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Trump’s trade war is hitting solar workers hard

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While politicians are debating the merits of a massive job-creating effort known as the Green New Deal, jobs in solar power are getting harder to find.

The solar industry lost 8,000 jobs last year, a drop of 3.2 percent and the second straight year of declines, according to The Solar Foundation’s annual report out Tuesday. That’s a sharp change after six years of growth.

Solar jobs largely come from the manufacturing and construction of new rooftop panels and solar farms, so these employment numbers offer a snapshot of the entire industry. The losses come as experts call for a massive ramp up in solar power as part of a larger effort to displace electricity generated with fossil-fuels.

What’s driving this? The Solar Foundation, a nonprofit research firm, lays most of the blame for job losses on President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Trump imposed tariffs against imported solar panels, along with two key materials — steel and aluminum,. Companies, uncertain about exactly how these tariffs will work, have put the brakes on operations. By last June, companies had canceled or delayed the construction of $2.5 billion worth of solar facilities, according to Reuters.

We can also chalk up some of the job losses to more local government quirks.. The two states that saw the biggest job losses were California (9,576), and Massachusetts (1,320), according the report. California companies have less incentive to build more solar farms because the state is ahead of its targets for renewable energy. And there was some policy uncertainty in Massachusetts as the state government crafted new targets for solar power. It issued those targets last September, and afterward saw a rise in applications to build more panels.

The Solar Foundation

The Solar Foundation anticipates a turnaround soon. This year, for instance, solar companies will need to begin construction on projects to take advantage of a tax credit that expires next year.

“Despite two challenging years, the long-term outlook for this industry remains positive as even more Americans turn to low-cost solar energy and storage solutions to power their homes and businesses,” said Andrea Luecke, executive director of the foundation.

It’s important to remember that The Solar Foundation’s not-so sunny report is a single source of data (though the Department of Energy’s official numbers have been roughly in line with this nonprofit’s).

It’s also important to remember that solar is just one sector of a clean energy economy that includes everything from home insulators to train-engine designers. The DOE has not yet released its annual report on employment for 2018, but its report from May of last year showed increases in energy efficiency and wind power jobs dwarfed the contraction in solar jobs.

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Trump’s trade war is hitting solar workers hard

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When coal goes low, Colorado goes Rocky Mountain High

Colorado’s high, clean mountain air has only been getting higher, thanks to wafting cannabis smoke, and will soon be getting cleaner, thanks to a plan approved on Monday by the state’s public utility commission.

Xcel, the state’s largest utility, will now retire two coal plants 10 years ahead of schedule, replacing them with wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries. The plan is supposed to slash the utility’s carbon emissions 60 percent below 2005 levels by 2026. That’s like taking 800,000 cars off the roads every year. All told, disease-causing pollutants, like NOx and SOx, should plunge 90 percent below current levels by 2026.

There are other utilities in Colorado, but because Xcel is so big, this deal will slash the amount of its electricity generated by coal from 44 percent to 26 percent.

“Colorado’s bold decision to invest in clean energy and a healthier future for the next generation shows what the public — and the marketplace — already know, that conservation and clean energy go hand in hand with a growing, healthy economy,” said Jon Goldin-Dubois, president of the environmental group Western Resource Advocates in a statement.

Environmentalists didn’t have to force this plan on Xcel, because Xcel proposed it. Colorado has powerful incentives for closing down old plants and building new ones, which has allowed big corporations to make a business case for switching to cleaner forms of energy.

Xcel will shutter 660 megawatts of coal generation from the two plants, replacing it with 1,100 megawatts of wind, 700 megawatts of solar, and 225 megawatts of energy storage. All this will cost $250 billion, but Xcel says that ratepayers will end up saving $200 million in the long run. (Independent observers have cast doubt on that figure.)

The two plants Xcel will lose are in the Comanche Power Station in the blue-collar city of Pueblo; a third plant in Comanche is slated to remain open. As part of the new plan, Xcel will build a 240-megawatt solar installation, which will help Pueblo in its bid to get all of its electricity from renewable sources (a quest we wrote about back in January).

“With approval of this plan, Pueblo is poised to become Colorado’s clean energy hub,” said David Cockrell, an activist working with Pueblo’s Energy Future and the Sierra Club.

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When coal goes low, Colorado goes Rocky Mountain High

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Hot weather strains the grid. Here’s how we could fix that.

