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Here’s how many people Pruitt’s environmental policies could kill

If the Trump administration is good at anything, it’s proposing rollbacks to environmental protections. “Proposing” is the key word here — though EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has tried to weaken or get rid of more than 40 rules, he hasn’t been very successful. Many of his attempted rollbacks have faced challenges in court.

If all these deregulations actually came to pass, we’d see astounding effects on public health: an additional 80,000 deaths and well over a million cases of respiratory illness over the next decade. And that’s an “extremely conservative” estimate, according to Harvard professors who tabulated the numbers in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week.

We’ve seen estimates of the health impact of environment rollbacks before, but here, the numbers have been collected in one place. The researchers lifted most of the estimates from reports published back when these life-saving regulations were originally proposed or implemented.

Air pollution could introduce some of the most threatening health problems. Back in October, Pruitt pledged to repeal the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era rule that aimed to cut the power industry’s emissions 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Without that plan, the researchers foresee a rise in exposure to particulate matter, resulting in 36,000 deaths and 630,000 childhood respiratory illness cases over the next 10 years.

Another major contributor to breathing issues: Pruitt’s plan to revive a loophole that would allow diesel trucks to use engines that create 450 times more soot than their newer counterparts. If implemented, that could lead to an estimated 900,000 cases of respiratory illness over the next decade, as well as 41,000 premature deaths.

Other rollbacks that pose major health threats include watering down rules for coal-fired power plant waste and adding a two-year delay to the implementation of the Obama-era Clean Water Rule.

So, about that hope we mentioned. The courts have the chance to keep many of these rules — and these lives — intact. While Pruitt is seen as a master deregulator, he’s been faulted for crafting sloppy rules, some of which have gotten struck down. For example, when Pruitt tried to keep methane regulations from going into effect, a federal appeals court struck it down, calling the move “unreasonable” and “arbitrary.”

And more of his attempts are headed to court. Just this week, for instance, a coalition of environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration over the suspension of water regulations.

The Harvard authors note that this kind of policymaking takes a lot of time to come to fruition. “Fortunately for those interested in public health,” they write, “the regulatory process will take many years. Whoever is sworn in as President in January 2021 will have a large effect on whether the Trump administration’s full environmental agenda goes into effect.”

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Here’s how many people Pruitt’s environmental policies could kill

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Behold the Greatest Budget Gimmickry of All Time

Mother Jones

Here’s a helluva weird story from Jim Puzzanghera of the LA Times:

The House Republican legislation scaling back Dodd-Frank financial regulations would reduce federal budget deficits by $24.1 billion over the next decade….Would reduce federal spending by $6.9 billion from 2018 through 2027….The bureau received $565 million in the 2016 fiscal year….The House Republican legislation would reduce the bureau’s funding to $485 million in 2018, and the CBO estimated that Congress would keep annual funding at about that level, adjusting for inflation, over the next decade.

So the bill would (a) reduce funding by $800 million, (b) reduce spending by $6.9 billion, and (c) reduce deficits by $24.1 billion. How do we get from $800 million to $24.1 billion?

I’m glad you asked! And trust me, you’re going to love the answer. Here’s how it breaks down:

This is a work of art. The savings come almost entirely from two places: eliminating the Orderly Liquidation Fund and modifying the way Dodd-Frank agencies are funded. Here’s the impressive part: neither of these things actually saves any money.

The OLF is funded entirely by the financial industry. If the government has to liquidate a big bank, it foots the bill and then recoups the money via a fee on the banking sector. However, the money has to be spent immediately, while it gets recouped over time. So it’s possible that, say, the feds would spend $10 billion to rescue a bank in 2027, but all the money would be recouped in later years. That counts as a $10 billion deficit in the the ten-year window 2018-2027.

So CBO guessed the probability of the OLF being used in each of the next ten years, along with the possible cash flow imbalances, and then calculated the expected value. They came up with $14.5 billion. CBO acknowledges that this estimate has “considerable uncertainty,” and that’s true. More to the point, though, the whole thing is just gimmickry. Using the OLF will cost the government nothing (or close to nothing), but expenses might fall inside the ten-year window while revenues fall outside the ten-year window. That’s all.

