Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 134

EPA: Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Airplanes Are Dangerous To Human Life

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced Wednesday that greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes are a health hazard and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

The so-called endangerment finding paves the way for the agency to develop regulations over airplane emissions. However, unlike with earlier findings, the EPA did not take the opportunity to set a standard, but rather deferred to ongoing deliberations by a United Nations agency working on the issue. Groups that had advocated for standards were disappointed with the announcement.

“What EPA should have done is issue proper standards today,” Vera Pardee, a staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, told ThinkProgress. “Airplanes are dangerous; pollution is dangerous. You can’t escape flying, but the means are there to get this under control.”

In an endangerment finding, the EPA determines that a substance — in this case, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — is endangering human life, and it establishes that a particular source is so large that it significantly contributes to the problem, Pardee said. According to the International Council on Clean Transportation, if commercial aviation were a country, it would rank seventh after Germany in terms of carbon emissions. Those emissions are expected to more than triple by 2050 if no action to curb them is taken.

Regulating emissions from airlines has been a priority for environmental groups for nearly a decade. In 2007, the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth filed a petition calling on the EPA to begin setting standards. The EPA did not respond to the petition, and EarthJustice filed a lawsuit on behalf of the environmental groups. In 2011, the judge ruled the agency was legally obligated to begin the process for crafting the regulations. In 2014, the EPA still had not come out with anything, and EarthJustice sent it an intent to sue.

By suggesting waiting for the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to set a standard, today’s EPA announcement fell short of what many climate change activists were hoping for. ICAO, which is housed under the United Nations, has also been tasked with creating international limits on airplane emissions since 1997. But the agency has not produced any regulations, and it has been criticized for watering down potential action. The ICAO standards are likely to only apply to new aircraft, a designation that would apply to roughly 5 percent of the world’s total aircraft fleet by 2030, Pardee said. She called these expected standards “totally insufficient.”

But one way or another, with this new endangerment finding, the EPA will now have to address emissions from airlines.

“Once the endangerment finding is final, there is absolutely no way [the EPA] can avoid setting standards. It makes it mandatory to set standards,” Pardee said.

The EPA took the opportunity to call for comment on its announcement. Environmental groups, the public, and the industry are all expected to weigh in on whether waiting for ICAO is appropriate.

“This notice actually invites people to say, no, this is totally unacceptable to let a growing source of greenhouse gases to escape regulation,” Pardee said.

The EPA began regulating car pollution in the 1970s. The crackdown on particulate matter, poisonous carbon monoxide, nitrogen, and other pollutants has made a big difference in air quality across the nation, particularly in cities such as Los Angeles. Then in 2009 the EPA announced findings that carbon dioxide — the leading human contribution to climate change — was a pollutant and that vehicles were a significant contributor. That announcement led to increased vehicle fuel efficiency standards.

Since then, the EPA has also undertaken a lengthy, litigous, and as-yet unfinished project of regulated carbon emissions from power plants, under the Clean Power Plan. That rule is expected to be finalized in August, and the process for putting out an airplane rule is expected to be similar. In other words, it still may be a while before airplane travel is as green as advocates want it to be.

The EPA’s findings apply only to commercial aircraft — not military flights, turboprop planes, or helicopters.

As Pardee put it, “Our CEOS in their private jets get to go and do whatever.”

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airlinescarbonClean Air ActemissionsEPAInternational Civil Aviation OrganizationplanesRegulationsTransportation

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New Proposal Would Give Western Governors Unchecked Power Over America’s National Forests

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote in the coming days on a proposal that would give Western governors unprecedented power over the management of national forests and American public lands in their states, including the power to veto plans to restore forest health, reduce wildfire risk, and expand access for hunting and fishing.

The ThinkProgress.

Why You Should Be Paying Attention To The ‘Other’ Form Of Solar Power

Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems have seen explosive growth because of their stunning 99 percent price drop in the past quarter century. As a result, the other form of solar power — concentrating solar thermal power (CSP) — is a small fraction of the solar market.

But the International Energy Agency (IEA) says CSP has a very bright future too because it enables cheap, efficient storage, which allows CSP plants to provide electricity long after the sun has set. According to the IEA’s 2014 CSP Technology Roadmap, 11 percent of global electricity will be generated by concentrating solar thermal power in 2050. In this post, I review the basics of CSP and look at how its recent resurgence portends a big future.

