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Scott Pruitt’s week has been a real March Against Science.

by MarceloBlakemore Posted on April 25, 2018

The EPA administrator has racked up more than 40 scandals and 10 federal investigations since he took office last February. Nonetheless, Scott Pruitt was smiling when he walked in to testify in front of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Thursday.

Prior to the hearing, the New York Times reported that Pruitt had a plan to deal with tough questions: Blame his staff instead.

He stuck to it. When New York Democratic Representative Paul Tonko confronted him about raises given to two aides without White House approval, Pruitt said, “I was not aware of the amount, nor was I aware of the bypassing, or the PPO process not being respected.”

And Pruitt’s $43,000 soundproof phone booth? Again, not his fault. As Pruitt told California Democratic Representative Antonio Cárdenas: “I was not involved in the approval of the $43,000, and if I had known about it, Congressman, I would have refused it.”

“That seems a bit odd,” Cárdenas commented. “If something happened in my office, especially to the degree of $43,000, I know about it before, during, and after.”

Democratic Representative from New Mexico Ben Ray Luján pointed out that Pruitt was repeatedly blaming others during the hearing. “Yes or no: Are you responsible for the many, many scandals plaguing the EPA?” he asked.

Pruitt dodged the question: “I’ve responded to many of those questions here today with facts and information.” When Luján pressed him futher, Pruitt replied, “That’s not a yes or no answer, congressman.”

Well … it wasn’t a “no.”

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Scott Pruitt’s week has been a real March Against Science.

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California’s next megaflood would be worse than eight Hurricane Katrinas

by LacyLeppert7 Posted on April 25, 2018

Worse than the 1906 earthquake. Worse than eight Hurricane Katrinas. Worse than every wildfire in California history, combined. The world’s first trillion-dollar natural disaster.

A wintertime megaflood in California could turn out to be the worst natural disaster in U.S. history by far, and we are making it much more likely, according to an alarming study published this week in Nature Climate Change.

The odds are good that such a flood will happen in the next 40 years, the study says. By the end of the century, it’s a near certainty. (And then another one hits, and another — three such storms are possible by 2100). By juicing the atmosphere, extreme West Coast rainstorms will happen at five times their historical rate, if humanity continues on roughly a business-as-usual path, the new research predicts.

The study’s lead author, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a lifelong Californian, says the best way to understand what we’re doing to California’s weather is to think of earthquakes.

“A major earthquake on the Hayward Fault in the San Francisco Bay Area or on the San Andreas Fault east of Los Angeles is an inevitability in the long run, and either event would likely be devastating,” Swain says. “Yet the big difference with the risk of a major flood event is that human activities are greatly increasing the likelihood of the physical event itself through the emission of greenhouse gases.”

Three years ago, much of the Pacific Northwest sat in stunned silence after reading Kathryn Schulz’s Pulitzer-winning description of “the really big one” — an unimaginably huge earthquake, a full-margin rupture of the Cascadia subduction zone. Within months of that article, Congress held hearings and proposed new funding to prepare.

California’s looming megaflood would likely be much worse.

In terms of sheer destruction, displacement of human life, re-ordering of society, a California megaflood would be without parallel in modern U.S. history. The state’s levees aren’t designed to attempt to hold back such a flood. The blow to the world’s sixth largest economy would send shockwaves throughout the world.

On his blog, Swain wrote: “Climate scientists are sometimes accused of being ‘alarmist,’ but I would argue that alarm is a reasonable human response.”

In 2011, the USGS assessed the modern-day implications of a flood like the one that happened in the winter of 1862 — currently the worst flood in California history. An unceasing onslaught of atmospheric rivers brought Los Angeles three years worth of rain, more than 36 inches, in a month and a half. Floodwaters turned California’s Central Valley into an inland sea, from Bakersfield to Redding. When it was all finished, the storms had destroyed one-third of the taxable land in California, and bankrupted the state.

