Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 160

ALEC Doesn’t Want To Be Known As A ‘Climate Denier’ Organization Anymore, And It’s Willing To Sue

CREDIT: Shutterstock

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the secretive organization that brings together conservative politicians and major corporate interests, is out to correct the impression that it’s a “climate denier” organization by threatening to sue groups that refer to it as one. But after a string of abandoned sponsors, the expansive free-market group’s threat to sue Common Cause and the League of Conservation Voters appears to be more motivated by containing its public relations spiral, rather than reshaping its anti-climate and anti-clean energy agenda.

As the Washington Post reports, in recent weeks attorneys for ALEC sent letters to the two organizations asking them to immediately “cease making false statements” and “remove all false or misleading material” suggesting that ALEC does not believe that “human activity has and will continue to alter the atmosphere of the planet.”

The letter states that ALEC’s position is clear: ALEC does not deny climate change. The possibility of any productive outcome from this threat is unclear, said David Willett, LCV’s senior vice president for communications.

“Threatening legal action is a funny way to start a dialogue and discussion,” Willett told ThinkProgress. “They clearly have realized that their approach is becoming politically toxic.”

Willett said LCV still has every reason to believe ALEC is still working to undermine the Clean Power Plan and renewable energy standards in states across the country. Willett said the approach appears to be consistent with the one taken by most former climate deniers these days.

“They know it’s unwise to attack the scientific consensus and they are scrambling for ways to continue pushing their existing agenda without that talking point,” he said, pointing out that the legal justification for their demands was not made clear in ALEC’s letter.

“It certainly does seem that the recent defections, including companies like Google who specifically cited climate issues, must be of concern to them,” Willett added.

A growing number of major corporate backers have cut ties with ALEC over the group’s controversial policies. The group’s backing of Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law, a substantial part of the national discussion following the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, led to multiple sponsors leaving the group, and the focus has now shifted to climate change.

In September, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt said groups were abandoning ALEC for spreading lies about global warming and “making the world a much worse place.”

Corporate sponsors including Amazon, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Kraft, McDonald’s, and Wal-Mart quit ALEC even before this climate meltdown. More recently major Silicon Valley companies including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Yelp, Microsoft, and AOL, have cut ties with ALEC over the organization’s extremist anti-climate positions.

In responding to ALEC’s cease and desist letter, Common Cause President Miles Rapoport stated that ALEC’s legal threats “are an effort to shut down debate about its policies and matters of national importance,” and that the group wants “to chill our right to advocate for the public interest.”

Rapoport said Common Cause “will not be strong-armed into silence.” Common Cause will not retract its statements or make any public corrections as requested by ALEC.

Common Cause points out that in citing 1998 model legislation acknowledging that “human activity has and will continue to alter the atmosphere of the planet,” which “may lead to demonstrable changes in climate,” in its letter, ALEC is omitting key sections of the legislation, including that “such activity may lead to deleterious, neutral, or possibly beneficial climatic changes,” and “a great deal of scientific uncertainty surrounds the nature of these prospective changes, and the cost of regulation to inhibit such changes may lead to great economic dislocation.”

So even if ALEC accepts the reality of human-caused climate change, the group also believes that climate change may be beneficial and that the nature of these changes is still extremely uncertain. Putting aside the increasingly strong scientific evidence collected over the last 17 years indicating the devastating consequences of human-caused climate change, what ALEC really seems to care about is another clause in the legislation: that “some states will be unduly impacted by such regulation especially those that export or produce large amount of carbon-based energy feedstock.”

ALEC wants to protect fossil fuel interests. Whether the group acknowledges climate change is somewhat beside the point if it doesn’t want to do anything about it. ALECClimateChangeDenial.org, a new website set up by DeSmogBlog, the Center for Media and Democracy, Common Cause and other organizations, documents ALEC’s long history of climate obfuscation and denial. One example: ALEC’s 2014 mid-year conference in Dallas, Texas, included a presentation from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. The NIPCC is funded by the Heartland Institute, which questions the existence of climate change, considers the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to be “a joke,” and has equated people that believe in climate change with the Unabomber.

Peabody, the largest private sector coal company in the world, is a longtime ALEC member, and Kelly Mader, Peabody’s top lobbyist, is a member of ALEC’s corporate “advisory council.”

ALEC, which does not publish a full list of all dues-paying members, includes some 2,000 state legislators, corporate executives, and lobbyists. Many of the state legislators have gone on to become members of Congress. It is also well-documented that most of ALEC’s revenue comes from corporations and corporate foundations, including those associated with petrochemical billionaires Charles and David Koch, rather than legislative dues. An analysis by the Energy & Policy Institute found that between 1998 and 2012, ALEC’s membership fees totaled just over $1 million while gifts, grants, and contributions were just over $78 million. ALEC received $500,000 in funding from various Koch foundations from 2005-2011 and $1.4 million from ExxonMobil this past decade.

The post ALEC Doesn’t Want To Be Known As A ‘Climate Denier’ Organization Anymore, And It’s Willing To Sue appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Endangered Animal Bracket: The Final Four

Click image to expand. Now updated with Friday’s winners: Falcon and Elephant!

CREDIT: Dylan Petrohilos

This is it, folks: today’s the Final Four in March Sadness, ClimateProgress’ educational bracket tournament of animals impacted by climate change and other environmental threats. For whichever animal wins, ClimateProgress will write a feature-length article exploring the story behind what’s ailing your chosen critter, and who is working to save them. Read the rules here.

In the bracket battles leading up to today, you’ve voted through one animal from each of our four categories. From the Paws and Claws section, the number one seed Polar Bear has crushed the competition. She’ll be facing off today against Sea Otter, the number six seed of our Fins and Flippers division. In addition, Elephant — the number two seed of the Hooves and Horns category — will go head to head against the so-far indomitable Peregrine Falcon, the number seven seed in our Shells and Wings section.

For the final four, we’ll briefly re-cap all we’ve learned about the environmental threats facing each of these animals. Only your votes can decide who moves to the final round. Vote in the embedded tweets below, on Twitter with the hashtag #CPMarchSadness, or on our Facebook page.

