Tag: climate change

Trump Adviser Compares Climate Scientists To Nazis, ISIS

William Happer Credit: Screengrab

Trump is preparing a panel to attack climate science headed by William Happer, who has compared climate scientists to Nazis, mass murderers, and members of the terrorist group ISIS.

The Washington Post reports that Happer, who is already a senior director in Trump’s National Security Council, is preparing the panel to attack research that has determined climate change is a national security threat.

“The initiative represents the Trump administration’s most recent attempt to question the findings of federal scientists,” the Post notes.

View the complete February 20 article by Oliver Willis with The American Independent on the National Website here.

House Transportation Committee to review transportation impacts on climate change in Minnesota

SAINT PAUL, Minn. – On Thursday, February 14 at 12:45 p.m., the House Transportation Finance and Policy Committee will discuss new data from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency identifying transportation as the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state. The committee will hear testimony regarding electrification of the state’s transportation systems.

Developing electric infrastructure of cars, buses, and other ways in which the state can reduce transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions will be up for discussion.

WHAT: House Transportation Finance and Policy Committee hearing on transportation and climate

WHO: Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, state agencies, businesses and environmental advocates discussing transportation, climate, and electrification of state transportation systems.

WHERE: Room 10, Minnesota State Office Building, 100 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., Saint Paul, 55155

WHEN: Thursday, February 14, 2019, 12:45-2:15 p.m.

By 2080, global warming will make New York City feel like Arkansas

“Heading south” will have a whole new meaning in a few decades.

New York City, welcome to Arkansas. Minneapolis, say hello to Kansas. And San Francisco, your new home is L.A.

Because of global warming, hundreds of millions of Americans will have to adapt to dramatically new climates by 2080, a study published Tuesday suggests.

View the complete February 12 article by Doyle Rice on The USA Today website here.

Democrats unveil Green New Deal that would push government to make radical changes

The resolution would force lawmakers to take a position on the deal, and its goals of remaking the U.S. economy within a decade

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez listens as Sen. Ed Markey speaks as Democrats announce their Green New Deal resolution outside of the Capitol on Thursday. Credit: Bill Clark, CQ Roll Call

A resolution outlining the goals of an ambitious progressive plan to overhaul the U.S. economy across all sectors, from finance to energy to social services, was rolled out Thursday with the aim of driving future legislation.

The Green New Deal resolution sponsored in the House by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and in the Senate by Massachusetts Democrat Edward J. Markey cites urgent warnings in two recent major climate reports to compel the federal government to act urgently on the radical changes they say would make the U.S. resilient and sustainable across all sectors.

In an October report, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that unless urgent and drastic action is taken, global temperatures could rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) between 2030 and 2052, which could have catastrophic repercussions for the economy, the environment, humans and wildlife.

View the complete February 7 article by Elvina Nawaguna on The Roll Call website here.

Building Progressive Infrastructure

How Infrastructure Investments Can Create Jobs, Strengthen Communities, and Tackle the Climate Crisis

Overview

Congress should pass a comprehensive infrastructure package to create jobs and raise wages, tackle the climate crisis, and improve access to opportunity and social equity.

Introduction and summary

Infrastructure is the foundation that makes the economy possible, shaping how Americans move, communicate, and earn a living. It is also essential to national competitiveness. When done right, infrastructure investments produce broad-based prosperity for American workers, facilitating social mobility and access to jobs, essential services, educational opportunities, people, and ideas.

Unfortunately, this social and economic foundation is crumbling. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gives the United States an overall infrastructure grade of D+, estimating a more than $2 trillion funding gap between needs and expected spending by all levels of government over the next 10 years.1 This gap is troubling, because inadequate facilities drag down economic productivity—especially in growing, dynamic regions. Many smaller communities struggle to repair crumbling older facilities, pushing out businesses and creating a downward spiral of population loss and a reduced tax base.

View the complete Janaury 31 article by Kevin DeGood, Alison Cassady, Karla Walter and Rejane Frederick on the Center for American Progress website here.

NOAA scientists debunk Trump’s ‘global waming’ tweets with a cartoon

Cartoon tweeted out bu NOAA scientists Tuesday morning. Credi: NOAA

“Winter storms don’t prove that global warming isn’t happening.”

