“Unprecedented” is often applied to the Inflation Reduction Act’s funding provisions to address the climate crisis. And as E2’s ongoing analysis shows, the dollars being invested in the nation’s green transition are already having a positive impact that IRA’s GOP foes would rather you not hear about—particularly good news such as 100,000 new manufacturing jobs. While notoriously praising the arrival of a new project in their own districts without mentioning that it wouldn’t exist without the IRA that every Republican voted against, they attack the overall program. They are determined to ax it if they get the opportunity should November work out for them.
Determined to backfoot America and its people in the global green transformation. Determined to sabotage hard-won environmental regulations that stand in the way of even more gargantuan profits. Determined to open the faucet even farther on the already-record flow of oil and gas right in the last moments we still have to turn it quickly down and off.
These planned reactionary attacks—whether voiced ad hoc by a congressional leader or enshrined in ideological tombs like Project 2025—are depressing when combined with the latest climate news. Whatever happens, however far the apparently non-linear climate changes so obviously now underway eventually go, and how fast they get there, rough times are coming no matter what we do. And “rough” could very well be the good parts.
Rep. Mike Garcia
But, to repeat for umpteeumph time, every extra bit of carbon we don’t emit into the atmosphere improves the odds of societal survival and every molecule of oil and gas we extract, transport, refine, and burn lowers them. Stopping those emissions cannot be an afterthought or #11 on our Top 10 priority list.
Given our circumstances, even unprecedented policy doesn’t cut it. Because the pace of climate change is way beyond unprecedented. Only the true numbskulls among us (in high places and low) brush off our current situation as not a crisis, not an emergency. But that is exactly what Republicans, hopeful of a two-house congressional majority and the presidency in their hands come January, clearly will do, and worse.
Democrats need offense as well as defense on climate policy
The Democrats are running partly, as well they should, on some major achievements of the Biden administration made possible by uncomfortable yet workable unity between progressives and the more centrist wing of the party. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) embodies the good results of that cooperation even though it is a shadow of its original self in the stymied Build Back Better Act, a byproduct of the stubbornness of Sen. Joe Manchin.
While Republicans wail about the evil “socialism” of the IRA, Democrats need both a defense of what they’ve achieved with the act and an offense—evidence of things they will initiate if November goes their way. Republicans aren’t shy about their agenda and Democrats shouldn’t be either, no matter how many times the Republicans screech malarkey about “Biden’s radical green agenda.”
Three years ago, Republicans, with some Democratic help, eviscerated key elements of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). Last Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Rep. Mike Garcia of California, and a bunch of co-sponsors introduced a bill to repair some of the damage caused back then. It’s called the Build Green Act, and it would provide $500 billion to be invested in green transportation and the grid over 10 years.
Funding would be distributed under the IIJA and IRA. Warren’s office estimates it would create a million new jobs, save $100 billion annually in health damages, and prevent 4,200 deaths each year.
Warren said in a statement: "The time to accelerate towards a clean energy future is now. Modernizing our transportation grid will pump billions into the economy, create green union jobs, and safeguard against the worst effects of climate change. That’s good news across the board."
Marianne Lavelle has a good analysis at Inside Climate News:
The bill would resurrect much of the DNA of the $2 trillion “Build Back Better” idea that Biden touted on the campaign trail in 2020. Warren was the original sponsor of the Build Green Act introduced early in 2021, and it became part of the template for the bipartisan $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that passed later that year. (”Build Green” is an acronym for the bill’s full title: the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development and Generating Renewable Energy to Electrify the Nation’s Infrastructure and Jobs Act.)
But in order to win over the votes of Republicans and conservative Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), clean energy investments were sharply cut and spending on repair and widening of highways and bridges were ramped up. For example, an originally planned $174 billion investment in electric vehicles and a network of charging stations was pared back to $7.5 billion for EVs, charging infrastructure and electric school buses in the final bill.
Of the $15 billion in direct grants to cities and local governments so far under the 2021 infrastructure legislation, 35.5 percent has been directed to road and bridge projects and another 12 percent to airports, according to tracking by the National League of Cities. Only 19.6 percent of funding has gone to public transit systems. Many more projects have sought funding than could be covered under available dollars.
To address that shortfall, the new Build Green Act would allocate at least $150 billion for fixed-route public transportation projects like subways, light rail and bus rapid transit systems. That would be more than enough to fund the current full cost of every project on the Federal Transit Administration’s Capital Investment Program Dashboard—a regularly updated list of projects seeking funding.
