Climate Change

The Brutal Racial Politics Of Climate Change And Pollution

October 6, 2017 Basav Sen, www.fpif.org Educate! Climate Change, pollution, Racism

By Basav Sen for Foreign Policy In Focus - As I watched coverage of Harvey’s flood damage in Houston, Irma’s wreckage in the Caribbean, the devastating record monsoons in South Asia, and the fresh nightmares of Hurricane Maria, I thought back to another place: Charlottesville, where racists openly rallied to their cause—and were later defended by the president. To explain why, let me point back to one of the least known—yet most outrageous—of the Trump administration’s early policy proposals: the proposed elimination of the Environmental Justice program at the EPA. While the division still exists for now, it has no more grants available for the current fiscal year, and its future is in limbo. Environmental justice is the principle that people of color and poor people have historically faced greater harm from environmental damage, so special efforts should be made to prioritize their access to clean air and water. The environmental justice program gave small grants to communities struggling with these disparate pollution impacts. Its budget was small—just $6.7 million out of the prior year’s EPA budget of $8 billion, or less than one-tenth of 1 percent. Clearly, the proposed cut wasn’t about saving money. Instead, it points to a more sinister agenda—especially when paired with other planks of the administration’s environmental platform.

Poll: Most Americans Want Government To Fight Climate Change

October 4, 2017 Timothy Cama, www.thehill.com Create! Climate Change, Public Opinion

By Timothy Cama for The Hill - More than 6 in 10 Americans believe that climate change is a problem that the federal government needs to address, according to a new poll. The poll, conducted in August by The Associated Press-NORC Center and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, found a large majority of Americans in both major parties believe that climate change is happening. But Americans’ opinions are less clear when it comes to what action they feel should be taken. Just 51 percent of respondents were willing to pay $1 a month to combat global warming, a figure that dropped to 18 percent when the prospective monthly fee increased to $100. “These results put the polarized climate debate in sharp relief, but also point to the possibility of a path forward,” Michael Greenstone, director of the Energy Policy Institute, said in a statement accompanying its Monday release. “Although half of households said they were unwilling to pay anything for a carbon policy in their monthly electricity bills, on average Americans would pay about $30 per month, as a meaningful share of households report that they are willing to pay a substantial amount,” he said. “So, while the raw economics appears to be less and less of a problem, the open question is whether it is feasible to devise a robust climate policy that accommodates these very divergent viewpoints.” Opinions were not entirely clear on hot-button climate policy issues, either. Only 17 percent of respondents said they support fracking. But if the pollster said it would save the respondent significantly on natural gas bill, support averaged 41 percent.

Most Powerful Evidence Climate Scientists Have Of Global Warming

October 4, 2017 Sabrina Shankman and Paul Horn, www.insideclimatenews.org Educate! Climate Change, Global Warming, Oceans

By Sabrina Shankman and Paul Horn for Inside Climate News - Earth's temperature is rising, and it isn't just in the air around us. More than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed into the oceans that cover two-thirds of the planet's surface. Their temperature is rising, too, and it tells a story of how humans are changing the planet. This accrued heat is "really the memory of past climate change," said Kevin Trenberth, the head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and co-author of a new paper on ocean warming. It's not just the amount of warming that is significant—it's also the pace. The rate at which the oceans are heating up has nearly doubled since 1992, and that heat is reaching ever deeper waters, according to a recent study. At the same time, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been rising. The charts that follow show how the oceans are changing and what they're telling us as a thermometer of global warming.

Organic Farms Could Help Fight Climate Change

October 2, 2017 Shaun Chavis, www.science.howstuffworks.com Create! Climate Change, Farming, Organic

By Shaun Chavis for How Stuff Works - Agriculture is one of the more significant contributors to global warming. Nitrogen-based fertilizers and farm animals generate greenhouse gases, including methane and nitrous oxide. Conventional farming depletes soilof carbon, while planting and managing forests can help offset carbon emissions. But a new study shows that organic farming fights climate change by trapping temperature-raising carbon in soil, keeping it from contributing to the greenhouse effect. Organic farming can also help offset carbon by storing it in soil. The study is published in the Oct. 1 issue of the journal Advances in Agronomy. The research was conducted by scientists at Northeastern University's National Soil Project, in partnership with The Organic Center. They gathered more than 650 topsoil samples from organic farmers in 39 U.S. states and compared those samples with more than 725 conventional soil samples from the continental U.S. The results showed soil from organic farms is 26 percent better at retaining carbon — and retaining it for longer periods of time — than soil that's farmed with conventional methods and synthetic fertilizers. Here's why: The matter that organic farmers use, such as compost, green manure, animal matter and others — as well as the living things in healthy soil, such as microorganisms, earthworms and other components — gives soil humic acids.

