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Uber and Lyft passengers are ultra-wealthy. Will this keep cities from investing in transit?

by TarquinRankine Posted on August 3, 2018

Turns out, a lot of Uber and Lyft users are rich. And not just a little rich: According to a new report, 45 percent of their customers in dense urban areas make over $200,000 per year. Eek. Only around 13 percent of Uber and Lyft passengers have incomes below $50,000. That could be bad for public transit — and the climate.

For years, ride-hailing companies have claimed their services will be a net-positive for energy use, traffic congestion, and urban planning. But research over the last year has suggested otherwise. Uber and Lyft pull riders away from public transit – rather than just away from their personal cars – and according to the same study, all those extra vehicles are choking up city streets.

In New York City subway ridership has fallen for the second year in a row, and transit authorities are blaming the rise of Uber and Lyft. And, given the new study, it could mean that it’s higher income transit riders that are increasingly avoiding mass transit.

The danger of this trend is that the most affluent city residents won’t see any reason to invest in — and vote for — big transit projects, which are essential to lowering transport emissions and creating more livable cities. “If the affluent voter or the swing voter is not taking the bus anyway, it’s really easy for people to just say: ‘Oh, we can just take Uber and forget about any kind of public transport,’” says Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who researches transportation. Meanwhile, low-income residents who depend most on mass transit could be left behind.

Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers-funded conservative lobbying group, has used ride-hailing to attack public transit projects around the country. Organizers often use Uber, Lyft, and autonomous vehicles as examples of the future of public transit, ignoring the fact that these services will be out of reach for many low-income residents.

“If you’re wealthier and your subway doesn’t work [well], it’s not as much of a burden to take an Uber instead. But if you’re less wealthy and trying to get to work, you could easily lose half a day’s pay trying to find a different way of getting around,” Gelinas says.

And right now, no one using ride-hailing services is paying full price. “TNCs [transportation network companies] are at the moment still pretty heavily subsidized by venture capital,” says Carter Rubin, mobility and climate advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “These companies don’t make money, so everyone is getting a nice discount.”

For the time being, that means that Uber and Lyft are more accessible to low-income residents than they would be otherwise — but it also means that prices could shift at any time.

In some ways, Uber and Lyft have been a boon to low-income and minority communities. A recent study shows that their cars service areas that taxis have traditionally avoided, and that people of color face less discrimination when hailing a Lyft or Uber than a taxi.

But it’s worrisome that what some view as the transportation method of the future is, at the moment, mostly accessible to the ultra-rich among us.

And ride-sharing can’t save us from climate change: only high-density public transit can. As Rubin tells Grist: “The idea that TNCs and autonomous vehicles will get us out of our transit problems — it just doesn’t square with the geometric realities of our climate goals.”

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California’s fire tornado is what climate change looks like

by celemaiieftinebileteavion Posted on August 2, 2018

For weeks now, the world has been in the grips of a global heat wave — one of the most destructive and unusually hot summers in human history. And we know that a summer like this couldn’t have happened without climate change.

In California and in wildfire zones around the world, survivors are sharing the images and videos they captured while fleeing some of the most destructive fires in history.

From an on-the-ground, human perspective, July looked and felt like hell.

The video above is of the massive Carr Fire, still burning mostly uncontained near Redding, California. At last count, 1,555 homes have burned — one of the most destructive fires in California history. Six of the state’s 20 most destructive fires on record have occurred in the past 10 months.

If it looks to you like a giant fire tornado, you’d be right. And living through it was just as terrifying as you’d expect.

Speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Governor Jerry Brown said simply, “We are in uncharted territories.”

Looking at the numbers, it’s easy to see why he’s right. July was the hottest month ever measured in Redding. Burnable vegetation in the area is at the 99th percentile. These are ideal conditions for a megafire. The Carr Fire alone is more than four times larger than the city of San Francisco; its smoke is setting records for the worst air quality in history as far away as 200 miles away in Reno, Nevada.

