Wednesday, May 29th, 2019
Tom Embury-Dennis, - Independent (U.K.)
Stephan: Nothing like being willfully ignorant and unprepared. I couldn't make this up in a novel, it would not be credible as fiction, but it is certainly real in America.
Credit: Michael Tercha/Getty
The Trump administration has told a major US government department to end predicting what the long-term effects of climate change will be on the country.
Director of the US Geological Survey (USGS) James Reilly – a White House-appointed former oil geologist – ordered that scientific assessments only use computer-generated models that track the possible impact of climate change until 2040, according to The New York Times.
Previously the USGS modelled effects until the end of the century, the second half of which is likely to see the most dramatic impacts of global warming.
The order is likely to impact the US government’s National Climate Assessment, an interagency report produced every four years which outlines the projected impact of climate change in every corner of US society.
In the most recent report, produced late last year and dismissed by Mr Trump, scientists used […]
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Wednesday, May 29th, 2019
Jessica Corbett, Staff Writer - Common Dreams
Stephan: The American government must now rank as one of the most corrupt in the world, and yet Trump today is at 41.1% approval rating, with 90% of Republicans approving of him and his administration. The problem with America is Americans, and I cannot tell you how sad I feel writing that sentence.
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao still owns shares in a consturction company that provides materials to pave roads.
Credit: James F. X. O’Gara/Hudson Institute/Flickr/
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao came under fire from ethics experts and reporters after The Wall Street Journal revealed Tuesday that she still owns shares in a major construction company that provides materials for road-paving despite pledging to divest from the company in the ethics agreement she signed before her confirmation in early 2017.
“Elaine Chao just threw her hat into the ring for the Trump admin’s worst self-enriching action.”
—Public Citizen
“The road to tyranny is paved with corrupt intentions: Elaine Chao just threw her hat into the ring for the Trump admin’s worst self-enriching action—retaining shares in a construction-materials company more than a year after she promised to relinquish them,” the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen tweeted in response to the report.
Shares of Vulcan Materials Co. “have risen nearly 13 percent since April 2018, the month in which Ms. Chao said she would be cashed out of […]
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ALISON DURKEE, - Vanity Fair
Stephan: The United States under Trump, his administration, and the Republican Congress is not only not preparing for climate change at the federal level, it is actively sabotaging any effort to do so. In my opinion, the future is going to remember this period in America as one of the stupidest and most criminally negligent in human history.
President Donald Trump speaks from the Oval Office of the White House.
Credit: Carlos Barria/Pool Photo/AP
From pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord to rolling back a wave of Obama-era environmental regulations, the Trump administration has always been quick to disavow any efforts to combat climate change. But it turns out they’re just getting started. The New York Times reports that President Donald Trump and his administration are “launching a new assault” against climate change efforts. The anti-environmental effort is being coordinated across a broad swath of agencies: Officials at the National Security Council are being directed to “strip references” to climate change in speeches, and the U.S. Geological Survey is changing its climate models to project the impacts of climate change only through 2040, rather than the previous modeling through the end of the century.
The greatest impacts, however, are likely to be felt through the National Climate Assessment, a government-funded climate change document published every four years. The assessment’s most recent release in November 2018 went against the Trump administration’s climate nonchalance by outlining […]
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Brian Palmer , - The Natural Resources Defense Council
Stephan: This is what I mean by criminal and negligent.
Huntington Canyon coal powered plant spews pollution.
Smoke and Mirrors
According to a report in the New York Times, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to change how it calculates air pollution deaths in an effort to mask increased mortality rates.
Back when he was running for president, Donald Trump regularly slammed President Obama’s Clean Power Plan—the EPA regulation aimed at reducing pollution from aging power plants—as part of a nefarious “war on coal.” But Trump didn’t realize that the Clean Power Plan was more than a carbon-cutting measure. It also vastly reduced particulate matter and other forms of air pollution. Cleaner air means healthier lungs, which means fewer premature deaths.
When Trump moved to replace the Clean Power Plan last year, it became immediately apparent that he had a problem: His watered-down alternative would result in an additional 1,400 deaths per year, all related to increased air pollution. In trying to revive the coal industry, Trump was waging a war on health.
Decades of research, beginning with correlational epidemiology and now extending to the molecular level, have proved the […]
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Rex Weyler, Columnist and Co-founder of Greenpeace International - Greenpeace
Stephan: I see this as very good news about a very bad news subject because it shows ordinary citizens getting up out of their chairs to take to the streets in support of rational ecological policies, and climate change remediation. Rex Weyler, who knows something about ecological activism, describes it with insight.
On the occasion of the 2019 World Hydropower Congress, which is being held on May 14, 2019 in the Parisian district of La Défense, activists of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Planète Amazone organized an action to raise awareness of large hydroelectric dams and against what they call hydrodisaster at the entrance of the Congress,
Credit: Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto/Getty
On May 1, the British House of Commons became the world’s first national parliament to declare a “climate emergency.” The motion is not binding and may have no effect on government policy, which appears reminiscent of the Paris emissions promises.
Nevertheless, the motion appears significant because the driving force behind this resolution was not an epiphany in the halls of British governance, but rather the Extinction Rebellion protests that closed bridges, occupied public landmarks, disrupted trains, and shut down Central London. Police had arrested over a 1,000 activists, some who had superglued themselves to Shell Oil headquarters and other buildings. The protesters gained international support and demanded a climate crisis response.
Greenpeace published polls showing widespread public […]
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