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Der Spiegel Just Published the Minutes From Trump’s Contentious Meeting With G7 Leaders

James West — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 16:10:32 +0000

German magazine Der Spiegel has been given access to minutes from a contentious meeting of G7 leaders in Taormina, Sicily, at the end of May, in which they applied last-ditch pressure on President Donald Trump to stay in the Paris climate agreement.

The meeting came toward the end of Trump's first trip abroad as president—and became an opportunity for world leaders to intensely lobby the American president before Trump's final decision on whether the United States would leave the historic climate accord.

The leaders told Trump in no uncertain terms that if the United States abandoned the agreement, China would be the direct beneficiary.

"Climate change is real and it affects the poorest countries," said Emmanuel Macron, the newly elected French president, at the outset of the private conversation.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau then told Trump that the success of repairing the ozone layer proved that industry could be persuaded to act on harmful emissions, according to the account.

Then, German Chancellor Angela Merkel brought up China: "If the world's largest economic power were to pull out, the field would be left to the Chinese," she said. According to Der Spiegel, Merkel added that Chinese President Xi Jinping was preparing to take advantage of the vacuum left by America's exit. Even Saudi Arabia, she added, was preparing for a world without oil.

Trump was unmoved. "For me," the president reportedly said, "it's easier to stay in than step out," adding that green regulations were killing American jobs.

As it became clear Trump would not budge, Macron admitted defeat, according to this account.

"Now China leads," he said.

The new Der Spiegel cover. pic.twitter.com/NJ0vKU5D3v
— Yashar Ali (@yashar) June 2, 2017

The account adds fresh details to the president's fraught European trip. Following the meeting, the G7 broke with tradition to release a statement where six nations reaffirmed the Paris climate agreement, without the United States. The president also caused a diplomatic scuffle in Italy after accusing Germany of being "very bad" on trade and appeared to literally shove aside a leader of a NATO ally.

In a Rose Garden ceremony last Thursday, Trump announced that the United States would leave the historic Paris climate agreement—promising to "begin negotiations to reenter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States."

In response to the president's announcement, President Macron of France released a video statement, saying, "If we do nothing, our children will know a world of migrations, of wars, of shortage. A dangerous world."

Donald Trump's Vision of Pittsburgh is Sooooooo 80s

Henry Grabar — Sat, 03 Jun 2017 10:00:08 +0000

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Donald Trump officially announced the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change on Thursday, framing the 2015 deal as a kind of global plot to sabotage America.

"The Paris Agreement handicaps the United States economy in order to win praise from the very foreign capitals and global activists that have long sought to gain wealth at our country's expense," Trump said. "They don't put America first. I do, and I always will."

And if Paris was the symbol of that ideology, the alternative, a nation of miners and pipelines, belching smoke like a charcoal grill, was represented by…Pittsburgh? "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris," Trump said.

It was a bad comparison, since citizens of both Pittsburgh and Paris share an interest in averting a minimum projected sea level rise of 2.4 feet by 2100, in the scenario in which the climate accord's goals aren't met.

But it was an especially bad comparison because Pittsburgh isn't the burned-out steel town Trump thinks it is. In fact, it's a pretty good example of how a city can recover and adapt to changing economic circumstances. Pittsburgh's doing OK.

Once again, Donald Trump has shown himself a man who has acquired little to no new knowledge since the 1980s. And during the 1980s, Pittsburgh was indeed having a very tough time. The city lost 30 percent of its population between 1970 and 1990; in 1983, unemployment in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area hit 17 percent. Neighboring counties fared even worse. Deindustrialization and globalization slammed the Monongahela Valley. But that was 35 years ago.

Today, Pittsburgh's biggest employer is the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Its other university, Carnegie Mellon, is home to a world-renowned robotics laboratory. The Golden Triangle is a landmark of downtown renewal. And Homestead, site of the great American labor battle of the 19th century, is a mall.

Before Pittsburgh was the poster child for a midsized, postindustrial city, it was a symbol of the ills of pollution. The soot from the steel mills hung so thick in the air the streetlights had to be on during the day. In 1948, 25 miles south of the city, the town of Donora was enveloped in a thick yellow smog that killed 20 people and sickened half the town. It was the worst air pollution disaster in US history and led to the passage of the Clean Air Act.

There's no city in America that stands to benefit from climate change, whose enormous costs are and will continue to be borne mostly by the federal government (and hence distributed among us). But as a symbol for withdrawal from a global climate treaty, Pittsburgh is an especially poor choice.

Look at All the Ways Trump's Staff Is Avoiding Answering This Basic Question

Nathalie Baptiste — Fri, 02 Jun 2017 20:27:48 +0000

Nobody at the White House seems to have asked President Donald Trump about his position on climate change. For years, Trump has been calling global warming a hoax, sometimes alleging that it was invented by China.

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

So why not just confirm that this is still his opinion? Especially when, after withdrawing the United States from the most important climate deal in history, aides might want to use the opportunity to show that the president understands the basic science.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and White House press secretary Sean Spicer had several opportunities to share the president's current thinking on the issue. At Friday's press briefing, four different reporters asked Pruitt four variations on this basic question from ABC's Mary Bruce: "Yes or no, does the president believe that climate change is real and a threat to the United States?"

And four different times, Pruitt basically gave this response: "All the discussions we had over the last several weeks was focused on one singular issue: Is Paris good or not for this country?"

EPA head Scott Pruitt dodges, refuses to say if Trump believes human activity contributes to climate change. (via @MSNBC) pic.twitter.com/0A0oPZvuWf
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 2, 2017

But Pruitt isn't alone. Over the last several days, many of his closest advisers have revealed they spend no time discussing global warming with the president.

At Tuesday's press briefing, when a reporter asked if Trump believes that human activity contributes to global warming, Spicer replied, "Honestly, I haven't asked him. I can get back to you." When he appeared at the podium again on Friday, Spicer still didn't have an answer.

On Thursday, after the Paris decision was announced, CNN asked Gary Cohn, Trump's top economic adviser, whether or not the president believes climate change is real. "You are going to have to ask him," Cohn responded.

During a press briefing following the Paris announcement, a reporter asked about Trump's beliefs on climate change. "I have not talked to the president about his personal views on climate change," a White House official said.

Earlier on Friday, Trump's adviser Kellyanne Conway also refused to answer if Trump thinks global warming is a hoax. When pressed by news anchor George Stephanopolous on Good Morning America, she assured him "The president believes in clean environment, clean air, clean water."

Many of his advisers may not broach climate change with Trump, but recently, K.T. McFarland, his deputy national security adviser, slipped him two Time cover magazine stories about global warming to get the president riled up.

The only problem? One of the stories turned out to be an internet hoax.

Quietly, Surely, We're Losing a Whole Pine Species En Masse and Nobody Gives a Damn

Maya L. Kapoor — Sun, 04 Jun 2017 10:00:09 +0000

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

U.S. Forest Service research ecologist Bob Keane has studied whitebark pine, a coniferous tree of the high country, for more than thirty years. Still, when asked to describe a whitebark to someone who's never seen one, he takes a breath and pauses for a moment. "Gosh," he says.

The shape of the tree is very distinctive, Keane says. Instead of growing cone-shaped like other conifers, whitebarks branch like hardwoods. "A lot of the undergrowth is very small, so you see these open park-like stands of beautiful spreading trees," he says. This shape is an adaptation that shows Clark's nutcrackers flying past that a tree below has many nutritious cones and might be worth a travel stop.

Clark's nutcrackers cache thousands of whitebark seeds, dispersing the pine across the high country, where the tree is a keystone species. Whitebark pine is one of the first trees to break ground after a fire, thanks to those nutcrackers, and it stabilizes soil and snowpacks at timberline. Living a millennium or more, whitebarks shape the West's high mountain ecology in countless ways.

But the whitebark is going extinct and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (the agency) hasn't given the species federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. In April 2017, two conservation organizations from Montana lost a lawsuit against the agency for its failure to list the pine. No one—not the plaintiffs, defendants, or panel of judges from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals—questioned the precariousness of the tree's fate. At question was how the agency prioritized which species it protects. Species, the court ruled, could be passed over because the agency didn't have the necessary funds. As the story of whitebarks demonstrates, extinction has as much to do with politics as it does with biology.

The whitebark pine is an iconic tree of the West's high mountains, ranging from Wyoming's southern Wind Rivers to northern Alberta and British Columbia. In the fall, in a whitebark pine forest, "there are tons of cones and it is alive with animals, just alive," Keane says. "You don't see that with subalpine firs." Researchers have found that whitebark cones feed more than 100 animal species and, in Glacier National Park, 40 percent of the understory plants in whitebark pine communities grow only there. The tree's fatty, protein-rich seeds are an important food for Greater Yellowstone grizzlies; when the seeds run short, the bears eat more meat.

