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ecfruchtman

Fiat Chrysler cheated on diesel emissions EPA says - 0 views

money.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by ecfruchtman on 13 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • ecfruchtman on 13 Jan 17
     
    The accusation from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board (CARB)is similar to the scandal that has plagued automaker Volkswagen for more than a year. Just this week, Volkswagen agreed to pay $4.3 billion to settle charges it cheated on diesel emissions tests with more than 590,000 diesel-powered U.S.
ecfruchtman

EPA: Fiat Chrysler used software to cheat on emissions tests - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...re-to-cheat-on-emissions-tests

shared by ecfruchtman on 12 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • ecfruchtman on 12 Jan 17
     
    The Environmental Protection Agency accused Fiat Chrysler Thursday of using software that enabled some of its diesel trucks to cheat on emissions tests. The news caused Fiat Chrysler's stock price to drop more than 13 percent in trading Thursday morning. Fiat Chrysler did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
bodycot

Scott Pruitt, Trump's E.P.A. Pick, Backed Industry Donors Over Regulators - The New Yor... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ott-pruitt-trump-epa-pick.html

shared by bodycot on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
    • bodycot
      bodycot on 16 Jan 17
       
      Donald Trump pick for EPA
malonema1

Industrial Facilities' Toxic Chemical Releases Dropped 8% in 2015 - Environmental Leader - 0 views

www.environmentalleader.com/...cal-releases-dropped-8-in-2015

industrial economy environment

shared by malonema1 on 16 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Air emissions of toxic chemicals from industrial facilities saw an 8 percent decrease from 2014 to 2015, continuing their 10-year decline, according to the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) National Analysis.
  • hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, toluene and mercury were among chemicals with significantly lower air releases at TRI-covered facilitie
  • This year’s report also includes a section highlighting the new Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, which updated the Toxic Substances Control Act
abbykleman

'Just racist': EPA cuts will hit black and Hispanic communities the hardest - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-cuts-pollution-justice-office

shared by abbykleman on 03 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 03 Mar 17
     
    Planned cuts at the Environmental Protection Agency are set to fall heaviest upon communities of color across the US that already suffer disproportionately from toxic pollution, green groups have warned. Donald Trump's administration is proposing a 25% reduction in the EPA's $8.1bn budget, eliminating nearly 3,000 jobs and several programs including the agency's environmental justice office.
Javier E

Me and My Jetta: How VW Broke My Heart - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tta-how-vw-broke-my-heart.html

VW scandal car pollution

shared by Javier E on 26 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Those of us who purchased the Jetta TGTBT (too good to be true) are now stuck with vehicles we cannot drive without making other people our victims. That’s because the copious NOx and hydrocarbons they emit become low-level ozone pollution. Ozone clings over urbanized areas — notably the Boston-to-Washington corridor and much of California — and the deaths it causes are a lot more real than the “kills” taking place around a Volkswagen conference table. Human-caused ozone pollution inflames and injures lungs, aggravates cardiovascular disorders, and contributes to the 500,000 or so asthma hospitalizations every year, many of them among children under 15. According to a 2013 study in the journal Environmental Research Letters, it also kills about 470,000 people a year worldwide.
  • I stayed awake much of Monday night fretting about this, and about a poisonous stew of corporate scandals — the news that Johnson & Johnson, my old paragon of corporate decency, had deliberately promoted off-label sales of a drug that caused old people to suffer strokes, and teenage boys to develop breasts; the smart-aleck investor who jacked up the price of a 62-year-old drug by 4,000 percent; Takata’s exploding airbags; G.M.’s deadly ignition switches; and of course the guy who knowingly sold tainted peanut butter that killed nine people and sickened hundreds.
  • we need to acknowledge that some of our favorite phrases — “clean diesel,” “green car” and apparently also “corporate responsibility” — are just a contradiction in terms. But that shouldn’t let us off the hook either. Every time we complacently accept some company’s green-scamming promises, we allow ourselves to become the gullible partners in crimes against one another, and the Earth. And that makes us all just a nation of willing fools.
katyshannon