But perhaps the most unusual thing about the Carr Fire is the incredibly strong winds it created:

The heat from the fire was so intense that it created a towering, rotating cloud six miles high — meteorologists call them pyrocumulus, but this one effectively was a giant tornado. The wind damage from the Carr Fire is consistent with speeds in excess of 143 mph.*

Winds this strong over such a widespread area are exceedingly rare in wildfires, though they have been documented before. Fires need oxygen to burn, and the Carr Fire created its own weather to ensure a constant oxygen supply — to devastating effect.

Big fires, like the Carr Fire, are getting more common as more people live closer to forests and temperatures rise. But it’s that latter factor that’s most important in making fire size skyrocket in recent years. The heat we’re experiencing right now is unlike any previous generation has ever experienced. And it’s not just happening in California.

In northern Finland, sunbathers lounged with reindeer near the Arctic Circle while a wildfire burned in the distance.

In Greece, there is terrifying footage of people escaping July’s horrific fires.

With more than a dozen large fires burning throughout California, this year’s fire season is already starting to outstrip the state’s resources. Thousands of firefighters have flown in from across the country to help fight the blazes, and wildfire season is just getting started. August is the peak month for wildfires across the western U.S. According to the latest fire outlook released on Wednesday, nearly the entire region will remain at above normal risk until at least October.

In Europe, ideal wildfire conditions are set to return this weekend, with temperatures in Spain and Portugal forecast to challenge all-time European records.

If there’s one thing we should take away from this nightmarish weather, it’s this: As bad as these fires are, climate change isn’t going to let up until we work together to address its root causes. Warming-fueled megafires isn’t a new normal, it’s a new exceptional; a new extraordinary.

*This post has been updated with new information.

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California’s fire tornado is what climate change looks like

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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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The New York Times and the super-wicked problem of climate change

by reubenjuj516 Posted on August 2, 2018

This weekend, the New York Times’ print subscribers will get something kind of crazy in the mail: A 66-page magazine with only a single article — and it’s on climate change. The long-form piece, written by Nathaniel Rich and titled “Losing Earth,” is online now and makes for fascinating, if sometimes depressing, reading. Between 1979 and 1989, Rich writes, humanity almost solved the problem of global warming.

The piece follows climate scientist James Hansen and environmental lobbyist Rafe Pomerance as they try to get pretty much anyone — politicians, the media, energy companies — to engage and act on the issue of climate change. But while they managed to move global warming onto the public stage, the opportunity for binding international action came and went with the 1989 U.N. climate conference in the Netherlands. The U.S. delegation, led by a recalcitrant Reagan appointee, balked when faced with an actual agreement.

“Why didn’t we act?” Rich asks, almost plaintively, in his prologue. He argues that the primary barriers to inaction today — widespread climate denial and propagandizing by far-right groups and fossil fuel companies — had not emerged by the mid-1980s. “Almost nothing stood in our way — except ourselves,” he writes.

Rich has already come under fire for this perspective. Many writers have complained that he is letting fossil fuel companies and Republicans off the hook. But is it true? Is human nature itself to blame for inaction?

A fair number of scholars agree — to a point. For a long time, climate change has been called a “wicked problem” or even a “super-wicked problem” by behavioral economists and policy experts. As political scientist Steve Rayner has written, climate change has no simple solution, no silver bullet. It is scientifically complex and comes with deep uncertainties about the future. It cuts across boundaries, both disciplinary and national. Its worst effects will occur in the future, not in the here and now. And it requires large-scale, systemic changes to society.

Unfortunately, humans suck at dealing with wicked problems, like poverty and nuclear weapons. Economist Richard Thaler’s work shows that we are only rational some of the time; and, when we are rational, we’re also pretty selfish. We think about ourselves more than others, and we think about the present more than future generations. “We worry about the future,” Rich writes. “But how much, exactly? The answer, as any economist could tell you, is very little.”