Then there’s the agency funding. It gets reduced $800 million, but somehow that becomes a deficit reduction of $9.2 billion. This one is even more impressive. Two agencies are affected—NCUA and CFPB—which currently get their funding from outside sources. This means their outlays count as “direct spending.” Under the Republican law, their funding would come from Congress and be subject to annual appropriations. For some reason—and I admit this remains inscrutable to me—reducing “direct spending” and replacing it with the same amount of appropriated spending counts as deficit reduction even though CBO assumes that actual funding levels won’t change.

This is the immaculate conception of congressional legislation. It doesn’t actually reduce spending more than trivially, but thanks to obscure budget gimmicks it gets scored as a $24 billion reduction in the ten-year budget deficit. It’s magic! Maybe it’s the power of the orb at work.1

1You all know what this refers to, don’t you?

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Behold the Greatest Budget Gimmickry of All Time

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Quote of the Day: Boredom May Be Trump’s Worst Enemy

Mother Jones

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From LA Times reporter Brian Bennett, writing about the possibility of President Trump brokering some kind of comprehensive immigration deal:

But immigration experts are skeptical Trump has the attention span or the desire to pass a sweeping immigration overhaul, a deeply complicated undertaking.

I have a feeling we’re going to be hearing versions of this sentence a lot over the next four years.

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Quote of the Day: Boredom May Be Trump’s Worst Enemy

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A $1 Billion Foreign Investment in the US Happens About Once Per Day

Mother Jones

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We’re going to be seeing a lot of this over the next four years:

How do I know? Because Trump sounds like Dr. Evil here. ONE! BILLION! DOLLARS! For comparison, here is total foreign direct investment since the start of the century:

Every year, there are hundreds of investments of a billion dollars by foreign companies in the US. The Fiat Chrysler announcement is entirely routine.

Still, that’s hundreds of opportunities every year for Trump to blather about how he’s making America great again. Just keep in mind that it’s all nonsense. I figure trend FDI should reach about $3.9 trillion in 2017. Wake me up if Trump manages to get it significantly higher than that, but please don’t insult me by trumpeting every piddling contribution along the way as if he were raining pixie dust over the entire economy.

UPDATE: The original headline and text way overstated the flow of new FDI each year. Sorry. It’s fixed now.

Taken from: 

A $1 Billion Foreign Investment in the US Happens About Once Per Day

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Three Things to Remember

Mother Jones

There are a few things we should all keep in mind over the next four years. No matter what I write, or how much I write, or what I write about, these things will stay front and center in my consciousness even if I don’t repeat them constantly:

We have elected a loudmouth, race-baiting game show host president of the United States. A. Game. Show. Host.

However that happened, it happened by a shift of a one or two percentage points in the electorate. Don’t listen to anyone on either side who writes lazy think pieces about how this portends a sea change in Western civilization and validates everything they’ve been saying all along.

A whole lot of people are going to suffer a whole lot over the next four years.

Link:

Three Things to Remember

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It’s a good day to be a seal, for once.

According to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), renewable energy, mostly solar and wind, accounted for more than half of all new electric capacity added in the world last year, a 15 percent jump from 2014. Globally, there is now more renewable power capacity than coal power capacity.

Clean energy growth was especially high in China, which was responsible for about 40 percent of all new clean energy capacity. Get this: In China in 2015, two wind turbines were installed every hour.

This surge in renewables, according to the IEA, can be attributed to policy changes, lowered costs, and improvements in technology.

So renewable energy hit some big milestones last year, but it’s still just the beginning: The IEA — which has been accused of underestimating the growth of renewables — expects 28 percent of electricity to come from renewables by 2021, up from 23 percent today.

“I am pleased to see that last year was one of records for renewables and that our projections for growth over the next five years are more optimistic,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol. “However, even these higher expectations remain modest compared with the huge untapped potential of renewables.”

So let’s keep this moving, folks.

Link to article:

It’s a good day to be a seal, for once.

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Trump Says Obama Is Probably a Secret ISIS Mole or Something

Mother Jones

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From the Washington Post:

Trump’s spokeswoman and campaign manager have yet to respond to a request for a fuller explanation of Trump’s comments about the president.

I have a feeling this sentence is going to get a lot of use over the next few months. As for what this is about, apparently Donald Trump was busily making the TV circuit this morning implying saying outright that “there’s something’s going on” with President Obama and Islamic terrorism. This is, of course, front page news, so now we all have to talk about it. Tomorrow we’ll get the thumbsuckers and fact checks explaining that, no, Obama is not in league with ISIS and he doesn’t hate America—but those will be on A13 because Trump will be on to something else and that will take up the front page.

