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Republicans are backing a ‘carbon dividend.’ What the heck is that?

by DesireeBleasdale Posted on June 21, 2018

Federal climate action may seem like a far-off prospect, but that’s not stopping a new group of climate hawks from launching a fresh campaign for a national carbon tax.

Here’s the real surprise: The proposal comes from Republicans, and it’s got the support of ExxonMobil and Shell.

The Baker-Shultz Carbon Dividends Plan, floated last year by the Climate Leadership Council, calls for taxing carbon emissions and returning the revenue as a “dividend” to everyday Americans. It’s named after James A. Baker III and George P. Shultz, two former secretaries of state and old-school Republican bigwigs.

And now this new bipartisan group, the Americans for Carbon Dividends, wants to push the plan through Congress someday — hopefully soon. The group is chaired by two former U.S. senators, Republican Trent Lott of Mississippi and Democrat John Breaux of Louisiana.

If you’re wondering what the heck a carbon dividend is, or why oil companies might be backing a carbon tax, we’ve got you covered.

The carbon dividend

The basic premise of a carbon dividend is to return 100 percent of the revenue raised from the tax to American households.

Other carbon fees would spend the money differently. To generalize, progressives prefer to invest the revenue in clean energy and climate mitigation. A coalition of new grassroots groups are pushing just this sort of policy in Washington state. Centrist and right-leaning climate-hawks, on the other hand, have called for a revenue-neutral plan that would return money to American citizens.

While Washington state’s proposed fee has an initial price of $15 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, the Baker-Shultz plan starts much higher, at $40 per ton. Under their proposal, the price would ramp up over time, taxing emissions from refineries, mines, wells, and ports.

To make up for higher energy costs, an average American family of four would receive about $2,000 from the program in the first year.

And then there’s cap-and-trade, which puts a limit on annual greenhouse gas emissions and either sells or gives companies permits to pollute. Although California and Northeastern states have figured out how to get regional cap-and-trade schemes in action, an attempt at a national cap-and-trade program failed almost 10 years ago — even with Democrats controlling both chambers of Congress. So…

Could a dividend be successful?

The carbon dividend has had prominent, eclectic backers, from James Hansen, a prominent NASA-official-turned-climate-advocate, to Bob Ingliss, a former Republican representative from South Carolina.

But there’s simply no good precedent. Like carbon taxes in general, it hasn’t been implemented in any state. And that can worry legislators who are considering it.

“It’s not going to happen overnight — we’ve been debating this for 30 years,” former Senator Lott tells the New York Times. But he says “the tide is turning.”

If a carbon dividend does manage to pass, experts are optimistic that it would be popular. In an interview earlier this year, Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said, “Once people have the experience of getting that check, there will be a huge constituency saying, ‘Don’t you dare touch my revenue.’”

Leiserowitz pointed to Alaska, where residents get a yearly cut of oil revenue from the Alaska Permanent Fund. It created the sort of popular demand that Leiserowitz thinks could make a carbon tax politically sustainable over the long term, protecting it from future politicians.

Of course, the end goal is to ditch fossil fuels. If the economy ever gets fully decarbonized, you won’t be getting a big check in the mail from the dividend program.

The trade-offs

And now we get to why Exxon and Shell might be a fan of the Baker-Shultz plan. Environmentalists will find some bits hard to swallow. For one, it would protect fossil fuel companies from future lawsuits to hold them accountable for climate change.

Baker-Shultz’s carbon tax would also replace the Clean Power Plan, which regulates pollution from coal- and gas-fired power plants. President Trump and Scott Pruitt have been trying to dismantle the Obama-era plan — but maybe Baker and Shultz could end up doing the work for them.

For its part, Americans for Carbon Dividends says their proposal would be better at reducing carbon emissions than all of Obama’s regulations combined.

That’s compromise for ya.

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Republicans are backing a ‘carbon dividend.’ What the heck is that?

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Don’t tell Trump, but meeting with North Korea could help environment

by DonnieConnah Posted on June 13, 2018

You might have heard that Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un had a strange, historic meeting this weekend in Singapore, leading pundits to furiously analyze a resulting joint statement for hints about the future of North Korean denuclearization and U.S. sanctions. But there was one overlooked issue that could have surprising consequences: the summit’s potential impact on the environment and climate change.

