Tag Archives: climate desk

Trump’s New Executive Order Will Worsen Hunger in Africa

by MinnaCasner9792 Posted on March 29, 2017

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on National Geographic Voices.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump took his most concrete step thus far to unravel his predecessor’s legacy on climate change, with a wide-ranging executive order that dismantles several Obama-era policies to restrict greenhouse gas pollution. The order outraged environmentalists—Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called it “a declaration of war on American leadership on climate change”—but it wasn’t very surprising: It simply followed through on a threat contained in the budget Trump proposed two weeks ago.

“We’re not spending money on that anymore,” Mick Mulvaney, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget said then, in response to a question about climate change during a press conference. “We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that.”

That stance could be a big problem for the dozens of farmers I’ve met across sub-Saharan Africa as a journalist reporting on climate change impacts to food security.

Christine Wasike is a maize farmer in Bungoma, an agricultural haven in western Kenya. She works half an acre by hand to produce food for her husband and several young children; if she’s lucky, there is enough left over to sell for cash to pay for school fees, clothes, healthcare, farm equipment, and other necessities.

Like all but a handful of wealthy farmers in Kenya who can afford irrigation systems, she relies exclusively on rainfall to water her crops, and last year, which scientists recently confirmed was the hottest ever recorded, the rains came late and light. As a result, Wasike’s harvest was disappointing, and her income for the season was less than $50, a net loss after covering the cost of seeds and other farm expenses.

“When there is drought farmers suffer a lot,” she says. “There is a lot of hunger, especially with children at home.”

Stories like Wasike’s are increasingly commonplace in sub-Saharan Africa. A majority of people on the continent depend directly on subsistence agriculture for their livelihoods, and because they rely almost exclusively on rainfall for water and often can’t afford adaptive technologies, they are among the world’s most vulnerable people to climate change. As a result, they are among those with the most to lose from if Trump reverses Obama’s climate change policies.

As America walks away from its commitment to help slow the global warming that it holds the primary responsibility for creating in the first place, Wasike, her children, and millions of her peers will be much more likely to face a future defined by hunger and poverty.

The main target of Trump’s executive order is the Clean Power Plan, a regulation hammered out during Obama’s second term that imposes limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. The regulation, which was Obama’s signature achievement on climate change, aims to slash the carbon footprint of the nation’s power sector by 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. But to Scott Pruitt, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, it was never more than a plot to “kill jobs throughout the country,” as he told ABC News on Sunday. As directed by Tuesday’s order, the EPA will now review all policies that “serve as obstacles or impediments to energy production”—including the Clean Power Plan. At the same time, the Justice Department will back down from defending the Plan against legal attacks.

These policy changes will reverberate far beyond the coal-fired power plants they are meant to protect. That’s because the Clean Power Plan is the domestic regulation underpinning the US commitment to the Paris Agreement, the groundbreaking global climate accord reached in December 2015. Although the agreement, signed by Obama shortly before he left office, contains language that would make it difficult for Trump to formally withdraw within the next few years, his order effectively accomplishes the same thing. Without the Clean Power Plan, America’s participation in the agreement becomes meaningless. And without America, the world’s second-biggest climate polluter after China, the whole agreement goes up in smoke.

As a result, the chance that global temperature rise will stay “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the limit agreed to in Paris, will vanish. That kind of warming will produce a variety of life-threatening effects in the US which, contrary to Mulvaney’s assertion, would cost taxpayers far more—in the form of damage to coastal property, lost agricultural production, increased electrical bills, public health threats, and other costs, according to a recent economic analysis lead by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg—than what they will save by slashing climate programs.

Still, the impact to developing countries—where livelihoods are more often linked directly to the land and where the money is scarce to, for example, build a storm surge barrier or develop a drought-resistant seed—will likely be even more severe. Millions of the world’s most vulnerable people will suffer the consequences of industrial pollution they did not produce. In other words, they will be left to clean up America’s mess.

In Africa, the most severe impacts will be to agriculture and food security. Sub-Saharan Africa already has the world’s least-productive farms: Average yields of staple grains per hectare are only one-quarter of those in the US and Europe, according to the World Bank, due mainly to poor soil quality and lack of access to financing and the latest farming techniques and equipment. Low productivity not only leads to hunger—23 percent of Africans, 220 million people, are chronically undernourished, the world’s highest rate—but also impedes economic growth, since agriculture is the main income source for a majority of people.

Rising temperatures (Africa has warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the last 50 years, and is expected to continue warming faster than the global average rate) and increasingly erratic rainfall are making the situation worse. An analysis for the 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report found that prolonged dry spells and high temperatures could reduce yield of staple grains across the continent up to 35 percent by 2050, even as the continent sees its population double.

