Articles include: Biden’s infrastructure Plan; Deforestation increased sharply despite the pandemic – The state of Tropical forests; Public Transit crisis; Should we block the sun? – better understand the possible risks and benefits of solar geoengineering — essentially, the idea of stopping sunlight before it can warm Earth’s atmosphere.; anti-Asian violence and climate justice.
Tag: Environmental and Racial Justice
The Daily Climate, April 2, 2021
Articles include: Birds versus bees: Here are the winners and losers in the great pesticide trade-off; How climate change is stunting farm production; California’s rooftop solar program collides with equity concerns; Barrier Reef doomed as up to 99% of coral at risk, report finds; Keep your Whole Foods gift card. We want systemic change.; US EPA takes tougher stance on new chemicals; Quebec clears path for farmers with Parkinson’s to get workers’ compensation; Florida’s only lead factory didn’t protect workers. Regulators didn’t either.; Fracking brings pollution, not wealth, to Navajo land; Decades of arsenic poisoning produced by Giant Mine has caused irreversible damage to Dene First Nation land; Mysterious death of bald eagles in US explained by bromide poisoning;
The Daily Climate, March 18, 2021
Articles include: ‘They aren’t used to losing’: Wealthy New York enclave battles over offshore windfarm; Feds move forward with New Mexico drilling plan despite community outcry; Report: Looking for climate solutions? Protect more ocean, researchers find; More than 10 million people displaced by climate disasters in six months, report finds; ‘Environmental racism’? Tenn. pipeline sparks uproar; Whiff of the unthinkable at EPA: CO2 standards for states; The race to scale up green hydrogen to help solve some of the world’s dirtiest energy problems
The Daily Climate, March 16, 2021
Articles Include: Maryland Senate passes climate act by wide margin; Canadian lobbyists attack Netflix children’s film for ‘anti-oil propaganda’; Poor and Latino neighborhoods endure hotter temperatures, Study finds; Maps reveal redlined areas face higher flood risks; Report: Renewable energy growth must speed up to meet Paris goals, agency says; Exclusive: U.S. Congress launches probe into multibillion-dollar ‘clean coal’ tax credit; Line 3: Stopping the next big climate threat crossing the U.S.-Canada border
Report: New York City Environmental Justice Advocates Release Roadmap to Retire All Fossil Peaker Plants in New York City by 2030
New York City Environmental Justice Alliance: New York City Environmental Justice Advocates Release Roadmap to Retire All Fossil Peaker Plants in New York City by 2030.
New York City: All fossil-fuel peaker power plants in New York City could reliably be retired and replaced by clean renewable energy and battery storage by 2030, according to a new report released today by the PEAK Coalition: New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA), UPROSE, THE POINT CDC, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), and Clean Energy Group (CEG). The PEAK Coalition collaboration brings technical, legal, public health, and planning expertise to support organizing and advocacy led by communities harmed by peaker plant emissions. The PEAK Coalition issued a predecessor report last year, Dirty Energy, Big Money, which forecast a path forward to large-scale replacement and retirement of fossil fuel power plants in New York City.
The new report, The Fossil Fuel End Game: A Frontline Vision to Retire New York City’s Peaker Plants by 2030, prepared by Strategen on behalf of the PEAK Coalition, is the first detailed strategic and policy road map to retire and replace an entire city’s fossil-fuel peaker plants.
The report marks the next phase of the PEAK Coalition’s campaign to transition New York City away from the outdated, inequitable, and polluting energy system that relies on peaker plants, and toward a clean, renewable energy and battery storage system that invests in environmental justice communities and enhances community resiliency, as detailed in PEAK’s previous report Dirty Energy, Big Money.
The Daily Climate, March 8, 2021
Articles include: Big banks make a dangerous bet on the world’s growing demand for food; In call for environmental justice, Biden’s climate agenda reaches into neighborhoods; Can the market save the planet? FedEx is the latest brand-name firm to say it’s trying.; Mexico set to reshape power sector to favor the state; Oil giants prepare to put carbon back in the ground; NFTs are hot. So is their effect on the Earth’s climate; Porsche to produce fuel ′as clean′ as electric vehicles; Carbon taxes don’t reduce emissions but closing offshore tax havens can; Singapore builds huge floating solar farm at sea in bid to tackle climate crisis; Lake Huron is getting warmer: What that means for Georgian Bay
DeSmogBlog, March 6, 2021
Articles include: PA Families Exposed to High Levels of O&G Chemicals, Report Finds; UN Condemn Expanding Petrochemical Industry in Louisiana; Fracking Companies Admit Shale Was a Bad Bet; New IEA Data World on Path to Resume Business-as-Usual’; Climate Disinformation Database: Steven Goddard.
There’s a clear fix to helping Black communities fight pollution
Vox: There’s a clear fix to helping Black communities fight pollution. Industrial pollution has sickened and poisoned Black communities for decades. Environmental justice experts have a solution to stop this.
Over the past three decades, roughly 150 chemical plants and refineries have been building facilities up and down the 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River that straddles New Orleans and Baton Rouge, which includes St. James Parish. According to data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), seven out of 10 US census tracts with the country’s highest cancer risk levels from air pollution are located in this corridor, known as “Cancer Alley.”
So when Lavigne heard that the Taiwanese plastics manufacturer Formosa was going to build a $9.4 billion petrochemical complex just two miles from her home, she retired from her teaching job in 2018 and started the faith-based environmental justice group RISE St. James to fight the new development project.
DeSmogBlog, February 27, 2021
Articles include: Racial Equity & Louisiana’s Cancer Alley Community; Exxon & Its Bad Fossil Fuel Investments; Texas Catastrophe Shows How Natural Gas Systems Can Fail; Aquaculture in the US; Texas Refineries’ Release Pollutants During Storm; Rejoining the Paris Climate Accord Matters; Climate Disinformation Database: Mark Steyn.
Texas grid crisis exposes environmental justice rifts
E&E News: Texas grid crisis exposes environmental justice rifts.
As temperatures plunged below freezing and much of Texas’ power grid collapsed last week, Ana Parras braved the pitch-black night to check on friends in the southeast Houston neighborhood of Manchester.
The majority-Latino, low-income community sits along the Houston Ship Channel, bordered by a major oil refinery and several petrochemical plants.
“The whole community was in the dark, there were no streetlights. Nothing. It was dangerous,” said Parras, co-executive director of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services. “But the road was lit because of the refinery flaring.”
While the height of Texas’ blackouts left more than 4 million homes and businesses without power, some experts say low-income areas and communities of color bore the brunt of much of the crisis. That is partly because people living in poverty often lack access to expensive backup generators, community groups say, and they tend to live in older, poorly insulated homes, where temperatures drop quickly when the power goes out.