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The Democratic debates heated up all the way to lukewarm on climate

the youth doth protest just enough

Climate activists protest at the DNC headquarters ahead of the first primary debate

Ten candidates will take the stage at the first official Democratic National Committee debate tonight in Miami, Florida. But a question already looms over the festivities: Should the DNC host a climate-themed debate?

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The Democratic debates heated up all the way to lukewarm on climate

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The House passes a climate bill for the first time in a freaking decade

On Thursday, the newly Democratic House came out swinging by passing a climate bill for the first time in … let me just check my notes here … a decade. Better late than never?

The Climate Action Now Act (H.R. 9) passed through the legislative chamber mostly along party lines, with a few Republican exceptions. The bill is aimed at reaffirming American commitment to the Paris agreement, a global climate accord that President Trump unceremoniously tried to ditch six months into his presidency.

The bill has little chance of passing the Republican-controlled Senate, a fact the Democratic leadership is acutely aware of. Rather, the act serves as a direct rebuke to Trump’s handling (or mishandling) of all things climate, and stands as a reminder to the rest of the world that at least one political party in the U.S. is still committed to taking climate action.

Illinois Representative Sean Casten, a Democrat with a background in renewable energy (and a background as a contributing writer to Grist), was tapped by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to preside over the House debate of the bill. He believes the bill serves a three-pronged purpose: restore America’s emissions reduction obligations, re-establish the nation’s trustworthiness on the international stage, and start the ball rolling on going even further than the Paris agreement.

“Reducing CO2 is kind of addictive,” he told me on the phone. “Every time that any country or any region has committed to reducing CO2, it has always been done faster and cheaper than they thought it was going to.”

This bill is the first step in a larger climate agenda in the climate-conscious House, Casten said. Before Democrats can get the ball rolling, though, they need to do some damage control: “We are unfortunately in this Congress playing defense against the damage done by the last two years of the Trump administration,” he said. “Maybe in the not-too-distant-future, depending on what Senate does, we can sit at the big kid’s table again at international climate negotiations.”

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The House passes a climate bill for the first time in a freaking decade

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GOP Rep. Mike Simpson: It’s my party, and I’ll fight climate change if I want to

In deep red Idaho, out of sight of the national news media and out of reach of the Twitterati, a real-live Republican member of Congress acknowledged the existence of climate change and even proposed taking action.

“Climate change is a reality,” said Mike Simpson, a Republican Congressman from Idaho, at a conference in Boise last week. “It’s not hard to figure out. Go look at your thermometer.”

Simpson knew he might hear a record scratch when he broke out of the well-worn Republican grooves. After stepping to the lectern, he joked that anyone carrying matches or lighters should pass them to the authorities as a security measure to prevent heads from bursting into flames.

Simpson was there to say he wanted to see Idaho’s mountain lakes full of salmon again, even if it meant tearing down the dams that the state’s politicians have defended for decades. Dams, climate change, and predators all threaten the fish, and Simpson said he was ready to consider all options. It was clear to anyone watching his speech he feels a spiritual obligation to save salmon.

Recounting a trip to a spawning creek in the Sawtooth Mountains in central Idaho, Simpson paused to swallow hard a couple of times. Only one salmon made it to those shallows, he said, to “create its bed, lay its eggs and die. It was the end of a cycle and the beginning of a new one. These are the most,” he paused for a deep breath, “most incredible creatures I think that God’s created. It’s a cycle God has created. We shouldn’t mess with it.”

This break with standard Republican talking points has people asking if he had “gone over to the dark side,” Simpson said. “I’ve had people say to my chief of staff, we don’t even like someone of Simpson’s seniority asking these questions.” And in the run up to this speech, he said his office was fielding calls from nervous people asking, “What’s Simpson going to say at this?”

Of course, Simpson isn’t the first Republican advocating for action on climate change, but most of those politicians differ from Simpson in one important way: They come from swing districts. In fact, the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus in the House of Representatives (Simpson isn’t a member) has a hard time keeping Republicans because voters keep kicking them out in favor of Democrats. Former representatives Carlos Curbelo, Mia Love, and Peter Roskam are exhibits A, B, and C.

Simpson was just elected to his 11th term in the House, so he isn’t pivoting left to get in front of his voters. Elections in Idaho are usually decided in the Republican primaries (personal aside: I started my reporting career covering politics — and everything else — in Idaho). In this part of the country, tacking to the right is smart politics; tacking to the left is often political suicide.

