Most recent 40 articles: Newrepublic
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US SEC adopts climate rule that may face challenges despite dilution - Newrepublic (Mar 7) |
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Mar 7 · The Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday voted 3–2 to finalize a rule on what companies disclose about their greenhouse gas emissions and how climate change stands to impact their business. On its face, that wouldn’t seem to be much cause for alarm. Companies are already required to disclose information on their management structures, overall financial health, and the kinds of risks facing their business. Large segments of the oil and gas industry, though, as well as their beneficiaries in the Republican Party, are treating the possibility of having to disclose climate-related information as if it were an existential threat. And as a result, the SEC’s rule is much weaker ... Read more ...
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Biden’s Climate Law Will Cost More Than We Thought. Good! - Newrepublic (Feb 15) |
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Feb 15 · Last week, the Congressional Budget Office - the body tasked with figuring out the expense of federal legislation - revised its estimate for how much the Inflation Reduction Act will cost through fiscal year 2033. The IRA will cost about $428 billion more than expected, the CBO said. CBO Director Phill Swagel explained that the package’s clean energy incentives “are much higher than the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation originally projected. Those costs reflect new emissions standards, market developments, and actions taken by the Administration to implement the tax provisions.”
The right has interpreted this as bad news. Ranking Senate Budget Committee Republican Chuck ... Read more ...
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The dubious, racially charged flood project Biden is resurrecting in Mississippi - Newrepublic (Jan 12) |
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Jan 12 · The wreckage stretched for miles from where Chuck’s Dairy Bar once stood in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. About five weeks before my visit in May, a tornado had ripped through, killing 17 people there and in the surrounding area and destroying swaths of this small town. On the restaurant’s plot fluttered an American flag, alongside a sign advertising Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster assistance. Looming nearby was a roughly 11-foot-high statue of a bull with a sign on its side: “NO MORE BULL. FINISH THE PUMPS.”
The slogan refers to the Yazoo Pumps, a federal project first authorized by Congress all the way back in 1941 to pump floodwater out of this sparsely populated ... Read more ...
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Don't expect gas companies to pause business on Gaza's behalf - Newrepublic (Nov 16) |
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Nov 16 · As Israel continues to bombard Gaza, fossil fuel companies are committed to continuing business as usual. Production at Israel’s Tamar gas field resumed on Monday after Chevron - which operates the field as a part-owner - received the go-ahead from the country’s Ministry of Energy; it had ordered production shut down in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 incursion into southern Israel. The Tamar site sits about 12 miles off the coast of northern Gaza, where Israel’s Ministry of Energy has created a dire fuel shortage that has made aid work there virtually impossible amid a worsening humanitarian crisis. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees has reportedly run out ... Read more ...
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Revealed: plan to brand anyone ‘undermining’ UK as extremist - Newrepublic (Nov 6) |
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Nov 6 · Earlier this year, news footage began making the rounds on social media of young activists from the German climate organization Letzte Generation (Last Generation) being assaulted as they obstructed streets in an effort to draw attention to the German government’s inaction on climate. A young woman, with her hand glued to the asphalt, was ripped off the road by her hair; a young man was run over by a truck driver; a passerby punched protesters and was cheered on. A few months later, German police raided the homes of Last Generation activists and froze their bank accounts.
It all seemed like a gross overreaction to a pretty tame form of protest. Blockading roads is not a new ... Read more ...
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Natural gas is way worse than coal - Newrepublic (Nov 4) |
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Nov 4 · Natural gas may be worse for the world than coal, but it’s got two important things on its side: the word natural and the seemingly unconditional support of the United States government. Preliminary research by Cornell University’s Robert Howarth, reported in The New Yorker by Bill McKibben this week, finds that “natural” (methane) gas may be 24 percent worse for the climate than coal in the best-case scenario. That’s thanks to extensive methane leaks at just about every stage of its production, from drilling to transportation. In the worst-case scenario - when LNG makes long journeys on old, polluting tankards - the fuel is 274 percent worse for the environment than coal ... Read more ...
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The U.S. is spending a fortune on war and a pittance on the climate crisis - Newrepublic (Oct 24, 2023) |
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Oct 24, 2023 · In the Middle East this week, world leaders have tensely debated who bears responsibility for the mounting destruction that could claim countless more lives. I’m referring not (at least exclusively) to the escalating war between Israel and Hamas, but a meeting in Aswan, Egypt. Some 700 miles from the Gaza border, United Nations negotiators have been wrestling over how best to finance the rebuilding of countries where lives and livelihoods are being destroyed by the climate crisis - and the United States is playing a familiarly troubling role.