Supreme Court Deals Blow to Obama's Efforts to Regulate Coal Emissions - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...oal-emissions-regulations.html

supreme court deals blow obama efforts coal emissions new york times US history crisis policy

shared by katyshannon on 11 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • In a major setback for President Obama’s climate change agenda, the Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the administration’s effort to combat global warming by regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants.
  • The brief order was not the last word on the case, which is most likely to return to the Supreme Court after an appeals court considers an expedited challenge from 29 states and dozens of corporations and industry groups.But the Supreme Court’s willingness to issue a stay while the case proceeds was an early hint that the program could face a skeptical reception from the justices.The 5-to-4 vote, with the court’s four liberal members dissenting, was unprecedented — the Supreme Court had never before granted a request to halt a regulation before review by a federal appeals court.
  • In negotiating that deal, which requires every country to enact policies to lower emissions, Mr. Obama pointed to the power plant rule as evidence that the United States would take ambitious action, and that other countries should follow.
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  • Opponents of Mr. Obama’s climate policy called the court’s action historic.“We are thrilled that the Supreme Court realized the rule’s immediate impact and froze its implementation, protecting workers and saving countless dollars as our fight against its legality continues,” said Patrick Morrisey, the attorney general of West Virginia, which has led the 29-state legal challenge.
  • The challenged regulation, which was issued last summer by the Environmental Protection Agency, requires states to make major cuts to greenhouse gas pollution created by electric power plants, the nation’s largest source of such emissions. The plan could transform the nation’s electricity system, cutting emissions from existing power plants by a third by 2030, from a 2005 baseline, by closing hundreds of heavily polluting coal-fired plants and increasing production of wind and solar power. Continue reading the main story
  • “Climate change is the most significant environmental challenge of our day, and it is already affecting national public health, welfare and the environment,” Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. wrote in a brief urging the Supreme Court to reject a request for a stay while the case moves forward.
  • The regulation calls for states to submit compliance plans by September, though they may seek a two-year extension. The first deadline for power plants to reduce their emissions is in 2022, with full compliance not required until 2030.The states challenging the regulation, led mostly by Republicans and many with economies that rely on coal mining or coal-fired power, sued to stop what they called “the most far-reaching and burdensome rule the E.P.A. has ever forced onto the states.”
  • The states urged the Supreme Court to take immediate action to block what they called a “power grab” under which “the federal environmental regulator seeks to reorganize the energy grids in nearly every state in the nation.” Though the first emission reduction obligations do not take effect until 2022, the states said they had already started to spend money and shift resources.
Javier E

Farms aren't tossing perfectly good produce. You are. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...perfectly-good-produce-you-are

farm food waste recycling

shared by Javier E on 12 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • f food waste were a country, it would be the world’s third-largest emitter of CO2, after China and the United States. In our nation alone, we throw away some 63 million tons of food a year, even as 40 million Americans are considered food insecure.
  • “Approximately 20% of organic and conventional produce in the U.S. never leaves the farm just because it looks a little different. . . . We think that’s crazy.”
  • advocates are getting the problem exactly backward. Less than 20 percent of total food waste happens at farms and packinghouses, where the ugly-produce movement works its magic, according to ReFED, a nonprofit dedicated to researching food waste policies.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The vast majority of waste — more than 80 percent — is generated by homes and consumer-facing businesses like grocery stores and restaurants.
  • The hype surrounding this movement is inflated by the public’s ignorance of the food supply chain.
  • Despite the dramatic anecdotes about truckloads of landfilled crops, little of farm waste is due to merely “cosmetic” blemishes. Much of it is bruised or weeping goods that can quickly break down and rot the entire crate. With many crops, misshapen produce knocks against its neighbors during transit, poking holes and jeopardizing entire bins. “Drops” (produce that’s fallen on the ground) are left behind because otherwise they tend to cause food-poisoning outbreaks. Farms till excessively damaged produce back into the soil along with the crop’s stems and leaves, recycling their nutrients.
  • North America’s packinghouses discard about 1 percent of the produce that enters their doors, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization — usually because it’s straight-up rotten.
  • For the most part, ugly-produce initiatives are simply gentrifying second-grade produce that was already being eaten — just not, perhaps, by upscale shoppers. It’s the food equivalent of Lyft “inventing” a bus.
  • The most effective ways to tackle that
  • boil down to the old mantra to reduce, reuse and recycle.
  • The single biggest source of U.S. food waste, accounting for 43 percent of the problem, is our own homes
  • Most of all, we should sync our shopping habits with our eating habits. Affluent shoppers waste the most produce because of how much of it they buy and then trash
  • The most important behavioral change consumers can make to address food waste isn’t to buy certain kinds of produce. It’s to actually eat what we bring home.
  • Homes, food service and grocery stores generate 7.8 million tons of food waste per year that can’t be salvaged, accounting for 12 percent of the problem. This waste needs to be recycled. The Environmental Protection Agency says that the United States composts only 5 percent of its food waste. (Compare that with 15 percent in the European Union.)
  • Biochar — made by heating inedible food and other organic waste until it becomes inert, odorless, nutrient-rich charcoal — could be a very effective way to recycle food waste, but it’s underutilized, because the equipment to do it at municipal scale is so new. Like composting, biochar can be used as a fertilizer, returning food waste’s nutrients back to the soil. Unlike composting, it can handle food waste that’s mixed with general nonhazardous trash — no need for costly separate collection and handling. Biochar also sequesters carbon for centuries.
  • But the infrastructure — donation matching software, cold storage and refrigerated trucks — to handle large donations of eggs, dairy, meat, bread and produce is still being built. Funding more food bank infrastructure, educating potential donors about liability laws, creating more donation tax incentives and standardizing food safety regulations would recover up to 996,000 tons of food, or 1.7 billion meals, per year, according to ReFED.
  • For certain crops like berries, tomatoes, leafy greens and cucumbers, farms can take advantage of state and federal funds that would help them switch from open-field to hoophouse or greenhouse methods. Already common in East Asia and Europe, these methods boost yields and dramatically reduce how much of the crop is too damaged to leave the farm
  • As long as we eat fresh food instead of shelf-stable nutrient bars, perishability is part of the bargain. The only way to completely eliminate food waste is to abolish fresh food. Beyond that, all we can do is manage the waste.
delgadool

