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The State Department could gut Obama’s last remaining executive action on climate change.

by MoniqueFournier Posted on January 19, 2019

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An independent review of the federal government’s actions on climate change might have inadvertently endangered President Obama’s last remaining executive action on global warming.

In 2017, five Democratic senators — including Sheldon Whitehouse, Dianne Feinstein, and Elizabeth Warren — asked the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conduct a review of how federal agencies were addressing climate change as a “potential driver of global migration.” The nonpartisan “congressional watchdog,” studied executive and federal activities between 2014 and 2018.

The GAO report, which was released on Thursday, adds to the bleak picture of federal climate action under the current administration. It shows that while the Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Department of Defense began to look into the nexus of climate change and migration while Obama was in office, much of that work has been undone by President Trump and his appointees.

The fact that climate connections have languished in several federal agencies over the past two years is not that surprising– President Trump has systematically dismantled musth of Obama’s climate legacy. But the report itself is having some unexpected consequences in certain parts of the federal government.

As a result of its inquiry into federal actions on climate change and migration, the GAO issued a recommendation to the U.S. State Department: it should provide its missions with guidance on how to assess risks posed by climate change. That’s something the department started to do after Obama issued an executive order on Climate-Resilient International Development in 2014. In response, according to the GAO, the State Department agreed to that recommendation this year — but added that the agency will consider asking President Trump to scrap Obama’s order.

“This is unprecedented within my experience that the agency would on the one hand essentially acknowledge and agree to the recommendation, but on the other hand begin working to consider whether to rescind the underlying executive action,” David Gootnick, director of international affairs and trade at the GAO, told Grist.

When the State Department develops its strategy for U.S. priorities in each country without including guidance on how to conduct climate change risk assessments, it misses out on opportunities to identify and address the potential impact global warming may have on migration, the GAO wrote. The department did not immediately provide comment, citing limited capacity due to the ongoing partial government shutdown.

The GAO report highlighted research on the global fallout of a warming climate, which it said raises “both humanitarian and national security concerns for the U.S. government.” Scientists have increasingly been able to attribute the growing severity of disasters like hurricanes and floods to climate change. Extreme weather events can often displace entire communities, and push people to move in order to rebuild their lives. Slow changes over time, like prolonged droughts and sea-level rise driven by higher average global temperatures, can also destroy livelihoods and factor into people’s decisions to migrate.

U.S. Government Accountability Office

Although the study notes that it’s difficult to quantify how much of a role climate change plays directly or indirectly on global migration trends, it did point to instances when federal agencies had made that connection in the past. In 2014, the Department of State wrote in its adaptation plan that climate change was a potential driver for migration and could affect the department’s peace-keeping efforts. That year, the Department of Defense stated in its adaptation roadmap that climate change was a “threat multiplier” that could threaten national security through migration. Also in 2014, USAID, which spearheads the nation’s international development efforts, identified climate-related events like flooding as a driver of migration and a risk to its aid programming.

The Trump administration has already revoked two other Obama-era executive actions on climate change: a 2013 executive order “preparing the United States for the impacts of climate change” and a 2016 presidential memorandum on climate change and national security.

Those actions have crippled the federal agencies’ ability to communicate with each other on climate change. It disbanded the Council on Climate Preparedness and Resilience and the Council on Climate Preparedness and Resilience — both of which brought together expertise from the Departments of State, Defense, and USAID.

“Those kinds of working groups are important for the U.S. government to bring its collective resources to bear and be able to be a partner with other bilateral and multilateral fora,” said Gootnick.

The GAO report also noted how the Trump administration has slashed funding for climate initiatives. And on top of vowing to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, the Trump administration also said that it would pull out of negotiations on the U.N. Global Compact for Migration, which is shaping up to be one of the first intergovernmental agreements to tackle climate-driven migration.

In an email to Grist, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who commissioned the GAO report, wrote, “President Trump’s immigration obsession has a serious blind spot: the role of climate change in driving people to flee their homes.”

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The State Department could gut Obama’s last remaining executive action on climate change.

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Bernie Sanders calls out Trump for ignoring the real crisis: climate change

by ShelliDubois Posted on January 9, 2019

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President Trump addressed the nation from the Oval Office on Tuesday night about an issue he thinks is worth shutting down the government over: illegal immigration at the United States’ border with Mexico. The U.S., he said, is facing “a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.” He called on Democrats to approve a $5.7 billion steel barrier — a move House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer say they have no intention of making.

