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Tons of promises were made at Jerry Brown’s climate summit, but only one requires rockets

by RickeyDavis Posted on September 15, 2018

California’s Governor Jerry Brown, once nicknamed “Governor Moonbeam,” announced on Friday that the state was launching its own satellite, a state-level space force to monitor greenhouse gas emissions. It was one of more than 500 commitments announced at the Global Climate Action Summit to cut pollution and protect the earth’s life-support systems, but Brown’s was the only one that required rockets.

With Brown sitting next to him on the last day of the summit, Washington Governor Jay Inslee told a few dozen reporters gathered on the sidelines of the summit a few reasons he’s hopeful for the future.

One has to do with the elections in November. Inslee expects the results will lead to more governors taking office who join the alliance of states that have stood behind the Paris climate agreement after President Donald Trump decided to pull the country out. Another reason has to do with how the world is still pushing forward.

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“Not one single mayor, not one single county executive, not one single governor in the world has followed Donald Trump … over the cliff of climate denial,” Inslee said.

While Trump undercuts international deals left and right (not just Paris, but agreements to phase out super-polluting hydroflurocarbons), Brown’s summit was aimed at demonstrating that there’s still a huge appetite for action, and that action is already underway. Some 27 cities announced that they have seen their emissions fall over the past five years—including Paris, London, and New York City.

“We will act when nations fail, including our own,” said New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, offering one of the back-to-back rallying cries from the summit stage.

So what did they promise? Here’s a short list:

Sony, Tata, and a slew of other big companies vowed to get as much electricity from renewables as they use.
70 cities with a total population of 425 million, including Los Angeles, Tokyo, Mexico City, and Accra, Ghana committed to going carbon neutral by 2050.
Walmart, McDonald’s, and other corporations released detailed plans for protecting habitats and ending deforestation caused by farmers in their supply chains.
400 investment firms managing a total of $32 trillion said they would funnel money into climate action and into low-carbon replacements for fossil-fuel dependent parts of the economy.

To be sure, these big promises could go as unfulfilled as many others. During the Paris talks in 2015, rich nations committed to pay billions into the Green Climate Fund. They haven’t. Back in 2014, a bunch of big corporations pledged to end forest loss, then backed away when they realized the magnitude of that challenge.

“We’re falling behind, and there’s a real risk of missing the 2020 goals on the New York Declaration on Forests,” said Lou Leonard, the World Wildlife Fund’s senior vice president for climate change and energy.

Still, Leonard said, he’s hopeful because these pledges force leaders to engage with the challenges, make mistakes, and begin to learn from them.

A report from the United Nations, published just before the summit found that pledges from corporations, cities, states, and regional governments were, at most, a third as large as the national goals. That percentage will leap when the commitments made during this summit are added in. And if these efforts scale up to their full potential, according to the report, “this would be instrumental in bridging the emissions gap to ‘well below 2 degrees Celsius’”.

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Tons of promises were made at Jerry Brown’s climate summit, but only one requires rockets

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Trump just doubled down on a lie about Hurricane Maria’s death toll

by KrisRowexbbf Posted on September 13, 2018

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

With Hurricane Florence set to pummel the East Coast, President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday to brag about his administration’s widely criticized response to last year’s Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico. Trump’s comments drew outrage, with critics pointing out that Maria led to the deaths of nearly 3,000 people. But Trump hasn’t been able to let the matter go. On Thursday, Trump insisted in a pair of tweets that the official death toll was concocted by “Democrats” as part of a conspiracy to “make me look as bad as possible.”

In fact, the Puerto Rico numbers were collected over months by researchers at George Washington University’s school of public health, at the request of the territory’s governor. As the New York Times explained in August:

At issue has been how to assess the severity of a storm whose devastating impact on fundamental needs — water, electricity, communications, and medical care — seemed to rival or exceed that of the deadliest recent storms to hit the United States, but whose official fatality count until now was far less severe. By comparison, Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, is thought to have killed anywhere from 1,000 to more than 1,800 people.

The government’s latest revision brings to a close a year of debate and scientific scrutiny over fatality estimates that had seemed to vary widely — in some cases by thousands. Governor Ricardo Rosselló faced constant political challenges over the disparity between the official death toll, released within weeks of the disaster, and what was apparent to most scientific researchers and reporters who investigated deaths. The inability to provide a reliable death count seemed, to many critics, to echo the dysfunction apparent in the island’s lack of preparation or any swift, effective response from the local and federal governments.

The report came nearly a year after a much-maligned visit to Puerto Rico by Trump two weeks after Maria, where he implied that residents should be “proud” that the official death toll at the time was just 16 people, far lower than that of a “real catastrophe, like Katrina.” That statement ignored the difficulty of counting deaths after the hurricane decimated the island’s infrastructure. In fact, by the time Trump got on his plane to return to Washington, that official death toll had already doubled.

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Trump just doubled down on a lie about Hurricane Maria’s death toll

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The next best thing to Paris: California’s climate summit

by ShaylaBrake9866 Posted on September 11, 2018

The people flooding into San Francisco for the Global Climate Action Summit come in all shapes and sizes. There are legions of grungy anarchists and crisply ironed elites jostling through crowds in the Financial District. Partisan campaigners and meticulously nonpartisan scientists, wonks of the nonprofitariate and the wannabe renewable-industry tycoons, techies in branded hoodies and hippies in sarapes are squeezing into crowded BART cars.