Swain’s research considered the consequences of these megafloods on the state’s water management system and found the signs of catastrophe:

[S]uch events would be unprecedented in California’s modern era of extensive water infrastructure. Few of the dams, levees and canals that currently protect millions living in California’s flood plains and facilitate the movement of water from Sierra Nevada watersheds to coastal cities have been tested by a deluge as severe as the extraordinary 1861–1862 storm sequence—a repeat of which would probably lead to considerable loss of life and economic damages approaching a trillion dollars.

And, deep breaths, this isn’t the worst-case scenario. It is “plausible, perhaps inevitable”, according to the USGS, that a flood even worse than the 1862 disaster will occur again. The USGS called their scenario the “ARkStorm” — a thousand-year megastorm — and made a stark warning: “The hazards associated with such extreme winter storms have not tested modern infrastructure nor the preparedness of the emergency management community.”

For California, it looks like the worst of climate change is just getting started.

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California’s next megaflood would be worse than eight Hurricane Katrinas

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For undocumented immigrants, the Trump admin makes fires and hurricanes even tougher to deal with

by DollyMoris Posted on April 24, 2018

Seven months after Juan and Jonathan Leija were forced to evacuate their flooded homes during Hurricane Harvey, the cousins face challenges that go beyond just recovering their lives. Building back isn’t easy for anybody, but the Leijas are doing it as looming policy decisions threaten to uproot them again.

Juan and Jonathan are Dreamers — young adults who qualified for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era policy that granted clemency to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children. In September, President Donald Trump announced he was canceling the program, leaving it up to Congress to pass legislation on the issue — which it hasn’t been able to agree on.

Undocumented immigrants were hit especially hard by last year’s devastating hurricanes and wildfires. Immigrant populations were already struggling with higher rates of poverty and less access to medical care. Then storms, fires, and mudslides wiped out homes and disrupted industries like agriculture that employ a largely immigrant labor force. Despite the dire need for relief, undocumented immigrants are ineligible for federal disaster aid. Some were afraid to even go to emergency shelters or reach out for help out of fear of exposing their own or a relative’s immigration status. Post-disaster, many immigrants have turned to jobs in construction and face injury and exploitation rebuilding communities that were leveled.

Juan Leija.

“Yesterday was the first time since Harvey that it rained really hard,” Juan told Grist in March. “It definitely brought flashbacks and it triggered a little bit in me. And just to add onto it, tomorrow a year from now my DACA expires.”

While undocumented immigrants like Juan work to pick up the pieces after disaster, the Trump administration is placing targets on their backs. In addition to ending DACA, Trump has revoked Temporary Protected Status for countries at a faster pace than any other president and has intensified immigration raids, even in sanctuary cities, over the past year. For some immigrant Americans, it’s political insult to climate change-induced injury — and suggests that it may be a while before they find a measure of stability in the U.S. again.

When Hurricane Harvey struck the Houston area, it brought with it a year’s worth of rainfall over in less than a week. The storm affected 13 million people across Texas and Louisiana, killing 88. Causing $125 billion in damage, Harvey was the second costliest storm (behind Hurricane Katrina) to hit the U.S. since 1900.

Ten days after Harvey made landfall in Texas, President Trump announced an end date for DACA the following March.

“I was angry. I was confused. I was sad. I was anxious,” Juan Leija recalls. “I thought it was really heartless for him to do that after a national travesty.”

Harvey hit Juan’s family’s home hard. The Houston house they rent flooded up to his thighs. Juan is 6’1’’ and says the water level was probably above his mom’s waist. The family evacuated. They waded through water for two miles before reaching a friend’s home. For the next four months, Juan, his two siblings, his mother, and her boyfriend squeezed into a one-bedroom apartment.

The Leijas joined hundreds of Texas families struggling to rebuild after the storm. While Harvey swamped all of Houston, its impacts were not felt equally.

AFP Contributor / Contributor / Getty Images

“In terms of the extent of hardship or suffering, we definitely found disparities across racial, ethnic lines, and across income lines,” said Shao-Chee Sim, a researcher at the Texas-based advocacy group Episcopal Health Foundation, who helped lead a study of adults living in Harvey-damaged counties.

