Loveland, Ohio, You may have heard our current president quoted for saying, “We are going to drill, baby, drill,” recently in the news or on social media. But what does all of this mean? Why is there so much excitement over this statement?
For starters, Donald Trump is not the one to coin the phrase “drill, baby, drill.” In fact, former Republican governor of the state of Maryland, Michael Steele, first used the phrase in 2008 to add enthusiasm to drilling from Alaska in order to reduce energy costs in America. The increasingly popular phrase is one passed down through the Republican party.
Our former president, Joe Biden, had called to reduce the drilling and mining in Alaska in hopes of helping the planet. Now that President Trump has been inaugurated, this is going to change.
However, many are opposed to the idea of drilling because of the environmental degradation that is attached to it. Many scientists argue that we need to decrease more fossil fuel extractions, not increase them, so as not to increase the Greenhouse Effect anymore than it already has been. Drilling oil from Alaska is undoubtedly going to harm any and all ecosystems in the Arctic, possibly even leading to mass extinctions. Alongside that, the melting of our ice caps will increase, assisting in polluting our air and spreading respiratory diseases globally. There is a possibility for the damage done by Trump’s resumption of drilling oil from Alaska to have irreversible effects on our planet.
With that being said, there is merit in drilling oil in Alaska. Millions of jobs will be created with the drilling reenacted. Also, a large amount of American tax dollars go towards oil and drilling, and that money is eventually used for American services in infrastructure and transportation, giving more leeway for the government to reduce the cost of necessities. In simple terms, since Alaska is far more local than other foreign oil extraction sites, it costs less to transport this fuel to Americans, making gas and groceries cheaper in the US.
The argument of drilling in Alaska is quite polarizing, but that’s not to say there isn’t an agreement somewhere. Both former Vice President, Kamala Harris, and current President, Donald Trump, have agreed upon the fact that drilling, fracking, and mining should continue. However, that’s where the agreement ends. Donald Trump’s right-wing Project 2025 will drastically change the position that the Environmental Protection Agency has in America. If we are to look at Trump’s past, he rolled back over 100 environmental regulations in his first four years in office.
It’s important to note that gaining energy from renewable sources such as solar, wind, or geothermal is arguably more cost-effective over time and greener than mining and drilling. Many argue that in order to secure a healthier future, we must invest in renewable and cleaner energy sources, and others believe that the cost of these sources is unnecessarily high for a return on investment that will take many years to actualize.
President Trump’s right-wing phrase “drill, baby drill” comes with environmental consequences and economic benefits, no matter what, and there is validity on either side of the argument. The future of US energy policy depends on finding a way to meet in the middle, boosting our economy and environment, ensuring future generations a world where humanity and nature live in harmony.
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Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
In today’s Covering Climate Now newsletter, the source explains what the future could hold after Trump’s presidency and how the United States will return to battle climate change.
Donald Trump’s defeat in the US presidential election is the biggest development in the climate story in years, if only because it means that the story might not have a hellish ending after all. News columns and Zoom meetings are already abuzz with to-do lists and speculation about what the administration of president-elect Joe Biden will or will not be able to accomplish on climate change. But that is another story for another day.
Like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Trump’s impending departure from the most powerful office on earth is an event of epochal importance whose ramifications cannot be fully fathomed at this point, much less confidently forecast. Instead of trying to predict what will come next, this is a time to pause and reflect. Let’s recognize the magnitude of what America’s voters just did and ponder what lessons it holds for the challenges ahead.
Penn State University scientist Michael Mann spoke for many climate experts when he warned before the election that “a second term for Trump would be ‘game over’ for climate.” That was not partisan hyperbole but unsentimental physics and math. To avoid an apocalyptic future—one shaped by intensifying heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and storms—humanity must slash greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, scientists with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared in a landmark 2018 report. That remains an immensely difficult challenge, requiring shifts in economic behavior at a scale and speed the scientists called “unprecedented” in human history. But the task would have become outright impossible, Mann explained, if the world’s biggest economy spent a second four years galloping in the wrong direction under a re-elected president Trump, with his pro-fossil fuels policies and rejection of the Paris Agreement.
That is the suicidal scenario humanity just avoided.
But make no mistake: Many more mountains remain to be climbed in order to preserve a livable climate. For example, three of the world’s four biggest economies—the European Union, Japan, and China—have recently pledged to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 or, in China’s case, 2060; citizens, public officials, and business leaders will have to push those countries’ governments to make that scientifically correct target a political reality. The US must match these net-zero efforts, starting during the Biden administration and despite all-but-certain opposition from Republicans and other fossil fuel loyalists in Congress, and sustain that progress for decades. Meanwhile, business and financial interests the world over must shift investment and loans away from the climate de-stabilizing status quo and towards clean energy, regenerative agriculture, and other foundations of a post-carbon economy. And all this and more must be accomplished even as the diminished yet still-formidable wealth and power of the fossil-fuel industry continues obstructing progress.
Removing Trump, then, is a necessary first step—but it is only a first step, a prerequisite to the difficult journey ahead. Where to turn next?
Good journalism is vital to answering that question, because the overall US election results, including congressional races, yield decidedly mixed signals about how committed America’s voters are to climate action.
Young activists—with their moral fervor; massive street protests; insistence on the intersectionality of racial, class, gender, and environmental justice; and pathbreaking policy reforms such as the Green New Deal—have upended climate politics in recent years. In the US, the Sunrise Movement and other groups mounted extensive campaigns to register and mobilize voters, especially other young people, to oppose Trump and vote champions of climate action into office. Post-election, activists have claimed considerable credit for the outcome. Observing that the candidate “with the strongest climate plan in history just won the White House with the most votes ever,” Varshini Prakash, the executive director of Sunrise, said that “a big part of the story is an unprecedented level of youth voter turnout, especially among young people of color.”