Simpson’s suggestion to consider tearing down dams is, if anything, even more taboo than an embrace of action to curb climate change. “In the past, the people talking about removing dams have been the environmentalists outside screaming and throwing pebbles against the walls of the halls of power,” said Sean O’Leary, communications director for the NW Energy Coalition a regional conservation group. “Now Simpson is saying the same things.”

In black and white text, Simpson’s words may read like political hyperbole — but it didn’t come across that way in the room.

“I looked over to my right and Simpson’s wife was sitting there with tears in her eyes,” O’Leary said. “No, this was genuine.”

In his speech, Simpson said he wanted to study every possible salmon fix, including removing four dams on the Lower Snake River, just across the border in Washington state. But this is about a lot more than fish. The public power agency that sells electricity from the 31 federal dams in the Northwest, the Bonneville Power Administration, is in deep trouble. It’s paying billions to try and rescue salmon, which drives electric rates up, Simpson explained. As a result, utilities and rural electric co-ops are thinking about buying electricity elsewhere, especially now that the combination of natural gas and renewables is providing cheaper rates.

Simpson sees the BPA’s problem as an opportunity: Maybe there’s a way to fix the salmon runs and the BPA in one fell swoop.

Everyone knows the status quo isn’t working, Simpson said. After electricity-bill payers and taxpayers spent some $16 billion on salmon, the fish population is still dwindling. Farmers from Idaho are sending precious water downstream to keep water cool for salmon smolt without seeing any increase in the number of fish that come back upstream. The situation isn’t great for anyone, Simpson argued, but all parties are so focused on protecting what they have that they’re unwilling to consider big changes. “We’ve got to stop thinking that way,” he said.

Simpson’s appeal might just work because he’s dealing with a regional issue, where the tangible facts can replace the hallucinations that accompany partisan rage. While national politics might seem like it’s all about rooting your side on, Idaho is full of farmers, outfitters, fishers, and electricity buyers who are more interested in finding solutions, said Justin Hayes, program director of the Idaho Conservation League. And all these people can see that the status quo is failing.

“It’s clear to everyone that the strategy of ‘our interests are more important than your interests, let’s fight’ doesn’t work,” Hayes said.

How does climate change enter into this? Well, removing dams would take a good chunk of clean electricity off the grid. So Simpson wants to replace the dams with new forms of power built in the region. He pointed to the Idaho National Lab’s work on new types of nuclear reactors. In eastern Washington, he said the Pacific Northwest National Lab is “the leader in battery storage in this country.”

So Simpson believes there’s a way to turn this whole mess into a surge of business for Idaho. In that way, he’s not straying from his red-state brand at all. But Simpson is unusual in that he’s willing to shake things up and make himself vulnerable, all to create the possibility of change.

The speech ended with Simpson looking to the end of his own life and his political legacy. “I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to stay alive long enough to see salmon return in healthy populations in Idaho … We need to do it for future generations.”

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GOP Rep. Mike Simpson: It’s my party, and I’ll fight climate change if I want to

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Here’s where all the official Democratic presidential candidates stand on climate

So far, 18 Democrats have announced bids to tussle with Donald Trump for the presidency in 2020, with more expected to throw their caps in the ring. In such a crowded field, it’s hard to decipher where each candidate stands on any issue, including climate change — a topic that was conspicuously absent in the 2016 election but appears will be front and center this time around. Luckily, the New York Times sent around a survey to each of the 18 declared Democratic candidates and got them all on the record about everything from a carbon tax to nuclear energy to renewables.

There are a few things that all of the candidates seem to agree on: The U.S. should stay in the Paris climate accord, reinstate President Obama’s climate legacy (which has suffered under Trump’s deregulation push), and invest in renewable energy. Some candidates said they would go even further in one or more of those issue areas, by adding their own flourishes to Obama’s Clean Power Plan or promising to work with the global community to strengthen the Paris pact.

Taking a look at where the candidates diverge yields a much more interesting analysis. Though there are many small distinctions between the 18 presidential hopefuls on climate policy, there are two issues where there is meaningful daylight between candidates.

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A carbon tax

A carbon tax is still controversial in the United States, despite its prominence in countries like Sweden and Norway, and the success of carbon-trading schemes in the state of California and the multi-state coalition named the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative on the opposite seaboard. That’s in part because politicians don’t agree on what to do with the money generated by the tax — though most of the candidates said they’d at least be willing to consider a price on carbon.

