Biden Calls Climate Denial ‘Dumb,’ Announces New Heat Protections for Workers. The proposed regulation from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration comes as a heat wave settles over California this week and triple-digit heat is also expected to scorch Portland, Ore., over the July 4 weekend. That follows an early heat wave last month that had much of the country sweltering. Mr. Biden noted that extreme heat is the deadliest weather-related hazard in the United States, responsible for more deaths than floods, hurricanes and tornadoes combined. Climate change, driven by the burning of oil, gas and coal, is causing heat waves to last longer. Last year, the hottest in recorded history, brought 2,300 heat-related fatalities in the United States… The regulation, if implemented, would for the first time require employers to monitor workers and provide rest areas and water when the heat index reaches 80 degrees or higher. Employers would also be required to establish heat safety plans. The rule could apply to about 35 million Americans who work both indoors and outdoors.
A report released today by California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara found that heat waves have cost Californians at least $7.7 billion over the last decade and killed nearly 460 people. (That’s likely an undercount, according to a 2021 Los Angeles Times investigation that found high temperatures killed nearly 4,000 people between 2010 and 2019.) The seven heat waves studied in the report affected nearly the entire population of California, around 12 times more people than the seven most-recent deadly wildfires. And, the report notes, heat is life-threatening to all Californians, but especially the elderly, young children and people of color who are more likely to have underlying health problems and lack access to air conditioning.
DELAY OF GAME: [The big California legislative victories last year were SB 253 –– which mandates disclosure of greenhouse gas emission data by all U.S. business entities whose total annual revenues exceed one billion dollars and “do business in California” –– and SB 261, which requires large companies to report their climate-related financial risk.] Politico says: We were waiting for the other shoe to drop on SB 253 and SB 261 — it did on Friday. Newsom’s Department of Finance proposed a 2-year delay to both the state’s nation-leading corporate emissions reporting and climate risk reporting laws.The budget trailer bill language would give the California Air Resources Board until 2027 to write rules for businesses to start reporting their emissions and their climate-related financial risks. Companies would have until 2028 to comply.
A federal judge in Louisiana on Monday put the Energy Department’s pause on natural gas export permits on hold, dealing another legal blow to the Biden administration’s climate agenda. Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana, a Trump appointee, granted a request for a stay from 16 red states that had challenged the pause, arguing it will harm their economies. [Ironically, a new gas export facility is building high wall around it to protect from the sea level rise fossil fuels are causing.]
BLM Signals Federal Land Is Open for Renewables. In May 2024, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM or the Agency) issued a final rule updating its renewable energy and right-of-way (ROW) policies. BLM is one of the largest landholders in the United States, with significant landholdings west of the Mississippi River in particular, and the final rule signals the Agency is open for renewable development on those lands. To drive the growth of renewable energy on BLM lands, the final rule reduces costs and institutes a streamlined administrative process for renewable energy projects.
Community solar allows customers to reap electric bill savings by subscribing to a share of a local solar project, rather than installing their own array. It’s an arrangement that ideally makes the benefits of solar more accessible to people who live in rental or multifamily housing and those who just can’t afford the upfront cost of rooftop systems. Forty-two states have community solar projects in place — but the precise nature of who has benefited remained unclear. Until now. A June study by researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that analyzed data from 11 states found that people who adopt community solar are 6.1 times more likely to live in multifamily buildings, are 4.4 times more likely to rent, and earn 23 percent less annual income than rooftop solar adopters, who skew wealthy. This study brought together demographic data, both measured and modeled, from more than 100,000 rooftop solar owners and 75,000 community solar adopters, O’Shaughnessy said. Notably, California wasn’t included; it lacks a robust community solar market — and regulators seem hell-bent on keeping it that way. Despite finding overall that community solar boosts clean energy access, the team found that the offering doesn’t increase solar access among minorities. Asians, Asian Americans, Blacks, and Latinos aren’t any more likely to adopt community solar than rooftop solar — at least not yet.
‘Summer of Heat’ Activists Blockade Doors of Citigroup Headquarters
As part of the second week of the “Summer of Heat on Wall Street,” a direct-action campaign targeting banks and financial institutions, hundreds of activists demonstrated outside the New York headquarters of Citigroup to protest its financing of fossil fuel projects. The bank is the largest financier of oil and gas companies that expanded their productions last year, according to the Rainforest Action Network’s Banking on Climate Chaos report. “We do not want to be here, but we feel we have to,” said New York Communities for Change campaigner Alice Hu at the rally, amidst boos and heckles from the onlooking crowd. “The fires, the floods, the famines and the mass, forced migration from the climate crisis are because of the $396 billion that Citibank has poured into fossil fuels since the Paris Agreement.”
One of North America’s largest areas of interconnected glaciers is melting twice as quickly as it did before 2010, a team of scientists said Tuesday, in what they called an “incredibly worrying” sign that land ice in many places could disappear even sooner than previously thought. The Juneau Ice Field, which sprawls across the Coast Mountains of Alaska and British Columbia, lost 1.4 cubic miles of ice a year between 2010 and 2020, the researchers estimated. That’s a sharp acceleration from the decades before, and even sharper when compared with the mid-20th century or earlier, the scientists said. All told, the ice field has shed a quarter of its volume since the late 18th century, which was part of a period of glacial expansion known as the Little Ice Age.
From the excellent Blogpost: HEATED
Big Meat is looking more and more like Big Oil every day. Large producers are getting sued over false sustainability marketing. They’re spending millions to influence academic research that downplays the industry’s pollution. And they’re pressuring major scientific bodies to censor themselves about Big Beef’s methane emissions.
[Blog writer Emily Atkin also found a fascinatingly awful MAGA meat picture on Instagram. What would you title it?]