In response to Trump’s address, Pelosi said, “President Trump must stop holding the American people hostage, must stop manufacturing a crisis, and must reopen the government.”

She wasn’t alone in accusing the president of ginning up a fake emergency. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who offered an unofficial response to Trump’s primetime address via YouTube and social media, levied the same charge.

Sanders hit back at Trump for the numerous falsehoods in the president’s speech, and for distracting the American people with politically-charged antics. He added that the U.S. is already facing an emergency of monumental proportions: It’s called climate change. The once-and-potentially-future presidential candidate referred to warming as “the biggest crisis of all.”

“The scientific community has made it very clear in telling us that climate change is real and is causing devastating harm to our country and the entire planet,” he said at the 11-minute mark in his speech. “Mr. President, we don’t need to create artificial crises. We have enough real crises.”

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Bernie Sanders calls out Trump for ignoring the real crisis: climate change

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CBO dismisses costs of global warming, posing hurdle for climate legislation

by LynwoodKroll1 Posted on December 21, 2018

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

In a baffling repudiation of the federal government’s own scientists, the Congressional Budget Office last week said that climate change poses little economic risk to the United States in the next decade.

The statement, which went so far as to highlight dubiously positive effects of rising global temperatures, poses a potential hurdle for future legislation to curb surging greenhouse gas emissions, experts said, and amounts to textbook climate change denial.

Buried on page 292 of a 316-page report titled “Options for Reducing the Deficit: 2019 to 2028,” the CBO said: “Many estimates suggest that the effect of climate change on the nation’s economic output, and hence on federal tax revenues, will probably be small over the next 30 years and larger, but still modest, in the following few decades.”

“That’s just completely false,” Gary Yohe, an environmental economist at Wesleyan University, said by phone Wednesday. “There are no references to these ‘many estimates,’ and the following part of the paragraph cherry-picks.”

The report — first noted on Twitter by investigative reporter David Sirota — goes on to tout positive effects like “fewer deaths from cold weather” and “improvements in agricultural productivity” as some of “the more certain effects of climate change on humans over the next several decades.”

The stunning remarks directly contradict the National Climate Assessment, which found that, by 2100, crop damage, lost labor, and extreme weather will cost the U.S. economy upward of $500 billion a year. That’s “more than the current gross domestic product of many U.S. states,” according to the report, drafted by researchers at 13 federal agencies.

In October the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change determined that unabated global warming beyond 2.3 degrees F above preindustrial levels would cause $54 trillion in damage and that the world is likely to hit that average temperature increase unless world governments halve emissions by 2030.

In a lengthy statement to HuffPost, the CBO referred to three of its own past reports, including one that said, “Even under scenarios in which significant climate change is assumed, the projected long-term effects on GDP would tend to be modest relative to underlying economic growth.”

“Although CBO has not undertaken a full analysis of the budgetary costs stemming from climate change, it has recently analyzed the potential costs of future hurricane damage caused by climate change and coastal development,” read an excerpt from one report highlighted in the statement. “All told, CBO projects that the increase in the amount of hurricane damage attributable to coastal development and climate change will probably be less than 0.05 percent of GDP in the 2040s.”

The agency’s report attributed differing climate predictions to “the imperfect understanding of physical processes and of many aspects of the interacting components (land, air, water, ice, and all forms of life) that make up the Earth’s climate system.”

In an as-yet-unpublished study shared with HuffPost, Yohe calculated that hurricane damage alone totaled $2.9 trillion from 1998 to 2018. Of that, he found $2.25 trillion (about $107 billion per year) could be attributed to climate change. That sum is up from $900 billion ($45 billion per year) from 1978 to 1997.

The CBO finding could delay efforts to pass long-overdue climate legislation in the next few years and provide ammunition to combat any such measures for lawmakers who have long denied the scientific realities of global warming on ideological grounds.

“Anybody writing legislation is going to have to understand that using budgetary effects is not necessarily going to get you a long way to getting passage,” said Mark Harkins, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute.

The CBO, established as Congress’ official budget scorekeeper in 1974, may be identifying a “difference between the impact on the budget and the economy,” said Stan Collender, a federal spending expert who runs the website The Budget Guy.

“If CBO said it, it’s serious and credible,” he said, adding that the assessment “decreases the political imperative” for sweeping climate policies like the Green New Deal that Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a Democrat from New York) and more than 40 other Democrats have vowed to champion in the next Congress.

