The Conservative Climate Caucus boasts 82 members, more than a third of the Republicans in the U.S. House. You might be led to think from the name that at least a part of the GOP has finally wised up about what scientists have been warning for at least 65 years in private and 36 years in public about our future if vigorous action isn’t taken to ameliorate, mitigate, and prevent some of the worst potential impacts of the changes the planet is undergoing. You might be led to think the CCC would have a positive impact on policies designed to actually take such action.
But no. With a handful of exceptions, it’s clear the caucus is mostly a decoration for Republicans to wear when campaigning, especially this year if they’re one of the 12 Republicans in districts President Joe Biden won in 2020. Several members have histories of climate science denial.
Let’s start with what the League of Conservation Voters has to say about the caucus. Every year, the moderate LCV creates a congressional report card on all members of the Senate and House of Representatives based on around 20 pieces of environmentally oriented legislation brought up for vote in the past year. It’s not the whole picture, but it offers pretty good evidence of the real stance of senators and representatives. On a score of 0-100, with 100 being greenest, the lifetime average score of those 82 CCC members as of 2023 was … 5%. The seven-member leadership did a tad better, with a 12% average. Rep. Jefferson Van Drew of New Jersey’s 2nd Congressional District got the top score of the caucus, still a pathetic 41%. Two members must have gotten lost on the way to signing up for some other group—Reps. Michael Cloud and Nathaniel Moran, both of Texas, scored 0%.
Rep. Marianette Miller-Meeks, chair of the Conservative Climate Caucus in the House of Representatives.
Since the CCC was established in 2021, Republicans in Congress have heightened their long-standing assault on existing climate- and other environment-related rules, policies, and proposals. Republicans have attacked moves by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in tense hearings. They’ve introduced a bill to scuttle the electric vehicle tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act. They plan, if they manage to win in November, to eliminate all the climate elements of the IRA. They have blasted the president’s use of the Defense Production Act for developing technologies such as heat pumps, solar panels, and fuel cells, something that CCC member Andy Barr—LCV score 4%— labels as "environmental fantasies." For the past year, CCC members and many other Republicans in Congress have intoned the incessant GOP talking point of “radical green agenda.” The real radical agenda, the real extremism, is a product of those politicians seeking to sabotage, delay, or co-opt any serious climate-addressing action.
Over the past couple of weeks, while the Biden administration was announcing new emissions rules, expanded national monuments, more money to spread solar power to low-income Americans, and other environmental initiatives, the House Republicans were ramming through a bunch of reactionary bills, with assistance from a smidge of Democratic enablers.
Chris D’Angelo catalogued some of the bills that passed April 23-24:
- H.R. 6285 to reverse the Biden administration’s rule barring oil and gas development across more than 13 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve on Alaska’s North Slope. It also requires the Interior Department to reissue all Trump-era oil and gas leases in Alaska’s fragile Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Biden administration canceled these last year.
- H.R. 3195 would rescind the Biden administration’s 20-year ban on new mineral development across 225,000 acres of national forest land adjacent to Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, one of the most visited wilderness areas in the U.S. It also would restore canceled leases to Chilean mining giant Antofagasta for a $1.7 billion underground copper-nickel mine and block judicial review of any mining leases and permits in the region.
- H.R. 3397 would require the Bureau of Land Management to withdraw a new rule aimed at balancing conservation and ecosystem restoration with traditional land uses, including drilling, mining, logging, and grazing. It would also prevent America’s largest land manager from proposing or finalizing any similar rule in the future.
- H.R. 764, the Trust the Science Act, would require the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to bring back the Trump administration rule that stripped gray wolves of protections under the Endangered Species Act. The bill would also block judicial review.
- H.R. 615 would block federal agencies from banning the use of lead ammunition and fishing tackle on federal lands and waters.
Said House Natural Resources Committee Chair Bruce Westerman of Arkansas—LCV score 3%— regarding the BLM change: “This rule is a poorly concealed effort to lock up more lands to advance the Biden administration’s radical 30x30 agenda. This rule would fundamentally upend more than 50 years of land management practices across the West that rural communities have relied on for their livelihoods.” The 30x30 agenda would protect 30% of U.S. land and waters by 2030.