Senate Confirms Biden's Pick to Lead E.P.A. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...michael-s-regan-epa-biden.html

politics climate

shared by delgadool on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Michael S. Regan, the former top environmental regulator for North Carolina, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and drive some of the Biden administration’s biggest climate and regulatory policies.
  • Climate Fwd: A new administration, an ongoing climate emergency — and a ton of news. Our newsletter will help you stay on top of it.
  • His nomination was approved by a vote of 66-34, with all Democrats and 16 Republicans voting in favor
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • “There are few leadership roles in the federal government that have greater responsibility for setting environmental goals and climate policies than the Environmental Protection Agency,” said Senator Tom Carper, Democrat of Delaware and chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Mr. Regan, he said, “is the person for the job at this critical moment.”
  • Mr. Regan will be the first Black man to serve as E.P.A. administrator.
  • Those potentially overlapping authorities have already provoked criticism from Republicans, some of whom voted against Mr. Regan’s confirmation because they said they did not know who is truly in charge of the administration’s climate and environment policy.
  • “Mr. Regan has plenty of experience,” Senator McConnell said. “The problem is what he’s poised to do with it.”
  • “I really liked meeting and getting to know Michael Regan,” Senator Capito said. “He is a dedicated public servant and an honest man.”
  • The Clean Power Plan rule met resistance at the Supreme Court, but the Trump version was struck down altogether.
Javier E

Opinion | Republican Science Denial Has Nasty Real-World Consequences - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...epublicans-science-denial.html