The summit doesn’t officially kick off until Wednesday, but when you bring such a diverse group of people together who all want to fight climate change, things start happening fast. Over the weekend, tens of thousands of people marched down Market Street singing and carrying signs.

Indonesian officials met with Brazilian foresters at the downtown Parc 55 hotel on Monday, while indigenous people wearing feathers and face paint protested that meeting from the narrow street outside. A few blocks away, artists unspooled cables and wheeled massive lights to project art onto the face of the city hall. Talks and trainings, declamations and dialogues, had already sprung up by the dozen, all over town.

Spots for some of the climate events in San Francisco. Google Maps

California’s Governor Jerry Brown called for the conference nearly three years ago, in hopes of spurring action beyond the commitments countries made in Paris in 2015 to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But the event took on new meaning after President Donald Trump entered the White House and pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement. Climate realists then pinned their hopes on California: If the state — home of the fifth-largest economy in the world — allied enough U.S. cities and states, perhaps they could simply vault over the federal government and land in a cooler, cleaner future.

There is some hope of actual progress. Politicians and corporations are sure to make impressive-sounding commitments, if only to have something to announce to the crowds. Sony already pledged to go 100 percent renewable, along with the Royal Bank of Scotland and the consultancy McKinsey & Company.

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The biggest commitment so far: Brown signed a law on Monday requiring California’s electrical generation to stop emitting greenhouse gasses, then tacked on an order for the state to choke off all emissions at the same time (a much, much higher bar, but an executive order is much, much more ineffectual than a law).

It’s one thing to pledge and another to deliver. A recent report suggests that the European countries are already falling behind on promises made in Paris. Instead of falling, global carbon emissions rose last year, and the fossil-fuel economy is still growing faster than the clean-energy one. Rich countries promised to pay poorer countries to combat climate change, but that money hasn’t materialized.

The real value of the summit will likely be humdrum and humanscale: People will meet face to face, argue, make connections, and walk away with new ideas.

But if you’re looking for tectonic shifts in the coming days, the biggest news could come from China. The largest polluter in the world is a primary partner in organizing the summit, and has arranged a “China Pavilion” where the first day of speeches will take place.

As Trump began rolling back Obama-era policies, Brown began looking for ways to make climate partnerships with China. He spent a week there last year, hand delivering a first-edition of John Muir’s book “The Mountains of California” to President Xi Jinping.

“California’s leading, China’s leading,” Brown said at a news conference after that meeting with Xi. “It’s true I didn’t come to Washington, I came to Beijing.”

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The next best thing to Paris: California’s climate summit

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A puzzling promo video earns the U.N. new criticism over its support of carbon offsets

by BobPerkins9 Posted on August 29, 2018

The international organization coordinating the world’s effort to stop global warming posted a strange video to social media on Wednesday morning.

The 52-second video from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is a bizarre promotion to call attention to the organization’s newly redesigned online platform for purchasing carbon offsets. It’s been deleted from Twitter and Facebook but you can still find it on YouTube and in an official press release.

It’s hard to know what the UNFCCC was thinking in producing this video, which makes fun of well-established ways to cut carbon emissions — like limiting driving, air travel, and meat consumption — in favor of purchasing controversial offset credits. Offsets are an accounting method favored by high-polluting industries as a way of evading real-world change.

The video was swiftly attacked by climate campaigners — a Swiss environmental lawyer called it “shameful” — and no justification has yet been given for its removal. (The UNFCCC did not immediately respond to an inquiry from Grist about the video’s production and its removal from social media.)

The problem with carbon offsets is clear. They’re designed to avoid immediate changes in behavior in favor of less verifiable and less reliable ways of reducing emissions by relying on someone else. You could, say, pay to plant some trees, which then must be tended and kept alive for decades, to atone for a single airline flight.

Sometimes offsetting is worse than doing nothing: It perpetuates high-carbon activities and shifts responsibility from the people and organizations most responsible for climate change. After a brief moment of popularity a decade ago, the credits faded from favor, in part because of these concerns.

This isn’t the first time the U.N. has come under fire for promoting carbon offsets. During the Paris climate conference in 2015, the U.N. set up a booth where attendees could supposedly neutralize the impact of their travel to the summit for as little as $1.  Some observers found that difficult to believe. On a much larger scale, in 2016, the U.N. organization tasked with overseeing the global airline industry was strongly criticized for favoring offsets in an attempt to avoid more radical (and expensive) changes in aircraft design that could reduce emissions.

More recently, at the World Cup in Russia this summer, the U.N. again promoted its carbon offset scheme; again it came under fire for “greenwashing” and relying on questionable math that meant only a small fraction of the promised offsets were actually reducing emissions.

Admittedly, the video is pretty funny as a piece of satire. But I’m not sure that’s what the U.N. was going for.

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A puzzling promo video earns the U.N. new criticism over its support of carbon offsets

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The modern automobile must die

by ElviaEngland Posted on August 21, 2018

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

Germany was supposed to be a model for solving global warming. In 2007, the country’s government announced that it would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by the year 2020. This was the kind of bold, aggressive climate goal scientists said was needed in all developed countries. If Germany could do it, it would prove the target possible.