But some say the CBO increasingly poses an obstacle to policies needed to curb global warming and halt worsening poverty, in the name of misplaced concerns about the national deficit. Among them is Stephanie Kelton, an economist at Stony Brook University and a proponent of modern monetary theory, the concept that, under a currency like the dollar, a government can print as much money as it wants without fear of going bankrupt.

When the CBO found that Republican tax cuts to the rich and corporations would inflate the national deficit, the GOP attacked the nonpartisan agency, and the White House claimed the CBO’s math “doesn’t add up.” While objecting to the GOP’s tax cut for the wealthy in an era of climate crisis, Kelton lauded the political will to challenge the traditional debt calculus.

“Everyone’s got to stop being so freaking deferential to the CBO,” she said by phone. “Republicans weren’t afraid to call them out and say their numbers were wrong. They dismissed it. I just think Democrats need to stand up when it comes time.”

Federal efforts to combat climate change should be met with the kind of seemingly unlimited bipartisan support that exists for military spending to defend the country from foreign threats, Kelton said, calling the CBO report “out of step with what the scientific community and others are telling us.”

“You’ve got to figure out a way around the CBO,” she said. “If they’re going to become an obstacle, you either have to go around or through or you remove the obstacle.”

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CBO dismisses costs of global warming, posing hurdle for climate legislation

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This year’s U.N. climate talks — brought to you by coal?

by antonioorozco Posted on December 4, 2018

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KATOWICE, POLAND — There’s a specter hanging over the COP24 climate talks, happening this week in the small city of Katowice, Poland. It’s not the goalpost-moving report that the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released two months ago about the need to limit warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (instead of 3.6 degrees). It’s not the conspicuous absence of prominent U.S. politicians — with the exception of former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who parachuted in, Terminator-style, to brag about his four low-emission Hummers. (Wait, what?)

Nope, the cloud over COP24 is coal dust. Literally. Smokestacks and coal plumes are visible from the spaceship-shaped conference center, and the Wujek coal mine is less than three miles away. And if you thought Poland would try to downplay its historical (and, well, current) reliance on coal, you’d be wrong: The booth for the town of Katowice, sitting right next to the official one for all of Poland, proudly touts coal. And not just a little coal — coal made into soap, coal made into earrings and other jewelry, coal under glass, coal in cages — lots and lots of coal.

This is no accident. The host city is in the heart of the Polish region of Silesia, which sits on a lucrative coal deposit. A Katowice native running the booth explained that here everyone has a connection to coal: a family member or friend who has either worked in the mines or supported the industry in some other form. Coal isn’t just an energy source in Katowice — it’s a way of life.

COP24’s president, Michał Kurtyka, a state secretary in Poland’s Ministry of Energy, argued in his opening remarks that bringing the climate summit to Katowice was a strategic decision: to exhibit a city and region in need of transition away from its lifeblood. “How does one tell a region of 5 million people — in over 70 cities across the region — to just move on, your world is that of the past?” he asked the assembled dignitaries.

It’s a rhetorical question familiar in the United States, where coal-mining jobs have been on a fairly steady decline since the 1980s. But while coal in the U.S. now makes up 30 percent of electricity generation, thanks largely to falling natural gas prices, in Poland coal still accounts for almost 80 percent. And the government is planning the construction of further plants.

“Every government in Poland is coal, coal,” Monika Sadkowska, a Warsaw-based climate activist, told Grist. “The only strong worker union in Poland is mining. And every government is afraid of them.”

Even as the IPCC declared in its October report that coal must be almost entirely phased out by mid-century to keep average global temperatures from cresting over the 2.7 degrees F mark, Polish President Andrzej Duda has been hesitant to renounce it. “According to experts, we have coal deposits that will last 200 years,” he said at a press conference on Monday. “It would be hard to expect us to give up on it totally.”

Soap made from coal is displayed at the Katowice booth at the COP24 climate talks.Meghan Shea

Instead, the Polish government is promoting “carbon neutral” ways to have its coal and burn it, too. In a pamphlet handed out at the Polish country booth, the delegation is promoting “forest coal farms,” or tree-planting projects that will “enable the absorbance of even more CO2” from the country’s massive coal installations.

At a press conference, Robert Cyglicki, the director of Greenpeace for central and eastern Europe, was blunt about the scientific reality of such a project. “One coal power plant, Bełchatów, emits more annually than all Polish forests can absorb,” he said of the world’s largest brown coal-burning facility. Yes, forests are great carbon sinks. But they’re no match for all of Poland’s old, dirty coal plants.

