Category Archives: climate change

Trump and the climate: His hot air on warming is far from the greatest threat

By Andrew Revkin, ProPublica, December 29, 2016

President-elect Donald J. Trump has long pledged to undertake a profound policy shift on climate change from the low-carbon course President Obama made a cornerstone of his eight years in the White House.

“This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop,” Trump tweeted a year ago.

In recent weeks, Trump doubled down, nominating champions of fossil fuels to several cabinet positions and peppering his transition team with longtime opponents of environmental regulations.

Both the rhetoric and the actions have provoked despair among many who fear a Trump presidency will tip the planet toward an overheated future, upending recent national and international efforts to stem emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and natural gas.

But will a President Trump noticeably affect the globe’s climate in ways that, say, a President Hillary Clinton would not have?

In recent weeks, a variety of consultants tracking climate and energy policy have used models to help address that question. ProPublica asked Andrew P. Jones at Climate Interactive, a nonprofit hub for such analysis, to run one such comparison.

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Following carbon dioxide through the atmosphere

 

NASA reports: A new NASA supercomputer project builds on the agency’s satellite measurements of carbon dioxide and combines them with a sophisticated Earth system model to provide one of the most realistic views yet of how this critical greenhouse gas moves through the atmosphere.

Scientists have tracked the rising concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide for decades using ground-based sensors in a few places. A high-resolution visualization of the new combined data product – generated by the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, using data from the agency’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite build and operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California – provides an entirely different perspective.

The 3-D visualization reveals in startling detail the complex patterns in which carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases, decreases and moves around the globe over the course of September 2014 to September 2015. [Continue reading…]

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Humans have been altering Earth for millennia, but only now are we wise to what we’re doing

David Grinspoon writes: As a planetary astrobiologist, I am focused on the major transitions in planetary evolution and the evolving relationship between planets and life. The scientific community is converging on the idea that we have entered a new epoch of Earth history, one in which the net activity of humans has become an agent of global change as powerful as the great forces of nature that shape continents and propel the evolution of species. This concept has garnered a lot of attention, and justly so. Thinking about the new epoch – often called the Anthropocene, or the age of humanity – challenges us to look at ourselves in the mirror of deep time, measured not in centuries or even in millennia, but over millions and billions of years. And yet much of the recent discussion and debate over the Anthropocene still does not come to terms with its full meaning and importance.

Various markers have been proposed for the starting date of the Anthropocene, such as the rise in CO2, isotopes from nuclear tests, the ‘Columbian exchange’ of species between hemispheres when Europeans colonised the Americas, or more ancient human modifications of the landscape or climate. The question in play here is: when did our world gain a quality that is uniquely human? Many species have had a major influence on the globe, but they don’t each get their own planetary transition in the geologic timescale. When did humans begin changing things in a way that no other species has ever changed Earth before? Making massive changes in landscapes is not unique to us. Beavers do plenty of that, for example, when they build dams, alter streams, cut down forests and create new meadows. Even changing global climate and initiating mass extinction is not a human first. Photosynthetic bacteria did that some 2.5 billion years ago.

What distinguishes humans from other world-changing organisms must be related to our great cleverness and adaptability; the power that comes from communicating, planning and working in social groups; transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next; and applying these skills toward altering our surroundings and expanding our habitable domains. However, people have been engaged in these activities for tens of thousands of years, and have produced many different environmental modifications proposed as markers of the Anthropocene’s beginning. Therefore, those definitions strike me as incomplete. Until now, the people causing the disturbances had no way of recognising or even conceiving of a global change. Yes, humans have been altering our planet for millennia, but there is something going on now that was not happening when we started doing all that world-changing. [Continue reading…]

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Obama bans drilling in parts of the Atlantic and the Arctic

The New York Times reports: President Obama announced on Tuesday what he called a permanent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling along wide areas of the Arctic and the Atlantic Seaboard as he tried to nail down an environmental legacy that cannot quickly be reversed by Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Obama invoked an obscure provision of a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which he said gives him the authority to act unilaterally. While some presidents have used that law to temporarily protect smaller portions of federal waters, Mr. Obama’s declaration of a permanent drilling ban from Virginia to Maine on the Atlantic and along much of Alaska’s coast is breaking new ground. The declaration’s fate will almost certainly be decided by the federal courts.

