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Trump is about to make the pork industry responsible for inspecting itself

by ElinorO62bp Posted on April 6, 2019

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

Next time you tuck into a pork chop or a carnitas-filled burrito, spare a thought for the people who work the kill line at hog slaughterhouses. Meatpacking workers incur injury and illness at 2.5 times the national average; and repetitive-motion conditions at a rate nearly seven times as high as that of other private industries. Much has to do with the speed at which they work: Hog carcasses weighing as much as 270 pounds come at workers at an average rate of 977 per hour, or about 16 per minute.

President Donald Trump’s U.S. Department of Agriculture is close to finalizing a plan that would allow those lines to move even faster, reports the Washington Post’s Kimberly Kindy. The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service is currently responsible for overseeing the kill line, making sure that tainted meat doesn’t enter the food supply. The plan would partially privatize federal oversight of pork facilities, cutting the number of federal inspectors by about 40 percent and replacing them with plant employees, Kindy adds. In other words, the task of ensuring the safety of the meat supply will largely shift from people paid by the public to people being paid by the meat industry.

Deregulation is on brand for the Trump team, but the idea of semi-privatizing the USDA’s meat inspection dates to former President Bill Clinton, who launched pilot programs for both chicken and pork plants. President Barack Obama was an enthusiast — his USDA approved a similar plan for chicken slaughterhouses in 2014, but declined in the end to let all poultry companies speed up the kill line after fierce pushback by workplace and food safety advocates. In its waning days in 2016, the Obama USDA was close enough to finalizing hog slaughterhouse deregulation that a bipartisan group of 60 Congress members sent a letter to then-USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack urging the the department not to make the move.

The Trump administration appears to be bringing new zeal to the task of reshaping meat inspection. Once it finalizes the new pork inspection, the USDA plans to roll out a similar scheme for the beef industry, Kindy reports. And last fall, the agency announced it would would let some chicken slaughterhouses speed up their kill lines from 140 birds per minute to 175 birds per minute.

The USDA has long insisted pulling inspectors off the kill line—while also speeding it up—is about “modernization.” “Advances in animal science, market hog production systems, biosecurity, and veterinary medicine have eliminated the vast majority of diseases inspected for under traditional inspection,” the agency claimed in a 2018 explainer.

What does this deregulation mean for the safety of our meat? We already have a sneak preview. For years, a USDA pilot program has allowed five large hog slaughterhouses to operate at higher line speeds with fewer inspectors. A 2013 audit by the USDA’s Office of Inspector General found that the USDA “did not provide adequate oversight” of the pilot facilities over its first 15 years, and as a result, the plants “may have a higher potential for food safety risks.”

According to the OIG report, there are 616 USDA inspected hog plants in the United States, meaning that just 0.8 percent of them are in the pilot program. Yet of the top 10 US hog plants earning the most food safety and animal welfare citations in the period of fiscal years 2008 to 2011, three were enrolled in the pilot program. By far the most-cited slaughterhouse in the United States over that period was a pilot plant — it drew “nearly 50 percent more [citations] than the plant with the next highest number.”

And in 2015, the Government Accountability Project released affidavits from four USDA federal inspectors working in the pilot hog plants. Their reports from the sped-up line, which I wrote about here, don’t make for appetizing reading. Here’s an excerpt.

“Not only are plant supervisors not trained, the employees taking over USDA’s inspection duties have no idea what they are doing. Most of them come into the plant with no knowledge of pathology or the industry in general.”

“Food safety has gone down the drain under HIMP [the acronym for the pilot program]. Even though fecal contamination has increased under the program (though the company does a good job of hiding it), USDA inspectors are encouraged not to stop the line for fecal contamination.”

In Kindy’s recent Washington Post report, Pat Basu, chief veterinarian for the USDA inspection service from 2016 to 2018, makes similar observations. He “refused to sign off on the new pork system because of concerns about safety for both consumers and livestock,” Kindy reports. “The USDA sent the proposed regulations to the Federal Register about a week after Basu left, and they were published less than a month later, according to records and interviews.”

