Tag: climate change

Four hours of debate — and 50 proposed amendments — but climate and energy omnibus approved

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Is renewable energy cheaper, cleaner and capable of making Minnesota a more self-sufficient state? Or is it dirty, inefficient and expensive?

It depends upon who you ask. But it seems to be the direction the vast majority of electrical utilities are going. And moving Minnesota’s energy production and use toward a carbon-free future is the overriding focus of the omnibus climate and energy finance bill.

The bill, as amended, was approved by the House Climate and Energy Finance and Policy Committee Friday, but not before navigating through 50 proposed amendments and four hours of debate that stretched over two days. Continue reading.

Gov. Walz and Lt. Gov. Flanagan Update: April 9, 2021

Governor Walz Launches Industry-Focused COVID-19 Vaccine Outreach Campaign

Campaign kicks off with food service industry workers

Gov. Walz at COVID Vaccination Center

As a part of the broader statewide ‘Roll Up Your Sleeves, MN’ campaign to make sure all Minnesotans have access to the COVID-19 vaccine,  Governor Walz launched an outreach effort focused on connecting workers in critical industries to the resources they need to get vaccinated. In the coming weeks, workers in priority frontline sectors will be vaccinated at community vaccination sites.

Continue reading “Gov. Walz and Lt. Gov. Flanagan Update: April 9, 2021”

Biden’s Big Bet: Tackling Climate Change Will Create Jobs, Not Kill Them

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WASHINGTON — In 2017, as Donald J. Trump was announcing the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the largest global effort to attack planetary warming, he declared, “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”

On Wednesday, President Biden traveled to Pittsburgh to try to make the opposite case: that the workers Mr. Trump was appealing to have more to gain from combating climate change than to lose.

It is going to be a tough bet. To Mr. Biden, a $2 trillion infrastructure plan is about creating union jobs, hundreds of thousands of them, in wind and solar power, electric cars and road- and bridge-building. Even those more basic infrastructure projects would have a climate angle: the new roads and bridges would be built to withstand the high waters and brutal storms of a changing climate.

“I am a union guy. I support unions, unions built the middle class. It is about time you start to get a piece of the action,” Mr. Biden said in Pittsburgh. Continue reading.

Janet Yellen: Climate change poses ‘existential threat’ to financial markets

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The FSOC focused on climate for the first time since Congress established the body in 2010.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Wednesday called climate change “an existential threat” and the biggest emerging risk to the health of the U.S. financial system, pledging to marshal regulatory forces to guard against its harmful effects.

Yellen made the promise during her inaugural appearance as the head of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a panel of top regulators tasked with policing Wall Street behavior that has the potential to crash the entire economy.

The council held its first public meeting under Yellen’s leadership Wednesday and focused on climate for the first time since Congress established the body in 2010. The group includes the heads of the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Continue reading.

Biden plans to dramatically increase offshore wind energy development

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The White House rolled out initiatives Monday aimed at jump-starting the development of large offshore wind farms that together would power over 10 million homes.

Why it matters: The target of 30 gigawatts of generating capacity by 2030 would go well beyond the big projects already on the drawing boards.

  • Research firm BloombergNEF currently forecasts that the U.S. will have 19.64 gigawatts of offshore wind power capacity in 2030. Continue reading.

Trolling and disinformation is actively keeping us from fighting climate change

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As inhabitants of the planet Earth, we desperately need to address climate change in order to ensure the health of our global ecosystem. The first step just might be dealing with the toxic waste getting dumped into our social media feeds. According to a new study published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science in the journal Ambio, disinformation and trolling across social platforms is making the effort to educate the public about the very real threats of climate change even more difficult.

The paper, which will be presented as part of the first-ever Nobel Prize Summitnext month, found that the same conditions of social media that have poisoned discourse and sowed doubt about democratic institutions and elections has similarly eroded trust in science. “Isolationism stimulated by social media-boosted discontent may hamper global cooperation needed to curb global warming, biodiversity loss, wealth concentration, and other trends,” the researchers wrote. They warn that “targeted attacks” on social media, including trolling campaigns, bot farms, and algorithm-generated content can all be used to alter and influence human behavior.