The whitebark pine faces intertwined threats that have killed the trees across much of their historic range. In 1910, Gifford Pinchot imported white pine blister rust, a fast-moving European fungal disease that kills whitebarks, to the West in a tree shipment.

And a century of fire suppression has imperiled whitebarks, too. The shade-intolerant trees rely on fire to open areas; without fires, trees such as subalpine firs shade out whitebarks. Often, Keane says, permanently stunted pines linger in the shadows of those new neighbors. "You'll see an overstory of subalpine fir, but an understory of tiny whitebark pine saplings that are probably older than the canopy," he says.

Meanwhile, native mountain pine beetles have taken out swaths of whitebark pines weakened by overcrowding and drought; a 2009 beetle outbreak killed whitebarks across more than 3,000 square miles. Exacerbating blister rust's spread, wildfire suppression, and pine beetle outbreaks is an ever more pervasive threat: "The fourth big one is climate change and how climate change is interacting with all of these things, " says Amy Nicholas, endangered species listing coordinator for the agency's Wyoming field office.

Conservationists have requested federal protection for whitebark pines under the ESA for more than 25 years, beginning in 1991. In 2011, the Fish and Wildlife Service found that the pine was likely to go extinct across much of its U.S. range in as little as 100 years, or less than two generations. Yet instead of listing whitebark pine as endangered, the agency listed the tree as a "candidate" species, essentially waitlisting the species for help.

The reason came down to a funding shortage: listing whitebark pine as endangered would have required the agency to devote resources to saving it. Without enough money to care for all disappearing species, the agency focuses on listing species that are part of legal settlements, for example.

As a candidate species, whitebark pine got a listing priority number, based on how likely it is to go extinct. In 2011, whitebark pine received one of the highest priority rankings, yet other species were being federally protected and whitebark pine was not.

Two Montana-based conservation organizations—WildWest Institute and Alliance for the Wild Rockies—sued the agency, arguing that by prioritizing candidate species ranked lower than whitebark pine, the Fish and Wildlife Service wasn't following its own guidelines for deciding which species to protect. The conservation groups felt species should be given help in order of biological need.

The court ruled in favor of the agency. While pointing out that current policies on listing seemed inadequate when "dealing with the potential life or death of an entire species," the court concluded that the agency was not required to make decisions based on its candidate species ranking system. "Scarce funds and limited staff resources may prevent FWS from taking immediate final action to list or delist a species," the presiding judge wrote.

According to Patrick Parenteau, a Vermont Law School professor, the agency often makes listing decisions based on finances. "This is a systematic problem that the Fish and Wildlife Service has had for decades," Parenteau says. He points to persistent resistance from Congress and some Republican administrations to fully fund the service's endangered species listing program.

Financial considerations do not factor into whether a species gets listed, but rather in what order and when, agency biologist Craig Hansen says. "The listing budget is given to us by Congress and has an annual cap," Hansen says. "We can't pull funds from other programs to list." The service's funding woes have led to a backlog of organisms waiting to be listed, such as northern California's Sierra Nevada red fox, which in 2016 included just 29 remaining adults.

These rust-resistant baby whitebarks are part of the U.S. Forest Service's collaboration with NGOs trying to save the species. Bob Keane

In 2016, to stop the constant backlog of candidate species waiting to be listed as threatened or endangered, the Obama administration drafted a streamlined process that prioritized the most imperiled species backed by the best available science. It wasn't adopted by the Trump administration.

Matthew Koehler, executive director of plaintiff WildWest Institute, grows frustrated talking about the whitebark case. Koehler believes the funding shortage that stalled the whitebark's listing is part of a strategy by Congressional members in both parties to tie the service's hands. "Then, the same members of Congress complain that the ESA doesn't work or that it moves too slow," he says.

Indeed, this past February, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., led a Senate hearing to "modernize the Endangered Species Act," arguing in a statement that the ESA has not been successful enough and causes economic harm.

Funding is only one of the ESA's difficulties, though. Court battles also stymie species' recoveries. For each species, a listing decision takes years, followed by litigation from whoever opposes the outcome. "It isn't just a bunch of scientists sitting around a table saying ‘let's list this species," says Parenteau. And still, species such as the whitebark disappear.

And then there's climate change. Congress wrote the ESA in the 1970s, long before scientists understood the profound ways in which greenhouse gases affect species and their homes. The ESA is designed to address discrete problems: overgrazing, point-source pollution, exurban development. In its revision of ESA listing guidelines, the Obama administration acknowledged as much: the agency could have put off working on species endangered by climate change, including whitebark pine, since it has less power to help them.

With our existing environmental laws, whitebarks may yet survive in the northernmost parts of their range in Canada, Parenteau says. "But in the southern part of its range, unless we get serious about climate mitigation, it's probably doomed anyway," he says.

In any case, listing isn't necessary for the feds to take action: Almost all whitebarks occur on federal public land, where the government can take steps to protect the species without listing, Parenteau says.

Indeed, having given up on the ESA for now, the WildWest Institute is seeking other pathways to whitebark protection. The organization is supporting a bill introduced to Congress to designate public lands in the northern Rockies where whitebarks live as wilderness. "We see wilderness designation as a way to protect that entire ecosystem," Koehler says.

When pressed to make predictions for the longterm, Keane says areas where whitebarks used to flourish will probably eventually burn. By then, though, there will be no source trees left for birds to find seeds to spread to freshly burned areas. Instead, he imagines, shrub herblands will grow.

Still, unlike Parenteau, Keane is optimistic about the climate extremes that whitebarks can survive, if the trees get help. He's part of a new collaboration between the U.S. Forest Service and two NGOs – American Forests and the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem Foundation—that's working to restore whitebarks in the West. The group's even developing rust-resistant seedlings. "Whitebark pine doesn't even start optimum cone production until it's 200 years old," he says. "What we want to make sure is what we're doing now, 100 years from now we will see the fruits of our labors."

"If we do nothing," Keane says, "we are making sure that it will be so low on the landscape, we will probably name the ones we see, there will be so few of them."

Picking Apart Trump's Climate Lies Is Unsurprisingly Easy. Here Are 9 Examples.

Alexander C. Kaufman — Fri, 02 Jun 2017 15:27:57 +0000

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

President Donald Trump announced plans to withdraw from the Paris climate accord on Thursday with a White House speech that made the historic agreement sound like a trade deal, which it isn't. But that was just one of the thorns in his Rose Garden statement.

The nonbinding pact to reduce planet-warming emissions, approved by every country but Syria and Nicaragua, commits its signatories to slashing greenhouse gas outputs and coming back to the negotiating table every five years to seek more ambitious goals with the hope of staving off the most catastrophic effects of global warming.

Trump did not discuss climate science nor the dire consensus among nearly all peer-reviewed climatologists that emissions from burning fossil fuels, industrial farming and deforestation have put the planet on course to warm beyond the point where the climate will be irreversibly changed by the end of the century.

By that sheer omission alone, the speech was misleading. Here are nine more things that Trump got wrong:

1. "The cost to the economy at this time would be close to $3 trillion in lost GDP."

That estimate came from a report that "does not take into account potential benefits from avoided emissions." The study was paid for by the American Council for Capital Formation and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce â€• two groups that represent major polluters and have long lobbied against climate policies. The assessment outlined in the report is based on what the Natural Resources Defense Council in March described as "a fictional scenario that does not reflect any current proposals or realistic plans to achieve our climate goals."

"By design, the Chamber study intentionally imposes the most stringent greenhouse gas regulations on the sectors that would face the highest costs per ton of GHG reduction," Kevin Steinberger and Amanda Levin, experts at the NRDC, wrote in a blog post. "This scenario greatly exaggerates the likely costs of any future program to achieve the economy-wide reductions set forth in the Paris Agreement, because any real program to meet those goals would be designed with cost-saving flexibility the Chamber deliberately left out."

2. "Exiting the agreement protects the United States from future intrusions on the United States' sovereignty and massive future legal liability. Believe me, we have massive legal liability if we stay in."

The Paris Agreement is legally nonbinding, meaning the United States can't be punished for failing to meet the 26 percent to 28 percent commitment made in 2015. Despite arguments from the White House to the contrary, legal experts said the U.S. could have negotiated a lower emissions target while remaining in the voluntary agreement.

President Trump made good on his campaign promise to withdraw from the pact. Rex Features via AP Images

3. China "can do whatever they want for 13 years. Not us."

The implication here is that China plans to continue increasing its emissions. But a study last year found that Chinese emission have peaked and were forecast to fall by 1 percent in 2017. The accuracy of official Chinese data is often called into question, with good reason. But a handful of independent studies over the past three years have corroborated the decline in Chinese emissions.

