Category Archives: Landmark

‘Put up or shut up’: New York forges ahead with statewide environmental justice measures

by TyrellBrogan Posted on June 25, 2020

Against the backdrop of renewed calls for racial justice nationwide in the aftermath of the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the state of New York announced on Tuesday a slate of grants totaling more than $10.6 million to help underserved residents access affordable solar energy. The grants will help offset predevelopment costs to address resource barriers that typically prevent low-income residents — particularly communities of color — from installing clean energy or energy storage in their homes.

The Empire State is set to provide individual grants of up to $200,000 each to affordable housing providers, community organizations, and technical service providers to assist low-income households and install solar and energy storage systems meant to benefit entire communities. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), the government agency administering the program, will be hosting a webinar on July 14 to launch the grant opportunities and provide more information on the application process. The state will accept applications on a quarterly basis through the end of 2024.

This initiative is the result of New York’s landmark environmental justice legislation, which helped bring the state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) to life in January. The CLCPA made headlines for being the most ambitious emissions-reduction legislation in the country, thanks to its promise that the state will reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and 100 percent renewable electricity by 2040. The CLCPA and the accompanying environmental justice bill require the state to make good on its commitments to address environmental injustice and invest in underserved and pollution-burdened communities. Tuesday’s announcement is part of that follow-through.

“We got a law passed — among all accounts the most ambitious in the country, maybe the world — so now, let’s see how real these elected officials are about Black Lives Matter,” Eddie Bautista, executive director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, told Grist. “This is for us a pivotal moment, where we can either work in partnership with the government or call hypocrisy at the top of our lungs.”

On Tuesday, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation also unveiled its appointments to the Climate Justice Working Group, which will guide the state in carrying out its ambitious climate targets. Bautista, who was announced as one of the group’s appointees, said that community members appointed to the group would hold elected officials accountable for continued funding and also figure out how to effectively reach out to marginalized communities to inform them about opportunities such as NYSERDA’s grants.

“In this moment where you have elected officials tripping over each other to claim some portion of the Black Lives Matter mantle, this is the moment where they have to put up or shut up,” Bautista told Grist. “It’s easy to put out a statement when you’re seeing police brutalizing people, but what do you do when the very air is brutalizing people?”

The Climate Justice Working Group consists of representatives from environmental justice communities across the state, including members from New York City community groups, rural communities, and urban communities in upstate New York, as well as representatives from state agencies such as NYSERDA, and the Departments of Conservation, Health, and Labor. The group is set to have its first convening in July as they map out next steps to fast achieve New York’s climate goals.

“We’re relieved that the process is moving forward,” Bautista said.

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‘Put up or shut up’: New York forges ahead with statewide environmental justice measures

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Trump trashes 50-year-old environmental law, blames coronavirus

by yaconsyruphelica Posted on June 10, 2020

With the nation’s eyes on ongoing protests for racial justice (not to mention a seemingly endless public health crisis), last week President Trump signed an executive order that would waive key requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

The landmark 1970 law requires federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of proposed federal actions and projects, including the construction of major highways, airports, oil and gas drilling, and pipelines. Trump’s new executive order relaxes the law’s requirement that major new infrastructure and energy projects undergo environmental reviews to ensure they will not significantly harm the environment and nearby public. (Industry representatives often blame the environmental impact statements required by the law for the extensive delay of permit approvals.)

“From the beginning of my Administration, I have focused on reforming and streamlining an outdated regulatory system that has held back our economy with needless paperwork and costly delays,” Trump wrote in the executive order. “The need for continued progress in this streamlining effort is all the more acute now, due to the ongoing economic crisis.”

But the president’s desire to suppress the 50-year-old law long predates the coronavirus-fueled recession.

Early this year, the Trump administration announced plans to overhaul key elements of the law, including by limiting requests for community input prior project approval, disregarding project alternatives, and shortening the deadline for environmental impact statements and environmental assessments. Pollution-burdened communities have long leveraged NEPA as a defense mechanism to protect their health and the environment — examples include the fights against the controversial Keystone XL pipeline and the expansion of the 710 freeway in Long Beach, California.

