Category Archives: Landmark

Andrew Wheeler confirmed as the nation’s 15th EPA administrator

by Perry08Cdrnx Posted on February 28, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Andrew Wheeler has been confirmed as the nation’s 15th administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Senate voted 52-47 to confirm the former coal lobbyist, who has served as acting EPA chief since former Administrator Scott Pruitt resigned amid ethics scandals last July.

In a statement posted to Twitter, Wheeler said he was “deeply honored” and looking forward to carrying out President Donald Trump’s agenda.

Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, voted against Wheeler after having supported his nomination as deputy administrator last year. Senator Susan Collins of Maine was the lone Republican to vote against the nomination. She opposed Pruitt’s nomination but, like Manchin, previously voted to confirm Wheeler as the agency’s No. 2 official.

In a statement Wednesday announcing her decision, Collins said Wheeler is “certainly qualified” but that she has “too many concerns with the actions during his tenure as acting administrator to be able to support his promotion.”

“The policies he has supported as acting administrator are not in the best interest of our environment and public health, particularly given the threat of climate change to our nation,” she said.

His confirmation adds yet another member to President Donald Trump’s Cabinet who as recently as 2017 was on the payroll of the industries he now regulates.

In 2017, the Senate confirmed Alex Azar, a former executive at the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co., to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. In January, former Boeing executive Patrick Shanahan took over as acting secretary of defense after James Mattis’ abrupt departure. The next day, David Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist and No. 2 at the Department of the Interior, became acting secretary when Ryan Zinke resigned amid mounting ethics investigations.

A week later, Trump nominated Wheeler, who in December became the longest-serving acting administrator in the EPA’s history, to take on the role permanently.

Thursday’s confirmation comes a day after the Senate voted 52-46 to end debate on the nomination. In a speech on the Senate floor following that vote, Senator Tom Carper, a Democrat from Delaware, said that in some cases Wheeler has “accelerated the environmental damage and regulatory zeal” that Pruitt began.

“Time and time again Mr. Wheeler has proven that his environmental policies are almost as destructive and extreme has his predecessors’,” he said.

Senator John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming, chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, said Wednesday that Trump picked the right man for the job. Regulatory proposals to replace the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era rule to cut carbon pollution from power plants, and to revise the 2015 Waters of the U.S. rule, which sought to safeguard drinking water for millions of Americans, shows that Wheeler “is serious about clear air and clear water while also understanding there’s an important role for states and local communities to play,” Barrasso said.

Wheeler’s record-breaking reign as acting administrator was marked by an unprecedented assault on greenhouse gas regulations amid historic wildfires and hurricanes that scientists say offer a preview of the rapidly warming world to come.

In August, Wheeler unveiled a proposal weakening fuel economy standards for new vehicles in a move seen as a “giant giveaway” to oil companies even as electric automobile technology made huge leaps forward. Weeks later, he proposed gutting a landmark Obama-era power plant regulation, allowing, by the EPA’s own calculus, enough pollution to cause an additional 1,400 premature deaths per year.

The planet has already warmed more than 1 degree C (1.8 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels. As a result, many Americans born after the mid-1970s have never experienced average temperatures unaffected by human-caused emissions. But in October, the United Nations released a landmark report predicting catastrophic effects of warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees F) — a fate that’s all but certain unless world governments halve emissions by 2030. A month later, federal scientists from 13 agencies, including the EPA, confirmed the findings in a National Climate Assessment that forecast U.S. average temperatures surging “9 degrees F (5 degrees C) or more by the end of this century.”

In response, Wheeler, despite admitting he hadn’t read the multiagency report, dismissed its findings and threatened to intervene in the drafting of the next National Climate Assessment.

In December, Wheeler delivered another two victories to the coal industry that, until mid-2017, had paid him to lobby the government. He proposed loosening requirements that coal-fired power plants reduce carbon dioxide emissions. He capped off the month by announcing plans to relax a rule restricting how much mercury and other dangerous pollutants coal-fired plants can release into the air.

In February, Wheeler announced that the EPA would consider regulating toxic, cancer-causing “forever chemicals” contaminating drinking water across the country — a move critics said amounted to a delay that could sicken millions. Last week, he broke off negotiations with California over a national vehicle fuel economy standard, setting the administration up for a lengthy legal fight with the Golden State, which is allowed under the Clean Air Act to set its own pollution limits.

Environmental groups reacted to Thursday’s confirmation much as they did when Wheeler took the reins as deputy administrator.

“Wheeler wants to turn the EPA into a wish-granting service for polluters, no matter the cost to public health or wildlife,” Emily Knobbe, EPA policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “But it’s only a matter of time before his dirty dealings land him in the same trash heap as his predecessor.”

View original: 

Andrew Wheeler confirmed as the nation’s 15th EPA administrator

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Landmark, ONA, oven, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Andrew Wheeler confirmed as the nation’s 15th EPA administrator

6 Ways You Can Help Endangered Species (Starting with a Call to Your Governor)

by EldonXLCNwqut Posted on February 26, 2019

Extinction is a natural phenomenon. Thank goodness. Unless you’re a six-year-old kid, chances are you’re relieved that dinosaurs no longer roam the earth.

But scientists estimate we’re losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the normal rate. To put that in perspective, the normal rate is one to five species per year.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, our planet is now in the midst of its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals. It might be hard to imagine, but were it not for a landmark decision in 1973, the situation could be even more dire.

Unfortunately, the Endangered Species Act ?which boasts a 99 percent success rate? is under political threat.?That means things could get worse really quickly.?We need to band together to help protect endangered species in whatever way we can.

Urging your governor to stand up for the Act?is one way to?help,?and there are lots of other things you can do to make a difference to the planet and its inhabitants.

How to Help Endangered Species

The sad reality is that 99 percent of currently threatened species are at risk as a result of human activity. On the bright side, this means we have the power to?turn the tide on extinction by changing our behavior.

A somewhat idealistic outlook, I’ll agree, but imagine if everyone made?a few simple changes to the way they lived.

Don’t panic, I’m not suggesting an off-the-grid Luddite existence. I love outrageously overpriced coffee as much as the next person.

What we need to do?is look beyond our immediate reality?and consider?that our actions and choices impact the world around us. It may not always be apparent when you’re rushing to work, dropping off kids and chasing deadlines, but we’re all connected.

These are things we should all do to protect endangered species. If we don’t, it won’t just be at the expense of the animals. The food on our plates is at risk too.

Image?Credit: Net Credit

1. Call Your Governor

Call or email your state’s governor and urge them to?stand up for the Endangered Species Act. Earthjustice has a form that makes it easy to send a quick email voicing your support. Never called an elected official before? This handy guide can help you get ready.

2. Learn about Endangered Species in Your Area

Endangered animals don’t only exist in far-flung places, like the Amazon Rainforest or Indonesia. Habitat loss, poaching and pollution affect hundreds of species in the USA, too. Take the time to learn about the wildlife, birds, fish and plants in your area.

Sometimes grasping the proximity of a problem?can help spur us into action. When you know your lifestyle choices have a direct impact on the wildlife in your area, you’ll be less inclined to opt for convenience.

3. Nurture Your Backyard Ecosystem

Find out how you can help the ecosystem in your own backyard thrive. Plant an environmentally friendly garden, use natural pest control methods. Capture rainwater for irrigation purposes. Favor plants over lawn. Do everything you can to make a place pollinators want to hang out.