Cory Booker, in his response to a survey question on whether he supports a carbon tax, said he would like to see the money from the tax go toward alleviating inequality. That progressive approach clashes with Pete Buttigieg’s response. The South Bend, Indiana, mayor said he supports a tax but advocates for returning the money generated by the fee to American families — a scheme favored by some Republicans.

Both the progressive and conservative versions of a carbon tax failed to pass in Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s deep-blue state. The self-described climate candidate has watched many iterations of such a tax fail, in spite of his state’s liberal voter base. Perhaps that’s why Inslee is still in the undecided camp when it comes to pricing emissions — there’s only so many times you can bang your head against the same wall.

Nuclear energy

Like it or not, nuclear energy will likely have to play a role in weaning the United States off of its oil and gas addiction. Any candidate who supports the Green New Deal (five senators and counting) will have a hard time achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 without leaning on nuclear, at least in the short-term.

Regardless of that inconvenient truth, the question on nuclear energy was the most divisive in the survey, according to the Times. Seven out of the 18 were in favor of new nuclear development, including Booker, Inslee, John Hickenlooper, and Amy Klobuchar. Bernie Sanders, one of the earlier proponents of the Green New Deal and the emissions target it centers around, is not in favor of new nuclear. Eight of the candidates either didn’t respond or had “strong reservations.”

“Nuclear energy is not ideal, by any stretch,” said Marianne Williamson, the spiritual healer who famously counseled Oprah Winfrey and is one of those with reservations. “But it is still head and shoulders above coal and natural gas.”

In such a crowded field, it’s these minute differences between candidates that will help climate-conscious voters decide who’s serious about tackling rampant warming, among the many other issues facing the nation. As a presidential candidate, it’s easy enough to say you’ll reenter a climate agreement that nearly every other global leader supports. It’s much more difficult to speak with literacy about controversial topics like nuclear energy, or thorny emission reduction plans like a federal carbon tax. As election season heats up, these candidates will have to expound on the ways they aim to cool the planet down.

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Here’s where all the official Democratic presidential candidates stand on climate

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Republicans attack Puerto Rico’s plan to go 100 percent renewable: ‘It’s just unrealistic’

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

Republicans on Tuesday pilloried Puerto Rico’s plan to stop burning imported fossil fuels to generate electricity, calling the proposal senseless and opening a new front in an increasingly bitter partisan battle over the storm-ravaged island’s struggle to recover.

At a House Natural Resources Committee hearing, GOP lawmakers dismissed the Puerto Rican legislature’s vote last month to approve an ambitious bill mandating 100 percent renewable power by 2050 as “political interference” and accused the territory’s legislators of squandering an opportunity to reap the spoils of the American fracking boom.

“It’s just unrealistic,” Utah Repbulican representative Rob Bishop said. “Yet there’s still legislation.”

The nine-term congressman, who’s received more from the oil and gas industry than any other donor since taking office, last month became the chief antagonist of Democrats’ Green New Deal resolution, which outlines the first climate proposal scientists say is on the scale of what’s needed to combat the global warming crisis. Bishop falsely claimed the Green New Deal banned hamburgers, and performatively gobbled one at a news conference. Later, he suggested the Green New Deal was tantamount to “genocide.”

Yet, on Tuesday, he blamed Puerto Rico lawmakers for playing politics with the state-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority.

“PREPA has been hamstrung by political demands,” he said. “One of the problems of PREPA in the past is political interference when your primary goal is [to] provide abundant and affordable energy.”

At least 13 states have passed or are considering plans that set 100 percent clean-electricity targets, according to a report last month by the consultancy EQ Research. But Puerto Rico’s circumstance is unique. In September 2017, hurricanes Irma and Maria shredded the island’s aging electrical grid, leaving millions without power in the second-longest blackout in world history.

Puerto Rico imports oil and gas for more than 80 percent of its electricity needs, saddling ratepayers with prices roughly twice the American average and a toxic legacy of pollution. Renewables made up just 2 percent of the electricity mix as of two years ago.

To some, the disaster, widely seen as a glimpse of what’s to come as climate change worsens, presented an opportunity to equip Puerto Rico to harvest its plentiful sun and wind for power. But Republicans instead proposed a shock-doctrine approach that promised to make Puerto Rico a reliable market for U.S.-produced gas and oil.