The new order promotes a quicker permit approval process on these kinds of projects by invoking a section of federal law that allows individual government agencies to use their own emergency authorities to bypass environmental requirements. Trump’s order weakens standard environmental review requirements not just in NEPA, but also in the Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act.

Even before Trump declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a national emergency, the White House Council on Environmental Quality held two public hearings in Denver, Colorado, and Washington, D.C., to gather feedback on Trump’s initial proposal to overhaul NEPA in ways that would speed up projects and de-emphasize environmental reviews. Students, construction workers, university professors, and grassroots activists testified before a panel of expressionless White House officials, testifying that NEPA’s requirements are vital for their safety, health, and the environment.

Anthony Victoria Midence and other environmental advocates in California’s Inland Empire, a region that experiences some of the country’s worst smog, have united environmental and labor groups to fight a controversial airport expansion that the government’s own assessment shows would add one ton of pollution to the region’s air each day. The groups invoked NEPA to mount a legal challenge to the Federal Aviation Administration’s approval of the project’s permits. Trump’s new executive order would have stymied their efforts, according to Victoria Midence, who is the community director for the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, a local social justice group.

“It’s clear that the Trump administration is willing to sacrifice working people of color for the benefit of industry,” he told Grist. “This latest move by Trump further demonstrates that he does not care about black and brown lives.”

The new executive order comes on the heels of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalizing a rule last week that will make it much more difficult for states, tribes, and the public to protest or block pipelines and other projects that could pollute the air and water systems. The decision, which overturns a 50-year-old understanding of the Clean Water Act, would set a strict one-year deadline for states and tribes to approve or deny proposed projects such as pipelines, dams, or fossil fuel plants.

Trump also signed another executive order last month that allows several federal agency heads to weaken regulatory requirements “that may inhibit economic recovery.” The move prompted the EPA to alert the fossil fuel industry that it could suspend enforcement of certain environmental laws, including those that require the gathering of public input on projects and the monitoring of air pollution levels.

“We need to place people over profit,” Victoria Midence told Grist. “As we suffer through this pandemic with the fear that our lungs and heart are already compromised because of diesel pollution, Trump is removing perhaps the last protections we have to raise our voices and demand environmental justice.”

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Trump trashes 50-year-old environmental law, blames coronavirus

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Climate change threatens the economy. Here’s what regulators can do right now.

by viflamar62285 Posted on June 2, 2020

Many of the economic risks of climate change are already crystal clear, and yet financial markets have yet to take them into account. That dangerous disconnect is the impetus behind a new report out on Monday from the sustainable finance nonprofit Ceres.

“U.S. financial regulators, who are responsible for protecting the stability and competitiveness of the U.S. economy, need to recognize and act on climate change as a systemic risk,” the report says. It calls on financial regulators across seven federal agencies as well as state agencies to do so, offering more than 50 recommendations that the authors believe are under the purview of regulators today, without the need for any additional legislation.

The report highlights three ways climate change is a systemic risk to financial markets. There are the physical risks of a warming planet — droughts, wildfires, and more frequent and intense storms will cause direct economic losses. This reality is already abundantly clear: The 2017 hurricane season caused $58 to $63 billion in damages in Florida alone. In 2018, wildfires in California burned up $12 billion in insured losses and led to the bankruptcy of the state’s largest utility, which took criminal responsibility for starting one of the fires.

Then there are socioeconomic risks, which are manifold. Industries that rely on physical outdoor labor, like agriculture and construction, will see productivity losses as temperatures rise. Economies that rely on tourism could be hurt by not only the physical risks outlined above but also by biodiversity loss. Higher temperatures will come with significant health impacts, including respiratory issues, premature deaths, and the spread of disease as carriers like mosquitos move into new habitats.

The third category is transition risk — the idea that the transition to a carbon-neutral economy is inevitable, and that companies in denial about that are setting themselves up to lose money. Transition risk includes possibilities like a carbon tax, changes in consumer sentiment, or the loss of investments in fossil fuel assets with long lifespans, like pipelines, that could end up out of commission before they are paid off.

The report calls on the Federal Reserve System, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Housing Finance Authority, and insurance regulators, among other financial regulatory bodies, to first and foremost acknowledge that climate change poses a systemic risk to financial market stability. Veena Ramani, Ceres’ senior program director for capital markets systems, said in a press call that once these agencies publicly affirm this fact, that will mean acknowledging that it’s within their mandate to address climate risks in their rulemaking.

