Tag "Presidency of Barack Obama"
Ryan Zinke Prioritized Fixing National Parks. He Exited With Them In Shambles.
On his second day as interior secretary, Ryan Zinke told his staff that America’s national parks were “the face” of the Interior Department.
Less than two years later — on Jan. 2, the 12th day of President Donald Trump’s ongoing partial government shutdown — Zinke exited the department under a cloud of ethics scandals, and Americans instead saw national parks and monuments around the country overflowing with trash and human waste.
“There’s an old adage that park rangers get paid in sunsets,” he said.
There’s an old adage that park rangers get paid in sunsets.
Meanwhile, Bernhardt’s memorandum allowing parks to drain entrance fee monies ― every last cent, if necessary, as The Hill reported ― means the primary resource for addressing the maintenance backlog is being depleted, Jarvis said.
And when the shutdown finally ends, the parks will have to spend additional funds cleaning up and assessing the damage.
“It’s kind of a triple whammy,” Jarvis said.
The Trump administration’s decision to keep parks and monuments open goes back to the brief partial government shutdown in early 2018.
The Interior Department and the National Park Service did not respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment Friday.
“This is mortgaging the park service’s future,” he said of the administration’s approach, including its decision to drain entrance fee revenue.
The Trump Administration’s ‘Dishonest’ Attack on Fuel-Economy Standards
The Trump administration’s plan to freeze fuel-economy standards is “the most spectacular regulatory flip-flop in history,” said a retired EPA engineer who helped to develop new the standards under the Obama administration.
The Obama-era fuel-economy rules for cars and trucks—which former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt announced the Trump administration would “revise” this past April—would have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 540 million metric tons and oil consumption by 1.2 billion barrels.
Passed in 2010 and 2012, the standards required automakers to continuously increase their vehicles’ fuel efficiency and decrease their emissions through the year 2025.
Alson said the effort—which involved “hundreds of meetings”—resulted in a plan to effectively double fuel efficiency over that time period while allowing automakers to incrementally improve their technology.
A Change in Plans Although the automotive industry publicly supported the old standards, experts say they also advocated for slowing them down, as evidenced by a letter a trade group called the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers sent to President Trump shortly after his inauguration.
The Trump administration’s freeze may appeal to corporate supporters, but they are not popular with the public.
In fact, he said, fuel-economy standards typically save the average car owner twice money as much as they spend on the cost of fuel-efficient technology. “They make decisions today about the billions of dollars they’re going to be spending on new technology over the next five or 10 years,” he said.
Still, the tide toward electric vehicles continues to slowly rise around the world, and activist Bill McKibben said that puts the Trump administration effectively “alone” in wanting the new standards.
And in the process, experts warn, they might be helping to cook the planet.
Trump’s Dirty Power Plan is much worse for kids’ health than for climate change
Last October, then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt announced that the agency would repeal the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan.
The rule’s costs in worsening public health far exceed its monetary benefits.
Dirty Power Plan’s climate impact is small Many news stories about the Dirty Power Plan exaggerated its climate impact due to confusion about various points of comparison.
For example, the Clean Power Plan aimed to reduce carbon pollution from US electricity generation 32% below 2005 levels by 2030.
The Dirty Power Plan will encourage coal plants to operate more efficiently, which the EPA estimates will reduce emissions about 1% more than simply repealing the Clean Power Plan.
That happened without the Clean Power Plan ever going into effect – we basically didn’t need it, because coal was replaced anyway just for being too expensive.
1/ August 21, 2018 The EPA’s new analysis found that under the Clean Power Plan, carbon pollution from US electricity generation would have fallen 29% below 2005 levels by 2030, and under the Dirty Power Plan, it would fall 26% below 2005 levels by 2030.
Both appear to be extremely conservative estimates – remember, US power sector carbon pollution already fell 25% below 2005 levels by 2016 – but the point is that the climate difference between the plans is relatively small.
The EPA estimates that US coal production will be just 8% higher in 2030 under the Dirty Power Plan than it would have been under the Clean Power Plan.
The silver lining is that Trump can’t save the dying dirty coal industry, and his EPA’s pollution plans will be reversed by the next administration in 2021.
The White House is Reviewing EPA Proposal to Repeal Obama’s CO2 Regulations
by Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent its proposal to repeal the Obama administration’s global warming regulation on power plants to the White House for review.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) received EPA’s proposal to repeal the Clean Power Plan (CPP) on Wednesday, according to the office’s website.
A repeal is expected to be finalized by the end of the year.
The CPP would have forced more coal plants to shut down, but a coalition of states, businesses and unions got the Supreme Court to issue a stay in early 2016.
Pruitt spearheaded state resistance to the CPP while attorney general of Oklahoma.
Former Senate staffer and coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler has taken over as acting administrator.
It’s not clear when President Donald Trump plans on nominating Pruitt’s successor.
Wheeler is not expected to deviate much from Pruitt’s agenda.
The EPA had already settled on a plan to replace the CPP with a less stringent rule on CO2 emissions before Pruitt’s departure.