science denial GOP history consequences NYT

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 24 - No Cached
  • In April 2020, 14 percent reported to Pew Research that they had little or no faith that scientists would “act in the best interest of the public.” By October 2023, that figure had risen to 38 percent.
  • Over the same period, the share of Democrats who voiced little or no confidence rose much less and from a smaller base line — to 13 percent from 9 percent.
  • “Empirical data do not support the conclusion of a crisis of public trust in science,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science at Harvard and Caltech, write in their 2022 article “From Anti-Government to Anti-Science: Why Conservatives Have Turned Against Science.” But the data “do support the conclusion of a crisis of conservative trust in science.”
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  • “in every sociodemographic group in this survey study among 443, 2f455 unique respondents aged 18 years or older residing in the U.S., trust in physicians and hospitals decreased substantially over the course of the pandemic, from 71.5 percent in April 2020 to 40.1 percent in January 2024.”
  • A paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association on July 31, “Trust in Physicians and Hospitals During the Covid-19 Pandemic in a 50-State Survey of U.S. Adults,” by doctors and health specialists
  • “During the Covid-19 pandemic,” the authors write,medicine and public health more broadly became politicized, with the internet amplifying public figures and even physicians encouraging individuals not to trust the advice of public health experts and scientists. As such, the pandemic may have represented a turning point in trust, with a profession previously seen as trustworthy increasingly subject to doubt.
  • Consider in 2000, 46 percent of Democrats and, almost equivalently, 47 percent of Republicans expressed a great deal of confidence in scientists. In 2022, these respective percentages were 53 percent and 28 percent. In twenty years, a partisan chasm in trust (a 25-percentage point gap) emerged.
  • Some people suffer from poor dental health in part because their parents distrusted fluoridation of drinking water. The national failure to invest until recently in combating climate change has raised the odds of pandemics, made diseases more rampant, destabilized entire regions, and spurred a growing crisis of migration and refugees that has helped popularize far-right nativism in many Western democracies.
  • Distrust of science is arguably the greatest hindrance to societal action to stem numerous threats to the lives of Americans and people worldwide
  • Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, wrote
  • Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, Dallek argued,turbocharged anti-science conspiracy theories and attitudes on the American right, vaulting them to an even more influential place in American politics. Bogus notions — vaccines may cause autism, hydroxychloroquine may cure Covid, climate change isn’t real — have become linchpins of MAGA-era conservatism.
  • Between 2018 and 2021, the General Social Survey found that the spread between the percentage of Democrats and Republicans who said they have “a great deal of confidence in the scientific community” rose to 33 points (65-32) from 13 points (54-41).
  • The direction of the partisan response, Bardon wrote, is driven by “who the facts are favoring, and science currently favors bad news for the industrial status quo.
  • The roots of the divergence, however, go back at least 50 years with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970, along with the enactment that same year of the Clean Air Act and two years later of the Clean Water Act.
  • These pillars of the regulatory state were, and still are, deeply dependent on scientific research to set rules and guidelines. All would soon be seen as adversaries of the sections of the business community that are closely allied with the Republican Party
  • These agencies and laws fostered the emergence of what Gordon Gauchat, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, calls “regulatory science.” This relatively new role thrust science into the center of political debates with the result that federal agencies like the E.P.A. and OSHA “are considered adversarial to corporate interests. Regulatory science directly connects to policy management and, therefore, has become entangled in policy debates that are unavoidably ideological.”
  • In their 2022 article, Oreskes and Conway, write that conservatives’ hostility to sciencetook strong hold during the Reagan administration, largely in response to scientific evidence of environmental crises that invited governmental response. Thus, science — particularly environmental and public health science — became the target of conservative anti-regulatory attitudes.
  • Oreskes and Conway argue that the strength of the anti-science movement was driven by the alliance in the Reagan years between corporate interests and the ascendant religious right, which became an arm of the Republican Party as it supported creationism
  • religious and political skepticism of science have become mutually constitutive and self-reinforcing.
  • and thus secular science, concentrate in the Democratic Party. The process of party-sorting along religious lines has helped turn an ideological divide over science into a partisan one.
  • As partisan elites have staked out increasingly clear positions on issues related to climate change, vaccine hesitancy, and other science-related policy issues, the public has polarized in response.
  • People look to their political leaders to provide them with information (“cues” or “heuristics”) about how they ought to think about complex science-related issues.
  • This creates a feedback cycle, whereby — once public opinion polarizes about science-related issues — political elites have an electoral incentive to appeal to that polarization, both in the anti-science rhetoric they espouse and in expressing opposition to evidence-based policies.
  • In a demographically representative survey of 1,959 U.S. adults, I tracked how intentions to receive preventative cancer vaccines (currently undergoing clinical trials) vary by partisan identity. I find that cancer vaccines are already politically polarizing, such that Republicans are less likely than Democrats to intend to vaccinate.