The survey found that, after Harvey, 64 percent of immigrants suffered unemployment and income losses compared to 39 percent of their U.S.-born neighbors. Immigrants were also more likely to have fallen behind on their rent as a result of the storm and were more than twice as likely to have had to borrow money from a family member or payday lender in order to make ends meet.

When Juan’s cousin Jonathan’s mobile home flooded, it was a huge setback. “Basically, we had to remodel everything,” he said. “That was going to cost money that we didn’t have.”

Undocumented immigrants — including Dreamers — are ineligible for aid provided in the wake of natural disasters by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Families with mixed immigration status, however, do qualify because parents can apply for relief on behalf of their U.S. citizen children. Even so, many eligible families avoided applying due to worries over providing personal information in an aid application. FEMA is, after all, an agency housed within the Department of Homeland Security, which also oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“In an immigrant community there is a huge concern about asking for aid because there is a fear — and a legitimate one — about, ‘will this come back to hurt my chances of gaining status at some point in the future?’” Kate Vickery, executive director of Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative, said. “The answer has always been complicated, but under the Trump administration, it is pretty grim.”

Jonathan Leija’s younger siblings are U.S. citizens, and the family decided to apply for FEMA assistance. The officer who came to inspect their home canceled four separate appointments before finally showing up.

Jonathan, who is studying construction management at Lone Star Community College, north of Houston, missed class twice in order to be home for appointments that never happened. Before Harvey hit, Jonathan had to withdraw from school for a semester to save up money for tuition. Dreamers don’t receive federal financial aid, so he took up jobs roofing and working at a tire shop so that he could get back to class. The storm posed more delays and after all the missed appointments, his family’s FEMA application was denied.

Still, Jonathan counts himself lucky. A nonprofit organization that builds affordable housing and has been working to help Houston homeowners recover, Avenue CDC*, sent contractors to repair the damage. That kind of help can be a godsend for undocumented immigrants who work in industries hit hard by flooding and fires. Immigrant-rights advocates are anticipating that those who lost employment because of last year’s disasters might seek out construction work as part of the rebuilding efforts.

Vickery, with Houston Immigration Legal Services Collaborative, warns that undocumented immigrants are disproportionately part of what she calls the “second responder wave.” “They are the labor force doing the cleanup,” she explained.

The rebuilding booms that follow disasters come with their own threats. More than a third of day laborers informally employed in construction in the first few weeks after Harvey said they were injured on the job, according to a study conducted by the University of Illinois at Chicago. Two-thirds of the respondents said that their workplace was unsafe. Eighty-five percent of day laborers who worked in hurricane-affected areas reported not receiving any training for the worksites they entered, and nearly two-thirds did not even have a hard hat to wear. Aside from all the safety risks, the study also found that more than a quarter of workers had experienced wage theft.

“The vulnerability of being a worker in a disaster recovery area if you don’t have status is a huge issue,” Vickery said.

Advocates in California are also concerned about the risks workers are facing after the state’s massive fires last year.

“A lot of people going into that labor might not have worked in construction. Those people need training,” said Christy Lubin with the Graton Day Labor Center.

Months after the blazes, many immigrants employed in affected industries — including agriculture, hospitality, and domestic work — have lost their homes and their jobs.

“A lot of people see wildfires in the hillsides of California or mudslides in affluent communities like Montecito as largely affecting wealthy homeowners,” said Lucas Zucker with the grassroots organization Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE). “The reality is those wealthy homeowners employ domestic workers who are largely undocumented. They get no attention and really have nowhere to turn.”

The Thomas Fire.Marcus Yam / Contributor / Getty Images

In Santa Paula, an hour and a half northwest of Los Angeles, Marisol, a mother of three, and her family are still recovering from the Thomas Fire, which burned down their home in December. Marisol’s husband had worked on a horse ranch and wasn’t allowed time off to help his family after the wildfire. He lost his job as a result. Fearful of applying for aid that would require them to disclose their undocumented status, Marisol (whose name has been changed to protect her identity) and her husband are trying to get back on their feet with fewer resources available to them — and while U.S. immigration enforcement efforts intensify.

