Articles include: Marine life can’t survive at the equator; Black climate agenda; Biden to court – dismiss children’s lawsuit; ghost forests and sea level rise; Enbridge pipeline & Michigan; handling the climate crisis; nuclear heating plant; lightning & the Arctic; Report: Canadian wood pellet industry; EPA reverses trump; polar bears’ food plight; PayPal net-zero pledge.
Tag: courts and lawsuits
DeSmogBlog, April 3, 2021
Articles include: Understanding the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Legacy of White Supremacy; Feds Move Forward with New Mexico Drilling Plan Despite Community Outcry; British Airways Nearly as Polluting as All Vans on UK Roads Combined, Data Shows; UK Court Urged to Respect 1.5C Climate Limit; Climate Disinformation Database: FTI Consulting
The Daily Climate, March 26, 2021
Articles include: Canada’s Supreme Court ruling on carbon tax; US carbon tax on O&G; promises of net zero carbon emissions; solar entrepreneurs; biomass; Congressional Review Act to reinstate methane rules; pro-fracking columnist is a denier; Massachusetts climate law; wind capacity not being built quickly enough; abandoning buses and trains; East Kentucky flooding; Volkswagen & Tesla.
The Daily Climate, March 24, 2021
Articles include: NATO & Climate Change; Cloud seeding; Anti-pipeline protests; corporate sustainability data; Biden and clean energy; Indonesians & coal court battle; Supreme Court – national monuments and environmental protections; House Committee on Energy & political contributions from energy companies; Biden’s plan to cut GHGs; no vaccine for global warming; automakers & court battles.
DeSmogBlog, March 20, 2021
Articles include: Argentina’s Illegal Oil and Gas Waste Dumps; Whistleblower Claims Dangerous Defects in Pipeline for Shell’s Pennsylvania Plastics Plant; Nudging Social Media Users to Think Critically Helps Slow the Spread of Fake News, Study Finds; Green Groups File ‘First-of-Its-Kind’ FTC Complaint Against Chevron for Climate Lies; Climate Disinformation Database: Principia Scientific International.
The Daily Climate, March 10, 2021
Articles include: One chemical plant emits a super-pollutant that does more climate damage than every car in the city Is the ‘legacy’ carbon credit market a climate plus or just hype? Ecuador court orders end to gas flaring by oil industry in Amazon; California’s big oil wins OK for 40,500 wells. Farmer vows to sue; Federal courts help Biden quickly dismantle Trump’s climate and environmental legacy; Twelve states are suing Biden’s administration over executive order on climate change; Climate change could drive Komodo dragons to extinction; Republicans’ new favorite study trashes Biden’s climate plans – but who’s behind it? U.S. judge approves Daimler’s $1.5 billion diesel emissions settlement
The Daily Climate, March 11, 2021
Articles include: Saguaro cactuses are under threat because of climate change; Warming oceans mean smaller baby sharks struggle to survive; Food systems responsible for ‘one third’ of human-caused emissions; Bitcoin rise could leave carbon footprint the size of London’s; The economic case for restoring abandoned oil wells; Summer could last six months by 2100, study finds; As oil prices rise, executives aim to keep them high; Between a black rock and a hard place; Utah agency reverses course, pulls back energy leases in original Bears Ears monument; LAW: Big Tobacco had to pay $206B. Is Big Oil next?
DeSmogBlog, March 12, 2020
Articles include: Plastic Pollution During Shipping; Flaring, Increased Health Risks, UCLA Study; Canceled Keystone XL Pipeline Driving Safety Changes in Canadian Oil-by-Rail; I’m a Climate Scientist — Here Are 3 Key Things I Have Learned Over a Year of COVID; Climate Disinformation Database: Energy In Depth.
Trump policy that weakened wild bird protections is revoked
ABC News: Trump policy that weakened wild bird protections is revoked. The Biden administration has reversed a policy imposed under President Donald Trump that drastically weakened the government’s power to enforce a century-old law protecting most U.S. bird species.
The Biden administration on Monday reversed a policy imposed under former President Donald Trump that drastically weakened the government’s power to enforce a century-old law that protects most U.S. bird species.
Trump ended criminal prosecutions against companies responsible for bird deaths that could have been prevented.
The move halted enforcement practices under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in place for decades — resulting most notably in a $100 million settlement by energy company BP after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill killed about 100,000 birds, according to federal data. Some scientists have said that number could be higher.
A federal judge in New York in August struck down the Trump administration’s legal rationale for changing how the bird treaty was enforced.
Study: The Surprising Source of Greenhouse Gas Emissions
EOS.org: The Surprising Source of Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Changing the way emissions are tallied may help litigators focus on the worst climate offenders and shape mitigation.
belching coal plant is easy to identify as a probable greenhouse gas polluter. Coal emissions are point source pollution—like a chemical spill in a stream, the pollution can be traced back to a specific activity at a precise place.
But is measuring the carbon produced at a power plant the best way to monitor emissions? A team of scientists recently took a different approach to estimating carbon dioxide: the bottleneck method. Instead of considering the pollution emitted only at the end use, burning phase of fossil fuel use, the researchers considered all phases: mining, transport, refining, and burning.
Their study identified the worst emissions offenders, and the results were surprising: oil and gas pipelines. The researchers noted that the companies enabling greenhouse gases emissions are most at risk of climate mitigation lawsuits.
Tallying Emissions
The new study, published in Energies, introduces the bottleneck method. “Most of the work that’s been done in this area in the past is looking at kind of end use because that’s where most of the emissions occur,” said Joshua Pearce, a materials and electrical engineering professor at Michigan Technological University and coauthor of the new study.