Electricity crackled and arced between wires as Los Angeles residents watched, filming with their phones. And then the power died.

As temperatures have soared this summer, Angelenos have cranked up their air conditioners, straining power lines. On July 6, overloaded lines gave out and left 46,000 people sweltering in the dark.

Extreme temperatures lead to extreme electricity demand, so when sweltering weather settled over Texas in mid-July, the electric system that serves most of the state set three all-time records for power demand, one hour after another.

“This summer has been seen as a make-or-break test,” for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, wrote Joshua Rhodes, who researches energy at the University of Texas, Austin.

Tougher tests are sure to come. Summer temperatures usually peak in August or September for the most densely populated areas of Texas and California. Every year, Los Angeles seems to set a new electricity demand record, said Martin Adams, Chief Operating Officer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

“Until the last few years we haven’t had many hot days downtown,” Adams said. “People are starting to put in air conditioning where they’ve never had it before.”

As the planet warms, higher temperatures and extreme weather are becoming more common, and that puts more stress on electric systems. The heat is already severe enough that farm workers in Georgia and Nebraska, as well as a postal worker in California, have died during this summer’s heatwaves. Rising temperatures trigger a dangerous chain reaction: More people run air conditioners to keep themselves cool, which strains electrical systems causing blackouts, which exposes people to hazardous heat.

How do we snap that chain? Experts have a few suggestions:

Replace old wires

When electricity demand surged in Los Angeles, pieces of the electrical system started to blow up. “Every weak link in the system shows up in a case like that,” Adams said. “A lot of times the failures are kind of explosive in nature.”

The sun was cooking the system from the outside, and the electricity surging through the wires was cooking it from the inside. When workers went to fix fried wires in one underground vault, a wall of 160 degree heat turned them back. They had to wait until the vault cooled to 120 degrees to check out the problem, Adams said.

It’s better for both utility workers and customers if utilities can replace aging parts ahead of time. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is spending about a billion dollars a year upgrading equipment, Adams said. And they’ve focused efforts on areas that get the hottest, like the San Fernando Valley.

As people around the country draw more electricity to cope with extreme weather, utilities will have to install thicker wires and quickly replace old transformers.

Let the market work

As demand for electricity soared in Texas, so did prices: A megawatt hour of power — which goes for $40 to $80 in normal conditions — went for more than $4,000. The maps charting prices in California and the Southwest turned from mellow green to high-alert red, indicating unusually high rates. That alert triggered power plant operators across the region to fire up generators that had been sitting idle until electricity prices went high enough.

“There are some power plants that operate basically only on the very hottest day of the year,” said Michael Wara, director of the climate and energy policy program at Stanford University. “These are basically aircraft engines on cement pads that can be turned on within five minutes. And they might need to earn their entire revenue in a few hours of a hot July afternoon.”

High prices also send a signal to solar companies to build more panels, especially in Texas, where the peak demand for electricity comes roughly at the same time as the sun is highest in the sky.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of solar built in Texas in the next few years,” Rhodes said. “By 2020, I wouldn’t be surprised if we had double the solar we have now.”

Although prices influence production of power, they don’t do much to change how people use electricity. “When there’s a shortage of electricity, the prices go up, but customers are mostly still paying the same price they would at any other time,” explained James Bushnell, an energy economist and the University of California, Davis.

Even if people were more exposed to electricity prices, it might not be enough to get them to run around the house unplugging appliances, Wara said. If we could get people to use less energy for non-essentials during peak hours, it could prevent blackouts before they happen. But how?

Manage demand

A while back, Rhodes’s electricity provider made him an interesting offer: Austin Energy wanted permission to control his thermostat for 15 minutes at a time, four to six times a year, when electricity demand was peaking. (Rhodes has one of those smart thermostats, so the company could adjust it remotely.) In return, Austin Energy, would pay him $85 a year. Rhodes took them up on the offer and has no regrets. He doesn’t even notice when they take over. But by making tiny adjustments to thousands of thermostats like his, the power company is able to ramp down its power demand.

In most places however, utilities haven’t gotten this sophisticated. In Los Angeles, the utility asks customers to raise their thermostats a few degrees, and to avoid doing laundry during peak times. The utility can also make a dent in demand by turning down its own machines. When things started heating up in mid-July, the utility turned off some of the massive pumps it uses to suck water hundreds of miles over mountains and hills. That alone accounted for drop of 60 megawatts, Adams said.