This idea — that the long timescale of climate change has made it difficult for us to act on it — is the theoretical underpinning of “Losing Earth.” It’s no one’s fault that we didn’t act in the 1980s. But at the same time it’s everyone’s fault.

Rich isn’t wrong that the timescale makes a difference, and that humans struggle with an issue as global and complex as climate change. But his sweeping vision of human nature at times takes on a tinge of inevitability. It reminds me, in a way, of Garrett Hardin’s 1968 “Tragedy of the Commons” — another dark theory on collective irrationality. Hardin argued that, as a species, we would always tend towards overuse of shared resources and overpopulation. His thesis was hugely influential, and continues to be a staple in environmental research.

The thing is: Hardin was wrong. Forty years after his paper debuted in Science, economist Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for showing that communities around the world do successfully manage and share resources — even over many generations. They do it through cooperation, communication, and small-scale local institutions. She was famous for showing that environmental problems can be solved from the bottom-up.

And that’s what Rich misses, in his otherwise fascinating and in-depth piece for the Times. It’s hard to say what would have happened if the United States had signed the 1989 agreement. As Robinson Meyer notes in the Atlantic: “There are too many counterfactuals to consider.”

But climate change, as a super-wicked problem lasting generations, could never have been “solved” in one fell swoop. The decade of climate action that Rich traces is only a small window into a fairly high level of decision-making: climate policy at the federal level. And, according to experts like Rayner, wicked problems need to also be addressed at the levels of states, cities, and provinces — not just by governments and nation-states.

The good news: That’s already happening. States, municipalities, neighborhoods, and community groups are already working to address climate change to the best of their ability. Many have redoubled their efforts in the Trump era. In 2006, Rayner predicted that states would file lawsuits against the federal government — 12 years later, climate lawsuits are common, and are even brought by children.

So did we really “lose Earth” in 1989? Of course not. But it is a sobering reminder of how much work we have left. “Human nature has brought us to this place,” Rich writes. “Perhaps human nature will one day bring us through.”

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The New York Times and the super-wicked problem of climate change

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Hot weather strains the grid. Here’s how we could fix that.

by CorrineBallentin Posted on July 30, 2018

Electricity crackled and arced between wires as Los Angeles residents watched, filming with their phones. And then the power died.

As temperatures have soared this summer, Angelenos have cranked up their air conditioners, straining power lines. On July 6, overloaded lines gave out and left 46,000 people sweltering in the dark.

Extreme temperatures lead to extreme electricity demand, so when sweltering weather settled over Texas in mid-July, the electric system that serves most of the state set three all-time records for power demand, one hour after another.

“This summer has been seen as a make-or-break test,” for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, wrote Joshua Rhodes, who researches energy at the University of Texas, Austin.

Tougher tests are sure to come. Summer temperatures usually peak in August or September for the most densely populated areas of Texas and California. Every year, Los Angeles seems to set a new electricity demand record, said Martin Adams, Chief Operating Officer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

“Until the last few years we haven’t had many hot days downtown,” Adams said. “People are starting to put in air conditioning where they’ve never had it before.”

As the planet warms, higher temperatures and extreme weather are becoming more common, and that puts more stress on electric systems. The heat is already severe enough that farm workers in Georgia and Nebraska, as well as a postal worker in California, have died during this summer’s heatwaves. Rising temperatures trigger a dangerous chain reaction: More people run air conditioners to keep themselves cool, which strains electrical systems causing blackouts, which exposes people to hazardous heat.

How do we snap that chain? Experts have a few suggestions:

Replace old wires

When electricity demand surged in Los Angeles, pieces of the electrical system started to blow up. “Every weak link in the system shows up in a case like that,” Adams said. “A lot of times the failures are kind of explosive in nature.”

The sun was cooking the system from the outside, and the electricity surging through the wires was cooking it from the inside. When workers went to fix fried wires in one underground vault, a wall of 160 degree heat turned them back. They had to wait until the vault cooled to 120 degrees to check out the problem, Adams said.