The Trump USDA first announced plans to finalize the new system in February of 2018, but has made no public comments on it since. Kindy reports the changes are imminent, and could be rolled out “as early as May.” The agency did not respond to my request for comment.

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Trump the environmentalist? The president’s 2020 campaign might start touting climate victories

by WhitneyClogstoun Posted on April 3, 2019

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In case you haven’t heard, there’s a big election coming up in a little over a year. President Trump is preparing to do battle with a crowded field of qualified Democrats. When it comes to hot button topics like jobs and immigration, Trump has got those stump speeches down pat. But a lot has changed since 2016. Climate change has become a top priority for voters and his biggest 2020 challengers have made climate action a cornerstone of their respective campaigns.

Perhaps that’s why Trump’s campaign team might be on the hunt for a list of climate-related victories to champion as the reelection fight draws nearer. Yes, you read that correctly: According to recent reporting from McClatchy, Trump’s 2020 strategy has a climate component.

McClatchy’s Michael Wilner spoke to two people close to Trump’s campaign and got confirmation from a Trump campaign spokesperson that the campaign is “gathering research for an aggressive defense of the president’s climate change record.” Of course, the Trump campaign did its standard about-face in response to the reporting that it had seemingly confirmed earlier, calling it “100 percent fake news.”

Is Trump warming up the idea of climate action? Not quite.

The White House is still mulling over a plan to establish a national security panel tasked with countering the Fourth National Climate assessment, a climate change report published in November by Trump’s own administration. If Trump decides to approve the panel, it is set to include William Happer, a physicist who once argued that CO2 is good for the planet. When a cold snap descended over parts of the U.S. this winter, Trump took to Twitter to call for some of that “good old fashioned global warming.”

Trump’s two-faced approach to climate change aside, are there any environmental victories his team can legitimately point to?

Here’s one possibility: Trump will tout his alternative to former President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the Affordable Clean Energy Rule. His plan rolls back regulations on the coal sector, but that likely won’t stop Trump from using it to boost his green credentials.

Or perhaps he’ll emphasize a 2017 EPA report that showed emissions fell 3 percent during his first year in office. But even those numbers don’t tell the full story. “Due to the lag in data collection, that decline occurred during President Barack Obama’s final year in office, 2016, not under Trump,” Politifact said in a fact-check of the EPA’s report. Plus, emissions are on the rise again as of last year.

To his credit, Trump did sign a massive public lands package into law just this year. It had broad bipartisan support in both legislative chambers, though, and not signing it might have been politically damaging.

There could have been hints of a new environmental strategy at the president’s speech at a recent rally in Michigan. “I support the Great Lakes,” he said, and promised to fully fund the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, funding that his own administration has tried to slash by 90 percent the past two years.

Regardless of how the president decides to portray his record on the campaign trail, here’s what we know for sure: Trump has rolled back, gutted, and slashed environmental protections and climate regulations pretty much every chance he got during his time in office thus far. His penchant for deregulation has touched everything from national monuments, to pristine Arctic wildlife refuges, to the habitat of a particularly snazzy looking bird called the sage grouse. He appointed oil, gas, and coal-loving former lobbyists to run his administration’s biggest environment agencies, and when some of those corrupt officials resigned in disgrace, he appointed equally oily men to replace them.

But don’t worry, y’all. Trump said he has a “natural instinct for science” that will guide him through this whole climate change thing. Phew.

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Trump the environmentalist? The president’s 2020 campaign might start touting climate victories

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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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Trump’s monument review was a big old sham

by IsmaelWicks Posted on March 16, 2019

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

President Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed “loyalty freak,” found a loyal friend and unwavering supporter in former Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah.

So when Hatch’s office sent a letter in mid-March 2017 requesting that the Interior Department shrink the boundary of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument to free up fossil fuel-rich lands, as the New York Times revealed, the Trump administration sprang into action.