Polar Bear vs. Sea Otter

CREDIT: Shutterstock/AP

Polar Bear: Here’s what we’ve learned about polar bears so far: They’re the world’s unofficial symbol of climate change. Arctic Sea decline is giving mother bears less time on the ice to hunt seals, and cubs are starving as a result. The story behind the animal is controversial — in a number of cases, polar bears have defied the odds, and in those cases their success story has become fodder for conservatives to support their argument that climate change isn’t real. At the same time, most scientists agree polar bears are in danger of extinction as the planet warms.

Sea Otter: A short re-cap: Sea Otters are being increasingly killed by toxic algae, which is expected to thrive in a warming world. And more severe weather is making it difficult for them to find food, contributing to starvation. That’s bad on its own, but what makes it worse is that the loss of sea otters due to climate change actually stands to make climate change worse. That’s because their main prey — sea urchins — like to eat kelp, so by keeping the sea urchin population at a sustainable level, they keep kelp forests lush. Kelp forests absorb a lot of carbon.

Which animal has a more interesting story? Which would you rather read about? Vote below.

Who's going to the championship? RETWEET for Polar Bear or FAVE for Sea Otter #CPMarchSadness http://t.co/gT4FLNoDGW pic.twitter.com/9WE0rRL9Tq

— Climate Progress (@climateprogress) April 6, 2015

Elephant vs. Peregrine Falcon

CREDIT: AP

Elephant: What have we learned about elephants so far? First, it’s clear humans are not these animals’ friends — not only is ivory poaching a problem, but growing human population is taking away their forest habitat, as are changes in land-use. What’s more, once-domesticated elephants in Asia are being left to starve or mistreated as the use of domestication loses popularity. Climate change is the nail in the proverbial coffin for this already-vulnerable animal — if temperatures rise even a few degrees higher than average in Myanmar, Asian elephants are in grave danger of dying of heat stroke, according to a 2013 study.

Peregrine Falcon: We’ve learned a great deal in a short time about the peregrine falcon, one of the fastest animals in the world. For one, the greatest threats to them come before they even know how to fly. Prolonged, heavy rains in the Arctic exacerbated by climate change are causing peregrine chicks to drown or die of hypothermia when the cold rain soaks through their fluffy down coats. Those rain spells are forcing some mother peregrines to give up. In one case, a mother who left her chicks in the rain and returned to find them visibly weakened killed both of them — the first case of infanticide ever recorded in wild peregrine falcons.

Which animal would you like hone in on and learn more about? Vote below.

Who will win? RETWEET for Elephant or FAVE for Peregrine Falcon #CPMarchSadness http://t.co/gT4FLNoDGW pic.twitter.com/uai6485buC

— Climate Progress (@climateprogress) April 6, 2015

***

TOURNAMENT UPDATES:

Day 1 – 3/19: Paws and Claws pt. 1 — Polar Bear vs. Wombat; Tasmanian Devil vs. Pangolin; (voting closed) WINNERS: Polar Bear and Pangolin.

Day 2 – 3/20: Paws and Claws pt. 2 — Lemur vs. Koala; Panda vs. Wolverine (voting closed) WINNERS: Koala and Wolverine.

Day 3 – 3/23: Fins and Flippers — Sea Lion vs. Sea Horse; Penguin vs. Manatee; Walrus vs. Sea Otter; Whale vs. Salmon (voting closed) WINNERS: Sea Horse, Sea Otter, Whale, and Penguin.

Day 4 – 3/24: Horns and Hooves — Elephant vs. Horned Lizard; Rhino vs. Narwhal; Saola vs. Moose; Mountain Goat vs. Reindeer (voting closed) WINNERS: Elephant, Narwhal, Moose, and Mountain Goat.

Day 5 – 3/25: Shells and Wings — Sea Turtle vs. Pelican; Sage Grouse vs. Peregrine Falcon; Oyster vs. Butterfly; Lobster vs. Red Knot (voting closed) WINNERS: Sea Turtle, Falcon, Butterfly, Red Knot.

Day 6 – 3/26: Polar Bear vs. Pangolin; Koala vs. Wolverine (voting closed) WINNERS: Polar Bear, Wolverine.

Day 7 – 3/27: Sea Horse vs. Whale; Sea Otter vs. Penguin (voting closed) WINNERS: Sea Horse, Sea Otter.

Day 8 – 3/30: Elephant vs. Mountain Goat; Moose vs. Narwhal (voting closed) WINNERS: Elephant, Narwhal.

Day 9 – 3/31: Sea Turtle vs. Red Knot; Butterfly vs. Peregrine Falcon (voting closed) WINNERS: Sea Turtle, Peregrine Falcon.

Day 10 – 4/1: Polar Bear vs. Wolverine; Sea Horse vs. Sea Otter (voting closed) WINNERS: Polar Bear, Sea Otter.

Day 11 – 4/3: Elephant vs. Narwhal; Sea Turtle vs. Peregrine Falcon (voting closed) WINNERS: Elephant, Peregrine Falcon.

Day 12 – 4/6: THE FINAL FOUR: Polar Bear vs. Sea Otter; Elephant vs. Peregrine Falcon. (voting NOW OPEN)

Day 13 – 4/7: THE CHAMPIONSHIP: TBD

PAST ROUNDS:

Round 11: Elite Eight, part 2

Round 10: Elite Eight, part 1

Round 9: Sweet Sixteen, part 4

Round 8: Sweet Sixteen, part 3

Round 7: Sweet Sixteen, part 2

Round 6: Sweet Sixteen, part 1

Round 5: Shells and Wings

Round 4: Horns and Hooves

Round 3: Fins and Flippers

Round 2: Paws and Claws, part 2

Round 1: Paws and Claws, part 1

The post Endangered Animal Bracket: The Final Four appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Obama Is Trying To Protect A Huge Arctic Wildlife Zone, But Congress Likely Won’t Have It

CREDIT: shutterstock

On Friday, President Obama formally sent Congress recommendations to set aside a majority of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as wilderness, finalizing a request first announced by the White House in January. The protections would ban oil and natural gas drilling across some 12 million acres, a level of protection that has drawn — and will likely continue to draw — staunch opposition from Republicans in Congress.