Like the Leija cousins, Marisol came to the U.S. from Mexico as a child — but she didn’t qualify for DACA because she doesn’t have a high school diploma, something she’s still working toward now. Her children, however, were born in the U.S. and are citizens.

“I don’t like to think about the consequences if me and my husband aren’t here,” Marisol told Grist through an interpreter as she fought back tears.

Undocumented folks and immigrant-rights groups have felt overwhelmed by the barrage of executive actions and policies targeting immigrants since Trump came into office. Deportations were already high under the Obama administration, but they jumped in the first year of Trump’s presidency. The number of people living in the United States who were deported rose nearly 25 percent, from roughly 65,000 in 2016 to more than 81,000 people in 2017.

For some migrants who received Temporary Protected Status because of a natural disaster that affected their home country, the experience of disaster and displacement is becoming a cycle — especially as climate change exacerbates extreme weather events. TPS is the only U.S. policy offering sanctuary to people displaced by environmental calamity, and Trump has been chipping away at the program by removing five countries designated for TPS, including Haiti and El Salvador, within the past year. More than 320,000 people could become undocumented as a result.

“We’ve kind of been in perpetual crisis mode for the last year as we’ve dealt with the disaster of the Trump administration on our communities to the literal disaster of wildfires and mudslides,” says CAUSE’s Zucker. “Immigrant families are basically caught in the middle of being under siege by the government and in desperate need of the government basically unwilling to provide that assistance.”

Marisol and her family in California got some much-needed financial help from an “UndocuFund” created by CAUSE and other groups, which provides grants to families affected by the raging wildfires and mudslides in California last year. But needs are still outpacing donations, and there are more than 800 disaster survivors awaiting assistance.

Meanwhile, back in Texas, Juan and Jonathan Leija are determined to keep moving forward. If Jonathan’s DACA status expires before Congress passes measures to replace the program, he’ll likely lose his job at the tire shop where he currently works. That will mean he will have to find another way to pay his way through school.

DACA protest.Mark Wilson / Staff / Getty Images

“Whatever happens, happens,” he said. “I’m still going to find a way to go to school, to finish it.”

Without DACA, Juan may be unable to find lawful employment even after graduating — but he doesn’t hesitate to speak out. Since before DACA was implemented, one of the Dreamers’ rallying calls has been  “Undocumented and Unafraid.” He still wants to replace fear with hope.

“I don’t want Dreamers to feel like they have to get back to the shadows.”

*An earlier version of this story incorrectly named another nonprofit.

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For undocumented immigrants, the Trump admin makes fires and hurricanes even tougher to deal with

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Someone please tell Scott Pruitt that air pollution leads to more deaths than fuel efficiency standards.

by EloiseReese044 Posted on April 20, 2018

The EPA administrator has racked up more than 40 scandals and 10 federal investigations since he took office last February. Nonetheless, Scott Pruitt was smiling when he walked in to testify in front of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Thursday.

Prior to the hearing, the New York Times reported that Pruitt had a plan to deal with tough questions: Blame his staff instead.

He stuck to it. When New York Democratic Representative Paul Tonko confronted him about raises given to two aides without White House approval, Pruitt said, “I was not aware of the amount, nor was I aware of the bypassing, or the PPO process not being respected.”

And Pruitt’s $43,000 soundproof phone booth? Again, not his fault. As Pruitt told California Democratic Representative Antonio Cárdenas: “I was not involved in the approval of the $43,000, and if I had known about it, Congressman, I would have refused it.”

“That seems a bit odd,” Cárdenas commented. “If something happened in my office, especially to the degree of $43,000, I know about it before, during, and after.”

Democratic Representative from New Mexico Ben Ray Luján pointed out that Pruitt was repeatedly blaming others during the hearing. “Yes or no: Are you responsible for the many, many scandals plaguing the EPA?” he asked.

Pruitt dodged the question: “I’ve responded to many of those questions here today with facts and information.” When Luján pressed him futher, Pruitt replied, “That’s not a yes or no answer, congressman.”

Well … it wasn’t a “no.”