For about as long as the U.N. has discussed climate change, the U.S. - the world’s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases - has ... Read more ...
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What Boiling Oceans Will Do to Life on Land - Newrepublic (Aug 07, 2023) |
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Aug 07, 2023 · It’s difficult to describe the insanity of what’s happening off the coast of Florida right now. A sensor in the Keys last week recorded water temperatures of more than 101 degrees - about the same as a hot tub - in what could be one of the highest ocean temperatures ever recorded; at this time of year, they should be in the 70s and 80s. Corals are bleaching and dying at previously unheard-of rates, thanks in part to the water’s steamy conditions.
And it’s not just Florida. Across the world this summer, heat waves are gripping the world’s oceans - and marine experts are sounding the alarm.
It’s easy to think of the oceans as a separate entity, but conditions in them ... Read more ...
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What climate change is doing to our sex lives - Newrepublic (Aug 01, 2023) |
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Aug 01, 2023 · When the fires from Canada blanketed New York City in smoke last month, my partner and I tried to have sex in the early evening. But the terrible air quality outside made us shallow-breathed and racked by coughing fits in the orange light. Our lungs have been the subject of much neurosis for the last three years in a pandemic deeply intertwined with climate change, and when we finally caught the virus eight months before the smoke came, we each developed a cough that wouldn’t leave us.
“Every generation thinks the world is ending,” my friend’s dad had told us months before, as we ate sweet corn cakes on an unseasonably warm spring night, “but you guys might be right.”
In ... Read more ...
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The GOP darling who claims fossil fuels are good for humanity - Newrepublic (Jul 25, 2023) |
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Jul 25, 2023 · Last week, a group of Republican senators gathered for a special closed-door lunch on Capitol Hill with author Alex Epstein, who distributed signed copies of his newest book to attendees. After the lunch, Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota told E&E News that Epstein was “brilliant,” adding, “He made the case that fossil fuels contributed more to people getting out of poverty than the other way around.”
Epstein’s name may not be recognizable to most Americans, but his star has been rising on the right for quite some time. We may all start hearing about him more often because the time is ripe for his particular brand of fossil fuel boosterism to become the GOP’s mainstream ... Read more ...
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Here's proof that gas stoves are overrated - Newrepublic (Mar 01, 2023) |
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Mar 01, 2023 · To hear some tell it, gas stoves are just better: Induction stoves, one Brooklyn chef fumed at the height of the gas-versus-electric controversy last month, would be “impossible” in the context of “fine dining.” Another restaurateur grumbled to the Rupert Murdoch–owned New York Post that cooking with an electric stove “takes forever and people don’t like the results.” The right, and the fossil fuel industry, constantly score culture-war points by pitting the planet and public health against pleasure and convenience in this way.
But in the Great Gas Stove Debate, as in many other areas, this binary turns out to be false. We can curb air pollution and improve our health, while ... Read more ...
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Ajay Banga is a weird pick for a 'green' world bank head - Newrepublic (Feb 28, 2023) |
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Feb 28, 2023 · In the days since Trump-appointed World Bank President David Malpass announced he will step down ahead of schedule, the White House has emphasized President Biden’s eagerness to appoint someone who will take climate change seriously. Malpass, after all, is leaving amid blowback over his comments last fall equivocating as to whether fossil fuels cause climate change. (They do.) And his successor will be tasked with implementing the bank’s “roadmap” to align itself with the Paris Agreement.
But on Thursday, Biden announced his intention to give the job to Ajay Banga, a financial-sector veteran lacking in both public-sector and climate experience. The choice speaks volumes about ... Read more ...
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Air pollution kills. Why are we so bad at recognizing that? - Newrepublic (Feb 22, 2023) |
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Feb 22, 2023 · This week marks the tenth anniversary of the death of 9-year-old Ella Kissi-Debrah. Three years ago, a coroner’s report made Ella the first person in the United Kingdom to have air pollution listed as her cause of death. Nitrogen dioxide levels in Ella’s neighborhood in southeast London, coroner Philip Barlow concluded, exceeded legal limits, while the levels of particulate matter exceeded World Health Organization guidelines. Citing the strong, well-established scientific link between such pollution and asthma risks, Barlow announced that “Ella died of asthma contributed to by exposure to excessive air pollution.”
