Just dropped · Trial Balloon · Ep. 193
The Magnificent Seven
A new Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll finds that a strong majority of Americans — about 8 in 10 — say that human activity is fueling climate change, and roughly half believe action is urgently needed within the next decade if humanity is to avert its worst effects. Nearly 4 in 10 now say climate change is a “crisis,” up from less than a quarter five years ago.
However, two-thirds say President Trump is doing too little to tackle the problem.
Reuters: “The Trump administration is moving forward with a plan to revoke California’s authority to set its own vehicle greenhouse gas standards and declare that states are pre-empted from setting their own vehicle rules.”
“President Donald Trump met with senior officials on Thursday at the White House to discuss the administration’s plan to divide its August 2018 proposal to rollback Obama era standards through 2025 and revoke California’s waiver under the Clean Air Act to set state requirements for vehicles.”
“The Trump administration on Thursday announced the repeal one of the Obama era’s most sweeping environmental rules — a set of pollution protections for small streams and wetlands that had riled up opposition from coal miners, home developers, farmers and oil and gas drillers,” Politico reports.
“The action creates instant doubts about the legal status of myriad seasonal or isolated wetlands and thousands of miles of waterways, including vast swaths of the arid West. And it clears the way for the Environmental Protection Agency to finish a follow-up regulation in the coming months that could leave most of the nation’s wetlands without any federal safeguards.”
CNBC: “Environmental groups condemned the move, claiming that loosening restrictions will substantially harm the country’s sources of safe drinking water.”
“The Justice Department has launched an antitrust investigation into four auto makers that forged an independent agreement with California on vehicle-emissions standards,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Justice Department lawyers are seeking to determine if Ford, Honda, BMW and Volkswagen violated federal competition law by agreeing with each other to follow tailpipe-emissions standards beyond those proposed by the Trump administration.”
“The Trump administration is moving forward with a proposal to revoke part of California’s authority to set its own automobile gas mileage standards, in another confrontation with a state that has repeatedly challenged environmental rollbacks,” the AP reports.
“The Environmental Protection Agency was preparing paperwork for the White House that would set a single national standard for fuel economy.”
“The Trump administration announced new rules on Wednesday to roll back requirements for energy-saving light bulbs, a move that could contribute to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change,” the New York Times reports.
“The gradual shift toward more efficient light bulbs is one of the largely unsung success stories in the fight to reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren released an ambitious new climate change plan on Tuesday, embracing goals laid out by Gov. Jay Inslee, and calling for $3 trillion in spending over a decade to combat human-driven global warming, the New York Times reports.
“Ms. Warren made her announcement on the eve of a CNN town-hall-style event on global warming… Sen. Kamala Harris is expected to put forth a detailed climate change plan on Wednesday morning, and three other Democratic presidential candidates — Sen. Cory Booker, Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Julián Castro — have also released climate change plans since Sunday.”
CNN: “Warren also challenged her rivals to meet Inslee’s standard.”
Climate Debate: Will a climate forum allow a productive climate change debate?
Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate activist from Sweden, has joined a protest outside the United Nations headquarters in New York to demand action on the climate crisis, the Guardian reports.
Thunberg arrived in New York after crossing the Atlantic via a solar-powered yacht.
Said Thunberg: “It’s insane that a 16-year-old has to cross the Atlantic in order to take a stand, but that’s how it is. It feels like we are at a breaking point. Leaders know that more eyes on them, much more pressure is on them, that they have to do something, they have to come up with some sort of solution. I want a concrete plan, not just nice words.”
“The Trump administration is set to announce on Thursday that it intends to sharply curtail the regulation of methane emissions, a major contributor to climate change, according to an industry official with knowledge of the plan,” the New York Times reports.
“The Environmental Protection Agency, in a proposed rule, will aim to eliminate federal government requirements that the oil and gas industry put in place technology to inspect for and repair methane leaks from wells, pipelines and storage facilities.”
“The proposed rollback is particularly notable because major oil and gas companies have, in fact, opposed it, just as some other industries have opposed the Trump administration’s other major moves to dismantle climate change and other environmental rules put in place by President Barack Obama.”
“President Trump has instructed Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to exempt Alaska’s 16.7 million-acre Tongass National Forest from logging restrictions imposed nearly 20 years ago,” the Washington Post reports.
“The move would affect more than half of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, opening it up to potential logging, energy and mining projects. It would undercut a sweeping Clinton administration policy known as the ‘roadless rule’ that has survived a decades-long legal assault.”
“I’m an environmentalist. A lot of people don’t understand that. I think I know more about the environment than most people.”
— President Trump, quoted by The Hill, after skipping a G7 summit meeting focused on climate, oceans and biodiversity.
“As an ecological disaster in the Amazon escalated into a global political crisis, Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, took the rare step on Friday of mobilizing the armed forces to help contain blazes of a scale not seen in nearly a decade,” the New York Times reports.
“The sudden reversal, after days of dismissing growing concern over hundreds of fires raging across the Amazon, came as international outrage grew over the rising deforestation in the world’s largest tropical rain forest. European leaders threatened to cancel a major trade deal, protesters staged demonstrations outside Brazilian embassies and calls for a boycott of Brazilian products snowballed on social media.”
New York Times: “The White House, blindsided by a pact between California and four automakers to oppose President Trump’s auto emissions rollbacks, has mounted an effort to prevent any more from joining the other side… But even as the White House was working to do this, it was losing ground. Yet another company, Mercedes-Benz, is preparing to join the California agreement.”
“Mr. Trump, described by three people as ‘enraged’ by California’s deal, has also demanded that his staffers step up the pace to complete his plan. His proposal, however, is directly at odds with the wishes of many automakers… The administration’s efforts to weaken the Obama-era pollution rules could be rendered irrelevant if too many automakers join California in opposition before the Trump plan can be put into effect. That could imperil one of Mr. Trump’s most far-reaching rollbacks of climate-change policies.”
Ivanka Trump drew ire for sharing photos of her trip to Wyoming on social media, including one image she captioned “Where the wild things are…”, the HuffPost reports.
Just last week, the Trump administration weakened the Endangered Species Act protecting threatened animals and plants.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), who has centered his 2020 campaign around climate change policy, was not one of the nine Democratic presidential candidates who qualified for an invite to CNN’s climate change town hall in September, Axios reports.
CNN said it would extend invitations to candidates who reach 2% in at least four DNC-approved polls conducted between June 28 and Aug. 21.
Sen. Kamala Harris was invited, but declined due to a scheduling conflict.
A bleak new federal report found that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose to levels the world has not seen in at least 800,000 years, highlighting the irreversible and mounting deleterious effects of human activity on the planet, Eco Watch reports.
Green That Life: What is “carbon footprint” and why should you care?
“The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would change the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, significantly weakening the nation’s bedrock conservation law credited with rescuing the bald eagle, the grizzly bear and the American alligator from extinction,” the New York Times reports..
“The changes will make it harder to consider the effects of climate change on wildlife when deciding whether a given species warrants protection. They would most likely shrink critical habitats and, for the first time, would allow economic assessments to be conducted when making determinations.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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