It’s better for both utility workers and customers if utilities can replace aging parts ahead of time. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is spending about a billion dollars a year upgrading equipment, Adams said. And they’ve focused efforts on areas that get the hottest, like the San Fernando Valley.

As people around the country draw more electricity to cope with extreme weather, utilities will have to install thicker wires and quickly replace old transformers.

Let the market work

As demand for electricity soared in Texas, so did prices: A megawatt hour of power — which goes for $40 to $80 in normal conditions — went for more than $4,000. The maps charting prices in California and the Southwest turned from mellow green to high-alert red, indicating unusually high rates. That alert triggered power plant operators across the region to fire up generators that had been sitting idle until electricity prices went high enough.

“There are some power plants that operate basically only on the very hottest day of the year,” said Michael Wara, director of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford University. “These are basically aircraft engines on cement pads that can be turned on within five minutes. And they might need to earn their entire revenue in a few hours of a hot July afternoon.”

High prices also send a signal to solar companies to build more panels, especially in Texas, where the peak demand for electricity comes roughly at the same time as the sun is highest in the sky.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of solar built in Texas in the next few years,” Rhodes said. “By 2020, I wouldn’t be surprised if we had double the solar we have now.”

Although prices influence production of power, they don’t do much to change how people use electricity. “When there’s a shortage of electricity, the prices go up, but customers are mostly still paying the same price they would at any other time,” explained James Bushnell, an energy economist and the University of California, Davis.

Even if people were more exposed to electricity prices, it might not be enough to get them to run around the house unplugging appliances, Wara said. If we could get people to use less energy for non-essentials during peak hours, it could prevent blackouts before they happen. But how?

Manage demand

A while back, Rhodes’s electricity provider made him an interesting offer: Austin Energy wanted permission to control his thermostat for 15 minutes at a time, four to six times a year, when electricity demand was peaking. (Rhodes has one of those smart thermostats, so the company could adjust it remotely.) In return, Austin Energy, would pay him $85 a year. Rhodes took them up on the offer and has no regrets. He doesn’t even notice when they take over. But by making tiny adjustments to thousands of thermostats like his, the power company is able to ramp down its power demand.

In most places however, utilities haven’t gotten this sophisticated. In Los Angeles, the utility asks customers to raise their thermostats a few degrees, and to avoid doing laundry during peak times. The utility can also make a dent in demand by turning down its own machines. When things started heating up in mid-July, the utility turned off some of the massive pumps it uses to suck water hundreds of miles over mountains and hills. That alone accounted for drop of 60 megawatts, Adams said.

In the future, utilities will likely get better at strategically curbing consumption, said Mary Anne Piette, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Utilities might even be able to make surgical tweaks like preventing a neighborhood blackout by moderating its electric demand as its wires start to overload, she said. For instance, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power might see the temperatures rising toward 160 degrees in that underground vault, and react by turning down the air conditioners of the customers downstream, allowing the equipment to cool before it blows up and leaves them with no air-conditioning at all.

The more the climate changes, the more people need electricity to cool them down. Unless we upgrade our electrical systems to prepare, there will be a lot more people sweating in the dark.

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Hot weather strains the grid. Here’s how we could fix that.

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The U.K. is tropically hot right now. 6 maps show why.

by marticreech2507 Posted on July 26, 2018

A dangerous heatwave is sweeping across Britain.

The temperature reached 95 degrees at London’s Heathrow Airport on Thursday, making it the hottest day so far this year. Friday is forecasted to be even hotter, and could be the hottest day in the island’s history.

This year’s heatwave began weeks ago, back in June, exacerbated by an absence of rainfall that has turned the countryside so brown it’s visible from space. It’s part of a worldwide rash of fires, floods, and other extreme weather in recent weeks that is putting climate change front and center.