This historic report only happened because Ella’s mother, ... Read more ...
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Are gas stoves the new cigarettes? - Newrepublic (Nov 09, 2022) |
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Nov 09, 2022 · We’ve long been told that gas stoves are simply better than their electric counterparts: prettier to look at and easier to control. Anyone who aspired to “elevated” cooking in their home must have one. But now we know they excel at something else: putting our lives in danger.
Last week, The New York Times reported a new study strongly suggesting that gas stoves may be poisoning people in their homes. This was not a surprise to those of us who’ve been following recent research on gas risks. For over a decade now, there’s been a steady stream of well-reported articles indicating not just that the alleged mystique of gas stoves was deliberately propagated by the fossil fuel ... Read more ...
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A gas industry PR flack compares fossil fuel opponents to Hitler - Newrepublic (Oct 28, 2022) |
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Oct 28, 2022 · At an end-of-day keynote at the North American Gas Forum - an annual confab for fossil fuel executives, sponsored by a who’s who of fossil fuel companies, including Shell, BP, Tellurian, and Baker Hughes - keynote speaker and Davies Public Affairs CEO John Davies made a curious comparison.
The presentation (“A Defining Moment for Natural Gas: What Are We Going to Do About It?”) was mainly about building public support for methane gas. “We’re being attacked on a daily basis,” he began, pacing around the stage in a gray suit.
You might reasonably expect Adolf Hitler would not come up in such a presentation. You would be wrong. If gas producers don’t counter negative ... Read more ...
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An immigration plan for the climate change era - Newrepublic (Oct 22, 2022) |
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Oct 22, 2022 · Deepak Bhargava has a big idea: America should live up to the best parts of our national identity and become the most welcoming country on earth for immigrants and refugees. Bhargava’s Statue of Liberty Plan proposes welcoming 75 million people over the course of the next decade. To do that, and to counter broad authoritarian appeals, we need a new narrative about immigration, rooted in progressive values.
Bhargava is a distinguished lecturer in urban studies at the City University of New York and a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and his ideas come at a crucial moment. In the coming years, an existing trend will accelerate: The people who contributed the least to ... Read more ...
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I wish John Fetterman would talk about climate change again - Newrepublic (Oct 04, 2022) |
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Oct 04, 2022 · John Fetterman was the poster dude for “green jobs“ during the first year of the Obama administration - that brief window of time when that administration seemed excited to address the climate crisis. As mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once-prosperous town that has never recovered from the exodus of the steel industry from the area, Fetterman starred in a 2009 video for an Environmental Defense Fund campaign called “Carbon Caps = Hard Hats.” Wearing work boots, he argued that a cap on carbon pollution would, by spurring growth in renewable energy, bring jobs to places like Braddock. He made similar arguments for green manufacturing on the floor of the House that year.
At ... Read more ...
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California is finally confronting the fossil fuel industry - Newrepublic (Sep 10, 2022) |
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Sep 10, 2022 · For all the progress the United States has made on climate change - having just finally passed a bill aimed at reducing emissions - it’s still a political third rail to go directly after the leading driver of rising temperatures: fossil fuels. The Inflation Reduction Act’s passage in Congress was premised on providing giveaways to oil and gas drillers, whose indefinite profits Democratic Party leaders don’t see as incompatible with a habitable future. For years that was also the case in California, which clung to its contradictory status as both a leader on climate policy and a prolific fossil fuel producer. That’s now changing.
Among the suite of climate bills the California ... Read more ...
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The case for harassing the climate arsonists among us - Newrepublic (Aug 23, 2022) |
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Aug 23, 2022 · There’s a rule in the climate movement about punching up. When we talk about the fossil fuel industry, it says, we should reserve our anger for the biggest players: the CEOs who lied about climate change for decades and the Wall Street tycoons who financed it all.
These top-tier climate arsonists deserve our condemnation a million times over. But does that really mean we should give everyone below the C-suite a free pass, when there are countless other professionals who have made careers out of sowing climate disinformation, blocking climate action, and generally doubling down on the fossil fuel industry’s catastrophic business model?
It’s true that blue-collar fossil ... Read more ...
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price controls - Newrepublic (Aug 16, 2022) |
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Aug 16, 2022 · As the Inflation Reduction Act progressed through the Senate last week to great acclaim, the House of Representatives quietly received a bill that would address inflation more directly, and could be a critical tool for reducing emissions, too. The Emergency Price Stabilization Act - introduced by New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman - would create a new sub-task force of the existing White House Supply Chain Disruption Task Force to compile data on prices in several key sectors, including energy, transportation, food, housing, health care, and transportation, complete with the subpoena power. The sub-task force would then make policy recommendations, and the bill empowers the White ... Read more ...
