Eight Republican House members have introduced legislation to defund climate czar John Kerry and other “climate tyrants“ inside the Biden administration, blaming them for an energy crisis that has sent gasoline soaring to $5 a gallon.
The group, led by Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, introduced the No Taxpayer Funding for CZARS Act that would ban federal funding for any activity of the special presidential envoy for climate, including salary and both administrative and travel expenses.
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The Equity Subcommittee of Maine Governor Janet Mills’ (D) Climate Council is recommending a plan to pay “disadvantaged” and “overburdened” state residents to attend its meetings because, according to its ideology, victims of systemic discrimination suffer greater impact from climate change than average Maine residents.
The Equity Subcommittee’s report, released in February, claims that some individuals in Maine, particularly those who are victims of “historical and systemic discrimination, underrepresentation, and isolation” are “more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than others.”
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Blackrock has gone from being known as the largest asset manager in the world to being known as the investment company that pushes a social agenda on the companies it invests in. From cajoling corporate America into signing the manifesto of stakeholder capitalism, the Business Roundtable Statement on Corporate Responsibility, to putting anti-oil board members on the board of oil companies, Blackrock has developed a reputation, at least among conservatives, as a company that is imposing CEO Larry Fink’s social agenda on American capitalism.
In fact, the reputational issue is so prevalent that Fink spent much of the recent annual report rebutting it, arguing that what he is practicing is simply capitalism and that the imposition of climate change minimization measures and other ESG issues relevant to stakeholders is simply capitalism. The standard arguments here are that practicing ESG is not politics but rather risk management. Typically ESG proposals talk about reputational risk or the risk that at some point in the future governments will embrace the values expressed in ESG circles and impose them involuntarily on businesses. In such cases, for example, fossil fuel companies will be stuck with “stranded assets”, i.e. oil and gas wells rendered worthless by the coming age of enlightened energy regulation.
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A coalition of 16 Republican governors sent a letter Tuesday to President Joe Biden, urging him to rescind a proposal introducing a series of climate requirements for companies.
The recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposal, which forces publicly-traded companies to share so-called climate change risks and greenhouse gas emissions, would harm businesses and investors by adding high compliance costs, the governors argued in the letter addressed to both Biden and SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. The climate disclosure rule, they added, would also represent an overstepping of the SEC’s authority.
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The Supreme Court denied a petition from 10 Republican-led states Thursday requesting it to block a key Biden administration climate policy.
The decision ensures that President Joe Biden’s so-called “social cost” of carbon policy — which assigns an estimated dollar value or cost to every ton of carbon emissions, according to the Government Accountability Office — can remain in place and be used for future federal permitting processes. The high court rejected states’ April 27 petition without giving a reason or listing which justices opposed it, according to a one-page filing published on the Supreme Court docket.
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On Earth Day, a 50-year-old environmentalist and photographer from Colorado named Wynn Alan Bruce lit himself on fire outside the US Supreme Court.
Friends of Bruce, who subsequently died, said he was worried about climate change.
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Sin, punishment, redemption: as an ideology, environmentalism shares many features with organized religion. Falling after Easter this year, Earth Day, which was celebrated April 22, focuses on the sin-and-punishment parts of the trilogy. Redemption comes later, toward the end of each year, at the annual U.N. climate conferences that will save the planet.
On Earth Day this year, however, a loud dissenting voice was heard. Speaking at a Heritage Foundation event in Florida, Donald Trump attacked climate-change catastrophizing.
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Twitter will no longer sell ads with messaging that contradicts the United Nations’ (UN) scientists, according to a statement from the Silicon Valley tech giant.
“To better serve these conversations, misleading advertisements on Twitter that contradict the scientific consensus on climate change are prohibited, in line with our inappropriate content policy,” the statement says. “We believe that climate denialism shouldn’t be monetized on Twitter, and that misrepresentative ads shouldn’t detract from important conversations about the climate crisis. This approach is informed by authoritative sources, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports.”
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The biggest decision the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is likely to make this year will be on mandated disclosure of information related to climate change and corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals. The Commission has been working on the issue since early last year, and a new proposed rule is now scheduled to be released on March 21st. The contents of that rule will likely determine the future direction of “responsible” investing in the United States.