So what might that look like? Ceres’ recommendations for regulatory agencies include doing deeper research on how climate change will affect the economic stability of the U.S. Regulators could also require banks and insurance companies to integrate climate change into their “stress tests” — analyses of how well an entity can withstand a financial crisis — and to reflect the costs of climate change in their decision making. The report also recommends that regulators encourage corporate transparency about climate risk — something that the SEC actually issued guidance on a decade ago, but then promptly eased up on enforcing. The SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance sent 49 comment letters to companies about their climate risk disclosures in 2010, but has sent only six such letters over the last four years.

Finally, the report advocates for financial regulators to require that banks disclose the carbon emissions from their lending and investment activities, and define which activities will make climate change worse and which will help mitigate the systemic risks posed by the crisis — and then reorient capital toward those solutions.

Many of the recommendations made in the report have already been implemented in other countries. For example, late last year, the Bank of England announced it would subject U.K. banks and insurers to climate resilience stress tests. Just this past Friday, the E.U.’s top banking regulator, the European Banking Authority, issued new guidelines that require banks to incorporate climate risks into their credit policies. The guidelines also say that banks should assess whether borrowers could be found responsible for contributing to global warming. They cite a European Commission report from 2018 that found that “close to 50% of the exposure of euro area institutions to risk is directly or indirectly linked to risks stemming from climate change.”

Also on Friday, the International Monetary Fund published a new chapter of its latest global financial stability report calling for climate risk to become a part of international reporting standards. The chapter highlights how little of an impact known risks like extreme weather events have had on markets.

In a press call about the Ceres report, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said that industries are finally awakening to the fact that climate change is not just a public relations issue. “This is something for their risk managers, this is something for their chief executives,” he said. “Whether you’re in agriculture, or insurance, or banking, or investment, these are dire warnings pointing right at the heart of your business.”

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Climate change threatens the economy. Here’s what regulators can do right now.

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Does New York need a new natural gas pipeline? It’s about to decide.

by lavondawaugh411 Posted on May 11, 2020

Last week, more than 100 protesters tuned into a virtual rally for a milestone push in a three-year battle against the Williams Pipeline, a controversial project that would bring a new supply of natural gas into New York City and Long Island. With individual pleas, homemade signs, musical performances, and speeches from the likes of Bill McKibben, Cynthia Nixon, and New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer, the protestors tried to summon the people power of a live event to tell New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration to stop the pipeline once and for all.

“We can’t pretend we are making progress on combating climate change if we continue to build out fracked gas infrastructure that will lock in emissions for years to come,” said Stringer, who is rumored to be considering a run for New York City mayor in 2021. “Let’s finish stopping this pipeline and move on to building out a cleaner, more sustainable city.”

The rally was held ahead of the May 17 deadline for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to rule on a key permit for the project. The pipeline would cut through northern New Jersey and then out about 23 miles into New York Harbor to connect with the existing gas system. One year ago, the agency denied the permit on the grounds that it failed to meet the state’s water quality standards. New Jersey’s environmental agency did the same. Both rejections were issued “without prejudice,” meaning Williams could reapply — which it quickly did.

National Grid, a gas utility that operates in Brooklyn, Queens, and Long Island, would be the sole customer of the pipeline’s gas. As the fate of the project hangs in the balance, so do National Grid’s long-term plans — and, according to many observers, the fate of New York City and New York State’s climate goals. Both the city and state passed landmark laws last year that seek to drastically reduce carbon emissions by 2050. The city’s Climate Mobilization Act specifically aims to cut emissions from buildings — the majority of which come from natural gas heating systems.

After the Williams Pipeline permits were denied last summer, National Grid began rejecting new customer applications, claiming that it would not be able to meet future demand unless the pipeline was built. Real estate developments were stalled, new restaurants were left in limbo, and homeowners finishing up repairs couldn’t get the gas turned back on. The issue came to a head in November when Governor Cuomo accused the utility of extorting New Yorkers and threatened to revoke its license. The resulting settlement required National Grid to go back to the drawing board and come up with a slate of alternatives to make sure New Yorkers aren’t left in the cold if the pipeline isn’t built.

