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

by LacyLeppert7 Posted on April 25, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

California’s looming megaflood would likely be much worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Oil companies bid on just 1 percent of available plots at America’s largest offshore lease sale

by JamaalMaupin691 Posted on March 22, 2018

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

The largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history, which included all available areas in the Gulf of Mexico, garnered only tepid interest from oil and gas companies on Wednesday. Industry and government representatives called the results encouraging and consistent. Critics deemed it an “embarrassing flop.”

The sale was in the spotlight amidst the Trump administration’s push to expand drilling in federal waters, and President Trump’s repeated commitments to “energy dominance.” It was considered a test of the industry’s appetite, and the modest bids that resulted are seen as a setback to the government’s plans of stimulating investment in the gulf. Trump’s efforts to cut environmental regulations and increase offshore oil drilling doesn’t just spell trouble for climate change: The fire sales are lowering the price, and taxpayers lose out as oil companies buy drilling leases at a fraction of the normal cost.

A 77.3 million acre patch of the ocean, about the size of New Mexico, was on the auction block, including plots offshore of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and a small part of Florida. (The majority of waters off the coast of Florida have been protected from drilling in the past, though it’s unclear if that will continue in the future.) The Bureau of Energy Ocean Management received 159 bids from 33 companies, with the top bids totaling $124.8 million.

Bids must be reviewed before they are finalized, but the preliminary results are similar to a slightly smaller region-wide sale in the Gulf of Mexico last year. That sale offered about 1 million fewer acres and generated about $121.1 million in winning bids. BOEM regional director Mike Celata pointed to the higher number of bids in this sale compared to the last (159 versus 99 bids) as a positive sign. “You are definitely seeing an increase in interest,” he said in a press call after the sale. “You see continued, consistent investment in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Earlier this month, Department of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke called Wednesday’s sale a “bellwether” for future offshore energy production. If that’s true, Wednesday’s sale might signal rough waters ahead.

Of the 77.3 million acres available Wednesday, just over 800,000 acres — or 1 percent — received bids. And when a tract of land did get bid on, the oil companies didn’t need to compete. More than 90 percent of the tracts of land leased on Wednesday had only one bid. Over the past 20 years, more than three-quarters of the leases awarded in the Gulf of Mexico — 76.6 percent — were awarded on the basis of single bids, the Project on Government Oversight reported earlier this year. Adjusting for inflation, the average price paid per acre in each Gulf of Mexico auction has declined by 95.7 percent, dropping from $9,068 to $391, the report also found.

While sales are not final, the average winning bid price from this week’s sale was $153 per acre, compared to $238 per acre in last year’s Gulf of Mexico sale. “The Trump Administration’s bargain basement fire sales of America’s oceans and public lands to the oil and gas industry are an embarrassing and fiscally irresponsible failure,” the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, said in a statement, calling the sale an “embarrassing flop.”

Major companies like BP, Chevron, and Shell all placed several bids. Money received from the leases are directed to the U.S. Treasury, Gulf Coast states, and the Land and Water Conservation Fund and Historic Preservation Fund. Lease terms stipulate that winning bidders explore and drill “in an environmentally sound and safe manner.” (If you want more details, check out BOEM’s flowchart of approval steps from sale to drilling.) “Once that process is done, then they can begin punching holes in the ground,” John Filostrat, BOEM director of public affairs, said in an interview with Mother Jones.

BOEM has imposed rental fees that escalate over time to encourage “faster exploration and development” of leases. The government also receives a royalty payment — a percent of production — once the companies start collecting oil or gas. Recently, BOEM cut the royalty rate for shallow water leases by a third (18.75 percent to 12.5 percent) to try to spark more interest. “They are reducing the return for the tax payer,” Raleigh Hoke, campaign director for the Gulf Restoration Network, says.

The Trump administration also has a new offshore energy plan in the works that would open up almost all of the continental shelf for drilling leases in 2019-2024. After a public comment period later this year, the final program is expected next year. Some analysts have predicted that oil companies’ response to the new plan will be slow.

Under pressure from energy companies, the administration recently rolled back offshore drilling safety measures established after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. “It’s crazy,” Hoke says, “to put all these lease blocks up for sale while simultaneously weakening safety regulations, putting workers at risk, and potential opening the door to another catastrophe.”

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Oil companies bid on just 1 percent of available plots at America’s largest offshore lease sale

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Nothing is certain but death and (maybe?) carbon taxes

by TerryBromilow Posted on March 12, 2018

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Nothing is certain but death and (maybe?) carbon taxes

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Hear ye, hear ye, the Washington state carbon tax is dead. (Again.)

by JesusSiddins0 Posted on March 2, 2018

On the first of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand and eighteen, the Evergreen State’s proposed carbon tax passed from this earth. Its untimely end came, as the end comes to most bills, in Legislature.