[image error]CSP is the use of mirrors to focus sunlight to heat a fluid that runs an engine to make electricity. One of the basic CSP designs used today is the power tower (above photo of the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project), which uses many mirrors moving in two dimensions to focus sunlight on a central tower that holds the engine. Another key design is the parabolic trough, which uses mirrors to focus the light on a long tube filled with a heat-storing fluid (right).

The key attribute of CSP is that it generates primary energy in the form of heat, which can be stored 20 to 100 times more cheaply than electricity — and with far greater efficiency. Commercial projects have already demonstrated that CSP systems can store energy by heating oil or molten salt, which can retain the heat for hours.

Here is a basic overview video of CSP from the U.S. Department of Energy:

What is happening right now with CSP? While market penetration has been slower than expected, in part because of the stunning price drop in PV power, CSP has begun to see significant growth.

Here is a chart of global CSP capacity from 1984 through 2013 in Megawatts:

[image error]

A 2014 independent market analysis projected that the global CSP market will see “phenomenal growth at a 19.4% CAGR [compound annual growth rate] between 2014 and 2020.” A global CSP market that was worth $2.5 billion in 2013 would hit nearly $8.7 billion by the end of 2020.

Both the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab and the IEA have said that after solar PV makes a deep penetration into the electricity market, CSP will likely become more valuable. A 2014 NREL study found a CSP project with thermal storage “would add additional value of 5 or 6 cents per kilowatt hour to utility-scale solar energy in California where 33 percent renewables will be mandated in six years.”

The more other forms of renewable power, especially PV, penetrate the market, the more valuable CSP becomes. Why? Right now, solar PV generates electricity at the most valuable time — daily peak electricity usage in daytime, particularly during the summertime, when air conditioning becomes the big draw on electric power.

But once solar PV hits 10 percent to 15 percent of annual electric generation in a region, PV can become less valuable. The IEA projects that when that occurs, perhaps around 2030, “Massive-scale [solar thermal electric] deployment takes off at this stage thanks to CSP plants’ built-in thermal storage, which allows for generation of electricity when demand peaks in late afternoon and in the evening, thus complementing PV generation.”

A 2014 study in Nature Climate Change from Austria’s International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis found that in Mediterranean region, “a connected CSP system could provide 70-80% of current electricity demand, at no extra cost compared to gas-fired power plants.” In the new study led by Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson, “100% clean and renewable wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) all-sector energy roadmaps for the 50 United States,” some 7.3 percent of total end-use power is generated by CSP with storage — with additional CSP used “for peaking and grid stability.”

The IEA’s 2014 roadmaps show that with the right policies and continued technology improvement, PV could provide as much as 16 percent of the world’s electricity by 2050 while 11 percent could be provided by CSP plants, which the IEA calls Solar Thermal Electric (STE).

[image error]

In that scenario, “Combined, these solar technologies could prevent the emission of more than 6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year by 2050 — that is more than all current energy-related CO2 emissions from the United States or almost all of the direct emissions from the transport sector worldwide today.”

One final note: What could dim the bright future of CSP in a carbon-constrained world? If electricity storage became considerably cheaper. If, say, battery technology makes major advances or if electric vehicles continue their recent exponential growth and widespread vehicle-to-grid systems become widespread. May the best technology win!

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Climate ChangeSolar Energy

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Keeping Your Old Cell Phone Is Horrible For The Environment

The constant cycle of phone upgrades — in which consumers buy phones once a new model comes out every two or so years — is having serious effects on the environment, according to a new study.

The study, published this week in the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, reviewed scientific literature on how the manufacture, use, and disposal of smartphones impact the environment. It found that many phone companies don’t have incentives in place for consumers to return their old phones for recycling purposes, and that when phones are discarded or simply kept by their owners instead of being recycled, the metals that go into cell phone manufacture — including gold, copper, and zinc — also remain unused.

And, according to the study, making new cell phones to replace these old ones is carbon-intensive. James Suckling, research fellow at the University of Surrey in England, said in a statement that across the U.K., there are about 85 million phones sitting unused. In total, these phones contain about four metric tons of gold, an amount that would take 84,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide to replace (i.e. if 85 million new phones were put together to replace these unused ones). And, if these phones end up in landfills — instead of sitting unused in a customer’s drawer — they can leach hazardous amounts of lead and other metals into the environment.

Suckling told ThinkProgress that the biggest problem with this scenario is that few phone companies have incentives in place for customers to return their old phones when they’re done with them. That means that too often, old cell phones sit in people’s homes until they’ve lost most of their value, at which point they’re often discarded, rather than recycled. Suckling said this is what concerns him the most.