In February, before the novel coronavirus swept the country, the utility released a report with 10 ideas. One of them was the Williams Pipeline. The rest were smaller projects, none of which would alone solve the supply problem, the report said, although a scenario with some combination of them could. Most of the solutions involved building new gas infrastructure, like a liquefied natural gas terminal where gas would be delivered by tanker, or a smaller “peak shaving plant” that would store excess gas during the summer for when demand ramps up in the winter.

Some of the solutions on the menu were projects National Grid was already working on, like the construction of a new compressor station that will increase the amount of gas received through an existing pipeline. There were also three “no infrastructure” options that would expand existing programs that reduce demand for gas, like incentives for people to weatherize their homes and to replace their gas boilers with electric heat pumps. (National Grid is already required to offer these kinds of programs under New York State law.)

Critiques of the company’s report poured in from activists, environmental groups, politicians, and even the City of New York during a series of virtual public meetings the company was required to hold and in an online forum for public comments. During the meetings, National Grid President John Bruckner asserted that the company had not decided on any particular solution yet. However, some commenters felt the company’s report continued to make it seem like the Williams Pipeline was the only viable way for National Grid to avoid another moratorium, which could scare regulators into approving it. “If targets are not met, will have to restrict new gas customer connections,” the report reads, referring to potential scenarios with minimal to no new gas infrastructure.

Several groups, like the Environmental Defense Fund and NY Renews, an environmental justice coalition of more than 200 groups across New York State, criticized the company for failing to analyze the emissions impacts of each option, which would be necessary in order to evaluate whether they’re compatible with New York’s climate targets.

In comments submitted on behalf of New York City, lawyer Adam Conway wrote that adding new gas infrastructure runs counter to the city’s policies, and therefore only the “no infrastructure” options were viable tools for National Grid to address supply and demand gaps. An analysis performed by Synapse Energy Economics, a research and consulting firm, on behalf of the Eastern Environmental Law Center, alleged that National Grid’s assessment was flawed even prior to the pandemic, and that the company does not actually face an impending supply shortage. It found that the utility did not account for city and state energy efficiency and emissions reduction programs that will reduce demand for gas in the coming years.

At both the virtual meetings and among the online comments, some parties, like a nonprofit called Heartshare that provides utility grants to low-income households and the Community Development Corporation of Long Island, argued that the Williams Pipeline would be the safest option to ensure that low-income New Yorkers have an affordable way to heat their homes.

But National Grid agreed to play ball and evaluate its options again. On Friday, one week after the comment period closed, the company filed a supplemental report that incorporated some of its critics’ suggestions, including a greenhouse gas analysis and an update to the way the forecasted gap between supply and demand was calculated — which slightly reduces the projected gap. The new report narrows down the solutions and proposes two viable paths forward. Option A consists of the compressor station upgrade, a combination of “no infrastructure” measures to reduce demand, and a brand new option that was not in the original report — upgrading an existing liquified natural gas plant to increase its capacity. Option B is the Williams Pipeline.

If all of the criteria National Grid considered are given equal weight — safety, reliability, cost, compatibility New York’s climate targets — the report recommends Option A. However, if greater importance is placed on reducing risk and making sure the company can meet demand, “then the preferred choice is Option B” it says — the pipeline.

The company’s settlement with New York indicates that one of these paths will have to be decided upon by early June. Whether or not Option B is really on the table now sits in the hands of the Department of Environmental Conservation and Governor Cuomo.

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Does New York need a new natural gas pipeline? It’s about to decide.