The consequences will be wide-reaching. Market prices will climb, calorie availability will drop, and national economies will suffer: A recent analysis by the OECD found that reduced agricultural productivity because of climate change could sap up to 4 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s GDP by 2060, the world’s highest rate of loss. Some areas may become unusable for farming or grazing, forcing people to look for new land, which in turn can lead to territorial ethnic conflicts and deforestation. Food and water scarcity can prompt mass migrations, like the one currently underway in the Sahel, and humanitarian crises, like the 20 million people currently in need of emergency food assistance in southern Africa. It can contribute to radicalization and the empowerment of terrorist groups like Boko Haram, which has benefited from destitution caused by the desiccation of Lake Chad.

These impacts will be borne in particular by the rural poor, who often have no “plan B” when the harvest fails, and in particular by women, who typically are responsible for growing crops for food and cash (in addition to other household duties).

Fortunately, in most cases, the solutions needed to make Africa’s farmers and pastoralists more resilient to climate change are nothing very fancy, expensive, or high-tech. People need training on basic techniques to conserve water and improve soil quality; they need access to microloans to afford better seeds, tools, fertilizer, and irrigation; they need secure land rights; they need better roads to take their produce to markets. The fate of programs to promote these solutions now in place at the the US Agency for International Development, now under the purview of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, remains unclear.

What farmers don’t need are unchecked greenhouse gas emissions from the US The specific numbers on projections of crop yields, hunger, poverty, and other factors differ slightly depending on which analysis you read, but one trend is consistent: The hotter the world gets, the worse off Africa’s rural poor will be. And if that doesn’t bother this administration, it should, since economic depression and political instability are ultimately harmful to US business, military, and diplomatic interests in Africa.

Deleting climate change from the EPA’s rulebook and the federal budget won’t make it go away—and it won’t settle our environmental debt to the rest of the world.

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Trump’s New Executive Order Will Worsen Hunger in Africa

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A Recently Bankrupt Coal Company Is Being Honored at Mar-a Lago

by HermanHallock Posted on March 22, 2017

Mother Jones

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President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort will host the opening reception Wednesday evening for a conference where a recently bankrupt coal company will be a guest of honor. The annual Distressed Investing Summit will bestow one of its “Restructuring Deal of the Year” awards to Arch Coal for clearing $5 billion in debt after it filed for bankruptcy in 2016.

“They emerged from bankruptcy in 2016 after shedding huge amount of debt, obligations to workers, and environmental cleanup,” Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal director Mary Anne Hitt says. “When a company is in bankruptcy, you don’t have a lot of leverage in there with all the lawyers and stakeholders. To have them feted at Mar-a-Lago as a turnaround is salt in the wound for workers and people representing the public interest.”

The summit, hosted by financial company The M&A Advisor, has held its opening cocktail reception at Mar-a-Lago for the past two years, ever since Trump emerged as a serious contender for president. In its invitation email, M&A Advisor names Arch Coal as one of its winners alongside a number of other firms, including energy companies Alpha Natural Resources, Midstates Petroleum Company, and Venoco, an oil and gas development company.

Here’s how the invitation describes Mar-a-Lago, “the new Winter White House”:

The agenda for roundtables that are held at a nearby hotel reads like a laundry list of Trump’s campaign themes: “Making America Great Again,” “Informing and Silencing The Media,” and the “Art of Dealmaking: Getting Deals Done In The New Economic Order.”

Not everyone agrees that Arch Coal’s 2016 bankruptcy deal warrants celebration. During the bankruptcy proceedings, environmental opposition forced the company to abandon its proposal that taxpayers should foot the entire bill to clean up its abandoned mines. The company also laid off hundreds of its miners that same year.

In the years before bankruptcy, United Mine Workers of America complained that Arch Coal moved 40 percent of its employees’ health care coverage to Patriot Coal, a volatile offshoot company. When Patriot went under, those health benefits were at risk and continue to be because of Arch Coal’s bankruptcy. Patriot and Arch Coal are only two examples of a larger problem. The union shop has been pressing Congress for a long-term solution for 22,000 miners’ benefits in jeopardy because of coal bankruptcies—an issue that won’t go away no matter what happens to federal environmental regulations.

The idea that the coal industry can recover is a cherished narrative for Trump. Earlier this week, at a campaign-style rally in Kentucky, the president claimed that he will “save our coal industry” and put miners back to work with executive orders that are expected any day. Trump likes to blame “terrible job-killing” regulations, but there are other pressures beyond federal regulation driving coal out of business, namely competitive natural gas.

