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The Koch brothers are funding Facebook’s newest fact-checking partner

by MattieNsk58774 Posted on April 29, 2019

Is Facebook trying to solve its fake news problem by partnering with … climate deniers?

Last week, social media giant Facebook announced that it would be partnering with CheckYourFact.com, the fact-checking offshoot of the Koch-funded, right-leaning news outlet The Daily Caller. The fact-checking site will help provide third-party oversight of Facebook’s news content, including stories about global warming.

The Check Your Fact site says it is “non-partisan” and “loyal to neither people nor parties,” describing itself as an “editorially independent” subsidiary from The Daily Caller, though it receives funding from both The Daily Caller and the Daily Caller News Foundation. The Daily Caller was founded by Fox News political analyst Tucker Carlson, who is known for hosting climate deniers on his show.

Critics say the deal say the partnership is a case of a fox guarding the hen house (Or, at least, Fox News guarding the greenhouse). “It is truly disturbing to hear that Facebook, already known to be a dubious organization with an ethically challenged CEO, is partnering with ‘Daily Caller,’ which is essentially a climate change-denying Koch Brothers front group masquerading as a media outlet,” leading climatologist Michael Mann told E&E News. “If they fail to cease and desist in outsourcing their ‘fact-checking’ to this bad faith, agenda-driven outlet, they will face serious repercussions.”

Facebook did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.

But is Check Your Fact really as bad as all that? In February 2018 the site was found to be “compliant or partially compliant” with the Poynter’s International Fact Checking Network Board’s standards, though the site was placed under review in November for not clearly listing its funders. Recently, Check Your Fact looked at President Trump’s claims that wind turbines cause cancer, and found them to be false. However, their statement also included quotes from National Wind Watch, an anti-wind advocacy group.

Facebook has contracted with several organizations to identify factually disputed stories, but its relationship with fact checkers has long been rocky. In 2017, several journalists expressed concerns about the company’s lack of transparency, saying the Facebook’s fact-checking effort had not been effective. More recently, both the Associated Press and Snopes.com, cut ties with the company, with Snopes’ managing editor saying she felt Facebook essentially used them for “crisis PR.”

This isn’t the first time Facebook has entrusted its fact-checking with a website associated with climate denial: In the fall of 2017, Facebook named the right-wing, partisan Weekly Standard as a fact-checking partner. According to IFCN officials, the organization does not take partisanship of the news outlet into account when verifying an organization, only partisanship of the fact-checking itself.

“[U]ltimately, it’s important that people trust the fact-checkers making these calls,” wrote Facebook product manager Tessa Lyons as part of the company’s Hard questions series. “While we work with the International Fact-Checking Network to approve all our partners and make sure they have high standards of accuracy, fairness and transparency, we continue to face accusations of bias. Which has left people asking, in today’s world, is it possible to have a set of fact-checkers that are widely recognized as objective?”

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The Koch brothers are funding Facebook’s newest fact-checking partner

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Joe Biden wants to be the anti-Trump. Here’s what that could mean for climate policy.

by FosterVDFiz Posted on April 25, 2019

Let’s play a game called two truths and a lie:

  1. Joe Biden is running for President.
  2. Joe Biden has endorsed a carbon tax and the Green New Deal.
  3. Joe Biden was the first senator to introduce climate legislation in the U.S.

For all those who guessed that No. 2 is the lie, you are correct! Congrats. The Democrat has not, in fact, endorsed the Green New Deal. Nor has gone on record about supporting carbon pricing, a climate solution embraced by most political moderates.

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Biden announced Thursday morning that he is throwing his ice cream-stained cap in the 2020 presidential ring, which means the already-crowded, left-lurching Democratic primary has its most establishment member yet in the 76-year-old former vice president. In a video that focuses heavily on the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, and the current White House occupant’s shocking response to the event, Biden clearly positions himself as the antidote to Donald Trump.

The longtime senator from Delaware has been under scrutiny for months as the media anticipated his official announcement. Dozens of stories have probed his decades-long record. And a month ago, Lucy Flores, a Democratic politician from Nevada, accused him of unwanted touching. Since then, a number of women have come forward with similar stories.

The accusations and the background checks didn’t stop the Democrat from joining the 2020 race. His launch video eschews any talk of issues, so what can we expect from Biden when it comes to tackling climate change? Let’s take a trip down memory lane.