“Based on the best available science and extensive public comment, the Service’s preferred alternative recommends 12.28 million acres — including the Coastal Plain — for designation as wilderness,” Obama’s letter reads. “This area is one of the most beautiful, undisturbed places in the world. It is a national treasure and should be permanently protected through legislation for future generations.”

As the letter states, ANWR, an area that comprises about 19 million acres, is home to some of the most diverse wildlife in the Arctic, providing critical habitat for gray wolves, polar bears, caribou, and over 200 species of migratory birds.

But the area also houses a reserve of energy resources, prompting some in Congress to suggest that it should remain open to development. The Coastal Plain alone is estimated to contain some 5.7 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil.

A “wilderness” designation is the highest level of protection the government can bestow upon a region: it prohibits the development of permanent roads and commercial enterprise within the area. But only Congress can designate areas as wilderness, and Congress in recent years has been hesitant to exercise its powers in this way, with some 30 proposals still awaiting approval.

Obama’s proposed protections for ANWR are almost certain to face the same gridlock when they arrive before Congress. With Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) chairing the Energy Committee and Republicans controlling the House and the Senate, Congressional action on Obama’s proposal is unlikely, Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s Lands Team, told ThinkProgress.

“There may be a hearing in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee, chaired by Sen. Murkowski. Drilling proponents know they do not have 60 votes so I doubt Murkowski will push a vote on allowing drilling in the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge,” Manuel said. And even if Murkowski did manage to push through a bill that opposes Obama’s protections, the president would most likely veto it.

Murkowski was among multiple lawmakers — especially those from Alaska — who voiced opposition to Obama’s official recommendation to protect ANWR.

“The vast majority of Alaskans do not support creating new wilderness in ANWR, so I am disappointed to see the Obama administration is continuing to press the issue,” Murkowski said in a statement. “A congressional designation of the coastal plain as wilderness will not happen on my watch.”

Murkowski has previously called opening up the ANWR a “top priority,” but has voiced concern that the Republican-controlled Congress won’t be able to accomplish this on its own. It’s “not a given that we can advance an ANWR initiative to successful passage,” Murkowski told the Alaska Dispatch News in November.

“You’ve got a president that is pretty committed to drawing a line in the sand,” she said. “That doesn’t mean we won’t push it and push it very hard.”

On March 4, the Alaskan State Legislature passed, with unanimous support, a bill opposing the president’s plans for protecting the ANWR.

For the time being, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will manage the proposed area in ANWR as though it is designated wilderness. Even without Congressional approval, that’s still a shift in management of the area that Manuel described as “significant,” as now there will be more wildlife monitoring and any oil development will be off-limits.

Still, though environmental groups widely applauded Obama’s final proposal, many reiterated their interest in having the protection made permanent through Congressional action.

“The Arctic coastal plain is invaluable and worthy of the wilderness protections President Obama has recommended,” David Houghton, president of the National Wildlife Refuge Association, said in a statement on Friday. “Now it’s up to Congress to permanently designate it as wilderness so that future generations may benefit from this legacy.”

Opening ANWR to drilling has been debated in Congress for decades: In 1995, Congress approved a measure that would have allowed drilling in the ANWR, but it was vetoed by President Clinton. Congress tried again in 2005, with the Senate voting 51-49 to open the ANWR to oil and gas drilling, but the measure was eventually removed from the budget.

The post Obama Is Trying To Protect A Huge Arctic Wildlife Zone, But Congress Likely Won’t Have It appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Boycotting States: The Future For Climate Activism?

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) at a Kentucky coal loading facility in October 2014. (Via AP.)

The next great moral imperative is the fight to preserve a livable climate for our children and future generations. For progressives to win this fight — and the fate of literally billions of people hangs in the balance — we will have to match the state-level success the LGBT community and its allies recently showed in changing a discriminatory Indiana law.

Conservative political leaders and their polluting funders have declared their intention to do everything possible to seize control of state governments in 2016 and block climate action. The Koch brothers have pledged to raise an unprecedented $889 million just for this election cycle.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has not merely urged states to ignore the law’s requirement for them to put forward a state implementation plan to meet the EPA’s proposed Clean Power Plan standards. In one of the most shocking statements ever issued by any U.S. political leader, McConnell actually admitted publicly that his goal is to stop a global deal to avert catastrophic climate change.

McConnell announced to the world last week that “our international partners should proceed with caution before entering into a binding, unattainable deal” in large part because “13 states have already pledged to fight” the EPA’s standards. How shocking a statement is this?

The Paris climate talks this December are the world’s best chance to get as far as possible from the unimaginably catastrophic 6°C (11°F) path we’re currently on. They are the first — and maybe the last — chance to give the next generation a plausible shot at staying well below the 4°C (7°F) path that would render large parts of the Earth unsuitable for farming and virtually uninhabitable, probably for centuries.

If McConnell were to succeed at a state (and international) level, here is what a 2015 NASA study — along with many other recent studies — project as the likely future of North America:

If we stay near our current path of CO2 emissions, we will turn the normal climate of much of the country and world into “severe drought.”

Imagine if there were a devastating global avian flu pandemic, and McConnell was urging the world governments not to come together to fight it aggressively because some U.S. states — egged on by McConnell himself — opposed the plan. That is how shocking McConnell’s effort to stop global climate action is.

McConnell, the Kochs, and their pro-pollution allies, have taken the climate fight to the states. So the climate community will have to step up its game the way the LGBT community has.

A decade ago, many progressive politicians ran away from LGBT rights, and some even credit John Kerry’s loss to the issue (although there is lots of blame to go around for that).

A decade later, the politics on the issue have turned 180° as is clear from the national pushback against Indiana’s effort to legalize anti-gay discrimination (in the name of religious liberty). The LGBT community and its many allies in the sports, entertainment, and business community made clear that Indiana’s law would lead them to boycott or pull business from the state.

I am NOT saying that the climate action movement is broadly analogous to the marriage equality movement. The harm that climate inaction will bring to billions in the future is just too different from the extensive past and present discrimination and harm gays suffer. But one key similarity is the moral nature of the cause.

“Once third-rail issues transform into moral imperatives, impossibilities sometimes surrender to new realities,” as Salon explained in a 2013 piece on the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Indeed Salon explained in a late 2011 article that what “moved gay marriage into the mainstream in 2011″ was “morality.”

