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The Planet Just Obliterated Another Heat Record

by HarrietGutierre Posted on March 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

February smashed a century of global temperature records by “stunning” margin, according to data released by NASA.

The unprecedented leap led scientists, usually wary of highlighting a single month’s temperature, to label the new record a “shocker” and warn of a “climate emergency.”

The NASA data shows the average global surface temperature in February was 2.43 degrees Fahrenheit (1.35 degrees Celsius) warmer than the average temperature for the month between 1951-1980, a far bigger margin than ever seen before. The previous record, set just one month earlier in January, was 2.07 degrees F (1.15 C) above the long-term average for that month.

“NASA dropped a bombshell of a climate report,” said Jeff Masters and Bob Henson, who analyzed the data on the Weather Underground website. “February dispensed with the one-month-old record by a full 0.21C 0.38 degrees F—an extraordinary margin to beat a monthly world temperature record by.”

“This result is a true shocker, and yet another reminder of the incessant long-term rise in global temperature resulting from human-produced greenhouse gases,” said Masters and Henson. “We are now hurtling at a frightening pace toward the globally agreed maximum of 2 C (3.6 F) warming over pre-industrial levels.”

The UN climate summit in Paris in December confirmed 3.6 degrees F (2 C) as the danger limit for global warming which should not be passed. But it also agreed to “pursue efforts” to limit warming to 2.7 degrees F (1.5 C), a target now looking highly optimistic.

Climate change is usually assessed over years and decades, and 2015 shattered the record set in 2014 for the hottest year seen, in data stretching back to 1850. The UK Met Office also expects 2016 to set a new record, meaning the global temperature record will have been broken for three years in a row.

One of the world’s three key temperature records is kept by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and its director Prof. Gavin Schmidt reacted to the February GISS temperature measurements with a simple “wow.” He tweeted:

“We are in a kind of climate emergency now,” said Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf, from the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research in Germany. He told Fairfax Media: “This is really quite stunning…It’s completely unprecedented.”

“This is a very worrying result,” said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, noting that each of the last five months globally have been hotter than any month preceding them.

“These results suggest that we may be even closer than we realized to breaching the 2 C limit. We have used up all of our room for maneuver. If we delay any longer strong cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, it looks like global mean surface temperature is likely to exceed the level beyond which the impacts of climate change are likely to be very dangerous.”

A major El Niño event, the biggest since 1998, is boosting global temperatures, but scientists are agreed that global warming driven by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions is by far the largest factor in the astonishing run of temperature records.

Prof. Adam Scaife, at the UK Met Office, said the very low levels of Arctic ice were also helping to raise temperatures: “There has been record low ice in the Arctic for two months running and that releases a lot of heat.” He said the Met Office had forecast a record-breaking 2016 in December: “It is not as if you can’t see these things coming.”

Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, UK, said: “It is a pretty big jump between January and February, although this data from NASA is only the first set of global temperature data. We will need to see what the figures from NOAA and the Met Office say. It is in line with our expectations that due to the continuing effect of greenhouse gas emissions, combined with the effects of El Niño on top, 2016 is likely to beat 2015 as the warmest year on record.”

The record for an annual increase of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, was also demolished in 2015.

Fossil fuel burning and the strong El Niño pushed CO2 levels up by 3.05 parts per million (ppm) to 402.6 ppm compared to 2014. “CO2 levels are increasing faster than they have in hundreds of thousands of years,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist at NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. “It’s explosive compared to natural processes.”

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The Planet Just Obliterated Another Heat Record

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Bobby Jindal’s Disaster in Louisiana Shows Why You Shouldn’t Bet on Fossil Fuels

by MelodyWdnjv Posted on March 10, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The state of Louisiana has fallen on hard times, and its situation offers some hard lessons. First, don’t let a right-wing ideologue cut your budget to the bone. Second, don’t hang your whole economy on fossil fuel extraction.