Amtrak Joe was actually the first to propose climate legislation in Congress’s upper chamber — a bill called the 1986 Global Climate Protection Act that would have done what Nancy Pelosi’s Select Committee on the Climate Crisis does now: “Establish a Task Force on the Global Climate to research, develop, and implement a coordinated national strategy on global climate.” Imagine how useful such a panel might have been three decades ago. Unfortunately the president at the time, Ronald Reagan, wasn’t exactly champing at the bit to address rising temperatures.

Between his early days in the Senate and now, Biden’s most notable climate-related accomplishment was serving as Barack Obama’s sidekick for eight years. The administration was especially focused on climate action, especially during its second term (think: CAFE standards, Clean Power Plan, the Paris agreement, among other achievements). Following the 2008 recession, Biden handed out $90 billion in funding for clean-energy programs and called the move “the thing I’m proudest of” from the administration’s first term. In a 2015 speech, the vice president said tackling climate change was “the single most important thing” the White House could do.

Overall, however Obama’s climate record is far from spotless: He bragged about helping the U.S. become the world’s leading oil producer. And part of his energy plan included handing Shell a permit to drill in the Arctic and promoting offshore drilling. Biden might now have to answer for those decisions.

Today, as the chatter left of the aisle centers on the Green New Deal, it’s clear that ideas like the Obama-era “all of the above” energy strategy aren’t going to fly in the Democratic primary. Already, five 2020-bound senators have signed on as cosponsors of the ambitious equity-focused, economy-transforming proposal offered by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey. A slew of other candidates not serving in the Senate have thrown their support behind the idea, too.

Biden, however, has so far been uncharacteristically quiet on that front. But, in a speech at the Conference of Mayors in January, he gave the audience a taste of what his thinking around climate is these days:

Lots of renewables: “Today we generate wind power for 24 million homes,” he said. “There’s no reason why we can’t quadruple that, virtually overnight.”
He’s all about setting goals: “There’s no reason that in 2025 all of North America can’t get half its electricity from non-polluting sources.”
Bipartisanship: “There’s unanimity in my party, the vast majority of Republicans agree,” he claimed, that climate needs to be addressed.
Climate change is a matter of national security: “Sea levels rise a half a foot or a foot, you have tens of millions of people migrating,” he explained, shaking his fist. “That’s how wars start.”
Climate change poses an existential threat: “It’s about a matter of survival.”

Biden wrapped up his speech with a call to arms: “We cannot continue down this blind path,” he proclaimed. “We cannot ignore science, we cannot abdicate our duty to lead the world.”

It’s no accident that Biden spent a third of his 30-minute speech expounding on his record on the environment and enumerating ideas to tackle climate change. With the clock ticking on much-needed action, the issue is often on the lips of many challengers vying to take on Donald Trump — and then, hopefully, warming.

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Joe Biden wants to be the anti-Trump. Here’s what that could mean for climate policy.

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This GIF captures just how gigantic the U.S. carbon footprint is

by AbelLankford25 Posted on April 23, 2019

President Trump likes to say that fighting climate change would give China and India an upper hand over the U.S. The three countries top the world’s biggest annual emitters list, sure, but that doesn’t take historical contributions into account. And now, we have a mindblowing visualization of nations’ cumulative carbon footprints.

Simon Evans, deputy editor at the U.K.-based Carbon Brief, put together a gif that ranks the countries with the greatest output of CO2 since 1750 — right before the Industrial Revolution began. Using code published by the Financial Times, the graph shows the startling and unyielding rate at which the U.S. has contributed to rising temperatures:

As you can see, in 1850, the U.S.’ mounting emissions made it the fourth largest emitter of CO2. In 1859, we outpaced Germany. A decade later, we surpassed France. And between 1877 and 1912 we managed to outflank the U.K. by emitting 18 billion tons of CO2. At present day, we are still ahead of China when you look at the big emissions picture. While China is currently the world’s largest annual emitter of pollution, it still ranks second cumulatively. And the U.S. still takes the cake on per capita emissions, too.

When it comes to setting a bad example for the rest of the world, America is No. 1. Go, team.

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This GIF captures just how gigantic the U.S. carbon footprint is

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Trump issues Earth Day message without mentioning climate change

by NatishaFe Posted on April 22, 2019

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

Donald Trump issued on Monday an Earth Day proclamation that omitted any mention of climate change or the cavalcade of environmental threats posed by deforestation, species loss, and plastic pollution. The president chose instead to praise the benefits of a “strong market economy.”

