I'm Glad This Week is About Over

This has been an unusually stressful week on the climate/environment front. Don't worry, it'll be back at full bore on Monday morning but at least there's the weekend (I hope) to chill out.

The week began with anxious wondering if Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party would table a motion for a declaration that the UK is in a climate change national emergency and how Parliament would respond.

On Monday came news of a poll of 100,000 Europeans that found climate change as their first priority, outdistancing the economy, migration, and everything else.

That same day, news of a report from the US EPA advising communities how best to cope with worsening destruction from climate change - everything from "debris streams" from ruined buildings, to how to recycle building materials and how to dispose of hazmat stuff such as asbestos.

On Tuesday there was encouraging news that two-thirds of Britons realized they were already in a climate emergency and three-quarters said they would vote for whatever party was best positioned to "protect the planet."

Canadian Press quoted the prime minister, responding to the flooding in Ottawa and Quebec, by saying "we will have to have significant reflections and conversations on how we move forward," a perfect WTF?? moment.

In Britain again, a Labour MP asked the thorny question "Why are taxpayers subsidising the oil and gas companies that are jeopardizing our future?" Too bad that question is taboo in our House of Commons.

The Weather Network released the second of its three part series, "2X Faster: Canada's Weather Future in a Changing Climate." It even features a bleating commentary from our EnviroMin, Dame Cathy McKenna.

On Wednesday, a NASA-Columbia University study discovered, through examining tree rings, that global warming has been ushering in an era of sustained drought since the turn of the 20th century.  This was disrupted from 1950 to 1975 thanks to a beneficial side effect of ozone-layer destroying aerosols but now it's back at full bore. The petro-provinces - tomorrow's barren wastelands.

The biggest news on Wednesday came from the House of Commons in Westminster where MPs overwhelmingly endorsed Labour's motion for a declaration that the UK was in a national climate emergency. Meanwhile, in Canada, Morneau was crowing about fracked gas and how the latest LNG venture shows that, when it comes to climate destroying carbon fuels, Canada can and will deliver.  Trudeau, meanwhile, begged Jason Kenney, offering to look the other way on certain Tar Sands emissions if Kenney would pretend to uphold Notley's deal on a carbon cap. 

And then the hammer dropped today with a sneak preview at a report to be released on Monday warning that a million species, our own very much included, are at risk of imminent extinction due to our carbon crisis and rapacious over-consumption of natural resources. What distinguishes this report from so many others is its scope. This isn't something that future generations will have to endure. It's your generation too. You. This is mass extinction and it's not decades off. It could be just a matter of years, possibly one decade. 

Finally I closed the week out with an op-ed written by David Suzuki a few days back warning that, when your life is at stake, don't count on your federal government to protect you.  If there's going to be any heavy lifting required, we'll have to see to it ourselves. 

I don't remember a week as simultaneously tumultuous, inspiring, dispiriting and terrifying as this one. We've had highs and we've had terrible lows. What will next week bring?

EPA Warns US Communities to Brace For Worsening Climate Change Impacts

Gee, who knew?

Despite a White House and Congress chock full of climate change deniers, the US Environmental Protection Agency has issued a stark warning to American municipalities. Get ready. Get ready now. It's here and what's coming is going to be worse.

The Environmental Protection Agency published a 150-page document this past week with a straightforward message for coping with the fallout from natural disasters across the country: Start planning for the fact that climate change is going to make these catastrophes worse. 

The language, included in guidance on how to address the debris left in the wake of floods, hurricanes and wildfires, is at odds with the rhetoric of the EPA’s own leader, Andrew Wheeler. Just last month, Wheeler said in an interview with CBS that “most of the threats from climate change are 50 to 75 years out.” 

Multiple recent studies have identified how climate change is already affecting the United States and the globe. In the western United States, for example, regional temperatures have increased by almost 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1970s, and snowmelt is occurring a month earlier in areas, extending the fire season by three months and quintupling the number of large fires. Another scientific paper, co-authored by EPA researchers, found that unless the United States slashes carbon emissions, climate change will probably cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars annually by 2100. 

