As Australia burns and impeachment churns, Mr. Trump and Ms. Thunberg are avoiding each other at Davos. Whether or not Mr. Trump is the world's "leading climate denier," as Australia's former prime minister called him, the president did tell business leaders gathered at the Swiss resort to stop listening to "prophets of doom," a thinly-veiled reference to Ms. Thunberg. I'm not going to get into all that, but I just want to say one thing. The day after the November 2020 election, should
President Trump be re-elected, the US will officially withdraw from the Paris
climate accord and there will be four more years of environmental regulation rollbacks. So, when you read this Tick Tock post,
please think about that.
And now, without
further ado, here are some dispatches from the climate front.
Build, Baby, Build! Underscoring
my plea above, this article from The New
York Times at Times
NEPA details the Trump Administration’s existing “nearly 100 environmental rollbacks, including weakening protections for endangered species, relaxing rules that limit emissions from coal plants and blocking the phaseout of older incandescent light bulbs, as well as newly proposed rule
changes to the National Environmental Protection Act. NEPA was signed into law by Richard M. Nixon
after the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire (above) and a tanker spilled three million
gallons of crude off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969. This is what the Times has to say about the NEPA deregulation:
The
interior secretary, David Bernhardt, who has overseen plans to weaken limits on
the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and loosen offshore drilling
safety rules, called the proposed changes to the National Environmental Policy
Act the Trump administration’s most significant deregulatory proposal yet.
All
told, Mr. Trump has gone further than any other president, including Ronald
Reagan, in dismantling clean air and water protections. “No other president has
had the gall to try to back polluters and turn back the clock to pre-Santa
Barbara,” [Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University] said.
Under
the National Environmental Policy Act, major federal projects like bridges,
highways, pipelines or power plants that will have a significant impact on the
environment require a review, or environmental impact statement, outlining
potential consequences. The proposed new rules would change the regulations
that guide the implementation of the law in a number of ways, including by
narrowing the range of projects that require such an assessment and by imposing
strict new deadlines on completing the studies [one year for small projects and
two years for larger ones]. The changes would also eliminate the need for
agencies to consider the “cumulative impacts” of projects. In recent years,
courts have said that includes studying the planet-warming consequences of
emitting more greenhouse gases.
The
changes were expected to appear in the federal register on [January 10]. There
will be a 60-day window for public comment and two public hearings before a
final regulation is issued, most likely in the fall. Richard L. Revesz, a
professor of environmental law at New York University, said he did not believe
the changes would hold up in court. The National Environmental Policy Act
requires that all the environmental consequences of a project be taken into
account, he said, and that core requirement cannot be changed by fiat.
Well, that’s
where all those newly-appointed federal judges come in, Mr. Revesz!
Wall of Shame.
If you’d like to know who are the foxes guarding the hen house and
enabling environmental deregulation at the Environmental Protection Agency (Andrew Wheeler, above),
the Department of the Interior (David Bernhardt, below), the Department of Energy, and the Office of
Information and Regulatory Affairs, this excellent article in The New York Times at Times
Enablers tells all.
Actually, we need additional, smarter, more effective environmental regulations, because this is what
the world looks and feels like now.
Like a Bathtub. 2019 was the warmest year on record for the
world’s oceans, according to a study published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences:
If
you look at the ocean heat content, 2019 is by far the hottest, 2018 is second,
2017 is third, 2015 is fourth, and then 2016 is fifth,” said … an author on the
study. Since the middle of last century, the oceans have absorbed roughly 93
percent of the excess heat caused by greenhouse gases from human activities
such as burning coal for electricity. That has shielded the land from some of
the worst effects of rising emissions.
Like a Furnace.
2019 was the second hottest year on record, per this excellent interactive
article from The New York Times at Times
Interactive.
Like a Rolling Stone, Only This One
is Gathering Moss. Per The
Guardian, shrubs and grasses are springing up around Mount Everest and
across the Himalayas, one of the most rapidly heating regions of the planet.
Like the Apocalypse. Australia is convulsed in epic
bushfires. Those raging near Melbourne,
home of the Australian Open, affected opening day and tournament players. Per The
New York Times:
Hazardous
air enveloping Melbourne, Australia, delayed play on the first day of
Australian Open qualifying matches on Tuesday and again on Wednesday, causing
one player to double over in coughing fits during a match as the country’s
wildfires marred the famed tournament. Dalila
Jakupovic, a Slovene player ranked 180th, was winning her match against
Stefanie Vögele in the midafternoon when she sank to her knees in a fit of
coughing. Struggling to breathe, she was forced to abandon the match as she was
leading, 6-4, 5-6.
Like a Melting Ice Cream Cone.
As the Washington Post notes, the
2019 Arctic Report Card found that the Arctic may have become a net emitter of
carbon due to melting permafrost which covers 24% of the Northern Hemisphere’s
land mass:
The
Arctic is undergoing a profound, rapid and unmitigated shift to a new climate
state, one that is greener, features far less ice and emits greenhouse gas
emissions from melting permafrost. There
has been concern throughout the scientific community that the approximately
1,460 billion to 1,600 billion metric tons of organic carbon stored in frozen arctic
soils, almost twice the amount of greenhouse gases as what is contained in the
atmosphere, could be released as the permafrost melts.
Like a Ghost Line.
The Guardian, which has pledged to devote extended coverage to
climate issues in 2020, reports that ice is being lost from Greenland seven
times faster than it was in the 1990s and the scale and speed are much higher
than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
That
means sea level rises are likely to reach 67 cm by 2100, about 7 cm more than
the IPCC’s main prediction. Such a rate of
rise will put 400 million people at risk of flooding every year, instead of the
360 million predicted by the IPCC, by the end of the century. “These are not unlikely events or small
impacts,” said one of the scientists on the study. “[These impacts] are happening and will be
devastating for coastal communities.”
Like the End.
From the same Guardian
article:
The
IPCC is the gold standard for climate science, but some experts are concerned
that its findings do not take into account the potential for “tipping points,”
thresholds beyond which climate breakdown accelerates and becomes catastrophic and
irreversible. [A] climate scientist…said
of the paper: “If this very high rate of
ice loss continues, it is possible that new tipping points may be breached sooner
than we previously thought.”
If the world
wants to mitigate the existing effects of climate change and avoid catastrophic
warming by the end of the century, it has to go to zero carbon emissions,
starting yesterday. It’s too late for
net zero. That means we have to leave
fossil fuels in the ground. Which means
we must disrupt and dismantle the fossil fuel industry. If we want to do that without putting people
out of work, destroying towns, and further fueling political backlash in the
form of right-wing populism, we have to spend money to compensate those who
will suffer economic injury. Germany is
doing just that, albeit more slowly than climate activists would like.
On January
16, Germany announced that it would spend $44.5 billion to quit coal by
2038. The money will be spent to
compensate workers, companies, and the four German states that produce coal. These states are in the former Communist East,
where the coal industry is a key provider of jobs. This is also where—surprise, surprise-- the
German far right party, the AfD, has its stronghold. If done right, the allocated funds should
have political as well as climate benefits. (Google Translate will help you with these AfD screeds, below.)
I’ll end on
that positive note.
Keep it
real!
Marilyn
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