Month: July 2024
How Project 2025 Will Gut Climate Regs
Dave Banks, a former Trump climate adviser, said the document would serve more as a wishlist for past and future officials than a reflection of the president’s own priorities.
“I think the big question is, are the people who wrote it going to be back in?” he said. “And I think there’s a strong likelihood that a lot of the folks who worked on Project 2025 will end up in a Trump 2.0, if that happens.”
Mandy Gunasekara, the Trump EPA chief of staff who penned the project’s chapter on EPA, left open the possibility that she might return to the William Jefferson Clinton Building that serves as the agency’s headquarters.
“That’s a question for the president to ask, and an answer for me to give with my husband and family,” she said. “And we’re not there yet.”
Most of the regulatory policies included in her 28-page chapter seem cut from the same cloth as those EPA attempted in the first Trump administration. They were rescinded under President Joe Biden or overturned in court.
But some are new, like a proposal to shrink the pool of industries required to report their greenhouse gas emissions each year to EPA.
Just the fact that the policies are being explored in a widely circulated document marks a departure from 2016. The Trump EPA transition team that formed after his surprise victory eight years ago was famously long on infighting and short on planning. Political appointees were slow to arrive and key components of Trump’s deregulatory agenda were thrown out in court.
Project 2025 would revive some of those rules. For example, the EPA chapter advises the agency to “make public and take comment on all scientific studies and analyses that support regulatory decision-making.” That dovetails with a Trump-era “secret science” rule that was vacated in 2021.
Gunasekara said an incoming EPA team could avoid similar outcomes by “applying lessons learned” from the first Trump term.
“It’s very different regulating from the inside versus applying oversight from the outside,” said Gunasekara, one of several Trump EPA officials who came to EPA from congressional committees. Gunasekara was a staffer on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee under the late Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), as was Trump’s second EPA Administrator, Andrew Wheeler.
Continue reading “How Project 2025 Will Gut Climate Regs”Trailer: Dylan Bio Pic with Timothee Chalamet
“A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” has never been more relevant.
Groundwater: “Mining” a Limited Resource
The Weekend Wonk: How Climate is Driving Inflation
Jeff Berardelli with a half hour discussion of how climate extremes are driving inflation – about half an hour.
Meanwhile, Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis is blaming the Biden administration for Florida’s home insurance woes.
Floyd County keeps flooding and the federal government keeps coming to the rescue.
In July 2022, at least 40 people died and 300 homes were damaged in flooding across eastern Kentucky. It was the 13th time in 12 years that Floyd County was declared a federal disaster. These are disasters so costly that local governments feel they can’t pay for it all, so the governor asks the president to declare a disaster freeing up federal funds.
“After that flood I had 500 homeless people looking at me, ‘Judge what are we going to do’?” recalled Judge Robbie Williams, administrator for the county of a bit more than 35,000 people. “It’s overwhelming and it’s just a matter of time before it happens again.”
Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: How Climate is Driving Inflation”Dumb and Dumber. This is Your Brain on Heat.
By now, most of us understand that extreme heat is bad for our health, making our hearts, lungs, kidneys and other organs work much harder. But too often we overlook the quieter, less obvious toll heat takes on another vital organ: our brain.
Extreme heat doesn’t just make us cranky and uncomfortable, it can make it harder to think clearly and be productive at work. It also worsens our mental health, exacerbating common mood disorders like anxiety and depression as well as rarer conditions like schizophrenia and self-harming. With each warming year, that issue deserves more time and attention.
Typically, a part of our brain called the hypothalamus keeps our body at its natural internal temperature (for most, that’s around 98.6F). But the human brain only has so much energy to devote to that, explains Kim Meidenbauer, a social, cognitive, and environmental neuroscientist at Washington State University. On an oppressively hot day, “one of the first things that seems to go is higher cognitive functioning,” she says, making it harder to pay attention and impairing working memory (humans’ ability to process and keep track of information in real time).
Continue reading “Dumb and Dumber. This is Your Brain on Heat.”Music Break: RIP John Mayall – The Laws Must Change
John Mayall, the pioneering British bandleader whose mid-1960s blues ensembles served as incubators for some of the biggest stars of rock’s golden era, died on Monday. He was 90.
The death was confirmed in a statement on Mr. Mayall’s official Facebook page. The statement did not give a cause or specify where he died, saying only that he died “in his California home.”