On the other hand, more than 71 million Americans, very nearly half of the electorate, voted to re-elect a president whose climate policies promised certain death for the world they know and love. They did so even though pre-election polling consistently found that sizable, bipartisan majorities of the American public supported clean energy and other forms of climate action. And while Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is correct that Rep. Michael Levin, a fellow co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, kept his seat, quite a few other Green New Deal backers—including Sunrise-backed candidates Mike Siegel in Texas, Beth Doglio in Washington, and Marquita Bradshaw in Tennessee—were handily defeated.
Identifying the ways in which the climate crisis shaped political engagement this election cycle should be a top priority for newsrooms in the weeks ahead. There is no substitute for shoe-leather reporting that talks in-depth with as many voters as possible to understand how and why they voted as they did. Probing, open-minded interviews can drill down into individual races, comparing what political parties, candidates, activist groups and others claim they accomplished with what actual voters say as well as the final election tallies. Don’t put much stock in exit polls, which have increasingly been recognized as methodologically suspect. Better insights come from Pew Research Center analyses that match post-election voter surveys with official voting records. It takes months to produce such analyses, however; in the meantime, newsrooms should be cautious about drawing conclusions about what role climate change did or did not play in the 2020 US elections.
What’s clear is that the fall of Trump propels the climate story into a decisive new era. The world is about to see whether the US government will help humanity grasp a final opportunity to turn down the heat. For journalists on the climate beat, it’s an exciting, important time. There are indeed mountains still to climb in humanity’s quest for a livable climate future. Strong and steadfast journalism is essential to lighting the way.
Now, here’s your weekly sampling of the latest in climate news, from across the CCNow collaboration:
The Guardian examines the climate implications of Republicans possibly maintaining control of the Senate. Under the Biden administration “there will probably still be large-scale spending on green infrastructure, like renewable power, electric vehicles and transit. But any hopes for climate requirements for businesses, like a clean energy standard, would feel much farther off.”
Though a Republican Senate might prove intransigent on climate action, Biden could still use the “bully pulpit” of his office to advance his climate agenda, 350.org co-founder Jamie Henn argues in The Nation. A large majority of Americans favor climate action already, and Biden can use the presidential bully pulpit, Henn says, to keep climate in the spotlight and make opposition politically costly for Republicans.
The U.S. exited the Paris Climate Accord last week. InsideClimate News looks at what Biden, as president, will need to do to rejoin the international agreement. The task is trickier than it might seem—but critical. “If it’s backed up with ambitious domestic climate policies, a green recovery from the pandemic, support from Congress and a renewed push for international collaboration on various climate initiatives, the U.S. reentry could help reinvigorate worldwide efforts to transition to a net-zero carbon economy by 2050,” InsideClimate News explains.
From Bloomberg Green, a review of corporate campaign contributions reveals that a great majority of cash—even from companies that publicly tout their ambitious climate agendas—goes to lawmakers who vote against climate action. Of $68 million given to House and Senate members since 2018, nearly half went to candidates with a lifetime score of 10% or lower from the League of Conservation Voters (meaning the member has voted for environment-friendly legislation 10% or less of the time).
The YEARS Project has a series of strong, explainer-style videos with Rewiring America’s Saul Griffith, suggesting that Americans need not sacrifice their lifestyles to tackle the climate crisis. Powering the U.S. with renewable electricity could actually save families thousands of dollars every year, jump start a post-Covid economy, and create tens of millions of jobs. The key is to provide up-front financing that underwrites a shift of energy production from fossil fuels to electricity generated by solar, wind and other non-carbon sources, Griffith says. Videos here, here, and here.
Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
In today’s Covering Climate Now article, Supreme court nominee Amy Coney Barrett chose not to answer questions about the topic of climate change. Article is written by Guardian staff and agency for The Guardian.
Supreme court nominee accuses Democratic senator of soliciting an opinion ‘on a very contentious matter of public debate’
Supreme court nominee Amy Coney Barrett refused to say whether she accepts the science of climate change, under questioning from Kamala Harris, saying she lacked the expertise to know for sure and calling it a topic too controversial to get into.
On Wednesday, Barrett framed acknowledgment of a manmade climate crisis as a matter of policy, not science, when she was pressed at her confirmation hearing by Democratic senator from California.
Barrett said Harris, the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee as well as a member of the Senate judiciary committee, was trying to get her to state an opinion “on a very contentious matter of public debate, and I will not do that”.
The federal appeals court judge responded that she did think coronavirus was infectious and smoking caused cancer. She rebuffed Harris on the climate change question, however, for seeking to “solicit an opinion” on a “matter of public policy, especially one that is politically controversial”.
Scientists say climate change is a matter of established fact and that the damage is mostly caused by people burning oil, gas and coal. Climate experts, including federal scientists in the Trump administration, say increasingly fierce wildfires, hurricanes and other natural disasters point to the urgency of global warming.
When Harris asked Barrett “is climate change happening?” Barrett responded: “I will not answer that because it is contentious.”
Harris later tweeted: “Amy Coney Barrett will admit that Covid-19 is infectious. She’ll admit that smoking causes cancer. But whether climate change is real? Apparently that’s up for debate.”
Donald Trump, an ardent booster of the coal, oil and and gas industries, routinely questions and mocks the science of climate change, while Democratic rival Joe Biden is proposing a $2tn plan to wean Americans off fossil fuels to tackle the climate crisis.
The Trump administration has rolled back major Obama-era efforts to reduce fossil fuel emissions from cars and trucks and power plants. Many of the administration’s environmental and public health rollbacks are likely to wind up before the supreme court.
On Tuesday, Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican and another member of the committee considering Barrett’s confirmation, also asked Barrett what she thought about a series of issues, including climate change.
