Earth Matters is a Daily Kos compendium of wonderful, disturbing, and hideous news briefs about the environment.
• Sen. Whitehouse calls out Trump for “slow-walking” offshore wind permits: The Rhode Island Democrat, one of the noisier climate hawks in the Senate, accused the Trump regime of dragging its feet in approving offshore wind farms to give natural gas suppliers a boost. GreenTechMedia reports that the infant U.S. offshore wind industry, with around 25 gigawatts of electricity-generation capacity set to be installed over the next decade, is being made to wait for federal permits for siting its 800-megawatt Vineyard Wind off the coast of Massachusetts. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is seeking more environmental reviews, which means a delay of Vineyard and, effectively, the larger offshore industry as a whole. “I think what we’re seeing is a deliberate slow-walk, and not just staff unfamiliarity and hesitation [at BOEM],” Whitehouse said in an interview played Monday at Greentech Media’s Power & Renewables Summit. His state is currently home to the only offshore wind farm in the United States, the 30-megawatt Block Island project owned by Ørsted. “It’s almost comical to see this completely anti-environment administration feign great solicitude for the ocean environment as it delays these projects,” he said.
• Videographer uses drones to locate animals to rescue from climate disasters: Douglas Thron flies two drones carrying infrared cameras, spotlights, and powerful zoom lenses to help find animal survivors of hurricanes and wildfires, which climate change is worsening in frequency and intensity. Once found, he can direct wildlife rescuers to move them to safety. “The potential for these drones to save animals, whether wild or domestic, and help in their recovery is just huge,” Thron says. With his equipment he “can count whiskers on a cat from hundreds of feet away and not disturb it,” he says. In 2019, one of his efforts focused on Kangaroo Island in South Australia where wildfires burned and killed wallabies and koalas by the thousands. When the infrared camera located a koala, Thron used the drone’s other camera to assess its condition. Rescuers could then be directed to capture injured koalas and take them to rehabilitation centers. Thron later was asked to undertake similar efforts for animals in other parts of Australia afflicted by bushfires that eventually charred some 46 million acres.
• One of the many effects of environmental racism:
• California becomes first state to ban 24 toxic chemicals from cosmetics: On Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the Toxic-Free Cosmetics Act—Assembly Bill 2762—which bans use of two dozen chemicals, including mercury and formaldehyde. They and the other banned chemicals have been tied to cancer, birth defects, hormone disruption, and other bad health impacts, according to the Environmental Working Group. The EU has banned the same ingredients from cosmetics and personal care products, but they are unregulated in the U.S. market on the national level. Introduced in the legislature by Democratic Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, the ban will go into effect in 2025.
• New study shows ocean stratification happening faster than expected. The negative impacts will arrive sooner too: Global warming is causing layering of the ocean, a stratification that blocks the free flow of heat, carbon, oxygen, and nutrients within the water column, and between the oceans and the atmosphere. The study in Nature, co-authored by eminent climate scientist Michael Mann, found the upper 600 feet of ocean is heating up faster than deeper down. The warmer water means intensified storms, depletion of oxygen, disruption of fisheries, and less absorption of carbon dioxide. If less carbon is carried deeper, that and other climate feedbacks, meaning atmospheric CO2 could triple and the global average temperature increase 8 degrees Fahrenheit by century’s end, according to Mann. "The take-home point, here, is that once again we are learning that the uncertainties are not breaking in our favor," he said. "If anything, the impacts of climate change are proving to be worse than we predicted."
• Carbon Tracker says capping abandoned oil and gas wells could cost $280 billion: That’s what it would cost states, tribes, federal agencies, and the oil industry to retire 2.6 million still-operating onshore oil and gas wells. That is in addition to what it will cost to cap 2-3 million already abandoned wells. But the report says states have managed to average less than 1% of that amount in surety bonds from the industry. The authors write, “This means that, as a whole, oil and gas producing states are susceptible to serial operator defaults and exposed to hundreds of billions of dollars in orphan well liability risk.”
• Green coalition urges Pelosi not to fast-track bill on ocean trash: Save Our Seas 2.0 Act, H.R. 3969, wouldn’t accomplish what is needed, the 40-member coalition says in a letter. It cites a Pew Charitable Trusts study estimating annual flow of plastics to the ocean could triple by 2040 without immediate action. "This bill simply fails to address the core issue outlined in the Pew study and many others: the amount of disposable plastic produced must be reduced," the letter states. Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former EPA regional administrator under President Obama, told Jacob Wallace at E&E News that the bill does not address the root cause of ocean pollution. "This bill is green washing, it's not going to save our seas, it's just providing false cover," she said.
• Change the Chamber group blasts U.S. Chamber of Commerce for continuing to support fossil fuel-friendly policies: The chamber, once derided as the Chamber of Carbon by climate activists, last year acknowledged climate crisis is real, caused by humans, and requires action. After analyzing the chamber’s lobbying, litigation, and campaign spending, the group wrote in the introduction to the study: “We are disappointed to report that the evidence overwhelmingly shows that the Chamber continues to promote fossil fuel interests over science-based climate action. Its recent pivot on climate is, so far, cosmetic.”