Though he played piano, organ, guitar and harmonica and sang lead vocals in his own bands with a high, reedy tenor, Mr. Mayall earned his reputation as “the godfather of British blues” not for his own playing or singing but for recruiting and polishing the talents of one gifted young lead guitarist after another.
In his most fertile period, between 1965 and 1969, those budding stars included Eric Clapton, who left to form the band Cream and later became a hugely successful solo artist; Peter Green, who left to found Fleetwood Mac; and Mick Taylor, who was snatched from the Mayall band by the Rolling Stones.
Fascism and the Firehose of Falsehoods
Not a coincidence that Climate Denial has gravitated to the same kind of techniques used historically by authoritarian dictators. Fossil fuel oligarchs are by nature authoritarians.
Many of the world’s most brutal dictatorships are propped up and fueled by fossil fuel extraction, and they have a natural alliance and affinity with globally integrated fossil fuel corporations.
And besides that, these techniques work.
Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic:
When Soviet leaders lied, they tried to make their falsehoods seem real. They became angry when anyone accused them of lying. But in Putin’s Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, politicians and television personalities play a different game. They lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But they don’t bother to offer counterarguments when their lies are exposed. After Russian-controlled forces shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, the Russian government reacted not only with a denial, but with multiple stories, plausible and implausible: It blamed the Ukrainian army, and the CIA, and a nefarious plot in which dead people were placed on a plane in order to fake a crash and discredit Russia. This tactic—the so-called fire hose of falsehoods—ultimately produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you just can’t know? If you don’t know what happened, you’re not likely to join a great movement for democracy, or to listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you are not going to participate in any politics at all.
“For the first time in its history, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has named the spread of climate misinformation as an obstruction to climate action, particularly in the United States.[i]” The question becomes, how do we deal with this onslaught of misinformation and disinformation? The first step is to understand what we are dealing with.
Dr Eileen Culloty, co-author of Disinformation and Manipulation on Digital Media,[ii] says “The distinction between misinformation and disinformation is about intention. Misinformation is false information that is shared without an intention to mislead. Disinformation is intentional.” We saw disinformation last Tuesday night from the Orange Monarch during the debate.
Continue reading “Fascism and the Firehose of Falsehoods”Spot-On: “Science Mom” Ads About What Climate Change is Taking from Us
Science Moms is a new group spearheaded by a core of climate scientist/communicators who are also Moms, including friend of the blog Katharine Hayhoe.
They’ve got some pretty devastating ads that bring home in very emotional terms what we are losing, right now. Things that make life worth living are being flooded, burned, or made unrecognizable by climate change.
In addition, the ads bring attention to climate pollution’s evil twin, air pollution, brought on by carbon emissions and resultant wildfire smoke.
Project 2025’s Snowball in Hell
One thing I think is important to note is that once again we see that those pushing against climate action are not just aligned with those attacking trans rights, racial justice, labor rights and reproductive rights, but are in the same organizations, being funded by the same universe of backers. (above, click to enlarge)
The complete Project 2025 manifesto is 900 pages (?!!), which might explain why it sometimes feels like we’re hearing about this thing all the time yet don’t know much about it. I haven’t quite finished it yet, but I have managed to get to page 500, including Chapter 13, in which the plan for the Environmental Protection Agency is laid out.
The first thing I noticed is the chapter’s author: Mandy Gunesakara. Today, Gunesakara is a visiting fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment and senior policy analyst for the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative women’s organization funded by the Bradley Foundation, Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Koch-backed donor-advised fund Donors Trust.
A lawyer by training, Gunesekara has previously been a member of the CO2 Coalition (you might recognize her as the Republican witness during Rep Jamie Raskin’s 2019 Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties’ hearing on “The Oil Industry’s Efforts to Suppress the Truth about Climate Change”), worked for Trump’s EPA (first as principal deputy assistant administrator at the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation and then as chief of staff to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler), where she claims to have been “the chief architect of the Paris Accord withdrawal and the repeal of the Clean Power Plan”, and was famously the Senator James Inhofe staffer who handed him a snowball during a 2015 hearing in which he claimed the existence of snow meant global warming wasn’t a problem. She was Majority Counsel for Inhofe, and led committee actions and policy development on Clean Air Act and climate change issues.