A little more than a month later, Trump signed an executive order calling for a review of more than two dozen recent national monument designations. It was clear that Bears Ears was the primary target. At the signing ceremony, Trump said he’d “heard a lot about” the 1.35 million-acre site in southeastern Utah and how “beautiful” the area is. He painted the Obama administration designation as a massive federal land grab. And he boasted that it “should never have happened” and was made “over the profound objections” of the state’s citizens, and that he was opening the land up to “tremendously positive things.”

He made no mention of the five Native American tribes that consider the area sacred and jointly petitioned for the monument’s creation. Instead, he thanked Hatch for his “never-ending prodding.”

“[Hatch] would call me and call me and say, ‘You got to do this,’” Trump said. “Is that right, Orrin? You didn’t stop. He doesn’t give up. He’s shocked that I’m doing it, but I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do.”

Again, this was before former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke launched what he promised would be an objective, thorough review of recent monument designations; one he said would give all stakeholders a voice. In the end, Trump signed a pair of proclamations to cut more than 2 million acres from Bears Ears and nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument — the largest rollback of national monuments in U.S. history. Seemingly every action leading to that decision suggested the outcome was predetermined.

On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Natural Resources Committee held an oversight hearing to examine what they described in a news release as Trump’s “illegal decision to shrink” the Utah sites. The event, titled “Forgotten Voices: The Inadequate Review and Improper Alteration of Our National Monuments,” featured testimony from several tribal leaders, the Utah state director of the Bureau of Land Management and other stakeholders. Zinke turned down an invitation to testify through his attorney, according to a committee spokesperson.

Representative Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona and the committee’s chair, told HuffPost in a recent interview that Zinke created a culture at the Department of the Interior centered on “making life easier” for oil, gas, and mining interests at the expense of conservation and environmental stewardship. The monument rollbacks, he added, “epitomizes” that culture.

Grijalva echoed that sentiment during the committee’s hearing. He said the administration’s review was “hollow and improper” and gave industry “special consideration.”

“It is my firm belief that this was a predestined outcome and that everything that has occurred since then has been to justify that outcome,” Grijalva said. “I don’t think it’s justifiable.”

BLM directed to free up coal deposits

One of the biggest revelations about the administration’s motives came during Wednesday’s hearing, when Representative Jared Huffman, a Democrat from California, cited testimony from a BLM employee who said he was directed to redraw the boundary of Grand Staircase-Escalante to exclude coal-rich areas and to be no more than 1 million acres.

“The first area I was told to exclude from the boundary, with no discussion, was the coal leases from 1996,” the BLM mapping specialist told investigators at Interior’s Office of Inspector General, according to Huffman.

Huffman went on to reveal that the expert was told to carve out areas rich in fossils, the very resources the monument was established to protect.

“The big one was the paleontological resources — huge dinosaur area,” the BLM expert told investigators, according to Huffman. “These coal areas are all pretty high dinosaur resources areas. We were told they are out regardless.”

This testimony is included in an unredacted version of an OIG report release in January that concluded there is “no evidence” that Zinke gave retired Utah state Representative Mike Noel preferential treatment when he redrew the monument’s boundary.

Ed Roberson, BLM’s Utah state director, told lawmakers Wednesday that the review was open, fair, and thorough. Huffman told Roberson that the order given to the BLM mapping specialist “does not sound like an honest and exhausted process,” but rather “a pre-cooked decision to allow coal companies to mine this coal.”

In his final report to the White House, Zinke acknowledged the potential for mining coal in Grand Staircase-Escalante, noting that the site contains “an estimated several billion tons of coal.” Downey Magallanes, the daughter of a former executive of coal giant Peabody Energy, was a top Interior official who oversaw the Trump administration’s monument review. She left the agency last year for a job at oil giant BP.

Former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke during a visit to Utah in 2017.George Frey / Getty Images

Zinke cozied up to monument opponents

In the week after Trump signed the orders threatening the future of 27 national monuments, Zinke met with Utah’s Republican delegation and the San Juan County Commission — staunch critics of Bears Ears — to discuss next steps. He sat down with members of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, a group of five area tribes that petitioned for monument status, only after they traveled to Washington to demand a meeting, claiming that neither Trump nor anyone on his team had consulted with them.