“I’ve read about climate change,” Barrett answered.
“And you have some opinions on climate change that you’ve thought about?” Kennedy asked.
“I’m certainly not a scientist,” Barrett replied, using a frequent refrain of more conservative Republicans on the matter. “I would not say that I have firm views on it.”
Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
In today’s Covering Climate Now Post, cities around the world are seeking Covid-19 spending to be made more “climate smart.” Article written by Andrew McCormick for The Nation.
This story is part of a collaboration between The Nation and InsideClimate News as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalistic collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. The piece below focuses on cities; to read how green recovery spending can impact rural areas, click here.
Trillions of dollars are on the table, as governments around the world seek to dig out from the economic crater caused by the coronavirus. With time also running short to avoid the worst of the climate crisis, the growing consensus among world leaders is that Covid-19 recovery spending must be “climate-smart.”
“This terrible challenge that has caused so much suffering is an opportunity,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said yesterday in an interview with Covering Climate Now. “We can either rebuild as it was, which is a huge mistake, because of the fragilities of the world, or we can rebuild a more inclusive and more sustainable economy and society.” The secretary general’s comments echoed statements in favor of a “green” stimulus by the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the International Energy Agency, and BlackRock, the world’s largest investments asset manager.
Climate-conscious stimulus spending creates more jobs per dollar invested than do expenditures on fossil fuel projects, according to an Oxford University study of more than 700 stimulus programs initiated after the 2008 global financial crisis. Nevertheless, with the exception of the EU, a majority of Covid-19 recovery spending to date by the world’s leading economies has reinforced the carbon-intensive status quo, propping up the very economic sectors and practices that have driven the climate crisis, including the fossil fuel and airline industries.
At the local level, however, leaders are calling for a better way.
In a recent letter coordinated by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, dozens of mayors from the world’s biggest cities declared that the economic recovery “should not be a return to ‘business as usual,’ because [business as usual is] on track for 3 degrees Celsius or more of over-heating.” What’s more, mayors say, their cities have existing and “shovel-ready” projects that could put climate-smart stimulus spending to work right away, if only national governments or central banks provide it.
“Mayors are in a position to really define what a recovery from Covid-19 looks like,” David Miller, a former mayor of Toronto and C40’s director of international diplomacy, said in an interview. “It’s not just their voices advocating to the national governments; it’s their actions demonstrating what’s possible.”
Here are five leading examples.
South Beach, Miami. (pisaphotography / Shutterstock)
IN MIAMI, A REPUBLICAN MAYOR EMBRACES CLIMATE-SMART STIMULUS SPENDING
Francis Suarez, Miami’s Republican mayor, has been consistently aggressive on climate. Dismissing the idea that taking climate change seriously makes him somehow less conservative, Suarez says the idea of a green stimulus is “music to my ears.”
In 2017, on the same day Suarez was elected, Miamians voted to authorize a $400 million “Miami Forever” bond that seeks to develop long-term resilience for the city, including against sea-level rise, flooding, and hurricane storm surge. That means building seawalls, installing stormwater pumps with valved outfalls (so water ejected from the city into water bodies is clean and doesn’t damage local ecosystems), and physically raising some city roads.
Flooding in the city is already routine, putting billions of dollars in property at risk and leaving many low-lying residents—nearly 60 percent of Miami-Dade county is less than six feet above sea level—anxiously looking for somewhere else to go. This past November, Suarez led Miami to declare a “climate change emergency.”
But $400 million isn’t nearly enough to prepare Miami for the full extent of what’s coming, Suarez said. And Covid-19 budget cuts have only complicated matters: Recently, the city weighed eliminating its chief resilience officer, for instance. “Miami Forever was sort of a down payment,” Suarez said. “It’s not going to solve all our problems. So, if we were to get a stimulus, we would be able to put the money to use right away.”
A green stimulus would also give a boost, Suarez said, to more ambitious, engineered solutions in the works. Large urban reservoirs, designed to trap and expel excess waters, are under construction along the inland Miami River, and along the ocean-side Biscayne Bay. The benefits are three-fold, Suarez said: elevating the sea wall, creating a buffer for the community in the form of a reservoir, and creating new public space. “And whenever you’re investing in public spaces, you get infinite return, because by their very nature they’re not going anywhere,” Suarez said.
Phoenix (Dreamfarmer / Shutterstock)
REVIVING A BATTERED SOLAR INDUSTRY TO HELP COOL PHOENIX
Phoenix is hot. It’s among the fastest-warming cities in the United States, with temperatures topping 100 degrees on 103 days in 2019. This summer was the city’s hottest season ever. And for four years running, Phoenix has set records for heat-related deaths.
This June, Phoenix’s Street Transportation Department fast-tracked a “cool pavement” pilot program. Roads in eight neighborhoods are being outfitted with a special, water-based treatment that is lighter in color than traditional asphalt and reflects sunlight instead of absorbing it. If the cool pavement proves effective in mitigating the urban “heat island” effect—and is resilient to Phoenix’s high temperatures, persistent sunshine, and monsoon storms—officials hope to implement it far and wide in the city.
Meanwhile, however, the Covid-19 lockdown has shrunk potential sources of funding for climate-smart projects. With ridership way down on public transit, fare collection has fallen by more than 50 percent. To ensure that cooling projects and sustainable development continue to reach the city’s residents, Phoenix needs a green stimulus, said Mayor Kate Gallego.
Federal support, Gallego said, would aid the expansion of cooled bus stops, shaded walking paths, and elevated solar panels around the city. The solar panels would provide not only electricity but also badly needed shade in open areas, especially in lower-income neighborhoods where regular access to air conditioning is not guaranteed.