The Washington Post reports on the state’s budget crisis:

Already, the state of Louisiana had gutted university spending and depleted its rainy-day funds. It had cut 30,000 employees and furloughed others. It had slashed the number of child services staffers…

And then, the state’s new governor, John Bel Edwards (D), came on TV and said the worst was yet to come. …

Despite all the cuts of the previous years, the nation’s second-poorest state still needed nearly $3 billion—almost $650 per person—just to maintain its regular services over the next 16 months. …

A few universities will shut down and declare bankruptcy. Graduations will be canceled. Students will lose scholarships. Select hospitals will close. Patients will lose funding for treatment of disabilities. Some reports of child abuse will go uninvestigated.

For eight years, under former Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), Louisiana slashed taxes and played tricks to fill budget holes. Jindal claimed that the tax cuts he pushed through would promote miraculous economic growth and make up for the lost revenue. That didn’t work, of course, just as it didn’t work on a national level under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The Post writes:

Many of the state’s economic analysts say a structural budget deficit emerged and then grew under former governor Bobby Jindal, who, during his eight years in office, reduced the state’s revenue by offering tax breaks to the middle class and wealthy. He also created new subsidies aimed at luring and keeping businesses. Those policies, state data show, didn’t deliver the desired economic growth. This year, Louisiana has doled out $210 million more to corporations in the form of credits and subsidies than it has collected from them in taxes.

The current Republican presidential frontrunners are running on a similar program of massive tax cuts tilted towards the wealthy—which would likely lead to a similar budget crisis on a nationwide scale. (Jindal’s ill-fated presidential campaign had its own gigantic regressive tax cut proposal.)

When government budgets collapse, environmental protection takes a big hit. This is particularly worrying in Louisiana. The state is filled with severely climate-threatened low-lying regions such as the Bayou and New Orleans, and its coastline is disappearing under the rising sea, so it should be investing heavily in climate adaptation. The state’s poverty also intensifies its aching need for improved mass transit. Huge spending cuts at the federal or state level, never mind both, are putting the state’s populace at greater risk.

Louisiana’s budget problems also demonstrate that fossil fuel extraction may be less an economic boon than a massive liability. Louisiana, with its oil refineries and offshore rigs, has the third worst poverty rate in the nation—and that is sadly typical of fossil fuel–heavy states. West Virginia and Kentucky, for example, are among the top three states for coal production and among among the 10 poorest states overall. And these states ranked dismally on poverty metrics even when oil, gas, and coal were booming. Now that they’re not, things are even worse.

Politicians from all of these places, even Democrats, argue that fossil fuel production is a needed economic engine. But fossil fuel extraction is inherently temporary: one day, the well will run dry—if the market doesn’t dry up first. Commodity prices are inherently volatile, and when they fall, the first thing you see is a loss of revenue to that industry and a decline in tax revenues. What comes next in many places may be even worse: with lower prices making harder-to-reach deposits unprofitable to extract, the industry cuts back on production. Workers get laid off, and the hard times ripple throughout the economy.

For Louisiana, where the oil and gas is offshore and therefore more expensive to drill than the oil right under the Saudi desert, this is just what has happened. As the Post notes, “The price of oil and natural gas fell off a cliff, causing a retrenchment in an industry that provided the state with jobs and royalties.”

Louisiana is not the only state experiencing this. Declining oil prices have forced Alaska to cut $1 billion in spending from its budget over the last two years. Now it faces a $4 billion deficit. And low coal and natural gas prices have West Virginia facing a $466 million budget gap.

Whole countries are feeling the same pinch. Russia, which depends heavily on gas and oil exports, is looking at a national budget that will be shorn of over $38 billion in income.

Instead of just relying on a short-term, unreliable, and polluting industry, states such as Louisiana need to diversify into industries that draw on human capital—whether it’s computer programming or solar panel manufacturing—and can provide a more stable source of revenue. Microchip prices don’t fluctuate wildly. And the high-tech sector doesn’t just fall apart when demand slackens for current products; companies innovate new ones. Louisiana can&’t innovate its way out of its current problem by inventing a new fossil fuel that just happens to be under its feet.

Perhaps, instead of cutting taxes and education spending, Jindal should have invested in a more educated workforce. But then his support for creationism might not have gone over as well.