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A week later, Zinke traveled to Utah as part of a monuments “listening tour,” when he spent four days visiting Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Monument opponents, including Utah Governor Gary Herbert (a Republican) and members of the San Juan County Commission, joined him on the tour of Bears Ears. Representatives of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition were given a one-hour meeting with the agency chief.

In an op-ed published Sunday in the Salt Lake Tribune, the coalition, one of several groups now suing the administration, called Trump’s rollback of Bears Ears “devastating” and said the administration “failed to meaningfully engage our sovereign nations.”

“The upcoming hearing will uncover the bias, the outsized influence of the mining and drilling industries and the political motivations of the administration that led them to their illegal decision,” the coalition wrote.

Cherry-picked data

In launching its review, the Interior Department claimed that the size of national monuments designated under the Antiquities Act of 1906 “exploded from an average of 422 acres per monument” early on and that “now it’s not uncommon for a monument to be more than a million acres.”

The figure formed the foundation of the administration’s argument that Trump’s predecessors abused the century-old law. But a look at early monument designations upends the agency’s math. In 1908, two years after the Antiquities Act became law, Theodore Roosevelt designated more than 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon as a national monument. Only a few Obama-era land monuments are larger. Roosevelt also designated the 610,000-acre Mount Olympus National Monument and the 20,629-acre Chaco Canyon National Monument. Republican presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover both designated monuments of over a million acres. Coolidge set aside Alaska’s Glacier Bay in 1925, and Hoover designated California’s Death Valley in 1933.

The Interior Department has never substantiated the 422-acre figure, despite HuffPost’s numerous requests.

Not about extraction, they said

Throughout the process, Zinke maintained that the review and subsequent rollbacks were not aimed at boosting energy and mineral development on once-protected lands.

“I’m a geologist,” Zinke, who is not a geologist, said at a congressional budget hearing last year. “I can assure you that oil and gas in Bears Ears was not part of my decision matrix.”

Media reporting over the last year suggests otherwise. The New York Times obtained emails via a public records request that show potential future oil extraction played a central role in the decision. The Washington Post uncovered a lobbying campaign from uranium company Energy Fuels to shrink Bears Ears. And Roll Call reported this month that Energy Fuels, which owns a uranium mill adjacent to the original Bears Ears boundary, met with a top Interior Department official to discuss Bears Ears even before the agency launched its review.

The Washington Post also reported on agency emails that show Interior Department officials dismissed information about the benefits of establishing protected monuments, including increased tourism and archeological discoveries, instead choosing to play up the value of energy development, logging, and ranching.

A man holds a sign in protest, during Ryan Zinke’s visit to Utah in 2017.George Frey / Getty Images

Nothing to learn from the public

Early in the review process, Interior announced a comment period to give the public a chance to weigh in. It was a move that Zinke said “finally gives a voice to local communities and states” that the Trump administration claimed previous administrations had ignored.

That invitation appears to have mostly been for show. As HuffPost first reported, the agency conducted its review of Bears Ears assuming it had nothing to learn from the public.

“Essentially, barring a surprise, there is no new information that’s going to be submitted,” Randal Bowman, an agency official who played a key role in the review, told colleagues during a May 2017 webinar to train a dozen agency staffers on how to read and catalog public comments. And in a May 2017 email exchange with Downey Magallanes, a former top aide of Zinke’s who played a key role in the review, Bowman said he expected the comments to be “99-1 against any changes.”

The support for keeping monuments intact was indeed overwhelming. An analysis by the Colorado-based Center for Western Priorities found that 99 percent of the more than 685,000 public comments submitted during a 15-day comment period voiced support for Bears Ears.

In a report summary made public in August 2017, Zinke acknowledged that the vast majority of the 2.8 million public comments the department received as part of its sweeping review favored maintaining national monuments, which he chalked up to “a well-orchestrated national campaign organized by multiple organizations.”

He didn’t appear to consider that the comments were the honest opinions of individual Americans.

