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Supreme Court Justice Kennedy is retiring. Here’s what that means for the environment.

by MichaelMahony Posted on June 27, 2018

Anthony Kennedy is retiring, and progressives around the country are trying not to freak out. The 81-year-old justice, who has served on the Supreme Court since 1988, has been a crucial swing vote on many issues from abortion to gay marriage to campaign finance. And — for better or worse — he has also been the deciding vote on environmental issues for the past three decades.

As a moderate on an increasingly divided court, Kennedy has been in the majority in an outstanding number of environmental cases. As Lewis and Clark environmental law professor Michael Blumm writes, “Advocates in environmental cases must tailor their arguments to win his vote or risk losing their appeals.”

Over his 30-year tenure, Kennedy — who was once called by the New York Times an “equal opportunity disappointer” — has been a mixed bag for environmentalists.

In Massachusetts v. EPA, the most consequential ruling on climate change in the past two decades, Kennedy was the swing vote. The state of Massachusetts had challenged the EPA’s refusal to regulate greenhouse gases, despite profound and convincing evidence that they are harmful to human health and well-being.

Kennedy joined the four liberal justices, arguing that the EPA would have to treat CO2 like any other pollutant, unless the Bush-era agency provided “scientific basis” for its reasoning. Although he didn’t write the majority opinion, without him — or with a more staunchly conservative justice in his place — we might still be fighting to have CO2 recognized as a pollutant at all.

On the other side of spectrum, Kennedy, again as the swing vote, tempered his support for the EPA by aligning with conservatives in the 2014 decision on Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, joining the late Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion. The majority argued that while the EPA could continue to place limits on CO2 emissions from large stationary pollution sources like power plants, the administration could not regulate smaller sources like schools, apartment buildings, or businesses.

In 2006, a Michigan property owner, John Rapanos, faced criminal charges from the EPA for draining and filling in potentially protected wetlands with earth. Conservative justices wanted to dramatically restrict the definition for wetlands — which would have decimated protected areas across the country.

Kennedy’s decisive opinion in the case, Rapanos v. United States, established a new standard which protected all wetlands that are part of a “significant nexus” of navigable waters. It was a win for environmentalists — but one that still significantly restricted wetland protection under the Clean Water Act.

Despite his mixed record, any replacement for Kennedy will likely have a much, much worse record on environmental issues. Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first Supreme Court appointment — and the son of a former EPA administrator to whom current chief Scott Pruitt has garnered frequent comparisons —  has been an opponent of many Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act protections throughout his career. Some of the other members on Trump’s initial shortlist carried even more alarming disregard both for issues of civil liberties and for the environment. And Kennedy has, at times, provided the much-needed fifth vote to reject restrictions on abortion rights, with significant impacts for both women’s health and our environmental future.

It remains to be seen exactly what the new justice will think of the EPA, clean air protections, and climate change, but the conservative-liberal split on the court will significantly change for the first time in decades. Environmentalists may have gotten lucky with Kennedy’s moderate support of CO2 regulation and protecting wetlands — and chances are their luck has run out.

“I’m fearful,” Blumm, the law professor, told Grist. “And I think all people who watch the court and care about the environment should be fearful.”

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Supreme Court Justice Kennedy is retiring. Here’s what that means for the environment.

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With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, Congress will likely gain a new climate champion

by VDCTraceeap Posted on June 27, 2018

On Tuesday night, 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez toppled a 10-term Congressman from New York City in a landslide Democratic primary victory. The shocking result virtually assures that the U.S. Congress will welcome its youngest female member ever next year.

The upset win also essentially guarantees that Ocasio-Cortez will bring with her the boldest climate platform of any representative in history.

Ocasio-Cortez, who was without a Wikipedia page on Monday, unseated Joe Crowley, the 20-year representative of New York’s 14th Congressional District who was vying to become the next Speaker of the House. The New York Times, her hometown newspaper, didn’t even cover the race. CNN called the victory “a real wakeup call for Democrats.”

Ocasio-Cortez said her triumph was “the start of a movement.” As a millennial woman of color, she’s already been referred to as the future of the Democratic Party.

Since her district, which comprises parts of Queens and the Bronx, is among the most strongly Democratic in the country, the general election in November likely will not be competitive. Pending the results of other elections across the country, Ocasio-Cortez seems almost certain to join Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as one of the few socialists ever elected to Congress.

Among her many progressive bona fides, it’s really her plan for tackling climate change that deserves the most attention.