The LGBT community did not win by asking by asking for “tolerance.” They weren’t trying to get folks to “accept gay marriage by holding their moral noses.” No: “the lesson that the gay revolution holds for any progressive movement” is that “they set out to change change people’s minds about what is moral.”

The fact that we are on track to harm billions of people who contributed little or nothing to their harsh fate makes climate inaction a grave “wrong,” as I wrote in November. But what makes our current inaction uniquely immoral in the history of homo sapiens is that the large-scale harm is irreparable on any timescale that matters — many hundreds of years — and, of course, that we could avoid the worst of the irreparable harms at an astonishingly low net cost.

That was the singular message of the most recent assessment of climate science by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), its 2014 “Synthesis” report. That report may have been the first time the world’s leading scientists and governments spelled out in detail why the irreversibility of impacts makes inaction so immoral. Here is the key finding (emphasis in original):

Without additional mitigation efforts beyond those in place today, and even with adaptation, warming by the end of the 21st century will lead to high to very high risk of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts globally (high confidence).

That is a tremendously important argument. The climate panel acknowledges in the very next sentence that mitigation efforts involve “some level of co-benefits and of risks due to adverse side-effects.” But the risks involved in reducing greenhouse gas emissions are both quantitatively and qualitatively different than the risks stemming from inaction because they aren’t likely to be anywhere near as “severe, widespread, and irreversible,” as the IPCC explains.

We don’t have to wonder what Jefferson and other founding fathers would think about the immorality of McConnell’s and the Kochs’ efforts to irreversibly destroy a livable climate and healthy soil for future generations. As The Constitutional Law Foundation has explained, “The most succinct, systematic treatment of intergenerational principles left to us by the founders is that which was provided by Thomas Jefferson in his famous September 6, 1789 letter to James Madison.”

I summarized Jefferson’s position here. The key question for Jefferson was very simple: Must later generations “consider the preceding generation as having had a right to eat up the whole soil of their country, in the course of a life?” Soil was an obvious focal point for examining the issue of intergenerational equity for a Virginia planter like Jefferson.

The answer to Jefferson was another self-evident truth: “Every one will say no; that the soil is the gift of God to the living, as much as it had been to the deceased generation.”

It is immoral for one generation to destroy another generation’s vital soil — or its livable climate. Hence it is unimaginably immoral to Dustbowlify their soil and ruin their livable climate irreversibly for many centuries if not millennia. But that will be the outcome if McConnell and the Kochs succeed in blocking or seriously delaying action at the state (and international) level.

For the record, the EPA is legally obligated to issue rules regulating CO2 from existing power plants, since the Roberts Supreme Court 2007 ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA that carbon dioxide qualifies as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act that Congress passed years ago. And just last year, the Roberts Court affirmed 7 to 2 the EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gases from stationary sources, such as power plants.

So McConnell is not accurate when he asserts that “two-thirds of the U.S. federal government hasn’t even signed off on” EPA action. He is more accurate when he says many “states have already pledged to fight it.” Sadly he himself has been pushing them hard to do just that. Nonetheless, states that join the effort to block serious climate action are making the choice for themselves, and that is a choice anyone who understands climate science should oppose.

I asked Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and one of the leaders of the climate movement, what he thought of Indiana, and its lesson for climate change. He told me, “this is what it looks like when the national mood has changed. Our job is to shift the zeitgeist, and if we do then the politics will follow.”

Those who seek to block action to preserve a livable climate have chosen the battlefield. And that means it is fast approaching the time when all those who say they care about the climate, their children’s health and well-being, and future generations will have to stand up for their values state by state.

The post Boycotting States: The Future For Climate Activism? appeared first on ThinkProgress.

‘An Era Of Extreme Weather': Report Shows Big Weather Events Cost U.S. $19 Billion In 2014

A warning buoy sits on the dry, cracked bed of Lake Mendocino near Ukiah, Calif. California’s ongoing drought was one of the most expensive extreme weather events of 2014.

CREDIT: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli

The most destructive extreme weather events in the United States last year caused 65 human fatalities and $19 billion in damage, according to an analysis of federal government and insurance industry data released Thursday by the Center for American Progress.

Titled “Extreme Weather on the Rise,” the report found that the U.S. experienced eight total extreme weather events in 2014, and that each of those disasters caused at least $1 billion in damage. Those events — which included historic drought, flooding, and storms — affected 35 states in total. In the last four years, the report found, extreme weather events across the United States caused 1,286 fatalities and $227 billion in economic losses across 44 states.

“Evidence shows that we are living in an era of extreme weather,” the report said. “If trends continue, the government must increase investments in resilience strategies, such as climate-smart pre-disaster mitigation, fortified infrastructure, sustainable resource management planning, and scientific research.”

CREDIT: americanprogress.org

The study noted a growing occurrence in the number of presidential Major Disaster Declarations relating to extreme weather since the 1960s. In only the first five years of the current decade, the United States has already experienced nearly as many extreme weather major disasters as it did in the 1960s and 1980s combined, the report said. If current trends continue, it said, the 2010s will see more than 600 extreme weather events — far surpassing any decade in over half a century.

The overwhelming view of the global scientific community is that extreme weather events will become more severe and frequent as the climate continues to warm. While no single episode can be easily connected to climate change, warming temperatures “can lead to changes in the likelihood of the occurrence or strength of extreme weather and climate events such as extreme precipitation events or warm spells,” according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Notably, 2014 was globally the hottest year on record.

While severe precipitation events tend to be the most deadly, the most expensive extreme weather disaster of the decade thus far is the Western drought, which has cost $46 billion to date, the report said.

In order to protect perilously low freshwater resources in those areas affected by the drought, multiple states have taken increased measures to manage natural resources that are key to their economies. On Wednesday, California Governor Jerry Brown ordered a 25 percent cut below 2013 water usage levels to water supply agencies across the states. Last week, Brown also signed a $1.1 billion emergency drought relief bill to help local communities meet the mandatory usage cuts.