Nonetheless, on Wednesday evening, a coal turnaround will be celebrated. Even though it might only be, as the Sierra Club’s Hitt notes, “one of many of the alternative facts they like to celebrate at Mar-a-Lago.”

Continued here – 

A Recently Bankrupt Coal Company Is Being Honored at Mar-a Lago

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The Crazy Theory About Smog That’s Gaining Ground in the White House

by AltonMrudqqjhwc Posted on March 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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

It was known as the Great Pea Soup. In 1952, a thick, greenish-yellow fog smothered London, halting traffic and daily life. At the time, when households burned cheap coal for heat, factories spewed unregulated smoke, and buses burned diesel fuel, Londoners were used to a certain degree of greasy haze. But the Great Smog or Big Smoke, as this 1952 pea-souper was also known, was unprecedented. Bitterly cold air “soaked up the pollution and held it like a blanket over the city” for four days straight, according to the Daily Mail. Twelve thousand people died.

Sixty-five years later, our scientific understanding of air pollution has advanced immeasurably. We now know—because of events like the Great Pea Soup, but also a groundbreaking 1993 Harvard University study of smog-ridden U.S. cities and countless research papers since then—that short-term and long-term exposure to air pollution can kill people, particularly those with pre-existing conditions. “The evidence is so large,” said C. Arden Pope, a professor at Brigham Young University world-renowned researcher of air pollution’s impacts on human health. “There are very few people conducting this research and publishing it in the peer-reviewed literature who don’t think fine particles pollution can lead to death.”

There are, indeed, very few people who believe air pollution—specifically “fine particulate” pollution, or PM2.5—doesn’t cause death. Those who do, however, are getting louder and gaining influence in conservative political circles and inside President Donald Trump’s administration. These air-pollution deniers have just one hope: the repeal of clean-air regulations that have long protected Americans’ health.

At last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), during a little-noticed panel on climate change and environmental regulation, air pollution denial was rampant and went unchallenged. Steve Milloy, formerly a paid flack for the tobacco and fossil fuel industries and member of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, argued that excessive air pollution is not linked to premature death. “My particular interest is air pollution,” Milloy said, alleging that EPA’s scientists are inherently biased. “These people validate and rubber-stamp the EPA’s conclusion that air pollution kills people.” Milloy also said, baselessly, that EPA scientists are “paying for the science it wants,” and that Trump must change the research process at the agency.

It is extensively proven, and widely accepted, that air pollution can harm humans, which is why the government regulates it. PM2.5 refers to tiny particles that are 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter—small enough to penetrate deep into the circulatory system and potentially infiltrate the central nervous system. The particles range in composition, originating anywhere from cement dust to tobacco smoke to pollen. They are currently regulated under the Clean Air Act, a widely popular law passed in 1963 that has seen major amendments receiving unanimous or overwhelming support in the Senate. The CAA currently requires Congress to set what’s known as National Ambient Air Quality Standards for particulate matter.

Even Breitbart, the alt-right media organization with close ties to Trump, seems to accept that air pollution is bad for human health. It has published dozens of articles over the years—many from wire services, but some from its own contributors—that report, without opinion, about studies on the issue. “The chronic problem of pollution in China has been linked to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths,” Thomas D. Williams, Breitbart‘s Rome bureau chief, wrote in 2015. “The fine particles are believed to play a role in cardiovascular disease, lung problems, cancer, and emphysema.” Earlier this month, Breitbart senior editor-at-large Joel B. Pollack reported, “Air quality in some East Asian capitals is famously poor, with residents of Beijing taking extreme measures to avoid the health risks associated with heavy pollution.”

But Breitbart has also provided a platform for those leading the charge for air pollution denial. Last year, it published a column by Milloy titled, “How stupid is air pollution ‘science’?” And earlier this month, Breitbart columnist James Delingpole—who usually sticks to columns attacking climate science—joined the fray. In an article declaring that “The EPA’s Air Pollution Scare Is Just Another Fake News Myth,” Delingpole took issue with the most recent State of Global Air report, which found that air pollution contributed to 4.2 million deaths in 2015, because the study was partly funded by the EPA—while conveniently ignoring that it was also funded by 23 car companies and Exxon Mobil. Delingpole cited Milloy exclusively and extensively, linking to Milloy’s “fact sheet” on air pollution.

“Frankly, it’s full of stuff and nonsense,” said Janice Nolen, the assistant vice president of national policy at the American Lung Association, referring to Milloy’s fact sheet. “Particle pollution is one of the most researched topics in the scientific world, and has been reviewed extensively.”