A thawing of relations between North Korea and the U.S. could open up opportunities for more research and environmental support. North Korea’s participation in the Paris climate agreement is at least partly due to a desire for access to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s agricultural and energy know-how. And the U.S. summit could mark the start of more ecological and technical exchange with the “hermit kingdom.”

“North Korea has a direct existential reason for wanting to address issues of environmental degradation,” says Benjamin Habib, lecturer in international relations at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Since the mid-1990s, North Korea has endured decades of drought, flooding, and deforestation, at times pushing people in the famine-vulnerable nation to starvation.

Due to poor agricultural techniques and limited sources of fuel — some trucks in the country actually run on wood — North Korea has lost over 25 percent of its forest cover. And in 2016 alone, flooding from Typhoon Lionrock displaced tens of thousands of its citizens.

After Syria’s entry into the Paris agreement in late 2017, the U.S. remains the only country on Earth not in the climate accord. Even North Korea — with its prison camps, rogue nuclear testing, and authoritarian propaganda — has pledged to reduce its CO2 emissions to support global climate goals. Last June, North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs critiqued Trump for backing out of the agreement, calling it a “silly decision.”

Habib argues that the fight against deforestation can serve as a less-politicized common interest for North Korea, South Korea, and the U.S. to unite behind. “The political window of opportunity is now open for environmental capacity-building in a way that it wasn’t before,” he says.

Of course, the future of U.S./North Korea diplomacy is far from certain, thanks to two wildly unpredictable leaders. And North Korea is sitting on more than 100 billion tons of coal. If sanctions are lifted, those reserves could be sold on the world market, with deleterious effects for the global climate. (China used to buy coal from North Korea but suspended those imports last year over the country’s nuclear testing.)

But still, a meeting between two historically narcissistic world leaders might net a positive effect on environmental outcomes? We’ll take what we can get, 2018.

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Don’t tell Trump, but meeting with North Korea could help environment

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Ruthless Tide – Al Roker

by Myrna Posted on May 22, 2018

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Ruthless Tide

The Heroes and Villains of the Johnstown Flood, America’s Astonishing Gilded Age Disaster

Al Roker

Genre: Nature

Price: $14.99

Expected Publish Date: May 22, 2018

Publisher: William Morrow

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


“Reads like a nail-biting thriller.” — Library Journal, starred review A gripping new history celebrating the remarkable heroes of the Johnstown Flood—the deadliest flood in U.S. history—from NBC host and legendary weather authority Al Roker Central Pennsylvania, May 31, 1889: After a deluge of rain—nearly a foot in less than twenty-four hours—swelled the Little Conemaugh River, panicked engineers watched helplessly as swiftly rising waters threatened to breach the South Fork dam, built to create a private lake for a fishing and hunting club that counted among its members Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Carnegie. Though the engineers telegraphed neighboring towns on this last morning in May warning of the impending danger, residents—factory workers and their families—remained in their homes, having grown used to false alarms. At 3:10 P.M., the dam gave way, releasing 20 million tons of water. Gathering speed as it flowed southwest, the deluge wiped out nearly everything in its path and picked up debris—trees, houses, animals—before reaching Johnstown, a vibrant steel town fourteen miles downstream. Traveling 40 miles an hour, with swells as high as 60 feet, the deadly floodwaters razed the mill town—home to 20,000 people—in minutes. The Great Flood, as it would come to be called, remains the deadliest in US history, killing more than 2,200 people and causing $17 million in damage. In Ruthless Tide, Al Roker follows an unforgettable cast of characters whose fates converged because of that tragic day, including John Parke, the engineer whose heroic efforts failed to save the dam; the robber barons whose fancy sport fishing resort was responsible for modifications that weakened the dam; and Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, who spent five months in Johnstown leading one of the first organized disaster relief efforts in the United States. Weaving together their stories and those of many ordinary citizens whose lives were forever altered by the event, Ruthless Tide is testament to the power of the human spirit in times of tragedy and also a timely warning about the dangers of greed, inequality, neglected infrastructure, and the ferocious, uncontrollable power of nature.

