states in the Northeast have cap-and-trade programs that serve a similar purpose. Offering an even higher tax would unlikely help a measure’s odds of passing.

So how to square all this? Perhaps a little wordplay will help. A recent study said that people might be more willing to rally behind a plan to tax carbon if proponents simply dropped the t-word and called it “a fine on corporations” instead.

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Some economics nerds just realized how much climate change will cost us

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Google searches for ‘climate change’ finally beat out Game of Thrones

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Google searches for ‘climate change’ finally beat out Game of Thrones

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The climate legislation this Congress could realistically pass

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The climate legislation this Congress could realistically pass

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Why 10,000 farmers have gotten behind the Green New Deal

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Why 10,000 farmers have gotten behind the Green New Deal

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Thousands of Amazon employees walk out for climate strike

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Thousands of Amazon employees walk out for climate strike

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