...“This EPA guidance is clearly telling the public you need to start dealing now with disasters that are being made worse by climate change and will be made even worse due to climate change,” said Amit Narang, regulatory policy advocate at the group Public Citizen. “It’s pretty troubling to me to see the head of EPA saying the exact opposite thing.” 

To some extent, the new document reflects the advances scientists have made attributing extreme events to climate change since a landmark analysis was published in 2004 looking at a deadly European heat wave the year before.

Of course the American government, like Canada's is deeply in the embrace of the fossil energy giants, a massive and potentially deadly conflict of interest. On one side is money, sort of. On the other side is life. You can't have both. When they pretend otherwise, they're lying.

The EPA document focuses on debris from severe climate change impacts and "debris streams" as well as how communities should deal with them. It's pretty damn dystopian. Topics such as what to do with all that asbestos when those old buildings collapse, that sort of thing.

Oh Dear. How Will Trump Square this Circle?

Donald Trump screwed up, big time. He forgot to get Congress to repeal the US Global Change Research Act of 1990. And, today, that earned the Mango Mussolini a swift kick in his climate change denying ass with the release of the programme's fourth National Climate Assessment.

From The Washington Post.


The report stands in stark contrast to the administration’s efforts to downplay humans’ role in global warming, withdraw from an international climate accord and reverse Obama-era policies aimed at curbing America’s greenhouse-gas output.

...The report affirms that climate change is driven almost entirely by human action, warns of potential sea level rise as high as 8 feet by the year 2100, and enumerates myriad climate-related damages across the United States that are already occurring due to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming since 1900.

“It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” the document reports. “For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence.”

...

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and President Trump have all questioned the extent of humans’ contribution to climate change. One of EPA’s Web pages posted scientific conclusions similar to those in the new report until earlier this year, when Pruitt’s deputies ordered it removed.
...

The report could have considerable legal and policy significance, as the scientific matter provides new and stronger support for EPA’s greenhouse gas “endangerment finding” under the Clean Air Act, which lays the foundation for regulations on emissions.

“This is a federal government report whose contents completely undercut their policies, completely undercut the statements made by senior members of the administration,” said Phil Duffy, the director of the Woods Hole Research Center.

The government is required to produce the National Assessment every four years. This time, the report is split into two documents, one that lays out the fundamental science of climate change and the other that shows how the United States is being impacted on a regional basis. Combined, the two documents total over 2,000 pages.
...

Talk of Tipping Points

When it comes to rapidly escalating levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the report states, “there is no climate analog for this century at any time in at least the last 50 million years.”

Most striking, perhaps, the report warns of the unpredictable — changes that scientists cannot foresee that could involve tipping points or fast changes in the climate system. These could switch the climate into “new states that are very different from those experienced in the recent past.”

HarperLand Snubs the US EPA on Kinder Morgan.

When it comes to dilbit pipelines, the Harper government is in no mood to extend courtesies to potential troublemakers, even the American Environmental Protection Agency.

Harper's National Energy Board has rejected a request from the EPA for an extension of time to file a written request to participate in hearings on the Kinder Morgan bitumen pipeline.  The EPA said it wasn't aware of the February 12 deadline for applications.

Now you would think that maybe, just maybe, the EPA should be at those hearings given that the dilbit-laden supertankers that will haul Tar Sands bitumen will navigate a shared strait and thereby imperil the state of Washington.  And did I mention this is Canada's largest trading partner?

My guess is that Harper and his trained seal, National Energy Board, don't want the EPA calling "bullshit" on yet another rigged hearing.

Hilarious (or Scary) Anti-EPA Campaign Video

Bette Grande, a North Dakota Republican running for Congress, says she'll "padlock the doors" of America's Environmental Protection Agency.  Watch her bizarre campaign video: