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Earth Matters: What new nat'l monuments will Biden create? Vermont funds 'Replace Your Ride' project [1]
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Date: 2022-10-06
ECO-RESOURCES
x Tudor Dixon, GOP nominee for #Michigan governor, said she drives a @chevrolet Tahoe, couldn’t afford an EV even if she wanted one.
Note MSRP:
2023 Chevy Bolt EUV = $27,200
2023 Bolt EV at $25,600
2023 Tahoe = $54,200
https://t.co/nGiEY0y49X via @freep @freepautos @GM — Phoebe Wall Howard (@phoebesaid) October 2, 2022
ECOPINION
America’s hardest-hit communities need Biden to declare a climate emergency. By Mustafa Santiago at The Guardian. Millions of people across the United States have witnessed, often tragically, how the climate crisis is here and levying steep costs on communities. Black, Indigenous, and other frontline communities, including those in West Virginia, are experiencing these impacts—lives lost, homes destroyed, livelihoods upended—first and worst. [...] These communities and others need to be helped to rebuild stronger and more resilient to climate-fueled storms. And to do so, leaders in Washington must build upon the investments made through the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law to reduce carbon emissions over the long term and address the real, immediate, and devastating impacts of the climate crisis. President Biden should step into the breach and declare a climate emergency.
Is the green energy transition taking off or hitting a wall? By Richard Heinberg at the Independent Media Institute.The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) constitutes the boldest climate action so far by the American federal government. It offers tax rebates to buyers of electric cars, solar panels, heat pumps, and other renewable-energy and energy-efficiency equipment. It encourages the development of carbon-capture technology and promotes environmental justice by cleaning up pollution and providing renewable energy in disadvantaged communities. Does this political achievement mean that the energy transition, in the U.S. if not the world as a whole, is finally on track to achieving the goal of net zero emissions by 2050? If only it were so.
The Climate Economy Is About to Explode. By Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic. Late last month, analysts at the investment bank Credit Suisse published a research note about America’s new climate law that went nearly unnoticed. The Inflation Reduction Act, the bank argued, is even more important than has been recognized so far: The IRA will “will have a profound effect across industries in the next decade and beyond” and could ultimately shape the direction of the American economy, the bank said. [...] The report made a few broad points in particular that are worth attending to: First, the IRA might spend twice as much as Congress thinks. Many of the IRA’s most important provisions, such as its incentives for electric vehicles and zero-carbon electricity, are “uncapped” tax credits. That means that as long as you meet their terms, the government will award them: There’s no budget or limit written into the law that restricts how much the government can spend. The widely cited figure for how much the IRA will spend to fight climate change—$374 billion—is in large part determined by the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of how much those tax credits will get used. But that estimate is wrong, the bank claims. In fact, so many people and businesses will use those tax credits that the IRA’s total spending is likely to be more than $800 billion, double what the CBO projects.
Desalination: An Essential Part of California’s Water Future. By Richard Frank at Legal Planet. It pains me to criticize a recent, closely-watched decision by the Coastal Commission to vote down–unanimously–a desalination plant that the Poseidon Water Company had proposed to build on a remediated Superfund site in Huntington Beach, California. That plant would have converted approximately 50 million gallons of seawater per day into fresh water for urgently-needed residential, commercial and industrial water use in Southern California. Governor Gavin Newsom, numerous other state agencies and Southern California local governments all supported the Poseidon desalination project as a critical, new source of fresh water in the face of “new normal,” persistent and severe drought conditions plaguing most of California and the American Southwest. Nevertheless, the Coastal Commissioners rejected the project, citing environmental concerns. Why is the Commission’s vote misguided? Let me count the ways.
The Market Won’t Save Us, Unless We Radically Change It. By Amy Westervelt at Hot Take substack. “In the early twentieth century, a group of self-styled “neo-liberals” shifted economic and political thinking radically,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway write in The Big Myth. “They argued that any government action in the marketplace, even well intentioned, compromised the freedom of individuals to do as they pleased—and therefore put us on the road to totalitarianism. Political and economic freedom were ‘indivisible,’ they insisted: any compromise to the latter was a threat to the former.” That meant really any compromise Oreskes told me at the climate disinfo event. “It might seem hard to believe that any group would come out campaigning in favor of allowing 5-year-olds to work,” she said. “But in the early 20th century, National Association of Manufacturers did exactly that.” But of course, she added, “Climate change is an epic market failure. So how can we possibly say the market will fix it, if we don’t address the neoliberal understanding of the market?”
Conservation communication: Time to rethink the word ‘poacher’? By John R. Platt at The Revelator. Killing an endangered species is a heinous crime, but the language around the act requires a refocus away from colonialization. I’m a conservation journalist focusing on endangered species, and I’ve written about wildlife trafficking and used the term “poach” (or “poacher” or “poaching”) hundreds of times, often in headlines. But for a while now, I’ve also found the word … troubling. You see, it dates back a millennium or so, to the era of William the Conqueror. Back then, many forest animals legally belonged to the king, and the Middle English term pocchen described the punishable-by-death crime of taking/hunting wildlife from the forest and hiding it in a “pouch” or bag. Centuries later, the term “poacher” has a distinctly colonialist (and therefore racist) feel. It places all illegal hunters and trappers — some of whom are immoral profiteers, others of whom are just trying to feed their families — together at the bottom of the social strata.
ECO-QUOTE
If we human beings learn to see the intricacies that bind one part of a natural system to another and then to us, we will no longer argue about the importance of wilderness protection, or over the question of saving endangered species, or how human communities must base their economic futures - not on short-term exploitation - but on long-term, sustainable development.—Sen. Gaylord Nelson
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
The best policies to help coal towns weather the switch to renewables. By Alison F. Takemura at Canary Media. A new report singles out Colorado, Illinois and New Mexico as trailblazers in just-transition laws. Could fossil strongholds Wyoming and West Virginia follow suit? “We’ve lost 45,000 coal [mining] jobs since 2012,” said Jeremy Richardson, manager of the carbon-free electricity program at RMI, a clean-energy think tank. The energy transition “is already happening.” For towns living through this transition, it can be devastating. Coal workers lose well-paying jobs, and communities lose a bedrock of their economies. How communities weather these choppy seas depends on the level of support they receive, which varies from state to state. That’s one of the takeaways of a new report by RMI, which analyzed 16 bills passed by states since 2011, all aimed at easing the transition away from fossil fuels and into the clean energy economy. The report’s findings enable lawmakers to learn from what has been done before to support a just transition for coal communities.
Since 2019, states in dark blue have passed coal transition legislation while those in light blue have introduced such legislation.
Low-income communities learn to tackle climate-fueled heat. By Anita Snow at the Associated Press. Reggie Carrillo knows firsthand that where you live can determine how hot your neighborhood gets. The environmental activist and educator resides in a largely Mexican American area of south-central Phoenix, where segregation once forced Black and Hispanic people to live south of the railroad tracks. More than a half century later, the historic lack of investment means fewer trees and subsequent temperatures 13 degrees F (7 C) higher than wealthier, leafier neighborhoods just a few miles away. “To understand climate change, to understand the urban heat island effect, you have to understand the history,” said Carrillo, who wants to share that knowledge with his neighbors and help cool the community.
EVs Add to Electricity Demand, But Not as Much as You Might Think. By Colin McKerracher at Bloomberg Green. California recently asked homeowners to reduce electricity consumption to help avoid blackouts as temperatures soared and the power system struggled to keep up. The plea was effective, with consumers temporarily dialing back demand enough to keep the lights on across the state. But these sorts of close calls are the stuff of nightmares for system operators, and this specific brush with near-disaster had a new element that caught a lot of attention: a call to electric vehicle owners to avoid charging during peak demand hours. Invariably, this was pounced on by critics as proof that California’s just-announced plan to phase out sales of new combustion vehicles by 2035 was doomed to fail. “How can the state electrify the vehicle fleet if it can barely keep the lights on?” went the refrain. These types of discussions get emotional quickly, so it’s worth stepping back a bit to look at the data on how much electricity consumption EVs really add.
EV contribution to global electricity demand under two scenarios
Double or Nothing: How regulators are gambling on the future self-interest of large oil and gas companies to decommission the Gulf of Mexico’s aging infrastructure. From Carbon Tracker. The Gulf of Mexico has long been a major oil and gas producing region for the U.S., but field depletion in shallower regions near shore has driven development into deep and ultra-deep waters, driving up the cost to develop and decommission infrastructure. Meanwhile, aging wells and platforms closer to shore — many of which are now owned by smaller operators — are increasingly marginal in value, raising the risk that they will be abandoned by their current operators. Double or Nothing finds that as the energy transition accelerates and oil and gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico close, taxpayers may be forced to pay tens of billions in clean up costs. At best, only 10% of estimated decommissioning costs for the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) are secured by bonds.
The Clean Water Act Is In Jeopardy From A Conservative SCOTUS. By Carolyn Fortuna at CleanTechnica. What test should courts use to determine whether the Clean Water Act applies to EPA-designated wetlands? The answer could have significant implications for the EPA’s efforts to regulate waterways more broadly.
How the Biodiversity Crisis Impacts All of Us. By Timothy Preso at EarthJustice. Increased threats could unravel the web of life that sustains so many species on this planet—including us. Biodiversity means a wolf pack that inhabits the remotest corner of Yellowstone National Park—and it also means the cardinal at your backyard feeder and the butterfly in your local park. Each species is important, as each is a part of larger natural systems that we all rely on. And today our remaining biodiversity is increasingly imperiled. Recent scientific evidence indicates that around 1 million species already face a threat of extinction, and that nearly 40 percent of all species on Earth may be threatened with or driven to extinction by the year 2100.
ECO-LINKS
• Barges grounded by low water halt Mississippi River traffic • Manhattan’s largest rooftop solar array is about to come online • ‘Top 1%’ of emitters caused almost a quarter of growth in global emissions since 1990 • Bolsonaro election loss could cut Brazilian Amazon deforestation by 89% • SparkCharge’s Currently Enables Affordable Mobile Fast Charging For The Masses • Former Industrial Wasteland Becomes New Nature Reserve in England • Interior police reforms require body cameras • BLM removed record 19K wild horses and burros this year • A Plan To Share the Pain of Water Scarcity Divides Farmers in This Rural Nevada Community • Texas Is Now the Nation’s Biggest Emitter of Toxic Substances Into Streams, Rivers and Lakes
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