The tax plan drew its last breaths on the floor of the Washington Senate, only a few votes shy of passing through to the House. Both chambers of Washington’s state legislature are controlled by Democrats, so the fate of this bill is a testament to how hard it is to agree on a price on carbon, even among lawmakers amenable to environmental policies. (This, by the way, isn’t the first time Washington state has tried to pass an ambitious carbon tax — a $25-per-ton tax perished in 2015.)

Our dearly departed bill had a bright future ahead of it, say supporters who would have liked to see Washington become the first state in the nation to impose a tax on pollution. Instead, the young proposal was cut down before its time, leaving uncertain the fate of similar bills currently waiting in a number of other states across the country.

The tax is survived by its creators, Washington Governor Jay Inslee and the bill’s primary sponsor, Seattle Democrat Senator Reuven Carlyle. The bereaved have vowed to continue to fight for all the tax stood for.

Inslee originally proposed a $20 per ton price on carbon emissions in early January, which would have raised $3.3 billion dollars in four years. The youthful optimism of that initial tax was later tempered with the pragmatism of age, to become the bill known to friends and family as Senate Bill 6203 — levying a $12 tax per ton price on the sale or use of fossil fuels, to increase at a rate of $1.80 annually until it reached a cap of $30 per ton.

The money raised by the tax — an estimated $766 million in its first two years — would have helped the state fund things like natural disaster relief and clean energy, and not been returned to consumers in the form of a check or a tax credit as some of this bill’s predecessors would have had it.

Now the Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy — a coalition of health advocates, business leaders, and environmental groups — will propose its a “fee on pollution”* in the coming weeks, believing people overwhelmingly support a tax that funds the clean energy economy. “From the air we breathe to worsening fires and floods, we know pollution and climate change affect us every day,” says a statement from the alliance. “Dirty energy has hurt our health and our climate for years, and it’s time to start cleaning up the mess.”

So pour one out for SB 6203, gone but NEVER forgotten. We barely knew ye, SB, but we hope you’re in a greater, greener world, one where you can roam free with all the other carbon taxes of our better nature.

*This post has been updated. It previously referred to the new Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy proposal as a “carbon tax” and included a quote from the coalition’s spokesman unrelated to its current initiative.

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Hear ye, hear ye, the Washington state carbon tax is dead. (Again.)

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Congressional Republicans got F’s on their environmental report cards

by TabathaMcVicars Posted on February 28, 2018

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

Congressional Republicans and Democrats have never been further apart on environmental issues. The top leadership in the GOP is comprised entirely of climate change deniers, while Democrats have aligned in opposition to President Trump’s agenda. But a report released today by the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) calibrates the distance between the two parties with some hard numbers.

The group has been calculating the performance by members of Congress for nearly 50 years by evaluating how each member votes on environmental legislation. This year, the Republican-controlled Congress had plenty of opportunities to show where they stand. LCV counted a total of 35 House votes and 19 Senate votes to overturn climate regulations, open up drilling on public lands, undermine the Endangered Species Act, and confirm a slew of Trump-appointed judicial and cabinet nominations.

“We’ve seen the parties have gotten further and further apart,” says Tiernan Sittenfeld, LCV’s senior vice president for government affairs, “and more Democrats have recognized that good climate politics is good politics.”

All those votes resulted in single-digit failing scores for most Republicans. The Senate average of 1 percent is a historic low, while House Republicans pulled an average of 5 percent. Meanwhile Democrats in the House and Senate earned 94 percent and 93 percent, respectively.

Those are just party averages, and it’s worth noting just how many legislators are at the extremes, which tilts the scores: More than 100 Democrats, now leading the opposition to Trump’s deregulatory agenda, earned perfect scores, while the Republican average was dragged down by the 170 lawmakers across the two chambers who earned a zero.

But what about the Climate Solutions Caucus in the House, the growing bipartisan caucus whose 70 members (with 68 voting members) are equally divided between Republicans and Democrats? For some moderate conservatives and climate activists, the caucus represents the best hope in Congress for ever advancing climate legislation as long as Republicans hold power. One might expect the caucus Republicans to earn higher scores than their party overall, and technically they did score a bit better than their House peers. But their average 16 percent score is still a failing grade.

In fact, more than half of the Republicans on the caucus earned less than 10 percent (Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, who once proposed a bill to abolish the EPA, is among them with 6 percent). Representative Carlos Curbelo is co-chair of the caucus and represents the Miami area. He is generally considered a leader on climate change, but his score was 23 percent. One caveat is that many representatives from Florida missed a number of votes, due to the time they spent in their districts after Hurricane Irma — those missed votes may have affected their scores.