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Pro-Trump billionaires continue to bankroll climate denial

by KermitBowman Posted on February 27, 2019

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

The GOP megadonor family that gave more than $15 million to President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign maintained its position as a key funder of climate change denial in 2017, dishing out nearly $5 million to nonprofits and think tanks that peddle misinformation about the global crisis, according to their latest tax records.

The continued largesse by the deep-pocketed but secretive Mercer family included a $170,000 donation to the CO2 Coalition, a right-wing think tank that argues Earth benefits from humans pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. William Happer, a retired Princeton physics professor whom Trump recently tapped to lead an ad hoc panel to conduct “adversarial scientific peer review” of near-universally accepted climate science, co-founded the group in 2015.

Hedge fund tycoon Robert Mercer funds the Mercer Family Foundation, and his daughter, Rebekah Mercer, directs it. The foundation’s six-figure gift to the CO2 Coalition accounts for a quarter of the $662,203 the coalition raised in 2017. The think tank received its first donation of $150,000 from the Mercers in 2016.

The CO2 Coalition was established out of the defunct George C. Marshall Institute, another conservative think tank that cast doubt on climate science before folding in 2015. Happer, a seasoned climate change denier, left the CO2 Coalition last September to serve as Trump’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies on the National Security Council.

Happer has called climate science a “cult,” claimed Earth is in the midst of a “CO2 famine,” and said the “demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”

The Mercers divvied out a total $15,222,302 to 37 nonprofits in 2017, according to the foundation’s most recently available 990 tax form, which researchers at the Climate Investigations Center shared with HuffPost. That’s down from the approximately $19 million they gave to 44 nonprofits one year earlier.

Roughly one-third of all the foundation’s 2017 contributions — just shy of $5 million — went to nonprofits that oppose federal regulations targeting greenhouse gas emissions, challenge the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is an immediate crisis, or promote or funnel cash to denial proponents.

“It appears that climate denial is a priority of the Mercer family,” Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigations Center, told HuffPost.

The foundation could not be reached for comment Tuesday. And the CO2 Coalition did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

For the second year in a row, the Mercers gave $800,000 to the Heartland Institute, an Illinois-based libertarian think tank that has gained influence during Trump’s tenure and applauded the president’s first year in office as “a great year for climate realists.” The Mercers have given Heartland a total of $6.7 million since 2008.

The foundation also upped its contribution to the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, a group founded by Art Robinson, a biochemist floated as a candidate for Trump’s national science adviser and whom FiveThirtyEight dubbed “the grandfather of alt-science.” Robinson used the organization to circulate an infamous and bogus petition that claimed 30,000 scientists had declared there is no evidence of anthropogenic climate change. The Mercers gave the group $500,000 in 2017, up from $200,000 the previous two years. The foundation has given the group nearly $2.2 million since 2005.

The Mercers in 2017 also made a first-time donation of $200,000 to the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (formerly the American Tradition Institute), a climate denial group that has received funding from coal companies and repeatedly filed lawsuits in an effort to obtain the personal emails of climate scientists.

Foundation money also went to the Media Research Center ($2 million), the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research ($450,000), and the Cato Institute ($300,000). Donors Trust, a conservative group that has funneled millions of dollars to climate denier groups like Heritage and the American Legislative Exchange Council, received $500,000, down from $2.5 million in 2016. Mother Jones called Donors Trust “the dark-money ATM of the right.”

The White House’s plan to convene a group of fringe researchers for a new climate panel is the latest in an ongoing effort to discredit and downplay decades of all-but-irrefutable climate science — a torch that has long been carried by Mercer- and fossil fuel-funded think tanks.

In May 2017, the CO2 Foundation, the Heartland Institute, and dozens of other climate denial groups signed onto a letter calling on Trump to fully withdraw from the historic 2015 Paris climate accord. Doing so, they told Trump, was “an integral part of your energy agenda.” Less than a month later, Trump announced plans to do just that.

