Climate Point: Weather shocks, food disruption

Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate change, energy and the environment. If you're looking for a pick-me-up, I'd recommend this story by Karen Chávez at the Citizen-Times in North Carolina, about young people (including many women) training to be national park rangers. It's a job that's increasingly in demand as more and more people visit America's public lands. To quote one of the rangers-in-training featured in the story: "Being able to blend my passion for law enforcement and my love for the outdoors, protecting nature and protecting people who are enjoying spending time in nature — national park law enforcement blends it beautifully."

I'm Sammy Roth, a reporter based in Southern California who loves reading about people who love the outdoors. Here are some other things you might want to know:

MUST-READ STORIES:

Rising seas, weather shocks and food disruption: Pretty much everywhere you look, there are harrowing stories about the impacts of climate change. Paste BN's Doyle Rice reports on new research finding that thousands of low-lying islands could become uninhabitable due to rising seas by mid-century, much sooner than previously expected. Doyle also wrote about a new study predicting that California's weather will swing even more wildly between drought and flood due to global warming. And if you don't live in California or on a low-lying island, well, you probably eat food. Bloomberg's Agnieszka de Sousa and Hayley Warren wrote a great, simple piece explaining how climate change is already disrupting global food production, from wine to coffee to corn.

EPA doing away with a whole lot of science: Scott Pruitt, who runs the Environmental Protection Agency for President Trump, announced a new policy this week limiting EPA's use of what Pruitt calls "secret science" in environmental regulations. For Pruitt, the move is all about transparency, as Paste BN's Ledyard King reports. In practice, though, the new policy would prevent EPA from taking into account "some of the most important research of the past decades — for example, studies linking air pollution to premature deaths and measuring human exposure to pesticides," as the New York Times' Lisa Friedman reports. One irony is that despite Pruitt arguing the new policy will promote transparency, EPA didn't let any reporters attend the announcement.

ALL ABOUT CLEAN ENERGY:

Clean energy in the Heartland: Here's a fun fact: Four states get over 30% of their electricity from wind power, and they're all politically conservative, as Nicholas Kusnetz reports for InsideClimate News. (Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma and South Dakota.) Jobs and cheap power, it turns out, trump ideology. Iowa in particular has lots of low-cost wind power, and lots of jobs in wind; the Des Moines Register's Danny Lawhon profiled several Iowans studying to be wind-turbine technicians, which is the nation's second-fastest-growing profession. Meanwhile, a small Iowa city is fighting to ditch its electric utility so it can invest more heavily in solar, as the Register's Donnelle Eller reports.

Big companies like clean energy, too: Paste BN's Elizabeth Weise reports that U.S. corporations bought more renewable energy than utility companies did last year, which is kind of remarkable. The trend has been driven by big tech companies like Apple and Google, but also by Walmart, GM and Budweiser. Although to go back to tech for a minute, another cool story this week is that Lyft — aka the ride-sharing app that is not Uber —says it will fight global warming by buying "carbon offsets" for every mile traveled in a Lyft vehicle, per Paste BN's Marco della Cava. Basically, Lyft will try to make up for its global warming pollution by investing in projects that reduce emissions elsewhere.

POLITICAL CLIMATE:

On Earth Day 2018, past is prologue: In honor of Earth Day (which was this past Sunday), the New York Times' Livia Albeck-Ripka and Kendra Pierre-Louis wrote about the seminal environmental disasters that helped spur the passage of America's bedrock environmental laws, from the Santa Barbara oil spill to the Love Canal disaster to the Cuyahoga River catching fire (again and again and again). As the Trump administration works to undo many of the regulations that have been established to carry out those environmental laws, it's important to remember why we have them in the first place.

AND ANOTHER THING:

You may have read about Sinclair, the TV broadcaster that owns or operates nearly 200 local stations across the country. Sinclair has recently forced local news anchors to read on-air promos attacking the news media that could be ripped from President Trump's playbook. More broadly, the company has faced criticism for pushing a conservative slant on local news coverage.

Now BuzzFeed's Steven Perlberg has written a remarkable story about a reporter who spent three years at a Sinclair-owned news station in Virginia, and who in 2015 was ordered to include Trump's point of view in a segment about climate change. When she argued with her bosses, she got written up in a performance review for not including the "balance" of the "other argument" — you know, the argument climate change isn't real.

To quote a character from "The Wire," one of my favorite TV shows: "A lie ain't a side of a story. It's just a lie."

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.