In the future, utilities will likely get better at strategically curbing consumption, said Mary Anne Piette, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Utilities might even be able to make surgical tweaks like preventing a neighborhood blackout by moderating its electric demand as its wires start to overload, she said. For instance, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power might see the temperatures rising toward 160 degrees in that underground vault, and react by turning down the air conditioners of the customers downstream, allowing the equipment to cool before it blows up and leaves them with no air-conditioning at all.

The more the climate changes, the more people need electricity to cool them down. Unless we upgrade our electrical systems to prepare, there will be a lot more people sweating in the dark.

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Hot weather strains the grid. Here’s how we could fix that.

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Rainforests: The good, the bad, and the Trump trade war

In the time it takes you to read this story, a forest the size of nearly 100 football fields will be cleared. Farmers have been burning forests for decades — in part to grow soybeans for hungry animals. In fact, soy cultivation is one of the major drivers of deforestation, especially in South America.

In an effort to stop the burning, the Louis Dreyfus Company, one of the world’s largest food corporations, recently announced plans to start policing its soy suppliers. It’s the latest in a series of corporate commitments aimed at stopping deforestation. As Trump’s trade war pushes soy cultivation from the United States into South America, these corporate pledges may be the last barrier against a massive rise in deforestation.

“This is a breakthrough from one of the world’s largest traders with huge significance to the global meat industry,” said Glenn Hurowitz, CEO of Mighty Earth, an environmental activist group chaired by the former Democratic Representative from California, Henry Waxman.

Dreyfus is one of four behemoths running the international grain trade. These so-called“ABCDs” — Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Dreyfus — dominate 70 percent of the industry. Some activists see their clout as an opportunity. How do you get billions of consumers to change their eating habits or convince millions of farmers to change their techniques? You don’t. But if you get those four middlemen to demand an end to deforestation, it might actually happen.

The ABCDs have all pledged to stop their supply chains from causing deforestation. Yet fires continue to consume rainforests. The problem is that corporate commitments and other efforts amount to a “feather on the brake,” according to Frances Seymour, a distinguished senior fellow at the World Resources Institute. And the global hunger for grain and meat is like a brick on the gas pedal.

World Resources Institute

Trump’s trade war with China could swap out that brick for a boulder. China, the world’s largest buyer of soy, has already cancelled several shiploads of beans from the United States in response to Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium. Now they’ll likely turn to South America for soybeans, raising the incentive for farmers there to expand their fields into forest land.

Faced with this challenge, activists have pushed the companies harder — lavishing praise on companies like Dreyfus that make the strongest commitments, while attacking those they consider laggards. Though all four big companies have committed to stop deforestation, some go farther than others. Cargill, for instance, initially aimed to eliminate deforestation from it’s supply chain by 2020, then pushed that goal back t0 2030.

ADM and Dreyfus have strong commitments in place, according to Hurowitz, so he’s putting more pressure on the other two. “There’s now no reason for McDonald’s and other companies to continue doing business with deforesters like Cargill and Bunge,” Hurowitz said.

Both Cargill and Bunge say they are keeping pace. Cargill said it remains committed to the goal of zero deforestation “while balancing forest protection with inclusive growth and sustainable development,” April Nelson, a Cargill representative, wrote in an email.

Similarly, a representative from Bunge told Grist that it’s developing a monitoring program to halt deforestation, and also welcomed Dreyfus’s announcement.

It’s a monumental challenge for a sprawling multinational corporation to figure out how to avoid buying soybeans grown a recently burned rainforest. Companies say they’re making strides. But it’s hard to tell from the outside how significant those strides really are.

Cargill’s CEO, David MacLennan, underscored the difficulty of getting a large and complex organization to change course in an interview with the New York Times last year.

“I don’t think I or others appreciated the vast complexity of the task,” he said. “Let’s say that we are trading or buying and selling soybean meal. Where did the soybeans come from? And did they come from deforested land? Maybe we weren’t buying the soybeans directly. I don’t know.”

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Rainforests: The good, the bad, and the Trump trade war

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California is turning farms into carbon-sucking factories

In a grand experiment, California switched on a fleet of high-tech greenhouse gas removal machines last month. Funded by the state’s cap-and-trade program, they’re designed to reverse climate change by sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. These wonderfully complex machines are more high-tech than anything humans have designed. They’re called plants.