As Megan Jula and I reported:

[The Climate Solutions Caucus’s] critics charge the caucus has expanded its size at the expense of its credibility, providing Republicans who have been actively hostile to government programs a low-stakes opportunity to “greenwash” their climate credentials without backing meaningful action — just in time for midterm elections. In fact, many members may be vulnerable in the 2018 cycle; 24 of the 35 Republican members’ districts will be competitive races, according to an analysis of The Cook Political Report. Republicans in these races could benefit from distancing themselves from Trump’s climate change denial.

The exception is Pennsylvania Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, who earned the highest of any Republican with 71 percent — a solid C-minus.

“It’s unfortunate that 71 percent is now such an outlier,” Sittenfeld notes, “because it used to be that a number of Republicans voted pro environment.”

Here’s LCV’s full report with a breakdown for individual members of Congress.

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Congressional Republicans got F’s on their environmental report cards

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How the mainstream media got played by Trump

by AntoineEichmann Posted on February 20, 2018

The media spent a ton of time in 2017 puzzling over whether President Trump thinks climate change is real. That was a ton of time wasted. His stance has long been clear, thanks to more than a hundred tweets and loads of comments dismissing or denying climate change.

The fact that Trump has called global warming a “hoax” was mentioned in nearly a quarter of all segments about climate change on the nightly news and Sunday morning programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC in 2017 — and in more than a third of those instances, the networks didn’t push back by affirming that human-driven climate change is a reality. Network journalists did numerous interviews asking Trump administration officials for clarity on the president’s stance. And outlets from Time to CNN cited the hoax claim and tried to make sense of Trump’s nonsensical climate views.

This misfire by mainstream media follows on the heels of a different sort of failure in 2016. That year, broadcast networks spent way too little time on climate change overall and completely failed to report during the campaign on what a Trump win would mean for climate change.

Now the networks are covering climate change but squandering too much of that coverage in trying to read Trump’s Fox-addled mind and divine whether he accepts climate science. That’s crowding out reporting on other, more critical climate-related news, from how the Trump administration is aggressively dismantling climate protections to how climate change makes hurricanes and wildfires more dangerous.

It’s bad enough that outlets waste all this time on old news about Trump’s climate views. But what makes it even worse is that they too often get the story wrong.

Consider this example: Last June, Trump’s U.N. ambassador, Nikki Haley, did the rounds on TV news to defend her boss’ decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. When asked to clarify Trump’s views on climate change, she said more than once that he “believes the climate is changing” and “he believes pollutants are part of that equation.”

Haley was employing Republicans’ favorite obfuscation technique on climate change — what savvy observers call “lukewarm” climate denial. The obfuscators try to sound reasonable by admitting that the climate is changing, but then get all squishy about why it’s changing or how it will play out or what we could possibly do about it. (In fact, there is overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is the primary cause of climate change, a fact that U.S. government experts again confirmed just three months ago.) You’d think that journalists who’ve been covering national politics would be thoroughly familiar with this gambit by now. Trump nominees made liberal use of it during confirmation hearings last year, and other Republicans have been employing it for longer still.

But ABC News completely fumbled the story. Splashing the words “BREAKING NEWS” and “CLIMATE CHANGE FLIP” across the screen, ABC’s World News Tonight made Haley’s comments seem like big deal.

Anchor Tom Llamas reported that her remarks represented a “dramatic switch” and “major concession” with “the administration saying the president does believe that the climate is changing.” Correspondent Gloria Riviera described Haley’s remarks as “a stunning reversal.”

There was no reversal. There was just a stunning incident of ABC falling for Trump administration spin.

Other networks and outlets have made similar mistakes, failing to properly identify the Trump team’s lukewarm climate denial and put comments in context. Like when The Associated Press declared, “Trump changes his tune on climate change,” though in fact he had done no such thing, as Grist pointed out at the time.

Instead of continuing to fixate on (and misreport) Trump’s personal views about climate change, journalists should offer more reporting on the consequences of having a president who disregards climate science and opposes climate action. Those consequences include: Policies that encourage dirty energy instead of clean energy. Less innovation. Fewer jobs in renewables and energy efficiency. Diminished national security. More destructive storms and dangerous wildfires, and communities that are less prepared to cope with them.

Topics like these got dramatically less coverage last year than they deserved, in large part because so much climate reporting was centered on Trump. A new Media Matters analysis found that when corporate broadcast TV news reported on climate change last year, they spent 79 percent of the time on statements or actions by the Trump administration — and even that included little coverage of efforts to roll back the Clean Power Plan and other climate regulations. Issues like how climate change affects the economy or public health got even less attention. And in a year when hurricanes and other forms of extreme weather hammered the U.S., the networks hardly ever mentioned climate change in their coverage of those disasters.