In addition to Happer, those under consideration for the White House panel include retired MIT professor Richard Lindzen. Last year, Lindzen spearheaded a letter signed by more than 300 climate skeptics urging Trump to pull the U.S. out of the United Nations’ climate change agency.

Lindzen is both on CO2 Coalition’s board of directors and a distinguished senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C., that is funded by the fossil-fuel billionaire Koch brothers.

It appears the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report that scientists from 13 federal agencies released in November, will be a prime target of the new committee, according to reporting by The Washington Post and E&E News. That dire report, which the Trump administration signed off on but the president said he doesn’t believe, concluded that planetary warming “could increase by 9 degrees F (5 degrees C) or more by the end of this century” without dramatic emission reductions.

In a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer vowed to introduce legislation to defund Trump’s “fake climate panel,” should the president move forward with it. As an “ad hoc group,” the committee would not be required to meet in public or be subject to public records requests, according to The Washington Post.

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Enviros get ready to throw down over Trump’s border wall national emergency

by MajorJeffcott Posted on February 15, 2019

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On Friday morning, President Trump declared a national emergency to secure funding for a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Opponents of the wall argue the issue does not warrant national emergency status. In usual Trumpian style, the president told journalists exactly what many were already thinking.“I didn’t need to do this,” he said. “But I’d rather do it much faster.” Whoomp, there it is!

The wall isn’t just an expensive political maneuver; its construction poses a threat to Tohono O’odham Nation land and culture, as well as biodiversity, wildlife refuges along the border, and endangered species. Case in point: One study shows that the wall threatens 93 endangered species.

Elected officials and the environmental community came out swinging against the executive order mere minutes after it was announced, promising lawsuits and counter-bills.

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The Sierra Club vowed swift legal action against the declaration. “We are repulsed by this unprecedented attack on the borderlands and on our democracy, and we intend to resist it with every tool possible,” the organization’s executive director said in a statement.

The League of Conservation Voters, an organization that keeps tabs on how Congress votes on environmental legislation, called the wall “xenophobic, racist and environmentally destructive” in an emailed statement.

And the National Butterfly Center, home to “the greatest volume and variety of wild, free-flying butterflies in the nation,” has already filed a restraining order to keep federal workers from trampling all over the sanctuary and its delicate inhabitants as they plan out a wall that would cut directly through the property.

On the congressional side, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced on Twitter that she plans to introduce a bill with fellow Democrat Joaquin Castro to block the executive order. “[We] aren’t going to let the President declare a fake national emergency without a fight,” she said. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer released a statement calling the order “unlawful.”

Meanwhile, Trump is preparing for battle. “I expect to be sued,” he told reporters. You got that right, buddy!

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Enviros get ready to throw down over Trump’s border wall national emergency

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Trump’s trade war is hitting solar workers hard

by JacelynBrigham Posted on February 12, 2019

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While politicians are debating the merits of a massive job-creating effort known as the Green New Deal, jobs in solar power are getting harder to find.

The solar industry lost 8,000 jobs last year, a drop of 3.2 percent and the second straight year of declines, according to The Solar Foundation’s annual report out Tuesday. That’s a sharp change after six years of growth.

Solar jobs largely come from the manufacturing and construction of new rooftop panels and solar farms, so these employment numbers offer a snapshot of the entire industry. The losses come as experts call for a massive ramp up in solar power as part of a larger effort to displace electricity generated with fossil-fuels.

What’s driving this? The Solar Foundation, a nonprofit research firm, lays most of the blame for job losses on President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Trump imposed tariffs against imported solar panels, along with two key materials — steel and aluminum,. Companies, uncertain about exactly how these tariffs will work, have put the brakes on operations. By last June, companies had canceled or delayed the construction of $2.5 billion worth of solar facilities, according to Reuters.

We can also chalk up some of the job losses to more local government quirks.. The two states that saw the biggest job losses were California (9,576), and Massachusetts (1,320), according the report. California companies have less incentive to build more solar farms because the state is ahead of its targets for renewable energy. And there was some policy uncertainty in Massachusetts as the state government crafted new targets for solar power. It issued those targets last September, and afterward saw a rise in applications to build more panels.