Seriously, though: Plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. They break open the tough CO2 molecule and use the carbon to build their leaves and roots. In the process, they deposit carbon into the ground. For years people have excitedly discussed the possibility of stashing carbon in the soil while growing food. Now, for the first time, California is using cap-and-trade money to pay farmers to do it on a large scale. It’s called the California Healthy Soils Initiative.

In April, trucks full of fertilizer trundled into Doug Lo’s almond orchards near Gustine, California, and spread composted manure around his trees. He then planted clover to cover the ground between the trunks. In theory, these techniques will pull 1,088 tons of carbon out of the atmosphere every year. Lo’s is one of about fifty farms getting money from the state of California to pull greenhouse gas from the air. California is paying him $50,000 to try it out.

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“We’re trying to sequester some carbon,” Lo said. “It should also help with the water-holding capacity of the soil, and the flowers in the cover crop should feed bees after the almond bloom is over.”

This is the first major utilization of farms as state-sponsored carbon-sucking factories. (To be fair, Oklahoma, of all places, has been experimenting with soil carbon since 2001, albeit on a smaller scale.) Agriculture and climate nerds — we wonkiest of wonks — have been anticipating this for the last decade as the scientific evidence accumulated.

In 2014 we wrote about the people pushing this research in California. And Grist told the story last year of how scientist Jonathan Sanderman put together key pieces of this puzzle after finding jars of old dirt, long forgotten in storage. And just recently, the New York Times Magazine ran a story summarizing the state of the science. But for years it’s felt like a lot of talk and not much action. That’s changing with the Healthy Soils Initiative, which makes money available for farmers like Lo, and monitors the results.

So how do you turn a farm into a carbon-sucking machine? Lo figured the money from the state would allow him to experiment without risk. He made a deal with a compost company to truck manure from dairies across California’s central valley then spread precisely 5.3 tons per acre under his almond trees as required by the state guidelines. An inspector from the California Department of Food and Agriculture showed up on the day the trucks arrived in April to make sure Lo was actually doing the work and not just doing the paperwork. Next, Lo planted clover and other cover crops in the rows between the trees.

A lot is riding on this, but it’s not a foregone conclusion that it will work. In theory, compost and cover crops should get carbon out of the sky and into the ground. But will it work in practice on Lo’s farm? With the farm’s particular soil structure, irrigation pattern, as well as the dirt’s microbiome? We don’t know how fast carbon will accumulate in his soil, or how long it will stay there.

When I asked Lo how confident he was that he was going to get exactly 1,088 tons of carbon into the ground he responded: “Well, that’s just what the soil scientists said. We’re going to see I guess!”

As of last Thursday the soil samples on Lo’s farm haven’t shown an increase in carbon content, but it takes about three years for compost to break down, he said. Other farmers and state officials will be watching this rollout of carbon-sucking farms closely. And if it works, and these farms manage to capture enough carbon, program could scale up massively. California’s Healthy Soils Initiative could serve as a model for other states.

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California is turning farms into carbon-sucking factories

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North Dakota is the first state with the power to decide how it will bury carbon.

Now, those lawsuits are here, and that prediction could bite the multinational oil company in the ass.

A treasure trove of documents released Thursday provide new evidence that Shell, like Exxon, has been gaslighting the public for decades. The documents, dating as far back as 1988, foretold “violent and damaging storms,” and said that “it would be tempting for society to wait until then before doing anything.”

At that point, the documents predicted, “a coalition of environmental NGOs brings a class-action suit against the U.S. government and fossil-fuel companies on the grounds of neglecting what scientists (including their own) have been saying for years: that something must be done.” Sound familiar?

When the scientific community began warning that the world could go down in fossil-fueled flames, Shell tried to convince them to take a chill pill, derailing global efforts to curb climate change.

And it gets shadier: This whole time, Shell has known exactly how culpable it is for a warming planet. By the mid ’80s, it had calculated that it was responsible for 4 percent of global carbon emissions.

That means San Francisco, Oakland, and New York now have more ammo for their lawsuits against Shell. The biggest hurdle to their cases wasn’t proving that climate change is a thing — even Big Oil’s lawyers can’t argue that anymore — but that fossil fuel companies can be held legally liable for the damages caused by climate change.

Shell just made that a lot easier.

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North Dakota is the first state with the power to decide how it will bury carbon.