In response, one leading climate scientist said Trump’s environmental policy was “in many cases the antithesis of protection.” The executive director of the Sierra Club said Trump was “the worst president for the environment our nation has ever had.”

Trump praised the “abundant beauty and life-sustaining bounty” of the American environment but did not echo growing warnings from scientists over rising temperatures or the precipitous decline of many species.

“Environmental protection and economic prosperity go hand in hand,” Trump said in his message for Earth Day, a global event held to support environmental protection annually since 1970.

“A strong market economy is essential to protecting our critical natural resources and fostering a legacy of conservation. My administration is committed to being effective stewards of our environment while encouraging opportunities for American workers and their families.”

Trump added: “At the same time that our nation is experiencing historic economic and job growth, our air and water quality ranks among the highest in the world.” He stated that his administration has “expanded support for conservation of land, water and wildlife.”

Last year, U.S. government scientists issued a 1,000-page climate change assessment that warned the country faces hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses due to rising temperatures, flooding, and wildfires. Thousands of Americans are expected to die in worsening heatwaves, with diseases such as West Nile, dengue fever, chikungunya, and Lyme set to expand in range as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns change.

“The fact that they’re not mentioning what many consider to be the gravest existential threat facing humanity is a good indication of the priorities of this administration,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University.

“The clear priority of the administration is extracting unsustainable short-term profits from the environment, which is in many cases the antithesis of environmental protection. This is not surprising.”

Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, called Trump “the worst president for the environment our nation has ever had,” adding: “He has regularly and consistently prioritized the profits of corporate polluters over clean air, clean water and the health of our communities.

“The fact that he continues to ignore the climate crisis endangers the nation and will be viewed by history with scorn.”

Trump has routinely disparaged climate science and has attempted to dismantle every major policy aimed at lowering planet-warming emissions, favoring a watered down alternative his administration admits would cause an extra 1,400 deaths a year from air pollution. In June 2017, he announced the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris climate deal.

The administration has thrown open vast tracts of public land and almost all U.S. waters to oil, gas, and coal mining, removed protections from some prized landscapes, and scrapped rules that stopped mining waste being dumped into rivers.

Trump, who recently erroneously claimed that wind turbines cause cancer, has repeatedly stated that the U.S. has some of the cleanest air and water in the world.

In fact, while the U.S.’s air is generally far healthier than growing economic powers such as China and India, the American Lung Association has pointed out that 4 in 10 Americans still live in counties with harmful levels of smog.

Millions of Americans are also exposed to drinking water containing industrial chemicals, while lead in water remains a widespread issue five years after the notorious contamination in Flint, Michigan.

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Trump issues Earth Day message without mentioning climate change

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Trump signs executive orders fast-tracking the pipeline approval process

by VaniaMalizia Posted on April 10, 2019

When Donald Trump was campaigning to become president in 2016, he promised to speed up the government review process for “private sector energy infrastructure projects.” On Wednesday, he made good on that pledge by signing two executive orders that would put pipelines on the fast track to success.

In addition to shortening the review process for infrastructure projects, the orders are aimed at limiting states’ power to pause construction and giving the president the final word on permits for cross-border projects, among other things.

“We’re gonna make it easier for you,” Trump said at a press conference on Wednesday. “You know about delays? Where it takes you 20 years to get a permit? Those days are gone.”

To date, oil companies have had a hard time selling their new, big pipeline projects in the court of public opinion. They’ve had an even harder time pushing those projects through the court of … courts. Pipeline company TransCanada, for instance, has been waiting a whole decade to build the northern leg of its Keystone XL extension.

Trump seems willing to go to any lengths necessary to get the job done. Months after a district court judge demanded the government conduct a more thorough environmental review of the potential impacts of the Keystone XL project last November, Trump issued a presidential permit aimed at allowing TransCanada to sidestep the courts.

He announced his new executive orders at an engineer training center in Crosby, Texas, a town near Houston that is still grappling with the fallout from a deadly chemical fire last week. “Smoke from the fires has barely cleared, but President Donald Trump shows no shame in using Texas’ petrochemical corridor as a prop for his misguided and dangerous proposals,” said Stephanie Thomas, an organizer at health and safety group Public Citizen, in a press release.