The Center’s report comes as Congress is set to finalize the fiscal year 2016 budget, which includes funding to combat what the report asserts are rising disaster costs. President Obama’s request to Congress includes in the ballpark of $90 billion worth of programming to reduce disaster costs and build resilient infrastructure and communities, the report said.

“At only this decade’s halfway point, extreme weather events of all sizes have devastated Americans’ lives and their wallets to the tune of more than $227 billion — a sum that dwarfs the roughly $90 billion in resilience spending that the president’s budget proposal calls for,” the report said.

Miranda Peterson is a research assistant for the Energy Policy team at the Center for American Progress. She is a co-author of Thursday’s report.

The post ‘An Era Of Extreme Weather': Report Shows Big Weather Events Cost U.S. $19 Billion In 2014 appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Pick The Winners: Elephant vs. Narwhal, Sea Turtle vs. Falcon

Click image to expand. Now updated with Wednesday’s winners: Polar Bear and Sea Otter!

CREDIT: Dylan Petrohilos

After a short hiatus from the bracket battles yesterday, we’ve reached the end of our Elite 8 in March Sadness, ClimateProgress’ educational tournament of animals impacted by climate change and other environmental threats. For whichever animal wins, ClimateProgress will write a feature-length article exploring the story behind what’s ailing your chosen critter, and who is working to save them. Read the rules here.

We had a really, really, close battle between Polar Bear and Wolverine on Wednesday. Wolverine — a number 7 seed — had been pummeling through, but wound up being overtaken by Polar Bear by one vote! The match between Sea Otter and Seahorse drew a lot of voters, but the outcome was less close. Sea Otter will be breezing toward the Final Four, which starts on Monday.

Today, the final two winners of our Hooves & Horns and Shells & Wings divisions will go head to head, each paired with more information about the threats they’re facing. Elephant, Narwhal, Sea Turtle, Peregrine Falcon — which two will make it to the Final Four? Only your votes can decide. Vote in the embedded tweets below, on Twitter with the hashtag #CPMarchSadness, or on our Facebook page.

Elephant vs. Narwhal

CREDIT: Shutterstock/WWF

Elephant: The tragic decline of both Asian and African elephants has been well-documented over the years. In Africa, demand for ivory and changes in land-use pose a serious threat to the species, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Asian elephants face similar threats from a growing human population, which is slowly taking away the animal’s forest habitat.

For this already-vulnerable animal, climate change is the nail in the proverbial coffin. Asian elephants are in grave danger of dying of heat stroke in Myanmar if temperatures raise even a few degrees higher than average, according to a 2013 study. Both Asian and African elephants are also threatened by water shortages brought on by drought, and hot, dry weather is particularly risky for elephants, since they rely on splashing water on themselves to help regulate their temperature.

But it’s not just wild elephants facing threats. In Asia, many elephants have been domesticated for work, serving primary purposes of transporting goods and people. But now, the trade of elephant-keeping is declining, and many domesticated elephants are being mistreated or left to starve.

Narwhal: Earlier in this bracket, we have discussed how some scientists are concerned about narwhals because their diets and habitats could be reduced as Arctic oceans warm. Those warmer waters could bring in not only more commercial fishermen to compete for food, but more killer whales, which hunt narwhals.

But it’s also shifting sea ice in a rapidly changing Arctic that threatens narwhals. Narwhals depend on cracks in the sea ice — called “leads” — to breathe between dives. Because they are creatures of habit, winds, storms, and currents shift the usual locations of these leads, putting the whales at risk of drowning.

Narwhals are the “marathon runners” of the sea, according to researchers Professor Terrie Williams and Dr. Shawn Noren of the University of California, Santa Cruz. This helps them swim long distances easily, and dive deep for halibut. However, they are also relatively slow swimmers and the researchers pointed to a rapidly changing Arctic with highly mobile ice floes as threats to narwhals. “The ice has become highly mobile,” said Williams. “That makes icebergs that are too big for these animals to swim beneath, and changes the reliability of known breathing holes.”

Which huge, tusked creature would you like to learn more about? Vote below.

Which big-horned beast is best? RETWEET for Elephant, FAVE for Narwhal #CPMarchSadnessohh http://t.co/Ujlzs7x3nD pic.twitter.com/zlYdc6jtJM

— Climate Progress (@climateprogress) April 3, 2015

Sea Turtle vs. Peregrine Falcon

CREDIT: shutterstock

Sea Turtle: When sea level rise shifts the location of the beaches sea turtles need to lay their eggs, things get harder. And because of rising temperatures, when the turtles do lay their eggs, they do so on warmer beaches. This actually causes more females to be born, which also makes things harder. The nests are also threatened by storm surge boosted by sea level rise, human development, and more extreme weather events along coastlines.

The best way for seacoast communities to protect their beaches from erosion due to sea level rise, thus far, has been to to erect barriers — but those barriers have been problematic for sea turtles. A recent University of Central Florida study found that the progress made in 30 years of sea turtle conservation success could be seriously reversed by erecting barriers, which bar the turtles from accessing the beach.

And even when the turtles aren’t trying to breed, they can’t hide from the effects of carbon pollution. Shifting ocean currents and rising acidity levels can also threaten sea grasses and other turtle food sources.

Peregrine Falcon: The biggest threats facing the Peregrine falcon — one of the fastest animals in the world — come when the birds are very young. For falcon chicks, heavy rains exacerbated by climate change can be deadly.

One 2013 study, conducted by researchers at the University of Alberta and the Université du Québec, found prolonged, heavy rains in the Arctic are causing peregrine chicks to drown or die of hypothermia when the cold rain soaks through their fluffy down coats. That kind of rain has become more frequent in the Canadian Arctic.

Typically, a mother peregrine will cover her chicks with her wings when it rains, shielding them from getting wet. But the study found more frequent rain spells are forcing some mother peregrines to give up and leave their chicks exposed to the rain. In one case, a mother who left her chicks in the rain for several hours and returned to find them visibly weakened killed both of them — the first case of infanticide ever recorded in wild peregrine falcons.

Which will advance — the slow turtle, or the fast falcon? You decide.