“It’s never been done before,” said Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at the University of Vermont. “There is no case law on this. It’s uncharted waters.”

The move — considered creative by supporters and abusive by opponents — is one of many efforts by Mr. Obama to protect the environmental policies he can from a successor who has vowed to roll them back. The president, in concert with United Nations leaders, rushed countries to ratify the Paris Agreement on climate change, putting the multinational accord into force in record time, before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

Environmentalists are already drawing comparisons between Mr. Obama’s use of the 1953 law to ban new drilling to what critics and opponents called his novel and audacious efforts to craft new climate change regulations: He turned to an obscure, rarely used provision in the 1970 Clean Air Act to write sweeping regulations that would require states to shift their electricity systems from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. [Continue reading…]

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Climate change forced over 1 million Africans from their homes in 2015

ThinkProgress reports: At least 12 million people lived in ongoing displacement caused by conflict, violence, and other disasters across the African continent in 2015. And in the future, climate change may be the lead driver of even greater displacement.

In the Africa Report on Internal Displacement  — a new report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre that focused on internal displacement across the entire African continent  — researchers found that “disasters triggered by rapid-onset natural hazards” forced 1.1 million people from their homes across 33 African countries last year. What’s more, disaster-induced displacement makes people more vulnerable from one year to the next and more susceptible to food insecurity since planting and harvesting become disrupted when farmers are absent.

“The figure of 12.4 million internally displaced people (IDPs) is more than double Africa’s 5.4 million refugee population across the continent, and is a reminder of the protracted nature of many conflicts in Africa,” Alexandra Bilak, the director of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), said in a statement. “But it still underestimates the full scale of Africa’s internal displacement crisis because data over time is not available for the millions more who become trapped in displacement as a result of disasters and development projects.” [Continue reading…]

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I’m a scientist who has gotten death threats. I fear what may happen under Trump

Michael E. Mann writes: My Penn State colleagues looked with horror at the police tape across my office door.

I had been opening mail at my desk that afternoon in August 2010 when a dusting of white powder fell from the folds of a letter. I dropped the letter, held my breath and slipped out the door as swiftly as I could, shutting it behind me. First I went to the bathroom to scrub my hands. Then I called the police.

It turned out to be cornstarch, not anthrax. And it was just one in a long series of threats I’ve received since the late 1990s, when my research illustrated the unprecedented nature of global warming, producing an upward-trending temperature curve whose shape has been likened to a hockey stick.

I’ve faced hostile investigations by politicians, demands for me to be fired from my job, threats against my life and even threats against my family. Those threats have diminished in recent years, as man-made climate change has become recognized as the overwhelming scientific consensus and as climate science has received the support of the federal government. But with the coming Trump administration, my colleagues and I are steeling ourselves for a renewed onslaught of intimidation, from inside and outside government. It would be bad for our work and bad for our planet. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump’s war on science

Lawrence M. Krauss writes: Last week, the Space, Science, and Technology subcommittee of the House of Representatives tweeted a misleading story from Breitbart News: “Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists.” (There is always some drop in temperature when El Niño transitions into La Niña — but there has been no anomalous plunge.) Under normal circumstances, this tweet wouldn’t be so surprising: Lamar Smith, the chair of the committee since 2013, is a well-known climate-change denier. But these are not normal times. The tweet is best interpreted as something new: a warning shot. It’s a sign of things to come — a declaration of the Trump Administration’s intent to sideline science.

In a 1946 essay, George Orwell wrote that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” It’s not just that we’re easily misled. It’s that, by “impudently twisting the facts,” we can convince ourselves of “things which we know to be untrue.” A whole society, he wrote, can deceive itself “for an indefinite time,” and the only check on that mass delusion is that “sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality.” Science is one source of that solid reality. The Trump Administration seems determined to keep it at bay, and the consequences for society and the environment will be profound.