One of the orders looks to curtail environmental reviews for pipelines nationwide. “It will now take no more than 60 days,” Trump said. “And the president, not the bureaucracy, will have sole authority to make the final decision when we get caught up in problems.”

The other allows the Environmental Protection Agency to limit state powers to pause pipeline construction on the grounds of the Clean Water Act. Previously, regulators in states like New York have halted construction that they argue jeopardizes water resources protected under the act.

“New York is hurting the country because they’re not allowing us to get these pipelines through,” Trump said in the press conference. “They also have a lot of energy under their feet and they refuse to get it,” he said, likely referring to the natural gas trapped in Marcellus shale under the state.

According to the Wall Street Journal, that same executive order also deals with investments, directing the Department of Labor to “scrutinize whether retirement funds that pursue environmental or socially progressive investment strategies are fulfilling their duty to maximize shareholder value.” In other words, Trump is prompting the department to take a magnifying glass to divestment. New York recently moved to divest its multi-billion dollar pension from fossil fuels.

Needless to say, oil and gas companies are pretty enthused about these orders. “Politically-motivated delays and pipeline bottlenecks in the Permian Basin and around the United States are hindering growth, so we appreciate the Administration’s work to bring clarity and certainty to the pipeline construction permitting process,” the Texas Oil and Gas Association said in a press release.

Environment groups? Not so much. “From the Dirty Water Rule to rolling back protections against toxic pollutants from power plants, this is now the next step in the Trump administration’s all-out assault on our clean water,” the League of Conservation Voters said in a statement.

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Trump signs executive orders fast-tracking the pipeline approval process

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5 facts to make you smarter than the president on Puerto Rico

by SylviaGodley297 Posted on April 2, 2019

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The fact-checking bar was already pretty low for Donald Trump, but the president’s untrue Twitter rant this morning regarding how much relief aid the U.S. has sent to Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria has still managed to shock and anger many of the island’s advocates.

When Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico in September 2017, it left mass devastation in its wake. It also left a train of misinformation, including the number of deaths associated with the storm, the amount of help that’s come from the government, and the relationship between the island’s residents and the mainland.

To (once again) clear the air, we’ve compiled a list of actual truths about Puerto Rico and its post-storm recovery:

Puerto Ricans are Americans

Despite Trump’s continued antagonism toward the island and a White House aide’s recent comment calling Puerto Rico “that country,” Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and its residents are U.S. citizens. More than 3 million people reside on the island.

Puerto Rico’s death toll associated with Hurricane Maria is about 3,000 people

A report commissioned by the Puerto Rican government estimated that 3,000 Puerto Ricans perished in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. In the first week after the storm, the government initially announced an official death toll of 16. That estimate then jumped to 64 but was updated when the report was released in August 2018 by George Washington University.

Puerto Rico has received about $1.5 billion in U.S. aid for storm recovery

The storm incurred around $91 billion in damages to the island. The island has received only about $1.5 billion in federal aid, out of a larger pot of aid funding previously approved by Congress. Puerto Rico is still waiting to receive most of the approximately $40 billion in relief funds which have been allocated to the territory.

Puerto Rico did not receive more recovery aid for Hurricane Maria than mainland states did for Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina, which in 2005 affected more than a million people across three states, cost the federal government more than $120 billion in recovery efforts. About $76 billion of that aid went to Louisiana projects. In comparison, Puerto Rico has only received about $1.5 billion in storm aid so far.

Most Puerto Ricans are not happy with Trump’s response to Hurricane Maria

Despite Trump’s tweet this Tuesday that “The best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico is President Donald J. Trump,” a poll conducted last year found more than half of Puerto Ricans felt Trump and his administration had done a poor job responding to the Hurricane Maria. That may not be surprising considering that earlier this year, the White House called Puerto Rico food stamp program “excessive and unnecessary.”

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5 facts to make you smarter than the president on Puerto Rico

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How U.S. recycling is changing now that China won’t take it

by AdriannMitten Posted on April 1, 2019

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

“This facility is our version of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.”

That’s how Eileen Kao described Montgomery County, Maryland’s recycling center on a tour. Kao, who is chief of waste reduction and recycling in the county’s Department of Environmental Protection, pointed out how machines in the facility help sort recyclables. As she described how the machines worked, a magnet separated steel and tin cans into a storage silo while a shaker table collected pieces of glass that were too small to be sorted. Dozens of workers hand-sorted at certain steps along the process.