  • Another key factor driving a wedge between the two parties over the trustworthiness of science is the striking partisan difference over risk tolerance and risk aversion.
  • Their conclusion: “We find, on average, that women are more risk averse than men.”
  • Our survey revealed that men rate a wide range of hazards as lower in risk than do women. Our survey also revealed that whites rate risks lower than do nonwhites
  • The group with the consistently lowest risk perceptions across a range of hazards was white males.
  • Furthermore, we found sizable differences between white males and other groups in sociopolitical attitudes.
  • white males were more sympathetic with hierarchical, individualistic, and anti-egalitarian views, more trusting of technology managers, less trusting of government, and less sensitive to potential stigmatization of communities from hazards
  • These positions suggest greater confidence in experts and less confidence in public-dominated social processes.
  • In other words, white men — the dominant constituency of the Republican Party, in what is known in the academic literature as “the white male effect” — are relatively risk tolerant and thus more resistant (or less committed) to science-based efforts to reduce the likelihood of harm to people or to the environment
  • major Democratic constituencies are more risk averse and supportive of harm-reducing policies.
  • Insofar as people tend to accept scientific findings that align with their political beliefs and disregard those that contradict them, political views carry more weight than knowledge of science.
  • comparing the answers to scientific questions among religious and nonreligious respondents revealed significant insight into differing views of what is true and what is not.
  • When asked whether “electrons are smaller than atoms” and “what gas makes up most of the earth’s atmosphere: hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide or oxygen,” almost identical shares of religious and nonreligious men and women who scored high on measures of scientific knowledge gave correct answers to the questions.
  • However, when asked “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals, true or false,” the religious students high in scientific literacy scored far below their nonreligious counterparts.
  • the evolution question did not measure scientific knowledge but instead was a gauge of “something else: a form of cultural identity.”
  • Kahan then cites a survey that asked “how much risk do you believe climate change poses to human health, safety or prosperity?” The survey demonstrated a striking correlation between political identity and the level of perceived risk: Strong Democrats saw severe risk potential; strong Republicans close to none.
  • the different responses offered by religious and nonreligious respondents to the evolution question were similar to the climate change responses in that they were determined by “cultural identity” — in this case, political identity.
  • Indeed, the inference can be made even stronger by substituting for, or fortifying political outlooks with, even more discerning cultural identity indicators, such as cultural worldviews and their interaction with demographic characteristics such as race and gender. In sum, whether people “believe in” climate change, like whether they “believe in” evolution, expresses who they are.
  • 2023 PNAS paper, “Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship by Scientists,” Cory J. Clark, Steven Pinker, David Buss, Philip Tetlock, David Geary and 34 others make the case that the scientific community at times censors itself
  • “Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups.”
  • Prosocial motives for censorship may explain four observations: 1) widespread public availability of scholarship coupled with expanding definitions of harm has coincided with growing academic censorship; 2) women, who are more harm-averse and more protective of the vulnerable than men, are more censorious; 3) although progressives are often less censorious than conservatives, egalitarian progressives are more censorious of information perceived to threaten historically marginalized groups; and 4) academics in the social sciences and humanities (disciplines especially relevant to humans and social policy) are more censorious and more censored than those in STEM.
  • Clark and her co-authors argue that
  • The explicit politicization of academic institutions, including science journals, academic professional societies, universities, and university departments, is likely one causal factor that explains reduced trust in science.
  • Dietram A. Scheufele, who is a professor in science communication at the University of Wisconsin, was sharply critical of what he calls the scientific community’s “self-inflicted wounds”:
  • One is the sometimes gratuitous tendency among scientists to mock groups in society whose values we see as misaligned with our own. This has included prominent climate scientists tweeting that no Republicans are safe to have in Congress, popularizers like Neil deGrasse Tyson trolling Christians on Twitter on Christmas Day.
  • Scheufele warned againstDemocrats’ tendency to align science with other (probably very worthwhile) social causes, including the various yard signs that equate science to B.L.M., gender equality, immigration, etc. The tricky part is that most of these causes are seen as Democratic-leaning policy issues
  • Science is not that. It’s society’s best way of creating and curating knowledge, regardless of what that science will mean for politics, belief systems, or personal preferences.
  • For many on the left, Scheufele wrote,Science has become a signaling device for liberals to distinguish themselves from what they see as “anti-science” Republicans. That spells trouble
  • Science relies on the public perception that it creates knowledge objectively and in a politically neutral way. The moment we lose that aspect of trust, we just become one of the many institutions, including Congress, that have suffered from rapidly eroding levels of public trust.
Javier E