The first sign of Trump’s intention to spread lies about empirical reality, “1984”-style, was, of course, the appointment of Steve Bannon, the former executive chairman of the Breitbart News Network, as Trump’s “senior counselor and strategist.” This year, Breitbart hosted stories with titles such as “1001 Reasons Why Global Warming Is So Totally Over in 2016,” despite the fact that 2016 is now overwhelmingly on track to be the hottest year on record, beating 2015, which beat 2014, which beat 2013. Such stories do more than spread disinformation. Their purpose is the creation of an alternative reality — one in which scientific evidence is a sham — so that hyperbole and fearmongering can divide and conquer the public. [Continue reading…]

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Michael Klare: Donald Trump’s energy nostalgia and the path to hell

The Trump administration-in-formation is a stew of generals, billionaires, and multimillionaires — and as in the case of retired Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, the likely new secretary of defense, even the military men seem to have made more than a few bucks in these last years.  In retirement, Mattis, for instance, joined the board of military-industrial giant General Dynamics as one of 13 “independent directors,” reportedly amassing at least $900,000 in company stock and another $600,000 in cold cash.

Oh yes, and there’s one other requirement for admission to the Trump administration: your basic civilian appointee must be ready to demolish the system he or she is to head. Betsy DeVos, the president-elect’s pick for education secretary, wants to take apart public education; Tom Price, the future secretary of health and human services, is eager to dismantle Obamacare and Medicare; Scott Pruitt, the proposed new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, seems to want to tear that agency limb from limb; and the announced new “labor” secretary (and you really do have to put that in scare quotes), fast food CEO Andy Puzder, is against raising the minimum wage and thinks the automation of the workplace is a total plus, since machines can’t take vacations or arrive late.

Let’s face it, the most extreme government of our lifetime is going to be a demolition derby. Think of it as the Reagan administration of the 1980s on steroids — and keep in mind that Donald Trump will be the president of a far more fragile country than the one Ronald Reagan and his cronies presided over.  Things could begin to fall apart fast for ordinary Americans.  For instance, the new Republican Congress is expected to swiftly pass a promised “repeal and delay” version of the obliteration of Obamacare, officially wiping that program off the books and yet postponing its departure and the arrival of whatever is to replace it until after the 2018 elections.  In the interim, however, the result is likely to be a “zombie” health care marketplace from which insurance companies are expected to begin to jump ship, potentially leaving significant numbers of those 20 million Americans who got medical coverage for the first time via Obamacare with nothing.  And after EPA chief Pruitt has helped let Donald Trump’s “energy revolution” of extreme fossil fuel exploitation loose to do its damnedest and, as TomDispatch regular Michael Klare makes clear today, America’s skies are once again veritable smog-fests, there will be plenty more health needs on whatever’s left of the horizon.

Donald Trump, as Politico points out, is already at war with labor, and prospectively with those “failing government schools,” and the American safety net, and the environment, not to mention the planet — and that’s before we even get to actual war, which will be overseen by a crew of Islamo– and Irano-phobes.  If, as Klare points out today, Trump himself has a serious case of nostalgia for the America of his youth (and mine), with its untrammeled growth and its fossil-fueled wonders, don’t think that nostalgia doesn’t reign in military affairs, too.  In that case, however, it wouldn’t be for the oily vistas of the mid-twentieth century, but perhaps for the age of the Crusades. Tom Engelhardt

Drowning the world in oil
Trump’s carbon-obsessed energy policy and the planetary nightmare to come
By Michael T. Klare

Scroll through Donald Trump’s campaign promises or listen to his speeches and you could easily conclude that his energy policy consists of little more than a wish list drawn up by the major fossil fuel companies: lift environmental restrictions on oil and natural gas extraction, build the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, open more federal lands to drilling, withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, kill Obama’s Clean Power Plan, revive the coal mining industry, and so on and so forth ad infinitum.  In fact, many of his proposals have simply been lifted straight from the talking points of top energy industry officials and their lavishly financed allies in Congress.

If, however, you take a closer look at this morass of pro-carbon proposals, an obvious, if as yet unnoted, contradiction quickly becomes apparent. Were all Trump’s policies to be enacted — and the appointment of the climate-change denier and industry-friendly attorney general of Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt, to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suggests the attempt will be made — not all segments of the energy industry will flourish.  Instead, many fossil fuel companies will be annihilated, thanks to the rock-bottom fuel prices produced by a colossal oversupply of oil, coal, and natural gas.

Indeed, stop thinking of Trump’s energy policy as primarily aimed at helping the fossil fuel companies (although some will surely benefit).  Think of it instead as a nostalgic compulsion aimed at restoring a long-vanished America in which coal plants, steel mills, and gas-guzzling automobiles were the designated indicators of progress, while concern over pollution — let alone climate change — was yet to be an issue.

