2020 presidential elections Archives - Community Energy Systems

Biden’s Got A Shitload Of Work To Do – Saving the environment from the cheeto burrito will be hard

Doug Nicodemus — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 22:13:22 +0000

From the XL Pipeline, to “saving” coal, to selling off Public Lands Trump did everything he could to gut environmental regulations and destroy the Environment. Here is some of what it is going to take to undue it, including probably 30 or 40 Executive Orders.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/on-climate-biden-must-do-more-than-undo-trumps-damage/

Climate

On Climate, Biden Must Do More Than Undo Trump’s Damage

The new administration cannot just go back to the future on carbon emissions

By Andrea Thompson on December 2, 2020

Credit: Egle Plytnikaite

One word sums up what the Biden administration must do to address climate change: restart.

In 2015 nearly 200 nations committed to the Paris Agreement, which aims to prevent the worst impacts of climate change by limiting global warming by 2100 to less than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. The U.S. pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. Then Donald Trump was elected president. He soon announced that the U.S. would pull out of the accord, and his administration spent four years relentlessly rolling back regulations intended to curb emissions and protect the environment. Dozens of coal-burning power plants, the worst carbon polluters, shut down anyway as market forces expanded the role of cheaper, cleaner natural gas, wind and solar power. And various states, cities and industries cut emissions. Yet even with that progress, Trump’s rollbacks could add the equivalent of 1.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2035, according to the Rhodium Group, an independent research organization.

Joe Biden must now make up for lost time, and last November he said the U.S. would rejoin the Paris Agreement immediately after he became president. This commitment is important because the U.S. is still the world’s second-largest emitter, behind China, and it can return as a world climate leader. But Biden will also have to ratchet up the original U.S. pledge because warming—and its effects—has only sped up since the Paris Agreement was established. Biden promised to issue an executive order calling for net-zero emissions by 2050, but he will need to set specific interim targets. The World Resources Institute says reducing emissions to 45 to 50 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 could put the country on track.

Congressional legislation is the most effective way to create the concrete policies needed to achieve those goals because it gives federal agencies clear priorities, is much harder to override with presidential actions, and can better withstand legal challenges that might be brought by industry or special-interest groups. But the divided U.S. Senate will make sweeping laws hard to pass. Biden will have to work through executive orders and will have to charge federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency with issuing new regulations under existing laws such as the Clean Air Act. He will need to “turn every stone possible,” says Narayan Subramanian, an environmental lawyer working with the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at Berkeley Law. The most immediate focuses are transportation, power plants, methane emissions and pesky hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).

With coal plants retiring, transportation has surpassed power generation as the country’s largest carbon emitter. The quickest action Biden can take to tackle those emissions is to reinstate California’s waiver to the Clean Air Act, allowing the state to enforce its Advanced Clean Cars regulations. The regulations set fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light-duty trucks that are tougher than federal rules, which means fewer emissions. In the past, automakers have built their nationwide fleets to meet the state’s standards to avoid making two versions of their vehicles, and some states, such as New York, typically follow California’s lead. The Rhodium Group estimates that reinstating the waiver would save about 573 million metric tons of emissions by 2035.

Go there and sob. (at least he is gone) More next week.

The post Biden’s Got A Shitload Of Work To Do – Saving the environment from the cheeto burrito will be hard appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

Joe Biden For President – There I said it

Doug Nicodemus — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 18:50:38 +0000

Trump doesn’t have a plan for the environment except to degrade it. Donald Trump doesn’t have a plan for energy consumption but to push coal usage and repeal regulation that encourage the switch to alternative energy sources. Joe Biden has a TRILLION dollar plan that is good for the environment and proposes to be carbon free at some point. We need sanity. We need Joe.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/14/joe-biden-unveils-green-jobs-and-infrastructure-plan-during-2020-election.html

https://joebiden.com/clean-energy/

Politics

Joe Biden unveils $2 trillion green infrastructure and jobs plan

Published Tue, Jul 14 20201:23 PM EDTUpdated Tue, Jul 14 20203:54 PM EDT

Jacob Pramuk

Former Vice President Joe Biden released a sprawling plan Tuesday to revamp American infrastructure and energy to both curb climate change and spur economic growth.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s proposal aims to achieve carbon-free power generation by 2035. As the coronavirus pandemic leaves the U.S. mired in an economic crisis, Biden said he will set out to create “millions” of union jobs that pay at least $15 per hour as the U.S. overhauls its roads, bridges, trains, auto industry and broadband system.

The plan, which comes days after a joint task force formed by the Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders campaigns outlined a climate change agenda, sets out a more ambitious approach to developing clean energy than the Biden campaign did during the Democratic primary. It calls for $2 trillion in spending over four years, more than the $1.7 trillion the campaign previously proposed to spend over a decade.

“Even if we weren’t facing a pandemic and an economic crisis, we should be making these investments anyway,” Biden said of the plan during remarks in Delaware. He called the investments “critical” for the economy and public health.

Go there and read. Read alot. More next week.

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A Town In Northern Siberia Had A 100 Degree Day – This is the last time I will write about Climate Change for awhile

Doug Nicodemus — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 20:19:07 +0000

Why? Because I am tired, pessimistic and it all seems so repetitive. I am also extremely disappointed. I am disappointed in myself, my friends, my State, my Nation, and hell even my enemies. WE HAD A CHANCE to stop this thing. We had the science and even the modeling on our side and yet we failed. We misjudged the power it would take and i think we totally misunderstood the violence it would take to stop the carbon industry from continuing to sell their products. We should have elected a President who wasopposed to fossil fuels 10 – 15 years ago. We should have blown up gas stations and power plants 10 – 15 years ago. Here we are looking at a 3 Degree uptick in temperature which will kill off all but the very hardy species. We act like there is still hope. We act like there is a future. Well I am done with that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/06/21/arctic-temperature-record-siberia/

Capital Weather Gang

Hottest Arctic temperature record probably set with 100-degree reading in Siberia

Record-shattering reading continues Siberia’s hot streak, foreshadows more heat elsewhere

Temperature departures from average projected during the next three days, showing extreme temperatures in Siberia and parts of Canada. (Climate Reanalyzer)

By Andrew Freedman

June 23

A northeastern Siberian town is likely to have set a record for the highest temperature documented in the Arctic Circle, with a reading of 100.4 degrees (38 Celsius) recorded Saturday in Verkhoyansk, north of the Arctic Circle and about 3,000 miles east of Moscow. Records at that location have been kept since 1885.

If verified, this would be the northernmost 100-degree reading ever observed, and the highest temperature on record in the Arctic, a region that is warming at more than twice the rate of the rest of the globe.

On Sunday, the same location recorded a high temperature of 95.3 degrees (35.2 Celsius), showing the Saturday reading was not an anomaly. The average June high temperature in Verkhoyansk is just 68 degrees (20 Celsius).

Go there and despair. More next week.

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