This type of disinformation is dangerous because of how quickly it can spread, entirely unchecked and unregulated. Systems designed to catch misinformation, like the types of fact-checks applied by platforms like Facebook and Twitter, often don’t act fast enough to stop the spread of misinformation. Research has found that intervening early is essential to stopping bad information before it can gain traction. Continue reading.

In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers

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The warming atmosphere is causing an arm of the powerful Gulf Stream to weaken, some scientists fear.

IT’S ONE OF THE MIGHTIEST RIVERS you will never see, carrying some 30 times more water than all the world’s freshwater rivers combined. In the North Atlantic, one arm of the Gulf Stream breaks toward Iceland, transporting vast amounts of warmth far northward, by one estimate supplying Scandinavia with heat equivalent to 78,000 times its current energy use. Without this current — a heat pump on a planetary scale — scientists believe that great swaths of the world might look quite different.

Now, a spate of studies, including one published last week, suggests this northern portion of the Gulf Stream and the deep ocean currents it’s connected to may be slowing. Pushing the bounds of oceanography, scientists have slung necklace-like sensor arrays across the Atlantic to better understand the complex network of currents that the Gulf Stream belongs to, not only at the surface, but hundreds of feet deep.

“We’re all wishing it’s not true,” Peter de Menocal, a paleoceanographer and president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said of the changing ocean currents. “Because if that happens, it’s just a monstrous change.” Continue reading.

Reversing Trump, Interior Department Moves Swiftly on Climate Change

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WASHINGTON — As the Interior Department awaits its new secretary, the agency is already moving to lock in key parts of President Biden’s environmental agenda, particularly on oil and gas restrictions, laying the groundwork to fulfill some of the administration’s most consequential climate change promises.

Representative Deb Haaland of New Mexico, Mr. Biden’s nominee to lead the department, faces a showdown vote in the Senate likely later this month, amid vocal Republican concern for her past positions against oil and gas drilling. But even without her, an agency that spent much of the past four years opening vast swaths of land to commercial exploitation has pulled an abrupt about-face.

The department has suspended lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico under an early executive order imposing a temporary freeze on new drilling leases on all public lands and waters and requiring a review of the leasing program. It has frozen drilling activity in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, delayed Trump-era rollbacks on protections of migratory birds and the northern spotted owl, and taken the first steps in restoring two national monuments in Utah and one off the Atlantic coast that Mr. Trump largely dismantled. Continue reading.

Scientists see stronger evidence of slowing Atlantic Ocean circulation, an ‘Achilles’ heel’ of the climate

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The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, a system of currents, is weaker than it has been in 1,000 years

A growing body of evidence suggests that a massive change is underway in the sensitive circulation system of the Atlantic Ocean, a group of scientists said Thursday.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), a system of currents that includes the Florida Current and the Gulf Stream, is now “in its weakest state in over a millennium,” these experts say. This has implications for everything from the climate of Europe to the rates of sea-level rise along the U.S. East Coast.

Although evidence of the system’s weakening has been published before, the new research cites 11 sources of “proxy” evidence of the circulation’s strength, including clues hidden in seafloor mud as well as patterns of ocean temperatures. The enormous flow has been directly measured only since 2004, too short a period to definitively establish a trend, which makes these indirect measures critical for understanding its behavior. Continue reading.

Climate Threats Could Mean Big Jumps in Insurance Costs This Year

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The federal government is revising rates for flood coverage on April 1. New data suggests premiums need to increase sharply for some homes.

WASHINGTON — The cost of federal flood insurance will need to increase significantly in much of the country to meet the growing risks of climate change, new data suggests, creating a political headache for the Biden administration.

The National Flood Insurance Program, which provides the vast majority of United States flood insurance policies, would have to quadruple premiums on high-risk homes inside floodplains to reflect the risks they already face, according to data issued on Monday by the First Street Foundation, a group of academics and experts that models flood risks.

By 2050, First Street projected, increased flooding tied to climate change will require a sevenfold increase. Continue reading.