Shells or wings? RETWEET for Sea Turtle or FAVE for Peregrine Falcon #CPMarchSadness http://t.co/Ujlzs7x3nD pic.twitter.com/JHhNmH5viJ

— Climate Progress (@climateprogress) April 3, 2015

***

TOURNAMENT UPDATES:

Day 1 – 3/19: Paws and Claws pt. 1 — Polar Bear vs. Wombat; Tasmanian Devil vs. Pangolin; (voting closed) WINNERS: Polar Bear and Pangolin.

Day 2 – 3/20: Paws and Claws pt. 2 — Lemur vs. Koala; Panda vs. Wolverine (voting closed) WINNERS: Koala and Wolverine.

Day 3 – 3/23: Fins and Flippers — Sea Lion vs. Sea Horse; Penguin vs. Manatee; Walrus vs. Sea Otter; Whale vs. Salmon (voting closed) WINNERS: Sea Horse, Sea Otter, Whale, and Penguin.

Day 4 – 3/24: Horns and Hooves — Elephant vs. Horned Lizard; Rhino vs. Narwhal; Saola vs. Moose; Mountain Goat vs. Reindeer (voting closed) WINNERS: Elephant, Narwhal, Moose, and Mountain Goat.

Day 5 – 3/25: Shells and Wings — Sea Turtle vs. Pelican; Sage Grouse vs. Peregrine Falcon; Oyster vs. Butterfly; Lobster vs. Red Knot (voting closed) WINNERS: Sea Turtle, Falcon, Butterfly, Red Knot.

Day 6 – 3/26: Polar Bear vs. Pangolin; Koala vs. Wolverine (voting closed) WINNERS: Polar Bear, Wolverine.

Day 7 – 3/27: Sea Horse vs. Whale; Sea Otter vs. Penguin (voting closed) WINNERS: Sea Horse, Sea Otter.

Day 8 – 3/30: Elephant vs. Mountain Goat; Moose vs. Narwhal (voting closed) WINNERS: Elephant, Narwhal.

Day 9 – 3/31: Sea Turtle vs. Red Knot; Butterfly vs. Peregrine Falcon (voting closed) WINNERS: Sea Turtle, Peregrine Falcon.

Day 10 – 4/1: Polar Bear vs. Wolverine; Sea Horse vs. Sea Otter (voting closed) WINNERS: Polar Bear, Sea Otter.

Day 11 – 4/3: Elephant vs. Narwhal; Sea Turtle vs. Peregrine Falcon (voting NOW OPEN)

Day 12 – 4/6: THE FINAL FOUR: TBD

Day 13 – 4/7: THE CHAMPIONSHIP: TBD

PAST ROUNDS:

Round 10: Elite Eight, part 1

Round 9: Sweet Sixteen, part 4

Round 8: Sweet Sixteen, part 3

Round 7: Sweet Sixteen, part 2

Round 6: Sweet Sixteen, part 1

Round 5: Shells and Wings

Round 4: Horns and Hooves

Round 3: Fins and Flippers

Round 2: Paws and Claws, part 2

Round 1: Paws and Claws, part 1

The post Pick The Winners: Elephant vs. Narwhal, Sea Turtle vs. Falcon appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Obama Is About To Announce A Big Job Creation Move For The Solar Industry

In order to expand the solar workforce, President Obama is looking to veterans.

CREDIT: Shutterstock

President Obama is scheduled to announce new initiatives to help bolster the country’s solar workforce on Friday, including a goal to add 75,000 solar workers by 2020, and a new program aimed at providing solar training to veterans.

The goal to add to the nation’s solar workforce adds to the President’s last commitment to solar training, which promised 50,000 solar workers by 2020. According to a statement released by the White House, the solar industry is adding jobs “10 times faster” than the rest of the economy, and prices for solar installations are falling, having declined 12 percent in the past year alone.

The announcement, which will be made during a visit to Utah’s Hill Air Force Base, will also lay out plans for a program aimed at providing military veterans with skills to enter the solar workforce. Dubbed “Solar Ready Vets,” the program will be a joint-venture between the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense, and will take place at 10 military bases across the country.

Solar Ready Vets, the White House says, is “based on the specific needs of high-growth solar employers, is tailored to build on the technician skills that veterans have acquired through their service, and incorporates work-based learning strategies.” The program will train service members in all facets of solar installation, teaching them how to size solar panels, connect electricity to the grid, and deal with building codes.

According to the White House, the Department of Veterans Affairs will help by encouraging state agencies to make G.I. Bill funding available to veterans interested in the program. The Department of Labor will also work to make sure that veterans are aware of job opportunities within the solar industry.

The President’s announcement comes just days after the United States submitted its climate commitments to the United Nations, which promised to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 28 percent by 2025. A report issued Monday by the NewClimate Institute said that meeting carbon-reduction goals would create nearly one million “green jobs” by 2030 in the United States, China, and the European Union.

The post Obama Is About To Announce A Big Job Creation Move For The Solar Industry appeared first on ThinkProgress.

The Keystone XL Pipeline Company Just Delayed Its Other Huge Tar Sands Pipeline

CREDIT: shutterstock

Pipeline company TransCanada is canceling its plans to build an oil export terminal in Quebec, a move that the company says will postpone the start of its proposed Energy East pipeline for more than a year.

TransCanada announced Thursday that, due to concerns about the safety of beluga whale populations in the St. Lawrence River, it won’t building marine and tank terminals in Cacouna, Quebec. Cacouna borders the St. Lawrence.

The company said in a statement that it is looking at other options for export sites in Quebec for the Energy East, a pipeline that would carry tar sands oil more than 2,850 miles from Hardisty, Alberta east to Saint John, New Brunswick. TransCanada had planned two export terminals for the project: one in Cacouna and one in Saint John. Because of the change in plans, TransCanada says the pipeline now has a projected start date of early 2020, rather than late 2018.

TransCanada previously halted work on the Cacouna terminal in December, after the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) recommended that the population of beluga whales in the St. Lawrence River be labelled endangered. At the time, TransCanada said it was looking into what impacts Energy East would have on the belugas, and was reviewing “all viable options.” Now, the company says it’s been swayed to scrap plans for the terminal completely.

“This decision is the result of the recommended change in status of the Beluga whales to endangered and ongoing discussions we have had with communities and key stakeholders,” Russ Girling, TransCanada’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement. “We have listened and our decision reflects that.”