The Solar Foundation

The Solar Foundation anticipates a turnaround soon. This year, for instance, solar companies will need to begin construction on projects to take advantage of a tax credit that expires next year.

“Despite two challenging years, the long-term outlook for this industry remains positive as even more Americans turn to low-cost solar energy and storage solutions to power their homes and businesses,” said Andrea Luecke, executive director of the foundation.

It’s important to remember that The Solar Foundation’s not-so sunny report is a single source of data (though the Department of Energy’s official numbers have been roughly in line with this nonprofit’s).

It’s also important to remember that solar is just one sector of a clean energy economy that includes everything from home insulators to train-engine designers. The DOE has not yet released its annual report on employment for 2018, but its report from May of last year showed increases in energy efficiency and wind power jobs dwarfed the contraction in solar jobs.

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Trump’s trade war is hitting solar workers hard

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Donald Trump and Amy Klobuchar threw down over climate change this weekend

by rosalindkleeman Posted on February 11, 2019

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In the midst of a snowstorm on Sunday, Senator Amy Klobuchar announced that she is adding her name to a growing list of 2020 presidential hopefuls. It only took a few hours for President Trump to weigh in on her race.

During her speech, the Minnesota Democrat included some details about her climate platform, saying that she would rejoin the Paris climate agreement on her first day as president. The 2020 contender also pledged to “reinstate the clean power rules and the gas mileage standards and put forth sweeping legislation to invest in green jobs and infrastructure” during her first 100 days in office.

Klobuchar didn’t say anything about the Green New Deal during her announcement, but the senator, like many of her fellow Democratic contenders, is a sponsor of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes and Senator Ed Markey’s recently introduced resolution calling for an economy-wide mobilization against climate change.

President Trump, who has a much different environmental record, took to Twitter hours after Klobuchar’s speech to belittle the candidate for bringing up climate change in the middle of a snowstorm. “Amy Klobuchar announced that she is running for President, talking proudly of fighting global warming while standing in a virtual blizzard of snow, ice and freezing temperatures,” he tweeted, adding that she looked like a “Snowman(woman)!”

It didn’t take long for Klobuchar to hit back at the president. “I’m sorry if it still snows in the world but the point is that we know climate change is happening,” she said Monday on ABC’s Good Morning America.

If Trump didn’t catch her response on ABC, he probably saw her clapback on Twitter.

Don’t bring a combover to a climate fight, buddy!

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Donald Trump and Amy Klobuchar threw down over climate change this weekend

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Former U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon just endorsed Democrats’ fight for a Green New Deal

by IvanVelasquez1 Posted on January 25, 2019

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

Former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon became the first major international diplomat to throw his weight behind the so-called Green New Deal, a nascent effort by left-wing Democrats to zero out planet-warming emissions and end poverty over the next decade.

In an interview with HuffPost, Ban — now the co-chair of the newly launched Global Commission on Adaptation, a cadre of top world leaders slated to host a summit next year in the Netherlands — called the push “a very, very good initiative.”

“I would strongly support it,” Ban said by phone Wednesday afternoon from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “This kind of initiative is good.”

He held the movement in stark contrast to the climate agenda President Donald Trump has pursued, aggressively bolstering fossil fuel production and announcing a withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. He called the Trump administration “very worrisome.”

“It is very important that the people should speak out,” he said. “I have always been urging that there should be the policies of a civil society heard loud and clearly all around the world.”

Ban, 74, made climate change a priority during his term as the United Nations’ eighth secretary-general from January 2007 to December 2016. In 2008, as much of the developed world slid into the Great Recession, the South Korean diplomat urged international leaders to enact a Green New Deal, which he defined as “an investment that fights climate change, creates millions of green jobs, and spurs green growth.”

The concept caught on. Barack Obama, then a presidential candidate, called for a Green New Deal on the campaign trail. Labour Party activists began laying the groundwork for a government-run green investment bank in the United Kingdom. By 2009, the United Nations drafted a report calling for a Global Green New Deal.