In 2019, Arizona was the state with the sixth most solar-related jobs—last year, the state produced enough solar energy to power three-quarters of a million homes—and nearly 90 percent of those jobs reside in the Phoenix metropolitan area. But the economic slowdown following the coronavirus hit the solar industry hard. Thousands of solar jobs were lost, and plans to expand solar deployment in Arizona were dramatically scaled back. Federal funding, especially for workforce training and development, could help the industry bounce back.
The government could also provide up-front loans to help people and businesses, particularly in low-income areas, adopt solar and other green technologies, such as more efficient windows, air conditioners and other appliances. “There are so many energy efficiency products that pay for themselves over time, but there are upfront [financial] barriers to some people taking advantage,” Gallego explained.
“There are beautiful and important ideas waiting to happen,” the mayor added. “If the federal government could lead the way, there are so many transformative projects that could happen, just when local government needs them most.”
Bogotá, Colombia. (Alejo Miranda / Shutterstock)
BOGOTÁ’S MAYOR SAYS DEVELOPING NATIONS CAN BE SUSTAINABILITY LEADERS
In Colombia, the funds a city receives from the national government are more or less fixed in the constitution, based on the city’s population and relative wealth compared with other parts of the country. When it comes to a stimulus, then, it’s a matter less of lobbying for better support than of rebalancing priorities in Bogotá’s budget.
That’s fine for the new mayor, Claudia López Hernández, who already counted climate action among her foremost priorities in Bogotá. The coronavirus pandemic has caused a significant shortfall in tax collection, so this is a time for fearless and intelligent use of debt, López said. “This is a time to invest heavily and push. This moment [calls for] a Keynesian approach. If we start doing some neoliberal solution, we’ll only depress the economy.”
López, who began her four-year term this January, is the first member of Colombia’s center-left Green Party elected to Bogotá’s mayorship, generally viewed as the second-most-important elected position in the country after president. López is also the first woman—and the first gay woman—elected to the post. “We don’t want to just comply [with UN climate goals]. We want to be a world leader,” López said. “We want to be a big, developing city in a developing country leading not only in what we achieve but in how we achieve it.”
Equity and reconciliation are foremost on López’s mind, in a country that is recovering from a long and recent civil war. “What we do has to be sustainable in both climate change and social inclusion terms, otherwise it’s not really sustainable in the long-term,” López said. In the near-term, López plans to implement a universal basic income and invest heavily in education, especially post-secondary education, with a focus on skills that lead to green jobs in digital and knowledge-based economic sectors.
Before the pandemic hit, López’s government declared a general alarm for environmental pollution in the city, where air pollution levels often are more than twice as high as the World Health Organization recommends, contributing to thousands of deaths annually.
Cleaning up the air means changing how Bogotá gets around. Since March, the city has added 80 kilometers of new bikeways, adding to the 500-some already in place. By the end of her term, López hopes to add 300 kilometers more, taking space away from cars directly and giving it to bikers: “inverting the pyramid” of how transportation space is allocated in the city, López said, enough that 80 percent of commuters in the city will be able to get around by bike if they choose to. (López has set an example in this regard, biking seven kilometers from home to her inauguration ceremony in Bogotá’s Parque Simón Bolívar.) The city will also aim to replace its buses with lower-emissions models and push forward with a new, all-electric mass transit system.
All of these plans were already in the works, López said, but in the wake of Covid-19 she’s front-loading them and striking while the iron is hot. “We have no choice,” she explained. “Just like we have no choice to wear masks and social distance and invest to improve our health and testing systems, there is no point to discuss here. The way we produce, the way we live, the way we consume, it’s simply unsustainable for humanity. We need to act.”
Paris (Thomas Samson / AFP via Getty Images)
PARIS CHAMPIONS “THE 15-MINUTE CITY” TO CUT BOTH STRESS AND EMISSIONS
Around the world, pandemic shutdowns prompted cities to reclaim streets from cars and preserve them for bikes and pedestrians. In Paris, that work had been underway for years. Since her inauguration in 2014, mayor Anne Hidalgo has eliminated thousands of on-street parking spots across Paris, barred high-polluting vehicles from entering the city, and banned cars from some streets entirely, including along the river Seine. Still, the lockdown this spring offered a calming, if uneasy, glimpse of what a green future could look like in the City of Light. “We could breath,” Hidalgo recently told Time magazine. “We could hear birds.”
Environmental pledges were central to Hidalgo’s campaign for reelection, which she won this June by a landslide. Hidalgo championed “the 15-minute city,” a planning concept in which neighborhoods function as villages unto themselves, where virtually all needs can be met with 15 minutes or less of walking or biking: stores, restaurants, fitness centers, schools, banks, work centers, and more. The need for cars, in turn, decreases.
The 15-minute city, or la Ville du quart d’heure, represents a shift away from the conventional zoning wisdom, which separates residential and commercial districts, that has dominated city development over the past century, said Carlos Moreno, an urban planning advisor to Hidalgo and professor at the Sorbonne.
It’s not just Paris that’s going green. France is in the midst of a “green wave,” with environmental party candidates winning mayoral elections in June in large cities across the country, including Marseilles, Lyon, Strasbourg, and Bordeaux. The election marked a decided shift, commentators said, toward public concern for climate action, driven perhaps in part by the unbearable heat of recent summers in Western Europe; Emmanuel Macron, the centrist president, has suggested a referendum to amend the country’s constitution to include language about fighting climate change.
With people’s movement necessarily constricted, the pandemic shutdown was a great time to pilot many aspects of the 15-minute city, including a further reclamation of public space from cars, Moreno said. Now, he added, the 15-minute city will prove key to Paris’s economic revitalization. As part of a “big bang of proximity,” as Hidalgo puts it, the city will move to reimagine work life, revolutionize child and elder care, revisit dated real estate practices, and ensure that cafés and cultural opportunities are more ubiquitous in all 20 arrondissements. In theory, this will help rekindle economic activity citywide, Moreno said—including in parts of the city that were underdeveloped and marginalized under France’s old economic status quo.
