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Climate Change

5 Ways Trump’s Clean Power Rollback Strips Away Health, Climate Protections

The Trump administration has proposed to replace the nation's landmark climate regulations with a watered-down version that would do next to nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and wouldn't even set a specific national goal. If the new plan survives legal challenges, it would fulfill a campaign pledge to abort the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. And in combination with the freezing of automotive emissions standards announced a few weeks ago, it would gut any attempt to achieve through federal regulations the goals of the Paris climate agreement, which the Trump administration has also renounced. Given that the new rule does not challenge the finding that greenhouse gas pollution from coal-fired power plants causes global warming and endangers people and the planet, nor court rulings that the Clean Air Act requires the Environmental Protection Agency to bring it under control, the proposal is breathtaking in its embrace of apathy.

BP And Big Oil Drive Society Over The “Climate Cliff”

At the end of July, as the American wildfires began to take hold in California, British oil giant BP made its biggest financial deal in nearly twenty years. In retrospect it would have been hugely symbolic if one of the largest oil companies in the world, BP, which had so badly devastated the Gulf of Mexico eight years earlier with the Deepwater Horizon spill, had taken this moment to say it was investing in renewables. All you had to do was look at the flames burning – and listen to the experts saying this was climate change in action –  to know that urgent action was needed. But BP did not do that. As Reuters reported, BP agreed to buy U.S. “shale oil and gas assets from global miner BHP Billiton for $10.5 billion, expanding the British oil major’s footprint in some of the nation’s most productive oil basins”. That’s a whopping $10 billion invested in more climate failure.

Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival

When evidence of the climate catastrophe (including the pivotal role of burning fossil fuels) became incontrovertible, which meant that the fossil fuel industry’s long-standing efforts to prevent action on the climate catastrophe had finally ended, the industry shifted its focus to arguing that the timeframe, which it presented as ‘end of the century’, meant that we could defer action (and thus profit-maximization through business as usual could continue indefinitely). Consequently, like the tobacco, sugar and junk food industries, the fossil fuel industry has employed a range of tactics to deflect attention from their primary responsibility for a problem and to delay action on it.

Pipeline Opponents’ Legal Challenge Asks The Fundamental Question

Citizen groups filed another lawsuit against the Atlantic Coast Pipeline Thursday, this time taking direct aim at the federal certificate that undergirds all other permits for the complex interstate gas project. Pipeline foes have long contended the project isn’t needed to meet demand in Virginia and North Carolina, and that it will cause unmitigated harm to the region’s forests, endangered animals, and waterways. They’ve filed numerous suits focused on the pipeline’s environmental impacts, winning temporary victories last week that have stalled construction.

Judge Dismisses Youth Climate Change Lawsuit In Washington State

A group of young climate advocates who sued the state of Washington to force it to reduce greenhouse gas emissions lost their case on Tuesday when a judge sided with the state and agreed to dismiss it. The judge urged them to pursue their cause through other channels. King County Superior Court Judge Michael Scott wrote that the issues at the heart of the case are political and should be considered by the state's legislative and executive branches, not settled by its courts. The Washington lawsuit is one of nine state-level cases involving youth advocates supported by Our Children's Trust, the group leading a federal youth lawsuit that heads to trial in a U.S. District Court in Oregon this October. Like the federal suit, known as Juliana v. U.S., the state lawsuits accuse the government of failing to protect the children from the dangers of climate change and pushing policies that favor fossil fuel use.

Does Humanity Deserve To Be Extinct?

Time is up! All humans, men and women, are guilty as charged! Guilty of abusing other species and the natural world we depend on; guilty, either by greed or ignorance, of abusing other species that sustain our own and driving them to expedient extinction. Wild life, big and small, is briskly moving towards a vanishing point. From the seas to the land and the skies, the global species disappearing act has reached a catastrophic and probably unstoppable momentum. Mammals are dying, fish are dying, birds and insects are dying.

New Book: Population And The Environment

Today we are pressing against the absolute limits of the earth’s carrying capacity. There are many indications that the explosively increasing global population of humans, and the growth of pollution-producing and resource-using industries are threatening our earth with an environmental disaster. Among the serious threats that we face are catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, extinction of species, and a severe global famine, perhaps involving billions of people rather than millions. Such a famine may occur by the middle of the present century...

Neoliberalism Drives Climate Breakdown, Not Human Nature

Attempts by the New York Times to blame humanity as a whole for climate change let the real culprits off the hook. Many zoos have an exhibit like this: a wall with a hatch, and under the hatch words like “Do you want to see the most dangerous animal in the world?”. Of course everyone does, and before they open the hatch they speculate as to what the animal behind the hatch will be. A lion? A crocodile? However, when you open the hatch there is a mirror, and you see yourself staring back. You are the most dangerous animal in the world. Of course this is nonsense. Not everyone who opens that hatch and sees themselves looking back is equally dangerous. We are not all equally responsible for destruction of the world’s ecosystems. Some humans who open the hatch probably are responsible for a great deal of destruction. Other are not. Many people bear the brunt of someone else's destruction.