And while Poland has started spreading the gospel of coal at COP24, the U.S. is poised to join the chorus. Last year, at COP23 in Bonn, Germany, the Trump administration ran a coal-focused side event that was interrupted by young protestors. This year, it has a similar gathering in the works, and reports say the U.S. delegation is likely to push for coal to be part of any future global energy mix.

Amid the heavy coal boosterism, this year’s conference has brought attention to the plight of workers whose livelihoods will be changed under an energy transformation. France’s recent “yellow vest” protests were in response to an increased fuel tax, and the populism spreading across Europe is omnipresent at COP24.

In Katowice, most delegates are calling for a “just transition” — a switch in energy sources that doesn’t leave society’s most vulnerable behind. Just as Trump has promised to save the coal industry, Poland’s leaders are promising to provide alternative livelihoods for their countrymen currently working in its mines and coal-fired plants.

Piotr Trzaskowski, the Polish organizer of 350.org, says the “just transition” talk in Poland is just that — talk. Coal is king here, and as President Duda suggested, Polish officials aren’t likely to abandon it. “Their vision is making sure it stays, but just tweaking it here and there,” he told Grist.

Meanwhile, attendees representing developing nations may be less concerned about what happens to today’s fossil fuel workers than with the fact that climate change’s worst effects are still on the horizon.

“Small islands feel like the ‘just transition’ conversation is only happening vis a vis workers who might lose their jobs,” explains Anabella Rosemberg, the international program director of Greenpeace. “They say,’ What about us? Yes they will lose jobs, but we are sinking.’ The ‘just transition’ for them is 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F).”

But to even dream of averting 2.7 degrees F will involve phasing out coal — and coal workers’ jobs — fast.

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This year’s U.N. climate talks — brought to you by coal?

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What’s the Environmental Impact of Flying Cross-Country?

by AnaBruxner Posted on December 3, 2018

With millions traversing the globe to reach their loved ones for the holidays, travel (particularly air travel) is top of mind.?How can I avoid the lines??Will I be able to fit all these gifts in my carry-on??But one more question arises in the environmentally conscious: What’s this going to do to my carbon footprint?

Aviation is, at its core, a fossil fuel industry, one which guzzles a shocking 5 million barrels of oil every single day. Burning this fuel to get you to your grandma’s place in Wisconsin or that winter getaway in Hawaii currently contributes to close to 2.5 percent of total carbon emissions. Experts expect this figure to rise to 22 percent by 2050, even as other sectors start cutting.

Additionally, we are flying more than ever. Demand for flights increases daily, to the point that demand from new and existing travelers is supposed to double by 2035. With?the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warning us that we have just 12 years to avoid apocalyptic climate change disaster, this rising trend in air travel is certainly bleak.

The third problem? While aircraft is becoming more fuel efficient, electric planes are still decades away. We have yet to invent a battery that can deliver as much power as jet fuel and, so far, the technology is cost prohibitive.

Most of us are ignorant of how our flying behavior contributes to climate change, largely because it just isn’t communicated to us very often. Think about it…when was the last time you saw an advertisement mentioning the environmental impact of flying? New cars, appliances, even houses are required to disclose energy efficiency. Planes and airlines? Not so.

So what’s to be done? We won’t be shutting down cheap air travel anytime soon (aviation was purposefully excluded from the Kyoto and Paris climate change agreements) and regulatory organizations are dragging their feet, avoiding any plan that might have negative economic implications.

Here’s what you can do about this.

Your government, your favorite airline, the companies that control global wealth…they won’t do a thing as long as citizens remain blissfully unaware of the impact of aviation emissions. Want a carbon tax on flights? Speak up.

Connect with your peers. Encourage everyone to use their voice to make change. Maybe then, we will be able to find a less damaging solution, while still retaining access to global travel and that vacay you always dreamed of in Hawaii.

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

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What’s the Environmental Impact of Flying Cross-Country?

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The U.N.’s watchdog on indigenous rights has her eye on climate change initiatives

by AXIJacinto Posted on September 13, 2018

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, fights a complicated climate battle. She’s a member of the Kankanaey Igorot people of the Philippines, and it’s her job to monitor threats being posed to indigenous communities and report her findings to the U.N. human rights council.

