Earth Matters: Jimmy Carter’s unheralded green legacy; Antarctica, Greenland could melt ‘scary’ fast

WEEKLY GREEN VIDEO

RESOURCES & ACTION

Earth Month Challenge: 30 Easy Actions for Every Day of April. Celebrate our beautiful home planet with a small act for every day of the month.

C40 Releases 2022 Annual Report. C40 is a network of nearly 100 mayors of the world’s leading cities united in action to confront the climate crisis. From São Paulo to Seoul, Accra to Ahmedabad, Beijing to Bogotá, and Milan to Montréal, C40 cities are stepping up and showing that ambitious climate action is possible. Three-quarters of C40 cities are now decreasing their per capita emissions at a faster rate than their own countries, while high-impact actions delivered by C40 cities – such as introducing low-emission zones, increasing green spaces, and planting more trees to improve air quality and to reduce urban heat risk, and achieving universal waste collection—have tripled in the past decade, which is vital if global heating is to be kept under 1.5˚C [2.7° F]. C40 cities are delivering climate action that not only cuts emissions and reduces climate risks, but also improves the quality of life enjoyed by all our residents.

The Climate Reality Leadership Corps. The corps was created so that everyday people could lead the fight on climate and together change the world. The program started back in 2006, when 50 aspiring advocates joined former Vice President Al Gore at his barn in Nashville, Tennessee, to learn how to share the truth about the climate crisis, just as he had in the Academy Award-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth.” Two decades on, that 50 has grown to over 45,000 advocates working together for bold and just climate solutions across sectors and continents. People come to the Climate Reality Leadership Corps with a desire to make a difference on climate. We give them the tools, training, and network to do it.

GREEN BRIEFS

new data on the last ice age raises concerns about future sea levels

As regular readers of community writer Pakalolo and the studies he regularly describes are well aware, the state of the world’s ice has been scary for some time. The latest study—Rapid, buoyancy-driven ice-sheet retreat of hundreds of meters per day—adds to the fears. 

Published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, the study found that at the end of the last ice age, the Eurasian ice sheet retreated by as much as 2,000 feet in a single day. That’s the fastest measured amount ever, 20 times as much as satellites currently record for glacier or ice sheet retreats, well beyond what scientists previously thought was an upper speed limit for them. If that were to happen in Antarctica and Greenland, it could mean a much more abrupt rise in sea level than has until now been predicted. The fastest measured retreat on the frozen continent is 160 feet a day. But that seems likely to be accelerated since temperatures at both the Earth’s poles are inexorably rising.

The scientists measured ice retreat across the Norwegian continental ice shelf dating back to 15,000 to 19,000 years ago. They found the shelf retreated 180 to 2,000 feet per day, with the fastest rates lasting from days to a few months. Lead author Christine Batchelor said If an ice sheet retreated around 600 meters (1,900 feet) a day for a year, there probably wouldn’t be any ice left.

Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California at Irvine who was not involved in the study, told Kasha Patel and Chris Mooney at The Washington Post, “This is not a model. This is real observation. And it is frankly scary. Even to me.” He added, “Ice sheets are retreating fast today, [especially] in Antarctica. But we see traces in the seafloor that the retreat could go faster, way faster, and this is a reminder that we have not seen everything yet.”

Communities of color take the ‘biggest hit’ in Los Angeles’ unequal spread of greenery

EPA seeks to Tighten Limits on Mercury and Other Pollutants From Power Plants

Once, in what seems like eons ago, a fair number of Republican politicians were bona fide environmental advocates. Eager to clean up toxic messes, protect wildlife, shield important ecosystems from exploitation, and reduce civilization’s deluge of trash, they could be counted on to support policies designed to achieve these objectives. Such Republicans are more recently rare indeed.