The bill won’t, of course, pass this year unless at least 10 Republican Senators (and Joe Manchin) have a sudden change of heart. But it’s the kind of reply Democrats should be delivering to reactionaries who are determined to make climate impacts worse by throwing obstacles in the path of taking even modest action. It’s not the Green New Deal, but it certainly ought to be a piece of it. And if piecemeal is the only path to success, so be it. The public transportation focus of Build Green serves the needs of a sustainable society while reining in the defects of an overly car-centric society.
Said Rep. Garcia: “By making crucial investments into electrifying public transportation and implementing sustainable technologies, we can effectively tackle the climate crisis while building a well-paid workforce and green economy. The Build Act allows communities nationwide to take the steps necessary to create a future that is cleaner and greener, paving the way for generations to come. The time to act is now.”
There’s a bit of the green boilerplate in that statement, but he’s not wrong. Since the 1970s, many advocates have argued that changing to less polluting, more sustainable ways of living would pay huge health, economic, social, and environmental benefits. The words and ideas got considerable media attention; the people who truly took those words to heart were not so many. The time to act was then. But it’s not (yet) too late to act now. The only other option is submitting to destruction. Far too many reactionary politicians and their patrons want us to ride the climate bomb to its destination.
Nobody should be under the illusion that the unfolding crisis can be resolved simply by switching how we power ourselves and get around. But it’s a key element of dealing with it. Building the infrastructure to get off oil and other fossil fuels has to move a lot faster than it has been. And as fast as even California has been adding renewable energy plus storage, this needs to be tripled by 2030. Even more so elsewhere in this country and in others. The costs arising from challenges in agriculture—from water to weather, from soil to migrating bugs—are going to make even 10 times that $500 billion in the Build Green Act look like peanuts. (Peanut farmers face serious problems from climate change, by the way.) Then there is the profound societal disruption from an increasingly hostile environment, a byproduct very much of our own doing, which will generate perhaps the most immense costs as well.
The Build Green Act addresses just one impact of our energy use. But every effort to permanently reduce demand for carbon-spewing fuels is worth doing. Democrats should embrace that credo even if climate isn’t foremost on most Americans’ minds. It rarely is, but it soon will be. We shouldn’t always have to ponder climate change through the lens of partisan politics. With the stakes so high, we all ought to be pulling in the same direction. But history and the present teach us that if we have to depend on Republican participation to take serious climate action, then we truly are doomed.
Tick, tick, tick.
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GREEN BRIEFs
Yes, we had another record-breaking average temperature for the 11th month in a row in April, and scientists also announced last week that the gauges at the Mauna Loa, Hawai’i, monitoring station registered that the largest-ever leap of carbon dioxide emissions had occurred in March. The average concentration of CO2 for the month was 4.7 parts per million higher than in March 2023. That addition was enough to hit a monthly average of 425.22 ppm. In 1958, when measurements began, the level was about 315 ppm. CO2 is highest in the spring when plants start growing and tapers off over the summer as they absorb the gas.
Ralph Keeling, director of the CO2 Program at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told The Guardian: “It’s really significant to see the pace of the increase over the first four months of this year, which is also a record. We aren’t just breaking records in CO2 concentrations, but also the record in how fast it is rising.” Keeling’s father, Charles Keeling, started the measurements atop the volcano 66 years ago. In preindustrial times, it’s estimated the CO2 concentration was 280 ppm. On Friday it was 426 ppm. A study published in Science asserts that it’s been 14 million years since the concentration was that high. That’s about the time the first great apes appeared.
Emissions hit a record last year, rising to 36.8 billion metric tons. “The emissions from the tropical forests are superimposed on these very large emissions from fossil fuel burning, which is bigger than ever,” says Keeling. “It's not that El Niño events are unusual, it's the fossil fuel burning is unusual in a historical sense. It's an extreme. It's never been higher.”
Meanwhile, there’s another source of carbon emissions because the permafrost is melting. This has been of concern of a few scientists since the earliest IPCC reports, but as with many of the details of climate change, there are differences of opinion about what is actually happening and what could happen. Sparsity of data and rapidly changing conditions in the circumpolar Arctic has made definitive answers hard to come by. A new study published in Geosciences makes what’s actually happening a little clearer.