So far, Germany has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 27.7 percent — an astonishing achievement for a developed country with a highly developed manufacturing sector. But with a little over a year left to go, despite dedicating $580 billion toward a low-carbon energy system, the country “is likely to fall short of its goals for reducing harmful carbon-dioxide emissions,” Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday. And the reason for that may come down not to any elaborate solar industry plans, but something much simpler: cars.

“At the time they set their goals, they were very ambitious,”Patricia Espinosa, the United Nations’ top climate change official, told Bloomberg. “What happened was that the industry — particularly the car industry — didn’t come along.”

Changing the way we power our homes and businesses is certainly important. But as Germany’s shortfall shows, the only way to achieve these necessary, aggressive emissions reductions to combat global warming is to overhaul the gas-powered automobile and the culture that surrounds it. The only question left is how to do it.

In 2010, a NASA study declared that automobiles were officially the largest net contributor of climate change pollution in the world. “Cars, buses, and trucks release pollutants and greenhouse gases that promote warming, while emitting few aerosols that counteract it,” the study read. “In contrast, the industrial and power sectors release many of the same gases — with a larger contribution to [warming] — but they also emit sulfates and other aerosols that cause cooling by reflecting light and altering clouds.”

In other words, the power generation sector may have emitted the most greenhouse gases in total. But it also released so many sulfates and cooling aerosols that the net impact was less than the automobile industry, according to NASA.

Since then, developed countries have cut back on those cooling aerosols for the purpose of countering regular air pollution, which has likely increased the net climate pollution of the power generation industry. But according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, “collectively, cars and trucks account for nearly one-fifth of all U.S. emissions,” while “in total, the U.S. transportation sector — which includes cars, trucks, planes, trains, ships, and freight — produces nearly 30 percent of all U.S. global warming emissions.”

In fact, transportation is now the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States — and it has been for two years, according to an analysis from the Rhodium Group.

There’s a similar pattern happening in Germany. Last year, the country’s greenhouse gas emissions decreased as a whole, “largely thanks to the closure of coal-fired power plants,” according to Reuters. Meanwhile, the transportation industry’s emissions increased by 2.3 percent, “as car ownership expanded and the booming economy meant more heavy vehicles were on the road.” Germany’s transportation sector remains the nation’s second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, but if these trends continue, it will soon become the first.

Clearly, the power generation industry is changing its ways. So why aren’t carmakers following suit?

To American eyes, Germany may look like a public transit paradise. But the country also has a flourishing car culture that began over a hundred years ago and has only grown since then.

Behind Japan and the United States, Germany is the third-largest automobile manufacturer in the world — home to BMW, Audi, Mercedes Benz, and Volkswagen. These brands, and the economic prosperity they’ve brought to the country, shape Germany’s cultural and political identities. “There is no other industry as important,” Arndt Ellinghorst, the chief of Global Automotive Research at Evercore, told CNN.

A similar phenomenon exists in the United States, where gas-guzzlers symbolize nearly every cliche point of American pride: affluence, capability for individual expression, and personal freedoms. Freedom, in particular, “is not a selling point to be easily dismissed,” Edward Humes wrote in The Atlanticin 2016. “This trusty conveyance, always there, always ready, on no schedule but its owner’s. Buses can’t do that. Trains can’t do that. Even Uber makes riders wait.”

It’s this cultural love of cars — and the political influence of the automotive industry — that has so far prevented the public pressure necessary to provoke widespread change in many developed nations. But say those barriers didn’t exist. How could developed countries tweak their automobile policies to solve climate change?

For Germany to meet emissions targets, “half of the people who now use their cars alone would have to switch to bicycles, public transport, or ride-sharing,” Heinrich Strößenreuther, a Berlin-based consultant for mobility strategies told Yale Environment 360’s Christian Schwägerl last fall. That would require drastic policies, like having local governments ban high-emitting cars in populated places like cities. (In fact, Germany’s car capital, Stuttgart, is considering it.) It would also require large-scale government investments in public transportation infrastructure: “A new transport system that connects bicycles, buses, trains, and shared cars, all controlled by digital platforms that allow users to move from A to B in the fastest and cheapest way — but without their own car,” Schwägerl said.

One could get away with more modest infrastructure investments if governments required carmakers to make their vehicle fleets more fuel-efficient, thereby burning less petroleum. The problem is that most automakers seek to meet those requirements by developing electric cars. If those cars are charged with electricity from a coal-fired power plant, they create “more emissions than a car that burns petrol,” energy storage expert Dénes Csala pointed out last year.“For such a switch to actually reduce net emissions, the electricity that powers those cars must be renewable.”

The most effective solution would be to combine these policies. Governments would require drastic improvements in fuel efficiency for gas-powered vehicles, while investing in renewable-powered electric car infrastructure. At the same time, cities would overhaul their public transportation systems, adding more bikes, trains, buses and ride-shares. Fewer people would own cars.

At one point, the U.S. was well on its way toward some of these changes. In 2012, President Obama’s administration implemented regulations requiring automakers to nearly double the fuel economy of passenger vehicles by the year 2025. But the Trump administration announced a rollback of those regulations earlier this month. Their intention, they said, is to “Make Cars Great Again.”