4. Stop Using Plastic

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. produces 32 million tons of plastic waste a year. No wonder 700 marine species are at risk of extinction because of plastic. Ditch the convenience of single-use plastic and opt instead for more sustainable alternatives.

5. Buy Local

Large-scale food production invariably uses agricultural practices that are harmful to the environment. One easy lifestyle change you can make right now is to support local farmers. Even if they’re not certified organic, their practices will be a lot better for the planet.

6. Slow Down When Driving

Urbanisation has forced a lot of animals into built-up areas. Along with their natural predators, these guys?now also have to be on the lookout out for human hazards, like cars. Drive the speed limit, and you’ll have a better chance of stopping in time.

When you see signs warning you of endangered animals crossing, pay even closer attention.?Remember, they need to get where they’re going just as much as you do.

Take Action

Small changes can add up, but we also need large-scale action to protect endangered species.?Join over 104,000 supporters and sign and share? petition demanding that Congress take bipartisan action to protect endangered species.

If?you want to make a difference on an issue you find deeply troubling, you too can create a Care2 petition, and use this handy guide to get started. You?ll find Care2?s vibrant community of activists ready to step up and help you.

?

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

See original: 

6 Ways You Can Help Endangered Species (Starting with a Call to Your Governor)

Posted in alo, bigo, Bunn, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, organic, PUR, Safer, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on 6 Ways You Can Help Endangered Species (Starting with a Call to Your Governor)

For a warming world, a new strategy for protecting watersheds

by NiamhWymark356 Posted on February 24, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Long before an aspen tree fell on a power line in New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains in June 2011, triggering the biggest wildfire in the state’s history, fire managers knew that New Mexico’s forests were vulnerable. Climate change-induced drought and higher temperatures had dried out the trees and soil. And after more than a century of fire suppression, areas that supported 40 trees per acre in the pre-European era now were blanketed with up to a hundred times as many. This profusion of trees — as many as one per square yard — weakened all of them, and rendered them defenseless against megafires.

Even so, the fire managers weren’t prepared for the astonishing power of the 2011 conflagration, known as the Las Conchas Fire. During its first 14 hours, it sent walls of flame hundreds of feet high as it consumed nearly an acre of forest per second and threatened the city of Los Alamos. By the time it was extinguished five weeks later, it had burned an area nearly three times as big as the state’s largest fire before it, and left behind nearly 100 square miles so severely burned that even seeds to regenerate the forest were destroyed.

But the fire’s full impact didn’t register until nearly two months later, when a thunderstorm in the Jemez Mountains washed tons of ash and debris into the Rio Grande River, the water source for half of New Mexico’s population and for a major agricultural area. Only an inch of rain fell, but the debris flows the storm generated turned the river black and dumped ash, sediment, and tree and shrub remnants into a major reservoir⁠, requiring a costly cleanup.

To ward off damage to equipment, water treatment plants in Albuquerque and Santa Fe closed for 40 days and 20 days respectively while they drew down precious stores of groundwater. Farmers found that the polluted water clogged the nozzles of their drip irrigation systems, rendering them useless. Even worse, the most severely burned portions of the watershed continued discharging debris and sediment into water channels long afterward; a heavy rainstorm two years later generated enough sediment to entirely plug the Rio Grande.

Ash blankets the forest floor immediately following the Las Conchas fire in 2011.

What has unfolded in New Mexico is far from unique. In the last two decades, megafires in similarly dry and overgrown watersheds have ended up contaminating downstream water supplies in numerous areas throughout the western United States, including Phoenix; Denver; Flagstaff, Arizona; and Fort Collins, Colorado. Downstream water managers serving millions of urban residents have learned that the security of their water supplies is tied to the health of upland watersheds that may be hundreds of miles away.

“There’s been a real change in consciousness among urban water providers and water utilities,” said Gregg Garfin, director of the University of Arizona’s Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center. “They’ve come to realize that management of watersheds and fire ecology issues is just as important as the direct impacts of drought on water availability.”

This development is part of a broader nationwide shift in forest management over the last generation, as degraded forests in watersheds and the resulting rise of megafires and pest infestation have helped generate a shift away from focusing on forests chiefly as sources of commercial timber and instead toward “ecosystem-based management,” in which forests’ natural processes are reinforced to reap benefits like clean water. Indeed, in some areas forest restoration has been shown to increase the amount of water flowing into reservoirs. The shift toward ecosystem management has occurred even in such regions as the U.S. Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, where wildfires are uncommon, but where other watershed menaces, including development and toxic agricultural runoff, have led to contamination of downstream water bodies such as the Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay, and the Hudson River.

In the western U.S., watershed restoration chiefly consists of two steps: thinning of trees and shrubs, and prescribed burns. In the eastern U.S., it involves a bigger set of tools, including planting native trees, reducing the area of impervious surfaces, and slowing the speed of stormwater so that more water percolates into soil and aquifers. All these measures are designed to improve water quality.

Both the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Forest Service have supported the shift, providing programs and funding for watershed restoration in much of the nation. But forest restoration is expensive: It costs anywhere from $600 ⁠to $1,500 per acre, depending on the degree of steepness of the terrain (sometimes helicopters are required to remove logs in mountainous areas) and the harvested logs’ commercial value (usually low to zero). Budget constraints exacerbated by the soaring cost of fighting rapidly proliferating wildfires have meant that government agencies can fund restoration of only a tiny fraction of the nation’s roughly 150 million acres of forest that need it. The result is that while numerous pilot projects have shown the efficacy of restoration, agencies rarely have enough money to treat entire watersheds.

Today, 108,000 acres of burned forest in central and northern New Mexico have been restored through strategic thinning and prescribed burns.

Faced with this dilemma after the Las Conchas fire, residents in the Rio Grande watershed pioneered a path forward. Guided by The Nature Conservancy, the most active U.S. environmental organization in watershed restoration, in 2014 they launched a public-private partnership, the Rio Grande Water Fund, whose 73 contributing members⁠ include government agencies at all levels, foundations and other NGOs, local water utilities, and local businesses and residents. Together they raised enough money for a 20-year program to restore 600,000 forest acres — enough to support the resilience of the entire central and northern New Mexico portion of the Rio Grande watershed. They have already restored 108,000 acres, and are racing to complete the job before another megafire occurs.

The Rio Grande Water Fund’s public-private partnership model has become official federal policy. Last August, the U.S. Forest Service published a landmark report called “Toward Shared Stewardship Across Landscapes” that outlined the agency’s intention to convene watershed stakeholders of all kinds to plan and fund watershed restoration. “Because fire crosses back and forth across land ownership boundaries, the risk is shared,” the report said. “Accordingly, land managers cannot achieve the fire-related outcomes people want … without shared stewardship of the wildland fire environment.”

Always free, always fresh.

Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy

The benefits of watershed restoration extend far beyond water security. Most obviously, healthy forests deter megafires. Laura McCarthy, the Rio Grande Water Fund’s executive director, says that in three instances since restoration work began in New Mexico, wildfires that ran up against restored zones immediately died down. Healthy forests can tolerate low-intensity fires: They possess diverse understories of grasses, sedges, and forbs, and rich, microbe-laden soil, all of which supports wildlife, from insects to mammals. Watershed restoration can double the amount of carbon stored in the soil, which means that it’s a vital tool in fighting climate change. And watershed restoration creates jobs: In the case of the Rio Grande Water Fund, many of those jobs go to youths in traditional Hispanic and Native American communities where unemployment rates are 30 percent or higher.