In March of last year, then-Acting Chair Allison Herren Lee issued a request for information on the matter, consisting of 15 questions and described as a response to the “demand for climate change information and questions about whether current disclosures adequately inform investors.” The questions covered a wide range of topics, from how to measure greenhouse gas emissions to how climate disclosures “would complement a broader ESG disclosure standard.”
When the SEC first issued guidance on climate change-related disclosures for public companies in 2010, the standards were fairly general and advisory, but the questions from last year’s request-for-information suggests that the agency’s leadership is considering a more aggressive and prescriptive framework.
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Thousands are dying from Russian missiles and bombs in the suburbs of Ukraine.
In response, the Biden Administration’s climate-change envoy, multimillionaire and private-jet owning John Kerry, laments that Russian president Vladimir Putin might no longer remain his partner in reducing global warming.
“You’re going to lose people’s focus,” Kerry frets. “You’re going to lose big-country attention because they will be diverted, and I think it could have a damaging impact”
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The Supreme Court heard arguments in West Virginia v. EPA on Monday, a blockbuster case that could have major ramifications in future separation of powers cases.
The case, which stems from an Obama administration climate rule, has wide-ranging implications for how the federal agencies may issue future regulations and rules, according to the parties that brought the case before the high court. States, environmental groups, large power utility companies, civil liberties organizations and pro-coal industry groups have inserted themselves in the case over the last several years, signaling the importance of the questions it has raised.
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President Joe Biden has continuously stated that “climate change” is the highest priority of his administration, fueled by Build Back Better spending. We are witnessing the disastrous impacts that establishing the wrong priorities can have.
On the day Biden became President, America was energy independent, our borders were secure, and the world was relatively peaceful.
Biden has done everything possible to shut down, curtail, and undermine American energy production. First, he shut down the permitted Keystone Pipeline. Then he eliminated fracking on federal lands, and slowed permits for new oil fields.
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The Associated Press announced Tuesday that it had secured funding from several progressive interest groups to hire two dozen climate change reporters.
The outlet referred to the groups’ funding as “philanthropic grants” and promised that the groups wouldn’t have any editorial control over the climate change content published, according to an announcement. But the five organizations — the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, Quadrivium and the Walton Family Foundation — are well known for pushing a variety of left-wing causes and funding Democratic political campaigns.
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A new study published in early February seems to indicate that many prior claims about the alleged acidification of ocean water dramatically exaggerated the process’s effect on fish and other marine life.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the study was published on February 3rd in PLOS Biology, and reviewed 91 different studies of the effects that acidification allegedly had on the behavior of fish. Many of these studies claimed that this would lead to a significant decrease in the fish population, as affected fish would be less likely to evade predators in the wild.
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The Biden administration altered the official federal policy on approving new interstate natural gas facilities and pipelines, requiring a climate consideration.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) announced that it will begin to “undertake a robust consideration” of the environmental justice impacts of such fossil fuel projects before granting approval, according to a fact sheet published Thursday. The agency, which is the top regulator of domestic natural gas infrastructure, said its new policy will presume projects that cause 100,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year will have a significant impact on the environment.
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There are few more easily observable measures of the cost of everyday living than the price of gasoline at the pump. As has been widely reported, gas prices in the United States recently hit a seven-year high. The striking thing, however, is not just how high gas prices have gotten, but how fast and far they have risen.
Based on statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration—the statistical arm of the Department of Energy—weekly average retail prices for regular unleaded gasoline in the United States increased 94 percent in less than two years. Average gas prices rose from $1.77 per gallon during the week ending April 27, 2020, to $3.44 per gallon during the week ending February 7, 2022—nearly doubling in the process.
That was the largest percentage increase in gas prices within a two-year window since October of 2005, more than 16 years ago. In the election of 2006, Republicans—then the party in power—lost 30 House and six Senate seats, thereby losing control of both chambers, before losing the presidency two years later.
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French President Emmanuel Macron announced Thursday that his government would add at least six nuclear power plants to its arsenal in the coming decades.
“We are fortunate in France to be able to count on a strong nuclear industry, rich in know-how and with hundreds of thousands of jobs,” Macron said during remarks in the city of Belfort earlier in the day, France 24 reported.
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On Thursday, a federal judge ruled against a planned sale of oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico, claiming, without evidence, that the leases would be damaging to the environment.