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Bobby Jindal’s Disaster in Louisiana Shows Why You Shouldn’t Bet on Fossil Fuels

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Are Big Power Companies Pulling a Fast One on Florida Voters?

by MichaelIredale Posted on March 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Florida Supreme Court is set to weigh in on a controversial ballot measure that environmentalists warn could erect a new obstacle for the state’s struggling renewable energy industry.

On Monday, the court is expected to begin hearing oral arguments over Amendment 1, a proposed ballot imitative that purports to strengthen the legal rights of homeowners who have rooftop solar panels. But critics in the solar industry and environmental groups claim that if the measure passes in November, it would actually deal a major blow to rooftop solar by undermining one of the key state policies supporting it.

Amendment 1 was created by an organization with a grassroots-sounding name: Consumers for Smart Solar. In reality, though, the organization is financed by the state’s major electric utility companies as well as by conservative groups with ties to the Koch brothers. The measure qualified for the ballot in late January, after nabbing nearly 700,000 signatures from Floridians. A competing measure—pushed by Floridians for Solar Choice, a group backed by the solar industry—did not get enough signatures to make the ballot.

In Florida, the Supreme Court is commonly asked by the attorney general to review ballot initiatives to ensure that what voters will read on the ballot accurately characterizes the legal effects of the measure. And in this case, it does not, according to a legal brief filed by the environmental group Earthjustice:

If passed by the voters, the utility-sponsored amendment would be a constitutional endorsement of the idea that rooftop solar users should pay higher utility bills than other customers. Solar users could end up paying twice as much as other customers pay to buy power from the utilities. This utility-sponsored amendment pretends to be pro-solar but is actually a disguised attempt to derail rooftop solar in Florida.

“This is really shrewd, cynical deception,” said David Guest, the Earthjustice attorney who will argue the group’s position to the court on Monday.

A spokesperson for the utility-backed Consumers for Smart Solar countered in an email that “our amendment is not misleading” and that its opponents “are manufacturing false arguments and using scare tactics.”

The court battle over the ballot measure is just the latest episode in a long and brutal fight in Florida pitting solar companies and their environmentalist allies against power companies that fear losing their customers to rooftop solar power. Despite being one of the country’s sunniest (and largest) states, Florida ranks just 15th for solar installations. As Tim Dickinson recently explained in a great feature for Rolling Stone:

Key policies that have spurred a rooftop solar revolution elsewhere in America are absent or actually illegal in Florida. Unlike the majority of states, even Texas, Florida has no mandate to generate any portion of its electricity from renewable power. Worse, the state’s restrictive monopoly utility law forbids anyone but the power companies from buying and selling electricity. Landlords cannot sell power from solar panels to tenants. Popular solar leasing programs like those offered by SolarCity and Sunrun are outlawed. Rooftop solar is limited to those who can afford the upfront expense; as a result, fewer than 9,000 Florida homes have panels installed.

The controversial ballot measure would amend the Florida constitution to guarantee that “electricity consumers have the right to own or lease solar equipment installed on their property to generate electricity for their own use.” Sounds great, right?

Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, Floridians already have that right, even though it’s not explicitly mentioned in the state’s constitution.

“There already is a right to own or lease solar,” explained Hannah Wiseman, a professor of energy law at Florida State University. In this area, she said, Amendment 1 “is entrenching existing laws.”

What the amendment won’t do, however, is legalize the type of solar lease offered by SolarCity, which is currently banned in Florida. “Third-party ownership” is a business model in which a contractor such as SolarCity installs solar panels on your roof free of charge, retains ownership of those panels, and then sells you the electricity they produce at less than the cost of buying electricity from the grid. That model has been extremely successful for SolarCity in California and other leading solar states, since it’s simple and allows homeowners to avoid the big up-front costs of installing and maintaining their own panels. In Florida, only electric utilities have the right to sell electricity to homeowners; you can buy or lease your own solar panels, but you can’t arrange to buy power from a third-party solar contractor. The failed ballot measure backed by Floridians for Solar Choice would have changed that, but Amendment 1 will not.

But according to Guest, there’s an even more insidious provision in Amendment 1’s fine print. The amendment says that state and local governments have the authority “to ensure that consumers who do not choose to install solar are not required to subsidize the costs of backup power and electric grid access to those who do.”