On its current pace, this will be the hottest summer in British history. Across the U.K., where air conditioning is rare, hospital emergency rooms have seen record numbers of patients this week, and public health officials warned people to stay inside. Authorities in London banned the use of barbecue grills after an explosion in the number of large grass fires. Network Rail has slowed and canceled some trains to keep tracks from buckling under the heat.

Earlier this summer, the roof of a science museum in Glasgow actually melted during one particularly hot day.

This isn’t normal weather, although it’s happening with increasing frequency. This week marks one of only a handful of times in more than 350 years of recordkeeping that temperatures in England have climbed above 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius).

This is a problem that’s only going to get worse. Within 20 or 30 years, if the world continues to ignore the problem of climate change, heatwaves like this week’s could happen nearly every year in the U.K., tripling heat-related deaths.

Summertime temperatures have sharply risen on every corner of the planet in recent decades, so what were once one-off excursions of dangerous temperatures a century ago are now nearly indistinguishable from the background influence of soaring levels of greenhouse gases.

That’s easy to see in the maps below. Decades ago, the bright red splotches of European heatwaves were starkly noticeable against the blue background of the rest of the planet. Lately, it’s hard to see where one heatwave ends and another one begins.

Peak daily temperature during past unusually hot summers in the U.K.:

August 1911

NASA GISS

36.7°C/98°F — an especially severe drought brought a long stretch of cloud-free skies to England, on par with the Nevada desert

August 1932

NASA GISS

35.6°C/96°F — children swam in London’s fountains to keep cool

July 1976

NASA GISS

35.9°C/96°F — currently the hottest summer in UK history

August 1990

NASA GISS

37.1°C/99°F — train service nationwide slowed as rails buckled

August 2003

NASA GISS

38.5°C/101°F — more than 30,000 people died across Europe

Summer 2018

NASA GISS

35°C/95°F — and poised to get hotter

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The U.K. is tropically hot right now. 6 maps show why.

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The EPA failed Flint. Now we know exactly how.

by ThurmanBlock7 Posted on July 19, 2018

As if the EPA hasn’t disappointed us enough this year, a report released today by the Office of the Inspector General found that the agency consistently dropped the ball during the Flint water crisis.

In a blistering 74-page report, the agency watchdog critiqued EPA Region 5, the district responsible for protecting human health and the environment in Michigan, for an inadequate response to the water crisis that exposed thousands to lead and caused a 58 percent spike in fetal deaths in the largely black community.

The mistakes are sobering. Despite receiving 87 citizen complaints about water quality between May 2014 and January 2016 — including many that directly referenced lead — the EPA did not take any significant action before releasing an emergency order on Jan. 21, 2016.

Instead, the report says, the EPA sent the residents form letters which recommended that they contact the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality or Flint water officials. In 11 cases, the EPA sent no response at all.

“As I have said before, the Flint water crisis was a failure of all levels of government,” said Dan Kildee, Democratic representative from the Michigan district that includes Flint, in a statement reacting to the report.

EPA officials had the chance to save Flint residents from months of exposure to toxins. The report cites five possible oversight actions that the EPA could have taken under the Safe Drinking Water Act, including alerting Flint residents about possible harms and acting in the place of state authorities when there is “substantial endangerment” to human health.

But in almost every case, officials deferred to their state counterparts, rather than using their legal authority to step in. As the report’s authors note, such oversight tools — like most tools out there — are “only effective when used.”

The OIG also pointed to a memo written by Region 5 scientist Miguel Del Toral, who repeatedly warned the region’s Director Susan Hedman that the lead levels in Flint water were at sky-high levels. (Anything over 15 ppb is considered unsafe — one home tested at 13,000 ppb). Hedman later resigned when it became clear that she had attempted to suppress Del Toral’s findings.

According to the report, Hedman and other EPA officials “lacked a sense of urgency” to address the water issues. Instead they failed to communicate with state officials, displayed significant “management weaknesses,” and ultimately delayed the federal response to the crisis.

And while they waited, thousands of residents were exposed to unsafe water. The consequences, for some, could last a lifetime.