Democratic Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández called the Republican package of bills a “great gift” to corporations that would destroy years of conservation work. But those bills are unlikely to clear the Senate, where Democrats still hold the reins for now.
What’s in that package is mild compared to the great gift that Republicans will lavish on the fossil fuel industry under the Heritage Foundation’s institution-toppling Project 2025, which Dartagnan recently explored. I am pretty sure none of my readers needs another lecture on how disastrous for this crucial lead abatement program and just about everything else (except for maybe the gilding industry) a second occupation of the White House by Donald Trump would be. Or if Republicans gained a majority in both houses of Congress. Or both. These folks have all been quite clear about what they plan to do. The Project 2025 manifesto lays it out. They want to wreck everything and are not shy about it. The Weather Underground’s 1974 “Prairie Fire” prescription for revolution was barely more incendiary.
ECO-VIDEO
RESOURCES & ACTION
GREEN BRIEFS
As of Thursday, President Biden had preserved more than 41 million acres of public lands, some of them in five new and three restored national monuments. On Thursday, he added to this acreage with expansions to two existing monuments in California. They are the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument, to which 106,000 acres were added, and the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, which got another 14,000 acres.
In a statement, Vice President Kamala Harris said, “As a U.S. Senator from California, I fought to defend and grow our public lands protections, including by introducing legislation to expand the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument. Thanks to President Biden’s leadership and the dedicated organizing of advocates throughout my home state, we are making that a reality by protecting an additional 120,000 acres of lands that are culturally, ecologically, and historically important to California and our nation."
The expanded boundaries of the monument designated by President Obama in 2014 encompass lands of cultural importance to Indigenous peoples. Still today, descendants of the Tongva people who called the land of the San Gabriels home for millennia gather traditional plants for medicine, food, and basket-making. Coastal sage, chaparral, and conifer forests are home in these mountains to a diversity of creatures, including threatened species like the California condor, which is steadily making its way back to reproductive stability thanks to human breeding intervention.
The 14,000 acres added to the 330,000-acre Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, which was designated by President Obama in 2015, include an 11-mile stretch of a ridge that will be renamed Molok Luyuk, which means Condor Ridge in the language of the Patwin people to whom it is sacred. As in the San Gabriels, chaparral dots the canyons, but oak and cypress dominate the woodlands. Molok Luyuk provides a wildlife corridor for species such as tule elk, cougars, and bears. Bald and golden eagles are common. Some 500 plants native to California have been identified in the expansion area.
The additions to the monuments are one more piece of the Biden plan to conserve 30% of U.S. lands and waters by the end of the decade, 30x30, as it is called. A truly tall order. According to Protected Planet, which monitors progress around the globe in reaching global biodiversity targets, the new monument designations bring the total protected land in the United States to a bit over 13%. Getting to 30% means conserving additional land equal to twice the size of Texas.
The rugged landscape of Avi Kwa Ame (the Mojave name for Spirit Mountain) in southern Nevada is of great spiritual and cultural importance to Indigenous peoples in the region. President Biden designated the Avi Kwa Ame a National Monument in March 2023.
The first president to designate national monuments under the 1906 Antiquities Act that he had pushed in Congress, was Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, but a wily, renegade one. Protecting important chunks of geography was a passion of his. These days, Republicans, particularly in the West, are obstacles to establishing more monuments, arguing that local residents don’t get enough say—by which they mean a veto—over new designations. Court precedent and half-century old legislation ought to have ended fighting over national monument authority. But in this age of right-wing efforts to damage or demolish environmental protections of all kinds, with a compliant Supreme Court in their corner, the battle lives on.
House Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman of Arkansas said that Congress should get a vote on the fate of public lands, and "shouldn’t have to operate with a gun to its head" in the form of the Antiquities Act. “The threat of a [presidential] designation makes local stakeholders come together, yet it inherently encourages preservationists and extremists to oppose bipartisan solutions when they know they can get everything they want with a stroke of a pen. This kind of approach unfortunately just ends up leaving local communities to deal with the fallout while the radical environmentalists move on to the next monument.” Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa would make designations by a president subject to congressional approval via her bill, H.R. 5499.