And there are many fronts to those threats: Fossil fuels push indigenous communities from their territories and destroy the ecosystems they depend on, all while a warming world threatens their traditions and livelihoods. Renewable energy is an important solution, but it has also caused harm — from companies grabbing tribal lands to governments criminalizing indigenous activists who oppose new energy projects, says Tauli-Corpuz.

Tauli-Corpuz highlighted the opportunities and risks that need to be navigated in the transition towards a fossil fuel-free future during an affiliate avent at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco. The event highlighted work by the Right Energy Project, an international collaboration that aims to provide 50 million indigenous peoples with access to renewable energy by 2030. The project also advocates for renewable energy that respects human rights.

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Energy is key for indigenous peoples achieving self-determined development, Tauli-Corpuz said during the panel. There’s a high demand for renewable energy projects in those communities, she added. But the U.N. special rapporteur noted an important caveat: “I have been to several countries where renewable energy projects are put in place but without consulting indigenous peoples, without involving them in planning, and without them benefiting from it.”

In the worst cases, indigenous leaders have been targeted and killed for their opposition to controversial energy projects billed as “renewable.” She pointed to the death of Honduran activist Berta Caceres, who was killed while mounting a campaign against a large hydroelectric dam. “This is one example of how to do it wrong, how to approach renewable energy projects in a deadly way,” Tauli-Corpuz said. She submitted a report to the Human Rights Council this month on the criminalization of indigenous peoples defending their rights. Tauli-Corpuz herself was accused of terrorism by the Government of the Philippines: “How will we get stronger solidarity when indigenous peoples are subjected to those kinds of treatments?” she asked.

Tauli-Corpuz said that a human rights-based approach to renewable energy means that local people are consulted and that free, prior and informed consent is obtained — the standard established in the United Nations’ International Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.

Grist also asked Tauli-Corpuz what her hopes and expectations are as the Global Climate Action Summit unfolds.

She pointed to Tuesday’s announcement that foundations were committing $450 million for forest conservation and protection. The anti-deforestation efforts are supposed to boost indigenous peoples’ rights and opportunities in the process. “Donors said that indigenous peoples’ rights should be respected and violence against them should be stopped,” Tauli-Corpuz said.” For me as a rapporteur, I think those are very good indications.”

Still, Tauli-Corpuz will be keeping a close eye on how this shakes out: “How will we make sure these funds will go directly into the communities? In our experience, if there are announcements like that, big intermediaries come into the picture and eat up 80 percent of the budget and 20 percent only is left with the indigenous peoples.”

Finally, she pointed to the various partnerships between local governments, the private sector, foundations, and indigenous peoples: “Those are the areas which need much more work.” Throughout the week, indigenous activists are holding protests and coordinating their own programming to bring forth community-led solutions and demand participation in policy-making.

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The U.N.’s watchdog on indigenous rights has her eye on climate change initiatives

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Trump just doubled down on a lie about Hurricane Maria’s death toll

by KrisRowexbbf Posted on September 13, 2018

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

With Hurricane Florence set to pummel the East Coast, President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday to brag about his administration’s widely criticized response to last year’s Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico. Trump’s comments drew outrage, with critics pointing out that Maria led to the deaths of nearly 3,000 people. But Trump hasn’t been able to let the matter go. On Thursday, Trump insisted in a pair of tweets that the official death toll was concocted by “Democrats” as part of a conspiracy to “make me look as bad as possible.”

In fact, the Puerto Rico numbers were collected over months by researchers at George Washington University’s school of public health, at the request of the territory’s governor. As the New York Times explained in August:

At issue has been how to assess the severity of a storm whose devastating impact on fundamental needs — water, electricity, communications, and medical care — seemed to rival or exceed that of the deadliest recent storms to hit the United States, but whose official fatality count until now was far less severe. By comparison, Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, is thought to have killed anywhere from 1,000 to more than 1,800 people.

The government’s latest revision brings to a close a year of debate and scientific scrutiny over fatality estimates that had seemed to vary widely — in some cases by thousands. Governor Ricardo Rosselló faced constant political challenges over the disparity between the official death toll, released within weeks of the disaster, and what was apparent to most scientific researchers and reporters who investigated deaths. The inability to provide a reliable death count seemed, to many critics, to echo the dysfunction apparent in the island’s lack of preparation or any swift, effective response from the local and federal governments.