Excerpt from:  

Someone please tell Scott Pruitt that air pollution leads to more deaths than fuel efficiency standards.

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Detroit is about to cut off water for thousands of people

by EtsukoBaracchi Posted on April 20, 2018

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

In the next few weeks, Detroit is set to start shutting off water to thousands of residents with unpaid bills. Since the shutoffs began four years ago, tens of thousands of Detroiters have had their water cut off, drawing sharp criticism from local anti-poverty activists as well as the United Nations.

Households are slated for shutoff once their water bill is 60 days or $150 past due. While more than 17,000 households are at risk, Gary Brown, director of the Detroit Water and Sewage Department, told the Detroit Free Press that roughly 2,000 will actually be shut off as more residents enroll in repayment and assistance plans. The city’s Water Residential Assistance Program (WRAP), for instance, offers up to $1,000 a year to help customers catch up on their accounts.

According to Brown, the average home slated for shutoff this year is $663 past due, and most water connections are restored within 48 hours of being turned off. City records obtained by Bridge Magazine show that the number of yearly shutoffs went from 33,000 in 2014 to 17,500 last year. Overall, there have been more than 101,000 shutoffs in the past four years.

In late March, Mayor Mike Duggan’s office touted the $7 million that has been spent in the last two years to help Detroiters facing shutoffs. Just the week before, the city council approved a $7.8 million contract to Homrich Wrecking for conducting water shutoffs.

Advocates who work with the poor black and brown Detroiters who are most vulnerable to losing their water say the city’s financial assistance programs are inadequate. They are little more than “a marketing plan being framed as a compassionate solution,” says Monica Lewis Patrick, president and CEO of We the People of Detroit, a grassroots group fighting the water shutoffs. Many Detroiters who enroll in payment plans are at risk of falling back into cycles of nonpayment, says Mark Fancher, staff attorney for the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Michigan. “Not because they’re lazy or just choosing to be poor,” but because “there are a whole lot of reasons why people are poor and there are lots of poor people in Detroit.”

Brown told the Free Press that the tricky part of conducting shutoffs is “separating the truly needy from those who are just not paying.” That line of thinking, says Fancher, presumes that those who aren’t paying are “deadbeats that have the money, but have chosen not to pay. This is completely contrary to the reality of most people who are dealing with these shutoffs.”

In a city that’s 80 percent black, more than 35 percent of residents live in poverty, the highest rate among the nation’s 20 largest cities. Unemployment hovers around 9 percent and the median income is around $28,000. Yet water rates have climbed as much as 400 percent in the last 20 years.

Large-scale water shutoffs began in 2014, just as the city was crawling out from the wreckage of the country’s largest-ever municipal bankruptcy, pegged at $18 billion. The shutoffs have been advertised as an unavoidable, if painful, treatment for restoring the city’s fiscal health. In 2014, the office of then-Emergency Manager Kevin Orr referred to the shutoffs as “a necessary part of Detroit’s restructuring.” Patrick isn’t buying it: “You can’t convince me that while you’re smiling at me and shutting my water off that this is good for me and you represent my interests. As my grandmother would say, ‘You can’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.’”

In 2014, two United Nations special rapporteurs declared the shutoff policy a “violation of the most basic human rights.” “I heard testimonies from poor African American residents of Detroit who were forced to make impossible choices — to pay the water bill or to pay their rent,” Catarina de Albuquerque, the special rapporteur on the human right to water and sanitation, said after visiting the city. Among the findings she recounted:

Ms. de Albuquerque cited the case of a woman whose water had been cut and whose teenage daughters had to wash themselves with a bottle of water during menstruation. In other instances, she continued, she heard mothers who feared losing their children because their water was shut off; heads of household who feared losing access to water without any prior notice; others who feared receiving unaffordable and arbitrary water bills.

Activists and researchers have pointed out that the Detroit Water and Sewage Department’s financial woes can’t be blamed entirely on the city, since it stretches far beyond the city itself, serving 40 percent of Michigan’s population. The progressive think tank Demos has described the decision to include the department’s $6 billion debt in the city’s bankruptcy filing as an accounting trick used to negotiate more favorable terms with lenders.