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Trump questionnaire recalls dark history of ideology-driven science

By Paul N. Edwards, University of Michigan

President-elect Trump has called global warming “bullshit” and a “Chinese hoax.” He has promised to withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate treaty and to “bring back coal,” the world’s dirtiest, most carbon-intensive fuel. The incoming administration has paraded a roster of climate change deniers for top jobs. On Dec. 13, Trump named former Texas Governor Rick Perry, another climate change denier, to lead the Department of Energy (DoE), an agency Perry said he would eliminate altogether during his 2011 presidential campaign.

Just days earlier, the Trump transition team presented the DoE with a 74-point questionnaire that has raised alarm among employees because the questions appear to target people whose work is related to climate change.

For me, as a historian of science and technology, the questionnaire – bluntly characterized by one DoE official as a “hit list” – is starkly reminiscent of the worst excesses of ideology-driven science, seen everywhere from the U.S. Red Scare of the 1950s to the Soviet and Nazi regimes of the 1930s.

The questionnaire asks for a list of “all DoE employees or contractors” who attended the annual Conferences of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – a binding treaty commitment of the U.S., signed by George H. W. Bush in 1992. Another question seeks the names of all employees involved in meetings of the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon, responsible for technical guidance quantifying the economic benefits of avoided climate change.

It also targets the scientific staff of DoE’s national laboratories. It requests lists of all professional societies scientists belong to, all their publications, all websites they maintain or contribute to, and “all other positions… paid and unpaid,” which they may hold. These requests, too, are likely aimed at climate scientists, since most of the national labs conduct research related to climate change, including climate modeling, data analysis and data storage.

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‘Trump is creating a government of, by, and for the oil and gas industry’

Kate Sheppard writes: Rex Tillerson at the State Department. Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency. Rick Perry at the Department of Energy. Jeff Sessions at the Department of Justice.

If environmentalists found themselves in some kind of paralyzing hypnagogia on Nov. 9, the day they realized that there was no waking up from this was Dec. 13.

Tillerson is the CEO of Exxon Mobil, a company that spent decades and millions of dollars supporting climate change denial and is currently under investigation for doing so. Tillerson has personally argued that climate change is no biggie because “we will adapt to this.” If he’s confirmed as secretary of state, he will be in the position of deciding whether the U.S. stays involved in the Paris climate agreement and whether to approve massive international oil pipelines like Keystone XL.

Pruitt is the attorney general of Oklahoma and has described himself as “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.” He is currently suing the EPA ― the agency he could lead ― to stop the Obama administration’s regulatory effort to curb emissions from power plants, and he was caught letting oil industry lawyers draft letters to regulators on his behalf.

Perry, the former Republican governor of Texas, is expected to be nominated to lead a department whose name he once famously forgot while pledging to eliminate it. He has said that climate change is just a “theory that remains unproven” and that climate scientists have “manipulated data to keep the money rolling in.” A few years ago, Perry’s top environmental officials in Texas removed all mentions of climate change from a report on rising sea levels in Galveston Bay. There are already signs that the Trump team wants to undertake a climate purge at the Energy Department; transition officials sent a questionnaire to the department last week, asking for the names of employees who had worked on the issue. [Continue reading…]

Anders Åslund writes: President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of ExxonMobil’s CEO Rex Tillerson is profoundly disturbing. Tillerson will receive a “nest egg” of some $300 million from ExxonMobil when he retires. These future benefits will be paid over many years making Tillerson deeply dependent on the success of ExxonMobil, not least in Russia, which accounts for a significant share of its investment. This is a serious conflict of interest. Worse, it involves a hostile foreign power. Hopefully, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would consider such a conflict of interest disqualifying.

While ExxonMobil seems to have abided by the US sanctions against Russia, the company has persistently protested against these sanctions since they were introduced in July 2014. Thus, Tillerson stands out as one of the greatest opponents of the current US policy on Russia. Tillerson has also developed close personal relations with Vladimir Putin and Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin. While that might have benefitted the business of ExxonMobil, these are not people that are commonly considered decent. [Continue reading…]

Tillerson’s nomination has been warmly received by prominent Republicans with ties to ExxonMobil.