But to do all of this, while also ensuring that those devastated financially by the coronavirus shutdown don’t fall through society’s cracks, will take spending. “Automatically, we will have a deficit,” Moreno said. The 15-minute city is a Paris project, and not something that requires explicit support or approval from France’s central government. But the central government can, Moreno said, help the city stay afloat financially as it charts a way forward in this difficult time.
Los Angeles. (4kodiak / Getty Images)
IN LOS ANGELES, A GREEN STIMULUS WOULD “SUPERCHARGE” THE SHIFT TO EVS
In the car capital of the world, it’s little surprise that plans for tackling climate change would focus on how Angelenos move.
As a part of the city’s extensive and thorough Green New Deal, announced by Mayor Eric Garcetti in the spring of 2019, work is underway to electrify the city’s bus fleet and to get more car owners into electric vehicles; the goal is for a complete, citywide transition to zero-emissions vehicles by 2050. That requires installing more EV chargers. The city’s Green New Deal calls for increasing the number of chargers from 8,000 at present to 10,000 by 2022 and 28,000 by 2028.
That was the plan, at least. But the coronavirus lockdown is forecast to cost the city’s transit agency, which partially funds green initiatives, $1.8 billion—a quarter of all forecast revenues for 2020, according to Doug Mensman, Los Angeles’s director of transportation. That doesn’t mean that the city’s Green New Deal projects will be scrapped, but all could be delayed or deferred. “It may take up to two years to recover to pre-Covid levels of financial security, so federal funding is imperative to backfill that loss,” Mensman said.
The transition to low-emissions cars, in particular, is funded by Low Carbon Fuel Standard credits, which reward the sale and consumption of cleaner fuels. But that requires a robust marketplace. Here, too, the federal government can play a role, in part by telling car manufacturers that low-emissions vehicles are the way of the future, said Lauren Faber O’Connor, LA’s chief sustainability officer. The Trump administration has done the opposite, rolling back fuel emissions standards for gas-powered vehicles.
A crucial element of the city’s Green New Deal, O’Connor said, is that all the city’s residents reap the benefits of change. That includes ensuring that jobs created through the Green New Deal reach historically underemployed populations. “We’re building a new economy. We need to be very deliberate about ensuring that everyone has the ability to participate in it.” To help low-income residents access electric vehicles, the city’s EV car-share program, BlueLA, offers steeply subsidized rates to consumers who need them. BlueLA is another program that could benefit immediately from climate-smart stimulus spending, O’Connor said. “We want to help people in every way to make the right decision.”
Los Angeles is also working to get drivers out of their cars and instead to choose public transportation, walking, bike share systems, or micromobility systems, such as scooters. “It’s not rocket science. The solutions are there,” O’Connor said. “We know what we need to do, and the strategies are no-regrets, economically and from a health perspective. All signs point in this direction. We just need the federal government to embrace it.”
Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
In today’s Covering Climate Now Post, we dive into current changes of environmental regulations and its lasting effects. Written by Vernon Loeb for Inside Climate News.
Pursuing an unrelenting fossil fuel agenda, Trump has scaled back or eliminated over 150 environment measures, expanded Arctic drilling, and denied climate science.
In the middle of his 44th month in office, two weeks before the start of the Republican convention in late August, President Trump rolled back Barack Obama’s last major environmental regulation, restricting methane leaks.
The move represented an environmental trifecta of sorts for the president, who had handed the oil and gas industry another gift in his quest for “American energy dominance,” thumbed his nose yet again at climate change and came close to fully dismantling his predecessor’s environment and climate legacy.
“I applaud and strongly support President Trump’s continued support for the oil and gas industry,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt said after the administration proposed its rollback of the Obama methane rules. “During these uncertain times, it makes no sense that we would be placing additional regulatory burdens on our vital industries which are not supported by sound science and do not consider economic impact.”
Environmental lawyers and climate activists who’ve been battling Trump since day one are in agreement that Trump, beginning with his decision to lead the nation out of the Paris climate accord, has done more to roll back and weaken environmental laws and regulations than any president in history.
Trump extolled the accomplishment and put a different spin on the superlative during a White House speech in July, saying, “We have removed nearly 25,000 pages of job destroying regulations, more than any other president by far in the history of our country.”
A few days earlier, as his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, unveiled a $2 trillion plan to combat climate change, Trump promoted what he called a “very dramatic” series of revisions to the National Environmental Policy Act, the foundation of environmental protection in the United States that had been signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon 50 years ago.
Environmentalists have used the law to block everything from pipelines to the destruction of natural habitats. Trump has now limited environmental reviews under the act to between one and two years and relieved federal agencies from having to consider a project’s impact on climate change during the review and permitting process.
“While our world is burning, President Trump is adding fuel to the fire by taking away our right to be informed and to protect ourselves from irreparable harm,” Gina McCarthy, Obama’s EPA administrator who now serves as president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said of weakening the act.
By late summer, Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law had counted 159 actions since Trump took office “to scale back or wholly eliminate climate mitigation and adaptation measures.” Many have been slowed or blocked by the courts.
“We are going to turn everything around,” Trump declared. “And quickly, very quickly.”
Once in office, Trump pursued a policy of unfettered support for fossil fuel development. He immediately signed memorandums to revive the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, projects blocked by Obama.
In early March 2017, his administration ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to stop gathering data from oil and gas companies needed to rein in leaks of methane, a potent short-lived climate pollutant. Fossil fuel infrastructure adds to greenhouse gas emissions, in part by leaking methane into the atmosphere.