Backing this up, China has aggressively moved to invest in renewable energy over the past few years. In January, the country set aside $360 billion for clean energy investment over the next four years and canceled plans for 103 new coal-fired power plants. As a result, China's own coal mining regions are suffering thousands of job losses.

4. "In short, the agreement doesn't eliminate coal jobs. It just transfers those jobs out of America and the United States, and ships them to foreign countries."

For starters, the text of the Paris Agreement never mentions coal. And while President Barack Obama's plan to limit emissions from coal-fired plants in the U.S. may not have helped the struggling industry, its own executives admit that competition from natural gas and declining demand abroad is responsible for the loss of coal mining jobs.

To make any sort of comeback, the coal industry needs to export to countries such as India, where coal remains a popular fuel source. The diplomatic repudiation that comes with backing out the Paris Agreement could make that more difficult.

"The future is foreign markets, so the last thing you want to do if you are a coal company is to give up a US seat in the international climate discussions and let the Europeans control the agenda," a U.S. official told The Independent in April.

5. "This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States."

The absurdity of this statement aside, the U.S. took the lead in brokering the Paris Agreement in order to attain more favorable terms for America than existed in previous climate deals. Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, for example, developing countries were excluded from slashing emissions. That was part of President George W. Bush's justification for refusing to implement the deal in 2001.

"But in the case of Paris, it's inexplicable why we would be leaving," Susan Biniaz, the State Department's former lawyer on climate change issues, told HuffPost Thursday. "We negotiated it largely to U.S. specifications and to fix the Kyoto problems."

Coal-fired plants are not mentioned in the Paris Agreement. Anonymous/AP Photo

6. "Yet, under this agreement, we are effectively putting these [energy] reserves under lock and key, taking away the great wealth of our nation â€• it's great wealth, it's phenomenal wealth."

Natural gas, made cheap by a drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is largely responsible for the U.S. already shrinking its carbon footprint by 12 percent below 2005 levels. (The country committed to lowering that number to 26 percent to 28 percent under the Paris Agreement). Nothing in the accord prevented the U.S. from extracting fossil fuels. There are ways to extract oil and gas responsibly. The problem is the Trump administration doesn't seem keen on doing that. In one of its first moves, the Trump EPA scrapped a rule requiring oil and gas companies to report leaks of methane, a potent natural gas that can trap 30 times as much heat in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

7. "At 1 percent growth, renewable sources of energy can meet some of our domestic demand. But at 3 or 4 percent growth, which I expect, we need all forms of available American energy, or our country will be at grave risk of brownouts and blackouts. Our businesses will come to a halt in many cases. And the American family will suffer the consequences in the form of lost jobs and a very diminished quality of life."

This appears to be based on a controversial study led by Energy Secretary Rick Perry into power grid reliability. For starters, the study failed to consult any actual grid operators. The report is being run by a right-wing think tank operative. As Vox's David Roberts points out, the entire review is a political attack on renewables that depicts zero-emissions energy sources as "unreliable" now that it is no longer possible to argue that they can't compete on price. Moreover, the real source of base-load problems, as Roberts notes, is natural gas, though it's unlikely that anyone in the Trump administration would anger gas companies by concluding this.

8. "Beyond the severe energy restrictions inflicted by the Paris accord, it includes yet another scheme to redistribute wealth out of the United States through the so-called Green Climate Fund â€• nice name â€• which calls for developed countries to send $100 billion to developing countries all on top of America's existing and massive foreign aid payments. So we're going to be paying billions and billions and billions of dollars, and we're already way ahead of anybody else."

The U.S. committed just $3 billion to the fund under Obama. So far, $1 billion has been paid. That's worth the same as 62 miles of a border wall that could stretch more than 1,000 miles.

9. "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris."

During the 2016 presidential election, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won Pittsburgh with 80 percent of the vote. By contrast, Trump won the Texas county that includes Paris by 78 percent, with 14,561 votes to Clinton's 3,583.

Sorry, Donald: Pittsburgh Thinks You Are Wrong About Climate Change

Jeremy Schulman — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 21:03:26 +0000

On Thursday, President Donald Trump portrayed his decision to pull the United States out of the historic Paris climate deal as a key part of his campaign pledge to put America first. "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris," the president said.

"I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris," Trump says of pulling out of a deal that'll affect every person on Earth pic.twitter.com/4jPTuCqbSG
— David Mack (@davidmackau) June 1, 2017

There's just one problem: The citizens of Pittsburgh are strongly supportive of climate action. According to a recent study from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 68 percent of adults in the Pittsburgh metro area support strict limits on carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants—a key element of the US commitment under the Paris deal. For Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, that number is 74 percent. For Pennsylvania's 14th Congressional District, which also includes Pittsburgh, it's 78 percent.

Roughly two-thirds of Pennsylvanians—and Americans as a whole—believe the United States should remain in the Paris agreement, according to the Yale research.

There doesn't appear to be any data on the popularity of the Paris agreement within Pittsburgh itself, but it's worth noting that the city's mayor, Bill Peduto, actually traveled to Paris during the 2015 negotiations to help press for an agreement. "Pittsburgh and other cities are on the front lines of the climate change crisis, and it is our responsibility to address the deep challenges it is creating for us, our children and our grandchildren," he said in a statement at the time, according to the Pittsburg Post-Gazette.

Peduto took to Twitter Thursday to express his displeasure with Trump's comments:

Fact: Hillary Clinton received 80% of the vote in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh stands with the world & will follow Paris Agreement @HillaryClinton https://t.co/cibJyT7MAK
— bill peduto (@billpeduto) June 1, 2017

As the Mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy & future. https://t.co/3znXGTcd8C
— bill peduto (@billpeduto) June 1, 2017

Trump Railed Against China While Abandoning Paris. His Views Are Wildly Outdated.

James West — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 21:26:21 +0000

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday afternoon that the US will abandon the historic Paris climate agreement—promising to "begin negotiations to re-enter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States."

In doing so, Trump characteristically railed against China—labeling it an economic foe and arguing it got the best end of the deal. "They can do whatever they want in 13 years, not us," he said of China's emissions plans. Casting the deal as an erosion of US sovereignty, Trump added that "the rest of the world applauded when we signed the Paris agreement. They went wild. They were so happy. For the simple reason that it put our country, the United States of America, which we all love, at a very, very big economic disadvantage."

But here's the reality: In the Paris agreement, China, for the first time, set a date at which it expects its climate emissions will "peak," or finally begin to taper downward: around 2030. That goal came about after the US and China finally brokered a landmark bilateral climate deal in 2014 to work together. China has always argued it's unfair for developed countries—who have already enjoyed the economic growth that comes with spewing carbon into the atmosphere—to curtail the growth of developing countries like China. So getting China to agree to "peaking" emissions was a major diplomatic break-through that turned out to be the secret sauce the world needed to come together in Paris.

The president's view of China is outdated. Here's what Trump left out:

China is already ahead of schedule. As we reported in March 2016, Chinese emissions may have actually peaked in 2014, and if those emissions didn't peak in 2014, researchers say, they definitely will by 2025, years ahead of China's official 2030 goal. Chinese coal consumption dropped 3.7 percent in 2015, marking two years in a row that coal use in the country declined. That meant 2015 was the first year in 15 years that carbon emissions dropped in China, according to the World Resources Institute.

China is far surpassing the US on investment to create clean energy jobs. In February, China announced that it would spent $361 billion over the next couple of years to create 13 million green jobs, according to the country's National Energy Administration.

China is winning on clean energy technology. In 2016, a Chinese firm topped a global ranking for wind energy production for the first time, beating America's General Electric. China leads the world in solar energy production—and has done so for some time. (Go inside one of the world's biggest solar manufacturing plants with me, here.)

This year China is slated to launch the world's biggest national carbon trading market—stitching together seven pilot carbon trading markets which have been up and running since 2013.

China overtook the US as the world's biggest market for electric vehicles in 2015—and has a big plans for expansion. "We are convinced China will become the leading market for electro-mobility," said Volkswagen brand chief Herbert Diess at a recent Shanghai car show.

Obama Slams Trump's Withdrawal From Paris Deal

Inae Oh — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 20:21:29 +0000

As President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement on Thursday, former president Barack Obama released a statement denouncing the move as one that "reject[s] the future" and reduces American leadership on the international stage.

He also expressed hope that cities and states would take the lead in the fight against climate change, even without the administration's support.