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Ruthless Tide – Al Roker

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California is turning farms into carbon-sucking factories

by EllenDMOYi Posted on May 11, 2018

In a grand experiment, California switched on a fleet of high-tech greenhouse gas removal machines last month. Funded by the state’s cap-and-trade program, they’re designed to reverse climate change by sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. These wonderfully complex machines are more high-tech than anything humans have designed. They’re called plants.

Seriously, though: Plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. They break open the tough CO2 molecule and use the carbon to build their leaves and roots. In the process, they deposit carbon into the ground. For years people have excitedly discussed the possibility of stashing carbon in the soil while growing food. Now, for the first time, California is using cap-and-trade money to pay farmers to do it on a large scale. It’s called the California Healthy Soils Initiative.

In April, trucks full of fertilizer trundled into Doug Lo’s almond orchards near Gustine, California, and spread composted manure around his trees. He then planted clover to cover the ground between the trunks. In theory, these techniques will pull 1,088 tons of carbon out of the atmosphere every year. Lo’s is one of about fifty farms getting money from the state of California to pull greenhouse gas from the air. California is paying him $50,000 to try it out.

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“We’re trying to sequester some carbon,” Lo said. “It should also help with the water-holding capacity of the soil, and the flowers in the cover crop should feed bees after the almond bloom is over.”

This is the first major utilization of farms as state-sponsored carbon-sucking factories. (To be fair, Oklahoma, of all places, has been experimenting with soil carbon since 2001, albeit on a smaller scale.) Agriculture and climate nerds — we wonkiest of wonks — have been anticipating this for the last decade as the scientific evidence accumulated.

In 2014 we wrote about the people pushing this research in California. And Grist told the story last year of how scientist Jonathan Sanderman put together key pieces of this puzzle after finding jars of old dirt, long forgotten in storage. And just recently, the New York Times Magazine ran a story summarizing the state of the science. But for years it’s felt like a lot of talk and not much action. That’s changing with the Healthy Soils Initiative, which makes money available for farmers like Lo, and monitors the results.

So how do you turn a farm into a carbon-sucking machine? Lo figured the money from the state would allow him to experiment without risk. He made a deal with a compost company to truck manure from dairies across California’s central valley then spread precisely 5.3 tons per acre under his almond trees as required by the state guidelines. An inspector from the California Department of Food and Agriculture showed up on the day the trucks arrived in April to make sure Lo was actually doing the work and not just doing the paperwork. Next, Lo planted clover and other cover crops in the rows between the trees.

A lot is riding on this, but it’s not a foregone conclusion that it will work. In theory, compost and cover crops should get carbon out of the sky and into the ground. But will it work in practice on Lo’s farm? With the farm’s particular soil structure, irrigation pattern, as well as the dirt’s microbiome? We don’t know how fast carbon will accumulate in his soil, or how long it will stay there.

When I asked Lo how confident he was that he was going to get exactly 1,088 tons of carbon into the ground he responded: “Well, that’s just what the soil scientists said. We’re going to see I guess!”

As of last Thursday the soil samples on Lo’s farm haven’t shown an increase in carbon content, but it takes about three years for compost to break down, he said. Other farmers and state officials will be watching this rollout of carbon-sucking farms closely. And if it works, and these farms manage to capture enough carbon, program could scale up massively. California’s Healthy Soils Initiative could serve as a model for other states.

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California is turning farms into carbon-sucking factories

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The U.S. forced Bikini Islanders to deal with nuclear tests and climate change. Now, it’s walking away.

by JoyPostbtocen Posted on May 11, 2018

Anderson Jibas, the mayor of Bikini Atoll, has for years wanted to assert his nation’s financial independence from the United States. And late last year, he found an unlikely ally in his battle: the Trump administration.

At the end of last year, the Department of the Interior released $59 million to the Bikini government to spend on whatever it wants, whenever it wants. The decision ended almost three decades of what Jibas has branded a colonialist system.