He followed up, at the end of March, by issuing a sweeping executive order directing all federal agencies to target for elimination any rules that restrict U.S. production of energy. He set guidance to make it more difficult to put future regulations on fossil fuel industries and he moved to discard the use of a rigorous “social cost of carbon,” a regulatory measurement that puts a price on the future damage society will pay for every ton of carbon dioxide emitted.
As his first year in office came to a close, Trump and Alaska’s Republican senators inserted a provision into his signature tax cut legislation that called for opening the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling.
Many of Trump’s regulations have also been tailored to favor the coal industry, often at the expense of cheaper, cleaner energy. Robert Murray, founder of the now-bankrupt coal company Murray Energy and one of Trump’s closest industry allies, gave the president a “wish list” early on that became a virtual template for the administration’s rollback of regulations.
The administration swiftly lifted an Obama moratorium on new coal leases on federal lands, to no real benefit. The decline of coal continued unabated, but Trump remained an unapologetic champion of the dirtiest fossil fuel.
Trump’s War on Science
When U.S. government scientists released their latest volume of the National Climate Assessment in November 2018, it revealed much about the robust, sobering scientific consensus on climate change.
It also revealed the striking disconnect between Trump and essentially every authoritative institution on the threat of global warming.
The president rejected the assessment’s central findings—based on thousands of climate studies and involving 13 federal agencies—that emissions of carbon dioxide are caused by human activities, are already causing lasting economic damage and have to be brought rapidly to zero.
“I don’t believe it. No, no, I don’t believe it,” Trump told a reporter after the assessment’s release.
In almost every agency overseeing energy, the environment and health, people with little scientific background, or strong ties to industries they would be regulating, were appointed to scientific leadership positions.
One of the administration’s first actions was to order scientists and other employees at EPA and other agencies to halt public communications. Several federal scientists working on climate change have said they were silenced, sidelined or demoted. The words “climate change” have been purged from government reports and other reports have been buried.
The administration’s mistrust of scientists and its tendency toward science denialism would also become a prominent feature of its response to the coronavirus pandemic, when the president muzzled scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and chafed at the dire predictions of many epidemiological models for Covid-19 deaths.
With the nation in a state of emergency over the pandemic, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist who serves as Trump’s administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, moved in late March to fast-track the “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” rule. Wheeler replaced Scott Pruitt, an Oklahoma Republican who served as Trump’s first EPA administrator before resigning in 2018 amid an ethics scandal.
Critics call Wheeler’s transparency proposal Orwellian and say it would actually limit the use of human health science in environmental decision-making, by eliminating studies that rely on patients’ anonymous medical data.
While Trump and his conservative allies contend that the reliance on such studies amounts to “secret science,” scientists and leading medical authorities respond that it is standard practice to honor patient confidentiality in peer-reviewed studies.
Numerous studies, including one based on health data from 60 million Medicare recipients, have shown that one of the signature pollutants from the burning of fossil fuels, microscopic particles less than 2.5 microns in width—known as PM 2.5—kill as many as 52,100 Americans prematurely each year.
Less than a month later, as much of the nation remained locked down to halt the spread of Covid-19, a respiratory disease, the Trump administration rejected a recommendation from government scientists to strengthen the national air quality standard for particulate matter. Trump chose instead to maintain the current PM 2.5 standard, handing the fossil fuel industry a major victory.
A ‘Concerted Attack’ on Alaska, Public Lands
The Trump administration knew no bounds for its fossil fuel agenda, pursuing drilling from the outset on pristine public lands in Alaska and the lower 48 states, where oil companies have long sought access.
Less than four months after taking office, Trump moved to lift Obama’s offshore Arctic drilling ban and, then, in July 2017, gave Italian oil company Eni a quick green light to drill exploratory wells.
In March 2018, the Trump administration proposed a resumption of leasing in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea. President Obama, shortly before leaving office, had “permanently” withdrawn from drilling there.
By then, Trump had also carved 2 million acres of land from the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments in southern Utah in what amounted to the most sweeping reductions in protections for public land in U.S. history.
In September 2018, the Interior Department finalized a rule that loosens methane requirements for oil and gas operations on federal lands. A month later, the administration proposed a regulation to streamline and expedite oil and gas permits on national forest lands.
The following summer, the administration proposed weakening protections under the Endangered Species Act for threatened species and critical habitat. Shortly thereafter, the Interior Department commenced the public comment period on its plan for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that had been included in the 2017 tax bill.
In early August 2020, the president signed the Great American Outdoors Act appropriating $900 million a year to the Land and Water Conservation Fund and $9.5 billion over five years to reduce maintenance backlogs in the national parks.
The bipartisan legislation was sponsored by a House Democrat, but Trump extolled its passage as the most significant act in support of parklands since Teddy Roosevelt.
Still, the administration was preparing, on the eve of the Republican convention, to start selling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The sale was one of six pending projects in which Trump was pursuing more drilling, logging and mining in Alaska.
One environmentalist called it the most “concerted attack” in 30 years on Alaska’s natural resources.
All six of the Trump initiatives could still be blocked or rolled back in the courts, or undone by a new Biden administration working with a Democratic Congress. But for now, they are proceeding, with enormous consequences for Alaska’s environment, and global climate change.
One by One, Obama’s Main Climate Accomplishments Fell
The same could be said for President Obama’s environment and climate legacy: Trump’s relentless attacks could be wholly or partially undone by a new administration and Congress. But for now, Trump has accomplished his mission: a near total elimination of his predecessor’s most significant measures.
After countless piecemeal rollbacks during Trump’s first two and a half years in office, the administration in June 2019 launched its long-awaited attack on Obama’s signature plan to tackle climate change. Designed to cut emissions from coal-fired power plants, Obama called it the Clean Power Plan.