At a November 2017 hearing before the same committee, Colorado Republican representative Doug Lamborn asked at the time “which environmental regulation waivers” were required to jump-start efforts to import more natural gas to Puerto Rico. Last July, Republican representative Tom McClintock  of California wondered why anyone would consider wind and solar favorable options for Puerto Rico at all.

He doubled down on those queries on Tuesday.

“They’re intermittent,” McClintock said. “They require reliable generators that are running at ready status so that if a cloud passes over or the wind drops off, they can instantly come on.”

It’s an argument President Donald Trump routinely deploys, albeit in less sophisticated terms, to deride renewables. But renewables are typically paired with battery systems that store excess solar or wind power for use when the sky is dark or the air is still. Solar panels paired with batteries provided oases of electricity during Puerto Rico’s monthslong blackout. Indeed, the 100 percent renewables bill exempts energy storage systems from sales tax and eliminates rules that barred Puerto Ricans from installing battery units without permission from PREPA.

Yet batteries barely came up at the hearing, except when one lawmaker pointed out that the technology can be expensive.

The hearing came amid a renewed fight over Puerto Rican disaster relief. Trump repeatedly threatened to cut funding to the battered island, which is still struggling to rebuild as federal aid trickles in slowly. Last week, the president falsely claimed Puerto Rico received $91 billion in relief. In reality, of the $41 billion approved to aid Puerto Rico, only about $11 billion has flowed from federal coffers. Another $50 billion is expected to be delivered, but over a period the Associated Press said “could span decades.”

The Senate failed last week to advance two separate aid bills as Democrats demanded additional funding for Puerto Rico to which Republican leaders said Trump would never agree. Negotiations broke down Tuesday as Congress headed for a two-week recess.

Disaster funding hasn’t halted the natural gas industry’s progress. Last July, the Department of Energy proposed easing shipping rules for liquefied natural gas. By reclassifying tankers as “small scale,” the ships could circumvent more robust federal environmental reviews, according to a report by the watchdog site The Real News.

“The finalization of this rule will expedite the permitting of certain small-scale exports of natural gas,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry said in a press release at the time. “The so-called ‘small-scale rule’ will further unleash American energy by reducing the regulatory burden on American businesses while also providing significant benefits to our trading partners in the Caribbean, Central America and South America.”

There have been hiccups. In December, Texas-based Excelerate Energy abandoned plans to build a $400 million natural gas terminal on the southern shore of Puerto Rico.

But last month, New York-based New Fortress Energy signed a five-year deal with PREPA to supply natural gas to the utility’s power plant in San Juan. On Tuesday morning, the U.S. Energy Information Administration published its latest figures showing Puerto Rico’s liquefied natural gas imports bounced back to pre-storm levels as of late 2018.

Energy Department electricity chief Bruce Walker, a Trump appointee, testified Tuesday that attempting to rebuild Puerto Rico with non-fossil sources after the storm would have slowed the recovery.

“There are some significant engineering concerns,” he said. “It’s not technically possible today to convert that island to 100 percent renewable.”

PREPA CEO José Ortiz Vázquez agreed, but said the debate was over how heavily to invest in imported gas to carry the island through to its eventual goal of 100 percent clean electricity.

“Some groups favor going straight up with maximum capacity of renewables and keep burning natural gas to get us through to 2050, while other groups have a different opinion, where we should make a big bet now on natural gas and slowly work on the renewable issue,” he said.

Asked how long it would take to convert Puerto Rico’s entire electricity supply, a panel of experts in the second half of the hearing offered answers ranging from “within a decade” to 25 years to “well before the 2050 deadline,” if implemented “under a well-managed, professional system.”

There is a real disagreement over the feasibility of going 100 percent renewable on the national level. A paper published in 2017 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argued a better plan was to aim for 80 percent renewables by the middle of the century, with nuclear plants and fossil fuel stations equipped with carbon capture and storage technology making up the rest. But studies released in 2015 made the case that the rapid strides in clean energy made it practical and financially sound to completely transition all 50 states and 139 countries to 100 percent renewable starting immediately.

Yet profits are at the heart of Puerto Rico’s dispute. Last year, the Puerto Rican legislature approved a plan to privatize PREPA. It’s a controversial decision that some say will help the bankrupt utility to dig itself out of debt and make the improvements it needs to lower electricity prices. But others fear a PREPA beholden to investors will lock in high rates and transfer control of a public good into the hands of the rich, establishing yet another way the downtrodden U.S. colony generates wealth for those back on the mainland.