In some regions, forest restoration even increases water supplies. Roger Bales, a hydrologist at the University of California, Merced, has shown that because watershed restoration requires the removal of vast numbers of young trees, loss of water into the atmosphere through evapotranspiration in those trees is eliminated. The water instead flows downward, into the soil, often on its way to the watershed’s rivers and reservoirs. Bales’ experiments in California’s Sierra Nevada show that restoration can increase water supplies in downstream reservoirs by 9 to 16 percent. That makes restoration a more cost effective (and vastly less destructive) water supply method in California than building dams. Restoration is also cheaper than fighting the megafires that are otherwise inevitable in the overgrown forests: Last year’s Camp Fire in Northern California alone caused $11 billion to $13 billion in damage.

Thinning of trees and shrubs is a labor-intensive (and, therefore, job-creating) process that may result in the removal of half or more of a degraded forest’s biomass in an effort to return the area to something like its pre-European ratio of trees to acreage. But unless it is followed by prescribed burns, undesirable trees and shrubs grow back. In that case, said Don Falk, a leading fire researcher at the University of Arizona, “You’re either committed to a perpetual Sisyphean cycle of thinning,” every 10 or 15 years, “or you’ve got to let fire back into the system.” Fire is an integral part of the functioning of many ecosystems: Blazes of less-than-megafire scale germinate seeds, keep native species in balance while warding off invasive species, and stimulate microbial activity that produces soil nutrients.

Prescribed burns are designed to do the job that naturally ignited fires once did, but they face certain obstacles. The seasonal window of opportunity for controlled burns is limited to a few months of the year, and conditions must be just right: high humidity, dry but not desiccated fuels, and some wind to disperse smoke high into the atmosphere, but not enough to risk losing control of the fire.

Laura McCarthy of the Rio Grande Water Fund points to a hillside near a Santa Fe, New Mexico reservoir where forest density has been reduced to fire-safe levels.

And even if conditions are perfect, firefighters trained in prescribed burn techniques may not be available. That’s because the lengthening of the fire season due to climate change has forced firefighters to spend more time away from home, trying to extinguish megafires throughout the West. To solve this problem, the Rio Grande Water Fund created a mobile team of prescribed-burn professionals who stay in the Rio Grande watershed.

When an unplanned fire occurs, fire managers must decide quickly whether an outbreak is modestly sized and unthreatening, in which case it should be allowed to burn as part of the desired reintroduction of fire into the watershed, or whether it’s a budding megafire, which must quickly be suppressed. A fire manager who lets a fire burn can face lawsuits or job loss if it goes out of control; for this reason, managers typically err on the side of fire suppression, sometimes setting back the cause of restoration.

As climate change intensifies, degraded watersheds will become more and more vulnerable to megafires, likely setting in motion a disastrous positive feedback loop: Megafires substantially increase greenhouse gas emissions, which heat the atmosphere and spawn more megafires. For this reason alone, watershed restoration is as urgent as any other kind of climate change remediation. Falk, the University of Arizona fire researcher, estimates that to have a chance of breaking this cycle, the area of watershed being restored in the U.S. must quickly increase by at least 10 times.

“Just as it’s imperative for us to begin addressing the underlying drivers of climate change at a much higher pace than we’ve been doing until now, in the same way we have to accelerate the work of restoring ecosystems,” he said. “These aren’t decisions we can sit around and ponder in an armchair for decades. We have to start acting now.”

Read this article: 

For a warming world, a new strategy for protecting watersheds

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Landmark, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on For a warming world, a new strategy for protecting watersheds

RIP Wallace Broecker, the scientist who changed the way we think about the climate

by RolandoBindon Posted on February 20, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

Wallace Broecker, the geochemist who popularized the phrase “global warming,” passed away on Monday at 87. His research changed our understanding of oceans and how we think and talk about climate change.

“The climate system is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks,” he said some 20 years ago.

His landmark 1975 paper “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” was one of the first to use the term “global warming.” In it, he predicted the rise in average global temperature over the next 35 years with stunning accuracy.

Broecker, who wrote roughly 17 books and 500 research papers over the course of his career at Columbia University, conducted groundbreaking research on the “ocean conveyor belt,” a pattern of currents that circulates water around the globe and regulates heat. He suggested that it’s the “Achilles heel of the climate system,” as even a small rise in temperatures could snap it.

Ever seen the movie The Day After Tomorrow, where global warming plays havoc with that conveyor belt, a tidal wave engulfs Manhattan, and much of the Northern Hemisphere turns to ice? It’s based on Broecker’s ideas — though, granted, it’s a wild exaggeration.

After some credited Broecker for coining “global warming” in 1975, he offered $200 to any student who could find an earlier citation. One postgrad took him up and tracked it down in a 1957 editorial in Indiana’s Hammond Times. Alas, the term is slightly older than that: The Oxford English Dictionary traces its usage back to a 1952 article from the San Antonio Express.

In any case, “global warming” was certainly catchier than “inadvertent climate modification,” a clunky phrase used by Broecker’s contemporaries in the 1970s. So global warming it was. The usage became widespread in the late ’80s, when NASA climate scientist James Hansen famously warned Congress of the risks of rising greenhouse gases.

Broecker “warned that he would turn over in his grave if someone put ‘global warming’ on his tombstone,” according to an article from Columbia’s Earth Institute. Instead, he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered in the ocean he spent his life studying.

Continue reading here: 

RIP Wallace Broecker, the scientist who changed the way we think about the climate

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Landmark, ONA, OXO, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on RIP Wallace Broecker, the scientist who changed the way we think about the climate

Likely 2020 voters support parts of Green New Deal, despite reservations over the cost

by ReggieBisdee Posted on February 16, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A majority of likely 2020 voters supports key aspects of a Green New Deal even when faced with potential costs and downsides, but strict regulations to decarbonize the nation’s top polluters could trigger a backlash, according to a new poll from proponents of the policy.

The survey, released by the think tank Data for Progress and shared with HuffPost, found net support for a range of policies, including improving drinking water infrastructure, reforesting land, providing job training and insurance to displaced workers, and guaranteeing clean-energy jobs.

“At the core, the Green New Deal is about a moral imperative to transform our economy and improve people’s lives for the better,” said Greg Carlock, the researcher at Data for Progress and architect of the first Green New Deal blueprint published last September. “You can’t put a price on that, but even when you do, people still support it.”

But faced with a range of possible price tags, voters’ support varied, suggesting costs could factor high into the Green New Deal’s political viability. The results showed a majority of voters would likely oppose policies with stringent mandates — rules requiring all cars be electric by 2030 and every fossil fuel power plant close by 2035.

To test the support, Data for Progress commissioned the Democratic pollster Civis Analytics to survey 3,496 likely voters between January 4 – 26 on 11 policies expected to be included a Green New Deal. The poll tested four different cost scenarios on each question, randomly alternating between zero, low, medium, and high prices to test how the cost of a policy weighed on one-quarter of respondents’ opinions.

The green jobs guarantee, considered by Green New Deal proponents to be the heart of the suite of policies, proved one of the tricker components. In a lengthy prompt, the survey asked respondents if they support or oppose a policy that Democrats promised would “guarantee an environmentally friendly job to every American adult, with the government providing jobs for people who can’t find employment in the private sector.”