Biden has designated five new national monuments, the most in a first term of any president since Jimmy Carter:
- Camp Hale National Monument in Colorado
- Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in Nevada
- Castner Range National Monument in Texas
- Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, which consists of sites in Illinois and Mississippi
- Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument in Arizona
He has also restored protections to three national monuments that Donald Trump had shrunk.
Ten years ago, in Flint, Michigan, a financial crisis led to a myopically adopted change in sourcing of the city’s water supply that resulted in lead exposure to thousands of residents, including up to 12,000 children. The political, economic, and media fallout was immense, with scandalous behavior revealed well beyond Flint. Ultimately, helped with $400 million in state and federal money, the city replaced the city’s 10,059 lead pipes with copper.
One other good thing came out of this—the scandal of continued lead exposure that a 2021 JAMA study showed STILL affects at the very least 1.1 million children in the United States caught serious attention in Washington. And that ultimately led to the Biden-Harris administration’s push to put some real money into getting the lead out of drinking water pipes in communities that just cannot otherwise afford to do so.
The White House on Thursday announced the release of another $3 billion of the total of $15 billion included in the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act for what Biden and Harris are calling by the boring name of the Lead Pipe and Paint Action Plan. What’s not boring is the $15 billion. But even that big wad of money still is not enough to handle the whole country’s lead pipe problem. This, howver, is not the administration’s fault. Back to that in a moment.
Lead is poisonous to everyone, but children are especially vulnerable. Their development can be sabotaged, with IQ reduced (a situation worse for Black children, because they get more exposure), language development hindered, attention span shortened, aggression and impulsivity heightened. For children and adults, exposure over a long period can permanently damage the brain and nervous system. It can raise the risk of high blood pressure, of heart disease, of kidney disease. It can reduce fertility. It worsens the odds of getting cancer. Crime rates are affected by exposure to lead.
Vice President Kamala Harris, second from right, and EPA Administrator Michael Regan watch while crews working with the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority replace a lead waterline
Despite the practically endless roster of adverse effects, the usual screams from industry and accompanying foot-dragging by certain politicians have greeted the federal government’s efforts to get lead out of the environment for more than 50 years, starting with the ban on leaded gasoline in 1973. For the record, that reform was spurred by grassroots action, as is so often the case.
The ban was followed five years later with another on lead paint for residential and consumer use. In 1986, under the Safe Drinking Water Act amendments, the use of leaded pipe and solder in new plumbing systems was banned. The Lead and Copper Rule was enacted in 1991 (and strengthened in 2011) and was followed in 1995 with a ban on lead used to solder food cans.
These and subsequent reforms had a major impact. In the 1976-80 period, the median lead concentration in the blood of children aged 1-5 was measured at 15 micrograms per deciliter. By 2013-2014 that had fallen to 0.7 µg/dL. A tremendous drop. The current standard is 3.5 µg/dL.
But that improvement didn’t reach everyone. Under the old Lead and Copper Rule passed in 1991, just 1% of utilities had after nearly 30 years actually replaced lead pipes by 2020 as a result of an excessive exposure measurement. Under the new LCR rule that year—one of the few good things the Trump administration did regarding environment and health—this flaw was fixed. Water systems now are required to fully replace at least 3% of lead service lines each year when 10 sampling results are measured above 15 parts per billion.
The revised rule also requires water utilities to tally just how many lead service lines they actually have and open the data to public access. Unsurprisingly, most lead pipes that remain in service can be found in older cities and homes that predate the 1986 prohibition. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates there are still 6 to 10 million lead service lines across the country, mostly in the East. The agency estimated in 2016 that about 7% of households—9 million of them—are hooked up to municipal water systems with lead service lines. In 2021, the administration estimated that around 400,000 schools and childcare facilities are exposed. As usual, poverty and race play a major role in who is likely to be drinking water carried by lead pipes.
Money has been the biggest hurdle in resolving the matter. In its 2019 “Strategies to Achieve Full Lead Service Line Replacement,” the EPA estimated that the average cost of replacing a single lead service line is $4,700. Multiply that times 10 million lead service lines and you get $47 billion. That, not coincidentally, sounds a lot like the $45 billion that Biden and Harris had sought for a decade-long lead replacement project with money from the infrastructure act. Compromising at only $15 billion was just another of the many prices that had to be paid to get enough Republicans on board to legitimately call the $1.2 trillion act bipartisan.