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Climate-smart farming is a lot harder than the inflation reduction act makes it sound - Newrepublic (Aug 04, 2022) |
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Aug 04, 2022 · Almost everyone’s eager to finally claim a win on climate policy and move on: After over a year of negotiations and derailing the Democrats’ climate agenda multiple times, renowned fossil fuel booster Joe Manchin has finally thrown his support behind $370 billion worth of subsidies and rebates for renewable and efficient energy, including solar panels, heat pumps, and electric vehicles. All of these technologies included in the rebranded Inflation Reduction Act have strong and proven potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While it’s not nearly enough to get us to zero emissions - most worryingly, it does not immediately curtail fossil fuel extraction - it’s a leap in the ... Read more ...
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Why your utility company sucks - Newrepublic (May 21, 2022) |
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May 21, 2022 · The United States will be asking a lot of its electric grid over the coming decades. Everything from home heating to transportation will need to move to the grid, as a system built to distribute electrons out from a central source transforms to accept them back from millions of rooftop solar arrays - all as it swiftly excises coal and gas and weathers the climate crisis those fuel sources have already created. Given the magnitude of the task ahead, it’s understandable that people are asking questions about how electricity is governed. Right now, the vast majority of the U.S. grid is managed by companies that have had regulatory capture and rampant corruption baked into their ... Read more ...
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Biden's quest for energy independence is taking America in the wrong direction - Newrepublic (Apr 14, 2022) |
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Apr 14, 2022 · In March’s final days, President Biden announced he would invoke the Korean War–era Defense Production Act, or DPA, to accelerate the domestic production of “strategic and critical minerals” used in the batteries that power clean energy technologies. Alongside the plan to release one million barrels per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Biden said his presidential determination was part of a two-pronged effort to lower gas prices and “lay a new foundation for true and lasting American energy independence.”
But Biden’s pursuit of a greener energy independence could run into the same problems his predecessors’ have in trying to build a fossil fueled one: “True” energy ... Read more ...
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Give communities control of carbon removal - Newrepublic (Apr 13, 2022) |
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Apr 13, 2022 · The window to confront climate change is quickly narrowing. A new report released last week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, makes this painfully clear.
The report is also reinvigorating a long-standing debate around what sort of role technologies that remove carbon from the atmosphere should have in confronting the climate crisis. Climate advocates are being offered a false choice between giving in to corporate carbon removal, driven by profits and greenwashing, or fighting it. But there’s an entirely different option: The United States and other rich countries could instead pursue equitable development and scale-up of carbon removal technologies ... Read more ...
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Democrats worried about gas prices are begging oil companies to drill more - Newrepublic (Apr 09, 2022) |
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Apr 09, 2022 · Last fall, the House Oversight Committee convened to grill oil and gas CEOs about their funding of climate disinformation. Democrats asked the CEOs whether they would commit to lowering fossil fuel production for the sake of the planet. This week, less than 48 hours after the release of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report showing that existing fossil fuel infrastructure would push the world past 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming, many of those same executives were chided by Democrats for not drilling more. The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s hearing on Wednesday about price gouging offered a window into how Democrats are fumbling through ... Read more ...
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Carbon removal isn't the solution to climate change - Newrepublic (Apr 08, 2022) |
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Apr 08, 2022 · In 1948, when the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere stood at only 310.5 parts per million, the sociologist Robert Merton coined the term “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Merton used the term to describe how racist beliefs produce institutional bias and justify underinvestment in the education of Black children, which can lead to their academic underachievement compared to white children - which then seems to confirm the racist bias that itself produces the outcome. “This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error,” Morton wrote, “for the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very ... Read more ...
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The fight in Washington over the Fed's climate policy is just heating up - Newrepublic (Mar 22, 2022) |
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Mar 22, 2022 · Sarah Bloom Raskin’s nomination to become the Federal Reserve’s top banking cop may be dead, but the climate-related financial regulations that Republicans and Joe Manchin oppose aren’t going anywhere. The Washington Post reported earlier this week that the Securities and Exchange Commission plans to require all publicly traded companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and the risks climate change poses to their business - rather than relying on voluntary disclosures, which has created a patchwork and incomplete picture.