“Justice for Flint families comes in many forms,” Kildee said in his statement. “The release of this report is one form of holding those responsible accountable.”

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The EPA failed Flint. Now we know exactly how.

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A new GOP carbon tax proposal is a long shot, but it’s a shot worth taking

by ModestoSpeckman Posted on July 18, 2018

There’s a very small chance that President Trump, later this year, could sign into law the country’s first-ever federal climate change legislation — and it might actually be a good thing.

I know, I know. I hear you. Yes, this is the same Trump who bailed on the Paris climate agreement last year. But there’s now a possibility that he could have the opportunity to meet its goals anyway.

According to E&E News, Florida congressman Carlos Curbelo — a Republican — will introduce legislation next week that calls for a gradually escalating carbon tax specifically designed to accelerate the decarbonization of the U.S. economy.

Starting in 2020, the proposal would require fossil fuel companies and manufacturers to pay a fee of $23 per ton for their carbon emissions, rising slightly faster than inflation. It’s a relatively low tax to start, but it could ramp up significantly over time. The fee would rise an additional $2 each year emissions targets aren’t met — a clever twist. Preliminary modeling shows that the policy would be sufficient to meet former President Obama’s climate target under the Paris Agreement — a 26 to 28 percent reduction in U.S. emissions by 2025, compared with 2005 levels.

There’s a catch, though. In exchange for the fee, the proposal would completely eliminate the gasoline tax and press pause on the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions (that’s in jeopardy anyway under the changing Supreme Court). It would also devote most of its revenue to building new transportation infrastructure nationwide. That it raises money at all is controversial — most Republicans in favor of a carbon tax want a completely revenue-neutral proposal.

In the midst of a tough reelection race in his Florida district, Curbelo (a member of the Grist 50) is bucking his own party by even proposing the legislation. It’s a long shot, but with the right mix of ideas, it just might work. Even if this specific bill doesn’t find its way to Trump’s desk, another one could, like the plan put forth by two Republican former Secretaries of State last year.

Almost 10 years after the last major attempt at climate legislation, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, failed in Congress, there’s reason to believe that this time, Republicans will lead the way.

The vast amount of America’s renewable energy is now produced in Republican-voting districts, and recent polling shows that Republicans nationwide are more willing than ever to support a carbon tax — especially one that will boost the growth of innovative technologies and reduce the burden of uncertainty on businesses that deploy them.

And the renewable industry seems to think Republicans are its best shot. In the 2016 election cycle, the industry’s political donations went disproportionately to Republicans for the first time. So far in 2018, that financial gulf has widened, and now favors Republicans roughly 2-to-1. More and more, renewable energy is a bread-and-butter right-wing issue.

Still, passing climate legislation is a tall order for an administration led by someone who has said climate change is a hoax. And, this week, congressional Republicans planned a symbolic resolution against carbon taxes that could be divisive — 42 Republican members have joined Curbelo in a bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus, and this vote would be the first chance for them to show real support. But now that Republicans control all three branches of government, it’s up to them to craft the next steps for environmental policy, for better or worse.

There are, of course, some serious flaws with Curbelo’s idea. In contrast to recent Democratic-led carbon pricing proposals, Curbelo’s bill is decidedly less aggressive. Taken as a standalone policy, replacing the gasoline tax with a carbon tax will do little to address transportation emissions, now the leading source of carbon pollution in the United States. To put the transportation sector’s emissions on a diet, there’d need to be accompanying incentives for electric vehicles and public transit.

That said, the final text of the bill has not yet been released, and these details could change.

Before you dismiss this GOP plan, remember the unyielding truth of climate change: We can’t wait for the perfect moment or the perfect piece of legislation. We have to do as much as we can, as soon as possible.

According to a report released this week, even a modest carbon tax would substantially improve the prospects for solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower — and may help spawn a next-generation nuclear renaissance.