Since Energy East would carry the same tar sands oil that the controversial Keystone XL pipeline would carry and is being proposed by the same company, it has been seen as the main alternative to carry Canada’s tar sands oil to market if Keystone XL isn’t constructed. Like Keystone in the U.S., however, the proposed pipeline — which if approved would involve building new pipeline as well as converting hundreds of miles of natural gas pipeline into oil line — has run into significant opposition in Canada and in parts of the Northeast U.S. Last October, thousands of protesters marched through Cacouna in opposition to the pipeline and its Quebec terminal.

Some political leaders have also voiced their concerns about the project. Ontario Premiers Kathleen Wynne and Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard said in November that, before they can sign off on the project, TransCanada must look into how Energy East will contribute to climate change. One report has found that the pipeline, which will have a higher capacity than Keystone XL, will contribute significantly: last year, Canada’s Pembina Institute found that Energy East could create more greenhouse gas emissions than Keystone XL, generating 30 million to 32 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year, compared with Keystone’s 22 million metric tons.

Even though the cancellation of the Cacouna terminal doesn’t spell the end for Energy East, it’s still a win for opponents. Some Canadians, including well-known environmentalist David Suzuki, have been fighting for months to halt TransCanada’s work in Cacouna and protect the belugas’ St. Lawrence habitat. The concern for the belugas isn’t surprising: The whales have had a difficult past in the St. Lawrence, struggling with whaling in the early and mid 1900’s and pollution that caused cancer, blood poisoning, and hepatitis. Last September, a researcher warned that the river’s whales were on a “catastrophic trajectory,” and that the Energy East terminal would do little to help the creatures.

Now, opponents are focused on killing the Energy East Pipeline altogether.

“Yes it’s a win, but ultimately the entire project needs to be scrapped,” Andrea Harden-Donahue, energy and climate campaigner at the Council of Canadians, told Reuters. “I think we’re going to see more municipalities taking a stand on this, more landowners. I think (aboriginal group) opposition along the route is strong and growing.”

The post The Keystone XL Pipeline Company Just Delayed Its Other Huge Tar Sands Pipeline appeared first on ThinkProgress.

The Senate’s Biggest Climate Deniers Are Demanding The EPA Explain Climate Models To Them

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy testifies at an oversight hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

CREDIT: AP

A group of Senate Republicans notorious for denying climate science sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday, demanding that the agency explain the science it used to justify proposed regulations on carbon dioxide emissions. Much of the letter asks for the EPA to compare climate projections with data about what has actually happened, suggesting that if the projections have been wrong, they shouldn’t be used to make inferences about climate change in the future.

Written by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the letter follows a March hearing where Sessions claimed that EPA administrator Gina McCarthy failed to directly answer questions about whether the models the agency uses have correctly predicted climate change. During that hearing, Sessions asked McCarthy whether soil worldwide was “more or less moist,” or whether there have been more tropical cyclones. McCarthy said she did not immediately know the answer to the soil question, and said that hurricane intensity has increased, though the question of land-falling hurricanes was “complicated.”

Sessions was not happy with her response.

“Although questions regarding the impacts of climate change were clear and straightforward, none of the questions received direct answers, and many responses contained caveats and conditions,” his letter states. Also signed by Sens. James Inhofe (R-OK), Roger Wicker (R-MS), and John Barrasso (R-WY), it asks for EPA models on drought, hurricanes, temperature rise, and climate impact monitoring.

But even if the EPA does supply all that is asked for, it seems unlikely that it would sway the group, which is made up of some of the most vocal fossil fuel advocates and climate deniers in the Senate. Inhofe, who is chairman of the Senate Environment committee, in February brought a snowball onto the floor of the Senate as a prop in an attempt to disprove global warming. He also has a long track record of using the Bible to refute climate change, citing Genesis in his book The Greatest Hoax as proof that humans are incapable of altering the climate.

Wicker has been called “the next Jim Inhofe,” and was the only member of the Senate to vote against a resolution calling climate change “real and not a hoax” (a resolution that even Inhofe voted for). Barrasso, while admitting that climate change is real, contends that humanity’s impact on the problem is “unknown.” And Sessions has vocally disagreed with the idea that there’s a scientific consensus about climate change, calling it “a danger that is not as real as it appears.”

So it seems strange that these senators would be so interested in diving into the science of climate modeling, a task so complex that a single atmospheric model can contain more than a million lines of code. Indeed, it makes sense that McCarthy’s answers would contain “caveats and conditions,” considering how complicated the task truly is.

“Climate models are fundamentally based on scientific principles, the physical laws that we know about in nature,” Michael Winton, a scientist with NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, told ThinkProgress.

These basic scientific principles — like conservation of mass or conservation of energy — are universally accepted and hard to argue with, but they only get scientists so far in predicting what will happen to the climate years down the road. There are other things — like cloud cover or the tiny ridges of snowflakes — that are too poorly understood or too small to be solely understood using those scientific principles. To include these in models, scientists have to use methods that are more subjective, which can lead to disagreement between climate models. This is why climate models are so good at predicting big-picture trends, but less solid at answering small, regional questions.

Still, as the supercomputers used to create climate models have become more advanced, scientists have been increasingly able to create more nuanced models.

“Climate models, largely because of the availability of supercomputers these days, have gotten very effective, especially being able to predict climate from the past 100 years,” said Jack Fellows, director of the Climate Change Science Institute at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “This gives us a lot of confidence that these climate models are useful in looking into the future.”

The Republicans who submitted the letter, however, do not share Fellow’s confidence in climate models. The letter’s first request is “worldwide data about whether or not we are having fewer or less droughts,” compared to what drought models suggested we might see in a warming world. Droughts are a particularly difficult phenomenon to model, especially in specific areas, where projecting how precipitation will change means relying on regional predictions, which tend to vary more widely. And looking at the United States as a whole is difficult because precipitation might become heavier in some places (the Northeast) and more scarce in others (the Southwest), creating a trends that, when looked at together, can appear to cancel each other out.

Where climate models do a good job of predicting precipitation change, however, is on a large, more global scale.