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Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump

The Washington Post reports: Alarmed that decades of crucial climate measurements could vanish under a hostile Trump administration, scientists have begun a feverish attempt to copy reams of government data onto independent servers in hopes of safeguarding it from any political interference.

The efforts include a “guerrilla archiving” event in Toronto, where experts will copy irreplaceable public data, meetings at the University of Pennsylvania focused on how to download as much federal data as possible in the coming weeks, and a collaboration of scientists and database experts who are compiling an online site to harbor scientific information.

“Something that seemed a little paranoid to me before all of a sudden seems potentially realistic, or at least something you’d want to hedge against,” said Nick Santos, an environmental researcher at the University of California at Davis, who over the weekend began copying government climate data onto a nongovernment server, where it will remain available to the public. “Doing this can only be a good thing. Hopefully they leave everything in place. But if not, we’re planning for that.” [Continue reading…]

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Bill Gates and investors worth $170 billion are launching a fund to fight climate change through energy innovation

Quartz reports: Bill Gates is leading a more than $1 billion fund focused on fighting climate change by investing in clean energy innovation.

The Microsoft co-founder and his all-star line-up of fellow investors plan to announce tomorrow the Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, which will begin making investments next year. The BEV fund, which has a 20-year duration, aims to invest in the commercialization of new technologies that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in areas including electricity generation and storage, transportation, industrial processes, agriculture, and energy-system efficiency.

“Anything that leads to cheap, clean, reliable energy we’re open-minded to,” says Gates, who is serving as chairman of BEV and anticipates being actively involved.

The directors of BEV include Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, venture capitalists John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, former energy hedge fund manager John Arnold, and SAP cofounder Hasso Plattner. The combined net worth of the directors is nearly $170 billion, based on estimates of their individual wealth by Bloomberg and Forbes. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday that “nobody really knows” whether climate change is real and that he is “studying” whether the United States should withdraw from the global warming agreement struck in Paris a year ago.

In an interview with “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace, Trump said he’s “very open-minded” on whether climate change is underway but has serious concerns about how President Obama’s efforts to cut carbon emissions have undercut America’s global competitiveness.

“I’m still open-minded. Nobody really knows,” Trump said. “Look, I’m somebody that gets it, and nobody really knows. It’s not something that’s so hard and fast. I do know this: Other countries are eating our lunch.”[Continue reading…]

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Trump transition team for Energy Department seeks names of employees involved in climate meetings

The Washington Post reports: Donald Trump’s transition team has issued a list of 74 questions for the Energy Department, asking agency officials to identify which employees and contractors have worked on forging an international climate pact as well as domestic efforts to cut the nation’s carbon output.

The questionnaire requests a list of those individuals who have taken part in international climate talks over the past five years and “which programs within DOE are essential to meeting the goals of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan.”

Trump and his team have vowed to dismantle specific aspects of Obama’s climate policies, and Trump has questioned the reality of climate change. The questionnaire, which one Energy Department official described as unusually “intrusive” and a matter for departmental lawyers, has raised concern that the Trump transition team is trying to figure out how to target the people, including civil servants, who have helped implement policies under Obama.

Thousands of scientists have signed petitions calling on the president-elect and his team to respect scientific integrity and refrain from singling out individual researchers whose work might conflict with the new administration’s policy goals. This potential clash could prompt a major schism within the federal government, with many career officials waging a battle against incoming political appointees.

While there have been many instances of political appointees and career scientists clashing in various administrations, what is novel is the request for the names of so many individual scientists, and the fact that it comes during the transition period, before the Trump administration has even taken power. This may be a signal of even more intense politicization after the inauguration. [Continue reading…]

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The violent costs of the global palm-oil boom

Jocelyn C. Zuckerman writes: Just after nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning in June, an environmental activist named Bill Kayong was shot and killed while sitting in his pickup truck, waiting for a traffic light to change in the Malaysian city of Miri, on the island of Borneo. Kayong had been working with a group of villagers who were trying to reclaim land that the local government had transferred to a Malaysian palm-oil company. A few days after the murder, the police identified Stephen Lee Chee Kiang, a director and major shareholder of the company, Tung Huat Niah Plantation, as a suspect in the crime, but Kiang flew to Australia before he could be questioned by authorities. (Three other individuals were eventually charged in the case.) Around the world, environmental and human-rights activists added Kayong’s death to the tally of violent incidents connected to the production of palm oil, which has quietly become one of the most indispensable substances on Earth.