The county’s recycling center in Derwood, Maryland, processed more than 31,000 tons of commingled material and more than 45,000 tons of mixed paper last year. At this building, commingled material (bottles, cans, and containers) is sorted. Mixed paper, including cardboard, is sorted in another facility nearby.

Over recent months, news coverage has depicted China’s National Sword policy as a crisis for recycling in municipalities all over the United States. Since early 2018, China has banned many scrap materials and has not accepted others unless they meet an extremely strict contamination rate of 0.5 percent. (Contamination rates of U.S. recyclables before sorting vary from place to place, but can reach 25 percent or higher.) The decision reflects China’s desire to recycle more of its domestic waste. Previously, China had been the destination for about 40 percent of the United States’ paper, plastics, and other recyclables.

National Sword sent waves through the global recyclables market. The changes in China diverted many materials to Southeast Asian countries, whose ports were not prepared to receive them in such high volume. Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia have begun to enact their own restrictions.

Meanwhile, many municipal recycling programs in the United States have suffered. As of January, Philadelphia was sending half of the recyclables it collects straight to the incinerator. Minneapolis stopped accepting black plastics. Marysville, Michigan, will no longer accept eight of 11 categories of items (including glass, newspaper, and mixed paper) for curbside recycling, in order to cut costs. Deltona, Florida, stopped curbside pickup altogether.

Many recycling and solid-waste organizations, as well as the U.S. EPA, have dedicated resources and staff to “identify solutions to be able to help support recycling here in the U.S.,” according to Dylan de Thomas, vice president of industry collaboration at the Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit that gives grants to and works with communities to improve their recycling programs. The EPA, which has typically left leadership on recycling to local governments, held its first-ever recycling summit in November 2018.

While recycling centers have been closing down in some places, like in greater Birmingham, Alabama, and around California, programs elsewhere are stepping up their efforts to decrease contamination levels in the recycling bin by educating residents about their role in the recycling process. This emphasis on outreach suggests a heavier onus on citizens to stop tossing items absentmindedly into the bin, and start disposing of them in a more informed, deliberate way.

Take plastic bags, for example. Whereas most grocery chains accept plastic bags for recycling, most municipal recycling programs do not. Still, plastic bags are frequently found in recycling bins. The mistake is so pervasive that Washington, D.C., mailed postcards to residents instructing them not to put plastic bags in the recycling bin. (D.C. only prints two types of mailers each year for recycling, one an overview and another focused on a particular issue.)

D.C. also did a pilot program with the Recycling Partnership to provide curbside feedback for residents. On one route, staff left a note behind for residents who had plastic bags in their recycling bin. Another route was the control, and staff did not leave tags. The route that gave residents feedback in the form of tags saw a 19-percent drop in plastic bags over the course of two weeks. The control route? An increase in bags of 2 percent.

“What we’re suggesting … is being very strategic and consistent with your tagging,” said Cody Marshall, the Recycling Partnership’s chief community strategist officer. “You have to go to the same houses over and over again four to five times with the tagging messages to really have an impact.”

Systematic tagging is an important strategy in the toolbox, according to Marshall, because it’s a targeted intervention to decrease the high contamination levels plaguing many municipalities as they try to bring their bales of recyclables to market. Recycling programs in central Virginia, El Paso, Tampa Bay and Orange County, Florida, and Phoenix are all tracking the impact of tagging on contamination.

The need for systematic approaches to reduce contamination is clear. Even though Americans recycle more now than ever, they’re not always sure what their local recycling program accepts. Increasingly, those mistakes can be costly for municipalities that are trying to sell the recyclables in bales. And, of course, to ensure that even more materials don’t end up in the landfill or incinerator.

Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) Recycling and Composting Rates, 1960 to 2015

Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Many Americans are either aspirational recyclers,” said David Biderman, the executive director and CEO of the Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA), “or they’re confused recyclers. Just because it’s made of plastic doesn’t mean it can be recycled.”

What can and cannot be recycled, as well as how recyclables are separated, differs based on where you live. Montgomery County, for example, has a dual-stream model. Residents have to sort their recyclables into two groups: commingled materials (bottles, cans, and containers) and mixed paper (cardboard and paper). Under a single-stream approach, by contrast, residents throw all household recyclables into one bin, separate only from non-recyclable trash. D.C. has a single-stream system.