The modern cars they’re seeking to preserve, and the way we use them, are far from great. Of course, there’s the climate impact — the trillions in expected economic damage from extreme weather and sea-level rise caused in part by our tailpipes. But 53,000 Americans also die prematurely from vehicle pollution each year, and accidents are among the leading causes of death in the United States. “If U.S. roads were a war zone, they would be the most dangerous battlefield the American military has ever encountered,” Humes wrote. It’s getting more dangerous by the day.

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The modern automobile must die

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Big Oil is spinning the New York Times’ historic climate article as a PR win. It isn’t.

by FannieCrabtree Posted on August 14, 2018

Turns out, fossil fuel interests love “Losing Earth.” The New York Times Magazine’s massive climate change article from earlier this month has attracted furor from critics, who argue that it sidesteps issues of climate change denial and fossil fuel lobbying. But recently, it has also drawn praise from supporters of ExxonMobil.

“Bombshell: New York Times debunks #ExxonKnew climate campaign,” crows a headline on the website of Energy in Depth, an oil and gas lobby group funded by BP, Shell, Exxon, and others. For reference, #ExxonKnew is a campaign that aims to hold Exxon accountable for researching and accepting the science of climate change in the 1980s — and then spreading misinformation about it for the next several decades.

You don’t have to read all 66 pages of “Losing Earth” to see that the Times is definitely not debunking #ExxonKnew. You only have to read the epilogue, in which author Nathaniel Rich describes some of the denial campaigns launched by Exxon and the petroleum industry’s so-called Global Climate Coalition. Rich is aware of the role Exxon played in spreading and perpetuating climate change denial. But he does shift some blame off of fossil fuel groups and conservatives, and on to the amorphous concept of “human nature.”

“The rallying cry of this multipronged legal effort is ‘Exxon Knew,’” Rich writes. But, he counters, “The United States government knew … Everyone knew — and we all still know.”

This narrative — however well-intended and well-executed — plays right into Big Oil’s hands.

Advertising the Losing Earth issue as a win for Exxon is low-hanging fruit — Look! Even the left’s favorite newspaper is hesitant to blame us for climate change!

For oil and gas companies, it also represents a new play on an old, tired trick.

“Putting out these ads just proves the point that they’re trying to manipulate public opinion and confuse people about who’s to blame for this crisis,” Jamie Henn, communications director at 350.org, tells Grist.

For years, Exxon faced off against established science, lobbying against environmental regulation in Congress, publishing reports that undermined action on climate change, and putting out ads (in papers like the Times!) that spread doubt about the causes of global warming.

As temperatures rise and the effects of climate change — crazy wildfires, mega-hurricanes, heavier downpours — become more and more visible, Exxon and other companies like it have shifted their marketing approaches to keep their ships upright in the sea of public opinion. Whereas Exxon used to rely heavily on Earth’s “natural changes” to explain away rising temperatures, it’s now changing course to accommodate the fact that a clear majority of Americans accept the science behind climate change.

One of its new strategies is to advertise low-carbon energy projects, says Ed Collins, a research analyst at U.K.-based nonprofit InfluenceMap. Shot-in-the-dark projects, like ExxonMobil’s algae push, intend to show the public and politicians that the free market and technological innovation, not government regulation, can solve the dangers posed by climate change.

Rich’s piece is an unexpected gift for an industry that’s trying to show that it’s on the side of the people — and on the right side of history. Finally! An opportunity for Big Oil to align itself with journalists and historians rather than climate deniers.

But at the end of the day, Henn says, it’s just one article. “The idea that Exxon and its front groups somehow think they’re off the hook because one New York Times Magazine journalist wrote a story one particular way is pretty naive,” says Henn.

Plus, the tides of public opinion may have already turned. BP is still dealing with fallout from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, in which nearly 5 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. And a slew of cities, districts, and attorneys general across the country have launched lawsuits and investigations against major polluters for the role they played in misinforming the public about climate change.

“I think people are realizing that companies like ExxonMobil should be the ones to pay for the damage that they’ve done,” says Henn.

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Big Oil is spinning the New York Times’ historic climate article as a PR win. It isn’t.

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President Trump, these are the real reasons California is on fire

by JanelleWeldon2 Posted on August 6, 2018

President Trump has finally weighed in on the California wildfires that began last month. But it wasn’t to express condolences for the victims or to praise the incredible bravery of firefighters — it was to try to score political points.

And he did so by badly twisting the science of how wildfires work. In a now-deleted tweet from Sunday, Trump blamed “bad environmental laws” for “diverting” water into the Pacific Ocean. On Monday evening, Trump reposted essentially the same tweet:

And he doubled down on this flawed argument.

According to the Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik, Trump’s tweets on wildfires and water “deserve some sort of award for most glaring misstatements about those two issues in the smallest number of words.” I’d have to agree.

In Trump’s muddled mind, there’d be “plenty of water” if California rivers were exploited to the point they were completely dry at the end of the line — like the Colorado River now is.

The conservative agriculture community in the state’s Central Valley yields a substantial clue to where this weird idea came from. In the minds of some farmers there, allowing even a drop for endangered fish habitat means the government is stealing their water.

Beyond cutting down forests as a fire management strategy (you can’t have fires if you don’t have trees!), Trump seems to argue for airdropping huge quantities of water from reservoirs onto fires.