In one of her first campaign tweets on the topic of climate change, more than one year ago, Ocasio-Cortez framed the issue as an “existential threat” — one that young people should be taking the lead on.

Ocasio-Cortez is one of the first American politicians to put forward a climate change plan that would keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

To meet that goal while leaving space for developing countries to move at a slower pace, independent assessments suggest that the United States needs to reduce its emissions by approximately 75 to 125 percent or more — actually drawing carbon dioxide out of the air — by 2035. Ocasio-Cortez hopes to move the entire country to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035. Even Bernie Sanders’ climate plan didn’t set such an ambitious goal.

The crash carbon diet would require “the complete mobilization of the American workforce to combat climate change,” as Ocasio-Cortez told HuffPost reporter Alexander Kaufman.

On her campaign’s website, she summarizes the danger that climate change poses to the planet:

Climate change is the single biggest national security threat for the United States and the single biggest threat to worldwide industrialized civilization, and the effects of warming can be hard to predict and self-reinforcing. We need to avoid a worldwide refugee crisis by waging a war for climate justice through the mobilization of our population and our government. This starts with the United States being a leader on the actions we take both globally and locally.

According to Ocasio-Cortez, such an effort would cost “trillions of dollars,” but would “not only save our planet from the ravages of climate change but would also lift millions of Americans out of poverty.”

It’s an audacious plan that’s easy to dismiss as wishful thinking. But last night’s results just brought Ocasio-Cortez’s vision a step closer to reality.

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With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, Congress will likely gain a new climate champion

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Big Oil touts offshore drilling jobs to communities most harmed by oil

by TresaBrickhouse Posted on June 27, 2018

Earlier this month, the American Petroleum Institute, the biggest U.S. trade organization for oil and gas, launched a bipartisan effort to reach out to diverse communities across the Southeastern U.S. The group touts offshore drilling jobs for African American and Latino workers.

“We want to build support in minority communities because the message that increasing the supply of affordable energy and good paying jobs will resonate,” API’s Erik Milito told Reuters.

While the oil and gas lobby is billing offshore drilling as an economic boon, environmental justice leaders caution that it’s pedaling dangerous work to the very communities that Big Oil has hurt the most.

“We used to call that economic extortion — in order to have a job you needed to be in a dirty job,” says Jose Bravo, the executive director of the Just Transition Alliance. Bravo, who organizes for clean jobs in California, says he’s seen decades of false promises by the fossil fuel industry.

Refineries located near neighborhoods of color often promise to hire locally, he says, but then bring on employees from out of town. And oil jobs can be risky.

“There’s a lot of potential damage both to the planet and to health,” Bravo says, citing the Deepwater Horizon explosion off the coast of Louisiana that killed 11 people in 2010. He also points out that the damage eventually makes its way back to land: “Historically, when we bring that oil onshore, we’re bringing it into communities of color.”

Last year, the NAACP published a report that found that over a million African Americans live within a half-mile of oil and natural gas production, processing, or transmission and storage facilities, leading to elevated risks of cancer and asthma attacks from toxic air emissions.

To be sure, many local business organizations have joined API’s effort, including the Florida Black Chamber of Commerce, the South Carolina African American Chamber of Commerce, along with Hispanic chambers of commerce from Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia, among others.

Another touchy subject has been the oil lobby’s outreach to Hurricane Maria survivors. Julio Fuentes, president of Florida’s Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, a partner in API’s initiative, defended the push to hire locals in an email to Grist. “Florida has welcomed many of our friends from Puerto Rico, and it is important to provide secure, high-paying jobs for our residents and evacuees,” he said. “Offshore exploration is one way we can do so.”

Michelle Suarez with Organize Florida, a grassroots nonprofit group that has been assisting hurricane survivors, sees how Big Oil can make an appealing offer to an evacuee who has just lost so much. “We’re in this crisis. And so I imagine that it’s going to be tempting for families that are impacted to get some of those jobs,” Suarez says.

Suarez doesn’t think working in Big Oil, with its links to climate change and more frequent and severe superstorms, is the answer to helping evacuees recover. “We’re talking about the industry that has been one of the causes of these disasters, indirectly through their work,” says Suarez.

Both Suarez and Bravo say that their communities don’t need to choose between jobs and a healthy community and environment.

“We need to switch from that narrative because we do need to take care of the earth. This is our home. We have to make it work so that we have jobs that are not extracting and destroying the environment,” Suarez says.