The question described the job as a position that would pay “at least $15 an hour, included healthcare benefits, and collective bargaining rights.” The surveyors added that Republicans warned the policy “would increase the national debt, endanger the long term health of our economy, and this policy will end up paying people who can’t contribute in the job market to perform pointless busy work.”

Thirty-nine percent supported the green jobs guarantee, 33 percent opposed, and 27 didn’t know. Without a price, voters were 9 percentage points likelier to support than oppose the policy. At a low of $100 billion, support hit 2 percentage points. Voters were about evenly divided on policies costing $500 billion or $1 trillion.

Mandates requiring the country to generate 100 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2050 enjoyed sweeping support. The question noted that Democrats believed such a policy would “kickstart the renewable energy sector, creating jobs for many Americans and ensuring that America leads the world in green technology,” while Republicans said, “this would take away freedom from American consumers, put people out of work, and raise prices for everything from transportation to consumer goods.”

Thirty-eight percent supported the proposal, 33 percent opposed and 30 percent didn’t know. Without a price, voters backed the policy by 7 percentage points. At a low of $25 billion, that figure fell to 2 percentage points. Support held steady at 1 percentage point for both a medium cost of $37.5 billion and a high of $50 billion. Age impacted support at the unstated price level. Voters aged 18 to 34 supported the policy by 15 percentage points, while those 65 and older opposed the policy by 11 percentage points.

Policies improving drinking water infrastructure proved to be the most popular. The survey outlined a proposal to improve infrastructure “and replace lead pipes,” considering that Republicans “say that our drinking infrastructure is in good shape already, and this represents a wasteful use of resources that will burden our children with debt.”

Half of the respondents supported the proposal, 21 percent opposed, and 29 percent didn’t know. At no stated price, voters supported the proposal by 36 percentage points. Faced with a low cost of $25 billion, support sank to 27 percentage points. At a medium cost of $37.5 billion, the percentage dropped to 23. At a high of $50 billion, it fell to 22 percentage points.

The least popular policy was one “proposing requiring that all new cars sold be electric by 2030.” The question said, “Democrats say this would help stop climate change, save thousands of lives by reducing pollution, and make the U.S. the definitive leader in the electric car industry.”

Republicans say this would take away freedom from American consumers, put people making cars out of work, and make new cars unaffordable for the average American.

Just 26 percent supported the policy, with 44 percent opposed, and 33 percent unsure. Without even seeing a price, voters opposed the electric car mandate by 15 percentage points.

The second-least popular was a proposal “requiring that all fossil fuel plants (coal, natural gas, and oil) cease operating by 2035” in an effort to “help stop climate change” that Republicans say “would put many Americans out of work, and could lead to an energy crisis as energy prices soar.”

Voters opposed the measure by 3 percentage points, again without seeing a price.

Always free, always fresh.

Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy

The findings come just weeks before the Senate is expected to hold a vote on the Green New Deal resolution Senator Ed Markey (a Democrat from Massachussetts) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a Democrat from New York) released last week. The measure, essentially a political statement outlining the scope of what’s needed to prepare the U.S. for a rapidly warming climate, staked out an ambitious list of policies to protect vulnerable communities already suffering from pollution.

In what Green New Deal supporters called a cynical ploy to halt their movement’s growing momentum, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (a Republican from Kentucky), a veteran climate change denier who’s taken millions from the fossil fuel industry, vowed this week to hold a vote, forcing swing-state senators to take positions on a policy Republicans are aggressively working to vilify.

The vast majority of Americans understand climate change is happening and human-caused emissions are the primary cause. In December, 81 percent of registered voters supported the goals of the Green New Deal, including 64 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of conservative Republicans, according to a poll from Yale and George Mason universities. But the pollsters warned that the overwhelming bipartisan support could erode as the Green New Deal became more closely associated with individual politicians.

The Sunrise Movement, the grassroots climate advocacy group whose thousands of volunteers helped propel the Green New Deal into the national stage in November with a series of protests against top Democrats, said Wednesday it would ramp up actions confronting both Democrats and swing-state Republicans, urging them to support the policy. Groups like Justice Democrats, the left-wing organization that helped run Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign, and Data for Progress vowed to aid efforts to primary any Democrats who oppose the Green New Deal.

“The Green New Deal won’t hurt Democrats politically,” said Sean McElwee, the co-founder of Data for Progress. “But failing to take aggressive action on climate change could demoralize the millennial base who demand immediate action on climate change.”

See the article here:

Likely 2020 voters support parts of Green New Deal, despite reservations over the cost

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Landmark, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Likely 2020 voters support parts of Green New Deal, despite reservations over the cost

House Democrats just told the Pentagon to redo its climate change report

by JeffereyLarocqu Posted on January 31, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Earlier this month, the Pentagon released a landmark report that identified the 79 American military installations most vulnerable to the “effects of a changing climate.” The 22-page filing frankly acknowledged the security implications of climate change — in dramatic contrast with President Trump’s very public global warming skepticism — but Democrats roundly criticized its failure to include several details requested by Congress, including specific cost estimates to protect or replace the ten most vulnerable bases from each of the military services.

Now those lawmakers want a complete do-over.

In a letter released Wednesday afternoon, three Democratic members of the House Armed Services panel, including Chair Adam Smith from Washington state, urged Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan to compile another report by April that “thoroughly and clearly addresses” the criteria requested by Congress.

“They clearly ignored the requirement in the law,” says Representative Jim Langevin of Rhode Island, one of the signatories, who had described himself as “deeply disappointed” with the original report. “The report they issued was completely unsatisfactory.” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services panel, said the report carried “about as much value as a phonebook.” Smith immediately demanded another report that “rigorously confronts the realities of our warming planet.”

Heather Babb, a Defense Department spokesperson, attempted to explain the priorities, saying earlier this month that Pentagon officials “focused on mission assurance” when compiling the report. “By using this alternative approach, we are able to highlight where there are operational risks,” she said. When asked about the new request on Wednesday, Babb said, “As with all congressional correspondence, we will respond directly to [the] authors of the letter.”

What was omitted in the first report that the Pentagon had a year to compile was striking. No Marine Corps installations were mentioned, for example, despite the fact that just four months before the report was released, Hurricane Florence slammed into Camp Lejeune, the Marines’ biggest base on the East Coast, costing more than $3 billion in damages. Omissions from other branches of the military were just as concerning. Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, where Hurricane Michael devastated 95 percent of the buildings in October, was not included among the Air Force’s most vulnerable bases.

In the summer of 2017, as part of the debate over last year’s annual defense spending bill, Langevin introduced an amendment requesting that the Pentagon assess how best to mitigate climate-related threats across the armed services, down to the level of an estimated cost and combatant command requirements. Earlier that year, the Washington Post had reported that defense officials removed nearly two-dozen references to climate change from a draft survey of installations vulnerable to the threat, creating an embarrassing news cycle for the Pentagon.

The amendment was added by voice vote in committee and reaffirmed with bipartisan support on the floor of the House. In July, more than 40 members of Congress, including several Republicans, even wrote to former defense secretary Jim Mattis to remind him of the requirements included in the report. Notably, lawmakers said they had been “disturbed” by the Post story, as if to warn Mattis against inciting a similar firestorm.“We expect that when this report is delivered to Congress later this year, it will contain candid assessments in line with the clear instructions passed by Congress and signed into law by the President,” the letter stated.