Plus I guess Trump gave a speech about something. Let’s see…oh, here it is:

This was going to be a speech on Hillary Clinton and how bad a President, especially in these times of Radical Islamic Terrorism, she would be….But today there is only one thing to discuss: the growing threat of terrorism inside of our borders.

Reading through it, it sounds like a teleprompter special. A bunch of mush about getting tough and banning immigration from Muslim countries etc. etc., but without quite so many howlers of fact as usual. I guess we’ll have to keep waiting for the speech about how bad a president Hillary would be.

This is barely worth mocking anymore, let alone covering seriously. I’m off to lunch.

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Trump Says Obama Is Probably a Secret ISIS Mole or Something

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Boston’s airport is going green(ish)

Boston’s airport is going green(ish)

By on 4 May 2015commentsShare

Boston’s Logan International Airport has decided to go green, an ambitious task given that the airport generated about 1.3 billion pounds of climate-changing carbon dioxide in 2013 alone. Here’s the scoop from the The Boston Globe:

The airport plans to cut its carbon emissions 40 percent and energy consumption by 25 percent below 2012 levels by 2020. Officials also plan to curb the amount of waste produced by passengers by 2 percent every year by 2030, reduce water use by 1 percent every year over the next 10 years, and increase the recycling rate by 60 percent by the end of the decade.

Well great! But there’s just one problem: The airplanes. A round-trip ticket from Boston to Seattle, for example, comes with a 1.68-metric-ton CO2 price tag. So an airport saying it’s going to clean up its act is kind of like an elementary school bully saying he’s going to keep stealing your money but won’t shove you into lockers anymore. It’s like, thanks, man, but you’re still kind of a dick.

Logan released a 40-page report that, according to The Globe, lacks specifics on how it plans to meet its goals but does point out some low-hanging fruit. It can, for example, ask that planes use just one engine while taxiing around aimlessly, as planes are wont to do. This sounds good, but it also begs the question: if planes only need one engine to torture their victims — er, passengers — this way, why don’t they already do this all the time?! 

Airport officials also touted their new “environmentally friendly” rental car center, which has cut shuttle bus trips down from 100 per hour to 30 per hour. But let’s be honest: There’s nothing green about a place that hands out cars to loads of people, who will undoubtedly drive around the city in the most inefficient and infuriating way possible.

Nonetheless, one of the report’s authors, Brenda Enos, assistant director of capital and environmental programs at Massport, had this to say: “For the first time, we have actual goals and measurements against those metrics. I think it holds our feet to the fire.”

Psst! Climate change was already holding your feet to the fire. Case in point: In addition to cutting emissions, airport officials are also planning for sea level rise. From the Globe:

With sea levels expected to rise 2 feet to 6 feet by the end of the century — and as much as an additional 5 feet during the heaviest storms — airport officials plan to spend $9 million over the next five years on flood doors and barriers, coastal management, and portable pumps to keep the airport running in the event of a major storm surge. Within 10 years, they plan to spend millions more to move all critical equipment and upgrade systems to be able to withstand the worst storms.

Well, that sounds like a very sensible thing to do. Come to think of it, all of this sounds pretty sensible, which is why I’m not going to pat Logan on the back for this. Airports are where we go to participate in one of humankind’s greatest achievements — flight — but they’re also shameless hubs of pollution, waste, consumerism, and all around misery. So this non-specific, 40-page report is important — but also way overdue.

Source:
Logan Airport drafts climate change plan

, The Boston Globe.

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Boston’s airport is going green(ish)

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Say What You Will About Almonds, but They Are Wildly Popular

Mother Jones

California’s thirsty almond orchards have been generating an impressive amount of debate as the state’s drought drags on. But that won’t likely stop their expansion. The title of a new report from the Dutch agribusiness-banking giant Rabobank explains why: “California Almonds: Maybe Money Does Grow on Trees.”

The report is “exclusive for business clients of Rabobank,” but an accompanying blog post offers some good tidbits. “Drought conditions and the stronger US dollar have increased the price of almonds for all buyers,” it states. On the US East Coast, wholesale prices for premium almonds have risen 20 percent since last year. “In Europe, the almond is becoming increasingly popular, not only as a nutritious snack but especially as a go-to ingredient for manufacturers,” it continues. There, wholesale prices are up 50 percent since last year, while “buyers in India and Hong Kong are paying 25 percent and 20 percent more, respectively.”