Mega-eruptions Caused Mass Extinction, Study Finds - 0 views

news.nationalgeographic.com/...n-volcano-paleontology-science

extinction Triassic volcano dinosaur

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • In a new study published today in the journal Science, researchers say they have confirmed that eruptions large enough to bury the U.S. under 300 feet (91 meters) of lava occurred at the same time that vast numbers of plant and animal species disappeared from the fossil record. About 201 million years ago, tectonic forces started ripping the supercontinent known as Pangaea apart, said Terrence Blackburn, a geologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and lead author of the study. The underlying mantle rock melted, generating these large eruptions, he added. The rift, which eventually created the Atlantic Ocean basin, happened between sections of Pangaea that would go on to become North America and Africa. (Read about how Pangaea formed.)
  • by using a rare mineral called zircon, found in igneous rocks like basalts, the researchers were able to narrow down their margin of error to 20,000 to 30,000 years—pegging the initial eruptions to just before the mass extinction event. “Zircon is a perfect time capsule for dating those rocks,” said Blackburn. When the mineral crystallizes, it incorporates uranium, which decays over a known time with respect to the element lead. By measuring the ratio of uranium to lead in our samples, we can determine the age of those crystals, he explained.
  • There is evidence that the initial volcanic eruptions doubled the amount of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which led to increased global temperatures and ocean acidification, he noted. This happened quickly, which probably didn’t give organisms at the time much of a chance to adjust to the changes.
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  • There is one case 65 million years ago, at a point in time known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary (K-T boundary), with strong evidence supporting an asteroid impact around the same time the dinosaurs disappeared.
  • “That one instance really guided everybody’s thinking, and the idea that impacts caused mass extinctions was really, really popular,” said Renne, who wasn’t involved in the Blackburn study.
  • enne says that even the asteroid impact at the K-T boundary likely only finished the job that major volcanic eruptions in India started. (Related: “What Killed Dinosaurs: New Ideas About the Wipeout.”)
Javier E

Pilot Plant in the Works for Carbon Dioxide Cleansing - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-carbon-dioxide-cleansing.html

carbon global warming tech solution

shared by Javier E on 06 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • “There is a lot of speculation of how much it will actually cost,” he said, with estimates from $20 a ton to as much as $2,000. “We won’t know for sure until someone builds a pilot plant.” (An average passenger vehicle generates about five tons of carbon dioxide a year.)
  • Dr. Keith says he thinks it may be possible to lower the cost of capture toward $100 a ton as the company grows.
  • Gas capture would be extremely important in developing a rational price for carbon emissions, said Dr. Fox of the British mechanical engineering society. “Whatever it costs to take it out of the air and store it away,” Dr. Fox said, “that’s the price polluters would pay if they want to put carbon into the air.”
Javier E

Obama's Ambitious Global Warming Action Plan - NYTimes.com - 0 views

dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/...mas-global-warming-action-plan

environment obama global warming

shared by Javier E on 26 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • But if you doubt the reality of this shift, just look at the news coverage from Monday of the drop in the price of shares in coal companies ahead of the speech. This headline in Street Insider says it all: “Coal Stocks Routed as Pres. Obama Preps to Tackle Carbon Emissions.”
  • What’s particularly welcome there is the language on “removing counterproductive policies that increase vulnerabilities” — which I hope will lead to some of the steps I recently described that could cut costs from future wildfires in America’s “red zones,” as well as shifts in how federal flood insurance is priced.
  • the Obama Administration is putting in place tough new rules to cut carbon pollution—just like we have for other toxins like mercury and arsenic
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  • Sets a goal to reduce carbon pollution by at least 3 billion metric tons cumulatively by 2030 – more than half of the annual carbon pollution from the U.S. energy sector
  • Directs EPA to work closely with states, industry and other stakeholder to establish carbon pollution standards for both new and existing power plants;
  • Makes up to $8 billion in loan guarantee authority available for a wide array of advanced fossil energy and efficiency projects to support investments in innovative technologies;
  • expanding and prioritizing forest- and rangeland-restoration efforts to make areas less vulnerable to catastrophic fire;
  • Commits to expand major new and existing international initiatives, including bilateral initiatives with China, India, and other major emitting countries;
  • calling for the end of U.S. government support for public financing of new coal-fired powers plants overseas, except for the most efficient coal technology available in the world’s poorest countries, or facilities deploying carbon capture and sequestration technologies;
johnsonma23