Naturally, the same forces that aligned against Raskin’s nomination oppose new SEC rules on climate, too. While climate groups have made more ... Read more ...
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Kate Aronoff is suffering through CERAWeek, and reported - Newrepublic (Mar 12, 2022) |
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Mar 12, 2022 · CERAWeek 2022 by S&P Global, this year’s annual confab for oil and gas executives, features a lot of two things: reverent references to the crisis in Ukraine and campy energy-themed rewrites of Broadway showtunes. And one rewrite in particular, on Tuesday, seemed to capture the industry’s relief at its change in fortunes, judging by the laughs it got in the Hilton ballroom where attendees gathered Tuesday night: “Don’t cry for me hydrocarbons.”
Hours earlier, as the second day of CERAWeek got started in Houston on Tuesday, President Biden announced that he would ban Russian energy imports to the United States. “Russian oil,” he said, “will no longer be acceptable at U.S. ... Read more ...
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Vultures are circling the Ukraine crisis - Newrepublic (Mar 01, 2022) |
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Mar 01, 2022 · The winners of Vladimir Putin’s cruel, imperialist war on Ukraine are few and far between. But some of them could be found on an upbeat earnings call held Thursday by Cheniere, America’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, whose stock jumped 7.6 percent as markets opened just hours after Russia’s invasion began.
“It’s tragic what’s going on in Eastern Europe, and it saddens me to see the satellite images on the newscreen that we’ve all witnessed this morning,” Cheniere President and CEO Jack Fusco said, responding to JP Morgan analyst Jeremy Tonet’s question about the company’s prospects on the continent in light of the conflict. “But if anything, these high ... Read more ...
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Never believe a bank's net-zero pledge - Newrepublic (Feb 17, 2022) |
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Feb 17, 2022 · As world leaders settled into their digs in Glasgow, Scotland, last October for the climate conference known as COP26, Bank of England head turned sustainable investment guru Mark Carney had a stern warning for his friends in the financial sector. “In the months and years ahead,” he wrote, “judge all financial institutions not by what they say but by their numbers: the total dollars of transition financing, the amount of polluting, the stranded assets retired, the emissions eliminated, and the timelines to get to net zero.” In April, Carney and State Department climate envoy John Kerry had launched the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, or NZBA, an “industry-led, U.N.-convened” group of 43 ... Read more ...
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let businesses solve it - Newrepublic (Nov 06, 2021) |
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Nov 06, 2021 · The private sector is already well on its way to solving the climate crisis. That, at least, is what Biden administration officials attending the U.N. Climate Change Conference, or COP26, this week are trying to convince themselves while facing the legislative defeat of the White House’s climate spending proposals back home.
International climate envoy John Kerry, looking a little worse for wear after several long days along the Clyde, struck an optimistic note: “Blend the finance, de-risk the investment, and … create the capacity to have bankable deals,” he told a side event for reporters that didn’t accept questions. “That’s doable for energy. It’s doable for water. That’s ... Read more ...
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Why Is Wall Street Profiting From Clean Energy Tax Credits? - Newrepublic (Oct 30, 2021) |
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Oct 30, 2021 · Since they were first introduced in the 1970s, tax credits for renewables have helped scale up and dramatically reduce the cost of clean power in the United States. But in recent years they have also created opportunities for a small handful of major investment banks to skim billions off the top, extracting lavish fees and control over clean energy projects as part of deals shrouded in secrecy. Read more ...
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Don't let the austerity hacks get their hooks in the climate debate - Newrepublic (Oct 19, 2021) |
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Oct 19, 2021 · Will the Democrat-controlled Congress advance any meaningful climate change mitigation? There is hope that it might: The budget reconciliation bill currently being debated takes substantive aim at the problem with a slew of solutions, ranging from petrochemical industry reform, investments in alternative energy, the creation of new jobs and job transitions, and upgrades to the nation’s climate resilience infrastructure. Scientific American enthused that the “reconciliation bill … could cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by nearly a gigaton by 2030”; the Center for American Progress lauded it as an “extraordinary legislative response that would set the world on a different path” - ... Read more ...
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Private equity is quietly keeping fossil fuel companies in business - Newrepublic (Oct 16, 2021) |
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Oct 16, 2021 · Even the worst vultures on Wall Street want you to think they’ve grown a conscience, realizing fossil fuel investments no longer make for good P.R. Private equity giants have been eager to tout their increasing support for sustainability, like embattled asset manager KKR’s $1.3 billion Global Impact Fund.