Those higher prices will evidently more than compensate California farmers for higher watering costs, and inspire than to expand acreage. Rabobank expects California almond production to rise by 2 percent to 3.5 percent per year over the next decade, accoring to Sacramento Bee‘s Dale Kasler, who got a look at the Rabobank study.

That’s impressive growth. If almond output expands by 3 percent per year over the next ten years, then—using this trusty formula—production will grow a whopping 34 percent between now and 2025. That’s a lot of growth for a state that already churns out 80 percent of the world’s almonds. This scenario doesn’t imply a 34 percent expansion in almond acreage—some of the almond trees that will contribute to that growth in output have already been planted and will be coming into production over the next few years (it takes almonds about four years to begin producing after they’re planted). But it does imply a robust expansion. Kasler quotes the study:

Higher prices and good profits for California almond growers will continue to encourage more planting of almond orchards…. Nurseries report very little slowing in orders of new trees.

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Say What You Will About Almonds, but They Are Wildly Popular

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India slaps taxes on coal, while China uses less of it

India slaps taxes on coal, while China uses less of it

By on 3 Mar 2015 3:41 pmcommentsShare

India is doubling its tax on coal, and will put the revenue toward encouraging clean energy.

Though Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is increasingly looking toward renewable and nuclear power, the nation remains heavily reliant on coal. Last year, the government said it hoped to double how much domestic coal the country consumes over the next five years. That would be seriously bad news for Indians. In some areas, pollution is already so extreme that it is taking years off millions of people’s lives.

But the new coal tax might signal an intent to push the country’s energy economy in a more sustainable direction. Bloomberg reports:

Coal fires about 60 percent of India’s electricity generation capacity and is among the cheapest sources of power in the country. The higher tax will lead to an increase of as much as 0.06 rupees in coal costs for every kilowatt hour of electricity, [said Kameswara Rao, who oversees energy, utilities and mining at PwC India].

“As the Paris convention approaches, these steps will show the government is serious about climate change,” said Debasish Mishra, a senior director at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India Pvt. in Mumbai. “We have to take care of the environment, and at the same time use fossil fuel to make sure we have energy at a reasonable cost for our growth. It’s not an either or situation.”

Much of India is incredibly poor; hundreds of millions of people lack electricity, and the Modi government has maintained that, in its quest to develop rural areas, it won’t turn its back on any source of energy. But the new coal tax, along with new taxes on petroleum, show that the government is trying to make the country’s fossil fuel-intensive economy slightly cleaner — without going so far as reining it in. The tax will, in theory, incentivize coal-burning utilities to make their plants more efficient so that they use less fuel. It could also push the country to strengthen its grid system, which loses huge amounts of power.

America and China, the world’s two largest emitters of greenhouse gases, took a medium-sized stride toward combating climate change when they announced a pact last November to curb their emissions over the next two decades. India, the world’s third largest emitter, hasn’t made any similar big announcement. But the country is taking smaller steps forward as the world collectively trundles toward a U.N. climate conference in Paris this December, at which diplomats hope nations will sign a global climate deal. The new coal tax is one of them.

And at the same time that India is boosting taxes on coal, China is using less of it. The country cut its coal use 2.9 percent in 2014, and may be on track to continue reducing its dependence on the fossil fuel. If this drop signals the beginning of a trend, China would also be on track to meet its goals of capping coal use by 2020 and peaking its carbon emissions by 2030, as it promised it would in the U.S.-China pact. China also said in the pact that it would try to beat that 2030 deadline. At ThinkProgress, Joe Romm argues that it might actually do that:

[W]hy would China announce with such public fanfare they are going to “make best efforts to peak early” if they didn’t think they could and would? Failure to peak early would show the “best efforts” of the Chinese failed. That is not how China rolls.

So no one should be surprised if China peaks in coal use before 2020 — as that would be key for them to peak CO2 emissions before 2030.

Coal is becoming less and less popular in the U.S. as well. That’s left American coal companies scrambling to ship their product to new markets abroad, like energy-hungry China and India. But now maybe that’s not looking like such a great idea.

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India slaps taxes on coal, while China uses less of it

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