The Chinese team scrutinized areas where the permafrost is melting—a process called thermokarst, This affects a fifth of the permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere. They found that in thermokarst-affected areas, the increase in carbon dioxide emissions was 5.5 times as high as unaffected neighboring areas. They calculate that global warming could increase carbon emissions from melting permafrost by 400 million tons annually, 1% of total current emissions from all sources. That’s significantly higher than previously thought.
The energy think-tank Ember released a stunning new report last week. In 2023, renewable generation of electricity with solar and wind for the planet exceeded 30% for the first time. In 2000, that figure was 19%, most of it hydropower. As has been the case for several years, China led in renewables expansion in 2023, with a 51% share of the additional global solar generation and a 60% share of new global wind generation. When nuclear power is added in, the world generated nearly 40% of its electricity from low-carbon sources last year. Consequently, the CO2 intensity of global power generation was 12% lower than its peak in 2007.
Meanwhile, the report found, global electricity demand also hit a record high in 2023. The increase of 627 terawatt-hours, equivalent to the entire demand of Canada (607 TWh), came from China, which saw a demand increase of 6.9%, compared with a decline in demand in the U.S. (-1.4%) and the E.U. (-3.4%). More than half the rise came as a result of the spread of five technologies: electric vehicles, heat pumps, electrolyzers, air conditioning, and data centers. While these technologies will continue to accelerate growth in electricity demand, energy demand overall will decrease because power from electrification is more efficient than from fossil fuels.
Led by solar and wind, clean generation has already helped slow the growth in fossil fuels by almost two-thirds over the past decade, Ember researchers found. “As a result, half the world’s economies are already at least five years past a peak in electricity generation from fossil fuels. OECD countries are at the forefront of this, with power sector emissions collectively peaking in 2007 and falling 28% since then.”
The decade ahead will see the energy transition enter a new phase. A permanent decline in fossil fuel use in the power sector at a global level is now inevitable, leading to falling sector emissions. Clean electricity additions – led by solar and wind – are already forecast to outpace demand growth in the coming decade, securing moderate reductions in fossil fuel use and hence emissions, even as demand accelerates to meet the growing needs of electrification and other booming technologies.
For the goal of achieving international climate change targets, this is critical, with multiple analyses finding that the power sector should be the first to decarbonise – by 2035 in OECD countries, by 2045 in the rest of the world. The sector is currently the highest emitting of all, producing more than a third of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. Clean electricity is also key to decarbonising transport, heating and much of industry, by replacing the fossil fuel burning that currently takes place in car and bus engines, boilers, furnaces and other applications. An accelerating transition to a clean electrified economy powered by wind, solar and other forms of clean energy will also unlock benefits in areas such as economic growth, jobs, air quality and energy sovereignty.
HALF A DOZEN THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
Oil Drilling Has Endured in the Everglades for Decades. Now, the Miccosukee Tribe Has a Plan to Stop It by Amy Green at Inside Climate News. Within a thicket of the Big Cypress National Preserve, established a half-century ago to protect the marshes and sloughs here that make up a vital part of the Florida Everglades, a series of wells extracts oil from more than two miles underground. [...] For decades oil production has endured in this corner of the fragile Everglades, a watershed that spans much of the peninsula and is the focus of a $21 billion federal and state restoration effort, one of the most ambitious in human history. Big Cypress is among some 10 percent of federally protected lands nationwide where the government owns the surface terrain while private entities retain the mineral rights underneath. [...] “Big Cypress National Preserve is very sacred to us,” said Talbert Cypress, elected chairman of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, a federally recognized tribal nation located in the Everglades. “We have a lot of ceremonial grounds that have been in Big Cypress National Preserve, burial grounds, places where we gather our traditional medicine. So just seeing that sort of damage in a place that really matters to us a lot, it’s sad to see it.” Now the Miccosukees, longtime environmental stewards in Florida who perhaps most notably helped steer stringent water quality standards for their sacred river of grass, have a plan for phasing out oil drilling within Big Cypress.
At Raccoon Point, in the Big Cypress National Preserve, oil was detected in 1978. Production began in 1981, and the field was expanded in 1992.
