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Donald Trump Is "Not a Big Believer" in Climate Change

by JanellTakasuka4 Posted on March 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Monday the Washington Post editorial board published a full transcript of its meeting with Donald Trump. It’s worth reading in full, if only because reading Trump’s unedited words, as opposed to hearing them spoken out loud, is an especially mind-blowing tour-de-force of nonsense. In response to the very earnest series of questions posed by WaPo editors, Trump offers little-to-nothing of any substance. In many cases, he just immediately changed the subject rather than respond to the actual questions.

One exception, where he actually did answer to the question asked of him, was the following exchange about climate change. As he has made clear many times before, he is a strident denier of climate science—or, as he puts it, “not a big believer,” as though accepting the premise that greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels warms the planet requires some sort of leap of faith. It doesn’t.

Naturally, Trump also doesn’t view climate change as a national security threat. It is.

Sad!

HIATT: Last one: You think climate change is a real thing? Is there human-caused climate change?

TRUMP: I think there’s a change in weather. I am not a great believer in man-made climate change. I’m not a great believer. There is certainly a change in weather that goes—if you look, they had global cooling in the 1920s and now they have global warming, although now they don’t know if they have global warming. They call it all sorts of different things; now they’re using “extreme weather” I guess more than any other phrase. I am not—I know it hurts me with this room, and I know it’s probably a killer with this room—but I am not a believer. Perhaps there’s a minor effect, but I’m not a big believer in man-made climate change.

STROMBERG: Don’t good businessmen hedge against risks, not ignore them?

TRUMP: Well I just think we have much bigger risks. I mean I think we have militarily tremendous risks. I think we’re in tremendous peril. I think our biggest form of climate change we should worry about is nuclear weapons. The biggest risk to the world, to me—I know President Obama thought it was climate change—to me the biggest risk is nuclear weapons. That’s—that is climate change. That is a disaster, and we don’t even know where the nuclear weapons are right now. We don’t know who has them. We don’t know who’s trying to get them. The biggest risk for this world and this country is nuclear weapons, the power of nuclear weapons.

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Donald Trump Is "Not a Big Believer" in Climate Change

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Clinton Says She’ll "Put a Lot of Coal Companies and Coal Miners Out of Business"

by DRXBenkzwfn Posted on March 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Just one day after Hillary Clinton issued a lengthy apology for a controversial comment she made about Nancy Reagan’s contribution to the fight against AIDS, the Democratic front-runner made another unforced error during a CNN town hall event on Sunday night.

Speaking in Ohio about her plans to revitalize coal country, Clinton said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business.” That comment was immediately preceded by a promise to invest in the clean-energy economy in those places, and immediately followed by a pledge to “make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people.” But it’s not hard to guess which comment will end up as a sound bite in attack ads in coal states during the general election.

Clinton’s statement likely referred to her support for President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the cornerstone of his climate policy, which will require states to reduce their coal consumption in favor of natural gas, renewables, and energy efficiency. It garnered a quick rebuttal from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

Obama’s climate regulations have little to do with the coal industry’s decline over the last decade. For one thing, they are currently held up in court, and they wouldn’t take effect for several years anyway. More important, coal is getting hammered by competition from natural gas made cheap by fracking, as well as the exploding solar and wind industries. In the last town hall, Clinton said that under her administration, “I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place.” Since a widespread decline in gas consumption would most likely lead to an increase in coal consumption, it’s possible that Clinton’s energy policy could be just the opposite of the “war on coal” Paul describes.

Although Bernie Sanders is also a vociferous proponent of clean energy, Clinton is so far the only candidate in the race to produce a specific plan for supporting coal communities affected by the transition to a cleaner energy economy. Still, Sanders appears to be crushing Clinton in coal states that have had primaries so far. So it probably doesn’t serve her campaign well to remind people that for a small number of communities, the fight against climate change could mean the end of a traditionally important field of employment.

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Clinton Says She’ll "Put a Lot of Coal Companies and Coal Miners Out of Business"

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China Slashes Coal Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions for the Second Year in a Row

by Claudia58Q Posted on February 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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China is continuing to drag itself off coal—the dirty energy source that has made it the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter. Figures published Sunday night by China’s National Bureau of Statistics showed coal consumption dropping 3.7 percent in 2015, marking the second year in a row that the country has slashed coal use and greenhouse gas emissions.