The World Wildlife Fund says that half of the items currently on American grocery-store shelves contain some form of palm oil. (“You’re soaking in it,” went the old tagline of the palm-oil-based dish detergent Palmolive.) The move away from trans fats in processed foods was a particular boon for the industry — semi-solid at room temperature, palm oil emerged as an ideal swap-in for the partially hydrogenated oils formerly used to enhance the texture, flavor, and shelf life of products like cookies and crackers. Since 2002, when a report from the National Academy of Sciences found a link between trans fats and heart disease, palm-oil imports to the U.S. have risen four hundred and forty-six per cent, and have topped a million metric tons in recent years. In addition to its widespread use in processed foods, the oil palm plant, Elaeis guineensis, lurks in one form or another in many cosmetics and personal-care products, such as shampoos, soaps, and lipsticks. It’s also used in animal feeds and industrial materials, and, increasingly, as a biofuel.

Elaeis guineensis is native to West Africa, and while its cultivation has spread recently in Central and South America and across equatorial Africa, eighty-five per cent of the palm oil produced today comes from Indonesia or Malaysia. Rising palm-oil exports have helped both countries make enormous economic strides in the past few decades, but the growth has come at a cost: deforestation rates in both places have been listed among the highest in the world. The habitat destruction brought about by palm-oil production has helped push scores of the region’s species, including orangutans and Sumatran elephants, rhinos, and tigers, to the brink of extinction. And, mostly thanks to palm-oil production, Indonesia can boast some of the world’s highest levels of greenhouse-gas emissions.

Yet it is violence — against local populations, farmers, and activists — that has human-rights groups closely watching the palm-oil industry. [Continue reading…]

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Scott Pruitt, Trump’s climate-denying EPA pick, is worse than you think

Jay Michaelson writes: Every scientist not on the corporate dole is upset about Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

Like Betsy DeVos, who wants to destroy public education, and Jeff Sessions, who wants to destroy the Voting Rights Act, Pruitt is against the very laws he will soon be in charge of enforcing.

And the more you know about environmental law, the more you know that the Oklahoma attorney general and his minions could be way, way, way worse at the EPA than pundits and scientists have said. Yes, he’s a climate denier. Yes, he’s sued the EPA five times to prevent regulations (and lost every time). And yes, he has openly defied court orders on same-sex marriage and abortion, investigated the Humane Society for daring to back an animal welfare law, and opined that public schools should distribute religious materials to children. But he’s about to enjoy free rein to gut environmental regulations, without Congress or the courts to stop him.

That’s because environmental laws are deliberately broad, delegating massive authority to the EPA, which then has broad discretion to determine how to implement them. If you think about it, this makes sense. Congress isn’t populated by scientists but by politicians. So they set policy goals — clean air, clean water, toxin-free environments — and leave it up to the experts to determine how to meet them.

Most of the nuts and bolts of environmental law have thus been created not by Congress but by generations of EPA regulations and implementations. Clean air standards for factories, thresholds for pesticides in fuels or toxic chemicals in detergents and fuels, pollution levels for rivers — all of these, and many more, exist in regulations contained in the Code of Federal Regulations.

Usually, it’s conservatives who have complained about this. First, of course, they tend not to like anything that restricts unfettered capitalism, and environmental law certainly does that. Second, they tend not to like big government and unaccountable bureaucracy, and reams of agency-generated regulations are exactly that. And they tend to be wary of executive power in general.
Thus, for the last 40 years, corporations, industry groups, conservative think tanks, and Republican lawmakers have sued the bejeezus out of the EPA (and other agencies), challenging just about every regulation the agency puts out.