Given that Trump drinks bottled water with both hands, he should know this fundamental fact better than most: Water is heavy. And it takes a lot of effort to lift it into the sky and drop it on wildfires.

California’s reservoirs are actually near long-term average levels right now. The state’s firefighting resources are vastly overmatched, and help is pouring in from across the country and around the world. There’s even a newly converted Boeing 747 that’s been airdropping flame suppressant.

And still, a tiny bit of rain would do incredibly more good than any amount of water that could be diverted from the state’s lakes and reservoirs by firefighters. A barely measurable sprinkle over the amount of territory that’s currently on fire in California is about 6,000,000 gallons of water — about what the 747 fire bomber could carry in 300 loads, a month’s worth of round-the-clock operations. It’s not water availability in reservoirs that limits the ability to fight these fires — it’s logistics.

The massive Mendocino Complex, which could soon be the largest wildfire incident in California history, is burning right next to Clear Lake, the largest natural lake in the state. Firefighters are using water from the lake as fast as they can to help fight the fire. The fire is just 33 percent contained. So no, Mr. President, the fact that water exists in the state does not mean that it’s very useful to combat a fire like this.

Letting rivers run their natural course is not what causes massive wildfires. It’s year after year of hot and dry weather that causes wildfires. And, it just so happens, there’s something we’re doing that’s making weather hotter and drier.

Decades of misguided fire suppression policy and booming urban development in forested areas have contributed to this boom, but the main reason for the surge is climate change. (Even California’s chief firefighter agrees.) For the president to deny the central role of climate change in what’s happening is not only foolish, it’s dangerous.

July was the hottest month in history for many parts of California, and burnable vegetation is off the charts. Longer, hotter dry seasons, combined with timber die-offs due to drought and temperature-related insect infestation, have turned the state into a tinderbox ready to explode.

After the state’s worst drought in millennia, the very wet winter of 2016-17 created loads of grasses and shrub growth — perfect kindling for wildfire now that the drought has returned. Temperatures this week have surged, particularly at nighttime, fanning the flames further and giving firefighters little time to recover. Smoke from the wildfires is detectable across half the United States, creating a public health nightmare that’s trapping people indoors.

This is already one of the worst years for wildfires in U.S. history, in a decades-long streak of increasingly really bad wildfire seasons. Four of the 10 most destructive fires in California history have occurred in the past 10 months. Together, these four megafires have burned nearly 10,000 structures. That’s a mid-sized American city’s worth of homes, gone.

So far this year, about three times more land area has burned than normal. The deserted Yosemite National Park is indefinitely closed due to the Ferguson Fire, the largest wildfire ever recorded in the Sierra National Forest.

And wildfires are going to get much, much worse in the years to come if we don’t radically reduce fossil fuel emissions. Instead, Trump’s anti-environmental policy moves, like stopping California from having stricter standards on automobiles, will worsen climate change. Trump’s proposed 2019 budget eliminates federal funding for wildfire research.

When Trump was elected, I said that the effects of his climate denial would linger for hundreds of years. That fear now seems to be coming true.

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President Trump, these are the real reasons California is on fire

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10 Effective Ways to Make Your Summer Flights More Eco-Friendly

by MaxwellLamingto Posted on July 23, 2018

Walk into any airport and you’ll find yourself?in a place custom-built for efficiency, not environmental sustainability. The United States airline industry alone discards enough aluminum cans every year to build nearly 58 Boeing 747s, and the 30 largest airports in the country create enough garbage to equal that produced by cities the size of Miami, according to this article in Scientific American.

But don’t expect the airlines and airports to change their ways anytime soon. Even in the midst of what we hope is a sustainability revolution, the industry remains remarkably apathetic, demonstrating a serious lack in initiative toward recycling and environmental sustainability in general.

This is a startling realization, particularly considering that more Americans are flying than ever before. Summer is the busiest time of year for?United States airlines. This year, despite a surge in fuel prices,?a record 246.1 million people are expected to fly between June 1st and August 31st, a nearly 4 percent increase since?2017.

Imagine each of these individuals checking a bag, grabbing a paper boarding pass, purchasing a magazine, tossing empty snack packs on the flight, and leaving behind a disposable face mask behind on the seat and you can see the problem…

Ready to do better?

Here are 10 meaningful ways you can be more eco-conscious when you fly.

1. Book direct flights and stay longer

Non-direct flights involve more takeoffs and landings than direct flights, because these activities burn more fuel than simply cruising through the skies. When booking your flight, choose an itinerary that has as few stops as possible. You’ll?waste less time standing in line and Mother Nature will thank you.

2. Sit in economy class

This is really just mathematics. Folks sitting in first or business class leave a much larger carbon footprint than those who are sitting in economy because they’re taking up more space. Some estimate that a premium flyer has a six times worse impact than an economy flyer. Yikes!

3. Opt for a (more) fuel-efficient aircraft

Some?airplane models are more efficient than others ? the best of the best including the Boeing B787-800 Dreamliner, Boeing B737 MAX, Boeing 747-8 Intercontinental, and the Airbus A380. While you won’t be able to filter your flights by aircraft, you should be able to look up which airlines use them and go from there.

Lower your carbon footprint by flying economy class.