If we allow those phones to go to landfill, those metals can only be replaced by further mining

“The issue is not so much the greenhouse gases emitted producing metals within the phones, but more the valuable resources which are languishing in consumers’ homes and may never make it back to manufacturing,” he said. “I am more disturbed by the millions of phones in that situation. From an environmental perspective, in general it is better to recycle metals than extract them from the ground and if we allow those phones to go to landfill, those metals can only be replaced by further mining.”

The report recommends that phone companies move to a cloud-based business model, in which all the phone’s major memory storage and processing would be moved to a remote server. That way, phones themselves would be simpler, and would require fewer precious metals for memory chips and other hardware.

“The proposed cloud based business model would allow the consumer access to communications and as part of that they are loaned a handset in order to do so,” Suckling said. “This means that the incentive to return the phone is one of the business, not the consumer. The business can then explore how best to extract the value from the phone, either through reuse or recycling.”

Suckling said he isn’t yet sure what will need to happen in order for phone companies to consider such a system. As far as recycling old phones, he said that Europe’s Waste Electronic and Electrical Equipment directive is a start, because it sets targets for the recycling of e-waste. But there still aren’t enough economic incentives out there for recycling.

In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency encourages electronics recycling, but it doesn’t have set targets for it — however, according to the agency, 25 states have passed legislation mandating recycling of electronics. The EPA lists multiple businesses that recycle phones, including Staples and Best Buy. There are also a few nonprofits that deal in recycling cell phones, including Cell Phones for Soldiers, which sells donated phones to recyclers and refurbishers and uses the proceeds to buy calling cards for troops deployed overseas.

Still, even when a piece of electronics is recycled, there’s a chance some parts could end up being exported to a developing country like China and Ghana, where people — even children — pick through piles of electronics for valuable metals and burn the rest. Cell phones contribute to this overall problem of e-waste, which is a huge environmental and health problem in developing countries. According to a United Nations report from earlier this year, 90 percent of the world’s e-waste is illegally traded or dumped each year. One EPA-endorsed company, E-Stewards, does make it easier to find responsible recyclers by setting a standard for companies and organizations that participate in its certification program, forbidding the recyclers from shipping e-waste overseas.

A September 2014 study found that 44 percent of the 1.8 billion new cell phones that were likely bought in 2014 will end up in buyers’ drawers, 4 percent will end up in landfills, and just 3 percent will end up being recycled. And it found that of the 40 elements in a cell phone, just 17 are are recovered completely, even in high-tech electronics recycling plants.

Suckling also said that as much as a new system for phone companies is important, a shift in the mindsets of consumers away from an upgrade every year or two culture towards a culture of keeping phones if there’s nothing wrong with them is also key.

“A cultural shift to understanding the wider impacts of what we do is essential to making take back schemes work,” he said. “I cannot speak for all companies, but many realize that resources are becoming more scarce and simply staying in business in the middle future will need different ways of working. But at the moment, the economics of selling as many phones as possible outweighs the environmental implications.”

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CellphonesClimate ChangeEnvironment

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Why These Tiny Island Nations Are Planning To Sue Fossil Fuel Companies

On Monday, the seven of the world’s wealthiest nations met in southern Germany and pledged to decarbonize the world’s energy systems by 2100, while limiting global warming to 2°C.

Later that evening, in the South Pacific, representatives from six decidedly smaller countries also took a stand against climate change. Under the People’s Declaration for Climate Justice, citizens from the nations of Vanuatu, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and the Philippines announced their intent to bring legal action against fossil fuel companies for their role in contributing to climate change.

“As the people most acutely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, we will not let the big polluters decide and assign our fate,” the declaration reads. “We refuse to accept the ‘new normal’ and demand for climate justice by holding the big polluters and their respective governments to account for their contribution to the climate crisis.”

In conjunction with the declaration, Greenpeace Southeast Asia is planning to submit a petition to the Philippines Commission on Human Rights, requesting that the commission open an investigation into the role of major polluters in human rights violations from climate change.

As the people most acutely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, we will not let the big polluters decide and assign our fate

“The power of this declaration is that it represents what I think is a growing movement of people who are no longer patiently waiting for governments to address the challenges of climate change, and who are actually saying, ‘We are going to use the legal mechanism available to us in our courts, in your courts, and human rights bodies to hold you, the polluters, accountable for the human rights violations we are suffering,'” Carroll Muffett, president and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law, told ThinkProgress.

In late March, Cyclone Pam ripped through the tiny island nation of Vanuatu, killing 24, displacing 3,300, and destroying 90 percent of the island’s infrastructure. A week later, three more tropical storms had circled through the South Pacific, pounding the region’s island nations with wind and rain.