Instead of trying to analyze Trump’s well-established refusal to accept climate science, media should be telling stories of how climate change is happening here and now, how it’s affecting real people, and how the EPA and other agencies are ripping up climate regulations. When they chase Trump around and let him set the agenda, the hoax is on all of us.

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

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How the mainstream media got played by Trump

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Pretending to care about climate change has never been so easy for House Republicans

by EugeniaScanlan Posted on February 16, 2018

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

Matt Gaetz, a freshman congressman from Florida, would like to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. Known for attacking the FBI’s Russia probe and inviting a Holocaust denier to the State of the Union, the House Republican earlier last year introduced a one-sentence bill to terminate the EPA. He’s also heralded Trump’s “strong leadership” for the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement. So it came as a surprise in November when the House Climate Solutions Caucus welcomed him as a member.

Gaetz may have said two years ago that global warming could also be naturally caused, but when asked recently about his views, he explained, “I think history will judge very harshly those who are climate deniers.” Yet even now, having admitted humans play a significant role in climate change, he stops short of backing action that science shows is needed to contain the process. And that includes policies favored by some Republicans, like a revenue-neutral tax on carbon pollution, which he says “will merely export our pollution to other countries.”

It turns out, despite its name, the Climate Solutions Caucus is a hospitable place for many members who, like Gaetz, do not seem especially concerned about global warming. The two-year-old caucus has expanded to 70 members, half of whom are Republican — and many of them have brought controversial records and a questionable commitment to advancing legislation in Congress that would protect the environment.

Its critics charge the caucus has expanded its size at the expense of its credibility, providing Republicans who have been actively hostile to government programs a low-stakes opportunity to “greenwash” their climate credentials without backing meaningful action — just in time for midterm elections. In fact, many members may be vulnerable in the 2018 cycle; 24 of the 35 Republican members’ districts will be competitive races, according to an analysis of The Cook Political Report. Republicans in these races could benefit from distancing themselves from Trump’s climate change denial.

“They are finding an easy action to get a green badge or a line on their resumes,” says Melinda Pierce, legislative director of the Sierra Club.

Before the 2016 election, Citizens’ Climate Lobby, an independent advocacy group, found two Florida congressman — Democrat Ted Deutch and Republican Carlos Curbelo — and persuaded them to form a bipartisan caucus focused on global warming. The group had worked since 2014 to find a willing Republican partner. (The idea grew out of the group’s attempt to form such a caucus among Florida representatives.) Unlike congressional caucuses that draw their members mostly or entirely from one party, Climate Solutions follows a “Noah’s Ark” model in which a Democrat could only join if a Republican does too. As the caucus gained traction, they’ve met a few times, occasionally circulating a letter for lawmakers to sign onto (with limited success), and held their first public meeting in 2017 on the coastal impacts of climate change.

A half-dozen Democrats and Republicans were members at the beginning, but it’s expanded faster as the midterm election draws near. Republicans in more moderate districts will have to defend seats where the president has historically low approval ratings. Today, a long list of Democrats are waiting to join the caucus, but all Republicans are welcome. New members aren’t subscribing to any particular set of principles — other than (hopefully) the view that climate change is not a hoax — given the deliberately vague mission of the caucus to educate members of Congress on climate risk and explore policy options around climate change. Meanwhile, Citizens’ Climate Lobby continues to play a role in getting Republicans on board, by lobbying members and finding supporters for action in their districts.

Consider the changes that caucus founder Curbelo has seen since he arrived in the House in 2015. He’s a moderate Republican representing a competitive district in Miami, one of the parts of the country most threatened by sea-level rise (another GOP Miami representative, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, is a member of the caucus and the GOP mayor of Miami is vocal on climate). Curbelo told Yale Environment 360 in late January that expanding the tent on climate change is significant progress on the issue, compared to when “maybe two or three Republicans” were talking about it in 2015.

When Florida’s Matt Gaetz joined the caucus, RL Miller, head of the Climate Hawks Vote super PAC that seeks to elect climate activists to Congress, took notice. “I started taking a very hard look, realizing not only were they not producing anything in the way of a bill beyond press releases,” Miller says. “Their voting patterns were really no different from voting patterns of Republicans outside the caucus.” She has taken to calling Climate Solutions the “Peacock Caucus,” for providing cover to Republicans who face competitive election cycles but don’t intend to do anything on climate.

After Trump’s announcement he would exit the Paris climate agreement, Miller says at least four Republicans applauded his move, while just six of the 22 Republican members actively condemned it. Gaetz was a Trump supporter; Representative Claudia Tenney, a New York Republican, called it a “good sign of leadership” in an interview with Syracuse.com; and Representative Mike Coffman of Colorado followed Trump’s lead by arguing for a “renegotiated climate treaty, ratified by the United States Senate, to continue our nation’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” There were other bills the House passed in 2017 that took aim at federal climate initiatives, and caucus members generally voted along party lines. One prohibits the government’s use of the social cost of carbon for calculating the benefits of climate regulation, another prevents EPA regulation of methane emissions on public lands, and a third prevents the EPA from using certain air pollution public health data in scientific studies. Some members, including Virginia’s Barbara Comstock, voted for all of them.