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Judge to Wyoming and Montana: Less coal mining, more climate minding.

Producing artificial snow used to be a desperate move taken by ski areas within striking distance of surfing beaches. Now, the practice is commonplace, even high in the Rocky Mountains and the Alps.

As a headline in Powder Magazine read last year, “Like It or Not, Snowmaking Is the Future.”

Utah’s Alta ski area has doubled its snowmaking capacity in the last decade. To make sure all those big machines and water pipes don’t detract too much from the scenery, they’re painted to blend in with the background, according to a dispatch from Wired. At Snowbird, also in Utah, each snow gun has its own weather station, allowing the machines to start, stop, and adjust water flow all on their own.

California’s Squaw Valley spent $10 million on machines that automatically change their water pressure and amount several times a second. Heavenly Ski Resort, at Lake Tahoe, can cover 3,500 acres with fake snow.

All these machines run on electricity, which comes from the still-mostly-fossil-fueled grid. That means making fake snow increases the rate of The Great Melt, which in turn creates demand for … more snow machines. There’s a self-perpetuating cycle of job security for these snow-bots: Is this the way Skynet becomes self-aware?

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Judge to Wyoming and Montana: Less coal mining, more climate minding.

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Fossil fuels are the problem, say fossil fuel companies being sued

Big Oil and the cities suing them in federal court agreed on at least one thing on Wednesday: Human-made climate change is real.

In the country’s first court hearing on the science behind climate change, a lawyer for Chevron, Theodore Boutrous Jr., said the oil company accepts the scientific consensus. He quoted chapter and verse from the reports of the International Panel on Climate Change, the thousands of scientists assembled by the United Nations to figure out exactly what’s going on. “From Chevron’s perspective, there is no debate about the science of climate change,” Boutrous said.

Oil companies have recently started saying they’re on the side of science, but they’ve never said it so clearly in court.

San Francisco and Oakland are suing BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell, arguing that the corporations that profit from fossil fuels should pay for the seawalls and pumps needed to protect them from rising tides. But Boutrous, the only oil company lawyer to speak at the hearing, didn’t accept blame, pointing the finger instead at the people who burned the fossil fuels. In other words, oil doesn’t cause climate change. People burning oil cause climate change.

For five hours, the two sides tried to explain climate science, after U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup had asked for a tutorial. A gaggle of 100-some attorneys, climate advocates, and journalists packed the mid-century-modern courtroom. Alsup strode into the room dressed for science, wearing a smart-looking pair of browline glasses and a tie decorated with images of the solar system.

In the run up to this hearing, journalists compared it to the Scopes monkey trial in 1925, which found a teacher guilty of telling students about evolution, but Alsup shot down such comparisons. “We have these tutorials so the poor judge can learn some science — it helps to have science,” he said in a soft southern accent.

The big question going into the hearing: Would the oil companies try to cast doubt on the evidence that their business model is heating the earth? Climate skeptics have been trying to make their voices heard by sending in friend-of-the-court briefs with their own spin on the evidence, but Boutrous stuck to the scientific consensus unveiling a deft bit of legal jiu jitsu that could form the core of the oil company argument as the case moves forward. Alsup would occasionally raise some climate-skeptic argument, and both sides would explain why it didn’t make sense.

Big Oil’s POV

Boutrous started by citing reports from the IPCC as an unimpeachable authority. These reports are an “amazing resource” he said, before quoting them at length. Boutrous explained that the IPCC has found with increasing certainty over the years that humans fossil fuel use is the primary driver of climate change — but that’s not the only point Boutrous wanted Alsup to absorb. He twice read a quote from the IPCC that climate change is caused “largely by economic and population growth.”

Then, Boutrous added his interpretation. “It doesn’t say that it’s the production and extraction that’s driving the increase,” he said. “It’s the way people are living their lives.”

This appears to be the core of the oil companies’ strategy. First, believe everything the IPCC says. Second, the IPCC says the real problem is prosperity, economic growth! Therefore, blame the ones burning the oil — all we did was dig the stuff up.

To hammer it home, Boutrous showed an IPCC graph of emissions from the United States and China since 1970, with a scale that makes U.S. emissions look like a flat line.

“One thing that surprises me is that the U.S. has gone up, but not gone up much,” Alsup mused, leaning on folded hands. “But China has gone up dramatically.”