But in 2010, austerity politics swept across the Atlantic. In the United States, Democrats came close to passing a cap-and-trade bill — a conservative market mechanism for curbing climate-altering emissions — but ultimately backed down. The term “Green New Deal” remained core to the U.S. Green Party’s platform, but away from the political fringe it all but disappeared.

That is, until 2018. A spate of left-wing Democrats revived the term and imbued it with a new sense of urgency and a much broader scope, calling for a rapid transition to 100 percent renewable energy and a guarantee of union-wage jobs for the millions of Americans struggling to survive as income inequality worsened. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a Democrat from New York) became the most prominent supporter, and at least two top Senate Democrats are now working on legislation. At least half the declared 2020 candidates for president now say they support a Green New Deal in some form.

On Wednesday, Ban stopped short of critiquing the longstanding dogma, among both Democrats and the few Republicans who acknowledge the realities of climate change, that says market-based tweaks, such as putting a price on carbon, are the only politically feasible paths to cutting emissions in the United States.

“There have been many discussions on how to address climate — cap-and-trade, carbon trading, carbon taxes,” he said. “Any such ideas which merit some deep discussions … that should continue.”

The remark bucked with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, which determined in October the world has roughly a decade to halve global emissions or face cataclysmic warming of at least 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, and likely much more. At a news conference, two authors of the IPCC report laughed when asked if market-based policies alone could deliver the cuts needed.

Asked whether the fossil fuel industry should be barred from future climate talks, Ban said no, despite widespread criticism of oil and gas companies’ deep-pocketed efforts to upend climate policies in the United States and elsewhere.

“I don’t think those people should not be allowed to participate,” Ban said. “They should listen to the voices of the people. These climate talks and climate conferences are open to everybody, so … we should welcome them.”

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Former U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon just endorsed Democrats’ fight for a Green New Deal

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North Carolina to Trump: End the shutdown so we can use our hurricane aid

by JanellLerner Posted on January 9, 2019

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North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper addressed the president in a letter today, explaining that the ongoing partial government shutdown (now on its 19th day) is holding up key disaster relief for the state. North Carolina needs to repair flood damage from Hurricane Florence last year and 2016’s Hurricane Matthew, and prepare itself for future storms.

Cooper writes: “Our critical long-term work to rebuild stronger and smarter is delayed with every day that federal funds are held in Washington.…Please work with Congressional leaders to end this shutdown so our communities can rebuild quickly and effectively.”

Last April, North Carolina was allocated $168 million for disaster recovery from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). And in September, HUD allotted an additional $1.68 billion to be shared between North Carolina and other states affected by 2018 storms. But states can’t access those funds until they are given guidance from HUD and the Federal Register, both of which are closed during the shutdown.

The shutdown is making things worse for disaster-affected communities across the board, but there was already a backlog in undisbursed funds. Bloomberg reported last week that the Trump administration has been sitting on $16 billion earmarked for storm protection while HUD delays the release of instructions for how states can apply for those funds.

Trump is more explicitly blocking disaster relief to disaster survivors in drier (and blue-er) parts of the U.S. In 2018, wildfires took the lives of nearly 100 people and completely leveled the town of Paradise, California. This morning he tweeted (then deleted, then retweeted after correcting some spelling errors): “Billions of dollars are sent to the State of California for Forest fires that, with proper Forest Management, would never happen. Unless they get their act together, which is unlikely, I have ordered FEMA to send no more money.”

Whether or not Trump’s California-centered threats have teeth remains up in the air. Such a move would be without precedent, and The Washington Post reported this afternoon that it’s unclear whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency is taking steps to comply. To add to the confusion, much of California’s forests are federally managed — so Trump can ask feds can rake their own leaves once they’re back on the job.

Despite states’ pleas, signs do not look good for a resolution to the shutdown. President Trump stormed out of a meeting with Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday, tweeting that it had been “a total waste of time.”

He ended the tweet by saying, “Nancy said, NO. I said bye-bye, nothing else works!”

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North Carolina to Trump: End the shutdown so we can use our hurricane aid

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