The report clearly fell short of its goal in the first version and now, with Democrats in control of the House, Langevin said the Armed Services committee is considering several options in case the Pentagon ignores this new request, from subpoenaing documents to hauling relevant DOD staffers before the panel for testimony. “I hope this doesn’t become a long, dragged-out battle,” he said. At least one major ex-Pentagon official has already voiced his support for a new report. John Conger, the former assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations, and environment, noted in a blog post earlier this month that “DoD should make the transition from anecdote to analysis and provide a fuller assessment, as Congress directed.”

For Shanahan, now in his fifth week leading the Pentagon as Mattis’s acting successor, the challenge from House Democrats poses an important early test of how compliant he will be with Congress. Mattis, who fell out of favor with Trump and ultimately resigned once the president announced that he would withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, had long been viewed as a climate change realist in a Cabinet of deniers and skeptics. Shanahan, whose background had been in weapons acquisition and management as a career executive at Boeing, arrived at the Pentagon as deputy secretary without a history of making his public policy views explicit.

But in the months since he entered government as the No. 2 to Mattis, climate change has risen on the military’s agenda. The recently released annual worldwide threat assessment from the intelligence community even listed global warming as a menace to “low-lying military bases.” The Democrats’ request for a new report can potentially put Shanahan at loggerheads with Congress, which confirmed him as deputy secretary with wide bipartisan support, and Trump, who has indicated that Shanahan could remain acting secretary indefinitely. (A spokesperson for Shanahan was not immediately available for comment.)

Since the early days of the Trump administration, the Pentagon has quietly but firmly adopted a more proactive approach toward climate change in some areas. After years of degradation to shipyards in Virginia, Hawaii, Maine, and other states, the Navy submitted a $21 billion infrastructure plan last year to clear a backlog of maintenance work. Military leaders have also grown more assertive in confronting the possibility of security threats from Russia and China in a warmer Arctic. In the past, reports from the Pentagon and the independent Government Accountability Office have even catalogued the threat to hundreds of installations in the United States and abroad. But the reluctance some officials have shown toward openly contradicting their commander in chief has compromised lawmakers’ confidence in DOD’s willingness to seriously confront the security implications of a warming planet.

Read the complete letter here.

Link to original: 

House Democrats just told the Pentagon to redo its climate change report

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on House Democrats just told the Pentagon to redo its climate change report

School strikes over climate change continue to snowball

by reenokabeeno2005 Posted on January 26, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The 16-year-old activist behind the fast-growing School Strikes 4 Climate Action has taken her campaign to the streets of Davos, to confront world leaders and business chiefs about the global emissions crisis.

Greta Thunberg, whose solo protest outside Sweden’s parliament has snowballed across the globe, will join a strike by Swiss school children in the ski resort on Friday — the final day of the World Economic Forum.

Thunberg traveled by train for 32 hours to reach Davos, and spent Wednesday night camped with climate scientists on the mountain slopes — where temperatures plunged to -18 degrees C (-0.4 degrees F).

Having already addressed the U.N. Climate Change COP 24 conference, Thunberg is rapidly becoming the voice for a generation who are demanding urgent action to slow the rise in global temperatures.

As she traveled down Davos’s funicular railway from the Arctic Base Camp — while more than 30,000 students were striking in Belgium — Thunberg said the rapid growth of her movement was “incredible.”

“There have been climate strikes, involving students and also adults, on every continent except Antarctica. It has involved tens of thousands of children.”

Thunberg started her protest by striking for three weeks outside the Swedish parliament, lobbying MPs to comply with the Paris Agreement. After the Swedish election, she continued to strike every Friday, where she is now joined by hundreds of people.

“This Friday I can’t be there,” she told the Guardian. “So I will have to do it here in Davos, and send a message that this is the only thing that matters.”

Students around the world have been inspired by Thunberg, with thousands skipping school in Australia in November. Last Friday there were strikes in Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland, where more than 20,000 students skipped school.

Missing gym class, geography, and religion each Friday is something of a sacrifice for Thunberg, who says she loves school and can’t pick a favorite subject.

“I like all subjects. I love learning, which people maybe don’t think about me.”

She’s also been forced to give up her hobbies, as climate change activism has taken more of her time. “I used to play theatre, sing, dance, play an instrument, ride horses, lots of things.”

She’s sanguine, though, pointing out that climate activism is much more important: “You have to see the bigger perspective.”

Thunberg said she would like more students to join her strike. “That would have a huge impact, but I’m not going to force anyone to do this.”

In the U.K., only a small number of students have so far begun strikes, including 13-year-old Holly Gillibrand in Fort William. But plans are now being made for a big strike on February 15. Thunberg predicts there will be protests in many locations.

She believes parents should be supportive if their children tell them they’re striking on Friday. “Everyone keeps saying that the young people should be more active, and they’re so lazy, but once we do something we get criticized.”

The world’s scientists warned in October that, without a dramatic ramping up of action to cut emissions, global temperatures would rise by more than 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels, with severe consequences for humanity.

Thunberg believes the older generations need to acknowledge that they have failed to protect the environment.

“We need to hold the older generations accountable for the mess they have created, and expect us to live with. It is not fair that we have to pay for what they have caused,” she says.

Thunberg has also called on business leaders and politicians to commit to “real and bold climate action,” and focus on the “future living conditions of mankind” rather than economic goals and profits.

In a video address for leaders attending Davos, she says: “I ask you to stand on the right side of history. I ask you to pledge to do everything in your power to push your own business or government in line with a 1.5 C world.”

Thunberg has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, which she believes helps her see the problem of climate change clearly.

“My brain works a bit different and so I see things in black and white. Either we start a chain reaction with events beyond our control, or we don’t. Either we stop the emissions or we don’t. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival.”

The school strikes last Friday were by far the biggest to date. In Germany, an estimated 30,000 students left their schools in more than 50 cities to protest, carrying banners including: “Why learn without a future?” and “Grandpa, what is a snowman?” One 17-year-old student in Kiel, Moritz, told Deutsche Welle: “We want to help shape and secure our future so that there will be another world for us to live in in 60 years.”

In Belgium, 12,500 students went on strike last Thursday and plan to strike weekly until the E.U. elections in May. Some teachers were tolerant of the truancy. Patrick Lancksweerdt, in Brussels, said: “Education has to turn youngsters into mature citizens. By their actions, they proved that they are.”

School strikes also took place in 15 cities and towns in Switzerland. In Geneva, 12-year-old Selma Joly said: “Frankly, I would rather demand climate action than go to school. Otherwise, years from now, we may no longer be here.”

Janine O’Keeffe, who helps coordinate and keep track of the school strikes from her home in Stockholm, Sweden, was surprised at the scale of last week’s actions: “I am still in shock, actually — a nice kind of shock.”

Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace, says youth activism on climate change gives her hope. “The 15-year-olds just speak truth to power.”

More – 

School strikes over climate change continue to snowball

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Casio, Citizen, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on School strikes over climate change continue to snowball

Why Detroit residents pushed back against tree-planting

by GlennLance Posted on January 14, 2019

Subscribe to The Beacon

This story was originally published by CityLab and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A landmark report conducted by University of Michigan environmental sociologist Dorceta Taylor in 2014 warned of the “arrogance” of white environmentalists when they introduce green initiatives to black and brown communities. One black environmental professional Taylor interviewed for the report, Elliot Payne, described experiences where green groups “presumed to know what’s best” for communities of color without including them in the decision-making and planning processes.