Bravo believes the U.S. can can still be a global leader in spurring careers in renewable energy.

“We are all for jobs but we’re for jobs that don’t pollute, we’re for jobs that are clean, we’re for jobs that are sustainable,” Bravo says.

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Big Oil touts offshore drilling jobs to communities most harmed by oil

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James Hansen’s legacy: Scientists reflect on climate change in 1988, 2018, and 2048

by VirgilioHam3 Posted on June 22, 2018

Thirty years ago this week, NASA scientist James Hansen testified to Congress that the age of climate change had arrived.

The announcement shook the political establishment in 1988. George H. W. Bush, in the middle of a heated presidential campaign, vowed to use the “White House effect” to battle the “greenhouse effect.” Four years later, with then-President Bush in attendance, the United States became a founding member of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — which still guides global climate action today.

Of course, it was not enough. Bush’s actions at the time were perceived as weakening the treaty — a missed opportunity. Since 1988, global carbon dioxide emissions have risen 68 percent. At the time of Hansen’s speech, fossil fuels provided about 79 percent of the world’s energy needs. Now, despite every wind turbine and solar panel that’s been installed since, it’s actually worse — 81 percent.

Hansen’s warning was prescient and his predictions were scarily accurate. Every county in every U.S. state has warmed significantly since then. Sea-level rise is accelerating, heavier rains are falling, countless species of plants and animals are struggling to adapt.

Thirty years after Hansen testified, the world still isn’t even close to solving the problem. In fact, for every year we wait, we are making the problem much, much harder.

On our current path, emissions will still be rising 30 years from now, and the world will have long ago left behind all reasonable chances of preventing the irreversible tipping points in the climate system that Hansen predicted.

If climate change was an urgent problem in 1988, it’s now an emergency.

Looking back on what’s happened in an interview with the Associated Press this week, Hansen expressed regret that his words weren’t “clear enough.” At times, Hansen and his colleagues have been down on themselves for not doing more, as if some perfectly worded sentence, or some arrestingly compelling chart would be enough to inspire a global mass-movement of action.

Thankfully, a new generation of climate scientists is starting to understand that perfect knowledge of the problem is no longer enough. Grounded in the missteps and failures of the past, scientists these days seem much more modest with their expectations for the next 30 years — but much more confident in their roles as citizens first, scientists second, just as Hansen has been.

This week, I asked 10 climate scientists to describe how Hansen’s work has affected them, and where they think the world’s response to climate change will go from here.

Ploy Achakulwisut, George Washington University
Suzana Camargo, Columbia University
Christine Chen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Andrew Dessler, Texas A&M University
Peter Kalmus, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (and Grist 50 member)
Kate Marvel, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Kimberly Nicholas, Lund University
Michael Oppenheimer, Princeton University
Eric Rignot, University of California-Irvine
Farhana Sultana, Syracuse University

Answers have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q. What has James Hansen — the advocate — meant to you personally and professionally as you wrestle with how to respond to climate change?

Kalmus: Simply put, Hansen is a personal hero of mine. Not only was he a pioneer in recognizing the scientific reality of climate change, he also realized this knowledge carries an obligation to sound the alarm.

Achakulwisut: As a PhD student in climate science, I wasn’t taught or incentivized to engage in advocacy. But Hansen’s actions helped me realize that the climate crisis is far too serious and urgent for me to contribute solely by publishing peer-reviewed papers. He’s inspired me to challenge academic norms and engage in grassroots activism.

Chen: I was born in the early ‘90s, which means that James Hansen’s testimony happened literally a lifetime — my lifetime — ago. Sometimes it’s hard not to feel hopeless about the situation when a NASA scientist has been trying to convince the world to mobilize for longer than I’ve been alive.

Camargo: I admire his courage to be such a strong public advocate. Unfortunately, other scientists can be discouraged from doing this type of advocacy, given the level of public attack that they could suffer.

Marvel: I think it’s important to note that there are now many diverse voices speaking up about the implications of climate change, and that there’s no “right” way to engage the public with the science. I admire James Hansen immensely as a scientist, and I respect his advocacy choices. But he’s not the only role model out there.

Oppenheimer: Jim became a symbol for the movement to push governments to act on climate change. I disagree with him on some of his specific proposals – like supporting a revival of nuclear power, and sometimes I disagree with him on the science. But it’s good to see a scientist who can articulate his concerns to governments, to the media, and other people based on the facts. We need more scientists who do so.