April M. Short
How a Neighborhood Co-op Started by Teens Helped Communities Around the U.S. Adopt Solar Power by April M. Short at Resilience. The nonprofit Solar United Neighbors (SUN) works to help communities around the U.S. move away from fossil fuels and toward solar power. They do so through public education and by establishing neighborhood-based cooperatives, which can help to bring the price of installing solar panels down significantly through group purchasing and negotiation support. The project was started by two preteen friends who were moved to action after watching the documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” in 2007. Twelve-year-old Walter (the son of Anya Schoolman, SUN’s founder and executive director), and his friend of the same age, Diego, decided to go door to door in their neighborhood of Mt. Pleasant in Washington, D.C. In two weeks, the boys gathered about 50 neighbors together who also wanted to go solar. This was the foundation of Mt. Pleasant Solar Cooperative and the start of what would become SUN. From there, the kids—supported by Anya Schoolman—worked to get legislation passed to improve solar policies in the Washington, D.C., area. The Mt. Pleasant Solar Cooperative started a MoveOn petition for legislation to require Washington’s primary utility company, the Potomac Electric Power Company, to use renewable power and support adding solar panels in the region. More than 2,000 Washington, D.C., residents signed the bill, which helped move it to a vote. It passed unanimously in 2011.
Over 100,000 manufacturing jobs announced since Inflation Reduction Act passed by Sean Wolfe at Renewable Energy World. According to the monthly tally of private-sector announcements from E2, since the Inflation Reduction Act was signed 21 months ago, at least 305 major clean energy projects have been announced in 40 states and Puerto Rico. Those projects are expected to create at least 105,454 new jobs and more than $123 billion in capital investment. In April, the federal government announced four new large-scale clean energy projects that will hire about 1,500 manufacturing workers. Among these is a $1.4 billion investment by Toyota to build a three-row electric SUV at its Princeton facility in Indiana and a $294 million investment by Boviet Solar to build its first North American solar manufacturing plant in North Carolina. The announced clean energy investments in Indiana now come to $7.8 billion, ranking it fifth among the states for the most investment dollars for clean energy projects. With $19.5 billion in announced projects, North Carolina ranks first.
This article includes a list of projects that generated these jobs sorted by state.
Solar to contribute over 60% of new U.S. electricity generation in 2024 by Ryan Kennedy at PV Magazine. The U.S. Energy Information Administration released its Short-Term Energy Outlook report this week, forecasting that the total electricity generation capacity in the United States will increase 3% in 2024 and 1% in 2025. “Renewable energy sources—chiefly solar—will supply most of that growth,” said EIA. Solar, wind, and hydropower in 2023 combined for roughly 21% of electricity generation in the United States. EIA expects this figure to grow to 24% in 2025. EIA said solar will provide 41% more electricity in 2024 than in 2023. EIA said the 19 gigawatts of solar capacity added in 2023 and the more than 37 gigawatts expected this year account for the large jump in generation. In 2025, total solar generation is expected to grow another 25%. U.S. electricity generation is expected to rise by 114 terawatt-hours (3% growth), in 2024, with 60% of this growth provided by utility-scale solar. Among other renewable sources, wind contributes will 19% of 2024 electricity generation growth, and hydropower will contribute 13%, said EIA. Despite the forecast for 3% electricity generation growth this year, EIA said “… we forecast that natural gas consumption in the electric power sector will be about the same as last summer, which saw the most power sector consumption on record.”
Why US offshore wind power is struggling—the good, the bad and the opportunity by Christopher Niezrecki at The Conversation.America’s first large-scale offshore wind farms began sending power to the Northeast in early 2024, but a wave of wind farm project cancellations and rising costs have left many people with doubts about the industry’s future in the U.S. Several big hitters, including Ørsted, Equinor, BP and Avangrid, have canceled contracts or sought to renegotiate them in recent months. Pulling out meant the companies faced cancellation penalties ranging from US$16 million to several hundred million dollars per project. It also resulted in Siemens Energy, the world’s largest maker of offshore wind turbines, anticipating financial losses in 2024 of around $2.2 billion. Altogether, projects that had been canceled by the end of 2023 were expected to total more than 12 gigawatts of power, representing more than half of the capacity in the project pipeline. So, what happened, and can the U.S. offshore wind industry recover?