Bikini Atoll is part of the Marshall Islands, a widespread chain of more than 1,000 islands. In 1946, the U.S. evacuated its 167 residents and spent the next 12 years testing nuclear bombs in the area. To this day, Bikini is uninhabitable, and its natives’ descendants remain in exile — mainly on the previously uninhabited Kili and Ejit islands, roughly 500 miles to the southeast.

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Today, Kili and Ejit, as well as the entire Marshall Islands, face a grave threat from sea-level rise spurred by climate change. In fact, a new report funded by the U.S. military, which appeared in the journal Science Advances, argues that previous estimates of many tropical atolls being uninhabitable by the 22nd century were too conservative. The recent research suggests that rather than the sea swallowing these islands, titanic waves crashing over them will ruin freshwater supplies for residents closer to 2050.

The U.S. set up a trust fund to help the Bikinians settle on these unfamiliar islands, doling out a yearly allowance to local officials. The Bikini Resettlement Trust Fund, as it is known, has become the subject of an acrimonious battle and ideological debate over the future of Bikini. For the Kili-Bikini-Ejit (KBE) government, Interior’s decision to hand over control of the fund represents a move towards self-determination. It sees control over the funds as crucial to being able to fortify Kili and Ejit from climate change-related hazards. But others — including Lisa Murkowski, the Republican Senator from Alaska, which also faces threats due to a warming world — wonder if the U.S. has essentially washed its hands of the islanders, leaving atoll officials to face the future without any support.

In December 2017, Murkowski introduced legislation to re-establish U.S. oversight of the Bikini trust fund. In February, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing to discuss the bill.

“We need the opportunity to move ahead and not just sit back and get slapped in the face with old colonialist and paternalistic systems that demean our honor and our integrity and treat us like children who do not know what they are doing,” Mayor Jibas said during his testimony.

According to his government, its limited annual budgets are almost depleted by funding food, fuel, housing, and education on Kili Island, leaving little for climate mitigation. With the newly released money, the council is making plans to place riprap along most of the seashore, plant vegetation that will prevent sea water from pouring inland, replace the current housing stock with buildings three to four feet above ground, and install solar-powered pumps to redirect rising water.

If all this fails, the spectre of another relocation looms, and Bikinians will likely require a bail out from the world’s richer nations.

Jack Niedenthal is skeptical of the council’s sudden windfall. An American citizen who lives on the islands and managed the Resettlement Trust Fund for 30 years, he — like Murkowski — believes the U.S. is simply abdicating its responsibility to the islanders.

“Think about it: Here’s this embarrassing event that’s been a thorn in your side for decades; and now, in a congressional hearing, you have a Bikinian saying ‘We’re never coming back to the U.S. again for anything,’” Niedenthal says. “If I’m the U.S., I’m doing cartwheels.”

Gordon Benjamin, the Marshallese lawyer representing the Bikini government in its negotiations with Interior, says he’s pleased at the faith Department officials are placing in the council. “I don’t like Trump, I’ll say that right now,” he explains, before noting that the move is “very Republican: Basically, they love to see communities taking charge of themselves.”

The decision to hand the KBE government control over the nearly $60 million fund is a substantial change to an arrangement where Interior would essentially set a yearly allowance for the council, which would then decide how to spend these funds. Interior officials would occasionally inquire about proposed expenditures, but they largely approved whatever the islanders wanted.

But on August 2017, the KBE government passed a motion rejecting U.S. oversight of the fund. The trust was not supposed to last forever, it argued, and the current annual allowance was too meager to allow the islanders to make long-term investments. To the Bikini council’s surprise, the U.S. didn’t push back. In a letter sent this past November, Doug Domenech, assistant secretary for insular areas at Interior, told Jibas that the department would no longer ration the fund.

Lisa Murkowski, the U.S. senator from Alaska who has a history of standing against the Trump administration, argues the decision runs counter to a U.S vow made in 1946, which stated that, “No matter where the Bikinian people found themselves, even if they were adrift on a raft at sea or on a sandbar, they would be taken care of as if they were American’s children.” She has suggested that Interior is abandoning its responsibility to the people of Bikini.

