Climate Point: A year of disasters
Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate change, energy and the environment. My name is Sammy Roth, and I'm a reporter for the Paste BN Network in Southern California. Thanks for joining me. If you were forwarded this newsletter (or if you're reading it on our website), you can sign up to get Climate Point in your inbox here. Tell your family, friends, sworn enemies, etc.
Christmas is here, so naturally I'm thinking about the national security implications of climate change, that most festive of topics. Military leaders have warned for years that rising temperatures, more extreme droughts and stronger storms will fuel instability in already-volatile countries, threatening America's security — so security experts are understandably concerned that President Trump's new National Security Strategy doesn't mention any of that. I wrote about the omission for Paste BN.
Here are some other things you might want to know:
MUST-READ STORIES
A year of disasters: The recent onslaught of disasters — ie. devastating hurricanes and wildfires — stretched the Federal Emergency Management Agency to its limits, as Paste BN's Rick Jervis reports. And the year isn't over. The Thomas Fire in California is close to becoming the largest wildfire in the state's modern history, as Megan Diskin reports for the Ventura County Star. In related news, a new report has found that last year's record global heat, and various other extreme weather phenomena, couldn't have happened without global warming, as Nicholas Kusnetz reports for InsideClimate News.
The tax bill is an environment story: One of the (many) non-tax things in the GOP tax bill is a provision opening part of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. As I've written previously for The Desert Sun, there's only so much more oil, gas and coal the world can burn while avoiding climate disaster, so drilling in ANWR could have serious global consequences. It could also have a big impact on the Alaskan landscape. Check out this piece by the New York Times' Henry Fountain, who shows that the scars left by a single oil well in the wildlife refuge from 30 years ago can still be seen today.
ALL ABOUT CLEAN ENERGY
Clean cars had a good week: Speaking of the tax bill, it does preserve a $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles, as Greg Gardner reports for the Detroit Free Press. In other clean car news, James Bruggers reports for the Courier Journal in Louisville that UPS has pre-ordered 125 of Tesla's sleek new electric semi trucks, joining Pepsi, Walmart, Anheuser-Busch and other corporate buyers — a big vote of confidence for Elon Musk. Russ Mitchell wrote for the Los Angeles Times about whether Musk is likely to succeed.
Wind blade maker sued over alleged worker injuries: Powerful story here by Kevin Hardy and Grant Rodgers at the Des Moines Register, who write that former employees are suing an Iowa company that makes blades for wind turbines, claiming that constant exposure to hazardous chemicals gave them serious skin injuries. My Twitter follower Bill Corcoran, who works for the Sierra Club, had this to say: "Clean tech needs to clean up its labor act. Protecting the earth should not be separate from protecting workers."
POLITICAL CLIMATE
EPA employees are less than happy: Let's check in on the Environmental Protection Agency... So it turns out EPA hired a consulting firm run by folks who have spent the last year scavenging for dirt on agency employees, looking for evidence in their emails that they're disloyal to Trump, as Eric Lipton and Lisa Friedman reported for the New York Times. (The firm's contract with EPA was canceled shortly after NYT and Mother Jones wrote about it. Journalism matters.) ProPublica's Talia Buford also wrote about how EPA chief Scott Pruitt decided to tear up a rule to keep coal waste from getting into drinking water, over the objections of career staff who had spent a decade working on said rule.
Prepare to pay more to enjoy your national parks: The Trump administration has proposed hiking the entry fee at many national parks during busy season to $70. (The public comment deadline is tomorrow, Dec. 22; you can comment here if you'd like.) The idea is to raise money for overdue maintenance projects, but it's far from clear the fee hikes would help much, as Jacy Marmaduke writes for the Coloradoan. Either way, the proposed fee hikes are the latest skirmish in a long battle over whether public lands should be run more like a business, as Krista Langlois writes for High Country News.
AND ANOTHER THING
My Desert Sun colleague Ian James recently visited Australia's Great Barrier Reef, where he experienced one of the world's most beautiful, most diverse and unfortunately most endangered ecosystems. Ian dove into the ocean and saw how waters heated by global warming are killing the reef's corals, turning their vibrant colors to gray rubble.
I'll let Ian close it out. He wrote: "Coral reefs are important for so many reasons. They sustain fishing communities around the world. They generate some of the oxygen that we breathe ... They provide habitat for about a fourth of marine species. I don’t want to imagine a world with most of its coral reefs dead, but scientists say that looks possible without bigger efforts to combat climate change."
That's all for this week. For more climate, energy and environment news, follow me on Twitter @Sammy_Roth. You can sign up to get Climate Point in your inbox here.