Q. Looking back on how scientists responded to climate change over the past 30 years — what was the single biggest mistake, in your opinion?

Camargo: If scientists had worked on a communication strategy from the start, there could have been a better chance for support of climate change policies by the public. The media had a big role in our current issues as well — by trying to give equal weight to the small minorities of skeptics and the other 95 percent of scientists.

Oppenheimer: We never found a way to make the issue tangible to the average person. That’s changing now as the impacts become more apparent. But for this problem, action before impacts was necessary. Now we are stuck with the inevitability of some unpleasant climate changes as we play catch-up.

Achakulwisut: When climate change first emerged in public consciousness, it somehow got filed under “environmental issue” with far-off impacts. (Polar bears are still the face of climate change.) But its major culprit — fossil fuel combustion — also causes many immediate impacts to our health and well-being. I think we missed an opportunity to connect these dots.

Q. And the single biggest success?

Dessler: The only encouraging thing happening today is the staggering drop in the price of renewable energy. I consider this our main hope to avoid catastrophic climate change — prices drop so much that emissions decrease without government policies.

Rignot: The biggest success was the banning of [ozone-destroying] CFCs with the Montréal protocol in 1986. It was the single biggest event where science and policy came together to take action and literally save the world. Now it should serve as a reference in time, where the world demonstrated that environmental changes can be solved for the better, with no economic setback.

Nicholas: The climate leadership void at the federal level has inspired so many state, city, business, finance, university, neighborhood, household, faith, youth, civil society, and other leaders to step forward and find ways to cut their climate pollution. People want to create solutions that work for them and their communities. They want a future without relying on fossil fuels.

Sultana: A positive outcome is that today a number of young people understand and care about the impacts of climate change … with a greater focus on issues of equity and justice.

Q. Where do you hope we will be 30 years from now? Where do you think we will be realistically?

Marvel: I hope we will take this seriously. I like humans, and I think we’re capable of great things. We (mostly) fixed the ozone hole. We signed the Paris agreement. I have optimism that we can do more in the future. But I fear that we will respond to the adversity that climate change brings with hate, fear, and unreason.

Dessler: I don’t think a serious carbon tax or other policy will happen. The best-case I see is that renewables become cheap enough that the economy switches by itself. As for what should happen: As a citizen and father, I think we should get our asses in gear and start reducing emissions as fast as we can.

Kalmus: I hope that we reach a cultural tipping point, where people finally vote with climate urgency, and elect leaders who enact sensible policies like a revenue-neutral carbon fee. Emissions ramp down, innovation ramps up. This is also what I think will happen – it’s only a question of when, and how bad we’ll let things get.

Rignot: Most likely we will only take a slow course of action. We will experience the consequences of climate change in full swing in the later part of the century. At that point, we will have technologies in place to avoid the most disastrous consequences. But the world should take a much more aggressive course of action. We also need to bring morality into the debate. The most deprived people on the planet will suffer the most from climate change.

Oppenheimer: Human history suggest that we may eventually wise up and move to cut emissions deeply – but only after significant losses emerge in such a way that action can’t be avoided. We do this sort of thing repeatedly but never seem to learn. Sometimes the catastrophe actually happens (like World War I and World War II), but often it’s averted, just barely (like the Cuban missile crisis).

Governments shouldn’t move blindly toward the precipice, mindlessly continuing behavior that is bound to end badly for everyone. There’s still time if we get going immediately to reduce our looming losses and come out the other side more or less OK. There’s still time, just barely.

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James Hansen’s legacy: Scientists reflect on climate change in 1988, 2018, and 2048

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The Koch brothers hate public transit. But they can’t always stop projects in their tracks.

by Selma4889gkgw Posted on June 20, 2018

The infamous Koch brothers have bankrolled climate deniers, propped up polluting industries, and even tried to turn the black community pro-fossil fuel. But, as a recent New York Times story shows, the billionaire conservatives have been steadily exerting pressure against public transit as well.

Americans for Prosperity, a conservative lobbying group funded by the Koch family, has rallied against public transit works across the country. With a mix of political ads and door-to-door campaigning, the organization managed to get a transit tax increase shot down in Little Rock in 2016. Koch-linked groups have successfully watered down legislation in Indianapolis and blocked efforts in Florida.