When it comes to proactive policy with Republican support, the caucus has done virtually nothing. Critics and supporters of the caucus have wondered when they will see a carbon pricing bill — a cost applied to carbon pollution to encourage reducing greenhouse gas emissions — that could draw any Republican cosponsors. During the debate on tax reform, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney tweeted an op-ed by conservative economists that called on Republicans to pass a carbon tax as part of their bill — an option no one took. Two Democrats have introduced their own versions of a price on carbon that have attracted no Republican cosponsors. In November, caucus member Connecticut Representative John Larson also introduced his own carbon pricing bill backed by 16 other Democrats but no Republican fellow caucus members. Curbelo has expressed support for a revenue-neutral price on carbon, though it’s unclear whether he will introduce a bill.

Curbelo’s office declined an interview, but a spokesperson pointed to the Yale Environment 360 interview in which he didn’t mention the chances of a carbon pricing bill coming in 2018. Curbelo didn’t make such a bill seem likely this year, suggesting that the caucus instead should move to the “blocking and tackling phase where we try to take on anti-climate legislation.”

One of the few bills that has garnered any Republican support was one last May that created a bipartisan commission to study possible policies to address climate change — hardly a move towards cutting carbon emissions.

At least one congressman has used his membership to defend his stance on climate change as he campaigns for reelection in a district Hillary Clinton won in 2016. The League of Conservation Voters, an environmental advocacy group, gives Representative Steve Knight, a Republican from California, a zero percent lifetime rating for his votes on environmental and energy issues. In 2015, he backed a bill to repeal the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which limits emissions from power plants. But a spokesperson for Knight pointed to his membership in the caucus to counter his Democratic opponents’ charges that he is a “climate change denier.”

“Most people, and probably every scientist, would conclude based on that piece of evidence that he is not a climate change denier,” the spokesperson emailed Mother Jones.

In January, the caucus gained arguably its most powerful addition yet, former Energy and Commerce Chair Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican. Upton, who has served in Congress for more than three decades, grew more conservative on energy with the Tea Party wave, and once challenged the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. More recently, he’s supported drilling in the Arctic and opposed the Clean Power Plan. Even so, he represents a new trend among Republicans that involves moderating their rhetoric on climate change, without coming any closer to actions addressing it as a real problem. Blunt climate denial, like the president’s, has become increasingly unpopular and out of fashion.

For some Democrats, having new willing partners after years of stalled talk is “really encouraging,” says caucus member Representative Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat, who recently introduced a revenue-neutral carbon tax that only Democrats supported. “It could provide some cover for Republicans in toss-up seats but that’s a fair price to have Republicans willing to be publicly identified with addressing climate change. I don’t think we should be cynical about every one of them.”

When asked why he joined the caucus, New York Republican Representative Lee Zeldin, in an emailed comment, talked about natural resources but not climate change specifically. All Americans, “should have access to clean air and clean water,” he wrote, and he will continue “to protect our natural treasures” through the Climate Solutions Caucus. Freshman Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said in an email via his spokesperson that humans are a contributing factor to climate change. “[L]eaders on both sides of the aisle must take serious and reasonable steps to combat climate change,” he wrote in response to why he joined the caucus. “This isn’t about party. That’s the kind of thinking we need. And it’s that pragmatism that pushed me to join the Climate Solutions Caucus on my first day in office.” Fitzpatrick is one of the Republican members who has been committed to the issue, cosponsoring a nonbinding resolution promoting climate action. Citizens’ Climate Lobby named him the 2017 recipient of its Climate Leadership Award.

Eli Lehrer, president of the R Street Institute, a conservative group that advocates for climate solutions, suggests that the wide range of ideologies actually improve the chance the caucus can advance legislation. “Like many caucuses it would be most effective if it can find common ground between people who are very far apart on a lot of things,” says Lehrer. “It’s obviously yet to produce anything major, but a caucus that is ideologically homogeneous is probably not going to do much good. A very diverse one has a better chance to produce something that could be a breakthrough eventually.”

If members of the caucus were to vote together alongside Democrats in the House, they could certainly block some of the worst deregulatory bills and budget cuts coming out of Congress. But that hasn’t happened. Instead, several caucus members have voted in ways that contradict the caucus’s mission: In December, the Senate version of a federal tax bill included opening up 1.5 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling. Eight Republican caucus members signed a letter asking the Senate to protect the wildlife refuge. But when the House voted on the budget bill, all but six of the 31 Republican caucus members, including Curbelo, voted for it anyway.