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While dual-stream recycling allows the sorting process to begin before waste reaches the facility, single-stream recycling is convenient because people can put everything in the same bin. Between 2005 and 2014, the single-stream model went from being used by 29 percent of American communities to 80 percent, according to one survey. It may lead to people putting fuller bins out to be collected, but the uptake of single-stream recycling has also meant higher contamination rates.

Some communities are switching back to dual-stream in an attempt to bring down contamination. Otherwise, they’re hoping citizens can make better recycling decisions. Ecomaine, a nonprofit that processes recycling for more than 70 communities in Maine on a single-stream model, recently hired a new educator to inform residents about what’s recyclable, what’s not, and why.

“It has certainly been a tough year-and-a-half to two years,” said Ecomaine’s communications manager, Matt Grondin. “But in the end, that landfill storage is forever storage, and to abandon recycling programs for a year or two of a down market really is a short-sighted solution to a long-term problem.”

Back in Maryland, China’s policy hasn’t led Montgomery County to stop recycling anything. It continues to generate revenues from all the materials it recycles, Kao said, except mixed-color, broken glass, which it pays to recycle because it has little value. The county sells the majority of its bales domestically. In fact, one silver lining to China’s crackdown is a growing domestic market in the United States. More than a dozen North American paper mills have announced new capacity to process recycled paper, although it will be a few years before all of it comes online.

In any case, there are strategies that local programs can use, either separately or in combination, to find their way back to health and continue recycling waste. China’s policy change may not represent the much-feared “end of recycling” in the United States so much as an inflection point.

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How U.S. recycling is changing now that China won’t take it

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Fed official: Climate change is an ‘international market failure’

by AntoineRuggles Posted on March 26, 2019

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Climate change was already worrying enough — now a report from the U.S. central bank cautions that rising temperatures and extreme storms could eventually trigger a financial collapse.

A Federal Reserve researcher warned in a report on Monday that “climate-based risk could threaten the stability of the financial system as a whole.” But possible fixes — using the Fed’s buying power to green the economy — are currently against the law.

Glenn Rudebusch, the San Francisco Fed’s executive vice president for research, ranks climate change as one of the three “key forces transforming the economy,” along with an aging population and rapid advances in technology. Climate change could soon hit the banking system “by storms, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme events” making it harder for businesses to repay loans.

Rudebusch warns that crops and inundated cities have already started to hurt the economy: “Economists view these losses as the result of a fundamental market failure: carbon fuel prices do not properly account for climate change costs,” he writes. “Businesses and households that produce greenhouse gas emissions, say, by driving cars or generating electricity, do not pay for the losses and damage caused by that pollution.”

A hefty carbon tax alone wouldn’t be enough to fix the problem — what he calls an “intergenerational and international market failure.”

Since Congress has yet to take sufficient action, Rudebusch says that the Fed could, in theory, take matters into its own hands by encouraging a shift away from fossil fuels. The problem is, the Fed’s only official job is to keep inflation tame and unemployment low. And its tools are limited to buying and selling government debt to tweak interest rates.

That means it can’t help companies make a shift to a low-carbon economy by, for instance, lending them money in the bond market. By contrast, the European Central Bank has been buying “green” bonds since 2016. An ECB research note last July found that those purchases have helped boost the market for these kind of investments, helping spur environmental improvements.

Along with a report last week from the insurance industry saying that climate change could eventually make insurance unaffordable for most people, Rudebusch’s report is part of a growing body of evidence that climate change poses an existential threat to the world economy as it currently exists.

Last month, Fed chairman Jerome Powell told legislators that asking why the Fed doesn’t currently consider the risks of climate change was a “fair question.”

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Fed official: Climate change is an ‘international market failure’

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Mozambique floods cover more ground than NYC, Chicago, D.C., and Boston — combined

by DarwinCXDjakzhq Posted on March 25, 2019

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Post-flood satellite images of Mozambique show that Cyclone Idai submerged about 835 square miles of homes and fields — an area larger than New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Boston combined. Aid workers in Mozambique describe the floodwaters as “inland oceans extending for miles and miles.”

Idai’s official death toll in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi reached 761 on Monday, but that total will surely rise. There are reports of hundreds of bodies alongside a single road as floodwaters began to recede.