This spring, the organization financed conservative activists in Nashville, Tennessee, to oppose a mass transit referendum. The plan would have increased the city’s sales tax in order to fund a light rail system, eight new bus lines, and 19 transit centers in the city. The anti-transit campaigners knocked on 6,000 doors and made 42,000 phone calls, all while repeating the anti-tax party line. The referendum, once a sure bet, failed, with almost 64 percent of voters rejecting it. Public transit experts were disappointed, but unsurprised.

Yonah Freemark, a transport researcher and doctoral student at MIT, says that the Koch effort has been around for years. “They have been focusing on regions without a strong transit constituency [or] historical support for transit investment,” he says. That’s perhaps why Americans for Prosperity has not focused as much on Seattle, San Francisco, or Los Angeles — but has targeted relatively conservative cities.

While it might seem puzzling that any group would be stridently opposed to public transit, the Kochs have both financial and ideological reasons to reject transit spending. The New York Times cited their extensive financial interest in the automotive industry, combined with a libertarian and anti-tax ideology.

“It’s part of their overall agenda of conservatism, and part of an ideology tied up with cities and transit being bad, and suburbs as good,” says Jeff Wood, a transit consultant and blogger based in San Francisco.

Luckily for transit enthusiasts, the Kochs have not always been successful, even in sprawling cities with a sizable Republican base. Phoenix, Arizona, successfully expanded its light rail system in the face of opposition from the organization’s state branch.

And the Nashville plan had other, compounding factors. Mayor Megan Barry, who introduced the referendum in October 2017, became embroiled in a sex scandal with her head of security and eventually resigned in March. Her resignation further ignited the already bitter conflict between pro- and anti-transit activists.

So transportation experts are still hopeful that the Koch brothers will not derail many more projects. “Despite the fact that we have these people going out and running smear campaigns against public services, the large majority of such referenda have passed,” says Freemark. In 2016, large transit plans were passed in Atlanta, Seattle, Raleigh, and Los Angeles. “Americans are not universally buying into these tactics,” he concludes.

Wood is similarly optimistic, and believes that the Nashville failure can inform future efforts. “I think we are going to see other places learn from this,” he says. “I don’t think this ideology can win forever.”

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The Koch brothers hate public transit. But they can’t always stop projects in their tracks.

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Exxon says climate lawsuits violate its right to free speech. Seriously.

by ClarenceMcClear Posted on June 19, 2018

Just a short time ago, it seemed like Exxon might finally be forced to reckon with the harm it had inflicted through the digging up, selling, and burning of fossil fuels.

A wave of cities led by San Francisco and Oakland filed suit against Exxon and other major polluters last year, alleging that the companies had purposefully misled the public about the effects of climate change in order to keep profits high. In March, a federal judge handed the California cities a small win: the chance to publicly debate polluters in court about their role in denying climate science.

But if we’ve learned anything from the way the tobacco industry rapidly went on the offensive when it was accused of peddling cancer sticks, it’s that getting industry to fess up to its wrongdoings is easier said than done. And Exxon, it seems, will do anything to shift the blame from its own shoulders, even if that means spinning an entirely new narrative around who the real victim is.

After the California cities filed suit, Exxon brought a petition before the Texas 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals claiming the lawsuits were part of a conspiracy intended to waylay the company’s right to free speech and force it to change its position on climate change. Yes, you read that correctly. Exxon argued that the cities were trying to make the company agree to a number of truths about climate change, which, in effect, violated Exxon’s First Amendment rights to say whatever the hell it wants about climate change.

Yeah, sounds crazy! But the Texas judge, R.H. Wallace Jr., bought the argument and handed Exxon a victory in April. That means the company can now grill California city officials about whether the climate suits, from the Bay to New York City, have been one big conspiracy to violate the company’s right to free speech.

Michael Burger, Executive Director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, doesn’t think Exxon’s free speech argument holds up under scrutiny. Exxon already tried a similar tactic in a New York court. Former Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who recently resigned after four women accused him of sexual assault, started investigating the company over climate change in 2015. Exxon’s lawyers argued Schneiderman tried to “silence and intimidate one side of the public policy debate on how to address climate change” by launching the probe.

The New York judge dismissed the case this year. When Exxon tried to edit, or “amend,” its original complaint, the judge denied the amendment “as futile,” which is a fancy way of saying the judge kicked Exxon in the gnads. The fact that Exxon already tried and failed to invoke its First Amendment rights doesn’t bode well for the company’s latest attempt in California. “The idea that these lawsuits could infringe on First Amendment rights is, as the judge in New York said, implausible,” Burger says.