The South Pacific is no stranger to extreme weather, but islands in the region have seen a marked uptick in the frequency of the most intense storms — from 1975 to 1989, and 1990 to 2004, the occurrence of Category 4 and 5 storms more than doubled in the Pacific region, according to the World Bank. And climate change is expected to continue that trend, with scientists warning of the potential for stronger and more frequent storms in the coming years.

Violent storms aren’t the only impact of climate change that the low-lying island nations of the South Pacific will have to contend with. There’s also rising sea levels, which threaten to overrun the islands, and ocean acidification, which threatens to severely impact marine life on which the island’s depend.

The declaration doesn’t directly translate into legal action — and the island nations could face several hurdles before their complaints are even heard in a court, according to David Hunter, director of the Program on International and Comparative Environmental Law at American University’s Washington College of Law.

“If you are citizens in Fiji and you want to sue Chevron, you’re going to have jurisdictional questions,” Hunter told ThinkProgress, noting that the nations could also run up against issues if they try to bring a case in the United States because of preemption from federal laws like the Clean Air Act. But, Hunter said, the nations have logic on their side.

“Generally speaking, if we look at this in the simplest form, they are people that are suffering from actions that companies and others have been involved in,” he said. “If we think about the legal system as trying to remedy an injustice or an injury, then you have injury and can probably demonstrate causation from the burning of fossil fuels to ocean acidification or sea level rise.”

Proving causation used to be a major hurdle for plaintiffs hoping to hold polluters accountable for climate change, but both Hunter and Muffett said that improved science is getting increasingly better at linking specific harm to specific actors.

They are people that are suffering from actions that companies and others have been involved in

In late March, a farmer in Peru filed a complaint with the German energy company RWE, demanding that the company pay for the cost of protective measures he’s been forced to install on his home. His home lies in the floodpath of the Palcacocha lake, which is threatening to overflow as the glaciers that feed it continue to melt due to climate change.

“This was not someone saying, ‘I’m generally concerned about the impacts of climate change on my country,'” Muffett said. “This was someone that could point to scientific data produced by his own government saying the water behind this specific dam is rising because of climate change.”

Another defense that defendants in climate litigation cases can use is the principle that carbon pollution is a global problem. The argument largely goes that if everyone is causing the problem, then no single actor can be held responsible. But research published in 2013 in the journal Climatic Change is making that defense more difficult for fossil fuel companies.

In that study, researcher Richard Heede, from the Climate Accountability Institute, tried to divvy up responsibility for man-made global warming emissions. What Heede found was that although there are thousands of oil and gas companies throughout the world, the majority of emissions can be traced back to a handful of participants — roughly two-thirds of industrial emissions come from just 90 entities, 50 of which were investor-owned companies.

“Courts may not be able to deal with 6 billion defendants, or 1 billion, but courts are very comfortable with 50,” Muffett said, noting that the concept of joint and several liability was, in essence, created to deal with cases where several defendants contributed to harming the plaintiff.

The South Pacific nations are just the latest in a slew of plaintiffs hoping to use litigation to spur action on climate change. In April, some 900 Dutch citizens filed a lawsuit against their government for failing to effectively curb climate change. There is a similar movement underway in Belgium, where a lawsuit against the government is in its early stages. And throughout the United States, Our Children’s Trust — an Oregon-based nonprofit — has launched several youth-led lawsuits against various state and federal entities for failing to stop climate change.

To Muffett, this growing suite of lawsuits signals a turning point in the fight against polluters.

“If you think about tobacco litigation, one case after another lost and lost and lost until the nature of the plaintiffs started changing and started growing, and suddenly the tobacco companies started losing,” Muffett said. “I think that’s the stage we’re at with climate change.”

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Climate ChangeCyclonesFossil FuelsSouth PacificVanuatu

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Top Republican Donor To Spend $175 Million To Get His Party To Take Climate Change Seriously

Usually the news that a major Republican donor will be dropping hundreds of millions of dollars on a campaign to influence voters on energy and climate change would make environmentalists worried. But not when that donor is spending $175 million to get Republicans to talk about clean energy and the solutions to the climate crisis.

Entrepreneur Jay Faison founded the ClearPath Foundation in December of last year in part to restore Republicans’ environmental legacy. Tuesday he announced that he will be investing $175 million on a public education campaign that will include a social media and online advertising to get Republicans to talk about market-based solutions to climate change. That includes $40 million through the 2016 cycle, and another $10 million as a seed fund for a political advocacy group. The foundation invested between $1 and $9 million in a few solar energy projects.