The author is director of the Center for Energy Innovation at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
Blocking renewable energy is a top state legislative priority for network of pro-fossil fuels think tanks from the Energy & Policy Institute. The State Policy Network announced on its website last month that it will focus on working with state lawmakers to prevent states from adopting wind and solar power in 2024. SPN is the national organization that serves as the central hub of a network of affiliated think tanks located in all 50 states, and is funded by right-wing and corporate donors that include fossil fuel interests. The network also includes associate groups like the Donald Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute and multiple organizations backed by Charles Koch, such as Americans for Prosperity. Koch is the billionaire CEO and chairman of Koch Industries, which operates in multiple sectors of the fossil fuel industry and has a long history of funding think-tanks and individuals who lied about climate change. His Stand Together Trust contributed $5 million in 2022 to SPN-affiliated think tanks and millions more to SPN associates like the American Legislative Exchange Council and Cato Institute, according to the Center for Media & Democracy. The Energy and Policy Institute is publishing new research profiles of SPN and several affiliated think tanks involved in coast-to-coast efforts to block renewable energy projects. At the story link you can see highlights from this research.
Image from one of the Center of the American Experiment’s Facebook ads. CAE received $250,000 from Koch’s Stand Together Trust in 2022 to continue delivering its renewables disinformation.
ECOPINION
Christiana Figueres
I understand climate scientists’ despair – but stubborn optimism may be our only hope by Christiana Figueres at The Guardian. b“Hopeless and broken”: that is how a top scientist interviewed by the Guardian described feeling as she and hundreds of other climate experts shared harrowing predictions of the future of the planet this week. I resonate with her feelings of despair. Even as the former head of the UN climate change convention that achieved the Paris agreement in 2015, I, like many, can succumb to believing in the worst possible outcome. [...] Collective doubt in our ability to respond to the climate crisis is by now dangerously pervasive. Beyond climate scientists, it’s shared by politicians and some young people. It’s also shared by some philanthropists who fund climate NGOs, and by many who work in those NGOs. It is shared by some financiers, and some of those who work in companies struggling to reduce their emissions. A sense of despair is understandable, but it robs us of our agency, makes us vulnerable to mis- and disinformation, and prevents the radical collaboration we need. Doubt holds us back from taking bold action, which is why it is strategically seized upon by incumbents, who have invested millions of dollars (probably much more) in sowing uncertainty around the climate crisis and its solutions among the general public. [...] While we grapple with the current lack of political will, and the abhorrent inequities of the climate crisis, we can take some comfort that so many of those who are key to designing our future have heard climate scientists’ urgent warnings and are channelling their spirit by taking positive action in response: think of the engineers reforming our grids, the architects, the social entrepreneurs, the regenerative farmers restoring our soil, the legal advocates, and the millions of people everywhere who are advancing new systems of care, repair and regeneration. It will take much more courageous collective action to turn the seemingly impossible into the new normal. But we are on the brink of positive societal tipping points. I believe that the children of children born this year will be the first fossil-fuel-free generation in modern history.
California’s Dream of a Green Hydrogen Future Could Backfire by Aaron Cantú at Capital & Main. Critics, such as environmentalists, emissions experts and utility reformers, worry that hydrogen boosters are pushing California into a risky regulatory framework, motivated by financial incentives in President Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the climate-focused Inflation Reduction Act. If implemented incorrectly, the state’s proposed hydrogen plan could actually increase emissions, they said. [...] Companies can generate hydrogen from renewable methane gas derived from landfills, dairy manure, agricultural waste, and forest overgrowth — all methods that generate pollution. Alternatively, machines known as electrolyzers can produce clean hydrogen by separating hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water. But that method is expensive and consumes vast amounts of electricity, which has climate consequences. Senate Bill 1420 proposes that low-carbon-sourced hydrogen made either through electrolysis or from renewable methane should be considered clean, and requires that by 2045, 60% of all hydrogen used in fuel cell vehicles be clean. It would also allow hydrogen producers to qualify for faster environmental reviews under the California Environmental Quality Act, which currently only apply to sectors such as solar, wind and thermal power plants and transmission projects. But opponents said the bill has multiple problems. It leaves the door open for fossil-fuel-sourced hydrogen in vehicles through midcentury. It entrenches gas collection at dairy farms, which pollutes the air and water of nearby rural communities and leaks climate-warming methane when piped and refined.
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Mukhtar Babayev, Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources of the Republic of Azerbaijan and also a former oil executive. He has been picked to preside over the COP29 climate summit that will take place in November 2024 in Baku.