There are pages of false claims in Milloy’s sheet, but a few are particularly egregious. He argues that two renowned air pollution studies that established the basic connection between PM2.5 and death—the aforementioned Harvard study and one by Pope, the BYU professor—have controversial methodologies that cannot be resolved because scientists refuse to make the raw data available. “For results to be considered to be scientifically credible, they must be capable of being independently replicated,” Milloy writes. This claim is the basis of a Republican-led bill currently being pushed through the House of Representatives.

There are several problems with this line of argument. The raw data Milloy seeks is private medical information on human subjects who were assured confidentiality when they participated in these studies. “There’s this issue if this data becomes public, will anyone be able to go and knock on these people’s doors?” said Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, an environmental health professor at Columbia University. Long-term health data is also difficult to reproduce because the people who participated in the study have grown up; many likely have died. This is why, scientists say, many public health studies simply can’t be replicated. (The Harvard study, however, was successfully replicated in 2001 by the Health Effects Institute, which is funded by EPA, the motor vehicle industry, and the oil and gas industry. A similar reanalysis was published in 2005.)

Milloy and Delingpole also claim that “not one single” epidemiological or toxicological study has ever shown that particulate pollution directly caused a death, either in the short term or due to prolonged exposure. Kioumourtzoglou says this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how scientists classify cause of death. When people die, they are given an International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code to signify what happened, and there is no ICD code for pollution. “If you died of a heart attack, you get the ICD code for a heart attack,” she said. “If exposure to PM2.5 has caused a heart attack, on your death certificate, it would still say heart attack, not PM2.5.”

Pope, whose study was one of the first to establish the connection between short-term exposure to fine particulate matter and death, also said Milloy’s claim misunderstands the type of person who dies from exposure. A perfectly healthy person is not going to croak from a short jog through haze. But people who are already unhealthy—who have asthma, or cardiovascular or heart disease—should be worried. “We often refer to it as triggering,” Pope said. “Particulates will trigger these acute events, such as heart attack.”

This is not to say that the research on this subject is flawless. Kioumourtzoglou, unlike Milloy, has lead and published studies on problems with the scientific methods surrounding the impact of particulate matter pollution on human health. Scientists cannot strap pollution monitors onto humans and follow them around for years at a time, so sometimes they rely on models that predict air pollution concentrations at certain locations and times. “We have to rely on less than perfect measurements,” she said. “And these are known to induce error.”

The error, however, is exactly the opposite of what Milloy claims. Kioumourtzoglou’s research has found that current air pollution measuring methods tend to understate the effects of air pollution. “In reality,” she said, “the effects are even worse than documented.”

The good news is, Milloy and Delingpole remain outliers in a sea of evidence. As ThinkProgress pointed out last month, “The Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization (WHO), the National Institutes of Health, the American Lung Association, and the United Nations all link air pollution to increased risk of asthma, heart disease, and stroke. In 2013, the WHO even concluded that air pollution could be categorized as a human carcinogen.” Even Breitbart, as indicated above, has published uncritical articles about these organizations’ findings.

The bad news is, we already know that outliers can have disproportionate impact on policy. Just look at the debate surrounding climate change. Despite near-consensus in the scientific community, one third of Congress are climate change deniers, as are Trump and his new EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt. What’s more, they’re using their fact-free ideology to dismantle policies that slow climate change. Trump is expected to issue an executive order this week undoing the Clean Power Plan, which regulates carbon emissions from fossil fuel plants. He is also considering withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, the landmark international accord to stop global warming.

Milloy and Delingpole surely would like air-pollution deniers to have a similar impact on national policy. Given Milloy’s closeness to Trump’s inner circle, and Breitbart‘s growing influence on the White House, and it doesn’t seem so far-fetched. But even if that doesn’t come to pass, these deniers have already succeeded in shaping—or rather, creating—a debate that no politician or scientist should rightly entertain. And that debate is now a public reality. Milloy’s “fact sheet,” for instance, is the first result in a Google search of “PM 2.5 science.” A legitimate scientific article is second.

Google screenshot

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The Crazy Theory About Smog That’s Gaining Ground in the White House

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Auto Execs Will Be Pleased With Trump’s Latest Gift to the Industry

by 4q4cv8v Posted on March 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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At an event for auto workers near Detroit, Michigan, on Wednesday, President Donald Trump will announce his latest gift to industry executives: the start of a potentially protracted process that will ultimately weaken carbon pollution standards for cars and trucks by reversing one of the last actions the Environmental Protection Agency took under President Barack Obama.