As reported by CNN, the Biden Administration made an effort to shut down all oil and gas leases across the country shortly after Biden came to power, with an executive order on January 27th indefinitely halting all new permits for such leases, pending a “rigorous review” of fossil fuel development programs. However, a lawsuit filed by 13 states ultimately led to a federal court in Louisiana blocking Biden’s order, allowing the sale of 80 million acres to move forward in November.
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Over the last decade, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) spent $1.1 billion on various projects that attempted to reduce carbon emissions through the practice of carbon capture and storage (CCS), only for the vast majority of these projects to either fail or be cancelled.
According to the Daily Caller, the waste of taxpayer money was revealed in a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that was released in December. The report revealed that the DOE had invested $684 million in eight different CCS projects that focused on coal, only for seven of them to be cancelled, while only a single facility remained in operation. The remaining $438 million was spent on three industrial CCS facilities; of these three, two were successful while one was cancelled.
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It has been a little more than a month since the United Nations climate meeting at Glasgow, yet global use of fossil fuels has increased rapidly.
For instance, U.S. President Joe Biden cancelled domestic oil projects and vowed to stop funding for international fossil fuel projects. But as fuel prices rose, Biden responded to his self-induced energy insecurity by releasing 50 million barrels of oil reserves and even called for an increase in domestic oil production.
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The Department of Energy (DOE) announced Thursday that it would begin hiring 1,000 employees for its so-called Clean Energy Corps which will be tasked with fighting climate change.
The new climate unit will be composed of both current DOE employees and the 1,000 recruits, according to the announcement. The Clean Energy Corps was created by the recently-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill, which appropriated $62 billion to the DOE for accelerating the nation’s transition to renewables.
“This is an open call for all Americans who are passionate about taking a proactive role in tackling the climate crisis and want to join the team that is best positioned to lead this transformative work,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in a message to applicants.
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Less than 40% of Americans view the coronavirus as a top-five issue to address in 2022, a new poll shows.
The Associated Press-NORC survey found that just 33% of Americans labeled virus concerns as a top issue, down 16 points from a year ago. On the other hand, 68% of respondents said that the economy was the top issue on which to focus this year, with subtopics ranging from inflation to unemployment and the national debt.
The results come as inflation has hit a multi-decade high and supply chain bottlenecks continue to affect Americans’ lives. However, it also comes as the Omicron coronavirus variant has fueled daily case counts near record-highs, with the U.S. now averaging over 650,000 new infections per day.
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A recent study published in American Political Science Review, a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Cambridge University, begins with a teasing question: “Is authoritarian power ever legitimate?”
For many, the answer is clearly no, concedes the study’s author—Ross Mittiga, an assistant professor of political theory at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. But Mittiga, in the abstract to the study, suggests otherwise:
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President Joe Biden surveyed the damage from a deadly weekend tornado in Mayfield, Ky., on Wednesday and said, “We’ve got $99 billion worth of damage just this year — just the year — because of foul weather and climate change.”
In Dawson Springs, Ky., he reiterated the cost of damages and then, in a possible reference to his Build Back Better Act, he said: “I promise you: You’re going to heal. We’re going to recover. You’re going to rebuild. You’re going to be stronger than you were before. We’re going to build back better than it was.”
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Monday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas Tech, Christopher Weiss to the newsmakers line to talk about last Friday’s out of season tornados that ravaged Kentucky and parts of Middle Tennessee.
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As I wrote in We Need Leaders Who Prioritize People Over Molecules, climate alarmists “seem to have portrayed the problem [of climate change] in such an extremist way that they have convinced a growing army of climate warriors that terrorism is justified.”
Consider that Tracy Stone-Manning, Biden’s appointment to Director of the Bureau of Land Management, was confirmed by Congress despite proof that she was involved in eco-terrorism and lying under oath.
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Following his trip to Rome a few weeks ago for the G-20 summit, President Joe Biden expressed worry that surging energy costs would harm working-class families and urged OPEC and Russia to pump more oil.
Some noted this was a strange message to send to the world, since Biden was preparing for a climate summit in Scotland where he pledged to reduce carbon emissions at home.
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Environmentalists voiced support for President Joe Biden’s decision to tap into the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) despite their firm opposition to fossil fuels.