Of the nearly $9 billion so far released, Pittsburgh is one of the many cities benefiting. It has received $42 million for lead pipe replacement, something it expects to complete by 2026. In February, Vice President Kamala Harris visited Pittsburgh where she announced progress in lead pipe replacement and new funding for clean water.
ECO-TWXXT
HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)
What's next for the Democrats' Big Oil investigation? by Emma Dumain at Greenwire. Congressional Democrats this week achieved what environmental advocates have been waiting to see for nearly a year and a half: the continuation of a stalled House probe into decades of alleged climate deception by Big Oil.Senate Budget Chair Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) convened a hearing Wednesday to spotlight thousands of pages of documents released just 24 hours earlier — holdovers from the trove of materials House Oversight Committee Democrats obtained through an investigation in the last Congress, when they still controlled the chamber. The private memos, internal papers and email exchanges from six major companies and their trade associations — Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — laid out in stark relief the lengths to which oil and gas boosters have worked to appear climate friendly while doubling down on policies critics say are anything but. Whitehouse painted the hearing — centered on the documents and a report — in the context of needing to stop a powerful force that is actively thwarting climate action, with global warming wreaking "shocks" all across the economy.
New documents show oil executives promoted natural gas as green — but knew it wasn’t by Kate Yoder & Joseph Winters at Grist. There are probably 50 stories at least that could be based on information in documents presented the hearings. One of the biggest revelations is that BP executives understood that natural gas, which the company promoted as a “bridge” or “destination” fuel to a cleaner future as coal declined, was incompatible with the goals of the Paris Agreement signed in 2015. “[O]nce built, gas locks in future emissions above a level consistent with 2 degrees,” at least without widespread carbon capture technology, according to a comment on a draft outline for a speech by BP’s CEO in 2017. “This is the first evidence I’ve seen of them acknowledging internally, at the highest levels, that they know this — natural gas is a climate disaster — and yet, they still promote it,” said Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental advocacy organization.
The Shrimp on Your Table Has a Dark History by Grey Moran at Civil Eats. Afew months ago, along the coast of Andhra Pradesh in eastern India, Josh Farinella drove 40 minutes out of his way to visit workers who peel shrimp for Choice Canning, where he worked as a shrimp factory manager. He didn’t travel to the rural area for any of his job responsibilities; he was there to document injustice. He observed a crew of local women quickly peeling shrimp along rusty tables in 90-degree heat, wearing street clothes and flip-flops. They worked for long hours in a shed in a dirt field, far from the main work site, easily escaping the notice of auditors.“These peeling sheds aren’t supposed to be there. They’re not supposed to be used by anybody,” Farinella told Civil Eats. “There are 20,000 pounds of shrimp per day going through these peeling sheds that are landing on U.S. grocery store shelves.” The high temperatures in the shed could easily lead to pathogen growth, he warned. Farinella started his work for Choice Canning in 2015 at a production facility in his hometown of Pittston, Pennsylvania. In 2023, when the company offered him a high-paying managerial position at a new facility in Andhra Pradesh, he accepted. But four months into the job, he decided to come forward as a whistleblower, exposing what he says are the deplorable and unsanitary conditions in one of India’s largest shrimp manufacturers.
Minnesota’s biggest solar project will help replace a huge coal plant by Eric Wesoff at Canary Media. One of the largest solar projects in the country is moving closer to completion, and it’s not in a famously sunny state like California, Texas, or even Florida. It’s in Minnesota, on former potato farms near the site of a retiring coal plant. The Sherco solar and energy-storage facility will be the largest solar project in the Upper Midwest, and the fifth-largest in the U.S. by the time it’s fully completed in 2026. The first phase of the project should begin sending emissions-free electricity to the grid this fall, heralding the start of a new era in a state whose largest solar project until now has been just 100 megawatts. This new project will have a capacity of 710 megawatts. It’s being built by utility Xcel Energy, which will also operate the facility once it’s online.The project is poised to deliver on the many promises of renewable energy: It will partially replace the nearby coal plant set to retire over the coming years, address the variability of solar power by pairing it with long-duration storage, and provide good-paying union jobs in a community that’s losing a key employer in the coal facility.