The report came nearly a year after a much-maligned visit to Puerto Rico by Trump two weeks after Maria, where he implied that residents should be “proud” that the official death toll at the time was just 16 people, far lower than that of a “real catastrophe, like Katrina.” That statement ignored the difficulty of counting deaths after the hurricane decimated the island’s infrastructure. In fact, by the time Trump got on his plane to return to Washington, that official death toll had already doubled.

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Trump just doubled down on a lie about Hurricane Maria’s death toll

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The Secret Life of Lobsters – Trevor Corson

by Myrna Posted on September 11, 2018

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The Secret Life of Lobsters
How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean
Trevor Corson

Genre: Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: October 13, 2009

Publisher: HarperCollins e-books

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


In this intimate portrait of an island lobstering community and aneccentric band of renegade biologists, journalist Trevor Corson escorts the reader onto the slippery decks of fishing boats, through danger-filled scuba dives, and deep into the churning currents of the Gulf of Maine to learn about the secret undersea lives of lobsters. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

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The Secret Life of Lobsters – Trevor Corson

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Trump has no standards when it comes to vehicle emissions

by AntonetClint Posted on August 2, 2018

President Donald Trump just slashed vehicle mile-per-gallon requirements. That will not only lead to more gas guzzlers on the roads, but more greenhouse gases and pollution-related deaths.

The move stops gas mileage standards from ratcheting up past 2020 levels, nixing Barack Obama’s Administration standard which ramps up to 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Instead, that target will top out at around 37 mpg after 2021.

The Trump administration also announced it was trashing a decades-old waiver that allows California to set its own pollution and gas-mileage standards above the federal government’s. Because California has so many car buyers, automakers follow the state’s guidelines, effectively making California’s higher standards the country’s.

Scrapping current mileage standards is likely to cost Americans billions of dollars, according to Energy Innovation, a pro-clean energy nonprofit. Allowing cars to guzzle more gas will also contribute to a host of pollution-related health problems: heart attacks, strokes, and respiratory disease.

Energy Innovation

Another risk is runaway climate change. By 2035, these changes will likely bump up yearly emissions by 11 percent from where they would be under the Obama standards. But, thanks to the popularity of electric cars, Energy Innovations expects things to take a turn for the better. More EVs on the road could help emissions reverse course by 2040.

Energy Innovation

The Trump administration’s move will also leave your wallet a little lighter. Junking the efficiency standards and the California waiver means we’ll all be buying more gas  — $457 billion more, according to Energy Innovation. It’s as if the Trump administration added a 57-cent tax in 2040. But instead of paying that money to the government so that it can repair roads and build better transit options, we’ll be giving it to the oil industry.

Energy Innovation

None of this is guaranteed. California’s Attorney General Xavier Becerra is fighting to keep the standards in place. “We’re ready to file suit if needed to protect these critical standards,” Becerra said in April when the EPA said it might slash them. A few weeks later California and 16 other states sued the Administration.

At the very least, legal challenges could delay the revisions into November, when midterm elections will gauge the public’s enthusiasm for the administration’s policies. The legal wrangling could also reopen the case that gave the EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases, giving an increasingly right-leaning Supreme Court the chance to weigh in. In the meantime, all this creates a lot of uncertainty for automakers, as they try to figure out what goals they’ll need to hit seven years from now.

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Trump has no standards when it comes to vehicle emissions

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Lab 257 – Michael C. Carroll

by Myrna Posted on July 6, 2018

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Lab 257

The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Germ Laboratory

Michael C. Carroll

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: October 13, 2009

Publisher: HarperCollins e-books

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


Strictly off limits to the public, Plum Island is home to virginal beaches, cliffs, forests, ponds — and the deadliest germs that have ever roamed the planet. Lab 257 blows the lid off the stunning true nature and checkered history of Plum Island. It shows that the seemingly bucolic island in the shadow of New York City is a ticking biological time bomb that none of us can safely ignore. Based on declassified government documents, in-depth interviews, and access to Plum Island itself, this is an eye-opening, suspenseful account of a federal government germ laboratory gone terribly wrong. For the first time, Lab 257 takes you deep inside this secret world and presents startling revelations on virus outbreaks, biological meltdowns, infected workers, the periodic flushing of contaminated raw sewage into area waters, and the insidious connections between Plum Island, Lyme disease, and the deadly West Nile virus. The book also probes what's in store for Plum Island's new owner, the Department of Homeland Security, in this age of bioterrorism. Lab 257 is a call to action for those concerned with protecting present and future generations from preventable biological catastrophes.

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Lab 257 – Michael C. Carroll

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