Even Deutch acknowledges there are members of the caucus who have been “rightly criticized by the environmental community.” But he adds, “The goals of the caucus don’t change when members act in ways that are inconsistent with what we are trying to do. It’s not for the caucus to have to defend the actions of individual members.”

There was one show of strength last year where Republican members played a key role in blocking an amendment that would have removed a requirement for the Department of Defense to study the threats posed by climate change. Last July, 46 House Republicans, including all but two of the 24 Republican members of the Climate Solutions Caucus, sided with Democrats to stop the amendment.

Sierra Club’s Pierce says the formation of the caucus is a “baby step” toward climate solutions. But she says caucus members haven’t taken enough actions to back up their words. “We just want to encourage them to take off the training wheels and actually ride the bike,” she says.

There’s one more argument for Republicans to advance climate legislation now — if Democrats retake Congress, especially by large margins, they would have the opportunity to debate more liberal climate policies. Lehrer thinks a price on carbon is inevitable, and conservatives won’t always be in the driver’s seat. “I think in the long term it’s actually close to inevitable that it will pass one way or another,” he says. “It will be imposed in a way conservatives like me will not like — by Democrats — or it will be done in a way that forwards conservative goals. I like the latter.”

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Pretending to care about climate change has never been so easy for House Republicans

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Coal lobbyist on track to become a top dog at EPA

by FallonPratten Posted on February 8, 2018

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

Andrew Wheeler, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be Environmental Protection Agency deputy administrator, appeared poised and polished at his Senate confirmation hearing in November. He couched his objections to widely accepted climate science in ambiguous legalese, and kept his cool when, at the same hearing, Kathleen Hartnett White, the president’s pick for the Council on Environmental Quality, flamed out, stammering over questions of basic science.

On Saturday, the White House announced plans to pull Hartnett White’s nomination amid waning Republican support. But on Wednesday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted 11 to 10 along party lines to advance Wheeler’s nomination, putting him one step from the EPA’s No. 2 job.

The restraint that steeled Wheeler’s nomination seems likely to clear the way for his confirmation. Unlike other Trump nominees whose outrageous opinions or lack of qualifications put them on the political fringe, Wheeler boasts both the Beltway aesthetic and the experience needed to become a powerful EPA operator. His confirmation, critics fear, will speed the Trump administration’s rollback of environmental and public health protections, and make a lasting, if quieter, impact.

“It’s very alarming and distressing,” Mary Anne Hitt, a campaign director at the Sierra Club, told HuffPost. “He is right up there with the list of the most extreme people that Trump has nominated for any agency.”

Wheeler, a coal lobbyist and former legislative aide to Oklahoma Republican Senator Jim Inhofe, is widely seen as having the relationships and finesse needed to avoid legal potholes while driving the EPA’s deregulatory agenda. He knows how to work the system from within, having spent four years working at the EPA’s Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He said the right things to woo critics at his confirmation hearing, calling EPA staffers “the most dedicated and hard-working employees in the federal government.”

“The mission of the EPA to protect human health and the environment is critical to our country and its citizens and something that I take very seriously and I know you do, too,” Wheeler said.

The EPA did not respond to HuffPost’s request to interview Wheeler, and directed questions about his nomination to the Senate committee. Faegre Baker Daniels, the law firm where Wheeler currently works, directed HuffPost to the EPA.

“Andrew will bring extraordinary credentials to EPA that will greatly assist the Agency as we work to implement our agenda,” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said when Wheeler was nominated in October. “He has spent his entire career working to improve environmental outcomes for Americans across the country and understands the importance of providing regularity and certainty for our country.”

Wheeler won approval from the Senate panel last year, but his nomination never came to the full chamber for a final confirmation vote. His nomination was returned to the committee as a matter of procedure when the new legislative session began last month.

If Wheeler has anything stacked against him, it could be a 2016 Facebook post he wrote calling Trump a “bully” who “hasn’t been that successful” in business and who “has more baggage then all the other Republican candidates combined.” The remarks, surfaced in October by The Washington Post, gained new relevance this month after reporters unearthed two 2016 radio interviews in which Pruitt called Trump a “bully” and an “empty vessel” on “the Constitution and rule of law.”

On Wednesday morning, The Intercept published a report detailing fundraisers Wheeler held for Senator John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, and Inhofe in May. The Sierra Club called on the Senate panel to delay the vote and open an investigation.

But that didn’t deter Republicans, who held the vote on schedule, even as many federal employees delayed morning activities by two hours because of snow.

“He’ll do a good job and I’m glad he’s going to be confirmed,” Inhofe said after Wednesday’s vote.