Faison, who comes from a wealthy family and made his fortune selling his audio-visual installation company SnapAV, has contributed over $50,000 to various Republican campaigns, according to campaign finance from the FEC. These include the North Carolina Republican Party, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM), and Sen. Bob Schaffer (R-CO).

“Environmental protection has drifted over time from a topic that once united all Americans,” Faison told the International Business Times, “to one that divides us as a symbol of our opposing political parties.”

To him the debate on climate change should not be about the science, but the solutions. “We think that there are real Republican solutions to the problem,” he told Politico.

While most party leaders are opposed to acting to solve the climate crisis, and many are dismissive of its existence (including 68 percent of those in Congress), 44 percent of registered Republicans think climate change is real and caused by humans. Another poll found that 48 percent said they are more likely to vote for a candidate who supports climate action.

Environmental groups welcomed ClearPath to the conversation.

“It may or may not be enough, but it’s a really good thing,” Debbie Sease, the Sierra Club’s national campaign director, told ThinkProgress. “If you look at the scale of what we need to do on climate, you can’t do it with one party, you need Republicans too. It would be naive of me to think it’s the one thing that’ll turn it around, but it’s a start.”

“If you look at how the progress on other environmental issues was made in the past, it was done with leadership from both parties.”

Faison, who according to Politico disdains Obamacare and “supports school choice, tort reform and small government,” has a chance to speak directly to other conservatives who are open to clean energy, or energy choice as it is often called in the Green Tea Party.

“I think it is a good thing,” said Debbie Dooley, a solar advocate who is also co-founder of the Atlanta Tea Party and member of the Tea Party Patriots Board of Directors. “Mr. Faison has an excellent reputation, I think he will be very successful. It’s a game-changer.”

“I’ve seen a lot of Republicans that are open-minded and believe in a clean energy future, some from a free market perspective, some from an energy choice perspective, some from a climate perspective. There’s no reason we can’t all work together.”

With the massive amount of spending expected to surround the 2016 presidential race, it is an open question whether ClearPath can break through.

“Jay clearly has a huge uphill battle,” said Craig Holman, Public Citizen’s government affairs lobbyist. “He will be bringing $175 million, but I’m expecting to see $2 billion or more from outside groups. It’s going to be a bit of a drop in the bucket, from the Koch brothers to Sheldon Adelson, most of whom do not share the position that Jay does on climate change.”

[image error]

CREDIT: ClearPath screenshot

Faison has personally donated $50,000 to Jeb Bush’s PAC and $25,000 to Lindsey Graham’s. According to Politico he has not picked a candidate because “this is an issue that … they haven’t clearly articulated yet.”

Graham has been active on efforts to address climate change in the senate, acknowledging it is happening. Since he announced his presidential campaign, he has said his administration would address “address climate change, CO2 emissions in a business-friendly way.” When he asks people what the environmental policy of the Republican party is, he says “I get a blank stare.”

“If the Republican party continues to be seen as anti-environment, I think they will lose in 2016,” said Tea Partier and solar advocate Dooley.

Faison singled out the millennials looking for “forward-thinking leadership that acknowledges the realities of today” in an interview with National Journal, saying “how our party and our presidential candidate talks about it will have a significant impact over voter perception, and I think the Democratic candidates know this.

If Faison succeeds in convincing large numbers of his party to push for action to solve climate change, they will have to actually work to solve those problems with Democrats and climate advocates that may disagree with them on specifics, such as whether nuclear power is worthwhile.

“There will be a group of Republicans whose solutions are not necessarily the set of solutions we would prefer, but getting them to think on it is a good step,” said Sease.

Faison has not espoused a particular solution, saying it’s “a little early to talk about which options are right.”

“We want to elevate the discussion about those menu items,” he said.

Sease readily acknowledges that ClearPath will not be able to change the minds of all those skeptical of doing something about climate change, “it’s a step in the right direction. It starts a dialogue.”

“Once you actually accept the fact that climate change is real, it’s caused by man, and controlling greenhouse gases is the way to address it,” Sease says, “it sets you down a clear path of clean energy and energy efficiency.”

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Climate ChangeRepublican Party

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New Report Shows EPA’S Proposed Carbon Regulations Will Create Tens Of Thousands Of Jobs

By 2020, the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed Clean Power Plan will create nearly 100,000 more jobs than are lost, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank.

The report’s initial estimates are higher than some similar studies; however, the institute found that the job impacts of the Clean Power Plan, which limits carbon emissions from power plants, would not last, and would become “almost completely insignificant by 2030.”