Consensus Is the Supreme Court's New Majority - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sus-supreme-court-roberts.html

supreme court US politics new york times

shared by johnsonma23 on 18 May 16 - No Cached
  • Consensus Is the Supreme Court’s New Majority
  • The Supreme Court has gone into hibernation, withdrawing from the central role it has played in American life throughout Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s decade on the court.
  • The court had leaned right until the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February.
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  • “I give great credit to the chief justice, who I think in general is a person who is concerned about consensus building, and I think all the more so now,
  • Opinions vary about whether a Supreme Court that does little is good for the nation, but the trend is certainly a testament to Chief Justice Roberts’s leadership. He has long said he favors narrow decisions endorsed by large majorities, and it turns out that goal is easier to achieve on an eight-member court. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • The justices will continue to issue decisions in most cases, but many will be modest and ephemeral, like Monday’s opinion returning a major case on access to contraception to the lower courts for further consideration.
  • “Yesterday’s contraception case shows why an equally divided court among liberals and conservatives has many benefits for our country, and also why the sky-is-falling claims by many court watchers about an eight-member court are overstated,”
  • “This type of consensus decision making,” Professor Segall said, “is a welcome change from the normal political and sometimes partisan approach we normally see in important 5-4 opinions, where one side can impose its own agenda on the parties and the country.”
  • forcing public workers to support unions they had declined to join violated the First Amendment. Justice Scalia’s questions were consistently hostile to the unions.
  • Four days before he died, the court blocked the Obama administration’s effort to combat global warming by regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants. The vote was 5 to 4, with the court’s conservatives in the majority.
  • The court has three major decisions left to decide before the justices take their summer break: on abortion, immigration and affirmative action.
  • All of this term’s blockbusters were added to the court’s docket before Justice Scalia died. Since then, the justices have agreed to hear just seven cases, and none of them concern issues of broad public interest
  • The next term, which starts in October, is thus shaping up to be a thin and quiet one. Until the next justice arrives, the Supreme Court will remain on the sideline of American life
cjlee29

Donald Trump's Energy Plan: More Fossil Fuels and Fewer Rules - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...bal-warming-energy-policy.html

shared by cjlee29 on 27 May 16 - No Cached
  • Laying out his positions on energy and the environment at an oil industry conference in North Dakota, he vowed to rescind President Obama’s signature climate change rules and revive construction of the Keystone XL
  • It was the latest in a series of recent policy addresses, including on Israel and foreign policy, intended to position Mr. Trump, the real estate mogul and reality show star, as credible on substantive issues now that he is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
  • skeptical of Mr. Trump’s command of the complexities of the global energy economy.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • don’t seem to appreciate the complex forces that drive the energy system,
  • A central question confronting the next president will be how to address climate change.
  • denied the established science that climate change is caused by humans,
  • Mr. Trump said that in his first 100 days in office, he would “rescind” Environmental Protection Agency regulations established under Mr. Obama to curb planet-warming emissions from coal-fired power plants.
  • will not have the legal authority to unilaterally rescind the climate rules
  • justices, rather than the president, will determine its fate.
  • agreement gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use on our land
  • Mr. Trump also repeatedly emphasized “energy independence” — the idea that the United States could isolate itself from global oil markets and cease importing fuels.
  • any country wishing to withdraw would have to wait four years to do so.
  • But there would be no legal consequence if the United States, the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas polluter
  • “stop all payment of U.S. tax dollars to global warming programs.”
  • And as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton pledged that rich countries, including the United States, would commit $100 billion annually by 2020 to help poor countries adapt to the ravages of global warming.
  • “We’re going to bring back the coal industry, save the coal industry,” he said. “I love those people.”
  • No government has control over the emissions-reduction plans of other governments.
  • “I’m hoping he’s going to support the oil industry, open up some new plays — in Pennsylvania, maybe — keep Texas going and help out in North Dakota,”
  • “I want to see what his stance is on oil fracking, oil renewables and coal,
  • “I would like to see coal be part of the energy mix.”
Javier E

Al Gore explains why he's optimistic about stopping global warming - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-about-stopping-global-warming