“I think a lot of the times it stems from the approach of oh we just go out and offer tree plantings or engaging in an outdoor activity, and if we just reach out to them they will come,” Payne told Taylor.

In fact, this is exactly what was happening in Detroit at the time that Taylor’s report came out. In 2014, the city was a few years deep into a campaign to reforest its streets after decades of neglecting to maintain its depleted tree canopy. A local environmental nonprofit called The Greening of Detroit was the city’s official partner for carrying out that reforesting task, which it had started doing on its own when it was founded in 1989. By 2014, TGD had received additional funding to ramp up its tree-planting services to the tune of 1,000 to 5,000 new trees per year. To meet that goal, it had to penetrate neighborhoods somewhat more aggressively than it had in the past and win more buy-in from the residents.

The tree-planters met stiff resistance: Roughly a quarter of the 7,500 residents they approached declined offers to have new trees planted in front of their homes. It was a high enough volume of rejections for such an otherwise valuable service that University of Vermont researcher Christine E. Carmichael wanted to know the reasons behind it.

She obtained data that TGD collected on the people who turned them down, and then visited Detroit to interview staff members and residents. What she found is that the rejections had more to do with how the tree-planters presented themselves and residents’ distrust of city government than it did with how residents felt about trees. Carmichael’s findings (with co-author Maureen H. McDonough) were published last week in the journal Society and Natural Resources.

The residents Carmichael surveyed understood the benefits of having trees in urban environments — they provide shade and cooling, absorb air pollution, especially from traffic, increase property values, and improve health outcomes. But the reasons Detroit folks were submitting “no tree requests” were rooted in how they have historically interpreted their lived experiences in the city, or what Carmichael calls “heritage narratives.”

These are the stories that people from all walks of Detroit life tell themselves and each other about why city conditions are the way they are. The heritage narratives that residents shared about trees in Detroit were different from the ones shared among the people in city government and TGD.

A couple of African-American women Carmichael talked to linked the tree-planting program to a painful racist moment in Detroit’s history, right after the 1967 race rebellion, when the city suddenly began cutting down elm trees in bulk in their neighborhoods. The city did this, as the women understood it, so that law enforcement and intelligence agents could better surveil their neighborhoods from helicopters and other high places after the urban uprising.

The city was chopping down trees at a faster clip at this time. And the city was flying helicopters over their homes at one point — to spray toxic DDT from above on the trees. However, the government’s stated reason for the mass tree-choppings was that the trees were dying off from the Dutch elm disease then spreading across the country. These were competing heritage narratives of the same event — the clearing away of trees in the 1960s. The two narratives are in conflict, but it was the women’s version, based on their lived experiences, that led to their decision to reject the trees today. It’s not that they didn’t trust the trees; they didn’t trust the city.

“In this case, the women felt that [after the race rebellion] the city just came in and cut down their trees, and now they want to just come in planting trees,” Carmichael said. “But they felt they should have a choice in this since they’ll be the ones caring for the trees and raking up the leaves when the planters leave. They felt that the decisions regarding whether to cut down trees or plant new ones were being made by someone else, and they were going to have to deal with the consequences.”

There was distrust not only of the city, but of the tree planters as well, particularly considering how TGD staff stepped to the people in the communities they were plotting on. The Greening of Detroit had 50,000 volunteers (during that 2011-2014 time period), most of them white and not from Detroit. The organization had just one community-outreach person on staff. And that outreach apparently did not include involving neighborhood residents in the planning of this urban-forestry program.

“City residents could request a tree planting in their neighborhood from TGD, but TGD’s green infrastructure staff decided in which neighborhoods to plant trees, as well as tree species to plant and tree maintenance protocols,” reads the paper. “TGD’s green infrastructure staff members committed to maintaining trees for three years after planting, which residents were informed of through door hangers and at community meetings, if they attended such meetings.”

Failing to meaningfully involve the residents in the decision-making is a classic environmental justice no-no. However, from reading excerpts of Carmichael’s interviews with TGD staff members, it’s clear some of the tree planters thought they were doing these communities an environmental justice solid. After all, who would turn down a free tree on their property, given all of the health and economic benefits that service affords? Perhaps these people just don’t get it. 

Always free, always fresh.

 
Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy

As one staff member told Carmichael in the study: “You’re dealing with a generation that has not been used to having trees, the people who remember the elms are getting older and older. Now we’ve got generations of people that have grown up without trees on their street, they don’t even know what they’re missing.”

However, environmental justice is not just about the distribution of bad stuff, like pollution, or good stuff, like forestry projects across disadvantaged communities. It’s also about the distribution of power among communities that have historically only been the subjects and experiments of power structures.

In 2014, Detroit had an African-American population of 83 percent, and the highest rate of concentrated poverty among the top 25 metros in the U.S., according to the Brookings Institution. This forestry project was ramping up right as the city was in the throes of bankruptcy. These residents may have had different priorities in mind than those carried by the tree-planters who came knocking. Race and class matters in urban greening agendas, as the City of Houston once learned when it failed to survey non-white, lower-income residents for the creation of its parks master plan in 2014.

One Detroit resident whom Carmichael interviewed for her study told her: “You know what, I really appreciate you today because that shows that someone is listening and someone is trying to find out what’s really going on in our thoughts, the way we feel, and I just appreciate you guys. And maybe next time they can do a survey and ask us, if they would like to have us have the trees.”

Monica Tabares, TGD’s vice president of operations and development, said the organization always had a community-engagement process, but other factors complicated their interactions with residents, such as the city’s poor record of tree maintenance.

“Our capacity to fulfill every community partner’s needs was in hindsight a bit more difficult to achieve, and that resulted in some impressions among some individuals about not feeling the inclusion,” Tabares said. “Also, the city itself didn’t have the capacity to bring down dead trees, nor to prune trees, plus the fact that we were now replanting trees in some really decimated areas with no tree canopy. It left people questioning whether they were going to be taken care of. It just didn’t jibe right with all of our resident partners.”

Since talking with Carmichael and learning her study’s findings, Tabares says TGD has made several changes to its program, adding more material involvement of residents in the tree-planting and planning process. The organization now also has four community-engagement members on staff, all of whom live in the city of Detroit, which Tabares said has encouraged more trust from the residents.

“Having people come in and not be from the city and then dictate what goes on — not that we ever did that — but that’s the feeling. So we want people to feel comfortable with our engagement team that’s talking about the benefits of trees,” Tabares said.

The lessons learned from the study are immediately important, given that environmental organizations often partner with cities for these kinds of services. This is especially true when local governments don’t have the funding to do it (as happened in Detroit) or when the federal government shuts down (what’s happening now). Having diverse staffs that reflect the city’s neighborhoods and understand the heritage narratives that run through them matters.

“Heritage narratives are important because they guide actions that are taken,” Carmichael said. “A nonprofit might say tree-canopy decline can be used to justify their approach to educating residents, because there are people who don’t understand the value of trees. But everyone I interviewed understood those benefits, so it’s inaccurate to say that. Ultimately, the feeling was that they were being disenfranchised.”

Continue reading:

Why Detroit residents pushed back against tree-planting

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, Landmark, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Detroit residents pushed back against tree-planting

Trump’s EPA isn’t so tough on law-breaking polluters

by EnriqueBarrier Posted on January 1, 2019

Invest in nonprofit journalism today.Donate now and every gift will be matched through 12/31.