We the People of Detroit and other grassroots groups have been organizing to not only stop the shutoffs, but make water more affordable. Cities like Philadelphia are experimenting with tying residents’ water bills to their incomes to ensure that families don’t become trapped in a cycle of missed payments. We the People recommends that no family living at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty line ($25,100 for a family of four) pays more than roughly 3 percent of their income for water, the rate considered affordable under UN guidelines. (The Environmental Protection Agency pegs affordability at 4.5 percent of median household income.) In 2017, Michigan State University researchers found that the median household spends about $1,620 on water bills annually, roughly 6.5 percent of a poverty-line income. More alarmingly, they found that by 2022, water rates would climb to unaffordable levels for 35 percent of households nationally.

Under an income-based plan, Fancher says, many Detroiters would not be paying market rate for water, but they would be paying something, leaving the city in better financial shape than it is under the status quo: “You replace a whole lot of people who are paying nothing with a whole lot of people who are paying something. In the long run, the utility is far better off than it would be.”

However, the city has refused to alter water rates, insisting that its hands are tied by a state constitutional amendment that requires new taxes to be approved by voters. An affordability fee, Fancher argues, would not legally be a tax. The constitutional argument, he says, has been “a convenient excuse for not doing something that makes a whole lot of sense.”

Some water rights activists see the city’s intransigence as more evidence of a quiet campaign to push poor people of color out of the city. In a recent study, We the People found that many home foreclosures concentrated in Detroit’s black communities were driven in part by overdue water bills. “It’s about using water to displace residents in order bring in a younger, whiter population to dilute black political power in Detroit,” Patrick says. They are “weaponizing water as a tool of gentrification.”

Continued:

Detroit is about to cut off water for thousands of people

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Scott Pruitt’s got 99 problems but Trump ain’t one.

by ardilase1976 Posted on April 19, 2018

Rick Scott, who has served as Florida’s governor since 2011, hasn’t done much to protect his state against the effects of climate change — even though it’s being threatened by sea-level rise.

On Monday, eight youth filed a lawsuit against Scott, a slew of state agencies, and the state of Florida itself. The kids, ages 10 to 19, are trying to get their elected officials to recognize the threat climate change poses to their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

18-year-old Delaney Reynolds, a member of this year’s Grist 50 list, helped launch the lawsuit. She’s been a climate activist since the age of 14, when she started a youth-oriented activism nonprofit called The Sink or Swim Project. “No matter how young you are, even if you don’t have a vote, you have a voice in your government,” she says.

Reynolds and the other seven plaintiffs are asking for a “court-ordered, science-based Climate Recovery Plan” — one that transitions Florida away from a fossil fuel energy system.

This lawsuit is the latest in a wave of youth-led legal actions across the United States. Juliana v. United States, which was filed by 21 young plaintiffs in Oregon in 2015, just got confirmed for a trial date in October this year.

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Scott Pruitt’s got 99 problems but Trump ain’t one.

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The Northeast is chugging right along on climate change action.

by DebbraPaulson Posted on April 19, 2018

Rick Scott, who has served as Florida’s governor since 2011, hasn’t done much to protect his state against the effects of climate change — even though it’s being threatened by sea-level rise.

On Monday, eight youth filed a lawsuit against Scott, a slew of state agencies, and the state of Florida itself. The kids, ages 10 to 19, are trying to get their elected officials to recognize the threat climate change poses to their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

18-year-old Delaney Reynolds, a member of this year’s Grist 50 list, helped launch the lawsuit. She’s been a climate activist since the age of 14, when she started a youth-oriented activism nonprofit called The Sink or Swim Project. “No matter how young you are, even if you don’t have a vote, you have a voice in your government,” she says.

Reynolds and the other seven plaintiffs are asking for a “court-ordered, science-based Climate Recovery Plan” — one that transitions Florida away from a fossil fuel energy system.