The EPA in January finalized a midterm review evaluating the program’s progress in which EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy affirmed the pollution standards that requires U.S. car manufacturers to raise efficiency from 27.5 miles per gallon to 54.5 mpg by 2025. Now, the Trump administration wants to restart this review process, moving the burden of responsibility for determining how far to roll back standards from the EPA to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the Department of Transportation.

The proposal doesn’t change any emission standards just yet, nor does it get into the thorny issue of whether to revoke waivers that California and 13 other states have in order to pursue tougher tailpipe emissions standards—although EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has suggested he is considering doing just that.

The logic for this plan was explained on a press call Tuesday with a senior White House official who asked not to be identified. The official said the EPA “sort of shoved it down their throats in December,” when it completed the midterm review before the required 2018 deadline. “I don’t think the industry and public had a lot of opportunity to gather their comments,” said the official who directed reporters to “read the Auto Alliance testimony” from the industry in order to learn more about the controversy. This was testimony presented to the House Energy and Commerce committee earlier last fall. Though it briefly embraced the standards in 2009, the industry has since said they are unattainable, and in the Auto Alliance testimony, CEO Mitch Bainwol stated the administration shouldn’t “jam standards that are inconsistent with consumer behavior.”

The EPA’s final determination found that the “standards are feasible at reasonable cost” based on market trends, without needing to manufacture many more electric cars or hybrid vehicles. They would cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, save 1.2 billion barrels of oil, and provide net benefits of $100 billion in savings, according to the EPA’s estimates for 2022 to 2025. If they are rolled back, the consequences could be less efficient cars made by U.S. manufacturers and tougher competition with countries in Asia and Europe that produce hybrid cars. It also could mean more money spent at the gas pump—the Obama-era rules were expected to cut down on gas bills, saving American buyers an average $8,000 over the lifetime of the vehicles.

“Making this U-turn on fuel economy is the wrong way to go for our security, economy and environment,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) says. “Innovation has been driving our historic progress on fuel economy, and we cannot let Donald Trump put us in reverse.”

Further actions targeting the EPA and the Department of the Interior could be released this week, and executive orders targeting climate regulations for new and existing coal-fired power plants are expected any day.

Originally posted here: 

Auto Execs Will Be Pleased With Trump’s Latest Gift to the Industry

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Republicans Beg Their Party to Finally Do Something About Global Warming

by tfem31x Posted on February 8, 2017

Mother Jones

You wouldn’t know it by looking at Congress or the White House, but the GOP isn’t in complete lockstep when it comes to climate change denial. The deniers just happen to be the ones who hold all the political power within the party. They drown out the other side—the conservatives who are urging their party to actually do something about global warming.

The contrast was especially clear this week. Just a day after Republicans on the House science committee accused government scientists of fabricating climate research, a group of Republican luminaries who don’t currently hold public office held a press conference calling for climate action. Specifically, they released a report—titled “The Conservative Case for Carbon Dividends“—in which they advocated a tax on carbon emissions.

The report, which was published by the Climate Leadership Council, calls for a tax on carbon starting at $40 per ton and rising over time, with revenue returned to taxpayers in the form of quarterly Social Security dividends. The authors include James Baker, who served as secretary of state and secretary of the treasury in the Reagan and first Bush administrations; Henry Paulson, who served as treasury secretary in the second Bush administration; Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz; and Martin Feldstein and Gregory Mankiw, who chaired the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under Reagan and George W. Bush, respectively. They see the tax as a replacement for the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations on greenhouse gases, including the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. The proposal would also include a border adjustment designed to tax products from countries that do not have a similar carbon price.

For these conservatives, a carbon tax would be like insuring against the worst risks of climate change—and they see it as a more efficient solution than EPA regulations. They describe their plan as “win-win”—even if some of them still claim to quibble with the science.

“For too long, we Republicans and conservatives haven’t occupied a real place at the table during the debate about global climate change,” Baker said at a Wednesday press conference. “Instead, we have tended to dispute the fact of climate change and particularly the extent to which man is responsible for any changes in the Earth’s climate. Now I need, in the interest of full disclosure, to tell you that I was and remain somewhat of a skeptic about the extent to which man is responsible for climate change. But I do think that…the risks are too great to ignore, and that we need some sort of insurance policy.”

None of the report’s authors currently hold public office. But Baker was scheduled to meet Wednesday with Vice President Mike Pence, Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner (who serves as a presidential adviser), and Trump adviser Gary Cohn to discuss the recommendations.