"I believe the United States of America should be at the front of the pack," Obama said. "But even in the absence of American leadership; even as this Administration joins a small handful of nations that reject the future; I'm confident that our states, cities, and businesses will step up and do even more to lead the way, and help protect for future generations the one planet we've got."

JUST IN: Statement from President Barack Obama on the Paris Climate Accord: pic.twitter.com/hVDrsPFrTH
— NBC News (@NBCNews) June 1, 2017

The statement, which was released as Trump was speaking from the White House Rose Garden, was a rare rebuke from the former president, who has largely avoided criticizing his successor.

Trump defended his decision to pull the country out of the historic accord, claiming the treaty was "very unfair to the highest level" to Americans. He said he was "elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris."

Trump's exit from the Paris accord is his most consequential move so far to undo his predecessor's legacy in combating global warming. The decision adds the United States to a group of just two countries, Nicaragua and Syria, that have rejected the landmark agreement.

Samantha Irby Has Some Diet Advice for You: Stay Fat

Mother Jones — Fri, 02 Jun 2017 19:21:40 +0000

Photo of Samantha Irby by Eva Blue

On this week's episode of the Mother Jones food politics podcast, Bite (you should really subscribe!), we're talking about fat shaming—and we hear from two amazing writers who try not to internalize all the messages about the importance of being skinny. First up, writer Lindy West, author of the book Shrill and many pieces about body image, including one for the Stranger called "Hello, I Am Fat." Next, we talk to Samantha Irby, writer of the blog Bitches Gotta Eat and author of the new collection of essays We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Listen to the episode and read a short excerpt from Irby's book below.

The following is an excerpt from Samantha Irby's essay "Fuck It, Bitch. Stay Fat."

Fuck it, bitch. Stay fat.

I mean, isn't this what we really want to do anyway? Because we already know how one loses weight: eat less and exercise more. Or get surgery. Why are we still playing around with the Oreo diet or the whole-milk-and-unpasteurized-cheese diet or the diet where you still get to eat a pound of pasta?! Either you're ready to eat vegetables and get on a treadmill, or you are not. And I'm ready. I just lost five pounds and here's how: for two weeks I quit drinking booze and soda and I stopped eating dessert. I didn't exercise—someone please tell me how you fit heart-rate-raising exercise into a schedule that includes working a real job and trying to get a good night's sleep?—but I tried to set reasonable goals like "Don't order one meat on top of another meat at lunch."

Cover art provided by Penguin Random House

Dieting is crazy and turns most of us jerks into insufferable babies. Either (1) you're a crabby asshole on the verge of tears all day long because you're desperate for a handful of Cheetos, or (2) you're perched atop a high horse made of fewer than twelve hundred daily calories, glaring down your nose at me and pointing out how much saturated fat is in my unsweetened iced tea. Man, don't you hate a fat-skinny bitch more than anything else on the planet? You know who I mean—your friend who used to eat mayonnaise straight from the jar but who recently lost twenty pounds doing Whole30 because she was going through a midlife crisis and is now suddenly an expert on health and nutrition, totally qualified to rip the corn dog out of your greasy little clutches. HOLY SHIT, SHUT UP, GIRL. Can't we all just decide that if you're over the age of twenty-eight you don't have to worry about being skinny anymore? Thin is a young woman's game, and I'm perfectly happy to chill on the bench this quarter with a chili dog. And if I happen to burn a few calories while texting, then great.

Now, let's not be crazy. Should you work out? Of course you should. But you don't need some magazine intern clucking at you from behind the computer screen about taking a jog around the block every once in a while. It doesn't even have to be hard—just go to Curves a few times a week and trade a couple of meals a day for some Special K or a salad (but not the meat-and-cheese kind). And drink water. To make your belly feel full and distract you from how much you would die for a Dove bar. Also running to the bathroom all the time has to qualify as minimal cardiovascular exercise.

The hard part isn't the knowing what to do, it's the doing. I just had a yogurt. It had 150 calories in it and 2 grams of fat. I wrote it down in a little notebook full of lies that I keep in my backpack to motivate myself to try to eat better. In theory, that notebook is supposed to hold me accountable for all my food choices so that I can get on a path to better eating. In reality, I willfully ignore its existence every time someone brings a pizza to the office or the nights my friends coax me out to the bar or the entire week I spent in LA pretending I didn't just vow to end my love affair with cheese. I know what I'm supposed to do; I just need someone to tell me how. Every single day until I die.

Seriously, though, every woman in America is probably an expert on health and exercise based solely upon her subscription to SELF magazine. Do you really need another article about how important it is to eat a big breakfast full of healthy fats and whole grains to curb afternoon snacking? NO, YOU DO NOT. You need bitches to write about how comfortable maternity jeans are for women who aren't really pregnant. And sexy ways to remove a bra that has four hooks. I'm always amused when they encourage you to eat "instead" foods, like eating an apple when you really want to rub a bacon cheeseburger all over your boobs is a fair substitute. Why not instead list which ice creams have the least calories, by the pint? Oh, sure, you can tell a woman just to run five miles and take up crafting after she gets dumped by some asshole and her friends won't call her back because they're tired of listening to her dissect every single aspect of their relationship ("Do you think we'd still be together if I hadn't hated on that Flight of the Conchords show in 2009?"), but she'd much prefer knowing whether an entire pint of Talenti has fewer calories than one of Häagen-Dazs. That's an "instead" a girl could really go for.

The above is an excerpt from WE ARE NEVER MEETING IN REAL LIFE by Samantha Irby. Copyright (c) 2017 by Samantha Irby. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. All rights reserved.

BREAKING: Trump Says He's Withdrawing From the Paris Climate Deal

Rebecca Leber — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 19:36:12 +0000

President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he intends to pull the United States out of the Paris climate change agreement.

Trump has already faced criticism from world leaders, who've pressed him to stay in the landmark accord; from business leaders such as Elon Musk; and of course environmentalists, who say Trump is dooming the world to the worst-case scenario of global warming. Other countries, including China and European nations, have responded by reiterating their commitments to the Paris deal this week as Trump signals the United States' withdrawal.

Trump said Thursday that he is open to renegotiating the Paris agreement or forging a new deal, though it was clear from a White House press call following his remarks that the administration hadn’t thought through what a renegotiation would look like. And even if Trump is serious about the idea, key world leaders quickly dismissed the idea:

BREAKING: France, Germany, Italy issue joint statement saying Paris climate accord can't be renegotiated.
— The Associated Press (@AP) June 1, 2017

The United States can't formally initiate the withdrawal until three years after the agreement entered into force, which happened last fall. The withdrawal process will then take an additional year to complete. That means that regardless of Trump's actions, the US will remain in the agreement until shortly after the 2020 election.

The Paris deal isn't enough on its own to keep global warming below the widely agreed-upon threshold of 2 degrees Celsius, but it is the most universal deal covering global greenhouse gasses yet. It commits developing nations and industrialized ones to a similar framework for tackling climate change.

Under the Paris framework, the US voluntarily committed to reducing greenhouse emissions 26-28 percent and contributing $3 billion to help developing combat climate change. Trump has already begun to undo the Obama-era policies that are central to meeting those emissions targets.

Asked how Trump's move affects the Paris climate accord, Laurence Tubiana, France's former climate envoy, remained optimistic. "It's not catastrophic for the Paris agreement by far," she said. "In a way, it's more a problem for the US than for the global community," she added, noting that governments and businesses around the world remain supportive of climate action.

The Truth About Meal-Kit Freezer Packs

Kiera Butler — Sun, 04 Jun 2017 10:00:09 +0000

People love to complain about the wastefulness of meal-kit delivery companies like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh. The baggies that hold a single scallion! The thousands of miles of shipping! The endless cardboard boxes! Those problems are annoying, but ultimately they're not environmental catastrophes: The baggies don't take up all that much landfill space, the cardboard boxes are recyclable, and it's not clear whether shipping meal kits is less efficient than transporting food to grocery stores and then to homes.

But there is a much better reason to criticize meal-kit companies—and as far as I can tell, few people are talking much about it. That's surprising, because it's actually the biggest (or heaviest, at least) thing in every meal-kit box: the freezer packs that keep the perishables fresh while they're being shipped. Blue Apron now sends out 8 million meals a month. If you figure that each box contains about three meals and two six-pound ice packs, that's a staggering 192,000 tons of freezer-pack waste every year from Blue Apron alone. To put that in perspective, that's the weight of nearly 100,000 cars or 2 million adult men. When I shared those numbers with Jack Macy, a senior coordinator for the San Francisco Department of the Environment's Commercial Zero Waste program, he could scarcely believe it. "That is an incredible waste," he said. The only reason he suspects he hasn't heard about it yet from the city's trash haulers is that the freezer packs end up hidden in garbage bags.