While the plan was challenged by industry and 27 states and blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court before Obama even left office, it encouraged many states to begin a process of planning for a transition away from coal-fired electricity at a time when cheaper natural gas and renewable energy already were forcing coal plants to shut down.
Next came Trump’s rollback of Obama’s 2012 automobile fuel efficiency standards, the single largest step any nation had taken to address global warming by cutting carbon emissions from cars and trucks. The weakened Trump plan will allow automakers to deploy fleets that average just 40 miles per gallon by 2025, instead of 54 mpg.
If Trump’s standard ultimately survives legal challenges, cars and trucks in the United States would emit nearly a billion tons more carbon dioxide during their lifetimes than they would have under the Obama standards.
Finally, in mid-August, Trump proposed the rollback of the methane rules, the last major Obama environmental regulation still standing. Methane, a super-pollutant, is 86 times more potent in warming the planet than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
In the climate realm, Obama is best known, of course, as the driving force behind the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Trump first announced in a Rose Garden speech in June 2017 that the U.S. would withdraw from the accord in three years, as soon as the treaty allowed.
So, right on cue, two years later, on Nov. 4, 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo notified the United Nations of the formal exit of the United States, activating the final one-year waiting period.
The actual U.S. withdrawal is set for Nov. 4, 2020, one day after the presidential election.
Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
In today’s Covering Climate Now post, Rolling Stone reports of a new podcast aimed at battling climate change and saving our planet. Article written by Daniel Kreps.
A new podcast, Spotify and Gimlet’s How to Save a Planet, is set to explore ways to solve the ongoing climate crisis and what we need to do to implement these necessary changes. The series will also examine topics like disaster prep, Europe’s Green New Deal and the similarities between the climate movement and the Black Lives Movement.
“Does climate change freak you out? Want to know what we, collectively, can do about it? Us too,” Spotify and Gimlet said of the podcast.
“How To Save A Planet is a podcast that asks the big questions: what do we need to do to solve the climate crisis, and how do we get it done? Join us, journalist Alex Blumberg and scientist and policy nerd Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, as we scour the Earth for solutions, talk to people who are making a difference, ask hard questions, crack dumb jokes and — episode by episode — figure out how to build the future we want.”
Ahead of the podcast’s August 20th premiere, Rolling Stone is sharing a trailer for the series:
The podcast also features Kendra Pierre-Louis, a former New York Times climate reporter, and Rachel Waldholz, a reporter focused on climate change, as well as interviews with prominent scientific experts like Mary Anne Hitt, Dr. Kate Marvel, Bren Smith and Colette Pichon Battle.
As evidenced by the trailer, How to Save a Planet tackles the key climate change question, “How screwed are we?” “We can choose to be completely screwed if we want to,” Marvel says in the trailer, “but we also have the ability to limit the damage. So we can choose whether we’re screwed.”
Additionally, the streaming service also posted a 12-minute prologue for the series ahead of its August 20th arrival.
Cover/featured image: All rights to Rolling Stone and Gimlet’s How to Save a Planet
Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
As the fashion industry continues to evolve, so do its consumers. Labels now read of “sustainability!” and “made ethically!”, as people take pride in knowing that a better future is coming. “Fast fashion” is now in the past, as the focus is now on what’s behind the scenes of production instead of what’s ready to wear.
“Fast fashion” can be categorized as the one of the most lucrative and busy markets that appeal to a massive pool of consumers- at any age, race, sex, etc. Google it and you will see the official definition: “inexpensive clothing produced rapidly by mass-market retailers in response to the latest trends.” Once seen on social media and how big a trend has gotten, most people want a designer inspired garment (or something trendy) for more than half of the price.
The problem with “Fast Fashion” stems from the work process that these garments need to be produced at. Usually, big retailers will use the work of people in largely populated countries who could be paid below minimum wage at the ease of the company and the disadvantage of its workers. (More on this topic in part II of this series)
The best introduction for what sustainable fashion is can be defined by Green Strategy. This term “implies continuous work to improve all stages of the product’s life cycle, from design, raw material production, manufacturing, transport, storage, marketing and final sale, to use, reuse, repair, remake and recycling of the product and its components.”
This resource divides the definition into an environmental and socio-economic perspective for separating the goals and for an overall better understanding. If you were to look from the environmental perspective, the product at hand would have passed through the best product life cycle by: “(a) ensuring efficient and careful use of natural resources (water, energy, land, soil, animals, plants, biodiversity, ecosystems, etc); (b) selecting renewable energy sources (wind, solar, etc) at every stage, and (c) maximizing repair, remake, reuse, and recycling of the product and its components. “
And in the socio-economic perspective, the companies should “work to improve present working conditions for workers on the field, in the factories, transportation chain, and stores, by aligning with good ethics, best practice and international codes of conduct.”
With that said, this brief introduction will allow us to dive deeper into the world where more sustainable options are available for both the garments that are made and the workers who make them. Here are facts taken from the official Sustainable Fashion Matterz website:
As this three part series progresses, we will be talking about the good and bad sides of the fashion industry’s trial at sustainability and how this can progress into a wide-spread market. With that said, we will also reveal how to do it yourselves and how to make an impact with your clothing choices. Until next time…
Batavia, Ohio – A recent sampling of Clermont County’s water system for chemicals called Per and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) found no detection of harmful substances in our water. As a real-life parallel to the movie Dark Waters, which portrayed a town in West Virginia whose groundwater is contaminated by a neighboring chemical company, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) has been sampling water systems across the state.
“This is very good news,” said Lyle Bloom, Director of Clermont County Water Resources. “All three of Clermont County’s water treatment plants were sampled as part of Ohio’s Statewide PFAS Action Plan for Drinking Water and there was no detection of PFAS from the raw or finished water at any of our treatment facilities.”