The move represents an awkward deviation from her usual ideology, as she herself acknowledged during February’s hearing. “I need you all to know that I am very sensitive to the notion that Washington, D.C., should not dictate local government decisions,” she said. “Alaskans have dealt with that mentality since we were a territory.”

But Murkowski has always had a reputation as an independent-minded politician — she won her 2010 Senate election as a write-in candidate — and has a history of engaging closely with issues relating to the Marshall Islands. She visited the country in person in April, meeting with ministers and chiefs. As an Alaskan, she also sees common ground with the Marshallese. Amchitka Island, part of the Aleutian Island chain in western Alaska, was the site of three underground nuclear detonations between 1965 and 1971. She found that, there too, residents weren’t given the continuous support they needed to recover in the aftermath of the bombing.

But this debate could all be moot if Murkowski’s bill dies before it reaches the Senate, as Jack Niedenthal thinks it might. Recalling the hearing in February, he says that there was only one senator left in the room by the time the Bikinians had finished testifying.

As the legislation languishes in Congress, the KBE government is making big plans for its newfound millions. In addition to its climate-adaptation plans, it intends to lease an airplane, revive its diving industry, and develop an informational tour around the atoll, which UNESCO listed as a World Heritage site in 2010.

“These are things we wanted to explore,” Benjamin says. “And we couldn’t do that with $2.5 million a year.”

Niedenthal, however, is unconvinced of the council’s claims it will put significant amounts of the added money toward climate change. He fears the islanders could be left destitute, without money to run their power plant, make housing repairs, pay for health insurance, fund scholarships, or even hold council meetings. And, once the Trump administration is out of office, it could be a challenge to hold the U.S. accountable, even as the descendants of the people it once bombed sink into poverty.

“If they had put together a proposal, for example, and said, ‘Look, we need extra money out of the trust fund to spend on these walls,’ I think [Interior] would have said yes, if it was specifically going to be spent on climate change activities,” he explains. “I think what’s happening now is you use whatever excuses, and it’s just spending money.

“They can talk about investments,” Niedenthal adds. “But I don’t see any investing yet.”

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The U.S. forced Bikini Islanders to deal with nuclear tests and climate change. Now, it’s walking away.

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The Caribbean relies on your vacation — but suffers from its carbon footprint

by dannhollander37 Posted on May 10, 2018

Some of our favorite travel destinations are in a bind. Small island nations, like Saint Lucia and Barbados in the Caribbean, are extremely vulnerable to a warming climate, yet many rely on an industry that’s a big driver of  global carbon emissions.

A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change this week revealed that tourism accounts for 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s nearly four times more carbon than previously thought.

The news comes as evidence piles up that suggests the type of hurricanes that tore through the Caribbean last summer are supercharged by a warming climate.

“The hurricanes in the Caribbean last summer were a wakeup call,” says Martha Honey, executive director of the Center for Responsible Travel, an organization that advocates for sustainable tourism. Resorts need to rebuild to be both more sustainable and more resilient to the effects of a changing climate, she says.

“We need to go back to the drawing board,” she says, after resorts and popular tourist spots were damaged or destroyed by hurricanes Maria and Irma last year.

Why are we just figuring this out now? Previous estimates didn’t take into account the carbon footprint of the goods and services related to tourism. So aside from offsetting the emissions from your flight, you might also want to rethink that collection of cheesy shot glasses.

“Our analysis is a world-first look at the true cost of tourism – including consumables such as food from eating out and souvenirs – it’s a complete life-cycle assessment of global tourism, ensuring we don’t miss any impacts,” lead author Arunima Malik of the University of Sydney said in a statement.

The study reinforces the Ugly American stereotype. Researchers looked at 160 countries and measured tourists’ carbon footprints two ways: by residence and by destination. When it comes to which country sends out its residents to go forth and pollute the most, the United States comes in first. And when it comes to which popular destinations have the largest carbon footprints, it’s America for the gold again. China takes second, followed by Germany, and India.