Given that many meal-kit companies claim to want to help the planet (by helping customers reduce food waste and buying products from environmentally responsible suppliers, for example), you'd think they would have come up with a plan for getting rid of this ever-growing glacier of freezer packs. Au contraire. Many blithely suggest that customers store old gel packs in their freezers for future use. Unless you happen to have your own meat locker, that's wildly impractical. I tried it, and in less than a month the packs—which are roughly the size of a photo album—had crowded practically everything else out of my freezer. Two personal organizers that I talked to reported that several clients had asked for a consult on what to do with all their accumulated freezer packs.

As Nathanael Johnson at Grist points out, Blue Apron has also suggested that customers donate used freezer packs to the Boy Scouts or other organizations. I asked my local Boy Scouts council whether they wanted my old meal-kit freezer packs. "What would we do with all those ice packs?" wondered the puzzled council executive. (Which is saying a lot for an organization whose motto is "be prepared.")

The meal-kit companies' online guides to recycling packaging are not especially helpful. (Blue Apron's is visible only to its customers.) Most of them instruct customers to thaw the freezer packs, cut open the plastic exterior, which is recyclable in some places, and then dump the thawed goo into the garbage. (Hello Fresh suggests flushing the goo down the toilet, which, experts told me, is a terrible idea because it can cause major clogs in your plumbing.) The problem with this advice is that it does not belong in a recycling guide—throwing 12 pounds of mystery goo into the garbage or toilet is not recycling.

To its credit, Blue Apron is the only major meal-kit service to offer a take-back program: Enterprising customers can mail freezer packs back to the company free of charge. But Blue Apron spokeswoman Allie Evarts refused to tell me how many of its customers actually do this. When I asked what the company does with all those used freezer packs, Evarts only told me, "We retain them for future use." So does that mean Blue Apron is actually reusing the packs in its meal kits, or is there an ever-growing mountain of them languishing in a big warehouse somewhere? Evarts wouldn't say.

Now back to that mystery goo, which, in case you're curious, is whitish clear, with the consistency of applesauce. Its active ingredient is a substance called sodium polyacrylate, a powder that can absorb 300 times its weight in water. It's used in all kinds of products, from detergent to fertilizer to surgical sponges. One of its most common uses is in disposable diapers—it's what soaks up the pee and keeps babies' butts dry. When saturated with water and frozen, sodium polyacrylate thaws much more slowly than water—meaning it can stay cold for days at a time.

Meal-kit companies assure their customers that the freezer-pack goo is nontoxic. That's true. But while sodium polyacrylate poses little to no danger to meal-kit customers, it's a different story for the people who manufacture the substance. (Meal-kit companies typically contract with freezer-pack manufacturers rather than making their own.) In its powdered state, it can get into workers' lungs, where it can cause serious problems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted in 2011 that workers in a sodium polyacrylate plant in India developed severe lung disease after inhaling the powder. Animal studies have shown that exposure to high concentrations of sodium polyacrylate can harm the lungs. Because of these known risks, some European countries have set limits on workers' exposure to sodium polyacrylate. Here in the United States, some industry groups and manufacturers recommend such limits as well as safety precautions for workers like ventilation, respirators, and thick gloves. But on the federal level, neither the Occupational Safety and Health Administration nor the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health have any rules at all. (The companies that supply freezer packs to Blue Apron and Hello Fresh did not return repeated requests for information on their manufacturing processes.)

Beyond the factory, sodium polyacrylate can also do a number on the environment. In part, that's because it's made from the same stuff as fossil fuels—meaning that making it produces significant greenhouse gas emissions, a team of Swedish researchers found in 2015 (PDF). It also doesn't biodegrade, so those mountains of freezer packs sitting in the garbage aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

So to review: Freezer packs create an epic mountain of garbage, and their goo is not as environmentally benign as meal-kit companies would have you believe. So what's to be done? One place to start might be a greener freezer pack. That same team of Swedish researchers also developed a sodium polyacrylate alternative using biodegradable plant materials instead of fossil fuels. A simpler idea: Companies could operate like milkmen used to, dropping off the new stuff and picking up the old packaging—including freezer packs—for reuse in one fell swoop.

A little creative thinking might go a long way—yet none of the companies that I talked to said they had any specific plans to change the freezer-pack system (though Hello Fresh did say it planned to reduce its freezer pack size from six pounds to five pounds). And when you think about it, why should they fix the problem? Heidi Sanborn, head of the recycling advocacy group California Product Stewardship Council, points out that the current arrangement suits the meal-kit providers just fine. "It's taxpayers that are paying for these old freezer packs to sit in the landfill forever," she says. "Companies are getting a total freebie."

Trump Has No Idea What He Just Did or the Backlash That Awaits

Rebecca Leber — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 19:47:25 +0000

The negotiations leading up to the Paris climate accord involved years of delicate diplomacy and thousands of voices offering guidance. President Donald Trump's handling of the decision to leave was the polar opposite.

Despite claiming that he's been "hearing from a lot of people," Trump doesn't appear to have any more detailed knowledge of climate change or the 2015 deal now than when he first pledged to cancel it on the campaign trail. The "lots of people" he's heard from include a disproportionate number of climate change deniers, even though there are far more leaders in industry and on both sides of the aisle advocating for the US to remain in the agreement. They have argued that the Paris deal is important to the US, not just for its environmental merits, but also so that the country is not excluded from the rest of the world, both economically and politically.

His months of hints and delays on a decision have drawn more than one comparison to The Bachelor reality show, but one with the highest of stakes. He recently went to the strongest US allies at the G-7 without a clear answer, leading the G-6 to isolate the US when it issued its communiqué that reaffirmed the agreement. As Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent noted, Trump’s nationalist case to exit Paris "does not allow space for recognition of what the Paris deal really is, which is constructive global engagement that serves America’s long term interests, as part of a system of mutually advantageous compromises."

Trump doesn't have any sense of the backlash that's coming for him and the US now that he's kickstarted the process of pulling out, which won't be official for another three years. Two factors will especially hurt the US: First, the world has been dealing with the US as an unreliable partner on climate change for more than two decades, and leaders still well remember the other times the US reversed course on its promises; second, the world has never been more aligned in favor of action, making climate change a much bigger factor in the US relationship with its allies in non-climate related issues—from trade to defense to immigration—than it once was.

Trump officials might have taken note of the consequences of US inconsistency with the 1997 Kyoto climate treaty. President Bill Clinton signed the treaty, which had binding targets, but never submitted it to the Senate for ratification. In 2001, Bush officials declared Kyoto dead and withdrew the US from the agreement. International backlash ensued. Some in the Bush administration, which like Trump's was split on how to handle Kyoto, came to regret how it was handled for the damage it did to the standing of the US in the world.

"Kyoto—this is not talking out of school—was not handled as well as it should have been," Bush's Secretary of State* Colin Powell said in 2002. "And when the blowback came I think it was a sobering experience that everything the American president does has international repercussions."

In her 2011 memoir, then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice detailed the reaction Bush faced in meetings with European leaders. Because of the way the administration handled the abrupt withdrawal, "we suffered through this issue over the years: drawing that early line in the sand helped to establish our reputation for 'unilateralism.' We handled it badly." Rice called it a "self-inflicted wound that could have been avoided."

US withdrawal also shifted the power dynamics across the world and gave Russia, which signed the agreement, greater leverage in international affairs. Russia's ratification became pivotal to the treaty entering into force, and in turn, it used its ratification to gain Europe's backing to enter the World Trade Organization, even while the US still had outstanding concerns. President Vladimir Putin noted in 2004 that the "EU has met us halfway in talks over the WTO and that cannot but affect positively our position vis-a-vis the Kyoto Protocol." Paris has already met the threshold needed to go into effect, but Russia is still pursuing a similar role and reaffirmed its commitment to the Paris accord today, seasoned with some light trolling: "Of course the effectiveness of implementing this convention without the key participants, perhaps, will be hindered," a Kremlin spokesperson told CNN. "But there is no alternative as of now."

We're decades away from the Kyoto treaty now, but many experts expect a US exit from Paris not to weaken the world's resolve in addressing climate change as much as it will create a power vacuum other countries might be eager to fill. Andrew Light, a senior fellow with the World Resources Institute, says it is "definitely going to hurt the US with respect to other countries sitting down and negotiating on anything the US is interested in." Light, who was a State Department climate official in the Obama administration, argued, "We're creating a vacuum in parts of the world where we have very clear security interests, not just climate, but security in North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. It creates an opening that China, the EU, and even India can step in and fill."