For instance, Republican opposition was ferocious when President Obama signed off on the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) in 2011, leading to an $18 billion industry clean-up of mercury and other toxins from smokestacks of coal-fueled power plants, and reducing mercury emissions by 85%-90%. Hal Quinn, head of the National Mining Association, asserted in 2018 that the Obama administration had engaged in “perhaps the largest regulatory accounting fraud perpetrated on American consumers” by claiming the benefits would outweigh the cost of equipment upgrades by power providers. In May 2020, Donald Trump weakened the MATS rule, claiming the cost of the clean-up didn’t provide commensurate health benefits and mandating a change in calculating those benefits. Critics noted that the new method could be used to relax restrictions on mercury and any pollutant the fossil fuel industry designated as too costly to control. 

Nobody should therefore be surprised by the Republican response to the Biden administration’s announcement Wednesday that, under a proposed new rule, the Environmental Protection Agency will require a further reduction in power-plant emissions of mercury, nickel, arsenic, and lead. All these have harmful health effects in extremely small amounts, with mercury and lead being particularly injurious to children’s brain development. Despite the clean-up under MATS, U.S. power plants still released nearly three tons of mercury in 2022. That makes no never-mind to certain people:

Michelle Bloodworth, president and chief executive of America’s Power, a trade group that advocates for coal-powered electricity, said the industry is concerned that the combined effect of E.P.A.’s regulations will lead to premature retirements of coal plants. The industry group has argued if coal plants shutter too quickly it will hurt the reliability of the electricity grid.

Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, said the Biden administration “continues to wage war on coal” with the regulation. Ms. Capito called the regulation unnecessary and said that it “put politics over sound policy.”

At this stage of the climate crisis, the shuttering of any coal-fired plant can scarcely be labeled “premature.” 

In a statement, Democratic Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, who is chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and has a long history of fighting for stricter controls over mercury and other toxins, said, “The Mercury and Air Toxics Standards continue to be a remarkable, cost-effective success in reducing mercury and other toxic air pollution. Thanks to MATS, children and families are breathing cleaner air and there is less pollution in our nation’s waters EPA’s proposed rule would build on the progress made to better protect communities. This science-based rule will ensure that power plants use modern pollution control technology to help save lives and support a healthy economy.”

ECO-QUOTE

“The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer, and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place.”—David Brower, first director of the Sierra Club

ECOPINION

The Chickenshit Club, Climate Edition. By Hannah Story Brown at The American Prospect. If we at the Revolving Door Project could exhort the Biden administration to do anything, it would be this: Choose the right enemies—rich, powerful corporations that harm the public, most often with impunity. Sometimes you will lose, but that doesn’t mean you should forfeit the fight. And getting caught trying can inspire the public to rally around a political party and its leaders. When the Biden administration chose to approve Willow, ConocoPhillips’s massive Arctic oil drilling project, earlier this month, it made enemies out of millions of young climate-concerned voters and the administration’s “green allies,” who have already filed responsive lawsuits. The New York Times framed the decision this way: “Ultimately, the administration made the internal calculation that it did not want to fight ConocoPhillips, the company behind the Willow project.” Why not? […] Using the interim current social cost of carbon first calculated by the Obama administration of $51 per ton of greenhouse gas emissions, the Willow Project’s anticipated 239 million metric tons would cost society over $12 billion in damages. Using the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed value, based on newer climate modeling, of $190 per ton, the Willow Project’s anticipated toll would exceed $45 billion.

The Case for Capping Sea-Level Rise. A More Tangible Way to Measure the Harm From Climate Change. By Alice C. Hill and Rafe Pomerance at Foreign Affairs. “Keep 1.5 alive.” For years, that phrase has been the rallying cry for climate advocates. Enshrined in the 2015 Paris climate accord, the 1.5-degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] figure is the world’s aspirational limit for average global temperature rise. For those well-versed in climate science, it serves as a shorthand for avoiding the worst consequences of climate change—the threats to nearly every aspect of human life that stem from rising global temperatures. […] To galvanize a global effort to stave off catastrophe, climate advocates need a less abstract—and easier to visualize—goal around which to rally. An upper limit for average sea-level rise—say, of two feet or half a meter, which is consistent with the most aggressive emission-reduction scenario—would offer exactly that. More so than rising temperatures, rising seas offer tangible evidence of the harms of climate change, including coastal erosion, abandoned communities, sewage backups and overflows, contaminated water supplies, and increased insurance costs. As countries prepare for the U.N. climate change conference in Dubai in November and December 2023, they should establish a ceiling for rising seas that would allow people to more easily grasp why it is so crucial to keep 1.5 alive.