“It’s not possible for PREPA to immediately convert to 100 percent renewable energy. There will be a transition period. We recognize that,” said Democratic representative Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who presided over Tuesday’s hearing as committee chairman. “But there are concerns that the current plan to focus on natural gas instead of maximizing and doing promotion around solar generation will lock us into an infrastructure that will soon be dated, an infrastructure that will be dependent on importation. Am I correct?”

Marla Pérez Lugo, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez, said the question captured “the essence of the problem.”

“We’re still thinking that what’s good for PREPA is good for Puerto Rico,” she said. “And that is not necessarily so.”

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Republicans attack Puerto Rico’s plan to go 100 percent renewable: ‘It’s just unrealistic’

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Trump the environmentalist? The president’s 2020 campaign might start touting climate victories

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In case you haven’t heard, there’s a big election coming up in a little over a year. President Trump is preparing to do battle with a crowded field of qualified Democrats. When it comes to hot button topics like jobs and immigration, Trump has got those stump speeches down pat. But a lot has changed since 2016. Climate change has become a top priority for voters and his biggest 2020 challengers have made climate action a cornerstone of their respective campaigns.

Perhaps that’s why Trump’s campaign team might be on the hunt for a list of climate-related victories to champion as the reelection fight draws nearer. Yes, you read that correctly: According to recent reporting from McClatchy, Trump’s 2020 strategy has a climate component.

McClatchy’s Michael Wilner spoke to two people close to Trump’s campaign and got confirmation from a Trump campaign spokesperson that the campaign is “gathering research for an aggressive defense of the president’s climate change record.” Of course, the Trump campaign did its standard about-face in response to the reporting that it had seemingly confirmed earlier, calling it “100 percent fake news.”

Is Trump warming up the idea of climate action? Not quite.

The White House is still mulling over a plan to establish a national security panel tasked with countering the Fourth National Climate assessment, a climate change report published in November by Trump’s own administration. If Trump decides to approve the panel, it is set to include William Happer, a physicist who once argued that CO2 is good for the planet. When a cold snap descended over parts of the U.S. this winter, Trump took to Twitter to call for some of that “good old fashioned global warming.”

Trump’s two-faced approach to climate change aside, are there any environmental victories his team can legitimately point to?

Here’s one possibility: Trump will tout his alternative to former President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, the Affordable Clean Energy Rule. His plan rolls back regulations on the coal sector, but that likely won’t stop Trump from using it to boost his green credentials.

Or perhaps he’ll emphasize a 2017 EPA report that showed emissions fell 3 percent during his first year in office. But even those numbers don’t tell the full story. “Due to the lag in data collection, that decline occurred during President Barack Obama’s final year in office, 2016, not under Trump,” Politifact said in a fact-check of the EPA’s report. Plus, emissions are on the rise again as of last year.

To his credit, Trump did sign a massive public lands package into law just this year. It had broad bipartisan support in both legislative chambers, though, and not signing it might have been politically damaging.

There could have been hints of a new environmental strategy at the president’s speech at a recent rally in Michigan. “I support the Great Lakes,” he said, and promised to fully fund the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, funding that his own administration has tried to slash by 90 percent the past two years.

Regardless of how the president decides to portray his record on the campaign trail, here’s what we know for sure: Trump has rolled back, gutted, and slashed environmental protections and climate regulations pretty much every chance he got during his time in office thus far. His penchant for deregulation has touched everything from national monuments, to pristine Arctic wildlife refuges, to the habitat of a particularly snazzy looking bird called the sage grouse. He appointed oil, gas, and coal-loving former lobbyists to run his administration’s biggest environment agencies, and when some of those corrupt officials resigned in disgrace, he appointed equally oily men to replace them.

But don’t worry, y’all. Trump said he has a “natural instinct for science” that will guide him through this whole climate change thing. Phew.

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Trump the environmentalist? The president’s 2020 campaign might start touting climate victories

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Your weather tweets are showing your climate amnesia

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

Every time someone in a position of power (for example) says that a cold snap in winter proves that climate change is not a thing, a dutiful chorus responds with a familiar refrain: Weather is not climate. Weather happens on the scale of days or weeks, over a distance relevant to cities or states. Climate happens over decades, centuries even, to an entire planet.

The problem is, guess what timescale and space-scale people live on?