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Under the Trump administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is more likely to give polluters a pass when they violate laws intended to keep the air healthy and water clean, according to recent reporting by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, a watchdog group.

By analyzing public data and interviewing past and current EPA employees, EDGI documented notable declines in agency law enforcement this year, particularly in EPA Region 8, which includes Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, and 27 Indigenous nations. According to an internal EPA report, by mid-year, Region 8 had opened 53 percent fewer enforcement cases in 2018 than in 2017. And it concluded only 53 civil cases in 2018, less than half the number in any year since at least 2006. Nationally, EDGI found a 38 percent drop in the number of orders requiring polluters to comply with the law, and a 50 percent drop in the number of fines.

EDGI’s analyses are based on provisional numbers, which the EPA routinely cleans up at the end of each year, so the exact figures could change when the agency’s annual enforcement report is released. Still, EDGI expects the general trend to hold.

“It’s another iteration of EPA’s industry-friendly approach,” said EDGI member Marianne Sullivan, a public health expert at William Paterson University. “It says we’re prioritizing industry’s needs and desires over the health of our environment and the health of our communities.”

In the short term, dialing back enforcement could be a particularly effective way to relieve industry of the burdens of environmental protections. President Trump’s EPA appointees have tried to formally roll back regulations, such as the Clean Power Plan and a rule safeguarding water from toxic coal ash. But it’s a slow and public process that invites lawsuits. Simply declining to enforce the law, however, can subtly accomplish the same thing, because it happens largely out of public view, and EPA administrators have wide discretion over it.

EPA officials deny ignoring violations of the law. “There has been no retreat from working with states, communities, and regulated entities to ensure compliance with our environmental laws,” spokesperson Maggie Sauerhage wrote in an email. “Focusing only on the number of federal lawsuits filed or the amount of penalties collected fails to capture the full range of compliance tools we use.”

Still, the agency acknowledges a shift in focus from “enforcement” to “compliance.” That means it’s likely to work less as a cop than an adviser with the companies it regulates, an approach critics say could incentivize companies to cut corners.

“Focusing on compliance instead of enforcement is a way of saying, ‘We might make people get back into compliance, but we’re resistant to the idea of punishment,’” explained David Janik, an attorney who managed Region 8’s legal enforcement program until 2011. But punishment helps you achieve compliance, Janik added. It deters polluters from spoiling the air and water in the first place, just as traffic tickets make drivers think twice about speeding. “If I go 90 and I get caught, I’m paying $200 for punishment,” he said. “If one chemical company has a big case and they pay $40 million to settle it, other companies will say, ‘Maybe I should hire another guy to make sure we don’t slip into noncompliance.’”

In some cases, lackluster enforcement since Trump took office appears to have been a boon to corporate pocketbooks, while the environmental benefits remain murky. Consider the difference in how a series of oil and gas cases were handled under President Barack Obama.

In 2015, the EPA and the state of Colorado jointly entered into a landmark settlement agreement with Noble Energy covering thousands of gas storage tanks that were leaking volatile organic compounds. VOCs are part of the toxic soup that contributes to smog levels on Colorado’s Front Range that exceed federal limits, exacerbating asthma and other respiratory diseases.

The settlement required Noble to pay a nearly $5 million fine, spend $60 million to reduce VOC emissions, and report its progress to the public. Two parallel cases resulted in smaller, but still substantial costs to companies in Colorado and North Dakota.

But under [former] EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, three similar cases came with remarkably cushier terms, according to the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project. In all three, the EPA declined to assess fines for the violations at all. And it’s unclear what, if anything, the companies were required to do to fix the problems. The companies were all Oklahoma-based, raising questions of favoritism from Pruitt, a pro-oil-and-gas Oklahoman.

The Noble case was part of an Obama-era National Enforcement Initiatives program focused on air pollution from oil and gas drilling. National initiatives historically targeted problems particular to certain industries and they’re where big enforcement cases were often made. But in August, Susan Bodine, EPA’s current head of enforcement, announced that the program was being renamed “National Compliance Initiatives,” and that the agency would discontinue the campaign on oil and gas in 2019, a move industry pushed for.

“It’s really about who’s going to benefit,” Sullivan said. “If industry doesn’t have to capture as much pollution, that may be good for their bottom line. But it puts the burden on the public. You can’t pollute for free. Either industry pays to capture it, or people pay with their health.”

Support nonprofit journalism

. Help us raise $50,000 by December 31! Only a few hours remaining.

Donate now and all gifts will be matched

.

Continued here: 

Trump’s EPA isn’t so tough on law-breaking polluters

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, organic, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump’s EPA isn’t so tough on law-breaking polluters

We need to talk about palm oil

by QDGSilviap Posted on December 31, 2018

Invest in nonprofit journalism today.Donate now and every gift will be matched through 12/31.

This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

We wash our hair with it, brush our teeth with it, smother our skin in it, and use it to powder our cheeks, plump our lashes, and color our lips. We clean our houses with it, fuel our cars with it, and eat it in chocolate, bread, ice cream, pizza, breakfast cereal, and candy bars.

Palm oil: You may never have walked into a supermarket with it written on your shopping list, but you’ve certainly walked out with bags full of it.

An extremely versatile ingredient that’s cheaper and more efficient to produce than other vegetable oils, palm oil is found today in half of all consumer goods including soaps and toothpaste, cosmetics and laundry detergent, and a whole array of processed food. Palm oil is also found in biodiesel used to power cars (more than 50 percent of the European Union’s palm oil consumption in 2017 reportedly went to this purpose).

Our modern lives are inextricably intertwined with the commodity, which can appear on ingredient labels under a myriad of alternative names including sodium lauryl sulphate, stearic acid, and palmitate. But activists warn that our insatiable demand for palm oil has fueled one of the most pressing environmental and humanitarian crises of our time.

The equivalent of 300 football fields of rainforest is destroyed every hour to make way for palm oil plantations, according to the Orangutan Project. This rampant deforestation — which has occurred in some of the world’s most biodiverse hot spots, mostly in Indonesia and Malaysia — has decimated the habitat of endangered species like orangutans and Sumatran tigers, displaced indigenous communities, contributed to a regional smog problem linked to tens of thousands of premature deaths, and is a significant driver of climate change.

Last month, palm oil and its impacts became the story of the hour when the U.K. banned a stirring ad about the commodity from TV broadcast. The ad, which featured an animated orphaned orangutan and was released by British grocery store Iceland, was deemed too political for television. The ban triggered a flurry of interest and outrage worldwide.

“There’s been a huge spike in awareness about palm oil because of the Iceland ad,” said conservationist and Mongabay.com founder Rhett Butler, who’s been monitoring trends in the palm oil industry for years. “It was quite astonishing actually. It seems like global interest in this issue is at an all-time high.”

But this spotlight on palm oil has revealed a troubling stagnation of the industry’s progress in tackling the environmental and human rights issues that have dogged it for years.

On the surface, significant progress appears to have been made since the early 2010s: Public awareness of the palm oil crisis has significantly increased; some of the world’s largest producers and buyers of palm oil have made very public and very lofty sustainability and human rights commitments; and governments — notably Indonesia’s — have vowed to do more to protect the people, species, and habitats exploited by the palm oil industry.