4. Pack as light as possible

A heavy aircraft works harder and burns more fuel than a light aircraft, so pack what you need and nothing more. Traveling with a group? Suggest sharing things like a hair dryer between you or?borrow from your hotel instead. Using a lightweight suitcase can make a meaningful difference.

5. Refuse all disposables

From your boarding pass to your in-flight munchies, you are going to encounter a ton of disposables. To start, simply skip the physical boarding pass and opt for an electronic version on your smartphone instead. Not only is this one less thing to worry about losing, it’s a helpful way to cut down on your personal waste at the airport. Second, think ahead and pack your own food for the flight, and request that flight attendants dispense drinks?into your reusable water bottle instead.

6. Bring your own in-flight gear

Bring your own headphones, eye mask and blanket (or sweater, preferably) so you won’t?create the need for the airline staff to unwrap and rewrap those items in plastic before the next flight.

Give priority to airlines who are making efforts toward fuel efficiency.

7. Offset your carbon

Many airlines ? Delta, Air Canada, United Airlines, Lufthansa ? have carbon offset programs that are designed to counter the CO2 emissions that were generated on your flight by putting resources toward an eco-friendly project?like?planting trees. Just make sure the offset program is certified, and remember that purchasing offset credits should?not be a means of justifying the system in its current form.

8. Lower the shades and open the vents

Closing the window shades might sound like overkill, but doing so actually keeps the aircraft a few degrees cooler ? enough to keep the staff from having to kick on the air conditioning any higher. A peek here and there is enough.

9. Favor airlines who prioritize fuel efficiency

If you have some flexibility with which airline you choose, consider checking this 2010 report by the International Council on Clean Transportation. They’ve listed airline carriers by fuel efficiency, from most efficient to least efficient, the difference between which?is a whopping?26 percent!

10. Limit unnecessary air travel

Limiting air travel is one of the?best things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint. So, when you’re planning a trip, consider using a carbon emissions calculator to see if driving might be a more eco-friendly option.

Related Stories:

3 Ways Becoming a Minimalist Will Improve Your Life
Minimalism is a Debt-Demolishing Lifestyle (Here’s Why)
How to Lead a Nearly Zero-Waste Life

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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10 Effective Ways to Make Your Summer Flights More Eco-Friendly

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Washington state will likely vote on a carbon price in November. The oil industry’s already fighting it.

by DwightGarsia Posted on July 3, 2018

A bunch of heavy boxes arrived in the Washington state capital on Monday morning. They were filled with thousands of petitions in support of the proposed “Protect Washington Act” — a first-of-its-kind “carbon fee.”

Initiative 1631 has collected nearly 380,000 signatures from Washington voters — 120,000 more than necessary for it to appear on the ballot this fall. If voters pass the measure in November, Washington would be the first state in the country to adopt anything like a carbon tax.

“We’re all set,” says Nick Abraham, communications director at the Yes on 1631 campaign. “It’ll take a week to two weeks to certify and verify all the signatures, and then we are officially on the ballot.”

It’s one of three carbon pricing efforts to watch in the United States this year. In Washington, D.C., Councilmember Mary Cheh is expected to introduce a “carbon fee” bill to the district’s progressive city council this month. The Massachusetts state legislature is also mulling over a (somewhat vague) carbon price.

Washington state’s proposal would charge industrial emitters $15 per metric ton on carbon emissions starting in 2020, ramping up by $2 per year until Washington state meets its climate goals. The revenue raised would go toward investing in clean energy, protecting clean water and forests, and helping to make sure the communities that suffer the most from carbon emissions prepare for the effects of wildfires and sea-level rise.

Surprise, surprise — major oil and gas companies are already trying to fight it. The Western States Petroleum Association recently formed the “No on 1631” political action committee. The Seattle Times reports that the PAC has the support of the big guys, like BP, Shell, Chevron, Phillips 66.

So far, opponents to the carbon fee are arguing that prices will rise at the gas pump, hitting average people where it hurts. Mark Funk, a spokesperson for No on 1631, told the Seattle Times that the fee would “place the burden for initiative squarely on middle-income and lower-income people.”

The PAC has already paid more than $130,000 in fees to a national consulting firm that helps wage battles over ballot measures, Winner & Mandabach Campaigns. (The company’s website boasts that it has a 90 percent success rate.)

The carbon fee initiative has something going for it, though. It’s backed by more than 200 groups across Washington state, from labor groups and faith communities to tribal nations.

“This is the largest and most diverse coalition in the political history of the state,” says Aiko Schaefer, director of Front and Centered — an alliance of organizations advocating for low-income residents and people of color that played a key role in drafting the initiative.

The Yes on 1631 campaign is going to be knocking on doors and making phone calls, Abraham says, working to educate people all over the state about climate change and what the initiative could do for their local communities. It’s also focusing on mobilizing voters.

“Polls show that people of color care deeply about these issues,” Schaefer says. “Our job is to show them that they have an opportunity to act on that concern this November.”

Polls have shown that both Latinos and African Americans want climate action more than the population at large. More than 80 percent of Latinos, for instance, support a carbon tax on fossil fuel companies, according to a 2017 survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Just two years ago, Washington voters rejected a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Kyle Murphy, executive director of Carbon Washington (the group behind that 2016 attempt) says his group supports the new campaign — and he has some advice.