The question of what can make human beings understand climate change is literally an existential one. It’s complicated by humans’ pathetically short lifespan and their attention-span, roughly akin to that of a cat in a laser-pointer QA lab. How can anyone expect people to grasp the planetary, millennium-encompassing implications of their half-remembered actions? There’s bad news on that front, and as is customary with bad news, it comes from Twitter.

From a database of 2.18 billion tweets sent by 12.8 million people in the continental U.S. — stripped of all identifying information except for date and location — a team of climate researchers isolated the ones that talked about the weather. Specifically, they looked for tweets talking about whether it was hot or cold. And then they compared the volume of those tweets to the “reference temperature” for the county where they originated; which is to say, they looked at historical data for whether that county was seeing an unusual number of hot or cold days over time.

In one respect, the researchers found what you might intuit. People bitch about the weather when the weather’s bad. But then, curiously, they stop. What used to seem extreme starts to seem normal. “If you have a recent history where you have abnormally warm or colder temperatures, that reduces the probability you’ll tweet about the weather,” says Fran Moore, an environmental scientist at UC Davis and lead author of a paper about this in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It’s not that people get used to that new normal, though. They just get sort of blind to it. Moore and her colleagues ran the non-weather tweets from their Twitter corpus through two different automated systems for sentiment analysis, the Valence Aware Dictionary for sEntiment Reasoning (VADER) and the much less cool-ly initialized Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. Sentiment analysis is still a field where smart people could disagree on whether it works, but even so, both analyses of the emotional content of these tweet streams showed the same thing. “People stop tweeting about these unusual temperatures,” Moore says, “but as best we can tell, the temperatures are still making them kind of miserable.” Yes, miserable even for Twitter.

It has been about a century since people began pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in earnest. Climate researchers rely on millennia-old data like tree rings and ice cores to show change. But, Moore says, it takes just about five years for people to forget what used to be normal. The cartoonist Randall Munroe had it right in a 2013 XKCD strip: “What used to be normal now feels too cold.” And that worries scientists like Moore, because it might mean that people essentially get amnesia when it comes to climate change. The variation is too subtle for anyone to notice or do anything about — until it’s not, when it’s too late. Which, arguably, is now.

Broadly this idea is called “shifting baseline syndrome.” As happens a lot when it comes to ecological disasters, the ocean researchers noticed it first. As commercial fisheries fall apart, what constitutes a “large catch” gets defined downward, as the marine biologist Daniel Pauly wrote in 1995. As the overall climate takes on the quality of non-stationarity — where past performance no longer predicts future events — memory gets shorter and shorter. It’s not historical, nor generational, nor even extending as far back as childhood; all we’re left with is now.

Or maybe not. Don’t panic. “It’s an important finding to see what they call the remarkability, the noticeability, of these unusual weather conditions tends to decline over time,” says Peter Howe, a geographer at Utah State University who studies people’s understanding of climate. “The effect they’re finding is real. What it poses are some interesting questions about how that relates to perceptions and opinions.” In Howe’s own work, which uses survey data as opposed to the clever expediency of social media, people in 89 different countries have been able to tell when the overall temperatures were going up.

Weirder still, the weather didn’t change people’s minds about climate change as much as the other way ‘round. People who understood that human activities were warming the planet were more likely to perceive weather events as being related to climate change. Those who didn’t, didn’t. And people’s opinion about climate change correlates with nothing so highly as their political affiliation. “Our pre-existing belief about the issue, driven by political factors and other things, shapes what we think we’ve experienced,” Howe says.

Yet even that baseline is shifting. Data from surveys conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication show a marked change over the last five years. Since 2013, the number of Americans who are worried about climate change has gone up 16 percentage points, to nearly 70 percent overall. The number who think it’s human-caused has gone up 15, to 62 percent. Those trends hold across the survey — and across political leanings, as well. So, sure, 95 percent of self-identified liberal Democrats are “very” or “somewhat worried” about global warming. But so are 32 percent of conservative Republicans, up from just 14 percent five years ago.

The quinquennial National Climate Assessment and the Worldwide Threat Assessment of the National Intelligence Community emphasized the present, ongoing dangers posed by human-caused climate change, from extreme weather to deaths from heat to disease outbreaks to displaced persons. More than a fifth of all the corn planted in the U.S. is genetically modified to be drought-tolerant, suggesting that no matter what farmers think about climate change, they know the climate is changing. Even petrochemical companies acknowledge in court, on the record, that climate change is real, dangerous, and human-caused (while continuing to pump out of the ground and sell the chemicals that cause it — arguably their fiduciary duty, genocidal though it may be).