There’s a very different conversation underway in the House, where Republicans are obsessed with finding a smoking gun that would expose global warming as a myth. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who chairs the science committee, held a hearing yesterday titled “Making EPA Great Again,” during which he and his colleagues accused federal agencies of falsifying data and pushing a climate hoax.

Smith cited allegations made by former NOAA data scientist John Bates that the agency mishandled data used in a 2015 study challenging the belief that global warming had “paused” in recent years.

“Everything I have read suggests that NOAA cheated and got caught,” Smith said. At another point, he said NOAA scientists wanted to “falsify data to exaggerate global warming.” (Bates, for the record, told the Associated Press that his concerns don’t undermine the scientific consensus that humans are warming the planet and that his NOAA colleagues had done “nothing malicious.” He said the controversy is “really a story of not disclosing what you did. It’s not trumped up data in any way shape or form.”)

For the conservatives behind the Climate Leadership Council report, the debate about science isn’t the point. Benefits of a carbon tax “accrue regardless of one’s views on climate science,” the paper’s authors write.

But this message has hardly gotten anywhere with GOP politicians in the past. And even Baker cautioned against optimism that Trump’s White House will reverse course. “We have no assurance at all that this is going to be something that the administration will grab hold of,” he said. “We happen to believe that this will help make America great again, but that’s our view.”

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Republicans Beg Their Party to Finally Do Something About Global Warming

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Donald Trump Just Replaced the White House Climate Website With…This

by MasonWebber Posted on January 20, 2017

Mother Jones

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As Donald Trump was sworn in Friday, the White House website got a major makeover. One of the casualties in the reset: any mention of the need to fight climate change.

The original White House page dedicated to the problem of climate change and former President Barack Obama’s policies to address it is now a broken link: “The requested page ‘/energy/climate-change’ could not be found.”

Instead, the White House website features Trump’s energy talking points from the campaign. The page—titled, “An America First Energy Plan”—makes no mention of climate change, other than to say, “President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the US rule. Lifting these restrictions will greatly help American workers, increasing wages by more than $30 billion over the next 7 years.”

The page contains only the briefest of mentions of the environment: “Protecting clean air and clean water, conserving our natural habitats, and preserving our natural reserves and resources will remain a high priority. President Trump will refocus the EPA on its essential mission of protecting our air and water.”

Here’s the new page:

For reference, Obama’s climate page looked like this:

Update: If you miss the old White House website, it’s archived here.

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Donald Trump Just Replaced the White House Climate Website With…This

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Scott Pruitt vs. Science

by TerrieMahler Posted on January 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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Outside Scott Pruitt’s confirmation hearing to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, the hall was packed with demonstrators. Some were Standing Rock activists protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. Others were wearing face masks to make a point about Pruitt’s polluter allies. Many environmentalists argue that Pruitt is simply too deep in the pocket of the oil and gas industry to make his EPA anything but a farce when it comes to science.

Inside the hearing, Pruitt at times seemed to bolster that case. Throughout the morning, he hedged on the basic science on a range of issues under the EPA’s purview, faltering even when it came to the most well-established impacts of pollution.

On climate change, Pruitt claimed there’s more scientific controversy than there really is. He acknowledged that global warming is not a “hoax” and that humans have at least some impact on the climate. But, he added, “the ability to measure and pursue the degree and the extent of that impact and what to do about it are subject to continuing debate and dialogue.” That’s a common line used by Republicans to dodge the tougher question of what policies are needed to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. In reality, there is virtually no debate in the scientific community over manmade climate change, and many of its consequences—from drought, to rising seas, to increased wildfires—are well-established.

Pruitt repeatedly insisted that as head of the EPA, his job would simply be to carry out the intent of Congress and that his “personal opinion is immaterial” when it comes to climate science. What he didn’t mention, however, is that the EPA administrator is mandated by Congress to evaluate the best-available science and implement regulations based on what is needed to protect public health.

Pruitt also seemed unaware of the science surrounding lead poisoning. “That’s something I have not reviewed nor know about,” he said when asked if there was any safe level of lead in the human body. “I would be concerned about any level of lead going into the drinking water. Or obviously human consumption. But I have not looked at the scientific research on that.” (According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “No safe blood lead level in children has been identified.”)

On other issues, Pruitt appeared to contradict his record as Oklahoma attorney general. Asked about the impact of mercury pollution, Pruitt said mercury is “very dangerous” and that he’s “concerned.” In 2012, however, he signed onto a lawsuit challenging the EPA’s mercury regulations, arguing that “the record does not support EPA’s findings that mercury…poses public health hazards.”