Conservatives have issued similar warnings.

In a New York Times op-ed earlier this month, George Shultz, a former Cabinet member of the Reagan and Nixon administrations, and Climate Leadership Council's Ted Halstead wrote, "Global statecraft relies on trust, reputation and credibility, which can be all too easily squandered. The United States is far better off maintaining a seat at the head of the table rather than standing outside. If America fails to honor a global agreement that it helped forge, the repercussions will undercut our diplomatic priorities across the globe, not to mention the country's global standing and the market access of our firms."

It's little surprise that Trump's own secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, agrees, preferring the US to retain a seat at the table.

To find the kind of momentum it eventually gained to enter into force in record time, negotiators in Paris had to bridge differences between developing and industrialized nations. "One of the great achievements of Paris, but sometimes overlooked, is it gave a very strong signal that climate change is no longer an isolated area of diplomacy," Light says. For example, climate change and renewable energy became building blocks in the US relationship with India, leading eventually to a bilateral commitment on climate change in the run-up to Paris.

While the US retreats, other nations are going to be building bridges with China as it curbs its sizeable greenhouse gas footprint. That's already happening: This week, the EU and China engaged in a climate summit where they signaled their "highest political commitment" to Paris, just as Trump pulls out. This will also not help the US president in his much-vaunted fight against terrorism. He's losing goodwill not just with Europe, but with partners in developing nations that stood to benefit from the $3 billion commitment the US had made to climate finance—another commitment that Trump won't deliver on. That means losing one of the main ways the US has built friendly relationships with countries that can otherwise be fraught with tension. Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy offers China as an example: "The South China Sea. Human rights. Trade. Currency manipulation. When U.S.-China relations are discussed we often ascribe these issues some level of tension. However, our countries’ cooperation has historically been more cordial and productive in one area: environmental protection."

Union of Concerned Scientists' Director of Strategy and Policy Alden Meyer, a longtime expert on the UN climate process, compared the US to the cartoon character Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip, always taking away the football from Charlie Brown at the very last moment. The rest of the world is likely to become weary of the US constantly taking away the ball when it comes time to negotiate tough issues like trade and terror, which Trump has sought to champion.

Or as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres put it this week, countries all over the world have only two options on climate: "Get on board or get left behind."

* Corrected

Elon Musk Threatens to Ditch Trump's Advisory Council Over Paris Climate Treaty Withdrawal

Inae Oh — Wed, 31 May 2017 19:03:49 +0000

Amid news reports that President Donald Trump is preparing to pull the US out of the Paris climate treaty on Wednesday, Tesla CEO and member of Trump's economic advisory council, Elon Musk, threatened to step down as an adviser if the president went through with the withdrawal.

Musk took to Twitter to insist he had done all he could to convince Trump to remain in the accord. When asked what he would do if his efforts went unheeded, the Tesla CEO said he would have no choice but to leave:

Musk is among a growing list of executives, Republicans, and oil industry leaders urging Trump to remain in the treaty that 195 countries have signed.

In December, Musk attracted widespread criticism for his decision to serve on Trump's advisory team, which includes other heads of powerful companies such as Disney and Walmart. While he previously expressed reservations regarding Trump's fitness for the Oval Office, Musk would later rationalize his decision to advise Trump as his effort to provide a "voice of reason" in the increasingly erratic administration.

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer refused to confirm mounting reports of Trump's plan to pull out of the agreement. When asked specifically about Musks' threat, Spicer told reporters, "Let's wait and see what the president's decision is."

Exxon's Shareholders Just Forced the Oil Giant's Hand on Climate Change

Inae Oh — Wed, 31 May 2017 18:07:37 +0000

In a landmark victory in the fight against climate change by corporations, Exxon Mobil shareholders on Wednesday voted to approve a plan that could force the oil company to release more information concerning its efforts to combat global warming.

The 62.3-to-37.7 landmark vote, which took place at Exxon's annual meeting in Dallas, comes amid mounting investor pressure for management to be more accountable when working to prevent worldwide temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius—a goal stipulated in the Paris climate accord. The energy giant has been notoriously resistant to such calls, with some board members claiming the company already produces enough reporting on the issue.

Last year, when the same measure was called to a vote, only 38.1 percent of shareholders supported it. In the interim, several new lawsuits against Exxon, including ones from the attorney generals in New York and Massachusetts, have been launched, accusing the world's largest oil company of knowingly misleading the public about the effects of global warming for decades. In a twist, Exxon and its former head, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, are among those urging the Trump administration to remain in the accord.

The unprecedented resolution on Wednesday was announced just hours after multiple news outlets reported President Donald Trump intends to withdraw from the historic Paris climate agreement, although the president himself remained coy on Twitter about his final decision.

I will be announcing my decision on the Paris Accord over the next few days. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2017

New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli recently told CNN that Exxon's defense of the Paris accord amounted to "empty words unless the company backs them up with action." On Wednesday, DiNapoli applauded the shareholder vote as an "unprecedented victory," noting the onus was now on Exxon to meet the demands of its investors and take climate change "seriously."

The Entire World Would Be Better Off If Donald Trump Just Watched This Video

Tom Zeller Jr. — Thu, 01 Jun 2017 10:00:45 +0000

In a yearlong series of short films for Undark, the digital publication of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program at MIT, Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Ian Cheney, whose works include documentaries like "King Corn," "The Search for General Tso," and "The City Dark," turned his lens on climate change. In just over 12 minutes, he explores the scale of the challenge facing humanity: scientific and technical, the emotional, psychological, and political. Cheney doesn't pretend to offer answers or specific solutions; he only seeks to shine a light into the fog, to look for shapes and patterns, and ultimately to explore the many reasons why the problem of climate change is so difficult for humanity to even fathom, much less come together to solve.

Take a look at the film here:

Above is a 12-minute compilation of Cheney's six short films in his series for Undark, "Measure of a Fog." We also encourage visitors to explore each of the six installments, which are individually titled "Distance," "Carbon," "Energy," "Geoengineering," "Politics," and "Ethics."

"The very concept of 'climate' challenges the human mind," Cheney noted at the outset of the series. "Its epochal timescales are difficult to fathom, its inner mechanics, rhythms and contours — they're sometimes hard to discern, and even scientists are still trying to understand it all.

"Meanwhile," he continued, "the changes we're making to this immense, complex machinery — changes arising from a colorless, odorless gas tied to positive-sounding things like progress and growth and prosperity — it can all seem placeless and everywhere at the same time, both invisible and plain as day."

Exploring and admitting to those tensions and ambiguities, Cheney suggests, is an important part of any conversation on where we go from here — perhaps the most important part. We hope you will find them useful as you continue your own discussions on this most crucial topic.

The Question Sean Spicer Hasn't Asked the President

Rebecca Leber — Tue, 30 May 2017 20:24:09 +0000

You'd think President Donald Trump's opinion of climate change might inform the decision he promised to make on the Paris climate accord this week, following meetings with G7 leaders who pressured him to keep the US engaged. But it seems his team doesn't know what his position actually is.

At a White House briefing on Tuesday, here is Press Secretary Sean Spicer's response to a reporter's question about whether Trump believes human activity is contributing to global warming: "Honestly, I haven't asked him. I can get back to you."

The reporter then asked if he feels as if Trump is still trying to make up his mind. "I don't know," Spicer responded.

Though Spicer didn't hint at what his boss will ultimately decide, he mentioned that Trump and Environmental Protection Agency Chief Scott Pruitt met on Tuesday. That might be a bad sign, as Pruitt has been leading the Trump administration's "leave" contingent.

It's not just Spicer who's sent mixed signals about whether Trump still thinks global warming is a "total, and very expensive, hoax," as he's tweeted.

During a press briefing in late March, when Trump was rolling out his anti-climate executive orders, a reporter asked a senior White House official whether the president accepted that humans contribute to climate change. "Sure. Yes, I think the president understands the disagreement over the policy response," he replied. But pressed further, he couldn't fully explain Trump's position, his advisers, or his own, for that matter. "I guess the key question is to what extent, over what period of time," he said. "Those are the big questions that I think still we need to answer."

His advisers have recently suggested that Trump's views on the Paris deal and climate change were, in the words of economic adviser Gary Cohn, "evolving," though they've offered little evidence of what those views now are. "I think he is learning to understand the European position," Cohn said during the G7 meetings last week. Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who acknowledges climate change as a threat, claimed Trump was "curious about why others were in the position they were" on the Paris deal, and that he was "wide open" on the issue.

Regardless what Trump thinks of the Paris agreement, he's been clear that his policy choices won't reflect the best available science. Our timeline of Trump's comments on global warming should give you a better idea of the ebbs and flows of his position since 2009.