Full story here
Coal Is Going Down, Even Without the Clean Power Plan
In 1980, more than 228,000 people worked in the coal industry.
Mining jobs aside, according to a new Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) analysis, the rapid transition away from coal-powered electricity is likely to continue no matter what the Trump administration does.
Now, 706 units at 329 coal-fired power plants have a capacity of 284 GW—20 percent less. In the intervening years, utilities converted 98 units to burn natural gas and retired 452 others.
Taken together, UCS analysis shows that U.S. coal-fired electricity capacity could drop by more than a third in the next 15 years.
UCS found that 12 of the 19 coal-fired units currently operating in the state are ripe for retirement, accounting for some 57 percent of the state’s electricity.
A 2012 NAACP study found that the nearly 6 million Americans who lived within 3 miles of a coal plant in 2000 had an average per capita income of $26,000 in today’s dollars—15 percent lower than the national average—and 39 percent were people of color.
According to an August 2016 Carnegie Mellon study in the journal Energy, converting all currently operating coal power plants to natural gas would further reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions by 90 percent and 60 percent, respectively. But coal plants are also one of the nation’s largest sources of carbon dioxide emissions, accounting for roughly 20 percent.
Congress Could Give Trump The Power To Immediately Repeal The ‘Waters Of The US’ Rule
The long-anticipated battle to repeal the Obama administration’s contentious “waters of the United States” (WOTUS) rule may be cut short if the Senate passes the House’s “minibus” spending bill.
The Senate will soon reconcile their budget bill with a nearly $790 billion spending bill passed by the House on Thursday.
The bulk of the bill has to do with defense spending, but one small provision would allow the Trump administration to immediately withdraw WOTUS without having to go through the formal public comment process.
The appropriations bill says the administration “may withdraw the Waters of the United States rule without regard to any provision of statute or regulation that establishes a requirement for such withdrawal.” The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers jointly administer WOTUS, which was finalized by the Obama administration in 2015.
Help your business save on summer time-of-use rates If passed by the Senate, the bill would allow the Trump administration to bypass the Administrative Procedures Act that requires rules, whether being proposed or withdrawn, to be subject to public comments.
Passing the bill would be a big win for the 31 states and dozens of businesses, trade groups and conservative groups challenging the legality of WOTUS in court.
The bill is expected to pass the Senate, but first it must be reconciled with any Senate appropriations bills for energy and environment-related matters.
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Climate change, of course, is real and demons… Guest essay by Eric Worrall The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has rejected a motion to delay implementation of Obama era methane emission laws which limit allowed emissions from oil and gas drilling.
Court rejects Trump’s delay of EPA drilling pollution rule BY TIMOTHY CAMA – 07/03/17 01:40 PM… From the Daily Caller Michael Bastasch 07/04/2017 A new study highlights how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is able to game the rule-making system to cloak contentious policy decisions as based on science.
EPA wants to halt fracking rules by two years, instead of 90 days
The Environmental Protection Agency announced Tuesday that it is ready to halt the Obama administration’s emission rules for fracking by two years, instead of the initial 90-day stay that it had announced weeks earlier. “Under the proposal, sources would not need to comply with these requirements while the stay is in effect.
Since issuing the final rule, EPA has received several petitions to reconsider certain aspects of the rule,” the EPA announced Tuesday evening.
The agency said the delay is necessary to conduct a review of the Obama administration’s oil and gas rules on methane emissions, or the 2016 New Source Performance Standards for the oil and natural gas industry.
The rules are part of former President Barack Obama’s climate change agenda, targeting methane, a short-lived, but potent, greenhouse gas.
Many scientists blame greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels for warming the Earth’s climate. “Earlier this month, EPA used its Clean Air Act authority to issue a 90-day administrative stay of these requirements,” it said. “To ensure there is no gap in the stay between the 90-day stay and the proposed two-year stay if finalized, EPA also is proposing a three-month stay.”
The EPA will open a 30-day period to collect comments on the proposed timelines for staying the fracking rules.
The comment period will go into effect once the proposed actions are published in the Federal Register.
Big Oil grouses over this weird bird. Trump administration promises sage decision.
Big Oil grouses over this weird bird.
Trump administration promises sage decision..
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced Wednesday his department would undertake yet another review of past policy.
Interior will rethink an Obama administration plan designed to protect the sage grouse, a peculiar fowl species synonymous with the West.
Sage grouse populations have declined by up to 90 percent, and the bird’s habitat has been increasingly threatened by fire and development in recent years.
Republicans and the oil and gas industry, both pervasive influences in sage grouse states, were not happy.
They said the plan would stifle economic development and take power from states who were capable of managing sage grouse populations.
Zinke says the 60-day review will assess the plan’s impact on energy and determine if state-driven conservation would be better.
But some conservation groups, like the Audubon Society, say Obama’s plan was working.
“No party that I know doesn’t want a healthy population of sage grouse out West,” Zinke said.
An Unmitigated Disaster: Executive Order on Climate Change Puts Us All in Danger
Author: Aimee Delach / Source: Defenders of Wildlife Blog President Trump’s latest Executive Order threatens recent strides to combat climate change. We’ve