Beira, Mozambique, reportedly the hardest hit city, “will go down in history as having been the first city to be completely devastated by climate change,” said Graça Machel, the country’s former first lady and a prominent humanitarian in an interview with the Mozambique newspaper Verdade on Monday.

The United Nations has characterized the storm and its aftermath as one of the worst weather-related disasters ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere. As a result, the UN World Food Program now considers it one of its top concerns globally — on par with the wars in Syria, Yemen, and South Sudan — estimating that some 3 million people have been affected, nearly half of them children.

On Monday, the UN launched a $282 million appeal for aid to cover the initial three months of its response to the cyclone. Over the weekend, President Donald Trump agreed to send the US military to help support the ongoing international relief operation — three days after a formal request from the Mozambique government.

Mozambique received nearly a year’s worth of rainfall in the days following Cyclone Idai, consistent with findings that rainstorms are becoming stronger and more common as Earth’s atmosphere warms up. After centuries of colonial rule by Portugal and decades of war after independence (in which the U.S. played an active role), Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in the world — a stark reminder of the inherent injustice of climate change, that those least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions are bearing its worst consequences.

An estimated 128,000 survivors have made their way to temporary camps near Beira, with an escalating risk of cholera and other waterborne diseases. The Red Cross announced plans to provide humanitarian support to 200,000 people for up to two years. “The scale and scope of suffering and damage is breathtaking,” said Red Cross secretary general, Elhadj As Sy, after touring the region around Beira.

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Mozambique floods cover more ground than NYC, Chicago, D.C., and Boston — combined

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Shell to Trump administration: Regulate us already

by CheryleKaufmann Posted on March 15, 2019

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When the EPA and the Department of Interior announced plans to scrap Obama-era regulations to curb methane leaks last year, they were transparent about their rationale — they wanted to help the oil and gas industry. The EPA estimated that its revised regulation for new wells would save companies $380 million every year. The Department of Interior touted that its updated rule would “reduce unnecessary burdens on the private sector.”

Now at least one member of the Big Oil club is balking at the Trump administration’s efforts.

At a conference in Houston earlier this week, Gretchen Watkins, president of Shell’s U.S. division, told Reuters that methane leaks are “a big part of the climate problem” and that she wants the EPA to establish more aggressive regulations that plug leaks. Methane, the primary component in natural gas, packs more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. (And leaks mean Shell “has less product to sell,” Watkins wrote in a LinkedIn post).

“We don’t usually tell governments how to do their job,” Watkins reportedly said, “but we’re ready to break with that and say, ‘Actually, we want to tell you how to do your job.’”

Watkins’ comments reflect shifting attitudes in the oil and gas industry. Shell, for instance, has fracking and refining operations in more than 70 countries. But Shell wants to invest up to $2 billion in “New Energies”, and it announced plans to become the world’s biggest power company by 2030 as part of a move, away from its core oil and gas business. An executive at ExxonMobil also said this week that methane regulation has “an important role to play” in “helping industry as a whole rise to the challenge” of producing energy while minimizing the effect on the planet.

“The big oil and gas companies see the writing on the wall in terms of climate change,” said Lauren Pagel, interim executive director at the environmental nonprofit Earthworks. “They spent so many years denying climate change is happening, denying that they caused climate change, they spent a lot of years in denial, and this is their new tactic — that they can be part of the solution.”

The two regulations in the Trump administration’s crosshairs are aimed at curbing methane leaks from wells on public lands and new oil and gas sites on private land. The Department of Interior published the final rule rescinding methane leaks on public lands in September, and the EPA is in the process of rolling back regulations for new drilling.

Methane leaks from well sites and pipelines undermine the industry’s argument that natural gas can help the country shift to a cleaner economy. A recent study estimated that 13 million metric tons of natural gas — enough to fuel 10 million homes — is lost through leaks each year. That’s roughly 2 percent of all natural gas produced in the country.

Leaking natural gas also poses numerous health risks. It contains benzene and a slew of other hazardous pollutants and volatile organic compounds, which have been linked to increased cancer risk and respiratory illnesses. An Earthworks report found that some 750,000 asthma attacks in children are attributable to smog from oil and gas pollution nationally. It estimated that 12.6 million people live within a half mile of an oil and gas facility.

Pagel said that as long as oil and gas companies are in business, strict regulations, such as those to decrease methane emissions, are required to protect public health and the environment.

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Shell to Trump administration: Regulate us already

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