Reports: Trump Is Planning to Abandon the Paris Climate Deal

Rebecca Leber — Wed, 31 May 2017 14:09:24 +0000

Multiple news outlets are reporting Wednesday morning that President Donald Trump intends to pull the United States out of the landmark Paris climate accord, citing White House officials. Trump himself continues to tease out the dramatic finish to a decision that he has put off for months:

I will be announcing my decision on the Paris Accord over the next few days. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2017

What's not quite clear yet is whether Trump intends to pull out of the Paris agreement itself, or the entire treaty underlining all international climate change negotiations, called the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. To pull out of Paris but keep the United States involved in the broader UNFCCC process would take more than three years, but withdrawing from the entire framework would be easier—though the backlash for doing so could be even stronger. Withdrawing from the UNFCCC, formed in 1992, would be a far more extreme move to undermine climate progress.

BREAKING: EU official: EU and China to reaffirm their commitment to Paris climate deal regardless of US decision.
— The Associated Press (@AP) May 31, 2017

The Paris deal, negotiated in late 2015, promised to be a new form of international cooperation to fight climate change. It didn't promise any miracles for fighting climate change, such as keeping the world to under 2 degrees Celsius of warming or committing countries to legally binding targets, but it did rally big developing nations to promise emissions cuts for the first time in history.

The very basis for the deal, a so-called "bottoms-up" approach to greenhouse gas targets, was to avoid a legally binding treaty. Nations put forward domestic targets and through international peer pressure can revise those targets to become stricter as time goes by. Far from imposing emissions targets on the United States, the deal just required the United States, like everyone else, to put a pledge on the table, which Trump could have then revised.

The Obama administration proposed to cut US emissions by 26 to 28 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, detailed in the Clean Power Plan, another policy Trump has begun to unwind.

Another important part of the Paris deal is the Green Climate Fund, which mobilizes billions of dollars to help developing nations fight and adapt to climate change. Trump has refused to deliver on the rest of the United States' $3 billion pledge to the fund.

Trump argues that the United States, the world's second-biggest greenhouse gas emitter—and historically the largest polluter, period—got the unfair end of the Paris deal. His administration is split though: His Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt has echoed Trump's anti-Paris remarks during his campaign while lobbying in TV interviews for Trump to leave. Steve Bannon is also firmly in favor of leaving.

The other side's main advocates are Ivanka Trump and Rex Tillerson. There are also some surprising Trump allies pushing Trump to retain a seat at the table, like Exxon Mobil and Peabody Coal. And in the last week, two Florida Republican congressman, Reps. Vern Buchanan and Carlos Curbelo, have pressed Trump to stay in the deal.

Agree w/ fellow @waysandmeansgop member @VernBuchanan. Protecting the environment and growing the economy are not mutually exclusive https://t.co/p9O822vPIq
— Rep. Carlos Curbelo (@RepCurbelo) May 30, 2017

It was once unthinkable in the environmental community that the next US president would take this step. But Paris isn't dead, even if the United States withdraws. It matters as much how other countries respond.

"Should the president withdraw the US from the Paris agreement it would define his America First foreign policy as being oblivious to important global challenges that the American people and our allies care deeply about," says Nigel Purvis, who has worked as a US climate negotiator and is now president of the consulting group Climate Advisers. "Regardless of whether the US participates in the Paris Agreement, other countries will continue to take action against climate change. They understand that most of what they need to do to reduce their climate pollution are things that make their economies more competitive and their people better off."

She's a Climate Scientist. Here's Why She Quit Working for Trump.

Elizabeth Shogren — Mon, 29 May 2017 10:00:10 +0000

This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The day after President Donald Trump's unexpected victory, Jane Zelikova was "crying her eyes out" in her office at the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington, D.C. As a scientist researching how big fossil-fuel industries can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, she feared that her work would be stymied because of the new president's skepticism about climate change. As a Jewish refugee who came to the United States as a teen, she felt threatened by Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric during the campaign. The election also created a rift in her family: Her father voted for Trump; her mother sat out the election. "Every part of me that I identify with felt fear and anger combined into outrage," Zelikova said.

She texted furiously with three close friends—other women scientists she had known since they went to graduate school at the University of Colorado, Boulder. At first, they simply shared their alarm. But by the second day, they wondered what they could do about it. "We moved into an email thread and added women scientists we knew," Zelikova recalled. "It grew very quickly—from five people to 20 to 50 to 100—within a matter of a couple of days."

They drafted an open letter from women scientists. "We fear that the scientific progress and momentum in tackling our biggest challenges, including staving off the worst impacts of climate change, will be severely hindered under this next U.S. administration," they wrote. The letter rejects the "hateful rhetoric" of the campaign and commits to overcoming discrimination against women and minorities in science. Then they built a website and gathered signatures. Thousands signed on, and a new activist group was born: 500 Women Scientists.

Zelikova's experience mirrors a broader phenomenon. Many scientists felt threatened enough by Trump's victory to abandon their usual detached objectivity. They wrote members of Congress to defend science funding and scientific advisory panels and used their knowledge of government research to protect data they feared could be erased from websites. They set up alternative Twitter sites for government agencies and planned and participated in protests. "The election mobilized scientists in a way we've never seen before," said Gretchen Goldman, who leads research on science in public policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an activist group. "I've personally been blown away by the scientists who want to be engaged in a new way."

Previously, Zelikova, a 39-year-old Ph.D. soil ecologist, had envisioned a future as a research scientist, working in academia or in government. But Trump's election, she said, is changing her in ways she never could have imagined. Her whirlwind metamorphosis provides a glimpse into just how disruptive the last six months have been for some in federal government. Zelikova—who is intense, articulate and has an engaging smile—doesn't have a permanent federal job. She took a leave from the University of Wyoming, where she's a research scientist, for a two-year fellowship at the Energy Department. She had less to lose than career civil servants with mortgages and government pensions, so she felt freer to speak out.

The Trump administration has proposed deep staff and budget cuts for the Energy Department, Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies whose mission involves safeguarding the environment. Many federal workers committed to protecting the environment share Zelikova's angst but won't say so publicly for fear of retribution.

For weeks after the election, Zelikova barely slept, working late into the night on her new group. "I am a Jewish, refugee, immigrant, woman scientist. At some level, this felt really personally offensive to me, and like an attack on all the parts of me that make me a complete human," Zelikova recalled. She had always been skeptical of political protests. She grew up in Eastern Ukraine, where Communist leaders used to orchestrate demonstrations in the 1980s. But Trump's election moved her to join protests. Her first was the Women's March the day after the Inauguration in Washington, D.C. After that, she frequently joined demonstrations, protesting Trump's travel ban and the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Meanwhile, things were changing in Zelikova's day job at the Department of Energy. In early December, Trump's transition team sent out a questionnaire that attempted to identify employees who worked on climate change. Staffers feared the new administration would target people who had worked on former President Barack Obama's climate change agenda. The day after the inauguration, with the Obama team gone, Zelikova attended a staff meeting at which, she said, only white men talked. "The backslide was immediate," she said. Trump's budget proposal, which came out in March, slashed funding for science and research. The morale at the agency was low and dropping.

Still, Zelikova kept working on her research. She was part of a team responding to Montana Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock's request that the Energy Department analyze options for keeping the state's largest coal-fired power plant, Colstrip, in business. Zelikova's team came up with scenarios for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent or more by installing equipment to capture carbon dioxide emissions.

Capturing carbon takes a lot of energy, however. So Zelikova went to Colstrip last fall to talk about using renewable energy—wind or solar—to power the carbon-capture process and thereby cut emissions even further. "Wouldn't it be cool if instead of sucking that parasitic load off the plant, you powered it with renewable energy?" she said. She thinks the idea holds great promise for other fossil-fuel plants. "We went to national labs and universities, and we talked to people about how do we make this happen," Zelikova said. "And then the election happened, and it felt like this isn't going to happen." Trump is determined to eliminate Obama's Clean Power Plan, removing a major incentive for plants like Colstrip to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. His budget proposal recommends slashing funding for the Energy Department's renewable energy and fossil fuel research programs. "I'm seeing all that work become really threatened," Zelikova said. "It feels like betrayal, because I got so personally invested."

Her boss at the time, David Mohler, recalls her reaction: "She was distraught clearly and for understandable reasons; the Trump team is really not appreciative of science, and certainly they don't believe in climate science." Before becoming deputy assistant secretary of the Office of Clean Coal and Carbon Management, Mohler was chief technology officer for the country's biggest electric utility, Duke Energy. Trump will probably slow reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, Mohler says. But even Trump can't stop progress on climate change: Utilities won't reopen closed coal-fired power plants, and low-priced natural gas will keep replacing coal. And Mohler believes that wind and solar will continue to expand because of declining costs, state mandates and tax incentives, which have bipartisan support in Congress.