“We found the per-capita carbon footprint increases strongly with increased affluence and does not appear to satiate as incomes grow,” lead researcher Manfred Lenzen said in a statement. That means that tourism will likely play a bigger role in global warming as travel becomes more accessible to more people.

And while the affluent are the biggest polluters, developing island countries — some of which rely on tourism to shore up their economies — are paying the higher price when it comes to climate change.

“The Caribbean as a whole has been a minor contributor to climate change overall, but a tremendous victim of it,” Honey says. And the Caribbean is the most tourism-dependent region in the world. Every year more than 40 million (mostly American) cruise passengers and resort tourists vacation there. Tourism accounts for 14 percent of the region’s gross domestic product.

For Honey, the way forward is to educate and engage travelers in reshaping the way the tourism industry works. What can travelers do on their end? There’s always the option of offsetting the emissions from your travel by donating to projects aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. Carbon offsetting, Honey says, is good — but not enough. “It’s not really addressing the problem that airplanes are big polluters and greenhouse gas emitters. We need the traveling public to be more engaged in lobbying for the greening of the airline industry.”

“There’s nothing like feeling like you’re part of the solution.”

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The Caribbean relies on your vacation — but suffers from its carbon footprint

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Happy birthday, Scott Pruitt! These songs go out to you

by Ferne31O069154 Posted on May 9, 2018

Fifty years ago, on this here day, a young Scotty Pruitt came into a world where oil spills stained beaches, rivers caught on fire, and the EPA didn’t exist. Today, the EPA exists, Pruitt is Chief, and, oh, it’s not looking so hot for the beaches and the rivers seem a little flammable, too.

But let’s not waste time harping on such dire and pressing matters. What better way to honor our fearful leader than to shower him in gifts. (No, I don’t mean the trove of detailed EPA documents released to the public this week.) I’m talking about this curated Spotify playlist, “Polluting the airwaves for Pruitt” brought to us by the folks over at the EPA employees union. The playlist features hits like “Dirty Water” by the Foo Fighters, “The Greatest Denier” by Doves, and “Man of Oil” by Animal Collective.

So let us look towards the year ahead, one full with promise of deadlier heatwaves and stronger hurricanes. What shall you accomplish in your 50th year around the sun, dear Pruitt? I put together a playlist of songs to get you inspired.

End Of The Road – Boyz II Men
Since U Been Gone – Kelly Clarkson
Hit The Road Jack – Ray Charles
Another One Bites The Dust – Queen
Bye Bye Bye – NSYNC
Somebody That I Used To Know — Gotye
Take A Bow — Rihanna
How The Mighty Have Fallen — Margo Price
Leaving On A Jet Plane — John Denver
Finale — Oklahoma

Pour one out for Scotty! Either for his birthday or the impending end to his dirty career.

Wanna gift Pruitt a song? Send us your ideas and we’ll put together a playlist. Look for it in tomorrow’s Beacon newsletter.

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Happy birthday, Scott Pruitt! These songs go out to you

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The EPA left this town in the dust. What happens now?

by CliftonNkb Posted on March 30, 2018

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

The residents of Uniontown, a poor, majority-black town in rural Alabama, are used to being ignored by the federal government. For years, they have fought against the Arrowhead landfill, a site that they say is negatively impacting the environment and forcing residents to cope with offensive odors, upper respiratory infections, headaches, and vomiting among other symptoms. The Environmental Protection Agency accepted a civil rights complaint from Uniontown in 2013, but earlier this month, the EPA announced that its External Civil Rights Compliance Office was “resolving and closing” the complaint citing “insufficient evidence” to find that the state violated any civil rights.

Have their options run out? “They’re not giving up by any stretch,” says Marianne Engelman Lado, a Yale University professor who helped represent Uniontown residents. Even after receiving the disappointing news from the EPA, residents are not going to back off. “We will continue to pursue every means that we can,” said Ben Eaton, the vice president of Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice. “Uniontown is a good place, with good people, even though we have an uphill battle to fight for our environmental civil rights.”