The most effective ways to address climate change are big and complex: reversing the demise of tropical forests, reducing food waste, encouraging family planning, shifting away from coal and natural gas. A carbon tax really only addresses that last one. But the other efforts can move forward alongside the push for a carbon tax, as part of a broad-based, radical rethink of civilization at a critical moment in our history.

Curbelo is turning the debate away from the science and toward solutions, and that should be celebrated. Now, let’s hope the other party leaders follow his lead.

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A new GOP carbon tax proposal is a long shot, but it’s a shot worth taking

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How California can make its cap-and-trade program more equitable

by JudeMathis Posted on July 18, 2018

Last week California celebrated a big milestone: The state announced it had succeeded in bringing down its carbon emissions to levels it hasn’t seen since the 1990s. And the Golden State managed to hit that benchmark four years earlier than it had set out to, all while laying to rest the tired old argument that an economy can’t grow while emissions shrink.

There is, however, a catch: Carbon emissions may have dropped statewide, but according to a study published in the journal PLOS Medicine, low-income and communities of color that border heavy industry are seeing greater amounts of greenhouse gases and other airborne pollutants. Further, the analysis validates criticism against one of the state’s most celebrated climate interventions: its cap-and-trade program.

Historically, proposed climate solutions have focused on addressing aggregate carbon dioxide numbers while ignoring localized impacts, says Amy Vanderwarker, senior policy strategist at the California Environmental Justice Alliance. And communities in closest proximity to greenhouse gas emitters have long argued that cap-and-trade has concentrated airborne contaminants on those who are most vulnerable to pollution.

“In many ways we have thought of the work that these research partners are doing as the ‘I Told You So Report,’” Vanderwarker says. “It’s academic and data- driven verification of the lived reality and experience and knowledge and wisdom of low income communities of color across the state.”

Unfair Trade

Through it’s cap-and-trade program, California sets a “cap” for the total amount of carbon that can be emitted by certain companies operating within the state. Companies can purchase or “trade” emission allowances with each other, allowing bigger polluters to essentially purchase the right to emit from state auctions or from other companies that aren’t sending out as much carbon and have allowances to sell. The danger of this system is that the companies that end up purchasing those allowances — and thus polluting more — tend to be located in “fence-line” communities, which are typically lower-income and inhabited predominantly by people of color.

The report shows a correlation between greenhouse gas emissions and the presence of other harmful pollutants, like particulate matter and volatile organic compounds, that have been linked to cancer, respiratory problems, and other health issues. (Grist board member Rachel Morello-Frosch is a study co-author.) Put simply, facilities are usually emitting more than just carbon: so when greenhouse emissions go up, so does the amount of other bad stuff in the air.

The new research confirms that facilities regulated by California’s cap-and-trade program are disproportionately located in “fence-line” communities: Neighborhoods within 2.5 miles of regulated facilities on average had a 34 percent higher proportion of residents of color and a 23 percent higher proportion of residents living in poverty than areas beyond that boundary. And more than half of these polluters actually increased the amount of greenhouse gases they released since the system started in 2013. Those facilities were surrounded by neighborhoods that had higher rates of poverty and more residents of color than those surrounding facilities that cut down their emissions .

“When it comes to climate change and to greenhouse gas emissions, place does matter,” Vanderwarker says. “When you look at what’s happening on the ground, you see a different picture than what a statewide analysis and statewide numbers show.”

Clean Air for All

So what is a well-meaning, climate-concerned state to do? In addition to pointing out California’s discrepancy in cap-and-trade pollution, the new study outlines potential solutions to make the program more equitable.

While cap-and-trade is designed to tackle climate change by reining in greenhouse gases statewide, it’s federal statutes, like the Clean Air Act, that regulate the quality of the air we breathe. One of the keys to improving California’s air overall, according to the study’s lead author Lara Cushing, is to quit thinking about measures designed to address climate change and those targeting air pollution separately.