So, while the Texas judge gave Exxon a small window of opportunity to question California officials about the alleged “conspiracy,” Burger says that doesn’t mean it’ll turn into a full-blown court case. California has already appealed Judge Wallace Jr.’s decision.

The First Amendment claim isn’t an entirely new invention — big companies have asserted such claims before, says Peter Lehner, former chief of the Environmental Protection Bureau of the New York State Attorney General’s office. But Exxon’s argument that the climate lawsuits are a big conspiracy, he says, is based on “flimsy ground.”

First of all, attorneys general communicate with each other often. And second of all, he says, “If the company is lying to their shareholders and to their consumers, then that is fraud.” It all comes back to the underlying issue: If California can prove Exxon knew about climate change and lied to the public about it, the company probably won’t be able to get out of an investigation by crying free speech. Why? Because the First Amendment doesn’t protect liars!

As for why Exxon might be pulling out the flawed free speech argument again, Burger raises one possibility: “It may well be that Exxon is threatening to bring a lawsuit in an effort to intimidate those [California] officials or enact some form of retribution.”

A major oil company acting like a huge bully? Nah, doesn’t sound like good ol’ Exxon. Psyche!

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Exxon says climate lawsuits violate its right to free speech. Seriously.

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Rising seas could wipe out $1 trillion worth of U.S. homes and businesses

by ClaudioFitzGibb Posted on June 18, 2018

Some 2.4 million American homes and businesses worth more than $1 trillion are at risk of “chronic inundation” by the end of the century, according to a report out Monday. That’s about 15 percent of all U.S. coastal real estate, or roughly as much built infrastructure as Houston and Los Angeles combined.

The sweeping new study from the Union of Concerned Scientists is the most comprehensive analysis of the risks posed by sea level rise to the United States coastal economy. Taken in context with the lack of action to match the scale of the problem, it describes a country plowing headlong into a flood-driven financial crisis of enormous scale.

“In contrast with previous housing market crashes, values of properties chronically inundated due to sea level rise are unlikely to recover and will only continue to go further underwater, literally and figuratively,” said Rachel Cleetus, an economist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, and a report co-author, in a statement. “Many coastal communities will face declining property values as risk perceptions catch up with reality.”

The report defines chronic inundation as 26 flood events per year, or roughly one every other week — enough to “make normal routines impossible” and render the properties essentially worthless. It builds on the group’s previous work to identify the risk of chronic flooding under a sea-level-rise scenario of two meters (6.6 feet) by 2100. Using data from Zillow for every property in every coastal zip code in the lower 48, the results of this week’s report are at once familiar and surprising. (Here’s the interactive map where you can plug in your zip code).

It’s probably no surprise that Miami Beach is the community most at risk nationwide. More than $6 billion could be wiped out by 2045 (within the lifespan of current mortgages). That’s more than 10 percent of the city’s property value. (All amounts are in 2017 dollars).

A more surprising result: New Jersey is the state with the most to lose over the same time frame, eclipsing Florida. In Wildwood, Ocean City, and Long Beach, more than $10 billion is at risk.

In about two percent of all coastal zip codes, rising waters could soon eliminate more than half of property tax revenue. For these communities, like Crisfield, Maryland and parts of Newport Beach, California, sea level rise is an immediate existential threat — city services would have to shutter with such a catastrophic budget shortfall.

Looking further ahead — under the high sea level rise scenario to 2100 — a quarter of Boston would be underwater. Vulnerable barrier islands, like Miami Beach and Galveston, Texas, would be largely uninhabitable. Nationwide, more than $12 billion in property tax revenue would be lost.

The study estimates that Long Island, New York would experience floods at the scale of Hurricane Sandy more than two dozen times a year. The longer the world waits to significantly cut emissions, and the more bad news we discover about the inherent instability of the vast Antarctic ice sheets, the more likely this scenario becomes.

Though the costs and scale of this looming disaster are staggering, it’s important to remember that the catastrophe will hit some people much harder than others. Academics and climate activists have been talking about this for a long time, but local governments have struggled to prepare for a more watery future.

“While wealthier homeowners may risk losing more of their net wealth cumulatively, less-wealthy ones are in jeopardy of losing a greater percentage of what they own,” Cleetus said. “Homes often represent a larger share of total assets for elderly or low-income residents.” For some, taking a $100,000 loss could be a life-shattering blow; for others it’s a temporary setback.