Rep. August Pfluger
U.S. Oil and Gas Production Is Booming. So Are the Industry’s Donations to Its GOP Allies by Marcus Baram at Capital & Main. August Pfluger, an Air Force veteran and member of the U.S. House representing a small district in West Texas, isn’t exactly a household name on the national political scene, with little press coverage in the last two months outside a recent Fox News appearance. But he is the country’s top recipient of campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry — out of all federal candidates, including President Biden, Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — receiving $573,721 during the current 2024 election cycle, according to campaign finance data compiled by Open Secrets. Pfluger is running for reelection, though it’s not a competitive race in the strongly Republican district, which includes part of the Permian basin, the largest oil-producing region in the country. But Pfluger has been a loyal ally of the industry, leading the congressional opposition to the Biden administration’s pause on liquefied natural gas exports. When Pfluger entered Congress in 2021, his first piece of legislation proposed prohibiting the Biden administration from demanding a moratorium on issuing new oil and gas permits for drilling on federal lands. He declared on the floor of the House: “My primary concern in Congress is to protect our oil and gas industry from the radical Democrats who will soon control the House, Senate, and White House.” Pfluger’s office did not return calls for comment.
‘Abnormal and unprecedented’: Sudden surge in sea level rise threatens the American South by Chris Mooney, Brady Dennis, Kevin Crowe, & John Muyskens at The Washington Post. One of the most rapid sea level surges on Earth is besieging the American South, forcing a reckoning for coastal communities across eight U.S. states, the newspaper’s analysis found. At more than a dozen tide gauges spanning from Texas to North Carolina, sea levels are at least 6 inches higher than they were in 2010 — a change similar to what occurred over the previous five decades. Scientists are documenting a barrage of impacts — ones, they say, that will confront an even larger swath of U.S. coastal communities in the coming decades — even as they try to decipher the precise causes of this recent surge. The Gulf of Mexico has experienced twice the global average rate of sea level rise since 2010. Few other places on the planet have seen similar rates of increase, such as the North Sea near the United Kingdom. “Since 2010, it’s very abnormal and unprecedented,” said Jianjun Yin, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona who has studied the changes.
ECO-QUOTE
“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.” —Robert Swan
ECOPINION
Lydia Millet
If Corporations Are People, Then Animals Should Be Too by Lydia Millet at The New Republic. The list of our dependencies on the other beings with whom we’ve coevolved is nearly infinite. So visionary policy is called for to protect those other beings and systems—not only for their intrinsic and cultural value but because they’re our life support, worth far more to our continued welfare intact than liquidated for short-term profit. If the goal is a livable future, for which we need to achieve a paradigm shift from exploitation to conservation, the services these networks of life supply need to be fully and properly valued. Their right to exist has to be enshrined in law. Both domestically and internationally, species and ecosystems need to be endowed with legal standing to give local and native stewards the tools to save them from the depredations of industry in the short term and sustain them over the long. Luckily, bestowing legal standing on extra-human parties isn’t a fanciful idea: The U.S. Supreme Court did exactly that in the 2010 case known as Citizens United, when it declared that corporations were legal persons—a decision that hobbled American democracy but also set a neat precedent for extending legal personhood to nonhuman entities. And corporations are clearly more abstract and disembodied than animals: Just a couple of weeks ago scientists and philosophers from many nations published the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, which argues for the likelihood of consciousness in all vertebrates and many invertebrates, including cephalopods and insects.
"Our lives might be on the line." Eighth graders reflect on the state of the planet from Environmental Health News en Español. In honor of Earth Day, EHN en Español published letters from 8th graders at YES Prep Northbrook Middle School in the Houston area neighborhood of Spring Branch, Texas. Literature and grammar teachers Cassandra Harper and Yvette Howard incorporated the environment into a series of lessons in December last year. Each student conducted their own research to begin writing letters to EHNe about their concerns or hopes. Here’s an excerpt from Jericsson Guervara-Franco’s letter:
In this world we have a lot of problems about climate change. Climate change affects a lot because there are oil factories that make a lot of smoke, and that smoke pollutes the air. When they breathe that air is when they get sick and sometimes these diseases cause the death of many people.