“Having them harmonize those efforts instead of regulating them separately might help the state achieve both its climate and its equity goals,” Cushing says. “From a public health perspective, getting the biggest bang for your buck for the emissions reductions you’re undertaking means prioritizing emissions reductions from sources that also release a lot of health-damaging pollutants.”

Another obvious course of action is for California to significantly lower the cap and give out fewer allowances to companies. An initial glut of allowances may have made it too easy for companies to purchase additional permits to pollute.

Then there’s the issue of offsets — investments companies can buy in green projects, like forest-preservation efforts (since trees absorb carbon dioxide). Facilities regulated by the cap-and-trade program can use offsets to cancel out up to 8 percent of the emissions they’re allowed under California’s cap. The problem: A majority of these investments — 75 percent — have been made on out-of-state initiatives. Cushing’s research suggests that regulations incentivizing or requiring companies to put their money in local green projects could help alleviate the health impacts facing California’s fence-line communities.

The state is actually starting to do this: When it passed an expansion of the cap-and-trade system last year, the bill included a measure that reduces the amount of offset credits a company can purchase and requires half of those credits to go towards projects that benefit California.

The California Environmental Justice Alliance — which opposed the expansion of the cap-and-trade system approved last year — is now paying close attention to how the state moves forward with implementing the program. Vanderwarker wants trends in the amount of greenhouse gases and co-pollutants emitted in fence-line communities to be clearly tracked as part of cap-and-trade, and she argues there needs to be a plan in place to address any hot spots where air concentrations are increasing.

“We haven’t really seen any clarity on that plan from the California Air Resources Board,” she says.

What California does to address equity within its climate policies matters not only for vulnerable communities in California, but for those across the country — particularly as other places consider their own carbon-trading systems.

“California is a leader on climate change, and California can be proud of that,” Cushing says, “It’s important that we get it right and that we continue to study this program — and whether disadvantaged communities are seeing the full benefits of California’s carbon reduction efforts — so that we can continue to play that leadership role.”

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How California can make its cap-and-trade program more equitable

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Scott Pruitt can’t escape his investigations just because he resigned

by AntonetMVNZ Posted on July 13, 2018

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

Scott Pruitt may be out at the EPA, but he left in the midst of more than a dozen federal investigations into his conduct. The bulk of these investigations are audits that the EPA’s Office of Inspector General agreed to take on. A week after Pruitt’s resignation, the OIG confirmed that these investigations won’t be ending just because Pruitt is no longer in office.

The independent EPA office will continue work on at least five audits, “all of which focus on programmatic, systemic, and/or operational agency issues,” Kentia Elbaum, a spokesperson for the OIG office, wrote in an email to reporters. Some of these audits were already examining issues that predated Pruitt’s arrival, but they have all expanded in scope to include revelations about how Pruitt deployed EPA resources. That includes whether the EPA adhered to its policies on Pruitt’s first-class flights and travel through December 2017; Pruitt’s approval of raises for two employees using the Safe Drinking Water Act; and reports of his staff deleting records that should be preserved under the Freedom of Information Act. And the two others pertain to his 24/7 protective security detail.

Three of these audits could be completed as soon as August, according to Elbaum.

Now, audits are not the same as criminal investigations. Once the office issues its findings, Pruitt would only face public embarrassment since he’s no longer employed by the agency and can’t be directly reprimanded. But a number of Pruitt’s critics have said that he is worthy of a criminal probe, given the reports that he used his public office to find a job for his wife. OIG would not comment on whether Pruitt faces a criminal investigation. “While the EPA OIG announces nearly all of our audit work, we cannot confirm or deny the existence of criminal investigations, which look for violations of law,” Elbaum said. “We can say that any criminal investigations that may have existed at the time of Mr. Pruitt’s resignation will continue.”

In May, Pruitt confirmed that he established a legal defense fund to help him through his investigations. As head of the EPA, he would have had to walk a fine line to not run afoul of ethics law in collecting his donations. Now, he’s free from those restraints.

Originally posted here – 

Scott Pruitt can’t escape his investigations just because he resigned

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