Toxic waste sites, such as landfills and oil refineries, are more likely to be located in communities of color so the pollution from these sites often has a disproportionate effect on marginalized people. This makes environmental justice an integral part of the civil rights movement. Just weeks after the EPA announcement, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a blistering statement about the EPA’s decision. “Sadly, these dismissals continue the EPA’s disturbing and longstanding track record,” it said. In 2016, the agency released a report that documented the EPA’s dismal failure to enforce civil rights. “We will continue to monitor the EPA’s enforcement of federal civil rights statutes,” the statement said, “and find this is yet another distressing step in the wrong direction for the agency.”

Uniontown is in Alabama’s Black Belt, a region in the central portion of the state that was once dominated by slave owners. The town is majority-black and poor with 48 percent of individuals living below the poverty line. Even before the landfill opened — which was designed to receive waste from over half the country — the people of Uniontown were against it. They formed the Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice to stop its construction by suing the Alabama Department of Environmental Management and the Perry County Commission, but a trial judge ruled against them.

Nonetheless, the Arrowhead landfill opened in 2007, and soon after, dust, foul odors, and flies became a part of daily life for the people living nearby. “People talk about how the paint peels from the cars,” Esther Calhoun, the president of the Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice, told Grist in 2016. “And there’s dust everywhere, everywhere. There’s buzzards everywhere, too.”

The following year, a disaster hundreds of miles away became Uniontown’s problem. In December 2008, a retaining wall at the Kingston Fossil Plant gave way in the middle of the night and more than 1 billion gallons of coal ash, the toxic byproduct of burning coal, spilled into the Tennessee River and on more than 300 acres of land. Three homes were destroyed and dozens were damaged. Even though no one was killed, the coal ash sludge, which contains hazardous chemicals such as arsenic and mercury, remained and needed to be cleaned up.

In 2009, with the blessing of local leaders and against the wishes of the residents, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the owner of the plant, began shipping its coal ash to the Arrowhead landfill. At the time, Bob Deacy, TVA’s vice president of clean strategies and project development told the New York Times that Arrowhead was chosen because it was accessible by train instead of truck, had the capacity to hold all the coal ash, and local leaders had underbid all the other offers.

Meanwhile, Uniontown residents had mobilized to fight back. In 2012, they filed their first complaint against the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, the agency in charge of issuing permits for the landfill. The complaint alleged that because ADEM permitted the landfill, it was violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits recipients of federal funds from taking actions that have disproportionate adverse effects on the basis of race. The complaint described the dire health consequences of living near the landfill, they also said that dust from the coal ash collected on their homes, plants, and cars. The presence of the landfill has decreased property values. After six years, the EPA issued their final decision this month, saying there was insufficient evidence to find any discrimination.

Lawyers working with them suggest that there may still be some legal options. “We are still looking at further legal action,” Claudia Wack, a member of Yale Law’s Environmental Justice Clinic, told the Selma Times-Journal. “We are keeping up the good fight.”

Faced with this setback, residents still are trying to make a difference on the local level by continuing to pressure ADEM. Some have decided to run for office to replace the town leadership that they believe got them into this situation in the first place. Ben Eaton, BBCHJ’s vice president, has been inspired to run for county commissioner to add his voice to those of the commissioners who “originally voted to allow the coal ash to come into Uniontown.” In terms of mounting an effective opposition, Engelman Lado said, running for office is “a really important part of their strategy.”

The Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice has also continued to organize actions surrounding environmental concerns in their community. The group has scheduled events to attend Uniontown city council meetings to voice their concerns about pollution and other injustices.

Uniontown residents may not have been surprised about the outcome, given the EPA’s history of ignoring civil rights complaints, but they were still disappointed. “When you go Uniontown, you smell that landfill,” Engelman Lado says. “You don’t need a peer reviewed study to tell you it’s affecting peoples’ lives.”

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The EPA left this town in the dust. What happens now?

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Native American tribes come together to protect Bears Ears from Trump

by LethaDevore Posted on March 23, 2018

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

Members of the Native American tribes that once came together to petition for the creation of Bears Ears National Monument gathered near the site Sunday to share stories about their connections to the sprawling landscape that the Trump administration recently stripped of certain federal protections.

