350 Humboldt

EXTREME WEATHER

• Tracking data from the National Weather Service, the nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists has found that since the beginning of May, extreme weather alerts have been issued for 99% of the country’s population.
• An investigation by the Los Angeles Times and Capital & Main has found that California has sharply cut its enforcement of heat-protection laws for outdoor laborers, putting farmworkers and construction workers in danger during worsening heat waves. Investigative reporter Robert J. Lopez found that the number of state field inspections dropped by nearly 30% from 2017 to 2023, while the number of violations issued to employers fell by more than 40%.
• In an opinion article in the L.A. Times, Reno pediatrician and author Debra Hendrickson shared her deep concerns about how climate change is threatening the health of children. “Because of their different physiology, small size, dependence on adults and still-developing organs, the youngest among us are uniquely vulnerable to the health threats posed by a warming world — by heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, infectious diseases, air pollution and more.” Calling for urgent action, she wrote: “If we squander the very narrow window of time to prevent the worst, and drive emissions up instead of down, the consequences will be devastating.”

Plastics

• U.S. will support limits to plastic production in major reversal. Since the United Nations resolved to end plastic pollution in 2022, oil-producing states such as Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States have argued that the UN should not aim to reduce plastic production but focus on managing plastic waste. This week, the Biden administration announced that it supports limits on plastic production – a major reversal that environmental organizations say could encourage other fence-sitting countries to support production constraints. As Joseph Winters reports, 460 million metric tons of plastic are manufactured globally each year – mostly out of fossil fuels – and only 9% of that is recycled. Read more »
• Reusable metal water bottles aren’t allowed at the Democratic National Convention. Plastic bottles are welcome.

OIL

• Advocacy groups call on New Mexico regulators to require oil and gas companies to comply with state law and plug and remediate more than 3,300 inactive wells. (news release)
• A federal agency appellate board rejects a company’s bid to abandon a 40-year-old oil well off California’s coast without following decommissioning rules. (E&E news, subscription)
• A California judge rejects an oil company’s bid to keep spill contingency plans secret for a pipeline near Santa Barbara that ruptured catastrophically in 2015. (Santa Barbara Independent)

LCFS.  The California Air Resources Board has been trying since last year to shore up the low-carbon fuel standard, its program that sets a single emissions limit for petroleum, ethanol, hydrogen, electricity and other transportation fuels and lets producers buy and sell credits among themselves to meet the threshold. But the draft amendments it put out last week have made even more enemies. Farmers are up in arms about a new proposal to limit credits for soybean- and canola-based renewable diesel. It’s aimed at preventing crop-based fuels from converting more natural land into farmland, thus increasing emissions, and at incentivizing fuel made from waste oils. But renewable diesel refiners and Midwestern farmers who have been building out production capacity to meet California’s demand say they feel like CARB is pulling the rug out from underneath them. [Getting LCFS to limit crop-based fuels is a major victory! ]

Is AI being powered exclusively by clean energy? “There is no physical reality for that claim,” said Michael Gillenwater, executive director of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute. AI companies are buying credits — called unbundled renewable energy certificates (RECs) — that can make it seem that power consumed from a coal plant came from a solar farm instead. Amazon, Microsoft and Meta rely on millions of unbundled RECs each year to claim emission reductions when making voluntary disclosures to CDP, a nonprofit that runs a global environmental reporting system. These carbon savings on paper are not actual emissions reductions in the atmosphere. If companies didn’t count unbundled RECs, Amazon could be forced to admit that its 2022 emissions are 8.5 million metric tons of CO2 higher than reported—that’s three times what the company disclosed and matches Mozambique’s annual impact. Microsoft’s sum could be 3.3 million tons higher than the reported tally of 288,000 tons. And Meta’s reported footprint could grow by 740,000 tons from near zero. From Bloomberg Green. [Earlier this year RCEA tried to use unbundled RECs from the local biomass plant to finesse a missed requirement for renewable energy. Luckily the RCEA Board turned them down.]

Chutzbah: Utah files a lawsuit seeking control of some 18.5 million acres of unappropriated federal lands in the state, claiming Biden administration regulations hamper oil and gas and other development. (Associated Press)

How much?  As much as $215 trillion will be needed globally by 2050 to keep temperature rises within a safe limit, yet the world’s current financial commitments are off-track for achieving that goal, according to a new study published Wednesday by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.About $120 trillion, or more than half of the overall sums, is driven by the sales of electric vehicles. The so-called “supply side”, which includes the installation of renewable power, energy storage and carbon capture technologies, will also require an investment of $79 trillion by mid-century, if countries want to materialize their targets included in the Paris Agreement, the report says.

Trawlers and climate

On Monday, the Scottish government proposed banning trawling, a highly destructive type of fishing that drags weighted nets along the seabed, in parts of the country’s offshore waters, to protect and restore damaged marine ecosystems. This type of fishing scoops up a high proportion of non-target species, has a negative impact on marine biodiversity and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. Early-stage research on the disturbance of seafloor sediments caused by bottom trawling globally estimates that it could release more carbon than the aviation sector.

Take Action

350.org is hosting a kickoff call next Thursday, 8/29 at 4pm PT to get into gear for the elections. Register here!

Sierra Club asks us to write to the Forest Service to preserve old growth.

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Last year over 500,000 people wrote in to the U.S. Forest Service on behalf of old growth and mature forests! You may have been one of them. Now, the US Forest Service is asking for our comments again. In December 2023, the U.S. Forest Service proposed an amendment to all 128 forest plans across the U.S, to help guide the stewardship of federal old-growth forests while allowing local variations. The Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for this proposal was released in June 2024. The U.S. Forest Service is asking for public comments through September 20, 2024.

You have an opportunity to add your voice. Please join us at the Forest Protection Forum to learn more, and to prepare to write your comments. If you cannot join the Forum, but want to write a comment, you can send a letter via: https://www.sierraclub.org/protect-old-growth-forests or https://www.climate-forests.org/take-action. In your comments, please be sure to ask the U.S. Forest Service to leave old-growth trees in the forest and to stop sending them to the mill.

Sign up for the Forum here. It is on August 26 from 4-5:30 PM