Coal mining and coal-fired power plants will face the biggest job losses if the Clean Power Plan is implemented, because coal-fired power plants are responsible for 39 percent of the United States’ electricity generation and three-quarters of the sector’s carbon emissions. But other sectors, including renewable energy, scientific research, and appliance manufacturing, will all increase, at least initially, the report found. Efficiency investments, such as retrofits for homes and businesses, will be a key driver in initial job growth, but will ultimately lower electricity demand, EPI said.

The report looks not only at direct employment — for instance, coal mining positions that will be lost, or solar industry jobs created — but also at indirect employment, such as a waitressing job in a mining town or railroad jobs affected by decreased coal shipping. That means the report looked at where coal miners are spending their paychecks.

But job growth analysis is incredibly complicated. Josh Bivens, research and policy director at the Economic Policy Institute and the report’s author, explained that measuring such things as doctor’s visits could end up on both sides of the ledger.

“Induced losses include fewer visits to doctors offices from people who’ve lost jobs, incomes, and insurance, but also include increased visits to doctors offices from people who have gained jobs, incomes, and insurance coverage,” he told ThinkProgress in an email.

But other related changes might not be included in a jobs analysis. For instance, the EPA estimates the Clean Power Plan will have “climate and health benefits worth an estimated $55 billion to $93 billion per year in 2030. This includes avoiding 2,700 to 6,600 premature deaths and 140,000 to 150,000 asthma attacks in children.” These savings are not included in the Bivens’ tally.

“I do not translate the monetized health benefits into jobs — that would be near impossible to do because even [though] they’re monetized they probably don’t add to measured GDP and hence employment,” he said.

More generally, though, Bivens acknowledged the ancillary benefits of the Clean Power Plan. “Given the vast importance of global climate change, this means that the impact of the CPP on economic, health, and environmental outcomes is likely to be quite large,” he wrote in the report. “It’s not an employment policy, so it really shouldn’t be graded on that continuum,” Bivens added on a call with reporters.

Bivens did emphasize, though, that even though overall the plan will add American jobs, expected losses will be “geographically concentrated.” Areas that have coal-fired plants or coal mining will be disproportionately negatively affected by the rule. Bivens noted that policies such as the Obama Administration’s support of miners’ health groups will be important to mitigate these effects.

There are roughly 80,000 people working in coal mining, according to the National Mining Association, but that number is declining every year. Domestic coal production, particularly in Appalachia, has fallen in recent years, largely due to lowering natural gas prices, which have made coal less competitive. There is also downward pressure on coal mining jobs because of increased automation in the industry.

Moreover, amid a global push to decrease carbon emissions, activist shareholders, including the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, the Church of England, and Stanford University, have all divested from coal interests. Coal companies are also struggling with their cash flows, and recent analysis found that overall, they likely do not have enough money to pay for the environmental damages they have caused.

Because of the decline in the workforce, the United Mine Workers (UMW) pension fund is about $1 billion short of being in actuarial balance, the EPI report said. Bivens noted that policies to address the specific groups most impacted by the new rule will be critical, including recent Obama administration efforts to mitigate losses to the coal industry’s pension and health plans. The proposed Fiscal Year 2016 Budget provides more than $55 million in funding for job training, job creation, economic diversification, and other economic efforts in communities that have experienced layoffs due to the declining coal industry. According to the White House, that funding is “unprecedented” and will go toward improving the economic security of coal miners and their families, who have “helped keep the lights on in this nation for generations,” ThinkProgress reported in February.

The final Clean Power Plan rule is expected to be issued in August, but has already faced legislative and legal challenges, primarily from states with large coal industries.

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Clean Power PlanCoalEconomic Policy InstituteemploymentEPAEPIHealthjob growthJobsJosh Bivens

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Rabbis: Scripture Says ‘If We Refuse To Let Earth Rest, It Will Rest Anyways’

With Pope Francis’ forthcoming encyclical on climate change due out on June 18, religious communities are preparing to seize this rare moment of environmental spotlight. The much anticipated papal declaration will lay out the church’s views on the subject, and now members of the Jewish community — inspired by the church’s efforts — have released a letter of their own calling for “vigorous climate action.”

The Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis, which was initiated by seven rabbis from across the spectrum of Jewish faith, has been signed by more than 340 rabbis. Released in late May, it calls for “spiritual leadership of the Jewish people to speak to the Jewish people as a whole and to the world on this deep crisis in the history of the human species and of many other life-forms on our planet.”