And usually, they have lost. Over several decades, the Supreme Court has tended to side more with the EPA than with its challengers. There have been exceptions — one of Justice Antonin Scalia’s last opinions required the EPA to limit mercury emissions only when it is cost-effective for corporations to do so. But in general, the court has observed that the “enabling statutes” passed by Congress deliberately cede authority to the EPA. Without congressional authority, the EPA couldn’t make up regulations and decide how to enforce them. But with it, the agency can.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. Now it’s arch-conservatives who will be controlling the EPA, with exactly the same level of authority as the environmentalists who preceded them. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump picks Scott Pruitt, ally of fossil fuel industry, to lead EPA

The New York Times reports: President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and a close ally of the fossil fuel industry, to run the Environmental Protection Agency, a transition official said, signaling Mr. Trump’s determination to dismantle President Obama’s efforts to counter climate change.

Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the president-elect’s comments during the campaign. Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to “cancel” the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr. Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a “war on coal.”

Mr. Pruitt, 48, who has emerged as a hero to conservative activists, is also one of a number of Republican attorneys general who have formed an alliance with some of the nation’s top energy producers to push back against the Obama regulatory agenda, a 2014 investigation by The New York Times revealed.

At the heart of Mr. Obama’s efforts to tackle climate change are a collection of E.P.A. regulations aimed at forcing power plants to significantly reduce their emissions of planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution. It will not be possible for Mr. Trump to unilaterally cancel the rules, which were released under the 1970 Clean Air Act. But it would be possible for a legally experienced E.P.A. chief to substantially weaken, delay or slowly dismantle them.

As Oklahoma’s top law enforcement official, Mr. Pruitt has fought environmental regulations — particularly the climate change rules. Although Mr. Obama’s rules were not completed until 2015, Mr. Pruitt was one of a handful of attorneys general, along with Greg Abbott of Texas, who began planning as early as 2014 for a coordinated legal effort to fight them. That resulted in a 28-state lawsuit against the administration’s rules. A decision on the case is pending in a federal court, but it is widely expected to advance to the Supreme Court. [Continue reading…]

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The Holocene hangover: it is time for humanity to make fundamental changes

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson writes: As a child growing up in the early 1980s, I often daydreamed of space exploration and interstellar frontiers. The leap into outer space seemed tantalizingly close. In the science fiction stories I read, the chronology of the future was also the potential biography of adulthood. One story projected a settlement on Mars in 1995; another depicted the grim labor of asteroid mining a decade later; a third imagined an encounter with alien artifacts in the Alpha Centauri system after 2020. The common thread in these stories, easily intuited even by an 11-year-old, was the lesson that the Earth was not our home.

Now the science fiction dream of leaving the planet behind appears to be coming true. One of the most striking effects of climate change — often remarked upon by writers — is its power to unsettle our basic understanding of the modern world. Our planet is changing into a strange and unstable new environment, in a process seemingly outside technological control. The fossil fuels that once promised mastery over nature have turned out to be tools of destruction, disturbing the basic biogeochemical processes that make our world habitable. Even the recent past is no longer what we thought it was. Scientists are telling us that the whole territory of modern history, from the end of World War II to the present, forms the threshold to a new geological epoch.

Our new planet is emerging quickly. The global climate is only one of nine earth system processes under threat. Land use is changing rapidly thanks to urbanization, agriculture, and population pressure. The rate of biodiversity loss is increasing in many ecosystems. Acidification is affecting marine biodiversity as well as the capacity of oceans to absorb carbon dioxide. The supply of fresh water in many regions is deteriorating. Aerosol loading and ozone depletion threaten the stability of the earth system’s atmosphere. Industrial agriculture has perturbed the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. Finally, chemical pollution may pose a risk not just at the local or regional level but also worldwide. Indeed, the planet’s biosphere bears so many marks of anthropogenic influence that it no longer possible to uphold the age-old distinction between the realm of wilderness and the world of human habitation.

To call attention to this unprecedented danger, the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the ecologist Eugene Stoermer in 2000 proposed a new name for the geological epoch we inhabit: the Anthropocene. For the first time, humans have become the prime drivers of the planetary climate. We have left behind the relatively stable pattern of natural variability that governed the environment in the Holocene epoch, beginning some 11,700 years ago. In the original formulation, Crutzen and Stoermer picked 1784 as the origin of the new epoch: the year of James Watt’s patent for a steam engine with a separate condenser. Britain’s early transition into the fossil fuel economy marked the end of the Holocene. More recently, the Working Group on the Anthropocene, established to validate the epoch in formal stratigraphic terms, has shifted the chronology of the Anthropocene from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Acceleration—the economic boom after World War II. [Continue reading…]

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