Despite the mnemonic frame-drag suggested by Moore’s Twitter research, most of the country is on board with getting something done about climate change, whether it’s a Green New Deal or some other attack on the problem. As a climate scientist (herself something of a skeptic) observed to Andrew Revkin in National Geographic, the last bastion of disbelief is the White House — which is, let’s be honest, one hell of a bastion.

The next step, then, is to figure out what makes people believe humans are changing the climate even as their own baseline shifts. “We’re not trying to say that this result means that no one’s going to believe in climate change, because people’s own experiences of weather are not the dominant piece of information they use,” Moore says. “What you could say is that you can’t expect people’s experience of weather alone is going to passively convince them.” So next she’s going to try to figure out if events other than temperature change might have more of an impact — wildfires, hurricanes, or coastal flooding. Weather definitely isn’t climate, but extreme weather may still change some minds.

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Your weather tweets are showing your climate amnesia

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What would a national emergency over climate change look like?

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Well, it finally happened: President Trump declared a national emergency in order to secure funding for his barrier between Mexico and the United States. We are under virtually no threat from illegal immigration through the southern border. Phew! But don’t put up your feet just yet, the U.S. actually is facing a pretty terrifying threat, not from immigrants, but from climate change.

Now that Trump has set a precedent, some are raising the point that a different president could use the same maneuver to declare a national emergency over rising temperatures. After all, rising sea levels, worsening hurricanes, wildfires, invasive species, and droughts threaten millions of Americans. Talk about a national security crisis.

Shortly after Trump made his declaration, Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar took to Twitter to call on the next president to declare climate change a national emergency upon taking office. If the idea catches on, 2020 Democrats might have to decide not only whether they support the Green New Deal, but also whether they would be willing to take that commitment to the next level.

Hold your horses, can a future president use emergency power to combat climate change? And if so, what would that even look like?

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Dan Farber, professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles, examined the idea of a climate change national emergency in a blog post. It turns out there are a few things a future president might be able to do to mitigate climate change through such a move. Here are the areas Farber thinks are worth exploring (these options are as of yet untested, could look different in practice, AND, as Farber told us in an earlier story, just ’cause it’s possible in theory doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea):

Oil drilling could be put on pause. “Oil leases are required to have clauses allowing them to be suspended during national emergencies,” Farber writes. If climate change is causing the emergency, doesn’t it make sense to pump the brakes on the stuff causing it? Hmmm?
The Secretary of Transportation, who is in charge of transportation coordination during national emergencies, could restrict use of gas-powered vehicles.
The renewable energy industry could get an influx of financial support, because a provision allows “the President to extend loan guarantees to critical industries during national emergencies,” Farber writes.
There’s even an act that could be invoked to give the president power to “impose sanctions on individuals and countries.” In a national climate change emergency scenario, the act could be used to sanction oil-producing countries.

In a national emergency, the president gets nearly 150 special powers. The options listed above are just a few of the ways those powers could be used in the name of climate change mitigation.

Already, Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer has announced he will be introducing a “congressional emergency declaration on the climate crisis” in Congress. Get ready, GOP! Even if the Supreme Court ends up striking down the border wall, Trump just opened Pandora’s Box.

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What would a national emergency over climate change look like?

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Mitch McConnell — yes, that Mitch McConnell — wants the Senate to vote on the Green New Deal

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has previously said that he wouldn’t bring legislation to a vote in the Senate that the president wouldn’t sign. But the senator from Kentucky announced on Tuesday that he will force a vote on the giant effort to tackle climate change and overhaul the economy known as the Green New Deal.

Have rising sea levels and worsening forest fires convinced the Republican leader to reassess his position on climate change? Not quite.

McConnell is eager to get Senate Democrats on the record about their support for the resolution introduced last week by Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. Republicans see the proposal as a big liability for Democrats, portraying it as a socialist plot to ban airplanes and cows. It’s the old red-baiting line of attack.

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The proposal includes progressive agenda items like universal healthcare and a federal jobs guarantee. An outdated and since taken down FAQ on AOC’s website confused things by promising economic security for those “unwilling to work.” For the likes of McConnell, that sounds like the kind of left-wing proposal that could alienate moderate voters and give President Donald Trump a boost in the 2020 presidential election.