“The Biden admin is taking effective action to protect Americans from oil price gouging. This is what reserves are for — defending our economy against disruption,” Democratic Sen. Ed Markey, a climate hawk and Green New Deal proponent, tweeted Tuesday. “Profiteering can’t go unanswered, especially as Big Oil makes billions and fuels the climate crisis through exports.”
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One of the most frequently raised arguments against capitalism is that it is the primary driver of environmental pollution and climate change. But if we compare Yale University’s ranking of countries with the highest environmental performance with the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, a very different correlation emerges.
For more than 20 years, Yale University has been publishing the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) and ranking countries according to their environmental health and ecosystem vitality. The EPI uses 32 performance indicators across eleven issue categories:
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Why are progressive regions of the country—especially in the old major liberal cities (e.g., Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle)—institutionalizing de facto racial quotas through “proportional representation” based on “disparate impact”? Why are they promoting ethnic and racial chauvinism, such as allowing college students to select the race of their own roommates, calibrating graduation ceremonies by skin color and tribe, segregating campus “safe spaces” by race, and banning literature that does not meet commissariat diktats?
Why are they turning into one-party political fiefdoms separating the rich and poor, increasingly resembling feudal societies as members of the middle class flee or disappear? What does it mean that they are becoming more and more intolerant in their cancel culture, and quasi-religious intolerance of dissent, on issues from climate change and abortion-on-demand to critical race theory and wokeness?
Isn’t it strange that there are entire states and regions wholly reliant on the money and power of “one-crop” Big Tech monopolies? And why, in the 21st century no less, are Democratic-controlled counties, cities, and entire states nullifying federal law?
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President Joe Biden will renominate Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to a second term leading the central bank.
The president, who was elected as a moderate, has faced pushback on Powell, who progressives feel is not tough enough on bank regulations or climate change policy.
Also in contention for the top job was Lael Brainard, who Biden will nominate to become the vice chair of the central bank’s board of governors.
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House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters on Tuesday that House leadership plans to hold a vote on final passage of President Biden’s $2 trillion Build Back Better Act by Friday at the latest.
Biden’s social spending bill contains new federal benefit programs and about $550 billion for climate change initiatives.
“I expect to consider most of the debate, perhaps not all, but most of the debate on Build Back Better on Tuesday, excuse me, on Wednesday, today’s Tuesday, on Wednesday, tomorrow,” Hoyer said during a news conference.
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The carbon footprint of COP26, the ongoing United Nations climate summit, is expected to double that of the previous conference held in 2019, according to a report.
The two-week COP26 conference, which is entering its final days in Scotland, is projected to lead to about 102,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide in emissions, according to a preliminary assessment commissioned by the UN from British professional services firm ARUP. That’s the equivalent of more than 225.9 million pounds of carbon emissions.
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The Department of Defense (DOD) said Wednesday that China and climate change were “equally important” threats to U.S. national security.
“We get paid to examine all the threats to our national security,” Defense Department press secretary John Kirby told reporters. “And I don’t know that it does anybody good to put some sort of relative analysis assessment on that. You’ve heard the secretary talk about the climate as a — a real and existential national security threat, and it is, not just to the United States, but to countries all over the world.”
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President Joe Biden’s nominee for a key Treasury Department role admitted that oil, natural gas and coal firms need to go bankrupt to prevent climate change, a resurfaced video showed.
“Here what I’m thinking about is primarily the coal and oil and gas industry. A lot of the smaller players in that industry are going to probably go bankrupt in short order, at least we want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change,” Saule Omarova — who the Senate is considering to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — remarked in a clip uncovered Tuesday by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), a conservative research group.
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The final $1.2 trillion INVEST in America Act passed the Democrat-led House in a late night vote on Friday. Tucked away inside the infrastructure bill are some controversial policies, including these five:
1. The cryptocurrency tax provision in the Senate version of the bill was the subject of scrutiny from Democrats and Republicans. The language was not amended in the final bill that passed the House. The legislation includes an IRS reporting requirement for brokers of cryptocurrency transactions.
2. Under the “national motor vehicle per-mile user fee pilot” section of the bill, there is a pilot program to create a vehicle miles traveled system for taxing drivers based on their annual vehicle mileage. During his confirmation process, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg floated the idea of taxing motorists based on the number of miles they travel each year as a way to partly fund the legislation. The Biden administration backed off of full-scale development of the controversial proposal, settling instead for a pilot program.