The issue here is net metering, a policy that exists in almost every state (including Florida) that requires electric utilities to purchase excess electricity from solar homes. In effect, the extra power your panels produce in the afternoon offsets the cost of power you take from the grid at night. The policy is widely loathed by power companies, because they not only lose a paying customer to solar, but have to pay that customer and take the customer’s extra power off their hands. Electric utilities across the country have waged a variety of wars against net metering over the last several years; one of their biggest wins was in Nevada last month.

Often the fight comes down to a complicated, sometimes esoteric, debate about whether or not net metering forces utilities to raise their rates for non-solar homes to cover the cost of solar homes. (In addition to having to buy the excess power, utilities say that solar homes still make use of transmission lines and other grid infrastructure without paying their fair share for it.)

That brings us back to the amendment: If passed, Wiseman said, it would allow utilities to argue that net metering is a “subsidy” for solar and that lawmakers have the authority to prohibit it.

“It could open the door for utilities charging solar users high fixed fees, and potentially getting rid of net metering,” Wiseman said.

Guest was more blunt: “They’re trying to kill net metering, is really what it is.”

All of this seems to be pretty confusing for Floridians, who appear to hold conflicting views on the controversy. According to the solar industry-backed Floridians for Solar Choice, 82 percent of the state’s voters said they would support changing the law to permit third-party ownership of solar. But a recent poll from the utility-backed Consumers for Smart Solar found that 73 percent of voters support their ballot measure.

One of the amendment’s opponents is Debbie Dooley, a Georgia-based Tea Party activist who has rallied conservative opposition to this measure and other potentially anti-solar policies around the country. Consumers for Smart Solar is engaged in “a campaign of lies and deception,” she said. The group “claims to support free market principle, but they are taking an anti-free market position by siding with monopolies to stop competition from solar.”

Now it’s up to the court to determine if Amendment 1’s wording is, in fact, deceptive. If they decide it is, they could throw the measure out. The case is much more ambiguous than the ballot measure language the court normally reviews, Wiseman said. But she added that it’s rare for the court to remove initiatives from the ballot.

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Are Big Power Companies Pulling a Fast One on Florida Voters?

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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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Florida Is Sinking. Where Is Marco Rubio?

by CandacePaquin3 Posted on February 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Newsweek and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

An unusual January storm bent palm trees and turned city sidewalks into creeks as a small group of Miami-area mayors and administrators huddled in Pinecrest, one of Miami-Dade County’s 34 municipalities. They had come at the invitation of Pinecrest’s mayor to discuss rising sea levels, long predicted by climate change scientists and now regularly inundating their towns. The mood in the room was somewhere between pessimism and panic.

On the agenda: making flood prediction maps to help prioritize which roads, schools and hospitals to save as waters rise; how to keep saltwater from leaching into the aquifer; and what to do about 1.6 million septic tanks whose failure could create a Third World sanitation challenge. Someone also brought up the alarming possibility of the sea engulfing the nearby Turkey Point nuclear power plant.

The scale of South Florida’s looming catastrophe—$69 billion worth of property is at risk of flooding in less than 15 years—is playing out like a big-budget disaster movie, but dealing with it has been largely left to local political and business leaders in tiny rooms like the Pinecrest Municipal Center’s Council Chamber. Their biggest problem is the one climate scientists have struggled with for decades: creating a sense of urgency. Before adjourning, the mayors considered finding a mascot to get people’s attention, like a climate change Smokey Bear or Woodsy Owl of the “Give a hoot, don’t pollute” campaign. Coral Gables Mayor Jim Cason suggested a WWE wrestler could be hired for television and billboard ads with the slogan “Climate change: The problem is bigger than you think.”

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Florida Is Sinking. Where Is Marco Rubio?

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Obama Blasts Climate Deniers and Calls for a Clean Energy Revolution

by CaitlynLuke5 Posted on January 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Fresh off the historic Paris climate change agreement, President Barack Obama used his final State of the Union address Tuesday night to urge Congress to finally act on global warming.

“Look, if anybody still wants to dispute the science around climate change, have at it,” Obama said. “You will be pretty lonely, because you’ll be debating our military, most of America’s business leaders, the majority of the American people, almost the entire scientific community, and 200 nations around the world who agree it’s a problem and intend to solve it.”