Murphy says grassroots organizing is the best way to counter the oil and gas industry’s message. “People will always believe their neighbors, the local firefighter, or the local clergyman over ads on TV from the oil industry,” Murphy says. “It’s gotta be normal people, regular people out there fighting for this.”

The initiative also has to find a way to reach voters in the middle of the political spectrum, he says: “We need some sliver of Republicans and moderates to join Democrats in passing something here.”

Public opinion polls say that almost 70 percent of Washington voters would support a measure to regulate carbon pollution; that includes more than half of Republicans. One of the big challenges for the I-1631 campaign, Murphy says, is convincing people that this initiative is the one that they want.

That, and of course, the fossil fuel industry. Schaefer says that she knows they will do everything they can to fight the initiative. But she still feels confident.

“They have a lot of money, we have a lot of people,” Schaefer says. “So our job is to mobilize people.”

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Washington state will likely vote on a carbon price in November. The oil industry’s already fighting it.

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What’s the ‘Green New Deal’? The surprising origins behind a progressive rallying cry.

by TeresitJ23 Posted on June 30, 2018

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

The man who popularized the phrase that left-leaning Democrats now use to describe a vision for a radical government spending plan to combat climate change is a self-described centrist “free-market guy” with a New York Times column.

It was Thomas Friedman who in 2007 started calling for a “Green New Deal” to end fossil fuel subsidies, tax carbon dioxide emissions, and create lasting incentives for wind and solar energy. At the dawn of the global financial crisis, the “New Deal” concept that Franklin D. Roosevelt coined 76 years earlier to describe the labor reforms and historic spending on infrastructure and armaments that pulled the United States out of the Great Depression proved attractive.

Friedman’s ideas made it into the mainstream the following year when presidential candidate Barack Obama added a Green New Deal to his platform. In 2009, the United Nations drafted a report calling for a Global Green New Deal to focus government stimulus on renewable energy projects. A month later, Democrats’ landmark cap-and-trade bill — meant to set up a market where companies could buy and sell pollution permits and take a conservative first step toward limiting carbon dioxide emissions — passed in the House with the promise of spurring $150 billion in clean energy investments and creating 1.7 million good-paying jobs.

But, by 2010, austerity politics hit. The cap-and-trade bill, known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act, died in the Senate. In Britain, the Labor Party, acting on a proposal that a team of economists calling themselves the Green New Deal Group drafted, established a government-run green investment bank to bolster renewable energy — only for the conservative Tories to sweep into office months later and begin the process of privatizing the nascent institution. Balanced budgets and deficit hysteria became the dogma of governments across the developed world. Talk of a Green New Deal withered on the vine.

Today the phrase is making a comeback among the ranks of Democratic insurgents running on left-leaning platforms in 2018 primaries across the country. Far from serving as shorthand for middle-of-the-road climate policies, the decade-old slogan is being reborn as the kind of progressive platform that increasingly looks like the only policy approach capable of slowing the nation’s output of planet-warming gases and adapting to a hotter world.

Progressive activists have long complained that there is no climate change version of a “Medicare for all” bill — legislation that serves both as a vehicle for sweeping reform and a litmus test for how far a Democratic candidate is willing to go on an issue. Yet the Green New Deal seems to be filling that three-word void.

Defining a ‘Green New Deal’

From the beginning, there were competing definitions of what “Green New Deal” meant.

Friedman’s version focused on policies that compelled the “big players to do the right thing for the wrong reasons.” He liked a lot of what Obama enacted — including $51 billion in “green stimulus” and a $2.3 billion tax credit to clean energy manufacturing — even after the administration shelved the Green New Deal rhetoric after the midterm election.

Sure, big-ticket policies like a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system and sunsetting the $20 billion in subsidies to oil, gas, and coal each year never came to fruition. Even the regulations the administration did achieve — like tightening fuel economy standards and incentivizing utilities to produce more renewable energy — disintegrated as soon as the Trump administration took over.

Subsidies for wind, solar, and battery technology managed to survive proposed cuts in the tax bill Congress passed last year because Republicans in states that have come to rely on those burgeoning industries saved them. For Friedman, that is proof that lasting climate policies are ones that make private renewable energy companies powerful enough to sway politics.

“The more the market does on its own, the more sustainable it is,” he said. Even as the Trump administration dismantles Obama’s climate legacy, Friedman feels the battle shouldn’t be for more aggressive government intervention to wean the economy off fossil fuels, but on messaging that focuses on the patriotic, nation-building aspects of greening the economy.

“We are the true patriots on this,” said Friedman. “We’re talking about American economic power, American moral power, American geopolitical power. Green is geostrategic, geoeconomic, patriotic, capitalistic.”

But then there’s Richard Murphy, a British tax scholar who also claims to have coined the phrase “Green New Deal” around the same time as Friedman. “I don’t even know who Tom Friedman is. If he used the term, it’s complete coincidence,” he says.

In 2007, Murphy, a political economy professor and founder of the London-based Tax Justice Network, started meeting with a cadre of newspaper editors, economists, and environmentalists to discuss the coming financial crisis and how any fiscal stimulus issued in response could be used to tackle the ecological crisis already underway.

This “two-birds-one-stone” approach proposed an aggressive spending plan that called for investing public funds in renewable energy, building a zero-emission transportation infrastructure, insulating homes to conserve energy, and establishing training programs to educate a national corps of workers to carry out the jobs.