Trump is already testing out this approach. “I really don’t like their policy of taking away your car, of taking away your airplane rights, of ‘let’s hop a train to California,’ of you’re not allowed to own cows anymore!” he said of the Green New Deal at a rally in El Paso, Texas on Monday night.

It’s no wonder McConnell seemed uncharacteristically gleeful when he said he’d be bringing the Green New Deal to the Senate for a vote. If you’ve never seen him smile before, take a look:

Markey quickly hit back at McConnell on Tuesday, releasing a statement blasting Republicans for failing to have a climate plan of their own. “The Green New Deal resolution has struck a powerful chord in this country, and Republicans, climate deniers, and the fossil fuel industry are going to end up on the wrong side of history,” he said.

Ocasio-Cortez issued her own rebuke hours later. “McConnell thinks he can end all debate on the Green New Deal now and stop this freight train of momentum … all he’s going to do is show just how out of touch Republican politicians are with the American people,” she said in a statement.

It’s hard to say whether McConnell will be successful in his bid to rattle Democrats on the fence about a resolution that promises so much so quickly. But the majority leader, and the rest of the GOP for that matter, might be too hasty in thinking it’s an Achilles heel for Democrats.

The deal is gaining popularity in the House, where more than 15 percent of representatives have signed on as sponsors. And it’s picking up momentum in the Senate, too, especially among White House contenders such as Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Kirsten Gillibrand.

To be sure, not all Senate Dems are as enthusiastic. When asked about the Green New Deal on Tuesday, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who is reportedly considering a presidential run, said that he supports a Green New Deal but is “not going to take a position on every bill that’s coming out.”

Whatever happens next, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Green New Deal is turning into something the two parties think they can use to their advantage.

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Mitch McConnell — yes, that Mitch McConnell — wants the Senate to vote on the Green New Deal

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Green New Deal leaves nuclear option on table

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The Green New Deal has been championed by advocates for getting the country running on purely renewable energy right away. Some 600 environmental groups had demanded the initiative set out to ban not just fossil fuels, but also nuclear, biomass power, and large-scale hydroelectricity. So when the resolution made its long-awaited debut on Thursday, it came as a surprise to some that the door was left open for nuclear power and even fossil fuels with carbon capture.

But it was likely the key to getting an impressive group of Democrats to get behind the deal. Senators Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren have signed up as co-sponsors, and all of them just happen to be running for president in 2020.

So just like that, the most aggressive climate policy proposal we’ve seen in years has the de facto backing of the Democratic party.

The Green New Deal doesn’t mention ‘nukes,’ but it doesn’t use the words solar or wind, either. The non-binding resolution, unveiled by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York, and Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts, calls for “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.” In wonk-speak, zero-emission is code for nuclear power or fossil fuels with carbon capture.

That conflicts with a factsheet found on Ocasio-Cortez’s website which says the deal “would not include creating new nuclear plants. It’s unclear if we will be able to decommission every nuclear plant within 10 years, but the plan is to transition off of nuclear and all fossil fuels as soon as possible.”

The factsheet disappeared from Ocasio-Cortez’s website on Thursday after the resolution was released.

This antinuclear stance might have been toned down to help get people who support nuclear into the coalition. Booker and Warren, for instance, have voted to fund research on advanced nuclear power.

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that we will need to rely on a variety of energy sources to make deep cuts to carbon emissions. Every scenario plotted by Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change that keeps the world from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius requires nuclear energy, and most such scenarios require building a lot more of it. Hydropower — the most abundant source of renewable energy going — is important, too. Try to get rid of both nuclear and hydroelectricity, and good luck cutting emissions enough to avoid the worst climate change has to offer.

“The resolution is silent on any individual technology,” Senator Markey said during a press conference on Thursday. “We are open to whatever works.”

In spite of this agnostic stance, a wide range of green and lefty groups welcomed the resolution. Many mainstream environmental organizations had refrained from adding their signatures to the letter demanding the Green New Deal restrict energy options to wind and solar, so when it emerged Thursday, they praised it.

The loudest attacks appeared to come from the right. “It’s a socialist manifesto that lays out a laundry list of government giveaways, including guaranteed food, housing, college, and economic security even for those who refuse to work,” said Senator John Barrasso from Wyoming in a statement.

Conservatives have long feared that climate action was just a Trojan Horse for a bigger government with more social-welfare programs. Now, after voting for years to kill market-based climate policies, they’re getting a taste of just what they had feared.

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Green New Deal leaves nuclear option on table

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