U.S. government climate scientists took the unprecedented step of tweeting out a rebuttal to President Donald Trump’s recent tweets implying that winter storms and cold weather in the U.S. somehow disprove global warming.

“Large parts of the Country are suffering from tremendous amounts of snow and near record setting cold,” Trump tweeted out last week. “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”

On Monday evening, he tweeted again: “What the hell is going on with Global Waming? [sic] Please come back fast, we need you!”

View the complete January 29 article by Joe Romm on the ThinkProgress website here.

Gone in a Generation

Credit: Stuart W. Palley, The Washington Post

Across America, climate change is already disrupting lives

The continental United States is 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was a century ago. Seas at the coasts are nine inches higher. The damage is mounting from these fundamental changes, and Americans are living it. These are their stories.

Michael Golden has hunted elk on this mountain in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley his entire life. It’s a tradition he shared with his father. But his son is growing up in a starkly different environment.

Montana has warmed 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950, considerably more than the United States as a whole. That added heat is contributing to raging forest fires and bark beetle outbreaks, a combination that has devastated the state’s forests.

View the complete January 29 article by Zoeann Murphy and Chris Mooney on The Washington Post website here.

As ‘Green New Deal’ talk gains traction, lawmakers who deny climate change are on the decline

Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, Credit: Xinhua/Liu Jie

New data indicates lawmakers who align themselves with the president’s climate rhetoric are losing ground.

As support for proposals that would broadly address climate change gain support and prominence on a national level, the number of lawmakers who deny or are skeptical of global warming is on the decline.

According to new analysis from the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF), there are 30 fewer lawmakers in Congress compared to last year who deny some element of climate change — whether it’s fully denying that global temperatures are increasing at all or just that warming is exacerbated by human activity.  (ThinkProgress is an editorially independent publication housed at the CAP Action Fund.)

That means there are total 150 lawmakers who deny or downplay climate change, all Republicans, who were singled out by the report. They represent 28 percent of the 116th Congress. Together, these lawmakers have received an average lifetime contribution of $455,730.55 from fossil fuel political action committees (PACs), CEOs, and employees.

View the complete January 28 article by E.A. Crunden on the ThinkProgress website here.

Scientists say Trump’s first 2 years have been fatal for a livable climate

AaN activist prepares a balloon painted to look like Plante Earth and decorated with orange hair in the likeness of U.S. President Donald Trump during a climate protest prior to a meeting of EU leaders in 2017 Credit: Sean Gallup Getty Images

“Cause of death: the Trump presidency.”

Two years in, the presidency of Donald Trump has been a possibly fatal disaster for our livable climate, a number of climate and clean energy experts told ThinkProgress.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, countless climate experts voiced their concern about Trump, who had infamously called climate change a “hoax” and said it was “created by and for the Chinese.” Trump promised to undo Obama-era environmental laws, bring back coal power, and withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, in which the world’s nations unanimously agreed to start ratcheting down carbon pollution.

For all these reasons, climatologist Michael Mann wrote in October 2016 that Trump was “a threat to the planet.”

View the complete January 18 article by Joe Romm on the Think Progress website here.

Climate Change’s Giant Impact on the Economy: 4 Key Issues

Wading through flood waters from Tropical Storm Harvey in Houston in August 2017. “We know we can adapt to slow changes,” a Yale economist said. “Rapid changes are the ones that would be most damaging and painful.” Credit: Jonathan Bachman, Reuters

Many of the big economic questions in coming decades will come down to just how extreme the weather will be, and how to value the future versus the present.

By now, it’s clear that climate change poses environmental risks beyond anything seen in the modern age. But we’re only starting to come to grips with the potential economic effects.

Using increasingly sophisticated modeling, researchers are calculating how each tenth of a degree of global warming is likely to play out in economic terms. Their projections carry large bands of uncertainty, because of the vagaries of human behavior and the remaining questions about how quickly the planet will respond to the buildup of greenhouse gases.

A government report in November raised the prospect that a warmer planet could mean a big hit to G.D.P. in the coming decades.

View the complete January 17 article by Neil Irwin on The New York Times website here.