Named after a pair of buttes, Bears Ears is home to thousands of Native American archeological and cultural sites and is considered sacred to many tribes. Tribal elders and other members of the Navajo Nation, Hopi, Zuni, and Ute Mountain Ute tribes made it clear at the gathering that they are focused on ensuring the area is given the protections they believe it deserves: nothing less than the 1.35 million acres set aside by President Barack Obama in 2016.

Malcolm Lehi, a member of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe who lives near White Mesa, said energy is building in indigenous communities, and lawmakers and government officials can’t turn a blind eye.

“It’s a really strong movement,” he said. “I like what I see.”

In December, on the recommendation of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, President Donald Trump reduced Bears Ears by 85 percent, cutting it to 201,876 acres, and divided it into two disconnected areas. The Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, the group of tribes that petitioned for monument status, condemned the move — which opened the door for new mining claims — and filed a legal challenge.

That Trump decided to gut Bears Ears came as no surprise, given comments he and Zinke made early in their review of the area.

The national monument designation “should never have happened” and was made “over the profound objections” of Utah citizens, Trump said at an executive order signing ceremony. And in a summary report in August, Zinke said the overwhelming number of public comments in support of maintaining the size of Bears Ears and other monuments was simply due to “a well-orchestrated national campaign organized by multiple organizations.”

The last few months have only further confirmed critics’ fears about the administration’s motives. Uranium mining company Energy Fuels Resources, a U.S. subsidiary of a Canadian firm, lobbied the administration to dramatically reduce the monument’s size, the Washington Post reported in December. And the New York Times obtained emails via a public records request that show potential future oil extraction played a central role in the decision.

The storytelling event on Sunday was organized by Utah Diné Bikéyah, a nonprofit organization working to safeguard Bears Ears and other ancestral lands, and came a little more than a week ahead of public scoping meetings that the Bureau of Land Management is hosting as it plans for how to manage the new, smaller monument.

Tara Benally, of the Navajo Nation, said Bears Ears has sustained her people for generations, and that they still use the area for religious ceremonies and to collect food and traditional medicinal plants.

“Losing Bears Ears to a cloud of industrial smoke from extraction and mining does not keep that preservation of life for us,” she said.

Clark Tenakhongva, an artist and the vice chairman of the Hopi Tribe, echoed that message. The Hopi, he said, believe they were the first to occupy this area and feel a responsibility to protect it.

“We do not want or believe that mining is good for our people,” he said at the event. “It may bring revenue, but what are we doing to the Earth?”

The tribes say they were ignored throughout the administration’s months-long review — a claim the Interior Department has dismissed. Zinke did meet with representatives of the tribal coalition last year, but for just one hour. He also toured Bears Ears with several monument opponents, including Utah’s Republican Governor Gary Herbert and commissioners of San Juan County, where the monument is located.

Zinke sparred with Arizona’s Democratic Representative Ruben Gallego on this topic during a congressional budget hearing last week. Gallego, who has introduced legislation that would protect the monument’s original boundary, asked the former Montana congressman about how many times he had met with industry representatives versus coalition members. Zinke said “all sides were represented” in his recommendation to Trump.

Gallego toured Bears Ears over the weekend and ended his visit with a stop at Utah Diné Bikéyah’s event. He told HuffPost that meeting with tribal members and hearing stories about their connections to the area only reinforced for him that the area is worth preserving. Shrinking the monument is an attack on the United States’ public lands and is “stripping parts of, I would say, people’s souls, because the Native American population here is so connected with that,” he said.

Gallego added that he expects “a monumental fight” — one he sees the Trump administration ultimately losing, whether in court or via congressional action.

“People are excited about protecting Bears Ears,” he told tribal members. “It’s something we have to continue to work on. But what I see for the first time in a long time is that the movement to protect Bears Ears is on the offense.”

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Native American tribes come together to protect Bears Ears from Trump

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Nothing is certain but death and (maybe?) carbon taxes

by TerryBromilow Posted on March 12, 2018

Continue at source: 

Nothing is certain but death and (maybe?) carbon taxes

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