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Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy – Alastair Gee & Dani Anguiano

by Myrna Posted on May 5, 2020

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Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy

Alastair Gee & Dani Anguiano

Genre: Nature

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: May 5, 2020

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


The harrowing story of the most destructive American wildfire in a century. There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and killed at least 85 people. The catastrophe seared the American imagination, taking the front page of every major national newspaper and top billing on the news networks. It displaced tens of thousands of people, yielding a refugee crisis that continues to unfold. Fire in Paradise is a dramatic and moving narrative of the disaster based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with residents, firefighters and police, and scientific experts. Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano are California-based journalists who have reported on Paradise since the day the fire began. Together they reveal the heroics of the first responders, the miraculous escapes of those who got out of Paradise, and the horrors experienced by those who were trapped. Their accounts are intimate and unforgettable, including the local who left her home on foot as fire approached while her 82-year-old father stayed to battle it; the firefighter who drove into the heart of the inferno in his bulldozer; the police officer who switched on his body camera to record what he thought would be his final moments as the flames closed in; and the mother who, less than 12 hours after giving birth in the local hospital, thought she would die in the chaotic evacuation with her baby in her lap. Gee and Anguiano also explain the science of wildfires, write powerfully about the role of the power company PG&E in the blaze, and describe the poignant efforts to raise Paradise from the ruins. This is the story of a town at the forefront of a devastating global shift—of a remarkable landscape sucked ever drier of moisture and becoming inhospitable even to trees, now dying in their tens of millions and turning to kindling. It is also the story of a lost community, one that epitomized a provincial, affordable kind of Californian existence that is increasingly unattainable. It is, finally, a story of a new kind of fire behavior that firefighters have never witnessed before and barely know how to handle. What happened in Paradise was unprecedented in America. Yet according to climate scientists and fire experts, it will surely happen again.

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Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy – Alastair Gee & Dani Anguiano

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Coronavirus postpones crucial U.N. climate conference

by NatalieRay317 Posted on April 1, 2020

COP26, the landmark United Nations climate conference of 2020 — originally planned to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, in November — will be delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“The world is facing an unprecedented global challenge & countries are rightly focusing on fighting #COVID19,” wrote Alok Sharma, the president of COP26 and a member of the U.K. parliament, on Twitter. “Due to this, #COP26 has been postponed.”

Policymakers and scientists have speculated for weeks about whether the conference, which would bring together delegations from almost 200 countries around the world, would be rescheduled due to the pandemic spreading across the globe.

Some had urged decision-makers not to delay the talks, saying that COP26 was a crucial step to advancing the goals of the 2016 Paris Agreement. “If it is going to be canceled, that should only be done at the last possible minute — in October,” Yvo do Boer, a former chief of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), told the Guardian in mid-March. (The UNFCCC, the UN treaty responsible for preventing dangerous climate change, is the framework for the annual COP, or “Conference of the Parties,” meetings.)

But with national governments reeling from almost 900,000 cases of coronavirus worldwide, the possibility of a successful and productive COP26 looked increasingly slim.

The conference will be held instead in 2021, but the United Nations and the U.K. have not agreed upon a new date. This is not the first COP to experience logistical problems — last year, COP25 had to be moved abruptly from Chile to Spain due to social unrest — but the disruption in this case will be much more significant.

Countries were expected to present updated national emissions targets at COP26, and there was hope that many countries would pledge to reduce their emissions to net-zero by 2050. The world is currently far off-track to meet the goals set by the almost 200 countries that signed onto the Paris Agreement four years ago.

While the coronavirus may have slowed global emissions for the moment, experts worry that the pandemic will hinder the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy in the long run. And the COP26 delay could drive attention away from the need to reduce fossil fuel use as quickly as possible.

“COVID-19 is the most urgent threat facing humanity today,” Patricia Espinosa, U.N. executive secretary for climate change, said in a statement. “But we cannot forget that climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity over the long term.”

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Coronavirus postpones crucial U.N. climate conference

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On the Origin of Species – Charles Darwin

by Myrna Posted on March 27, 2020

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On the Origin of Species

Charles Darwin

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $3.99

Publish Date: December 30, 2014

Publisher: Open Road Media

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


Darwin’s most famous work formed the bedrock of evolutionary biology In one of the most important contributions to scientific knowledge, Charles Darwin puts forth the theory that species evolve over time through the process of natural selection. When he first established this hypothesis, many ideas about evolution had already been proposed and were receiving public acclaim, but none could fully explain the course of human evolution as elegantly as Darwin’s did. Drawn from extensive research performed on various creatures living in the Galápagos Islands, his research suggests that “one species does change into another.” This revolutionary notion has become a landmark of scientific theory. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

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On the Origin of Species – Charles Darwin

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Revolution or steady progress? The Bernie-Biden climate split

by HeikeRidgley042 Posted on March 13, 2020

Is it better to take on climate change with bold, revolutionary action, or compromise and tinkering?