In other words, it is a call for a “new sense of eco-social justice.”

According to Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of the Shalom Center and one of the seven authors, the the rabbis came up with three main reasons to take immediate action on climate change.

As laid out in an article in the American Jewish publication Forward, Waskow states that the rabbis wanted to bring “unique Jewish wisdom” to the efforts to heal the world from climate change; to remind the Jewish community that the “relationship between humans and the earth is encoded in the Torah;” and to connect with the younger generation of Jews who are concerned about the damaged world they and their children may inherit.

What are the sections of the Torah that most specifically relate the the climate crisis?

The rabbis found these to be Leviticus 25-26 and Deuteronomy 15, where the scripture calls for one year of every seven to be “Shabbat Shabbaton” or Sabbatical Year — “a Year of restful Release for the Earth and its workers from being made to work, and of Release for debtors from their debts.”

“In Leviticus 26, the Torah warns us that if we refuse to let the Earth rest, it will ‘rest’ anyway, despite us and upon us — through drought and famine and exile that turn an entire people into refugees,” the letter states.

The rabbis acknowledge that for centuries the attention of the Jewish community has focused on the “repair of social injustice” as the Jewish people experienced such traumas in their own history of exile. Now, it is time to focus on the deeper environmental crisis of which the Jewish tradition “has always been aware.”

“We urge those who have been focusing on social justice to address the climate crisis, and those who have been focusing on the climate crisis to address social justice,” state the rabbis.

What sort of action does this new eco-social justice entail? The letter offers some directives:

Purchasing wind power rather than coal-fired power.
“Organizing our great Federations” to give grants and loans to Jewish organizations to help make their buildings solar-powered.
Moving bank accounts from those that invest in “deadly carbon-burning” to those that invest in local neighborhoods, such as credit unions.
Divesting endowment funds from fossil fuels and putting them into “stable, profitable, life-giving enterprises.”
Demanding that tax money no longer goes towards subsidizing fossil fuel companies, but instead to the rapid growth of renewable energy “as quickly in this emergency as our government moved in the emergency of the early 1940s to shift from manufacturing cars to making tanks.”
Convincing lawmakers to put in a place a system of “carbon fees and public dividends” that incentivizes society to move beyond the “carbon economy.”

The rabbis place a strong emphasis on the United Nations climate talks at the end of the year in Paris, where world leaders hope to finalize a global agreement to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

“If past governmental behavior is any indication, the governments will probably get stuck in Paris — unless we, the peoples, insist on action,” writes Rabbi Waskow. “What we do during the next six months will decide what happens in Paris.”

Together the United States and Israel are home to more than 80 percent of the world’s Jews. This significance is not lost on the rabbis, who note that while the U.S. is one of the biggest contributors to the climate crisis, Israel is one of the more vulnerable. The letter states that that Israeli scientists have predicted that under a business-as-usual scenario in which greenhouse gas emissions are not heavily mitigated, “the Negev desert will come to swallow up half the state of Israel, and sea-level rises will put much of Tel Aviv under water.”

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This County In Oregon Completely Banned GMO Crops. Here’s Why That Matters For The Environment.

Katelyn Harrop is an intern with ThinkProgress under the Center for American Progress.

On June 5, Oregon’s Jackson County became the newest county in the U.S. to have an active ban on the growing of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

The Genetically Engineered Plant Ordinance went into effect following the partial dismissal of a lawsuit brought by a group of noncommercial alfalfa farmers on May 29. The farmers sought to overturn the GMO ban, viewing the ordinance as a violation of their economic and legal rights.

The ordinance restricts the cultivation of GMO plants. Its activation — and the lawsuit’s partial dismissal — is good news for family farmers and environmental, health, and social justice activists, who pushed for the ban. The grassroots-level ballot measure cited the untested health effects of GMOs, the economic effects of mega-GMO seed companies on local organic farmers, and the unknown long-term environmental effects of GMOs as reasons to support the county-wide ban.

These largely unexplored long-term effects that GMOs may have on agricultural health and environmental well-being were among the greatest concerns raised by anti-GMO advocates and county ban supporters. GMOs are often paired with significant levels of herbicides and pesticides, which have been linked to soil damage and decreasing levels of soil fertility. Human health is also a concern with some of these pesticides and herbicides — the most popular pesticide in the U.S., Monsanto’s Roundup, has an active ingredient that “probably” causes cancer, according to the World Health Organization (a claim that Monsanto disputes).