Trump’s Indictment Was Not the Biggest Story of the Week. By Bill McKibben at Common Dreams. Last Thursday’s big news story was the indictment of Donald Trump, with banner headlines in all the papers that still print on paper. The phrase I saw most often was “uncharted territory” (and occasionally “unchartered territory”), which is somewhat true: we’ve never had a former president, much less one seeking election, under indictment. But, truth be told, it seems like these waters were fairly easy to predict. It’s been obvious for many years that Trump disregarded rules and laws, acted on whims and appetites, and was a greedy skinflint; him ending up in trouble for tax evasion to cover up an affair with a porn star seems unlikely only in its details. The truly novel story came out a few hours earlier on Thursday, with the publication of Nature. The magazine is one of the world’s two pre-eminent scientific journals, and it emerges weekly from its London base with the latest in carefully peer-reviewed research. This week it carried one of the most important installments in the most important saga of our time, the rapid decline of the planet’s physical health. It was in the form of a dispatch from the Antarctic, where researchers found, to quote their title, clear evidence of “Abyssal ocean overturning slowdown and warming driven by Antarctic meltwater.”  One understands why that was not quite as easy to put into headlines as Trump’s arrest. But translated from the scientific, it’s the rough equivalent of “South Pole to Planet Earth: Drop Dead.”

A lingering Trump-era regulatory trick could push orcas, salmon to extinction. By J.W. Glass at Environmental Health News. In the Pacific Northwest there are no species more iconic than orcas, salmon, and steelhead. But it’s well-documented that all of them are in deep trouble. Yet, for decades, the EPA has shirked its legal duty to make sure that pesticides aren’t helping to drive the catastrophic decline of those and other endangered species. To address that lack of oversight, the Biden EPA has ramped up its work with the two federal agencies responsible for assessing harm to protected species—the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service. But despite the Biden EPA’s pledge to more aggressively address pesticides’ harms, whether the agency will put meaningful measures in place to protect endangered species from the two pesticides is far from certain. Here’s why. Thanks to a troubling allegiance to a regulatory sleight-of-hand put in place by the Trump administration, both the Biden EPA and the Fish and Wildlife Service are opting not to base their risk assessments of carbaryl and methomyl—or any other pesticides—on the best-available independent science. Instead, the agencies are taking advantage of an industry-requested loophole created by Trump Interior Secretary David Bernhardt.

MAGA Legislators Increasingly Force Taxpayers to Support Fossil Fuel Industry. By Stan Cox at TomDispatch. The demise of Silicon Valley Bank last month triggered plenty of angst among solar energy developers. Before it collapsed, SVB claimed it had “financed or helped finance 62 percent of community solar projects in America,” according to Washington Post business reporter Evan Halper. At first, it wasn’t clear who might fill that gap. MAGA politicians took great delight in the disruption of what they tediously referred to as the “woke” economy. Missouri Republican Sen.  Josh Hawley tweeted this non sequitur: “So these SVB guys spend all their time funding woke garbage—‘climate change solutions’—rather than actual banking.” Meanwhile, Stephen Miller, the vampirish mastermind of Donald Trump’s 2017 Muslim travel ban, asked all too rhetorically how much time and money that bank had spent on what he called equity, diversity, and climate “scams.” Why has the right become so obsessed with climate-friendly banking? Here’s a clue to answering that question: just as MAGA-world was celebrating such an interruption in renewable-energy financing, red-state lawmakers were taking legal aim at private companies, and local leaders considered insufficiently deferential to the fossil-fuel industry. In state after state, such politicians are now attempting to dictate the makeup of the American energy supply—sometimes putting a thumb on the scale, at other times stomping on it.

