CLIMATE

CLIMATE WATCH - Just in time for the COP26 UN climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland, the Biden administration has released the National Intelligence Estimate: Climate Change and International Responses Increasing Challenges to US National Security Through 2040. 

THE ENVIRONMENT - The most important battleground in California’s perpetual war over water is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

CLIMATE POLITICS - COP26 will kick off next Sunday 31 October, following a one-year delay due to the pandemic.

THE ENVIRONMENT - It’s been more than six years since lax safety management led to an explosion at ExxonMobil’s oil refinery in Torrance, California.

CLIMATE WATCH - As the fight against climate change becomes more urgent, focus has increased on methane emissions, with U.S. climate envoy John Kerry tweeting that cutting methane is “the single most effective strategy we have to reduce global warming in the near term” to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

CLIMATE WATCH - Thirteen thousand feet high on the far side of the Himalaya mountains, we have entered the past and the future at the same time.

ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARD - As cleanup crews on Sunday rushed to contain the damage from one of the largest oil spills in recent Southern California history, environmentalists stressed the necessity of ending offshore drilling—and ultimately, of keeping all fossil fuels in the ground. 

CLIMATE CHANGE - For almost 75 years, GuideOne has been an insurance firm whose primary business has been insuring places of worship, faith organizations, and religious schools.

CLIMATE CHANGE - The UK (in partnership with Italy) will host the 26^th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties, COP26 in Glasgow on October 31- November 12, 2021. 

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE-Los Angeles County took a step toward a complete ban on oil and gas production within its borders after the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved on Wednesday a motion to phase it out on unincorporated land. It’s the largest urban area in the country to declare such a ban, which will impact over a thousand active wells.

PEACEVOICE - I vividly recall reading Bill McKibben’s prophetic work, The End Of Nature, serialized in The New Yorker beginning 11 September 1989.

CLIMATE CHANGE - As Democrats work to rapidly finalize the details of their $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, climate campaigners on Wednesday urged them to exclude fossil fuels and "false solutions" from a new clean energy program intended to cut down planet-heating emissions.

CLIMATE POLITICS-The Amazon rainforest is arguably the world’s premier asset. Indeed, it’s the world’s most crucial asset in a myriad of ways, nothing on Earth compares.

CLIMATE WATCH - Over the past four years, oil and gas producers have applied for more than 10,000 permits to drill for oil and gas on federal land in New Mexico.

CLIMATE POLITICS-U.S. House Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) recently introduced a bill in Congress to overhaul GDP, the nation’s most watched economic indicator.

THE GRID - The Energy Information Administration, the primary authority in the federal government on energy numbers, concludes that renewables, primarily hydro, wind and solar, rose to become 21% of electricity generation in the U.S. in 2020.

CLIMATE POLITICS-Like many, the pandemic gave me an opportunity to self-reflect on my life and my role in the world.

GREEN ENERGY-Reuters reports that President Biden intends to slash tax subsidies for fossil fuels like coal and petroleum and to use taxes instead to encourage renewable energy.

CLIMATE POLITICS--Is it possible that the country is truly rebuilding itself . . . from the soul up?

THE FUTURE OF GREEN-At the moment, signs point to a green economic recovery from COVID.

CLIMATE POLITICS-As the New Year asserts itself -- a year that begins in global lockdown and political shock-and-awe -- an extraordinary question emerges: Are we on the brink of real change?

DEEGAN ON LA-Blueish may be how we’re feeling, now that we’re shut in and uncertain of what to expect in a future that could be tinted with grey.

BEGREEN--Change in climate is a common phenomenon in recent times and apart from scientific backing, there is now evident physical evidence. Scientists believe that the major reason for the warming of our planet is human activity.  

BEGREEN--This past June 17, four members of the California Assembly sent a letter to the California Air Resources Board, granting cautious blessing to the air board’s proposal for saving the world’s tropical forests. That proposal, the California Tropical Forest Standard, was crafted over the last decade by air board staff and would set guidelines to improve the integrity of tropical forest-based carbon credits.

BEGREEN--June 2019 was the hottest June in recorded history. July was even hotter — in fact, it was the hottest month ever recorded worldwide, as a wide swath of the continental United States sweltered with heat indexes of over 100 degrees.

BEGREEN--In June, I delivered a keynote presentation on Australia’s vulnerability to climate change and our policy challenges at the annual meeting of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the main conference for those working in the climate science community. I saw it as an opportunity to summarize the post-election political and scientific reality we now face.

BEGREEN--As France, India, the U.S., and other nations face unprecedented and deadly heat waves, new research published Wednesday showed the planet has warmed more quickly in recent decades than at any point in the past 2,000 years.

BEGREEN--The Republican Party's stance on climate change has been shifting. Prominent conservatives who once might have been labeled climate deniers have begun acknowledging the reality that our climate is changing. Though not all have accepted the role of humans in causing that change, many now say that human action must be a part of the solution, releasing conservative climate policies to counter environmental policies from the left, including the Green New Deal.

CLIMATE CHANGE--The world is in the throes of an extinction crisis unlike any throughout paleoclimate history, a.k.a., the Sixth Mass Extinction -- keeping in mind that the normal “background rate” for extinction is 1-to-5 species gone per year. But, what if it’s five every 24 hours? 

OTHERWORDS--Every year around Earth Day, I’m reminded of papers I graded in an environmental sociology class.