climate change global warming discourse

shared by Javier E on 22 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • we are now seeing the approach of a global political tipping point.
  • The appearance of more extreme and more frequent weather events has had a very profound impact on public opinion in countries throughout the world
  • A second factor is the sharp and unexpectedly steep decrease in prices for electricity produced from wind and solar and the demand destruction for fossil fuel energy from new efficiency improvements.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • the projections made 5-10 years ago for the installation of solar and wind technologies were, similarly, not just wrong but way wrong. We’ve seen a dramatic increase that’s far more rapid than anybody projected and it’s accelerating — not just in the United States but even more rapidly in developing countries.
  • Once questions are resolved into a choice between right and wrong, then the laws change. It happened with civil rights. It’s happening now with gay rights. It happened with apartheid and, in an earlier era, with abolition. And this is now being resolved into a question of right and wrong.
  • remember the impact of policy direction on business calculations is forward-looking. When business begins to understand the direction of policy, they have to start adjusting to where the policy is going. When you look at the EPA process, it’s undeniably clear that there will be a price on carbon one way or the other. Then when you look at the movement in other countries and the states and local measures being enacted, the direction is now quite clear and businesses are making plans to adjust to it.
  • people are connecting the dots. The cumulative amount of energy trapped by manmade global warming pollution each day in the earth’s atmosphere is now equal to the energy that would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima bombs going off every 24 hours.
  • The leading scientists have in the last two years changed the way they discuss that particular connection. It’s true that it used to be common for them to say you can’t blame any single extreme weather event on global warming.
  • the odds have shifted and those events are becoming more common and extreme. They’ve now changed their description of that connection. The temperature has increased globally and there’s now 4 percent more water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere than 30 years ago. As a result, every extreme weather event now has a component of global warming in it.
  • I think the most important part of it is winning the conversation. I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, hey man, we don’t go for that anymore. The same thing happened on apartheid. The same thing happened on the nuclear arms race with the freeze movement. The same thing happened in an earlier era with abolition. A few months ago, I saw an article about two gay men standing in line for pizza and some homophobe made an ugly comment about them holding hands and everyone else in line told them to shut up. We’re winning that conversation.
  • the political climate is changing. Something like Chris Hayes’s excellent documentary on climate change wouldn’t have made it on TV a few years ago. And as I said, many Republicans who’re still timid on the issue are now openly embarrassed about the extreme deniers. The deniers are being hit politically. They’re being subjected to ridicule, which stings. The polling is going back up in favor of doing something on this issue. The ability of the raging deniers to stop progress is waning every single day.
rachelramirez

Why Volkswagen's share price has fallen so far | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...gens-share-price-has-fallen-so

volkswagen economist policy

shared by rachelramirez on 22 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Why Volkswagen’s share price has fallen so far
  • Over the weekend, the company was accused by America's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of cheating emissions tests.
  • The carmaker could still face a fine of up to $18 billion—more if regulators find that it committed similar acts in Europe and Asia.
Javier E

Most Americans Support Government Action on Climate Change, Poll Finds - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...climate-change-poll-finds.html

global warming survey GOP election politics

shared by Javier E on 30 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Although the poll found that climate change was not a top issue in determining a person's vote, a candidate’s position on climate change influences how a person will vote. For example, 67 percent of respondents, including 48 percent of Republicans and 72 percent of independents, said they were less likely to vote for a candidate who said that human-caused climate change is a hoax.
  • In 2012, all the Republican presidential candidates but one – Jon M. Huntsman Jr. – questioned or denied the science of human-caused global warming, and opposed policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions
  • Among Democrats, 63 percent said the issue was very or extremely important to them personally. In contrast, 40 percent of independents and only 18 percent of Republicans said the same.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • 83 percent of Americans, including 61 percent of Republicans and 86 percent of independents, say that if nothing is done to reduce emissions, global warming will be a very or somewhat serious problem in the future.
  • over the past year, President Obama has proposed a series of Environmental Protection Agency regulations intended to reduce carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, which Republicans in Congress have attacked as a "war on coal."
  • 77 percent of Americans say that the federal government should be doing a substantial amount to combat climate change, the support was greatest among Democrats and independents. Ninety percent of Democrats, 78 percent of independents and 48 percent of Republicans said the government should be fighting climate change.
  • the number of Americans who believe that climate change is caused by human activity is growing. In a 2011 Stanford University poll, 72 percent of people thought climate change was caused at least in part by human activities. That grew to 81 percent in the latest poll. By party, 88 percent of Democrats, 83 percent of independents and 71 percent of Republicans said that climate change was caused at least in part by human activities.
  • – 71 percent — expect that they will be personally hurt by climate change, although to different degrees.
  • the problem for many Republicans is how to carve out a position on climate change that does not turn off voters like Mr. Becker, but that also does not alienate powerful conservative campaign donors. In particular, advocacy groups funded by the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch have vowed to ensure that Republican candidates who advocate for climate change action will lose in primary elections.
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