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The U.S., China and more than 100 other nations signed onto a pact to end deforestation by 2030 at the ongoing United Nations climate summit, the U.K. announced.
“Conserving our forests and other critical ecosystems is indispensable — an indispensable piece of keeping our climate goals within reach as well as many other key priorities that we have together: ensuring clean water, maintaining biodiversity, supporting rural and Indigenous communities, and reducing the risk of the spread of disease,” President Joe Biden remarked on Tuesday.
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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen estimated that the world would need to devote $100-150 trillion, more than the entire world’s annual gross domestic product, to fighting climate change over the next three decades.
Yellen signaled that the world economy will need to undergo a complete transformation in order to prevent devastating climate change in the future, during a speech Wednesday at the ongoing United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland. The Treasury secretary delivered the remarks during the summit’s “finance day” opening event.
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The Biden administration rolled out broad new regulations that it said will substantially reduce U.S. methane emissions within 15 years.
The sweeping regulations would cut methane emissions, which account for roughly 10% of the greenhouse gasses emitted by the U.S., by 41 million tons between 2023 and 2035, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced Tuesday. Such a reduction is equivalent to 920 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, or the amount emitted by all cars and commercial aircraft in 2019.
“As global leaders convene at this pivotal moment in Glasgow for COP26, it is now abundantly clear that America is back and leading by example in confronting the climate crisis with bold ambition,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement.
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Michael Regan began his tenure as President Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator by dismissing dozens of outside scientific advisers appointed during the previous administration — part of an effort to “ensure the agency receives the best possible scientific insight to support our work.”
At the time, Regan (pictured) called it a “reset.” Opponents grumbled that it looked more like “a purge.” Now, one of those advisers, Stanley Young, has filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the agency of violating U.S. law; the suit also seeks an injunction to halt the work of his former committee.
The legal dustup is the latest rearguard action from the right on environmental issues. Conservatives see the case as their best chance to thwart the Biden administration’s multi-agency approach to combating climate change, seen as hostile to the fossil fuel industry.
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The Democrats’ reconciliation package will likely include more than $500 billion worth of climate provisions, more than the entire Department of Energy budget, the White House said, according to The Hill.
The budget represents an opportunity for “historic investment in climate change,” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said during an event hosted by The Hill on Tuesday evening. The likely price tag for climate programs included in the bill is likely to fall somewhere between $500 billion and $555 billion, Axios previously reported.
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Recent news in the energy world has not been encouraging. Prices are rising rapidly due to a supply crunch coupled with blistering, post-pandemic demand. Renewables like wind and solar are faltering in an unprepared electrical grid. Coal burning is set to spike to make up for energy supply shortfalls at a time when the world needs to aggressively decarbonize.
Some of this hardship might have been avoided if, over the past couple of decades, policy makers had the guts to support the safest, most reliable form of energy, which also happens to be carbon-free: nuclear. Instead, Germany is taking its nuclear fleet offline and replacing it with fossil fuels, as the country’s already exorbitant electricity prices soar. California is shutting down its last nuclear plant, further imperiling its notoriously fragile grid. All the while, Americans remain divided on nuclear power.
Again, the data is clear: despite nuclear’s damaged reputation, clouded by a few high-profile accidents, nuclear power kills fewer people per electricity produced than any other energy source. It is also the most reliable. Nuclear’s capacity factor, a measure of how often a power plant is producing energy at full capacity over a certain period of time, is the highest by far – almost double that of coal and more than triple that of solar. And nuclear is clean, producing no carbon emissions. Though its radioactive waste often attracts negative press, coal plants actually create more. Moreover, all of the waste that America’s nuclear power plants have collectively produced in a half-century could fit on one football field. This is because nuclear is incredibly efficient. In the U.S., just 55 nuclear power plants produce 20% of the country’s electricity! It takes nearly 2,000 natural gas plants to produce 40 percent.
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A Thursday White House report on climate change and national security proposed granting refugee status for individuals identified as “climate change activists” or “environmental defenders.”
“Climate activists, or environmental defenders, persecuted for speaking out on government inaction on climate change may also have a plausible claim to refugee status,” the report said. It notes that if a government “withholds or denies relief from the impacts of climate change” to people who “share a protected characteristic in a manner and to a degree amounting to persecution,” then these individuals could also be “eligible for refugee status.”