“Correct,” Boutrous responded. That’s because China’s population has grown, and its coal-burning economy has grown even more. The implication was clear: It is demand for energy driving carbon emissions, not the companies providing the fossil fuels.

Death by PowerPoint

While the oil companies just had one slick lawyer making a focused argument, the cities had three scientists scrolling through their very own PowerPoint presentations. The scientists hammered some simple points, aided by many graphs of temperature over time. They also skated quickly over some bewildering complexity.

Alsup didn’t let the tricky stuff fly over his head — he jumped in to make the presenters explain. At one point, he questioned Oxford scientist Myles Allen on the graph he was using: “Explain that graph there? I still don’t get it,” Alsup said.

Allen’s explanation only muddied the waters further. “I just don’t think your chart demonstrates what you’re telling me,” Alsup said. After a moment, Allen realized he must have grabbed the wrong figure. “You’re absolutely right,” he said.

At another point the court waited on tenterhooks as a scientist tried to get an animation of sea-level rise to work. It didn’t.

To be sure, the plaintiffs had a bogglingly complex task. There are hundreds of thousands of studies on climate change, and Alsup had asked them to boil it all down into a two-hour presentation, which just isn’t the way science works. Science advances through accumulation of evidence backed by piles of data, but law advances through argument.

After the final expert, University of Illinois scientist Don Wuebbles, had plowed through 20 minutes of facts and figures, Alsup tried to pull him from his PowerPoint. “Just in the last 10 minutes: You heard what the other side said right? What critique would you make?” But Wuebbles declined to respond and returned to his PowerPoint presentation.

The showdown that wasn’t

Alsup appeared to want to see some of the classic climate-skeptic arguments fought out, face to face, in his courtroom. But nothing doing. Each side agreed, for instance, that greenhouse gases are more important than water vapor in warming the planet. If nothing else, that seems like a victory for climate hawks: When all the Big Oil companies are willing to say, clearly and unambiguously, that humans burning fossil fuels are warming the planet, it means that the terms of debate have shifted.

Boutrous represents only Chevron, but Alsup held the feet of the other companies to the fire, too.

“You can’t just get away with sitting there in silence then saying, ‘He’s not speaking for us,’” Alsup told to the attorneys for the other companies. “You have two weeks to tell me if he said something you disagree with.”

This court tutorial was the first of its kind for climate science, but it’s not entirely out of the ordinary. Judges are frequently called on to serve as arbiters of scientific uncertainty, so it only makes sense that they sometimes ask for primers from scientists to get themselves up to speed. “In this age of science, we must build legal foundations that are sound in science as well as in law,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. “Scientists have offered their help. We in the legal community should accept that offer.”

Even if this tutorial persuades Alsup, the cities could still lose. The oil companies seem poised to argue that those who bought petro-products are just as responsible as those who sold them. And they will almost certainly argue that those suffering the ravages of climate change should try to fix things by passing laws rather than suing businesses. That’s a position even the most liberal members of the Supreme Court have held in the past.

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Fossil fuels are the problem, say fossil fuel companies being sued

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Striking teachers in West Virginia call for raising taxes on coal and gas.

A new review paper pulls together all the research on what farming will look like in California in the coming decades, and we’re worried.

California has the biggest farm economy of any state, and “produces over a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts,” according to the paper. In other words, if you enjoy eating, California agriculture matters to you.

Alas, the projections are mostly grim, with a few exceptions. Alfalfa might grow better, and wine grapes might be able to pull through, but nuts and avocados are in for a beating.

David Lobell et al.

The changing climate could make between 54 to 77 percent of California’s Central Valley unsuitable for “apricot, kiwifruit, peach, nectarine, plum, and walnut by the end of the 21st century,” according to the paper. That’s, in part, because many fruit and nut trees require a specific number of cold hours before they put out a new crop.

Milder winters will also mean that more pests will survive the cold and emerge earlier in the spring. Perhaps most importantly, the state is projected to lose 48-65 percent of its snowpack — a crucial storehouse of irrigation water to get through hotter, drier summers.

Maybe we’ll live to see conservative California farmers convert to cannabis, or move north to plant almond orchards in British Columbia.

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Striking teachers in West Virginia call for raising taxes on coal and gas.

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3M pays up after Minnesota sued over poisoned drinking water.

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3M pays up after Minnesota sued over poisoned drinking water.

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