In practice, it’s usually both. You can organize protests, and support the incremental art-of-the-possible tweaks that city and state officials work to pass. But in the contest to nominate the Democratic candidate for the White House, this question has been an either-or proposition. The race has narrowed to Senators Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, who represent opposite sides of this divide (or at least their supporters do). You’re bound to see this populist versus insider split when they face off in debate Sunday.

Sanders promises big, Green New Deal-style changes, counting on a popular uprising to transform political reality. Biden, though also a supporter of the Green New Deal, offers more modest changes within the existing political framework. Which is a better bet?

In the middle of our national flame-throwing fest about how to get things done, we could learn a lot from a little-noticed debate from last year that serves as the perfect proxy for this question. This wasn’t your typical chest-pounding debate, in fact it was sort of the opposite: A disagreement offering so much clarity that, no matter your position, it’s certain to shift your thinking at least a little bit.

It started in March last year, when Jerry Taylor, president of the Niskanen Center, pleaded in “An Open Letter to Green New Dealers” for a more Biden-esque approach. (Taylor is a former CATO Institute climate-change skeptic who changed his mind as he reviewed the evidence).

Leah Stokes, a professor of political science at the University of California at Santa Barbara (and a newly minted member of the Grist 50) fired back with an epic thread of tweets, making the Bernie-esque case that elected officials would need a social movement, a push from the people, to get anything done.

The two met in person last September and hashed it out at a conference organized by the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank. You can watch the whole debate yourself.

But if you’re trying to limit your screen time, here are some of the highlights:

Taylor warned Stokes against fighting the impossible fight. He anticipated that a political window would open to pass climate legislation in 2021, which Democrats could miss if they become focused on the Green New Deal. There’s good reason to think something that big would fail: The Democratic Congress couldn’t even pass a resolution to support it in principle.

“In other words, if there was a Republican rapture experience, and they all disappeared and all we had were Democrats in the House, it still wouldn’t pass,” Taylor said.

It turned out that Stokes agreed with this: “A lot of your critiques, Jerry, really speak to the inside Congress game. And I think you are spot on on that.” But she argued that if there’s going to be any hope of passing legislation big enough to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, we should be looking outside of Washington for leadership. “If you look at the Earth Day movement, the founding of the EPA, the Clean Air Act, a lot of the landmark legislation that we still rely on today actually came out of a big public outpouring of people in the streets,” she said.

The problem with Stokes’s line of thinking, Taylor responded, is that climate action is polarized along political lines. Republicans such as climate-change denying Senator James Inhofe are the ones blocking legislation, he said, not the politicians influenced by climate strike-leader Greta Thunberg. “I don’t care how many people Greta puts in New York, it’s not changing James Inhofe’s mind, nor is it changing the votes of most Republicans.”

But the fact that activists, like those from the Sunrise Movement, are banging down the doors of Congress and holding strikes is creating space even for right wingers to offer their own version of policy, Stokes said. “If you are being asked by journalists all the time, like, “What’s your climate plan?” and the Republicans have no answer, they have to come up with something.”

There’s much more to be gleaned from the debate (you really should watch it, these two are so funny and smart) Witness Taylor ripping the GOP (“First of all, you have to speak their language: Russian”) and Stokes self-mockingly professing her passion for energy research (“I just want to spend a lot of money because I love the government, bad habit”).

It’s important to recognize that a lot has changed in the last 4 months. When I recently asked Taylor for an update, he pointed out that the Green New Deal is no longer sucking all the air out of the room, so the door is open for politicians to push for other measures in Congress. Democrats are working on bills like the Clean Future Act which, he said, is less a Green New Deal and more a copy of California’s state climate policy rejiggered for national scale.

Taylor also had words of praise for the activists he had once been so worried about. “What Sunrise has done,” he said, “is to elevate climate change to the near-top of the progressive agenda. And that counts for something. It may count for a lot, actually.”