The futurist Alex Steffen calls this situation a “brittleness bubble,” and it’s characteristic of slow-onset but predictable problems like climate change. When the brittleness bubble breaks, those without means — the economically poor, those from marginalized groups — will be forced to abandon their homes and ways of life.

“The risks we face grow with inaction,” Steffen recently wrote. “So, too, do the losses we can expect.”

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Rising seas could wipe out $1 trillion worth of U.S. homes and businesses

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Here’s how many people Pruitt’s environmental policies could kill

by DOTHarriet Posted on June 15, 2018

If the Trump administration is good at anything, it’s proposing rollbacks to environmental protections. “Proposing” is the key word here — though EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has tried to weaken or get rid of more than 40 rules, he hasn’t been very successful. Many of his attempted rollbacks have faced challenges in court.

If all these deregulations actually came to pass, we’d see astounding effects on public health: an additional 80,000 deaths and well over a million cases of respiratory illness over the next decade. And that’s an “extremely conservative” estimate, according to Harvard professors who tabulated the numbers in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week.

We’ve seen estimates of the health impact of environment rollbacks before, but here, the numbers have been collected in one place. The researchers lifted most of the estimates from reports published back when these life-saving regulations were originally proposed or implemented.

Air pollution could introduce some of the most threatening health problems. Back in October, Pruitt pledged to repeal the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era rule that aimed to cut the power industry’s emissions 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Without that plan, the researchers foresee a rise in exposure to particulate matter, resulting in 36,000 deaths and 630,000 childhood respiratory illness cases over the next 10 years.

Another major contributor to breathing issues: Pruitt’s plan to revive a loophole that would allow diesel trucks to use engines that create 450 times more soot than their newer counterparts. If implemented, that could lead to an estimated 900,000 cases of respiratory illness over the next decade, as well as 41,000 premature deaths.

Other rollbacks that pose major health threats include watering down rules for coal-fired power plant waste and adding a two-year delay to the implementation of the Obama-era Clean Water Rule.

So, about that hope we mentioned. The courts have the chance to keep many of these rules — and these lives — intact. While Pruitt is seen as a master deregulator, he’s been faulted for crafting sloppy rules, some of which have gotten struck down. For example, when Pruitt tried to keep methane regulations from going into effect, a federal appeals court struck it down, calling the move “unreasonable” and “arbitrary.”

And more of his attempts are headed to court. Just this week, for instance, a coalition of environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the suspension of water regulations.

The Harvard authors note that this kind of policymaking takes a lot of time to come to fruition. “Fortunately for those interested in public health,” they write, “the regulatory process will take many years. Whoever is sworn in as President in January 2021 will have a large effect on whether the Trump administration’s full environmental agenda goes into effect.”

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Here’s how many people Pruitt’s environmental policies could kill

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House Democrats call on the FBI to investigate Scott Pruitt

by AlinaJunkins Posted on June 9, 2018

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

Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt already faces at least 12 federal inquiries from the EPA’s Inspector General, Government Accountability Office, and House Oversight committee.

Could a criminal probe be next?

Six House Democrats led by Representative Don Beyer, a Democrat from Virginia, sent a letter on Friday to the FBI and Department of Justice requesting a criminal investigation into Pruitt. “At the very least, we know that federal ethics laws bar public officials from using their position or staff for private gain,” they write in the letter. “Administrator Pruitt has certainly done just that. Further, his actions related to his wife’s employment and the quid-pro-quo condo situation with industry lobbyists may have crossed a line into criminal conduct punishable by fines or even by time in prison.”

The letter cites recent revelations about how Pruitt used his position to find a job for his wife and his staff to obtain a “well below market value” rental in a Capitol Hill townhouse owned by an energy lobbyist. There have been additional stories this week about how Pruitt directed an aide to hunt for a used Trump hotel mattress and his security detail to find him a certain lotion only available at Ritz-Carlton hotels, presumably inspired by the time he spoke to the National Mining Association at the hotel in April of last year.

In May, Pruitt confirmed in a Senate budget hearing that he has set up a legal defense fund to potentially address the expanding number of investigations into his behavior. Although the fund would be useful if he faced a criminal investigation, ethics experts see it as potentially another ethical minefield, because federal law says he cannot accept donations from donors whose business interests involve the EPA.

Read the letter from the House Democrats.