Wheeler is likely to be confirmed in the full Senate, where the GOP holds a narrow majority. No Republicans publicly oppose him, and Democrats senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota — who generally vote with the GOP on fossil fuel issues — are likely to vote for Wheeler. Neither senator responded to requests for comment on Monday.

To boot, Democrats have already spent political capital to upend more egregious environmental nominations. Those include Hartnett White — who credited coal with abolishing slavery and suggested increased carbon dioxide emissions were good for the planet — and Michael Dourson, whose consultancy was described in 2014 by InsideClimate News as the “one-stop science shop” favored by the chemical and tobacco industries seeking affirmative research. Pruitt picked Dourson to lead the EPA’s chemical safety division, but withdrew the nomination in December after two Republican senators said they would not vote for him.

Democrats seem more at ease with Wheeler’s nomination. No Democrat raised concerns about Wheeler last week during Pruitt’s first Senate hearing since taking office, though no Democrat voted for Wheeler on Wednesday.

The choice of Wheeler is itself a naked gift to the coal industry, which has yielded outsized influence over the Trump White House. Wheeler lobbied on behalf of coal mining giant Murray Energy as recently as last year, disclosure filings show.

“This is the swamp,” Senator Jeff Merkley said at Wednesday’s hearing. “This does not serve the American people. And we should reject this nomination.”

The company’s bombastic chief executive, Bob Murray, has already played a major role in shaping Trump administration energy and environmental policies. Last month, Murray’s so-called “action plan,” became public. The proposals include a federal bailout of coal-fired plants, repeal of the Clean Power Plan, and reopening of the 2009 EPA “endangerment finding” that determined carbon dioxide pollution poses a risk to public health.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, in a break with the White House, rejected the bailout plan. Pruitt announced his repeal of the Clean Power Plan, a suite of rules to reduce emissions from power plants, in October. But the administration’s decision on the so-called endangerment finding is up in the air. Despite calls from ardent climate-change deniers to reopen the finding, overturning the conclusion would require disproving the science behind human-caused climate change in court — an extremely unlikely prospect. Pruitt said last week that he had not yet decided whether to challenge the finding.

Wheeler could be the man to lead that assault. In October, Pruitt railed against the endangerment finding for citing the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In what appeared to be a dog whistle to nationalists, he claimed the endangerment finding “represents, and this is the first time in history this has ever occurred, this agency took work product of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and adopted it, transferred it to this agency and used that as the basis, underpinnings, of the endangerment finding.”

In reality, the technical support document on the endangerment finding references more than 100 published scientific studies and cites peer-reviewed syntheses of climate research by the White House’s Global Change Research Program, the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the U.N.’s IPCC.

But the criticism echoes Wheeler’s own suggestions. In March 2010, he accused the IPCC of blurring “the lines between science and advocacy” and functioning “more as a political body than a scientific body.” He suggested the EPA could “reconsider its endangerment finding without almost exclusively relying upon the IPCC,” according to remarks posted to his website.

“I believe that man has an impact on the climate, but what’s not completely understood is what the impact is,” Wheeler said at his confirmation hearing when aggressively questioned about the findings of the federal government’s latest climate report.

Wheeler’s Senate career gives pause to environmentalists, too. Inhofe, who serves on the Senate panel voting on his nomination, is one of the most ardent climate-change deniers in Congress. In 2015, the Oklahoma Republican brought a snowball to the Senate floor in a comically flamboyant attempt to prove climate change is a hoax. Inhofe is a close ally of Pruitt, who is said to be considering a bid for his seat when the 83-year-old senator retires. Pruitt’s ambitions raise the prospect that Wheeler could, as The New Republic pointed out, become the next EPA administrator.

“Andrew Wheeler’s nomination is very much in keeping with the Trump administration’s agenda of fossil fuel exploitation and climate inaction,” Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University and coauthor of a book on climate change denialism, told HuffPost. “The environmental community’s celebration of the failed nomination of climate-change denier Kathleen Hartnett White to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality may be short-lived.”

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Coal lobbyist on track to become a top dog at EPA

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Ready or not, winter ‘bomb cyclone’ heads for East Coast

by CorrineMacnamara Posted on January 3, 2018

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

Much of the eastern United States has been assaulted by brutally cold temperatures over the last week. New Year’s Eve revelers in New York City rang in 2018 in 9 degree weather — the coldest midnight temperature since 1907.

And the worst is yet to come.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that a “bomb cyclone” is expected to batter the East Coast later this week. A weather system only earns that name by dropping in pressure rapidly — at least 24 millibars over 24 hours — in a process called bombogenesis. Winds could kick up to 55 mph just off the coast of New England, a prospect that has prompted local weather stations to warn of hurricane-force winds.

In Boston, which is no stranger to cold weather and has suffered through brutally low temperatures this past week, the National Weather Service forecasts near-blizzard conditions, with just a quarter-mile of visibility.