Asked about methane pollution—which often leaks from natural gas sites—Pruitt noted that it is a “more potent” greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. He added that he’s “concerned” about methane, but not “deeply concerned.” As attorney general, Pruitt sued the EPA over its efforts to restrict methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure.

Pruitt also told to Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) that the EPA’s so-called “endangerment finding”—its ruling that that carbon pollution is a danger to public health and is therefore subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act—should continue to be enforced. “Nothing I know of that would cause a review at this point,” he said. As attorney general, Pruitt sued the EPA in an effort to overturn the endangerment finding.

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Scott Pruitt vs. Science

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China Is Pumping Hundreds of Billions of Dollars Into New Renewable Energy Projects by 2020

by TeodoroAAQ Posted on January 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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President-elect Donald Trump has called climate change a hoax created by the Chinese. The Chinese disagree—and are pumping billions of dollars’ worth of investments into green energy over the next three years.

On Thursday, Reuters published details of the latest installment of China’s plans to break its deadly use of coal, an addiction that makes it the world’s worst greenhouse gas emitter.

The funds—$361 billion by 2020—are designed to create 13 million green jobs, according to the country’s National Energy Administration. New projects such as solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear power will form half of all new electricity generation by 2020 and will create the energy equivalent to 580 metric tons of coal.

The announcement matches China’s past pledges to kick its coal habit—the fuel that dominates its electricity production and creates heartburn for the country’s leaders, as the public’s angry reaction to foul air becomes a major political threat. Despite China’s so-called “war on pollution,” this week brought yet another toxic “airpolcalypse” to Beijing’s skies. Watch this incredible time-lapse video of the smog rolling into town:

China has been pulling out all stops to create a clean-tech revolution. Last year, a Chinese firm topped a reputable global ranking for wind energy production for the first time, beating America’s General Electric. China already leads the world in solar. (Go inside a massive Chinese solar factory with me, here.) China is also on track to peak and then begin to taper its greenhouse gas emissions around 2025—five years ahead of a promise made by its leader, Xi Jinping, in November 2014, as part of China’s historic deal with the United States. This year, China will launch the world’s biggest national carbon trading market.

But China is on the verge of losing its major global partner in these endeavors. Trump has promised to end America’s role in the Paris climate agreement and cancel contributions to UN climate programs. He has also tapped pro-fossil-fuel and anti-regulation types, including some unapologetic climate change deniers, for top positions in the new administration. For example, as Oklahoma attorney general, Scott Pruitt has repeatedly sued the Environmental Protection Agency—which Trump wants him to lead.

There are also Trump’s new anti-China trade hawks, including outspoken China critic Peter Navarro, who advocates a much more adversarial approach, including a controversial 40-plus percent tariff on Chinese imports, potentially ratcheting up tension between the two global giants even before Inauguration Day on January 20.

China has issued unusually blunt warnings to Trump and US leaders if they abandon international efforts to combat climate change—while saying they’ll act alone if necessary. “If they resist this trend, I don’t think they’ll win the support of their people,” said China’s longtime climate negotiator Xie Zhenhua before the November election. “And their country’s economic and social progress will also be affected.”

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China Is Pumping Hundreds of Billions of Dollars Into New Renewable Energy Projects by 2020

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The Link Between Road Pollution and Dementia Just Got Stronger

by deneseschilling Posted on January 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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Most of us associate car pollution with coughing and wheezing, but mounting evidence is linking air pollution to a less obvious health effect: Dementia.

People who live near a major road are up to 12 percent more likely to develop dementia—a group of memory-loss disorders including Alzheimer’s disease—than those who live further away, according to study published Wednesday in medical journal in The Lancet.

The study, led by scientists at Public Health Ontario, found that the risk of dementia increased the closer residents lived to a major road, and the longer they lived there. The authors tracked all the adults living in Ontario, Canada—about 6.6 million people—over the course of a decade from 2001 to 2012. Using postal codes and medical records, they determined how close a given resident lived to a major road—including freeways, highways, or congested roads with two or more lanes—and if they went on to develop dementia.

Residents living within 50 meters (55 yards) of a major road were between 7 and 12 percent more likely to develop dementia, depending on how long they had lived there and whether they lived in an urban or rural area. With distance from the road, the risk dissipated until, 200 meters away from a major road, residents were at no more risk than those who lived further away.

The numbers are particularly alarming considering how many people live close to traffic sources: Nearly half of adults in Ontario lived within 200 meters (219 yards) of a major roadway, and Copes estimates similar numbers for the United States.