Mohler, an Obama appointee, left government on Jan. 20, and moved back to South Carolina. Zelikova started thinking about leaving Washington, too. "Resistance as daily existence was starting to diminish my ability to function," Zelikova recalled. She talked her supervisor into letting her move to Colorado in February for the rest of her fellowship. She continued to work for the Energy Department at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden. In her spare time, she kept building 500 Women Scientists. The group grew quickly, spawning nearly 150 local branches around the globe in just a few months.

One branch was founded in Seattle by Sarah Myhre, a 34-year-old climate change scientist at the University of Washington's Department of Atmospheric Sciences. The group gave Myhre the courage to stand up to a prominent professor, Cliff Mass, from her own department.

In January, at a state legislative committee hearing, Myhre criticized Mass for stressing uncertainties about how much human-caused climate change is affecting wildfires and ocean acidification in the Pacific Northwest. Myhre described Mass as an "outlier" in the department whose views did not represent the broad scientific consensus. In online comments to a Seattle Times opinion piece Myhre wrote in February with Zelikova and another woman scientist, Mass called them "three idealistic young scientists (none of them really are climate scientists, by the way)." When Myhre traveled to Washington, D.C., at the end of April for the People's Climate March, one of the women she marched with carried a sign that read: "Idealistic Young Real Scientists."

A week earlier, on Earth Day, Zelikova joined other members of 500 Women Scientists for the March for Science in Washington, D.C., waiting for hours in a chilly rain to get through security screening for the rally at the Washington National Monument. Shivering in her watermelon-red ski shell, Zelikova reflected on the ways her life would be different if Trump had not been elected. "I would have never founded a big group—ever," she said. "I would have never been a loud advocate for things. I would have never protested. These are now the hugest part of my life."

At the end of May, Zelikova quit her fellowship at the Energy Department. In July, she will start a new job for a tiny nonprofit called the Center for Carbon Removal, based in Berkeley, California. She hopes to help states move forward on capturing carbon from fossil fuel plants. "Western states are perfectly poised to lead on climate action," she said. "In terms of federal action, there's going to be very little, so we need to work with states, so that when the political climate changes and there can be federal action, we can be ready to go."

Wow. The Grand Canyon Is Being Stolen By a Sea of Fog.

Mary Papenfuss — Sun, 28 May 2017 10:00:10 +0000

This story was originally published by HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

SKYGLOWPROJECT.COM: KAIBAB ELEGY from Harun Mehmedinovic on Vimeo.

A stunning time-lapse video of the Grand Canyon shows the carved formation as it may have looked millennia ago — but instead of water, it’s filled with what has the appearance of an ocean of fog.

Filmmaker Harun Mehmedinovic has set up his camera at the canyon 30 different times since 2015. During one visit, he managed to witness and film the dramatic changes of a full cloud inversion, which occurs when warm air traps cold air beneath and creates a sea of fog. The inversion lasted the entire day, allowing time for Mehmedinovic to film fog “crashing” on the “shores” of the canyon and swirling through winding passages.

The film made its debut on BBC Earth in early May and has been viewed online millions of times.

The video is part of the Skyglow Project, a crowdfunded operation to record the effects of light pollution from urban areas and contrast them with stunning vistas.

Mehmedinovic is a Bosnian-American who went into hiding in his war-wracked hometown of Sarajevo for three years when he was 9. His family stayed indoors in a cellar of their home to escape the Serbs. He moved to the U.S. when he was 13 and went to film school in Los Angeles.

Check out the Reuters video below for more information about background:

Reuters TV interviews Harun Mehmedinovic from Harun Mehmedinovic on Vimeo.

Trump's Behavior in Europe Has Made the World Cringe. Here's What's Really on the Line at the G7.

Rebecca Leber — Fri, 26 May 2017 16:28:21 +0000

Update, May 27, 2017: The G7 broke with tradition to release an unusual statement where six nations reaffirmed the Paris climate agreement, without the US. “The United States of America is in the process of reviewing its policies on climate change and on the Paris Agreement and thus is not in a position to join the consensus on these topics,” the communiqué reads. "Understanding this process, the Heads of State and of Government of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom and the Presidents of the European Council and of the European Commission reaffirm their strong commitment to swiftly implement the Paris Agreement."

Trump says he’ll be ready to make a decision on Paris “next week”:

I will make my final decision on the Paris Accord next week!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2017

One year ago Friday, when speaking on a campaign stop in North Dakota, Donald Trump declared he'd "cancel" the Paris climate agreement within 100 days of his presidency, framing it as a "bad deal" that undermines domestic interests. The 100 days have passed, but his unfulfilled pledge hangs over the G7 meeting in Italy.

Trump has already appeared to push a NATO leader aside in Brussels and caused a diplomatic scuffle in Italy after accusing Germany of being "very bad" on trade. But his decision on Paris is far more significant, especially in terms of the response of the 195 signers of the 2015 agreement. The question is whether the rest of the world sinks to the low bar that Trump has set, and the G7 is the first key test. On the one hand, Trump's resistance may force the G7 to downgrade its climate ambitions and show how US denial is already taking its toll on the global stage. On the other, a G7 that reaffirms Paris goals would demonstrate that the rest of the world won't be dragged down by America's new president.

"I think what the other countries are concerned about is that there is not any question about the rest of the industrialized countries raising ambition over time," says Union of Concerned Scientist's Director of Strategy and Policy Alden Meyer, who's followed global climate negotiations for more than 20 years. "That's why this is so tricky to go along with the US's minimalist demands in negotiations."

After world leaders from Germany, France, Canada, Japan, Italy, and the United Kingdom meet on Friday, senior officials will gather to hammer out a text to try to represent a unified front, with global warming usually ranking among the top priorities. Climate change may not be important to Trump, who's regularly called it a hoax, but it is to leaders of the G7—and has been for a long time. Meyer, who's followed global climate negotiations for more than 20 years, points to 2005 as when concerns began, but David Waskow, World Resources Institute's International Climate Initiative director, says the focus extends even further back, receiving some mention in every G7 text for the last three decades.

That's not to say there were never any disagreements. In 2015, Canada, home to carbon-intensive tar sands and then led by the conservative Stephen Harper, resisted strong climate goals but eventually agreed to a long-term decarbonization target that involved phasing out fossil fuel use by the end of the century. Japan, which has higher emissions than most countries in the G7, save for the United States, has also historically resisted stronger climate language and has become more reliant on coal ever since it mothballed nuclear plants after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Yet both these countries have changed. Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is more committed on climate change than his predecessor was, and Japan has vowed to fulfill its pledges in the Paris agreement. European countries, especially Germany, are expected to take on new leadership in climate negotiations. France's new President Emmanuel Macron urged Trump in Brussels on Thursday not to abandon the deal.

"We're seeing a much broader set of actors playing a real leadership role," says Waskow. "It ranges from major emitters, like the EU, China, and Canada coming together, to many of the most vulnerable countries, to many countries in between, as well as cities, states, and businesses. It's no longer dependent on one or two countries playing that leadership role."

But Trump could change everything. The United States is still the major polluter in the G7, at 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to self-reported data to the United Nations, and second in the world only to China. France, Italy, and Canada are each responsible for less than 2 percent of global emissions, and Germany and Japan's slightly higher emissions hardly compare to pollution in the United States. If it were up to Trump, the G7 would probably break its tradition on climate change and ignore the issue entirely. His administration is divided on the Paris decision, and the uncertainty has spilled over into other international negotiations.

Even if the United States remained in the agreement, it would likely push for lower engagement across the world, urging countries to include language that recognizes the long-term dominance of fossil fuels, which the oil, gas, and coal industries would appreciate seeing. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this month, Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who was an energy adviser on Trump's campaign, argued that the United States should advocate "advancing technology for clean coal and pushing for increased investment and a better regulatory environment" in future climate talks.

On the other hand, the United States will face pressure to flip on Trump's insistence that we do nothing. We saw that at an Arctic Council meeting with Nordic countries, Russia, and Canada earlier this month, where Secretary of State Rex Tillerson agreed to text that loosely reaffirmed the Paris climate agreement and global action to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Headed into the Arctic Council, it wasn't clear if the United States would attempt to remove language on Paris entirely.

Meanwhile, the world waits for Trump to decide: recommit, drop out, or come up with some understanding for continued engagement.

"Some of the Europeans seem to think he may make a decision on the spot in the [G7] meeting," Meyer says. "No one obviously knows. Maybe even including him."