weekly ECO-TWEET

HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)

Solar and Wind Are Growing Faster Than Fledgling Nuclear and LNG Once Did. By Nathaniel Bullard at Bloomberg Green. On an absolute basis, today’s newest energy technologies are the fastest growing in at least 50 years. On a relative basis, though, they have more work to do to have the same global impact. Wind and solar together now generate more electricity than the world’s nuclear power fleet, but to have the equivalent impact that nuclear power had in the 1970s and 1980s, they will need to grow roughly twice as fast. Fortunately, they are. Research group BloombergNEF expects 316 gigawatts of solar power to be added this year, and 110 more gigawatts of wind power as well. That continued growth would keep the trends in Shell’s chart fresh: The two fastest-growing energy technologies of the past five decades are likely to continue their path, and continue their impact too.

Lolita the Orca Will Return to the Sea After 50 Years in a Tank. By Molly Taft at Gizmodo. One of the world’s most famous orcas is going back to the ocean after more than 50 years in captivity, following years of activism pushing for her release. On March 30, the Miami Seaquarium, home of the orca named Lolita, also known as Tokitae, announced that it is planning to release her back into her natural habitat in the Pacific Northwest within the next two years. The effort is part of a first-of-its-kind legal agreement between the Seaquarium and Friends of Toki, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the orca’s welfare. Moving Lolita from Florida back to the Pacific requires that federal regulators, which oversee the care and keeping of wild animals in captivity, sign off on the move. It’s also going to be a pricey endeavor. While specific numbers have not been provided, the cost could soar above $1 million, and it may require the use of a military plane or a 747. The transport will be bankrolled by Jim Irsay, owner and CEO of the Indianapolis Colts. Lolita was taken from the Puget Sound when she was around 4 years old in 1970, from a group known as the L pod. Her capture—an infamous incident that saw 80 orcas from an endangered population rounded up, seven captured, and five killed—was part of a rush in the late 1960s and early 1970s to collect orcas from the wild for shows at aquariums, marine parks, and other facilities. Lolita was originally given a Chinook name, Tokitae, but was renamed upon her arrival in Miami. Initially, Lolita was kept with a mate, a male named Hugo, who was prone to slamming his head against the wall of their glass tank. After 10 years together, Hugo died after running into the wall with particular force, and Lolita was moved to a smaller tank—around 35 feet wide, just 15 feet longer than her body. It’s the smallest orca tank in the U.S. Solitary confinement for decades. Outright torture.

Is There Anything ‘Solar Meadows’ Can’t Do? By Elizabeth Hewitt at Reasons to Be Cheerful. Amid black-eyed Susans and purple wildflowers growing between rows of solar panels at Connexus Energy’s headquarters in Ramsey, Minnesota, Rob Davis has seen hoverflies, swallows, and a hummingbird moth. “It’s just like being in a nice, natural place,” says Davis, Connexus public affairs lead. “But it’s also just a visual delight, because there’s so many things to see when you sit and wait.” When the array was installed almost a decade ago, the initial plan was to keep gravel around the panels. Instead, the electricity co-op planted a mixture of flowering plants—becoming what Davis says was the first pollinator-friendly solar project in the U.S. Now, many others are following suit. Across the country, planners are increasingly eschewing turf grass and gravel for flowering meadows that support butterflies, bees, insects, and other threatened wildlife.  