To put that in perspective, Greenpeace East Asia says China’s drop in coal use over the past two years is equal to Japan’s total annual coal consumption—a trend the environmental group says could “far surpass” China’s commitments enshrined in the Paris climate deal reached in December. Last year, China’s carbon emissions dropped 1-2 percent, Greenpeace says, a decline the group attributes to both falling economic output from China’s heavy industries and an upswing in renewable energy use. China is widely expected to meet or surpass its goal of “peaking” emissions (the point at which the country begins to permanently reduce its greenhouse gas emissions) by 2030.

But the shift away from coal will also hit the country’s workers hard: The government plans to slash 1.8 million jobs in the steel and coal industries—about 15 percent of the workforce in those sectors, according to Reuters. The government says it has a $15.27 billion plan over 10 years to relocate these workers.

Today’s news follows China’s promise of a three-year moratorium on all new coal mines. The country also plans to shutter 1,000 existing coal mines this year alone, with deeper cuts to come. All of this has been accompanied by massive investments in wind and solar that have made the country’s renewable energy firms world-leaders in clean power.

But with China—the world’s second largest economy—there is always a disclaimer. It’s right to be skeptical of official economic and energy statistics coming from China, which some experts say can be subject to political pressure.

Still, there are some undeniable signs of progress. The last major coal-fired power station in Beijing is expected to close this year, welcome news to residents of a city that is frequently blanketed in toxic smog.

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China Slashes Coal Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions for the Second Year in a Row

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Obama Wants to Raise Your Gas Prices to Pay for Trains

by XLCDevinca Posted on February 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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In his final State of the Union address last month, President Barack Obama promised to “change the way we manage our oil and coal resources, so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet.” A few days later, he followed through on the coal aspect of that pledge, with a plan to overhaul how coal mining leases are awarded on federal land. Now, he seems ready to roll out his plan for oil.

The president’s budget proposal for his last year in office, set to be released next week, will contain a provision to place a new tax on oil, White House aides told reporters. According to Politico:

The president will propose more than $300 billion worth of investments over the next decade in mass transit, high-speed rail, self-driving cars, and other transportation approaches designed to reduce carbon emissions and congestion. To pay for it all, Obama will call for a $10 “fee” on every barrel of oil, a surcharge that would be paid by oil companies but would presumably be passed along to consumers…The fee could add as much as 25 cents a gallon to the cost of gasoline.

The proposal stands virtually no chance of being adopted by Congress. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the renowned climate change denier who also chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement, “I’m unsure why the president bothers to continue to send a budget to Congress. His proposals are not serious, and this is another one which is dead on arrival.”

Still, the idea may be helped a little by the sustained drop in oil prices, driven by a glut of supply from the Middle East and record production in the United States. Gas is already selling for less than $2 per gallon in all but 11 states, the lowest price point since 2009. Raising that cost would also be a boon for electric vehicle sales, which have stagnated because of low gas prices as sales of gas guzzlers have climbed.

Obama’s prospective Democratic successors, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, haven’t weighed in on this proposal yet, although they have both been broadly supportive of his climate change agenda. But the proposal could prove to be awkward for Clinton, who has promised not to raise taxes on families making less than $250,000 a year.

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Obama Wants to Raise Your Gas Prices to Pay for Trains

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There Is a New Video Of Giant Panda Tian Tian Rolling Around In the Snow

by AndersonRapp Posted on January 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Awwwww! Look at it roll!

#TianTian is still rolling in the snow, but we’re still clearing it for visitors! The Zoo will be closed Jan. 26 while we continue to clear roadways and pathways for humans. #Blizzard2016

A video posted by Smithsonian’s National Zoo (@smithsonianzoo) on Jan 25, 2016 at 11:29am PST

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There Is a New Video Of Giant Panda Tian Tian Rolling Around In the Snow

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The Company Behind Keystone XL Now Wants $15 Billion From US Taxpayers

by LoreneTanaka453 Posted on January 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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In November, environmentalists were ecstatic when President Barack Obama decided not to grant a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. But TransCanada, the company behind the project, was not so happy. On Wednesday, it filed a lawsuit against the federal government seeking to overturn the permit rejection. At the same time, it gave notice that it plans to pursue compensation under the North American Free Trade Agreement, to the tune of $15 billion.

In its NAFTA complaint, TransCanada alleges that “the politically-driven denial of Keystone’s application was contrary to all precedent; inconsistent with any reasonable and expected application of the relevant rules and regulations; and arbitrary, discriminatory, and expropriatory.”