Climate change also affects people a lot because when the climate gets too hot, many fires occur in the world. These fires occur more frequently in forests. The smoke created by fires also affects people and pollutes the environment.
C40 Cities and Climate Mayors highlight EPA’s US $7 billion fund to expand local solar investment from C40 Cities. There is no climate progress without climate justice. Low-income and disadvantaged communities have disproportionately higher energy burdens than the national median. The EPA’s work to support communities and their clean energy transition is vital in securing an equitable and healthy future for all. We look forward to seeing localities activate billions of dollars to deploy community solar projects and close the gap for accessing solar energy. “Clean energy is a key component to addressing climate change and increasing community resilience. The new Solar For All funding will support historically overburdened communities with clean, affordable, and reliable energy to power a healthier and more sustainable future for American families,” said Kate Wright, Executive Director of Climate Mayors. “We are excited to support our mayors to meet this moment and put this unprecedented funding into action.” Said Kate Johnson, Head of US Federal Affairs at C40 Cities: “Funding from the EPA’s Solar For All program will transform lives in cities across America. Projects funded by this program will help alleviate the burden of high utility bills for lower-income households and create good jobs—all while slashing climate pollution. We look forward to working with mayors to implement clean energy projects and build a stronger, more inclusive future for all.”
How data will help cities fight the climate crisis by Ken Moore at Fast Company. While Earth Day is a compelling reminder of our urban centers’ pivotal role in the climate narrative, the initiatives need to happen all year. The journey towards sustainable cities hinges on collaboration—among governments, businesses, technologists, and citizens worldwide—to foster environments where innovation thrives. Use the inspiration from Earth Day to amplify our efforts. Engage with your community. Challenge local leaders. Advocate for smart technologies that pave the way to sustainability. Looking ahead, we stand on the cusp of technological breakthroughs that promise to redefine our approach to urban living. From advancements in AI and IoT to new frontiers in renewable energy, the potential for creating resilient, efficient cities is boundless. Let’s commit to inclusivity as we navigate this journey to ensure our solutions are adaptable and beneficial across diverse global contexts. Let’s also champion transparency and responsible standards in deploying these technologies. By developing and adhering to clear success metrics, cities can track their progress. They can also share insights and collectively evolve toward a sustainable future.
Long-term transmission planning will power America’s future by John Szoka and Ted Thomas at Utility Dive. While the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is receiving a lot of attention thanks to President Biden’s recent nominees, the current FERC commissioners have an important ruling pending on their docket that is just as deserving of notice. As the United States grapples with an increasing demand for electricity and decreasing reliability of the power grid in certain regions, FERC is considering new guidelines for transmission planning. This rule would create a robust, well-planned transmission network, enabling market competition for electric generators and expanding the geographic reach of generators so that more Americans have access to reliable energy. As conservatives, we believe that excessive government planning can impair efficiencies naturally brought about by the free market. However, it is in the national interest to approach the power grid the same way we have approached the internet, the interstate highway system and telecommunications — all of which require standardization and interoperability that is only made possible by good planning. A well-planned network broadens the scope of markets and reduces costs to customers.
John Szoka is the CEO of the Conservative Energy Network and former member of the North Carolina House of Representatives. Ted Thomas is the founding partner of Energize Strategies and former chairman of the Arkansas Public Service Commission.
OTHER GREEN STUFF
Storing energy with compressed air is about to have its moment of truth • Researchers make a plastic that includes bacteria that can digest it • If Plants Could Talk—Some scientists are starting to reopen a provocative debate: Are plants intelligent? • Three NY offshore wind projects unravel after GE scraps turbine plans • Thousands of Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells Pollute the Texas Landscape • DOE Finalizes Efficiency Standards for Water Heaters to Save Americans Over $7 Billion On Household Utility Bills Annually • Hydrogen Offers Germany a Chance to Take a Lead in Green Energy • Power outages linked to heat and storms are rising, and low-income communities are most at risk, as a new NYC study shows • How Fracking Is Making Some U.S. Communities More Radioactive Than Chernobyl • The world’s garment workers are on the front lines of climate impacts • A single gang of poachers may have killed 10% of Javan rhinos since 2019 • DOJ sides with Native American tribe in lawsuit against major oil company: “Lacks any legal right to remain”