This lawsuit is the latest in a wave of youth-led legal actions across the United States. Juliana v. United States, which was filed by 21 young plaintiffs in Oregon in 2015, just got confirmed for a trial date in October this year.

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The Northeast is chugging right along on climate change action.

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8 kids from Florida are suing their state over climate change.

by JodiDwyer1 Posted on April 16, 2018

Rick Scott, who has served as Florida’s governor since 2011, hasn’t done much to protect his state against the effects of climate change — even though it’s being threatened by sea-level rise.

On Monday, eight youth filed a lawsuit against Scott, a slew of state agencies, and the state of Florida itself. The kids, ages 10 to 19, are trying to get their elected officials to recognize the threat climate change poses to their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

18-year-old Delaney Reynolds, a member of this year’s Grist 50 list, helped launch the lawsuit. She’s been a climate activist since the age of 14, when she started a youth-oriented activism nonprofit called The Sink or Swim Project. “No matter how young you are, even if you don’t have a vote, you have a voice in your government,” she says.

Reynolds and the other seven plaintiffs are asking for a “court-ordered, science-based Climate Recovery Plan” — one that transitions Florida away from a fossil fuel energy system.

This lawsuit is the latest in a wave of youth-led legal actions across the United States. Juliana v. United States, which was filed by 21 young plaintiffs in Oregon in 2015, just got confirmed for a trial date in October this year.

Source:

8 kids from Florida are suing their state over climate change.

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Trump’s new executive order spells disaster for our air quality.

by JaiLongwell7 Posted on April 13, 2018

In a statement about the decision, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder said that the city’s water has tested below the federal action level for lead and copper for the last two years. But Mayor Karen Weaver doesn’t agree that the free bottled water should stop, and many Flint residents aren’t so sure their tap water is OK to use.

“My water stinks. It still burns to take a shower,” Melissa Mays, a Flint activist and plaintiff in a lawsuit that forced the replacement of water lines, told the Associated Press. “There’s no way they can say it’s safe.”

Resident Ariana Hawk doesn’t trust the water, either. “Everything that me and my kids do from cooking to boiling their water for a bath, we’re using bottled water,” she told the local ABC-affiliate news station.

The New York Times reports that about 6,000 of Flint’s lead or galvanized steel pipes have been replaced, but there could be 12,000 more lines to go. According to the World Health Organization, there is no known safe level of lead exposure.

“This is wrong,” tweeted Mona Hanna-Attisha, a Flint doctor whose research exposed lead poisoning in the city. “Until all lead pipes are replaced, [the] state should make available bottled water and filters to Flint residents.”

But after the remaining free bottles are collected, only water filters and replacement cartridges will be provided.

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Trump’s new executive order spells disaster for our air quality.

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A mustachioed ironworker with a kickass climate plan could replace Paul Ryan.

by LaurieBLPM Posted on April 11, 2018

Now, those lawsuits are here, and that prediction could bite the multinational oil company in the ass.

A treasure trove of documents released Thursday provide new evidence that Shell, like Exxon, has been gaslighting the public for decades. The documents, dating as far back as 1988, foretold “violent and damaging storms,” and said that “it would be tempting for society to wait until then before doing anything.”

At that point, the documents predicted, “a coalition of environmental NGOs brings a class-action suit against the U.S. government and fossil-fuel companies on the grounds of neglecting what scientists (including their own) have been saying for years: that something must be done.” Sound familiar?

When the scientific community began warning that the world could go down in fossil-fueled flames, Shell tried to convince them to take a chill pill, derailing global efforts to curb climate change.

And it gets shadier: This whole time, Shell has known exactly how culpable it is for a warming planet. By the mid ’80s, it had calculated that it was responsible for 4 percent of global carbon emissions.

That means San Francisco, Oakland, and New York now have more ammo for their lawsuits against Shell. The biggest hurdle to their cases wasn’t proving that climate change is a thing — even Big Oil’s lawyers can’t argue that anymore — but that fossil fuel companies can be held legally liable for the damages caused by climate change.

Shell just made that a lot easier.

Original link – 

A mustachioed ironworker with a kickass climate plan could replace Paul Ryan.

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