In other words, TransCanada thinks it got misled and ripped off by the Obama administration, just to satisfy a wacky cabal of treehuggers. Now, it wants the US Treasury to cough up an apology in cash.

NAFTA is a trade agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico meant to protect trade between those countries. One provision of the agreement, Chapter 11, allows a corporation in one country to sue the government of another country if it feels that country’s regulations unfairly discriminate against it. It’s a provision that has always been highly controversial with environmentalists, since it provides an avenue for corporations to contest another country’s environmental policies, as TransCanada is doing now.

That strategy is unlikely to succeed, according to David Wirth, a professor of international trade law at Boston College and a leading expert on international environmental disputes. Wirth said he actually used this very question—could TransCanada win a NAFTA case against the United States?—on a recent exam, and the answer was pretty clearly no. First off, although TransCanada claims to have spent around $3 billion preparing to build the Keystone XL pipeline, it’s not clear that this would actually count as an “investment” that was illegally taken from the Canadian company by the US administration.

“They knew that without the permit approval the project wouldn’t go forward,” Wirth said. “So any money spent in advance is purely speculative.”

Second, although the complaint claims that “environmental activists…turned opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline into a litmus test for politicians—including US President Barack Obama,” it’s not clear how that really constitutes a legal problem.

“The president, in making a decision in the national interest, has to weigh a variety of factors, including arguments of environmentalists,” Wirth said. “Just because there was political disagreement doesn’t mean the process was defective.”

But most importantly, Wirth said, TransCanada’s complaint doesn’t distinguish between a bureaucratic trade decision that treated a foreign company unfairly—the kind of action NAFTA is supposed to prevent—and a decision made by the president for the benefit of public health and the environment.

“The intent of NAFTA was not to require governments to pay every time they take an action that’s in the public interest,” Wirth said. “It’s very troubling if every time the president makes a decision in the interest of the people, he’s risking an enormous liability of this sort.”

The US has a good track record on NAFTA suits brought by foreign corporations, having lost just one of 14 since the agreement came into effect in 1994. Wirth said NAFTA tribunals have tended to set a pretty low bar for the minimum standard of treatment foreign companies should expect to receive. In other words, TransCanada would have to prove that it was treated exceptionally unjustly by the Obama administration, not just that it had a frustrating experience.

As for TransCanada’s federal lawsuit seeking to reverse Obama’s ruling, the odds for that aren’t great either, since US courts have previously found that cross-border pipelines really are the president’s decision to make, according to Reuters.

Sorry, TransCanada. Maybe try for the permit again in 2017 if a Republican wins the White House. Until then, you might be out of luck.

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The Company Behind Keystone XL Now Wants $15 Billion From US Taxpayers

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A Food Giant Wanted to Squash Eggless Mayo. It Just Lost.

by TammieHinds Posted on December 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the great mayo wars of 2015, there is finally a winner.

For those who haven’t been following the scandal-filled sandwich spread controversy, a bit of background: It all began in 2013, when the egg-alternative food startup company Hampton Creek launched a vegan mayonnaise-like product called Just Mayo, which soon became Whole Foods’ most popular mayonnaise.

Read our past coverage of the hackers trying to make fake eggs better. Ross MacDonald

So popular was Just Mayo, in fact, that in November 2014, Unilever, parent company of market leader Hellmann’s, sued Hampton Creek for false advertising and unfair competition. The food giant argued that Just Mayo, because it contained no eggs, “damages the entire product category, which has strived for decades for a consistent definition of ‘mayonnaise’ that fits with consumer expectations.” Unilever dropped the lawsuit about a month later “as consumers heaped scorn on the company for what they viewed as a frivolous lawsuit,” the food industry news site Food Dive reported.

Nevertheless, in August of this year the FDA ruled that Hampton Creek couldn’t call its product mayonnaise. “The use of the term ‘mayo’ in the product names and the image of an egg may be misleading to consumers because it may lead them to believe that the products are the standardized food, mayonnaise,” the FDA said in a statement.

Then, in September, internal emails from the American Egg Board surfaced. They showed that the industry group had tried to stop Whole Foods from selling Just Mayo—and that Egg Board members were really worked up over Hampton Creek. From the Guardian:

More than one member of the AEB made joking threats of violence against Hampton Creek’s founder, Josh Tetrick. “Can we pool our money and put a hit on him?” asked Mike Sencer, executive vice-president of AEB member organization Hidden Villa Ranch. Mitch Kanter, executive vice-president of the AEB, jokingly offered “to contact some of my old buddies in Brooklyn to pay Mr. Tetrick a visit.”