Yet, in spite of all this, “unfortunately from an environmental perspective, not a lot has changed,” Butler said.

Deforestation is still occurring at an alarming rate in Indonesia and Malaysia, which supply about 85 percent of the world’s palm oil. A September Greenpeace investigation found that more than 500 square miles of rainforest — about the size of Los Angeles — had been cleared in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the neighboring nation of Papua New Guinea for palm oil production since the end of 2015.

According to the Greenpeace report, 12 of the world’s largest brands including Nestle, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Colgate-Palmolive, PepsiCo, and Unilever continue to source palm oil from producers and growers that were found to be “actively clearing rainforests” — despite the “zero-deforestation” commitments that these companies have made in recent years.

“We’re consuming their products on a daily basis,” said Annisa Rahmawati of Greenpeace Indonesia, according to Mongabay.com. “So we’re … indirectly [participating in these] deforestation and human rights violations.”

Some companies including Unilever and Nestle responded to the Greenpeace report by reiterating their sustainability commitments. “Our ambition is that by the end of 2020 all of the palm oil that we use is responsibly sourced,” Nestle said on its website.

“Greenpeace rightfully addresses serious and systematic issues that we know are fundamentally broken in the palm oil supply chain,” Unilever noted in a statement, adding that the company is “actively driving change in both our own operations and across the industry.”

This summer, Wilmar International, the world’s largest palm oil trader, was embroiled in controversy after its billionaire co-founder Martua Sitoris was accused of running a “shadow company” with his brother that had cleared an area of rainforest twice the size of Paris since 2013 — the same year that Wilmar had promised to work toward “no deforestation” and “no exploitation” in its supply chain.

Sitoris was forced to resign in the wake of the allegations, and Wilmar — which controls almost half of the world’s trade in palm oil — vowed this month to strengthen its sustainability policy.

“Wilmar’s [scandal] makes abundantly clear that these companies cannot be trusted to police themselves,” said Tomasz Johnson, head of research at Earthsight and founder of The Gecko Project, speaking from London last week.

Emma Lierley, forest policy director at the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), echoed this sentiment. “The same problems are still happening in this industry,” she said. “Deforestation is continuing, threatened species are still being put at risk, and there’s evidence that labor abuse including child labor and forced labor are still commonplace across plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia — and all of this is happening despite corporate policy changes.”

“Corporate policy is all well and good but it has to be worth the paper it’s written on,” Lierley added. “We’re just not seeing that real change taking place.”

And the clock, she warned, is ominously ticking: The palm oil industry is causing potentially irreparable damage to the planet — and its climate — and if we don’t take prompt and comprehensive action, the outcome could be catastrophic.

“What a lot of people don’t realize is how much of an impact palm oil has on our future climate stability,” Lierley said.

Palm oil cultivation is currently conducted disproportionately in high-carbon areas like tropical forests and carbon-rich peatlands. When these areas are deforested to make way for plantations, enormous volumes of climate-warming gases are released into the atmosphere.

It’s estimated that tropical deforestation is responsible for between 15 and 20 percent of global warming emissions — more than the emissions from cars and other forms of transportation.

Indonesia’s peatlands alone now release more than 500 megatons of carbon dioxide every year — an amount greater than California’s entire annual emissions, The New York Times reported in November. And the deforestation of Borneo, an island shared by Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei, has contributed to “the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two millenniums,” the paper said, citing NASA research.

Palm oil plantations are the main driver of deforestation on Borneo, which has lost more than 16,000 square miles of ancient rainforest — and critical habitat for a wide variety of creatures — because of the commodity. Almost 150,000 critically endangered Bornean orangutans were killed between 1999 and 2015, partly because of palm oil.

“Scientists have warned us that we have just 12 years to avert the worst effects of climate change,” Lierley said, referring to a grim United Nations report released in October. “The stakes are incredibly high. A lot of people are trying to pass the buck in the palm oil industry, but we need to see really bold action from companies all along the supply chain, as well as government actors and other institutions.”

This is particularly pressing given the expected ballooning of demand for palm oil in the coming years. The Center for International Forestry Research estimates that world consumption of palm oil will increase by 62 percent in a “medium growth scenario” and 94 percent in a “high demand scenario.” Other countries, particularly in Africa, are expected to see a boom in palm oil production to meet this growing demand.

Johnson, who for years has been investigating corruption in the palm oil industry, warned that the same broken agri-industrial model of palm oil production in Indonesia and Malaysia is already being replicated in parts of Africa.

“The same palm oil companies that have been operating in Indonesia have announced plans in recent years to do the same” in countries like Liberia and Uganda, said Johnson. “And you could just see the disaster slowly unfolding.”

Companies like Wilmar and the Malaysian conglomerate Sime Darby have been granted enormous concessions, or cultivation areas, for palm oil in these countries — and reports have already emerged of deforestation and land-grab issues.

“Many of these countries are fragile, post-war states,” said Johnson of the African nations where the palm oil industry has been steadily encroaching. “If these [companies] aren’t even following the rules properly in Indonesia,” where President Joko Widodo has taken steps to crack down on conflict palm oil, “what’s the chance they’ll do things better in these fragile states?”

The problems with palm oil may feel complex and entrenched, but activists insist that solutions are within reach.

Though reducing consumption of palm oil could be a positive step, boycotting the commodity entirely doesn’t appear to be the answer. Producing alternative vegetable oils like soybean would have similar, or even worse, environmental impacts, Lierley noted.

“It’s not palm oil itself that’s the problem,” she said. “It’s the way it’s produced.”

And that, activists say, is what needs to change.

Consumers should push companies to be more transparent about where their palm oil is coming from, said Mongabay.com’s Butler.

“Look at the ingredient lists on the things that you are buying and figure out what products actually contain palm oil,” he said. “Then contact the company and ask them what their palm oil policy is. It doesn’t actually require that much feedback from consumers to send a strong message to a company.”

Companies, in turn, need to be more transparent about their practices, Johnson said.

“If they want to be trusted, they need to put everything on the table, they need to be as transparent as humanly possible and people need to be watching them closely. If not, we’re just going to see more ‘zero deforestation’ companies buying from dodgy suppliers,” he said.

Consumers can use their dollars to support companies that have made — and fulfilled — sustainability commitments. The “bare minimum,” said Butler, is to choose companies and brands that are certified by the RSPO, or the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.

The RSPO, which is the world’s leading certification body for sustainably sourced palm oil, has been widely criticized in the past for not setting high enough standards for its members and for inadequately enforcing its rules. Last month, however, the group significantly strengthened its criteria — a move lauded by activists.

WWF, RAN, and the Union of Concerned Scientists have palm oil scorecards that track how some of the world’s biggest companies and brands are faring when it comes to sustainable palm oil.

“Companies often say it’s a lack of resources or lack of information that make it difficult for them to fulfill their sustainability commitments. But if a small nonprofit like RAN can identify labor abuses, deforestation, and land-grab issues, there’s no reason why a huge multinational can’t do it too,” Lierley said.

“It’s not an impossible problem,” she continued. “It’s a matter of willpower.”

Dig this article?Support nonprofit journalism

. Help us raise $50,000 by December 31! A little bit goes a long way.

Donate today and your gift will be matched

.

Excerpt from: 

We need to talk about palm oil

Posted in alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, Landmark, LG, ONA, Paradise, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on We need to talk about palm oil