The developer of the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline abandoned the project Wednesday after a decade-plus effort.
Why it matters: TC Energy’s decision ends one of the century’s highest profile battles over climate change and energy. But the move is unsurprising.
After over 175 years of publishing, Scientific American made a major editorial announcement on Monday: the historic U.S. magazine will officially adopt the term “climate emergency” for its coverage of the human-caused crisis.
The move came as part of a new initiative led by Covering Climate Now, a global consortium of media outlets dedicated to improving climate coverage. SciAm was one of the nine initial signatories of the Climate Emergency Statement.
Common Dreams is a member of the consortium, has signed on to the new statement, and has been using the term climate emergency in our reporting for several years. Continue reading.
Biden’s EPA will rewrite the plan for cutting carbon emissions from power plants, which it already planned to do
An appeals court on Tuesday vacated the Trump administration’s primary environmental regulation for electric utilities, sending it back to the Environmental Protection Agency and accusing the agency of “fundamentally” misunderstanding the law.
The court directed EPA to start over with a new plan to regulate greenhouse emissions under federal law. The agency is required to regulate air pollutants, including greenhouse gases, though the incoming Biden administration had said it would strengthen domestic carbon regulations on the books even before Tuesday’s ruling.
Issued unanimously by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the ruling is a blow to President Donald Trump on his final full day in office and provides President-elect Joe Biden a legal mandate to draft a new rule to tackle domestic greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector. Continue reading.
I, Joseph R. Biden Jr., President of the United States of America, having seen and considered the Paris Agreement, done at Paris on December 12, 2015, do hereby accept the said Agreement and every article and clause thereof on behalf of the United States of America.
Done at Washington this 20th day of January, 2021.
JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.
Trump’s EPA administrator wants to redraw our nation’s mercury standard to benefit coal-fired power plants that belch out nearly half the nation’s mercury emissions. But the agency’s Science Advisory Board is balking.
The board, headed by Trump administration appointee Michael Honeycutt who previously opposed tougher mercury standards, told the EPA it needed to look again at how much mercury people get from fish and the harm from mercury.
“EPA should instigate a new risk assessment,” the board wrote. Continue reading.
Now that the 2010s are officially over, it’s safe to say that there were a lot of changes over the past 10 years. Notably, weather across the world took a dramatic turn and the last decade is now officially the hottest on record. With many experts saying it’s a reflection of global warming, this trend could continue into the 2020s.
If you’ve been keeping track of the weather, this news doesn’t come as a surprise. In 2019, June, August, and September broke records as the hottest of their respective months. July 2019 ended up beating out all of them as the warmest month ever recorded.
With all of those record breaking months in 2019 alone, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a November report predicting 2019 to be the second-hottest-year ever recorded was to be expected. Spoiler: they were right and 2019 ended up breaking over 100,000 records in the U.S. alone. Continue reading.
President Trump‘s proposed overhaul of a bedrock environmental law aims to streamline project reviews, but those changes are likely to hit minority communities and those with high poverty rates the hardest, experts warn.
The White House on Thursday detailed a sweeping proposal to revamp the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) which requires environmental reviews for big proposed projects like highways or pipelines, as well as when polluting industries plan to discharge into the air or water.
The changes eyed by the Trump administration would limit the scope of the environmental analysis required for such projects, including allowing greater industry involvement in environmental reviews and diminishing the role climate change plays in those assessments. Continue reading.
Rural communities face many challenges, and climate change is only making matters worse. Flooding and drought are hitting rural communities hard, causing massive financial losses for farmers, who are also facing low commodity prices and bearing the brunt of an international trade war. And the rural landscape is changing as farmland is being lost to the same development pressures that are contributing to climate change. These challenges are creating a palpable sense among rural residents that their way of life is changing and under threat.
Shifting weather patterns are one of the most noticeable changes. For example, in Iowa, the past 18 months have been the wettest on record, according to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.1Iowa climatologists cite climate change as one of the key causes of flooding in the state. Across the Midwest, flooding caused $3 billion in damage in 2019.2 According to an August 2019 poll, 1 in 4 Iowans say that they or someone in their family has experienced property damage or other economic hardships as a result of flooding or severe storm damage in the past 12 months.3
Flooding has been especially devastating for farmers. Fields saturated with water forced farmers to leave more than 19 million acres of agricultural land unplanted in 2019.4 Crops that they did manage to plant remained in the ground, as the wet soil coupled with propane shortages (due to pipeline distribution constraints) prevented farmers from drying and storing their grain. These challenges, along with a global trade war, rising input costs, and low prices have been a catastrophic combination, with farm debt projected to hit $415 billion in 2019.5 In addition, from October 2018 through September 2019, Chapter 12 bankruptcies for farms increased 24 percent, with 40 percent occurring in the Midwestern states.6 These factors raise serious questions about the prospects for agriculture and rural livelihoods in the future. Continue reading.
WASHINGTON — As the state of Virginia prepared for a major bridge and tunnel expansion in the tidewaters of the Chesapeake Bay last year, engineers understood that the nesting grounds of 25,000 gulls, black skimmers, royal terns and other seabirds were about to be plowed under.
To compensate, they considered developing an artificial island as a haven. Then in June 2018, the Trump administration stepped in. While the federal government “appreciates” the state’s efforts, new rules in Washington had eliminated criminal penalties for “incidental” migratory bird deaths that came in the course of normal business, administration officials advised. Such conservation measures were now “purely voluntary.”
The state ended its island planning. Continue reading