Of course, many of the politicians the president was addressing still do want to dispute the science. That includes Ted Cruz, the current Republican presidential front-runner in Iowa. While the Obama administration was busy hashing out the Paris agreement in December, Cruz literally was debating the US military (the retired oceanographer of the Navy, anyway) on the realities of climate science.

Obama sought to push past these distractions by broadly outlining how he planned to address the problem in his final year in office. “We’ve got to accelerate the transition away from old, dirtier energy sources,” he said. Obama criticized fossil fuel subsidies. He nodded to one of the top priorities of environmental activists when he said he planned to “push 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.” And he called for putting “tens of thousands of Americans to work building a 21st-century transportation system.”

Still, Obama couldn’t resist taking a shot at his Republican critics who reject scientific facts. “Sixty years ago, when the Russians beat us into space, we didn’t deny Sputnik was up there,” he said. “We didn’t argue about the science, or shrink our research and development budget. We built a space program almost overnight, and 12 years later, we were walking on the moon.”

Obama has made big climate policy promises before. My colleague Tim McDonnell examines the mixed results of proposals the president laid out in his past seven State of the Union speeches in the video below:

* This post has been revised.

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Obama Blasts Climate Deniers and Calls for a Clean Energy Revolution

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Here’s Every State of the Union Climate Promise Made by Obama

by FlorPilgrim353 Posted on January 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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If history is any guide, climate change is likely to make a prominent appearance when President Barack Obama gives his final State of the Union address Tuesday night. He’s brought it up in every one of his previous SOTU speeches, most strongly in 2015, when he said that “no challenge—no challenge—poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.”

Along with dire warnings about rising sea levels, droughts, and other climate impacts, Obama has made an evolving series of commitments to the American people and demands to Congress regarding climate action. He has called repeatedly for a cap-and-trade bill, for an end to fossil fuel subsidies, for federal investment in renewable energy, and for American leadership in the international fight against global warming.

It’s safe to say that his speech Tuesday, at 9 p.m. EST, will revisit some of these ideas. Obama is likely to bring up his administration’s success in shepherding the Paris Agreement—the first global pact to fight climate change—that was adopted in December. And he might mention some of the remaining items on his climate change to-do list, which include setting new emissions standards for heavy-duty trucks and fending off Republican attacks on his new regulations restricting power plant emissions.

For some clue about what we might expect to hear this year, we took a look back at the climate-related statements from Obama’s previous SOTU speeches. Then we compared his proposals to what actually happened. Turns out, while Obama has pretty clearly done more on climate change than any of his predecessors, there are plenty of goals that remain unfulfilled. Watch the video above for a complete rundown.

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Here’s Every State of the Union Climate Promise Made by Obama

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Here’s One Big Thing Obama Can Do in His Final Year in Office

by IvaMoenchfnsr Posted on January 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There’s only one year left until President Barack Obama leaves office, and there’s a fair chance he will be replaced by a climate science-denying Republican, perhaps one in the form of a comb-over-sporting reality TV star. So time may be running out for the United States to take meaningful actions to fight climate change.

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Here’s One Big Thing Obama Can Do in His Final Year in Office

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There’s a Huge Problem With the New Food Guidelines That No One Is Talking About

by KourtneyHrz Posted on January 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Every five years, the government tries to tell Americans what to put in their bodies. Eat more vegetables. Dial back the fats. It’s all based on the best available science for leading a healthy life. But the best available science also has a lot to say about what those food choices do to the environment, and some researchers are peeved that new dietary recommendations released yesterday seem to utterly ignore that fact.

Broadly, the 2016-2020 dietary recommendations aim for balance: More veggies, leaner meats, try some fish! Oh, and eat way less sugar, no more than 10 percent of your total diet.

Read more: Congress doesn’t think agriculture affects your health.