This Summer’s Heat Waves Could Be the Strongest Climate Signal Yet

Earth's global warming fever spiked to deadly new highs across the Northern Hemisphere this summer, and we're feeling the results—extreme heat is now blamed for hundreds of deaths, droughts threaten food supplies, wildfires have raced through neighborhoods in the western United States, Greece and as far north as the Arctic Circle. At sea, record and near-record warm oceans have sent soggy masses of air surging landward, fueling extreme rainfall and flooding in Japan and the eastern U.S. In Europe, the Baltic Sea is so warm that potentially toxic blue-green algae is spreading across its surface. There shouldn't be any doubt that some of the deadliest of this summer's disasters—including flooding in Japan and wildfires in Greece—are fueled by weather extremes linked to global warming, said Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia.

Supreme Court Refuses To Halt A Climate Change Lawsuit Brought By Children And Teenagers

The United States Supreme Court on Monday refused to halt a lawsuit that represents a novel attempt by children and teenagers to sue the federal government over its inaction on climate change. First filed in 2015 by a group of young Americans in Oregon, the lawsuit claims that the federal government's refusal to address climate change threatens the constitutional rights of young people and future generations who will come of age in a world of greater scarcity and danger. As Pacific Standard reported in 2016, the 21 plaintiffs allege that "the U.S. government's knowing inaction on climate has violated their right to 'life, liberty, and property' as enshrined in the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment."

National And State Media Failing To Connect Recent Extreme Heat Events To Climate Change

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The media is mostly ignoring the leading cause of record-breaking temperatures seen by several states in recent weeks, a Public Citizen report (PDF) found. The report, which examined media coverage of extreme heat and climate change from Jan. 1 to July 8, found that among the top 50 U.S. newspapers by circulation, a total of 760 articles mentioned extreme heat, heatwaves, record heat, or record temperatures, but only 134 of these pieces, or 17.6 percent, also mentioned climate change. “Climate change is already harming Americans, and soon it will pose an existential threat,” said David Arkush, managing director of Public Citizen’s Climate Program. “But most Americans still think of the problem as distant, hurting people long in the future or in faraway places. The media’s failure to cover climate has a big role in that complacency. We need much better reporting if the public is going to wake up and demand action in time to prevent catastrophe.”

The Burning Hot Planet

A recent UK newspaper headline read “The World’s On Fire,” which is literally true as extraordinary continent-wide wildfires consume the planet, accompanied by unbearable, insufferable, oppressive heat. Europe, North America, Japan, and North Africa are all experiencing unprecedented scorching heat. All of which begs the question of when anthropogenic, or human-caused, global warming will be recognized as a reality by America, the second biggest contributor of greenhouse gases (GHG). Don’t look for confirmation from the Trump administration, the U.S. Senate or House, the leadership of America (ahem). They are all deniers, and thus have blocked any and all efforts of an American “Marshall Plan” for renewable energy.

The Arctic Pandora’s Box

Edward Snowden said that his greatest fear with regards to revealing the largest government spying program in history was that “nothing will change.” When I interviewed John Kiriakou, he agreed. When it comes to climate change, it often feels like I’m screaming “fire” at a bunch of people sitting around roasting marshmallows. For so many, the issue of climate change has become normalized, even oddly comfortable. In the film “This Changes Everything,” Naomi Klein laments the apathy she feels in seeing yet another polar bear caught on a melting piece of ice. It’s an image we’ve seen so often, it just becomes another image – a passable piece of our reality – unfortunate but too big, too abstract, too difficult to change. In the film, likewise the book, Klein makes the point that while climate change is indeed a crisis, capitalism is what’s driving that crisis.

Regeneration: Solving The Immigration And Climate Crises At The Same Time

“Regenerative agriculture provides answers to the soil crisis, the food crisis, the health crisis, the climate crisis and the crisis of democracy.” — Dr. Vandana Shiva. Two of the most serious and intractable crises pressing down on us—in North America, Europe and worldwide—are the immigration crisis and climate change. Most of the media coverage of these issues until now has focused on the bad news: “Hottest Year Ever,” “CO2 Concentrations in the Atmosphere Rising,” “Trump Determined to Build a Wall,” “Thousands of Immigrant Children Separated from Their Parents and Locked Up,” “Another Boatload of African Refugees Sinks in the Mediterranean,” “Immigration Crisis Polarizes EU.” Unfortunately, there’s been little or no discussion about the interconnected roots of these crises and, most importantly, the good news: that there are positive solutions at hand.

‘This Is Zero Hour’: Youth-Led Marches Across the Globe For Climate Justice

Declaring that climate change is "an issue of survival" that must be confronted with urgency, young activists across the globe on Saturday kicked off three days of marches and demonstrations to pressure elected officials to "reject the corrupting monetary influence of fossil fuel executives," ban all new dirty energy developments, and safeguard the planet for both its current inhabitants and future generations. "Climate change is our last chance to either fix colossal systems of inequality and emerge as a more efficient, better equipped society as a whole, or reach a chaotic state where your privilege ultimately decides if you live or die," said 16-year-old climate activist Ivy Jaguzny,

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