Tag Archives: rhode-island

Think the climate change lawsuit is dead? It’s just beginning.

by alizamcinnes2 Posted on July 19, 2018

Another climate change accountability lawsuit appears to have died. RIP. But take heart, you fine-feathered climate hawks. No man is an island, but every court is.

As you may recall, in January, New York City sued ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, and ConocoPhillips, alleging that the companies had purposefully misled the public about the effects of climate change in order to keep raking in money.

United States District Judge John F. Keenan tossed the lawsuit straight in the proverbial trash can on Thursday. “Global warming and solutions thereto must be addressed by the two other branches of government,” Judge Keenan said.

Fat chance of that happening anytime soon.

Just last month, a U.S. district judge dismissed similar complaints against major oil companies brought by Oakland and San Francisco. “Using lawsuits to vilify the men and women who provide the energy we all need is neither honest nor constructive,” said R. Hewitt Pate, Chevron’s vice president and general counsel.

Both the California and New York suits were part of a wave of climate accountability lawsuits taking place across the country, from Rhode Island to Colorado to King County, Washington.

So are all these climate suits going to evaporate? Not quite.

“It’s easy to see this decision as momentum,” said Michael Burger, executive director of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. But “no other court is bound by this decision. It’s as simple as that.”

Just because one judge rules a certain way doesn’t mean other judges looking at similar cases will make the same decision. “Each judge and each panel of appellate judges is going to look at these issues independently until it gets resolved by some higher court,” Burger said.

What’s more, the New York lawsuit is likely to get appealed. That means it could get pulled out of that same proverbial trash can, dusted off, and sent along to the federal court of appeals. So Big Oil isn’t out of the woods quite yet. If a higher court does ultimately side with polluters, however, lower courts would likely follow that precedent.

Burger doesn’t know, ultimately, whether the dismissal of the New York case will change the outcome of the other climate suits. But he isn’t the only law expert who thinks this isn’t necessarily the end of the line.

“We remain optimistic that the majority of these cases will end up in state court where they belong, and that taxpayers will ultimately prevail in their efforts to recover costs,” Richard Wiles, executive director of the Center for Climate Integrity said in a statement.

Original link: 

Think the climate change lawsuit is dead? It’s just beginning.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Think the climate change lawsuit is dead? It’s just beginning.

The country’s biggest offshore wind farm is coming to Long Island.

by RubenCandler1 Posted on January 26, 2017

On Thursday, TransCanada, the corporation behind the infamous project, resubmitted an application to the State Department for permission to build the pipeline across the U.S.-Canada border.

Just two days earlier, President Donald Trump had signed a presidential memorandum formally inviting the company to give the pipeline another go. Apparently, TransCanada got right down to work.

“This privately funded infrastructure project will help meet America’s growing energy needs,” said TransCanada CEO Russ Girling, “as well as create tens of thousands of well-paying jobs.” A 2013 State Department report found the pipeline would create 28,000 jobs, but just 35 would be permanent.

Barack Obama rejected the pipeline plan in 2015, after indigenous groups and environmentalists fought it for nearly a decade. Now that a new application has been submitted, the project needs to be OK’d by both the State Department and Trump to proceed. Nebraska also needs to review and approve the project, which it’s expected to do.

Last June, TransCanada took advantage of the North American Free Trade Agreement — a deal Trump disdains — to file a $15 billion claim against the U.S. government for rejecting its Keystone proposal. Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

Continue reading – 

The country’s biggest offshore wind farm is coming to Long Island.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, Ringer, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized, Wiley, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The country’s biggest offshore wind farm is coming to Long Island.

This man tried to sue the pants off the EPA, and now he’ll be running it.

by MatildaCrompton Posted on December 7, 2016

One of the five newly installed turbines off the shore of Block Island, Rhode Island, will be late getting spinning because someone at the General Electric factory in Saint-Nazaire, France, left a six-inch drill bit inside it, which damaged critical magnets.

Fortunately, the turbine is still under warranty, so it’s GE’s responsibility to pay for floating new 60-pound magnets out to the broken turbine, hoisting them 330 feet into the air, and repairing the turbine’s generator.

The Block Island Wind Farm is noteworthy not because offshore wind is new (Europeans have been doing it since the ’90s), but because, as the first such installation in the U.S., it could herald a whole lot of offshore wind development along the Atlantic coast. The region is a significant user of coal, oil, and natural gas, but it’s geologically well-suited for offshore wind and many of its residents and leaders are motivated to switch to clean energy by the already-visible effects of sea-level rise.

Block Island has been getting its electricity from diesel generators, but now it will be able to ditch them (except for one it’ll keep for backup). Three other offshore wind projects in the region are already in the works.

From: 

This man tried to sue the pants off the EPA, and now he’ll be running it.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Dolphin, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Ringer, The Atlantic, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This man tried to sue the pants off the EPA, and now he’ll be running it.

California Farms Are Sucking Up Enough Groundwater to Put Rhode Island 17 Feet Under

by CarenSundberg Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

California, the producer of nearly half of the nation’s fruits, veggies, and nuts, plus export crops—four-fifths of the world’s almonds, for example—is entering its third driest year on record. Nearly 80 percent of the state is experiencing “extreme” or “exceptional” drought. In addition to affecting agricultural production the drought will cost the state billions of dollars, thousands of jobs, and a whole lot of groundwater, according to a new report prepared for the California Department of Food and Agriculture by scientists at UC-Davis. The authors used current water data, agricultural models, satellite data, and other methods to predict the economic and environmental toll of the drought through 2016.

Here are four key takeaways:

The drought will cost the state $2.2 billion this year: Of these losses, $810 million will come from lower crop revenues, $203 million will come from livestock and dairy losses, and $454 million will come from the cost of pumping additional groundwater. Up to 17,100 seasonal and part-time jobs will be lost.
California is experiencing the “greatest absolute reduction in water availability” ever seen: In a normal year, about one-third of California’s irrigation water is drawn from wells that tap into the groundwater supply. The rest is “surface water” from streams, rivers, and reservoirs. This year, the state is losing about one-third of its surface water supply. The hardest hit area is the Central Valley, a normally fertile inland region. Because groundwater isn’t as easily pumped in the Valley as it is on the coasts, and the Colorado River supplies aren’t as accessible as they are in the south, the Valley has lost 410,000 acres to fallowing, an area about 10 times the size of Washington, DC.
Farmers are pumping enough groundwater to immerse Rhode Island in 17 feet of it: To make up for the loss of surface water, farmers are pumping 62 percent more groundwater than usual. They are projected to pump 13 million acre-feet this year, enough to put Rhode Island 17 feet under.
“We’re acting like the super-rich:” California is technically in its third year of drought, and regardless of the effects of El Niño, 2015 is likely to be a dry year too. As the dry years accumulate, it becomes harder and harder to pump water from the ground, adding to the crop and revenue losses. California is the only western state without groundwater regulation or measurement of major groundwater use. If you can drill down to water, it’s all yours. (Journalist McKenzie Funk describes this arcane system in an excerpt from his fascinating recent book, Windfall.) “A well-managed basin is used like a reserve bank account,” said Richard Howitt, a UC-Davis water scientist and co-author of the report. “We’re acting like the super-rich, who have so much money they don’t need to balance their checkbook.”

Continued: 

California Farms Are Sucking Up Enough Groundwater to Put Rhode Island 17 Feet Under

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta, Vintage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on California Farms Are Sucking Up Enough Groundwater to Put Rhode Island 17 Feet Under