Which is one of the key points Stokes was making in their debate. Taylor shifted his stance as he realized the facts had changed. As for Stokes, she noted that this primary season is a referendum on whether activists like the Sunrise Movement can lead a surge in new voters to support something like the Green New Deal. That hasn’t happened. “I think we are seeing the limits of that,” she conceded. Both Taylor and Stokes have moved closer to each other.

But Stokes stuck to her guns on one point: She sees a role for a social movement around climate change. “I think that climate change is the unity issue for the Democratic Party. And it’s a huge wedge issue: It has a lot of support among independents and young Republicans.”

A smart candidate would run on a climate-focused surge of spending, promising good union jobs and clean air, Stokes said: “That would be a winner in November.”

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Revolution or steady progress? The Bernie-Biden climate split

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UK court ruling: Heathrow airport expansion doesn’t fly under Paris Agreement

by MarcellaEstell Posted on February 28, 2020

Terms like “flight shame” might be new to many of us, but environmental activists have been waving their arms about the aviation industry’s ginormous carbon footprint for decades. And on Thursday, they triumphed in a fight over an airport expansion at London’s Heathrow Airport that’s been brewing for years.

In a historic decision, the United Kingdom’s Court of Appeal ruled that a controversial plan to build a third runway at Heathrow is illegal because it fails to take into account the country’s commitment to cutting carbon emissions under the landmark Paris Agreement. The U.K. government has said it will not appeal the court’s decision.

Heathrow is already one of the busiest airports in the world, and the expansion would have brought in about 700 more planes per day, undoubtedly leading to a boom in emissions. Plaintiffs argued this runs counter to the law the U.K. passed last June to align its climate policy with the Paris Agreement. That law requires the U.K. to bring its contribution to global warming down to net-zero by 2050 by vastly reducing its emissions and offsetting any remaining greenhouse gases through other solutions like tree planting and carbon capture technology.

The court’s decision is a big deal, and not just for the U.K. This is the first time a court has cited the Paris Agreement to strike down a major infrastructure project — or any project — and could have implications all over the world. As more and more countries, states, and cities enact their own climate policies, courts will inevitably be asked to adjudicate projects that expand the use of fossil fuels, which could be anything from airport expansions to new gas pipelines to highways.

We’ve gotten a taste of cases like this in the U.S., where we don’t even have national emissions targets. Last year a U.S. district court temporarily blocked oil and gas drilling on public land in Wyoming because the Bureau of Land Management didn’t assess the emissions footprint of the projects. The decision was based on a requirement in the National Environmental Policy Act, a requirement which the Trump Administration is now trying to toss out. But in places like the European Union that remain members of the Paris Agreement, the Heathrow decision will only make challenges to emissions-increasing projects look stronger.

The ruling was also a major victory for Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, plaintiffs in the suit that have been fighting the project for more than a decade. In 2007, activists clashed with police after setting up camp near Heathrow for a week of protests against a proposed expansion. In 2008, members of the activist group Plane Stupid climbed to the roof of Parliament and unfurled a banner that read “no 3rd runway at Heathrow.”

In 2009, the actress Emma Thompson helped activists buy a piece of land where the runway would have been built to delay its development. Then there was the custard incident, in which activist Leila Deen threw green custard onto then-Business Secretary Peter Mandelson as he was on his way into a “low-carbon summit.” Deen called it a “lighthearted way of making a very serious point” about what she called the government’s hypocritical policy on climate change, since Mandelson was a supporter of the third runway at Heathrow.

So does the ruling put an end to the protests? In a blog post about the decision, Greenpeace cautioned against celebrating too soon. While the government doesn’t plan to appeal, the company that owns the airport does. The government also has the option of pushing the project forward by submitting an amended plan that shows how a third runway could comply with the country’s commitment to the Paris Agreement.

But there doesn’t look to be much appetite for reviving the fight. When he was mayor of London, now-Prime Minister Boris Johnson railed against the proposed runway, saying he would lie down “in front of those bulldozers and stop the building, stop the construction.”

It would also be a bad look given that the U.K. is hosting the next Conference of the Parties, the U.N.’s annual climate change conference, in November.

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UK court ruling: Heathrow airport expansion doesn’t fly under Paris Agreement

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This tiny but mighty California bureau is taking on polluters

by sseerss4tr Posted on February 21, 2020

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This tiny but mighty California bureau is taking on polluters

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