Early Estimate For Hurricanes, Wildfires At $300 Billion

October 1, 2017 Sabrina Shankman, www.insideclimatenews.org Educate! Budget, Climate Change, Hurricane, Wildfires

By Sabrina Shankman for Inside Climate News. The devastation from hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria—plus dozens of wildfires that raged across the West in early August—could result in the costliest string of weather events in U.S. history, according to a new report. Over the course of a few weeks, the hurricanes and wildfires left a trail of damage that could add up to nearly $300 billion, according to early estimates from the authors of "The Economic Case for Climate Action in the United States," a report released on Wednesday by the nonprofit Universal Ecological Fund. If they're right, the cost of the damage would be equivalent to nearly half the president's proposed 2018 budget for the Department of Defense.

U.S. Courts Taking Climate Change Seriously

September 30, 2017 Robert M. Thorson, www.courant.com Educate! Climate Change, Courts

By Robert M. Thorson for Hartford Courant - Hallelujah! The third branch of the federal government, the appointed judicial branch, is finally getting serious about climate science. No longer can the elected executive branch and the elected legislative branches cave in to popular pressure to avoid the inconvenient truth that climate change adaptations will be hugely expensive. My hope is that the lawsuits that will surely follow Hurricanes Maria, Jose, Irma and Harvey will help normalize the idea that "government can be legally accountable for failure to prevent foreseeable harms to its citizens." That quote comes from a hot-off-the-press column published in the Sept. 8 issue of Science, "Science in litigation, the third branch of U.S. climate policy." The quote describes a ruling by a Dutch court that forced the Dutch government to take steps to reduce greenhouse emissions to reduce imminent dangers to its citizens. Meanwhile, back in the United States, many agency heads in the present administration are either climate deniers or climate demurrers. By executive order, we are pulling out of the Paris climate accord and have tossed out "the mandate of the previous administration to "consider climate change in infrastructure planning." We've also withdrawn "guidance to federal agencies ... on how to incorporate climate considerations" into National Environmental Policy Act analysis.

Elders Demonstrate Against Mine In Rocking Chairs

September 29, 2017 Elders Rising, www.popularresistance.org Resist! Climate Change, Mining, Oil and Gas, Tar Sands

By Elders Rising. SALT LAKE CITY - Tuesday morning, September 26, organizers from Elders Rising called for land restoration and inter-generational justice at the PR Spring tar sands mine in eastern Utah. While sitting in rocking chairs outside the mine, seniors sang songs and held banners to bring attention to US Oil Sands’ destruction of nearly a hundred acres in the Book Cliffs, endangerment of the Colorado River Basin, and contribution to climate chaos. “As a mother and grandmother, I am here to look straight at the destruction of our land in Utah in the pursuit of boom and bust profit from mining tar sands, the dirtiest fuel on this planet,” said Joan Gregory, a member of Elders Rising.

Hurricane Survivors Occupy Senator McConnell’s Office

September 28, 2017 350.org, www.popularresistance.org Resist! Climate Change, Fossil Fuels, Hurricane

By 350.org. WASHINGTON - On Wednesday, a delegation of survivors of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma occupied Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office on Capitol Hill, demanding he acknowledge the role of climate change and the fossil fuel economy in making these storms worse. The delegation was led by members of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (t.e.j.a.s.) and the New Florida Majority as leaders in their communities fighting for climate justice. These leaders called for action from lawmakers at the scale of the climate crisis, including a commitment to 100% clean energy, stopping new fossil fuel projects, and a just and equitable energy transformation.