Monsanto is responsible for the vast majority of GMO seed sales, allowing the company to create popular Roundup Ready seeds that resist the pesticide. This means that the pesticide can be liberally sprayed to exterminate weeds across fields while the crop survives. However, the more that Roundup is used, the more resistant weeds become to its chemicals. Some farmers worry that this may to the development of a pesticide-immune super weed and a greater level of codependence between farmers and pesticide producers.

Monsanto has vigorously denied claims of environmental harm from its pesticides, but environmentalists, health specialists, and farmers remain concerned.

“Unfortunately, we’re moving onto a pesticide treadmill as Roundup becomes less effective, leading to more super weeds and more reliance,” Friends of the Earth Food and Technology Program Director Lisa Archer told ThinkProgress. “GMOs are getting us addicted to more and more toxic pesticides which is taking us in the wrong direction.”

Archer also cited concerns with cross contamination of non-GMO crops with their genetically-engineered neighbors, which puts the authenticity of organic crops and organic farms in jeopardy.

“Another problem that probably drove this news in Oregon is this contamination of non-GMO crops which is a rampant problem through the contamination of wheat in the northwest,” Archer said. “This can cause a real problem for farmers who can lose their export market.”

Since the ban passed in 2014, the county has experienced no shortage of lawsuits from GMO-supporting businesses. Many of these big agriculture businesses have cited Oregon’s Right to Farm Act, which places limits on local government’s abilities to regulate farming practices and emphasizes the importance of utilizing open land.

Although the court has partially dismissed the first lawsuit brought by commercial alfalfa farmers, other cases brought by fiscally powerful companies hang in the balance.

Jackson follows in the footsteps of county-wide restrictions in neighboring states California and Washington, but the county may be the last in Oregon to pass an anti-GMO ordinance for the time being. Senate Bill 863 names the state as supreme regulator of seeds, thereby banning similar county legislation but excluding the Jackson County ban due to the time at which it was developed. This state-level regulation is nothing new — other states, including Georgia, Indiana, and New Jersey, also hold seed regulation tight to the state level.

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BREAKING: Court Throws Out Challenge To Obama’s Climate Change Rule

The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia threw out a lawsuit that challenged the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Clean Power Plan Tuesday, saying that because the rule isn’t yet in its final stage, it’s too soon for court challenges.

“They want us to do something that they candidly acknowledge we have never done before: review the legality of a proposed rule,” Judge Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the opinion. “But a proposed rule is just a proposal. In justiciable cases, this Court has authority to review the legality of final agency rules. We do not have authority to review proposed agency rules.”

This ruling wasn’t unexpected. When the court heard the case in April, the three presiding judges made it clear that they were skeptical of the requests to act on a rule that was in its proposal stage.

“Do you know of any case when we have stopped rule-making? Why would we do that?” Judge Thomas Griffith asked Elbert Lin, an attorney for West Virginia, during the proceedings in April.

The three judges that threw out the lawsuit were staunchly conservative, which means if another lawsuit is filed against the rule, it will likely be met with a more moderate panel. The decision on that future suit will be based on the merits of the final rule, rather than on the fact that the judges can’t review the legality of a proposal.

The dismissed lawsuit was a combination of two challenges brought against the rule — one from a group of energy companies led by coal company Murray Energy Corp., and the other from a group of 15 states led by coal-heavy West Virginia. The states argued that the EPA didn’t have the authority to regulate carbon dioxide from power plants, and the Murray Energy suit requested that the Court move to prevent the EPA from implementing the “disastrous” rule.

“This is clearly an illegal attempt by the Obama EPA to impose irrational and destructive cap-and-tax mandates, which Congress and the American people have consistently rejected,” Gary M. Broadbent, assistant general counsel and media director for Murray Energy, said in a statement in 2014, when the lawsuit was filed. “These proposed rules will cause immediate and irreparable harm to Americans, including our citizens on fixed incomes and our manufacturers of products that compete in the global marketplace.”

The EPA’s proposed Clean Power plan seeks to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 25 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. The final version of the rule is expected this summer.

The rule may be safe for now from Murray Energy and the 15 states’ challenges, but this is far from the last time we’ll see the regulation challenged. It’ll likely face more legal challenges after the final rule is released, and many in Congress are working to undermine it through legislation and budget proposals. States, too, could present a major obstacle for the rule — states are supposed to come up with their own plans for implementing the regulation, but several have promised to fight it.

Still, environmental groups heralded the judges’ dismissal.

“Today’s decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals is both a big win in protecting our communities and families against the massive carbon pollution from power plants and an important victory for a fair and democratic rule-making process,” Vickie Patton, the general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, told National Journal.

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