But according to a new report from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, actual private equity investments frequently don’t align with their climate-friendly public posturing. Of the 34 companies acquired by KKR’s energy portfolio, PESP found that 82 percent are fossil fuel producers. The report found that, overall, the 10 largest private equity firms have invested $1.1 ... Read more ...
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Follow the money into Joe Manchin's pockets - Newrepublic (Sep 23, 2021) |
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Sep 23, 2021 · Lots of ink has been spilled this year trying to figure out what makes West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin tick. Is the Senate’s crucial swing voter a Machiavellian political genius out to save the Democratic Party from itself, or just a media gadfly enjoying his moment in the sun? Is he fighting for his legacy and the interests of West Virginians that national policy leaves behind?
Manchinology is back with a vengeance this fall, now that the senator has announced he may not cast a deciding vote in favor of the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package, and instead wishes to delay voting on it until 2022. The spending measure is vital, not least because it could ... Read more ...
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75 percent of young people are frightened by the future, that's the only sane reaction to climate change - Newrepublic (Sep 18, 2021) |
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Sep 18, 2021 · The climate crisis is also a mental health crisis. Psychologists have known this for some time. But this week, preliminary findings from a massive new study have revealed that global warming’s impact on young people’s well-being is far more intense than anyone predicted. The worst part is that the kids’ distress isn’t irrational: The problem lies with their governments.
Climate distress has been a growing field of inquiry but, until now, low on quantitative research. This study’s scale was impressive: Researchers surveyed 10,000 people aged 16 to 25, in 10 countries (1,000 in each country) on their feelings about the climate crisis. The findings in the study, which has not yet ... Read more ...
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Playing nice with the fossil fuel industry is climate denial - Newrepublic (Aug 11, 2021) |
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Aug 11, 2021 · The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released the first, nearly 4,000-page installment of its Sixth Assessment Report. The report, from a working group of over 200 scientists, distills the current consensus about the physical science of climate change from 14,000 peer-reviewed studies. This consensus is grim: None of the emissions scenarios this report highlights see warming kept below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Heat waves previously seen only twice in a century will soon hit every six years, along with a slew of vicious storms and droughts.
Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are at their highest point in two million years. We can no longer ... Read more ...
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How tax breaks for fossil fuel companies inflated profits for oil and gas drilling - Newrepublic (Jul 25, 2021) |
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Jul 25, 2021 · During infrastructure negotiations, Republicans have been eager to frame any and all green spending as a wasteful add-on that picks winners and stifles competition. But the United States already picks winners - and a new report from the Stockholm Environmental Institute, a nonprofit think tank, provides one of the first-ever estimates for just how much these subsidies have been worth to one of the world’s most harmful industries. By boosting projected earnings by billions of dollars a year, government policy has been meddling in supposedly free markets - and driving up emissions - for years. Strikingly, the researchers estimate that these tax breaks are worth billions more to firms ... Read more ...
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The Left is the only reason we're talking about climate change at all - Newrepublic (Jul 23, 2021) |
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Jul 23, 2021 · Smoke from raging, climate-fueled wildfires out West blanketed East Coast skies this week. Siberia is burning, too. And flooding in China has displaced some 1.2 million people. In Jacobabad, Pakistan, conditions are too hot and humid for the human body to withstand, leading to a rash of heat-related illnesses and death. One might think this drumbeat of extreme weather would have some bearing on the week’s political events in D.C. It hasn’t. Republicans are still dragging the process along on the White House–supported infrastructure bill so as to obstruct it for as long as possible, and Joes Manchin and Biden are still holding out hope for bipartisan agreement from a party that can’t ... Read more ...
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Chuck Schumer is ready to break Democrats' fealty to the “clean gas” lie - Newrepublic (Jul 13, 2021) |
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Jul 13, 2021 · It’s not every day that the senate majority leader weighs in on a local fossil fuel infrastructure fight. It’s also not every day that - flanked by democratic socialists - he comes out against fossil fuel infrastructure more generally.
“There is an imperative, not just an option, to stop this plant and to stop all of the expansion of coal, oil, and gas throughout our country and, frankly, throughout our world,” Chuck Schumer said in a press conference Friday outside ConEd’s Astoria Yard generating facility in Queens. Schumer was there to announce his opposition to a controversial gas peaker plant being proposed as an expansion to the same site by energy giant NRG, and opposed ... Read more ...
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