Secret NAFTA Negotiations Threaten Climate Regulation

September 28, 2017 Staff, www.foe.org Educate! Climate Change, NAFTA, Regulation

By Staff of Friends of the Earth - Prime Minister Trudeau seeks to preserve a “reformed” but still environmentally dangerous investment chapter in NAFTA. Canada has faced 38 NAFTA Chapter 11 Investor-State Dispute Settlement cases – from an early challenge to Canada’s right to regulate environmentally harmful additives to gasoline through to a current challenge by a U.S. affiliate of Lone Star, a Canadian fossil fuel company suing Canada for $250 million because Quebec imposed a moratorium on fracking under the St. Lawrence River. Trudeau is also seeking a new “regulatory reform” chapter in NAFTA, which would hobble climate and other environmental regulations. This would encourage the fossil fuel industry to continue to file NAFTA investment suits for billions of dollars if climate regulations interfere with their expected future profits. These investor-state provisions must be removed. Together, Friends of the Earth Canada and Friends of the Earth U.S. demand that Donald Trump, Justin Trudeau and Enrique Peña Nieto change course.

Climate Change Brings Socialism And Science Together

September 27, 2017 Eve Ottenberg, www.truth-out.org Strategize! Climate Change, Science, Socialism

By Eve Ottenberg for Truthout - Thanks to climate change, science and socialism have become entwined in ways previously unimaginable. Science brings the news that, unless we act swiftly to control climate change, we will inhabit a dying planet. Socialism traces the causes of this catastrophe to the destructive and chaotic growth model of capitalism and advocates for a different system. Meanwhile, sensing the source of danger to their profits, corporate and government reactionaries fuel disinformation campaigns to discredit science and confuse the public. This has been going on for years, with disastrous results. Ian Angus' new book, A Redder Shade of Green, (red for socialist revolution, green for ecological revolution) is about the prospect of ecosocialism in the face of capitalist ecocide. Angus has written previously about the "Anthropocene," a name for our era that emphasizes the centrality of human-influenced climate change. He does not accuse humanity as a whole of environmental destruction, but only a small sliver of humanity -- the capitalist class, which has left a gigantic, planet-sized carbon footprint. Angus repeatedly stresses that billions of people have a negligible impact on climate change and that the overpopulation argument -- which blames humanity as a whole for climate change -- has been used to distract and undermine an effective, ecosocialist movement. The US military has a hugely destructive impact on the environment.

San Francisco, Oakland Sue Oil Giant Over Climate Change

September 21, 2017 Staff, www.insideclimatenews.org Resist! Climate Change, Criminal Justice, Oil and Gas

By Inside Climate News. San Francisco and Oakland sued five major oil companies in the state courts on Wednesday in the latest attempts to hold fossil fuel producers accountable for the effects of climate change. The parallel lawsuits call for the companies to pay what could become billions of dollars into a fund for the coastal infrastructure necessary to protect property and neighborhoods against sea level rise in the sister cities, which face each other across San Francisco Bay. The moves follow similar lawsuits filed against 37 fossil fuel companies earlier this summer by three other coastal California communities at risk from sea level rise.

Court Orders New Climate Impact Analysis For 4 Gigantic Coal Leases

September 20, 2017 John H. Cushman JR., www.insideclimatenews.org Resist! Climate Change, Coal Mining, Courts, Mining

By John H. Cushman JR. for Inside Climate News - A federal appeals court in Denver told the Bureau of Land Management on Friday that its analysis of the climate impacts of four gigantic coal leases was economically "irrational" and needs to be done over. When reviewing the environmental impacts of fossil fuel projects under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the judges said, the agency can't assume the harmful effects away by claiming that dirty fuels left untouched in one location would automatically bubble up, greenhouse gas emissions and all, somewhere else. That was the basic logic employed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in 2010 when it approved the new leases in the Powder River Basin that stretches across Wyoming and Montana, expanding projects that hold some 2 billion tons of coal, big enough to supply at least a fifth of the nation's needs. The leases were at Arch Coal's Black Thunder mine and Peabody Energy's North Antelope-Rochelle mine, among the biggest operations of two of the world's biggest coal companies. If these would have no climate impact, as the BLM argued, then presumably no one could ever be told to leave coal in the ground to protect the climate. But that much coal, when it is burned, adds billions of tons of carbon dioxide to an already overburdened atmosphere, worsening global warming's harm. Increasingly, environmentalists have been pressing the federal leasing agency to consider those cumulative impacts, and increasingly judges have been ruling that the 1970 NEPA statute, the foundation of modern environmental law, requires it.