But the snow won’t be limited to northern states. As far south as Georgia and Florida, forecasters are calling for potentially dangerous winter weather, with several inches of snow in some areas.

In late 2016, Mother Jones reported that climate change may be contributing to such weather events.

The theory — advanced by Rutgers professor Jennifer Francis and other scientists — is that the rapidly warming Arctic is affecting the jet stream in ways that can contribute to bone-chilling weather in other parts of the Northern Hemisphere:

To understand how it works, it first helps to think of the jet stream as a river of air that flows from west to east in the Northern Hemisphere, bringing with it much of our weather. Its motion — sometimes in a relatively straight path, sometimes in a more loopy one — is driven by a difference in temperatures between the equator and the North Pole. Southern temperatures are of course warmer, and because warm air takes up more space than cold air, this leads to taller columns of air in the atmosphere. “If you were sitting on top of a layer of atmosphere and you were in DC, looking northward, it would be like looking down a hill, because it’s warmer where you are,” explains Francis. The jet stream then flows “downhill,” so to speak, in a northward direction. But it’s also bent by the rotation of the Earth, leading to its continual wavy, eastward motion. As the Arctic rapidly heats up, however, there’s less of a temperature difference between the equator and the poles, and the downhill slope in the atmosphere is accordingly less steep.

That shrinking temperature difference is what wreaks havoc on the jet stream. “When the jet stream gets weaker, it meanders more,” explained Francis in an interview this week. “It wanders north and south and when it gets into one of these wandering and wavy patterns, that’s when we see these pools of cold air pulled southward.” Those pools of cold air are what vast parts of the country are experiencing right now.

The bomb cyclone is expected to leave bone-chilling cold in its wake — even colder than the last few weeks. Temperatures will likely drop 20 to 40 degrees below normal, the Washington Post reports. That means sub-zero in nearly all of New England — and lows reaching down into the 20s, if you can believe it, in Florida.

Seasoned experts over at the National Weather Service have tips for avoiding hypothermia. President Donald Trump simply suggests we “bundle up.”

Link:  

Ready or not, winter ‘bomb cyclone’ heads for East Coast

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Fracking harms the health of babies, study shows

by stuart1952 Posted on December 14, 2017

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

The practice of drilling into the ground to release natural gas — known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking — first made national headlines in 2011 when drinking water taps in fracking towns in Pennsylvania began catching fire because flammable methane was seeping into water supplies.

Since then, fracking has been linked to earthquakes in Oklahoma and a myriad of health issues. Proponents of fracking say the practice has reduced energy costs and has created thousands of jobs. But environmental groups, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, say that for people living near sites, fracking can have severe health affects such as respiratory illnesses and cancer.

A new study from the journal Science Advances found that infants born to women living near fracking sites in Pennsylvania were especially vulnerable to adverse health outcomes. “As local and state policymakers decide whether to allow hydraulic fracturing in their communities, it is crucial that they carefully examine the costs and benefits,” said Michael Greenstone, a coauthor of the study and the director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, in a press release. “This study provides the strongest large-scale evidence of a link between the pollution that stems from hydraulic fracturing activities and … the health of babies.”

The researchers analyzed vital statistics of more than 1.1 million births in Pennsylvania between 2004 and 2013. They studied infants born to women living 1 kilometer (or slightly over half a mile) away from fracking sites, as well as women living within 3 kilometers (or less than 2 miles), and women living between 3 to 15 kilometers (or less than 2 miles to 9 miles) away.

They found that fracking reduces the health of infants born to mothers living within 3 kilometers from a fracking site. But for mothers living within 1 kilometer, the affects were acute. The probability of low infant birth weight, meaning the infant weighs less than 5.5 pounds, increased to 25 percent.

Studies show that low birth weight can lead to infant mortality, asthma, lower test scores while school-age, and lower earnings as adults. The study also found that mothers whose babies may have been exposed to nearby fracking sites tend to be younger, less educated, and less likely to be married — factors that can also lead to poor infant health.

But there are significant differences between the mothers who give birth close to fracking sites and those who don’t. Black mothers included in the study were more likely to live nearest to fracking sites, exposing their infants to higher risks of pollution. “This difference arises because over time, more wells were drilled near urban areas such as Pittsburgh, where higher numbers of African Americans live,” the authors wrote. Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, has 63 active fracking wells. Many other fracking sites are located in lower-income communities.

Nationwide, between July 2012 and June 2013, as many as 65,000 infants were exposed to pollution from fracking, because their mothers lived within 1 kilometer of a fracking site.

“Given the growing evidence that pollution affects babies in utero,” said coauthor Janet Currie, who is a economics and public affairs professor at Princeton University, “it should not be surprising that fracking has negative effects on infants.”

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Fracking harms the health of babies, study shows

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