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House Democrats call on the FBI to investigate Scott Pruitt

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Media fails on climate and extreme weather coverage, except for this guy

by LaraChamberlain Posted on June 8, 2018

Everyone knows that the country got gobsmacked by hurricanes last year. But if you rely on mainstream media for news, you might not know that climate change had anything to do with those storms or other extreme weather events — unless you’ve recently paid close attention to Al Roker.

Climate scientists tell us that as the climate warms, hurricanes will get more intense. Yet the major broadcast TV news programs mentioned climate change only two times last year during their coverage of the record-breaking hurricanes (yes, two times). The climate-hurricane link came up once on CBS, once on NBC, and not at all in the course of ABC’s coverage of the storms, Media Matters found. All in all, major U.S. TV news programs, radio news programs, and newspapers mentioned climate change in just 4 percent of their stories about these devastating hurricanes, according to research by Public Citizen.

So it’s probably no surprise that many major media outlets also neglected to weave climate change into their reporting on last year’s heat waves and wildfires.

Will coverage be any better this year?

Al Roker has given us reason to feel slightly optimistic. Last week, Roker, the jovial weather forecaster on NBC’s Today show, demonstrated one good way to put an extreme weather event into proper context. While discussing the devastating flooding that recently hit Ellicott City, Maryland, he explained that heavy downpours have become more common in recent decades thanks to climate change, using a map and data from the research group Climate Central to support his point:

As we roll into summer — the start of the season for hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, and heat waves — that’s just the kind of connect-the-dots reporting Americans need.

The New York Times helped set the scene with a map-heavy feature highlighting places in the United States that have been hit repeatedly by extreme weather. “Climate change is making some kinds of disasters more frequent,” the piece explained, and “scientists also contend that climate change is expected to lead to stronger, wetter hurricanes.”

It’s one thing to report on how climate change worsens weather disasters in general, as the Times did in that piece, but much more rare for media to make the connection when they cover a specific storm or wildfire. Roker did it, yet many other journalists remain too squeamish. They shouldn’t be; science has their back.

In addition to what we know about the general link between climate change and extreme weather, there’s a growing body of peer-reviewed research, called attribution science, that measures the extent to which climate change has made individual weather events more intense or destructive.

Consider the research that’s been done on Hurricane Harvey, which dumped more than 60 inches of rain on the Houston area last August. Just four months after the storm, two groups of scientists published attribution studies: One study estimated that climate change made Harvey’s rainfall 15 percent heavier than it would have been otherwise, while another offered a best estimate of 38 percent.

Broadcast TV news programs failed to report on this research when it came out, but they should have. And the next time a major hurricane looms, media outlets should make note of these and other studies that attribute hurricane intensity to climate change. Scientists can’t make these types of attribution analyses in real time (at least not yet), but their research on past storms can help put future storms in context.

Of course, in order to incorporate climate change into hurricane reporting, journalists have to report on hurricanes in the first place. They failed miserably at this basic task when it came to Hurricane Maria and its devastation of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Maria got markedly less media coverage than hurricanes Harvey and Irma, according to analyses by FiveThirtyEight and researchers from the MIT Media Lab. The weekend after Maria made landfall in September, the five major Sunday morning political talk shows spent less than a minute altogether on the storm. And just last week, when a major new study estimated that Maria led to approximately 5,000 deaths in Puerto Rico, as opposed the government’s official death count of 64, cable news gave 16 times more coverage to Roseanne Barr’s racist tweet and her canceled TV show than to the study.

Hurricane Maria overwhelmingly harmed people of color — Puerto Rico’s population is 99 percent Latino, and the U.S. Virgin Islands’ population is 98 percent Black or African-American — so it’s hard not see race as a factor in the undercoverage of the storm.

The lack of reporting on Maria sets a scary precedent, as climate disasters are expected to hurt minority and low-income communities more than whiter, wealthier ones. Unless mainstream media step up their game, the people hurt the most by climate change will be covered the least.

Ultimately, we need the media to help all people understand that climate change is not some distant phenomenon that might affect their grandkids or people in faraway parts of the world. Only 45 percent of Americans believe climate change will pose a serious threat to them during their lifetimes, according to a recent Gallup poll. That means the majority of Americans still don’t get it.

When journalists report on the science that connects climate change to harsher storms and more extreme weather events, they help people understand climate change at a more visceral level. It’s happening here, now, today, to all of us. That’s the story that needs to be told.

Lisa Hymas is director of the climate and energy program at Media Matters for America. She was previously a senior editor at Grist.

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Media fails on climate and extreme weather coverage, except for this guy

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