Good COP, bad COP: Azerbaijan’s climate charm offensive is backfiring by Gabriel Gaven & Sara Schonhardt at Climate Wire.Azerbaijan scored a major diplomatic victory when it won the right to host this year’s COP29 U.N. climate talks. Now, it’s experiencing the downside of this newfound prestige — heightened scrutiny of the regime’s murky foreign influence peddling, jailing of critics, political crackdowns and unrepentant fossil fuel deal-making. The most recent example came Friday, when the United States indicted Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) on charges that he took hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from Azerbaijan to act as its “foreign agent” in Washington. According to the indictment, the Texas Democrat actively lobbied for Azerbaijan’s oil firm Socar while working with the country’s ambassador to advance the nation’s interests. The charges by the Biden administration came months after Azerbaijan won the right to host and run the negotiations at this November’s massive global gathering. That was the capstone of the South Caucasus petrostate’s yearslong effort to burnish its credentials with Western politicians and investors. Yet experts say the allegations circling Cuellar—which he denies—are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Azerbaijani influence efforts abroad.
The Dawn of the ‘Non-Driver’ Movement: A Conversation with Anna Zivarts by Kea Wilson at StreetsblogUSA. About 30% of U.S. residents don’t have a driver’s license—and countless more have given up their keys, even if they still have that all-important card in their wallet. So why do so many people assume that there are no “non-drivers” in America, and what will it take to prioritize their needs in our transportation decisions? In her essential new book, “When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away From Car Dependency,” disability rights advocate Anna Zivarts unpacks the large and diverse community of people who never get behind the wheel, whether because of their age, their disabilities, their immigration status, their criminal history, or because they simply can’t afford it. And then, she outlines a roadmap for building a world where those who can’t depend on cars can still get where they’re going safely, easily, and independently — and why everyone would benefit from that fundamental shift. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length; an extended audio version will be released shortly on Streetsblog’s podcast, The Brake.
We cannot afford another lost year for food and climate action by Emile Frison at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It is really only in the last two or three years that food systems have begun to be taken seriously in climate change spaces. Previously, the spotlight had predominantly shone on fossil fuels and our dirty energy systems. This emphasis was rationalized by the undeniable truth that the burning of coal, oil, and gas constitute the primary sources of global warming emissions.Yet food systems—encompassing the entirety of activities spanning from agricultural production on the farm to processing, distribution, consumption, and disposal—are responsible for fully a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. At the carbon dioxide equivalent of 18 metric gigatons, that’s more than the annual emissions of the United States and China combined. Additionally, they contribute significantly to fossil fuel consumption, accounting for 15% of total usage. Though these food systems emissions may be complicated, dispersed, and inconvenient, they cannot be ignored. According to an influential paper in the peer-reviewed journal Science, “even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C [2.7°F] and difficult even to realize the 2°C target [3.6°F]. It is to be welcomed, therefore, that after 28 successive summits, annual UN climate negotiations have at last begun to pay attention to food and agriculture. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) presidency of the COP28 climate negotiations promised to put food on the table at the conference in Dubai last December (COP 28 2023a). This shift signals that food can no longer enjoy a free ride, under the radar of scrutiny.
RELATED: The future of food in a time of climate change
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel
Climate Movement Cheers Michigan AG's Plans to Sue Big Oil by Jessica Corbett at Common Dreams.Advocates of holding fossil fuel giants accountable for their significant contributions to the climate emergency welcomed Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel's Thursday announcement that she intends to sue the polluting industry. "Big Oil knew decades ago that their products would cause catastrophic climate change, but instead of doing the right thing they lied about it," declared Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity. "The people of Michigan deserve their day in court to make these companies pay for the massive harm they knowingly caused." Dozens of municipalities and attorneys general for the District of Columbia and eight states—California, Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont—have already filed climate liability suits against Big Oil in recent years. "Our 'Pure Michigan' identity is under threat from the effects of climate change," said Nessel, whose state was praised last year for passing clean energy legislation. "Warmer temperatures are shrinking ski seasons in the UP and disrupting the wonderful blooms of Holland's Tulip Time Festival. Severe weather events are on the rise."
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OTHER GREEN STUFF
Japan is Revising its Law on Ivory Trade—Time to Finally Close the Market • Will changes at San Gabriel Mountains National Monument serve LA’s communities of color? • Indonesian company defies order, still clearing peatlands in orangutan habitat • Without Heat Protections, Florida Laborers Brace for a Cruel Summer • How Shadowy Corporations, Secret Deals and False Promises Keep Retired Coal Plants From Being Redeveloped • Venezuela Thought to Be First Country To Lose All of Its Glaciers • The country’s first new aluminum smelter in 45 years could cut production emissions by 75% • El Niño is on the way out after a record-breaking year of heat + Saudi forces 'told to kill’ to clear land for eco-city