Climate Change An Existential Threat To Humanity By 2050

September 18, 2017 Gary Robbins, www.sandiegouniontribune.com Educate! Climate Change

By Gary Robbins for The San Diego Union-Tribune - There’s a very small but distinct possibility that rapid global warming could pose an “existential threat” to the survival of humans by 2050, UC San Diego said Thursday in one of the most dire forecasts yet about climate change. The school’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography published a paper that said there is a 5 percent chance of catastrophic change within roughly three decades, and a smaller chance that it would broadly wipe out human life. Scripps made the claim while proposing two new classifications for climate change: catastrophic and unknown, or existential. Catastrophic means that most people would have trouble adapting to such change. The latter terms means that they would not be able to. “Other people have used the word catastrophic, but I have resisted doing so until now,” said the study’s lead author, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a renowned climate scientist who helped influence Pope Francis to urge the world to fight global warming in 2015. “I changed my mind because, over the past five years, I have gone back and reviewed data that we began collecting from satellites in the 1980s and data from aircraft and changes in the intensity of storms, and studies about the possible health affects of rapid global warming. “There is a low probability that the change will be catastrophic. But you would not get on an airplane if you thought there was a 5 percent chance that it was going to crash.”

Energy Forecast Sees Global Emissions Growing, Thwarting Paris Climate Accord

September 18, 2017 John H. Cuahman JR., www.insideclimatenews.org Educate! Climate Change, Energy, Fossil Fuels

By John H. Cuahman JR. for Inside Climate News - The U.S. government's energy forecasting branch issued its formal international prognosis on Thursday, and it paints a picture of a world still so addicted to fossil fuels that emissions of global warming pollution continue to increase for the foreseeable future. The Energy Information Agency (EIA) projected that worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels would grow 16 percent by the year 2040 from the levels of 2015, the year that the nations of the world agreed to the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change that is intended to reverse the trend. Absent any policy changes, the business-as-usual "reference case" findings at the heart of the agency's International Energy Outlook 2017 report can't be squared with the ambitions of Paris, which demand quick action to bring emissions down sharply and avoid the worst risks of a warming planet. The EIA, despite being part of the U.S. Department of Energy, conducts its analyses without regard to the policy agenda of the administration that happens to be in office. In this case, that's the Trump administration, which the report noted has announced its intention to quit the Paris accord, has jettisoned the emission pledge presented by the Obama administration during the treaty negotiations, and has announced that it wants to rewrite the centerpiece of federal climate policy, the Clean Power Plan, which is being challenged in court by the fossil fuel industry and its mainly Republican political allies.

These Corporations Have The Biggest Influence On Climate Policy

September 16, 2017 Lorraine Chow, www.ecowatch.com Educate! Climate Change, Corporations, Lobbying, Policy

By Lorraine Chow for Eco Watch - For better or worse, corporations have a major influence on climate change policy. Just look at Koch Industries, a multinational conglomerate owned by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch that has contributedhundreds of millions to federal candidates and lobbying over the last 25 years. The "Corporate Carbon Policy Footprint," a new analysis from U.K. nonprofit InfluenceMap, now ranks Koch Industries as the company with the strongest opposition to the Paris climate agreement and most intensely lobbies against policies in line with the landmark global accord. The InfluenceMap scoring system does not measure a company's actual greenhouse gas emissions. Rather, it measures "the extent to which a corporation is supporting or obstructing the climate policy process." For the InfluenceMap report, researchers analyzed more than "30,000 pieces of evidence" on 250 global companies and 50 major trade associations on their lobbying records, advertising, public relations and sponsored research, according to Bloomberg. The research group gave the Wichita-based company an "F" grade for its anti-climate actions: "Koch Industries appears to be actively opposing almost all areas of climate legislation. In 2014 in the US, they were reportedly active in their opposition to a carbon tax, funding politicians and campaigns to oppose the tax.

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