But Americans consume more calories per capita than almost any other country in the world. (Austria occasionally out-gorges the US.) So the things Americans eat have a huge impact on climate change. Soil tilling releases carbon dioxide, delivery vehicles burp exhaust, and cattle spend much of their life farting methane into the atmosphere before they end up medium rare and slathered in A-1. The government’s dietary guidelines could have done a lot to lower that climate cost. Not just because of the bully pulpit: The guidelines drive billions of dollars of food production through federal programs like school lunches and nutrition assistance for the needy.

On its own, plant and animal agriculture contributes 9 percent of all the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. That’s not counting the fuel burned in transportation, processing, refrigeration, and other waypoints between farm and belly. Red meats are among the biggest and most notorious emitters, but trucking a salad from California to Minnesota in January also carries a significant burden. And greenhouse gas emissions aren’t the whole story. “Food production is the largest user of fresh water, largest contributor to the loss of biodiversity, and a major contributor to using up natural resources,” says Miriam Nelson, director of the John Hancock Center on Physical Activity, Nutrition, and Obesity Prevention at Tufts University.

All of these points and more showed up in the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s scientific report, released last February. Nelson chaired the subcommittee in charge of sustainability for the report, and is disappointed that bullet points like eating less meat and buying local food aren’t in the final product. “Especially if you consider that eating less meat, especially red and processed, has health benefits,” she says.

So what happened? The official response—foreshadowed last October in a joint press release from the secretaries of Health and Human Services and the USDA—is that sustainability falls too far outside the guidelines’ official scope, which is to provide “nutritional and dietary information.” (A government spokesperson referred me back to that press release when I requested to speak with an official about the sustainability omission.)

Possibly the agencies in charge of drafting the decisions are too close to the industries they are supposed to regulate. “On one hand, the USDA is compiling dietary advice,” says David Wallinga, a physician and senior health officer with the National Resources Defense Council. “On the other, their clients are US agriculture companies.” To the USDA’s credit, the agency makes sizable investments in sustainable farming.

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There’s a Huge Problem With the New Food Guidelines That No One Is Talking About

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Europe Is Going After Donald Trump in the Most Amazingly European Way

by ChandaVaughn Posted on January 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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

A parliamentary petition backed by 500,000 people failed to bar Donald Trump from the United Kingdom, but the controversial US presidential candidate and climate change skeptic now faces a new deterrent: a fine for the carbon pollution from one of his enormous private jets.

The Bahrain Royal family, 21st Century Fox America, the company chaired by Rupert Murdoch, and British construction vehicle manufacturers JCB have also been asked to pay up for flights to and from the UK.

The Environment Agency, which is responsible for enforcing the European Union’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) in the UK, has issued over £750,000 (roughly $1.1 million) in fines to a total of 25 operators for “failure to surrender sufficient allowances to cover annual reportable emissions”.

The ETS requires polluters to surrender a carbon permit for every metric ton of carbon pollution emitted, or pay a €100 ($109) per ton fine. Permits are given to many air operators for free but can be bought if needed for about €8 ($8.72) currently.

Donald Trump faces a £1,610 ($2,339) penalty for a flight to the UK in a plane owned by DJT Operations I LLC, possibly the $100 million Boeing 757 he uses as a private jet, complete with master bedroom and gold taps. The 757 is 54 meters long and usually carries 200-300 passengers. Trump opened his golf course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in 2012, the period covered by the fines published on 5 January.

The ETS is intended to limit carbon emissions and reduce climate change. This is unlikely to impress Trump, who has called climate change “bullshit” and a concept “created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” Hope Hicks, Trump’s campaign communications manager, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Bahrain royal family has been hit with a heftier fine, £60,698 ($88,275), while 21st Century Fox America was fined £17,463 ($25,397).

The 25 operators fined include a series of private jet operators, insurance giant AIG, Air India, and a “MIG Russian Aircraft,” which was not a military plane. JCB Ltd was hit with the biggest fine of £157,596 ($229,197)

“The EU Emissions Trading System is an important means of regulating emissions from aviation operators,” said Liz Parkes, Environment Agency deputy director of climate change and business services. “The Environment Agency’s enforcement activity is part of coordinated action across Europe.” Confidentiality rules mean the EA is unable to disclose whether fines have been paid or not.

Additional reporting by Scott Bixby in New York.

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Europe Is Going After Donald Trump in the Most Amazingly European Way

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