The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) has been sampling water systems across the state.
The plan calls for Ohio EPA to gather data from public water systems statewide to determine if PFAS are present in drinking water. The water system was sampled for six individual PFAS contaminants: PFOA, PFOS, GenX, PFBS, PFHxS, and PFNA.
PFAS are a group of man-made chemicals applied to many consumer goods to make them waterproof, stain resistant, or nonstick. PFAS are also used in products like cosmetics, fast food packaging, and a type of firefighting foam called aqueous film forming foam (AFFF) (which are used mainly on large spills of flammable liquids, such as jet fuel). PFAS is also called the “forever chemical” because they are not easily broken down by sunlight or other natural processes. They may remain in the environment for many years.
Recent sampling of Clermont County’s water system for chemicals called Per and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) found no detection of PFAS
PFAS can enter drinking water at sites where they are made, used, disposed of, or spilled. Some, but not all, studies in humans with PFAS exposure have shown that certain PFAS may: affect growth, learning and behavior of infants and children; lower a woman’s chance of getting pregnant; interfere with the body’s natural hormones; increase cholesterol levels; affect the immune system; or increase the risk of certain cancers. Scientists are still learning about the health effects of exposures to mixtures of PFAS.
In 2013, Clermont County performed sampling and analysis at all three of its water treatment plants. At that time, there was also zero detection of PFAS. There are currently no national drinking water standards (Maximum Contaminant Levels or MCLs) established for PFAS compounds; however, OEPA adopted Action Levels ranging from 21 to 140,000 ng/L for various PFAS chemicals. Ohio EPA will be establishing response protocols for public water systems in Ohio when action levels are exceeded, including public notification and issuance of drinking water advisories.
Loveland Magazine is one of the 400 news outlets worldwide, with a combined audience of over 2 billion people “Covering Climate Now”, a global journalism initiative committed to bringing more and better coverage to the defining story of our time.
The initiative, was co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review
Mihaela Manova is “Covering Climate Now” in Loveland, Ohio as an editor for Loveland Magazine
In today’s Covering Climate Now post (written by Joseph Winters for Grist), Winters sheds light on journalism’s “bothsidesism” in an effort to distinguish the decline of acknowledgement and action for climate change in the media.
Ever wonder why Americans have been so slow to support climate action? A new study lays some of the blame on media bias —for 30 years, three of the country’s most influential sources of news gave too much credence to arguments that the world shouldn’t take decisive action to mitigate climate change.
“Opponents of climate action have been given an outsize opportunity to sway this debate,” said Rachel Wetts, the author of the study. Her results were published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Wetts analyzed 1,768 press releases from business, government, and social advocacy organizations from 1985 to 2013, categorizing them by their stance on climate action. She then ran the press releases through plagiarism detection software to see how often they were featured in the country’s largest-circulation newspapers: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.
She found that even though 10 percent of the press releases contained messaging against climate action — arguments like, “It would be too expensive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” — 14 percent of them wound up in print. By contrast, the more prevalent press releases arguing for personal, corporate, or political action to tackle climate change were only covered 7 percent of the time. And the least-covered press releases came from groups with the most expertise on science and technology, such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and IBM.
Edward Mailbach, director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communications, called these conclusions unsettling. “Rather than marginalize self-interested voices and give prominence to expert voices, these papers did just the opposite,” he said.
How to explain the results? Wetts said one reason for the imbalance might be tied to journalistic norms of objectivity, which reporters and editors often interpret as a need to give at least two sides to every story, no matter the science. She called this “false balance,” because it can put unsubstantiated opinions on the same footing as well-established facts. In the case of climate change, she said that the practice has lent legitimacy to those who deny climate change, leading readers to believe that denial is “more than a fringe stance.”
Previous research has suggested that this practice — also known as “bothsidesism” — began to decline in the mid-2000s. But Wetts’ analysis found no statistically significant change in coverage over the 30-year period of the study. She also said that the trend couldn’t be explained by excessive coverage of anti-climate press releases in the business-friendly Wall Street Journal. Claims that steps to curb carbon emissions would be too costly or undermine U.S. energy independence, for instance, also found favor in the liberal-leaning New York Times.
As climate denial falls out of fashion, what’s been called “climate delay” has taken some of its space. This is when people acknowledge the reality of climate change but seek to put off large-scale efforts to address it, sometimes redirecting responsibility for the climate crisis to consumers and emphasizing the downsides of urgent action.
Wetts scanned press releases for both climate denial and delay — anything that argued against climate action — regardless of whether they accepted the science.
“Maybe people are covering climate deniers somewhat less,” Wetts said, “but then they’re substituting in other conservative voices instead. They’re talking about people who are opposed to climate action for some other reason besides denying the science.”
Jennifer Marlon, a senior researcher at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, acknowledged that the media environment has changed since the mid-2010s — The New York Times in particular has ramped up its climate coverage — but she suspects that false balance continues to influence the national conversation. For instance, newspapers might be better at contextualizing opponents of climate action, explaining that their views are outside the mainstream. “But those arguments are still out there and are very much in play,” Marlon said.
Wetts called on researchers to investigate the effects of media skew on public policy. The messages amplified by the media “can dampen political will to act on climate change,” she said in a statement, “with potentially serious consequences for how we as a society address — or fail to address — this issue.”
In 2013, Clermont County performed sampling and analysis at all three of its water treatment plants. At that time, there was also zero detection of PFAS. There are currently no national drinking water standards (Maximum Contaminant Levels or MCLs) established for PFAS compounds; however, OEPA adopted Action Levels ranging from 21 to 140,000 ng/L for various PFAS chemicals. Ohio EPA will be establishing response protocols for public water systems in Ohio when action levels are exceeded, including public notification and issuance of drinking water advisories.