US Government Agencies – No Fricking Fracking

Report: Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere Hits Record High Despite Pandemic Dip

New York Times: Carbon Dioxide in Atmosphere Hits Record High Despite Pandemic Dip. Global emissions dropped last year, but the decline wasn’t nearly enough to halt the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The amount of carbon dioxide piling up in Earth’s atmosphere set a record last month, once again reaching the highest levels in human history despite a temporary dip in the burning of fossil fuels worldwide caused by the coronavirus pandemic, scientists said Monday.

Scientific instruments atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii showed that levels of carbon dioxide in the air averaged 419 parts per million in May, the annual peak, according to two separate analyses from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Those readings are about half a percent higher than the previous high of 417 parts per million, set in May 2020. Carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas driving global warming and researchers have estimated that there hasn’t been this much of it in the atmosphere for millions of years.

Study: A 20-Foot Sea Wall? Miami Faces the Hard Choices of Climate Change.

New York Times: A 20-Foot Sea Wall? Miami Faces the Hard Choices of Climate Change. A proposal to construct barriers for storm surge protection has forced South Floridians to reckon with the many environmental challenges they face.

Three years ago, not long after Hurricane Irma left parts of Miami underwater, the federal government embarked on a study to find a way to protect the vulnerable South Florida coast from deadly and destructive storm surge.

Already, no one likes the answer.

Build a wall, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed in its first draft of the study, now under review. Six miles of it, in fact, mostly inland, running parallel to the coast through neighborhoods — except for a one-mile stretch right on Biscayne Bay, past the gleaming sky-rises of Brickell, the city’s financial district.

This map of the U.S. heating up is horrifying. Show it to every climate denier you know

Fast Company: This map of the U.S. heating up is horrifying. Show it to every climate denier you know. The U.S. looks like it’s on fire.

Was it a hot day? Or is the world actually getting hotter over time? It’s hard to be sure on a day-to-day basis. Isn’t summer always a little too sweltering? Aren’t there always a few unseasonably warm days in winter?
A new map proves it’s not just you: The U.S. really is getting hotter, whether you live in California, Florida, or Indiana. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has tracked U.S. weather for more than a century. And every decade, it releases the latest 30-year average. An average is considered the “new normal.” This month, NOAA released its latest new normal, the U.S. map from 1991 to 2020.)

To put it bluntly, the map looks bad—especially when compared to the last 120 years of averages. What we see is that the nation has transitioned from a cool blue to a hot red—marking a 2.5-degree shift that happened in a blink of Earth’s history. The U.S. looks like it’s on fire.

DeSmogBlog, May 8, 2021

Articles include: Oregon Utility Using Greenwashing and ‘Renewable Natural Gas’ To Push Back on Potential Gas Bans; New Government Report Highlights Federal Failures to Oversee Offshore Drilling [report is here]; New Lawsuit Challenges ‘Fast-Track’ Permits Used for Oil and Gas Pipelines Nationwide; Over a Half-million Americans Live Near Oil Refineries With High Levels of a Cancer-causing Air Pollutant, Report Finds [report is here]; Ugandan Farmers Whose Land Will Soon Become a Crude Oil Pipeline Pathway Lose Years of Livelihood; Climate Disinformation Database: Energy4US

Report: NOAA – New Climate Normal – 3 articles

Washington Post: NOAA unveils new U.S. climate ‘normals’ that are warmer than ever. Drawing from the latest decade of weather data, the new normals are a reflection of climate change.

ABC News: Most of US experienced warming trend over last 30 years: NOAA. “This simply means that most days in a year are warmer than they should be.”

CNN: Your city just got hotter. NOAA announced new climate normals Tuesday. The report is in the Köppen climate classification.

End fracking exemptions, a threat to maternal and public health

StatNews: End fracking exemptions, a threat to maternal and public health.

The adoption of safe, clean, renewable energy is an essential element for sustaining the U.S. economy and maintaining the health of its citizens. There are many paths to these goals. Hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, is not one of them.

To protect communities across the country today — from the Santa Maria Basin in California to the Appalachian Mountains in northern New York — as well as future generations, the country must rapidly phase out harmful fracking.

Fracking involves injecting pressurized water mixed with chemicals and sand into shale formations to break up bedrock and release the oil they hold. Environmental pollutants caused by fracking are known risk factors for congenital heart defects, hormonal disruption, maternal stress, and preterm birth. Fracking rigs have become so abundant in the U.S. that their flares can now be seen from NASA satellites. An estimated 17 million Americans live within 1 mile of a fracking site.

Daily Climate, April 29, 2021

Articles include: The climate solution actually adding millions of tons of C02 into the atmosphere; Joanne Chory is harnessing plants to stop climate change; The Exxon of green power: A Spanish company and its boss set sky-high goals; Poland clinches ′historic′ deal to phase out coal by 2049; DOE unveils grid plans to unlock renewables; A warming world threatens Colombia’s coffee future; Study: Reversing warming quickly could prevent worst climate change effects; Study: ‘Life support’ measures could buy Great Barrier Reef another two decades.

WV congressional delegation not on same page on legislation targeting PFAS

Charleston Gazette-Mail: WV congressional delegation not on same page on legislation targeting PFAS.

hey’re in our clothes, our food and our blood. We made them virtually indestructible, but there’s evidence that they can destroy us.

They’re per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), industrial chemicals whose extensive contamination and deleterious health effects have left a toxic legacy in West Virginia.

But West Virginia’s congressional delegation isn’t on the same page when it comes to recently reintroduced federal legislation designed to protect Americans from PFAS, the “forever chemicals” that don’t break down in the human body and the environment and can be found in food, household products and drinking water.

Reps. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., and Fred Upton, R-Mich., last week announced legislation that would require the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to establish a national drinking water standard for two of the most extensively found PFAS, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS).

Report: The US power grid is already halfway to carbon neutrality, and it’s saving lives

Popular Science: The US power grid is already halfway to carbon neutrality, and it’s saving lives. We’re seeing fewer pollution-related deaths a year. Renewable energy’s rapid growth is accelerating a national shift to a carbon-free electric power system.

So far 17 states plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, have adopted laws or executive orders setting goals for reaching 100-percent clean electricity by 2050 or sooner. And 46 US utilities have pledged to go carbon-free. Now the Biden administration and some members of Congress are proposing to decarbonize the power sector by 2035.

While this much change in 15 years seems ambitious, our new report, “Halfway t o Zero,” looks back at the past 15 and finds that power sector emissions are half of what they were projected to be.

We analyzed the “business as usual” projection in the 2005 Annual Energy Outlook published by the Energy Information Administration, the US government’s official agency for data collection and analysis. It projected that annual carbon dioxide emissions from the electric power sector would rise from 2,400 million to 3,000 million metric tons from 2005 to 2020.

Report: Congress must act to solve the methane problem

The Hill: Congress must act to solve the methane problem.

When world leaders convened at the climate summit, carbon dioxide (CO₂) wasn’t the only climate pollutant on the agenda. They also grappled with methane. Methane accounts for 16 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it’s one of the most powerful levers for fighting climate change. We’re unlikely to be able to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius without cutting methane emissions and — as we proposed in a recent sign-on letter — also finding ways to neutralize methane already in the atmosphere.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) recently wrote to President Biden asking him to elevate the methane issue at the summit and to give it its own emissions target. Methane is so important to the climate because it’s 84 times more powerful a global warming agent than CO₂ in the 20-year near term. It accounts for a quarter of anthropogenic global warming we’re experiencing today, and it’s rising alarmingly fast. This month the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released new data showing methane emissions surged in 2020 by the largest jump since measurements began in 1983.