“Certain aspects of drought are not that hard. The general global pattern of wetting and drying we understand physically and it makes sense to us,” Winton said. “Wet places are going to get wetter and dry places are going to get drier.”

That’s a conclusion supported by the most recent National Climate Assessment, whose models have a high confidence for suggesting what regional climates are going to look like in the future, according to Fellows. Even the U.S. Climate Change Science Program’s 2008 report, cited in the letter as concluding that droughts “have, for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U. S. over the last century” makes an exception for the dry U.S. Southwest, noting that “the main exception is the Southwest and parts of the interior of the West, where increased temperature has led to rising drought trends.” Recently, several studies have suggested, with increasing certainty, that megadroughts will become more common if carbon emissions aren’t reduced.

The letter also requests information about “global tropical cyclone frequency and trends in annual tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes in the North Atlantic basin.” Predicting events like these with current climate models, according to Fellows, is relatively easy. According to NOAA, climate models increasingly suggest that global warming will cause hurricanes, globally, to become more intense and contain more precipitation. In the North Atlantic specifically, Fellows says, models suggest that hurricanes may become less frequent, but will most likely be more intense when they do occur.

When it comes to the letter’s last question — modeling the rate of temperature rise — Fellows says that models have been very consistent over the long-term — as long as you take into account human activity. “You can only match the observed warming by including both the natural and human forcing,” Fellows said, which makes scientists very confident that the warming over the past 100 years is because of human activity.

The letter asks for the EPA to provide data and explanations of their modeling no later than April 21, and the EPA has said that while it plans on responding to the specific questions, it remains confident in its scientific grounding.

“We stand by science and the models that inform assessment reports such as the IPCC reports and the National Climate Assessment,” Liz Purchia, an EPA spokesperson, said in an emailed statement. “The scientific record and numerous lines of evidence all point to the reality of climate change.”

The post The Senate’s Biggest Climate Deniers Are Demanding The EPA Explain Climate Models To Them appeared first on ThinkProgress.

Company Wants 100 West Virginians’ Land For A Pipeline

In this Thursday, April 17, 2014 photo, workers continue the construction at a gas pipeline site in Harmony, Pa.

CREDIT: ASSOCIATED PRESS

A pipeline company is suing more than 100 landowners in West Virginia in an attempt to get access to their land, claiming that its proposed pipeline has the right of eminent domain.

Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court last week to force more than 100 property owners and three corporations in 10 West Virginia counties to open their land to surveying for the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The proposed pipeline, if approved, would carry natural gas about 300 miles from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia. Since it’s an interstate pipeline, the approval lies with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

In the suit, Mountain Valley Pipeline LLC — which is a joint venture of multiple energy companies including NextEra U.S. Gas Assets and EQT Midstream Partners — states that “it is necessary to enter the respondents’ properties to survey (in order to obtain) necessary rights-of-way, obtain a FERC certificate and construct the pipeline.” The pipeline company says that it contacted the residents being sued to try to get permission to survey their land, but all of them “failed or refused to permit” the company from entering their properties.

Joe Lovett, executive director of Appalachian Mountain Advocates, told ThinkProgress that he didn’t think the lawsuit has legs.

“I don’t think the pipeline company has the right to survey people’s property in West Virginia before it’s been granted right of eminent domain,” he said. “This is an attempt to gain a right through litigation that they do not have.”

Mountain Valley Pipeline hasn’t yet submitted a formal application to FERC to build the pipeline — it’s planning to do so in October. But, according to West Virginia Public Broadcasting, the company can’t ask the courts to use eminent domain until it gets a certificate to proceed with the project from FERC.

Appalachian Mountain Advocates is supporting three landowners who filed their own lawsuits against Mountain Valley Pipeline last month. Those lawsuits state that the pipeline company doesn’t have the right to eminent domain because the natural gas won’t be used by West Virginians. That means, they say, that the pipeline doesn’t meet the “public use” clause in West Virginia’s eminent domain law.

“Not a single West Virginian will have access to or otherwise use gas carried by the pipeline,” one of the lawsuits reads. “The general public of West Virginia does not have a definite or fixed use of the gas in the pipeline, and, accordingly, has no definite or fixed use of the property on which the pipeline will be located.”

That argument is similar to claims from opponents of the much larger Keystone XL pipeline, who say that the proposed project wouldn’t be built for public use in America, but rather to send Canadian tar sands oil to overseas buyers.

Residents in West Virginia and Virginia have voiced their disapproval for the Mountain Valley Pipeline over the last few months. Some are worried about the pipeline’s potential impact on local watersheds, and others are concerned about the line disrupting the natural beauty of their counties. In March, residents in Craig County, Virginia submitted a petition against the pipeline that was signed by 1,221 people.

“The pipeline will provide no benefit to this region and it will endanger health, the natural resources, the water quality, the cultural values, tourism, property values and citizen safety,” read the petition, which was submitted to the county’s board of supervisors.

The Board of Health of Monroe County, West Virginia — one of the counties on the Mountain Valley Pipeline’s proposed route — has also spoken out in opposition to the pipeline.

“The proposed Mountain Valley Pipeline poses a significant and substantial risk for the health and welfare of Monroe County residents,” the board wrote in a February open letter. “The pipeline is designed to pass close to a public school and a long term care center, risking the welfare of some of our most vulnerable residents. Most importantly, our pristine water supplies will be in constant danger of contamination from runoff and turbidity.”

Though natural gas pipelines on average have fewer overall incidents, such as spills, than pipelines carrying other hazardous liquids, they do have more serious incidents that result in death or hospitalization. In 2012, a natural gas pipeline explosion destroyed four homes in West Virginia.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline isn’t the only line that West Virginians are grappling with. Just last month, the Texas-based Columbia Pipeline Group filed initial paperwork with FERC for its proposed Leach XPress Pipeline, a 161-mile natural gas line that would travel through southeast Ohio and northern West Virginia.

The 550-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline has also run into opposition in West Virginia and Virginia. In February, ten people were arrested while protesting the pipeline, which would carry 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day from West Virginia to North Carolina. And in January, a group of concerned residents traveled to D.C. to discuss their worries about the pipeline with FERC.

The post Company Wants 100 West Virginians’ Land For A Pipeline appeared first on ThinkProgress.