Egg Board CEO Joanne Ivy retired early in the wake of the episode.

While all that was going on, Hampton Creek was working with the FDA on a compromise, and today, the company announced that it will be allowed to keep the name Just Mayo, as long as it makes its eggless-ness even clearer on the product label. The AP’s Candice Choi reports:

The changes include making the words ‘egg-free’ larger and adding ‘Spread & Dressing.’ An image of an egg with a pea shoot inside will also be smaller.

Now, all this hoopla over a “spread and dressing” and its picture of a pea-shoot-bearing egg might seem ridiculous, but keep in mind that this business played out against the backdrop of a devastating avian flu outbreak that hobbled the egg industry. What’s more, in April two former egg industry executives were sentenced to jail time for their connection with a 2010 salmonella outbreak that is thought to have sickened as many as 56,000 people.

All those egg woes aside, there’s another reason behind egg purveyors’ massive freak-out: At least according to writer Rowan Jacobsen, unlike most other eggless mayonnaise products, Just Mayo actually tastes good.

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A Food Giant Wanted to Squash Eggless Mayo. It Just Lost.

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Shit Is About to Get Real in California, El Niño Report Predicts

by RefugioDurbin Posted on December 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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After four years of drought, Californians are bracing for another potentially destructive weather event: El Niño. Earlier this week, FEMA released a disaster plan including what to expect from the upcoming rainy season. Here are the key takeaways:

This may be the strongest El Niño on record. Weather reports indicate that this year will be warm and wet—perhaps even more so than the winter of 1997-1998, which is currently the strongest recorded El Niño. That year, California evacuated 100,000 people.
The dry conditions mean more flooding. The lack of soil moisture has made the soil “harden and act like cement,” making it, paradoxically, less likely to soak up the rain. The chance of flooding is far higher than usual, especially in the productive farm country of Central Valley and the surrounding area—including America’s the state’s capital. “The primary risk areas are in populated areas mostly notably in Sacramento,” the report reads—and because of that, “a major flood situation would have significant impact on the economic, cultural, and political life of California.” Additionally, a catastrophic levee failure in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta would jeopardize a major source of water for 60 percent of California homes and for a portion of the state’s agricultural industry.” One in five Californians lives in a flood zone.
Wildfires in the summer mean more landslides in the winter. The wildfire season this year was devastating in California, scorching more than 300,000 acres. Mudslides are common in these scorched areas, called “burn scars,” because water quickly runs off and there aren’t trees to keep the soil, rocks, and other debris in place. Southern Californians got a little taste of what this might look like when rain led to severe landslides in October.
King Tides, El Niño, and the Blob mean higher sea levels and more potential damage. Sea levels typically rise a few inches during El Niño, but this winter, scientists predict that the giant swath of warm water off the West Coast dubbed the Blob will lead to a rise of between 8 and 11 inches. State officials are particularly concerned about the potential damage caused by storms towards the end of both December and January, when the highest tides of the winter, called King Tides, are expected.
The rains may ease the drought, but won’t solve it. All this water will certainly ease the drought and raise levels in the state’s depleted reservoirs. But because the state is so behind on precipitation, it’s very unlikely that it will make up for the state’s now four-year water deficit.

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Shit Is About to Get Real in California, El Niño Report Predicts

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Jane Goodall Just Called Out Republicans on Climate Change

by EvelyneCuriel Posted on December 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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At the major climate summit in Paris on Monday, renowned conservationist Jane Goodall called for Republicans in Congress to back down from opposing an international agreement on climate change.

“Success at the Paris climate summit would be a binding agreement to limit carbon,” she said, in a briefing with reporters. But “a binding agreement isn’t much use unless it leads to actions and implementation. So there has to be a commitment to go back to your nation and follow through.”

Asked whether that will happen in the United States, Goodall said “it depends on who the next president is, doesn’t it?” All of the leading Republican presidential candidates—most recently (and colorfully) Chris Christie—have said they would walk back President Barack Obama’s climate agenda. Most of them reject mainstream climate science, as well. The Democratic candidates have all taken the opposite position, wanting to push action on climate change beyond what Obama has been able to achieve.

