Environmental Policy & Law

Hurricane Harvey has unleashed heart-breaking devastation in South Texas. But the troubling truth is that even more damage is in store in the years ahead as climate change worsens — and our federal government is now on track to be less prepared, writes Fellow Shaye Wolf.

The Department of Energy (DoE) released a study of our nation’s energy grid that attempts, but ultimately fails, to lay the groundwork for the coal industry to get a bailout, writes Fellow Kim Smaczniak.

With tens of thousands of people displaced and many billions of dollars in estimated damages from the impacts of Hurricane Harvey, an environmental group on Tuesday filed a formal request on Tuesday to discover why the Trump administration recently decided to lift flood zone restrictions designed to mitigate these kinds of costly disasters.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) is asking scientists to reword their grant proposals so as to avoid mentions of “climate change” or “global warming,” Fellow Jennifer Bowen says.

For decades, California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia has been trying to clean up the air in polluted neighborhoods — first as an activist, then as a legislator. Recently, she celebrated her most significant victory: Governor Jerry Brown needed her help to extend California’s cap-and-trade program. In return for her support, she got the legislature to pay attention to not just greenhouse gases, but all the accompanying nasty that pours out of smokestacks. The result: California’s most significant air-pollution law in years.

The Trump administration began the formal process to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, but says it’s willing to "re-engage" if terms more favorable to the U.S. are met. The State Department said it notified the United Nations that the U.S. will pull out of the global agreement as soon as it can under the terms of the 2015 accord, but President Donald Trump would agree to remain in the deal was reconfigured to be better for U.S. interests ... Observers said they doubted the administration truly intended to renegotiate the climate deal.

Abstract

Fellow Kelly Levin says the process of opposing red and blue teams — the consensus on one side with an equal number of opponents on the other — might work well to encourage new ideas and test the strength of existing ideas but has no place in determining the science of a changing climate.