‘Doomerism’: Why scientists disagree with Biden on 1.5 C. By Scott Waldman at ClimateWire. Damned. Lost. Done. President Joe Biden keeps saying the world as we know it will be gone if global temperatures rise beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit]. His comments are raising concern among scientists who say the president risks adding to public confusion about the dangers of surpassing the 1.5 C threshold, an event that is expected to occur in about a decade. Biden has been ratcheting up his warnings about breaching that benchmark in recent speeches, claiming that future generations would be damned and that “we lose it all” if the world overshoots that target. But those assertions go beyond what many climate scientists say would happen. Surpassing 1.5 C is dangerous, they say, but it’s not a point of no return. Biden’s rhetoric is “misleading and unhelpful,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. The best way to view what lies beyond 1.5 C is as a continuum of worsening climate impacts, he said, rather than as a climate cliff. “It indeed feeds doomerism since there’s a very real possibility that we will fail to limit warming below 1.5 C,” Mann said of Biden’s remarks. “If we miss that exit ramp, we don’t continue headlong down the fossil fuel highway. We get off at the earliest possible exit.”  

Economic implications of the climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. By John Bistline, Neil R. Mehrotra, and Catherine Wolfram at Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. According to their paper, Economic Implications of the Climate Provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, most models suggest the law puts the United States on track to achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels in the range of 32-42% by 2030, which is 6-11 percentage points lower than without the IRA. The IRA lowers the costs of adopting clean technologies and accelerates the deployment of clean electricity generation, electric vehicles, and several emerging technologies, including carbon capture and hydrogen. That would narrow the gap between current emissions and the goal set for the United States under the Paris Climate Agreement. But, the authors note, revenue losses from the tax provisions of the IRA could be “significantly larger” than initially estimated by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). The agencies put the cost of the law’s climate provisions at $392 billion over 10 years: $121 billion in direct spending and $271 billion in tax credits. The Electric Power Research Institute’s US-REGEN model suggests that the tax credits alone would cost $780 billion by 2031 (almost three times the CBO/JCT estimate). That’s because most of the credits are uncapped and their cost will depend on the extent to which households and firms use them. The larger fiscal costs generated by the model reflect its estimates that the tax credits will be more successful than initially estimated at spurring investments by firms in clean energy production and by households in electric vehicles and energy-saving home improvements, which also lower the cost of electricity.

Climate change litigation has finally reached the world’s highest court. By Maria Antonia Tigre and Jorge Alejandro Carrillo Bañuelos at Climate Law—A Sabin Center blog. On March 29, 2023, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution requesting an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the obligations of states with respect to climate change. The U.N. adopted resolution (A/77/L.58) by consensus. The Republic of Vanuatu spearheaded this initiative in a 2021 announcement supported by grassroots youth groups. The General Assembly requested the ICJ render an opinion on the following questions: (a) What are the obligations of states under international law to ensure the protection of the climate system and other parts of the environment from anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases for states and for present and future generations? (b) What are the legal consequences under these obligations for states where they, by their acts and omissions, have caused significant harm to the climate system and other parts of the environment, with respect to: (i) states, including, in particular, small island developing states, which due to their geographical circumstances and level of development, are injured or specially affected by or are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change? (ii) Peoples and individuals of the present and future generations affected by the adverse effects of climate change?

GREEN LINKS

Come to Florida for the Low Taxes, Stay for the Climate Disaster • Wright’s Law Spells Doom For Legacy Auto Around The World • ‘A Win for All Living Beings’: Appeals Court Tosses Mountain Valley Pipeline Permit • ICE car values plummet in China and it is the canary in the coal mine • ‘Ocean Is at Stake’ at International Seabed Authority Negotiations Over Deep-Sea Mining • Pacific Walruses Fight to Survive in the Rapidly Warming Arctic • In Ohio, Electric Cars Are Starting to Reshape Jobs and Companies • NY moves toward public ownership, operation of renewable power in budget negotiated by state leaders • As Enforcement Lags, Toxic Coal Ash Keeps Polluting U.S. Water • New discoveries spark ‘concerns’ about Fukushima’s future ‘earthquake resistance’ • In rural America, big solar projects often get a frosty welcome • Not enough fish in the sea​​​​​​​