This week, diplomats from nearly every nation on Earth are huddled in Paris to finalize a sweeping global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change. Prior to the summit, Obama offered a commitment from the US to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by a third by 2025. That commitment is backed by regulations based on existing US law—the Clean Air Act—but the commitment itself is unlikely to be legally binding internationally. Last week in Paris, Obama said that other parts of the agreement should be binding, including a requirement that countries periodically revisit and possibly strengthen their carbon reduction targets.

But at the same time—back in Washington, DC—Republicans in Congress have taken steps to sabotage the Paris negotiations, passing legislation to block key parts of Obama’s climate agenda. (Those resolutions will almost certainly remain symbolic, as they face a guaranteed veto from the president.)

Obama’s statements notwithstanding, the US delegation in Paris could present obstacles to achieving a strong agreement as the talks move into their second and final week. One of the biggest issues on the table is international finance; i.e., how wealthy, high-polluting countries such the US should help pay for climate change adaptation and clean energy in vulnerable developing countries. As Ben Adler reported last week for Climate Desk partner Grist:

Presumably the Obama administration would like to offer more climate finance, but it cannot without congressional authorization. Asking Republicans for foreign aid to solve a problem they claim doesn’t even exist would be like asking them to pay for gay weddings. Instead, the Obama administration has to fight with Congress just to make sure the GOP doesn’t strip what little climate finance the US has pledged, around $500 million per year until 2020, from the budget.

To Goodall, who spent more than 50 years studying chimps in Tanzania, these lawmakers are letting short-term politics obscure the bigger picture. They need to “just sit down, and forget about politics,” she said. “Think about your children, and revisit your belief.”

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Jane Goodall Just Called Out Republicans on Climate Change

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France Scrambles to Secure Upcoming Climate Talks After Deadly Attacks

by EvanGenders Posted on November 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Saturday, just a day after terrorist attacks in Paris left at least 129 people dead and hundreds more injured, the French government vowed to forge ahead with a long-scheduled international summit on climate change.

The summit, which is scheduled to start in just two weeks, will take place at an airport in the northern suburbs of Paris, not far from the stadium that was the site of multiple bombings on Friday. There, world leaders plan to hash out final details of the most wide-reaching international agreement ever to combat climate change. White House officials confirmed to Politico that President Barack Obama still intends to attend the talks, as scheduled prior to the attacks. Dozens of other heads of state are expected to be there as well.

“The summit will go ahead with reinforced security measures,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said. “This is an absolutely necessary step in the battle against climate change and of course it will take place.”

Christiana Figueres, who chairs the UN agency overseeing the talks, released a similar statement on Twitter:

Even prior to the attacks, 30,000 French police officers were scheduled to secure the event, according to Radio France International. More than 10,000 diplomats, non-governmental organization employees, and journalists are expected to attend the summit. Specific new security measures have not yet been made public, but Politico quoted an unnamed French official who said participants should expect “extremely tightened security” following the attacks.

Paul Bledsoe, a former climate advisor to President Bill Clinton, also told Politico that the attacks could actually improve the odds that the talks reach a successful outcome.

“The resolve of world leaders is going to be redoubled to gain an agreement and show that they can deliver for populations around the world. The likelihood for a successful agreement has only increased because of these attacks,” Bledsoe said.

On Thursday, just a day before the attacks, Secretary of State John Kerry appeared to butt heads with his French counterpart over what the exact legal status of the agreement will be. Other questions remain as well, such as how wealthy, heavily polluting countries such as the United States will help developing nations pay for climate change adaptation. But overall, the Paris talks are expected to yield a better outcome than the last major climate summit, in Copenhagen in 2009, which failed to produce any meaningful action to curb greenhouse gas emissions or prepare for the impacts of global warming.

Meanwhile, on Monday French officials said they would block a series of rallies and side events that were scheduled to take place outside the main negotiations. Environmental groups are scrambling to work out how to change their plans following the attack. Several groups involved in organizing protests and rallies that were intended to coicide with the Paris talks confirmed to Mother Jones that a hastily arranged meeting to hash out a plan will take place on Monday evening, Paris time. Will Davies, a spokesman for Avaaz, one of the main advocacy groups involved, said that despite the flurry of activity, plans for global marches in cities other than Paris were still going ahead as scheduled.

Stay tuned for more updates on this story.

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France Scrambles to Secure Upcoming Climate Talks After Deadly Attacks

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