Murphy’s cadre, which named itself the Green New Deal Group, was more ambiguous on how to fund all this green development. He said they supported “straightforward deficit spending” — meaning government money that’s borrowed rather than already raised through taxes — as well as quantitative easing, a strategy in which the government buys bonds to inject money straight into the economy. Rather than buying bank bonds to prop up private financial institutions, Murphy suggested instead establishing a green infrastructure bank that would issue bonds the government could then buy back — a policy with enough leftist bona fides to be nicknamed the “people’s quantitative easing.” He also proposed closing tax loopholes.

The ideas caught on, and in 2010 the ruling Labour Party established a green infrastructure bank. But later that year the conservative Tories swept into office, sold the bank and scaled back renewable and energy-efficiency subsidies.

“The austerity narrative took over,” Murphy said by phone. “This is the polar opposite of the austerity narrative.”

Revival of an idea

Talk of a Green New Deal went quiet for years in the U.S. and Britain. But a new wave of progressive candidates, spurred by the organizing that went into Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Democratic presidential bid, began reviving the term in the past year.

It could be a winning strategy. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly support efforts to reduce climate pollution and increase renewable energy capacity, even if it comes with a cost. Sixty-one percent of Americans who voted for Obama in 2012 and then for Trump in 2016 supported requiring a minimum amount of renewable fuels even if it increased electricity prices, according to Cooperative Congressional Election Study’s 2016 survey results analyzed for HuffPost by Data for Progress, a left-leaning think tank. That increased to 76 percent among voters who picked Obama in 2012 but sat out the 2016 race, and it surged to 85 percent among those who voted for both Obama and, in 2016, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

The data showed similar support for strengthening enforcement of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, even if it cost U.S. jobs. Fifty percent of Obama-Trump voters said they would support such regulations, increasing to 77 percent among voters who picked Obama then sat out the 2016 election, and 83 percent for Obama-and-Clinton voters.

Some have called for federal spending plans similar to the World War II economic mobilization to bolster renewable energy and rebuild roads and bridges to make them more resilient in extreme weather.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialists of America-backed challenger who trounced Democratic Representative Joe Crowley Tuesday night in a working-class Bronx and Queens district in New York City, outlined a similar vision. She called the Green New Deal proposed in Obama’s 2008 platform a “half measure” that “will not work.”

“The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan,” she said by email. “It will require the investment of trillions of dollars and the creation of millions of high-wage jobs. We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy but this time green energy.”

Others suggested tying such a plan to a federal jobs guarantee, a policy that has recently gained traction among a similar cadre of candidates.

“Our infrastructure is crumbling,” said Democratic candidate Randy Bryce, a union ironworker and Army veteran running to succeed House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District. “We need to reinvest in our country. I can’t think of a better way than to have that be a future that’s reliant on renewable sources.”

At the heart of this policy is a call for 100 percent renewable energy. Among this group, Kaniela Ing, a state representative running in Hawaii’s 1st Congressional District, stands out as a candidate from the only state so far to adopt a 100 percent renewable energy mandate. To him, a Green New Deal provides a mechanism for meeting that goal.

“The backbone of this proposal will be a jobs guarantee, something like what FDR proposed in the Second Bill of Rights,” he said by phone. “There’s so many jobs out there that the private sector won’t create that would literally help protect our planet and save us from impending climate doom.”

Other candidates were more vague. Kevin de Leon, the California state senator and union-backed progressive who is facing off against U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a fellow Democrat, did not identify specific proposals for federal spending policies on climate. But he hinted that he would support large-scale federal spending to bolster a renewable infrastructure push, agreeing that Republican concerns over the deficit — the wellspring of austerity politics — proved bogus as the GOP-controlled Congress passed a massive tax cut law last year.

Left-leaning visions for a Green New Deal have even gained traction in state-level races. Abdul El-Sayed, the underdog progressive running in Michigan’s gubernatorial race, proposed a green infrastructure bank to start building renewable energy projects across the state, and he said he’d use his bully pulpit to push for federal action.

“We’re thinking about it at the state level, which both gives us a level of concreteness that is helpful and also allows us to be very specific about solving these challenges encapsulated under the umbrella of Green New Deal,” he said.

“We’ve watched as our infrastructure has crumbled,” he added. “We understand the responsibility to stand up against climate change, create jobs, and rebuild that infrastructure — it’s a clear, crystalline opportunity.”

Still, some climate activists see the term as trite and ineffective. Some climate organizers say it’s time to abandon the phrase “new deal” and embrace something newer and more forward-facing.

But for others, the phrase offers a helpful entry point to a policy program that would, in essence, buck with the last 40 years of neoliberal market-based solutionism and government spendthrift.

“The Green New Deal is a great framing, and I’m glad it’s catching on, but this whole thing needs to be at least as comprehensive as the New Deal,” said Ashik Siddique, who serves on the Democratic Socialists of America’s climate working group. “We are talking about the need to transform the physical infrastructure of every sector of the economy.”

“It’s very clear that something possibly even bigger scale than that is necessary now. Getting people used to thinking of it in those terms is welcome,” he said, then he laughed. “Even Tom Friedman is talking about it.”

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What’s the ‘Green New Deal’? The surprising origins behind a progressive rallying cry.

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