This isn’t the first study to suggest that air pollution can change the brain. As journalist Aaron Reuben reported in a 2015 Mother Jones feature, several studies have found that people exposed to high pollution rates over time show more cognitive decline and pre-dementia symptoms than those who breathe cleaner air, even when controlling for things like income, ethnicity, and other environmental factors. Scientists are still pinpointing exactly how air pollution changes the brain, but as Reuben noted, fine particulate matter found in car exhaust is small enough to travel throughout our bodies—including to our brains. Once in the brain, pollution particles lead to inflammation that could contribute to cognitive decline over time.

Public health advocates have long recommended limiting exposure to major roads to the extent possible—whether that means living farther from major roads or choosing to exercise or commute on less congested streets. For now, this option isn’t available to all: Multiple studies have found that people of color and low-income populations are be exposed to air pollution at far higher rates than white people.

“The challenge is to look at different ways of laying out of communities so that we have a higher percentage of our population who are located or residing more than 200 meters away from major traffic arteries,” says Ray Copes, the director of environmental and occupational health at Public Health Ontario and a co-author on the Lancet study. That could mean building new homes, schools, and hospitals farther from major roads, or planning cities with more dispersed traffic.

The end goal, according to Copes: create “a greater degree of separation between traffic and noses.”

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The Link Between Road Pollution and Dementia Just Got Stronger

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Obama Just Took a Big Step on Climate—and Trump Probably Can’t Undo It

by SerenaCastello Posted on December 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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

Barack Obama has permanently banned new oil and gas drilling in most US-owned waters in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, a last-ditch effort to lock in environmental protections before he hands over to Donald Trump.

Obama used a 1953 law that allows presidents to block the sale of new offshore drilling and mining rights and makes it difficult for their successors to reverse the decision.

However, Obama’s ban—affecting federal waters off Alaska in the Chukchi Sea and most of the Beaufort Sea and in the Atlantic from New England to the Chesapeake Bay—is unprecedented in scale and could be challenged by Trump in court.

The president-elect has vowed to unleash the country’s untapped energy reserves and exploit fossil fuels. He has previously questioned the science of climate change, threatened to tear up the Paris climate agreement and appointed climate-change deniers in his cabinet.

This has led to a scramble from environmentalists calling on Obama to impose whatever regulations and executive orders he can to protect his climate legacy.

Tuesday’s move came in a joint announcement by Obama and the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who also put a moratorium on new oil and gas leasing in its Arctic waters, subject to periodic review.

Obama, currently on holiday in Hawaii and with only a month left in office, said in a statement:”These actions, and Canada’s parallel actions, protect a sensitive and unique ecosystem that is unlike any other region on earth. They reflect the scientific assessment that, even with the high safety standards that both our countries have put in place, the risks of an oil spill in this region are significant and our ability to clean up from a spill in the region’s harsh conditions is limited.

“By contrast, it would take decades to fully develop the production infrastructure necessary for any large-scale oil and gas leasing production in the region—at a time when we need to continue to move decisively away from fossil fuels.”

In 2015, just 0.1 percent of US federal offshore crude production came from the Arctic. A Department of Interior analysis shows that, at current oil prices, significant production in the Arctic will not occur. “That’s why looking forward, we must continue to focus on economic empowerment for Arctic communities beyond this one sector,” the statement said.

Campaigners welcomed the announcement. Jacqueline Savitz, a senior vice president at the advocacy group Oceana told the Associated Press: “This decision will help protect existing lucrative coastal tourism and fishing businesses from offshore drilling, which promises smaller, short-lived returns and threatens coastal livelihoods.

“The people of the Atlantic coast refused to allow their way of life to be compromised and we commend their hard work making their voices heard in Washington.”

Few energy companies have expressed a wish to drill any time soon off the coasts thanks to abundant cheap shale oil in North Dakota and Texas. Exploratory drilling in the Arctic is costly and risky.

But with Trump in the White House, the obscure law could face a challenge. Dan Naatz of the Independent Petroleum Association of America told the Associated Press: “Instead of building on our nation’s position as a global energy leader, today’s unilateral mandate could put America back on a path of energy dependence for decades to come.”

And Erik Milito, upstream director at the American Petroleum Institute, told Reuters: “We are hopeful the incoming administration will reverse this decision as the nation continues to need a robust strategy for developing offshore and onshore energy.”

Canada will designate all Arctic Canadian waters as indefinitely off limits to future offshore Arctic oil and gas licensing, to be reviewed every five years through a climate and marine science-based life-cycle assessment.

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Obama Just Took a Big Step on Climate—and Trump Probably Can’t Undo It

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