The report goes on to discuss actions for the U.S. government to consider in addressing the relationship between climate change and migration, including considering claims based on “climate change activism” and situations where individuals may not be granted governmental relief from climate change’s impact.
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For many, thinking about the future of our planet is terrifying. According to a global survey reported by the BBC, 56 percent of young people believe that humanity is doomed because of climate change and 45 percent say that their anxiety about the climate affects their daily lives. Here in the US, the story is much the same; three-quarters of Americans believe that climate change will result in the extinction of man, and one in five millennials believe that that extinction will occur within their lifetime.
A college student recently wrote the following in a campus newspaper about her climate anxiety:
I stay up into the early hours of the morning, Googling some variation of “Is there hope for climate change,” and “Biden climate change plan good?” (…) I fret over every piece of waste I encounter, wondering whether I should trash it or wash it and hope it qualifies for the recycling bin. What if I wash the aluminum foil I heated leftover lasagna on, does it become recyclable then? The anxiety is crippling.
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Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia reportedly opposed two pieces of his party’s spending package as negotiations over its price tag and reach continue to stall.
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia’s opposition reportedly relates to the Democrats’ climate change and child tax credit provisions of the budget proposal. While the majority of his party lauded both programs, the 50-50 Senate means that any one Democratic senator could tank the bill, giving Manchin veto-like power while representing a rural, coal-producing state that voted for former President Donald Trump by almost 40 points in 2020.
Multiple reports surfaced Friday suggesting that the Clean Electricity Payment Program would likely be scrapped from the bill due to Manchin’s objections, part of Democrats’ attempt to fight climate change. Those backing the program, which would provide incentives for clean energy use while implementing fines and penalties for organizations continuing to rely on fossil fuels, see it as a fundamental piece of the Democrats’ agenda and key to reaching President Joe Biden’s goal of reducing U.S. emissions by 50% of what they were in 2005 by 2030.
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Democrats have inserted numerous provisions and subsidy programs into their $3.5 trillion budget that would benefit green energy companies and speed the transition to renewables.
The Build Back Better Act would invest an estimated $295 billion of taxpayer money into a variety of clean energy programs in what would amount to the most sweeping climate effort passed by Congress, according to a House Committee on Energy and Commerce report. That price tag doesn’t factor in the other costly measures approved by the House Ways and Means, Agriculture, Natural Resources, Oversight and Transportation committees last month.
“This bill is crammed with green welfare subsidies, specifically for corporations and the wealthy,” House Ways and Means Ranking Member Kevin Brady told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview.
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Climate envoy John Kerry applauded climate actions made by the U.S. and other countries, but refused to single out China for not setting substantive goals for cutting emissions.
“We have a lot of things to still come across the transom and that will sort of decide where we are overall and which countries have neglected to do what is responsible,” Kerry told the Associated Press in an interview.
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Some of the world’s top emitters of methane haven’t signed a global effort to curb how much of the greenhouse gas is emitted by 2030.
The three countries – China, Russia and India – that produce the most methane emissions in the world haven’t signed onto the pact, which has been spearheaded by the U.S. and European Union ahead of a major United Nations climate conference. The nations that have signed the agreement represent nearly 30% of global methane emissions, the State Department said Monday.
The U.S. and EU unveiled the Global Methane Pledge on Sept. 18, which they said would be key in the global fight against climate change. The U.K., Italy, Mexico and Argentina were among the seven other countries that immediately signed the agreement last month.
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Google and YouTube announced a new policy Thursday demonetizing all content that denies the scientific consensus on climate change.
Google will no longer allow ads for “content that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change,” the company announced in a support page added to its website Thursday. The policy, which Google will start enforcing next month, covers YouTube videos and websites that treat climate change as a “hoax or a scam,” content “denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming” and content “denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change.”
The search giant said it was implementing the policy due to pressure from advertisers, who didn’t want their products associated with content promoting climate denial.
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said extreme weather caused by climate change will lead to more illegal entries into the U.S. across the southern border.
Severe earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, tropical storms and other weather events caused by climate change will lead to “border mass migrations” that could put additional stress on U.S. border patrol, the DHS warned in its Climate Action Plan released Thursday. Climate change has “deep implications” for the security of U.S. borders, the agency said.
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