Free Republic

The Trump administration will reverse course from previous Obama administration policy, eliminating climate change from a list of national security threats. The National Security Strategy to be released on Monday will emphasize the importance of balancing energy security with economic development and environmental protection, according to a source who has seen the document and shared excerpts of a late draft. “Climate policies will continue to shape the global energy system,” a draft of the National Security Strategy slated to be released on Monday said. “U.S. leadership is indispensable to countering an anti-growth, energy agenda that is detrimental to U.S. economic...

It’s hard to be optimistic about climate action, not in a week when federal scientists reported that “the Arctic shows no sign of returning” to the “reliably frozen region of recent past decades.” Not in a month when California’s wildfires show every sign of burning straight through Christmas. And not in a moment when the federal government keeps scrubbing basic climate information from its websites. But something big is starting to shift. After years of effort from activists, there are signs that the world’s financial community is finally rousing itself in the fight against global warming. A foretaste came last...

‘We have an obligation to redistribute’ The holiday season is upon us, and leave it to an Ivy Leaguer to play the role of the proverbial stick in the mud. Writing in the Yale Daily News, guest columnist Xuan (who uses the pronouns “they” and “them”) invokes the United States’ “legacy of colonialism, exploitation, slavery and genocide” to argue that Americans’ personal charity isn’t “quite enough” nor “all of morality.” They offer examples of a shady used car salesman and a sketchy entrepreneur who, after screwing over people in the past attempt to make good later in life through charitable...

The recent round of U.N. climate negotiations ended Friday in Bonn, Germany. While no important decisions were made on climate finance — transfers from wealthy to poor countries to support climate mitigation and adaptation — the question of who pays for global climate gave rise to heated debates. Trump’s decision leaves the United States alone outside the Paris agreement. While U.S. noncooperation shouldn’t deter other countries from pledging climate action, my recent research with Thijs Van de Graaf shows that it threatens industrialized countries’ promises of climate finance for mitigation and adaptation in poorer countries. If the United States refuses...

UN negotiations on implementing the Paris climate change agreement wrapped up on Friday after two weeks of talks that were slowed down by the United States defending the use of fossil fuels. Delegates reported mixed progress in Germany, with the reemergence of divisions between rich and developing countries. A key stumbling block was on finance for the world’s poorer nations to help them prepare for, and deal with, the fallout from climate change including more frequent and severe superstorms, droughts and land- and crop-gobbling sea level rises. Another obstacle was the insistence of developed nations led by the US that...

A Peruvian farmer won a small but significant legal victory on Monday when a German court said his appeal against energy giant RWE, which he accuses of contributing to climate change that is threatening his Andean home, had merit. After hearing oral arguments from both sides, the higher regional court in the western city of Hamm said Saul Luciano Lliuya’s demand for damages from RWE was “admissible”, paving the way for the case to proceed. Luciano argues that RWE, as one of the world’s top emitters of climate-altering carbon dioxide, must share in the cost of protecting his hometown Huaraz...

BONN, GERMANY - Today, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP23), WHO, in collaboration with the UN Climate Change secretariat and in partnership with the Fijian Presidency of the twenty-third Conference of the Parties (COP23), has launched a special initiative to protect people living in Small Island Developing States from the heath impacts of climate change. The initiative has 4 main goals. First, to amplify the voices of health leaders in Small Island Developing States, so they have more impact at home and internationally. Second, to gather the evidence to support the business case for investment in climate change...

With the first week of the UN-sponsored climate talks drawing to a close, the trust deficit between rich industrialised and poor developing countries that has for long marred the negotiations appears to be back in some measure. The co-operative spirit that underpinned the talks at Paris and Marrakech seems to be fast receding. Unlike the Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015, which requires that beginning in 2020 all countries take measures to tackle climate change, in the pre-2020 period, the onus is on industrialised countries. The pre-2020 actions also includes the voluntary efforts that poor developing countries took on to slowdown...

The failure of wealthy nations to deliver on short-term climate commitments could hinder the rollout of a landmark treaty, a bloc of 134 developing countries, including India and China, warned Thursday at UN negotiations in Bonn. The diplomatic spat has underscored the difficulty of reaching a consensus at the 196-nation talks. "If we do not respect decisions that we have made, then how can we build trust among the parties?" said Chen Zhihua, China's senior negotiator, referring to long-standing pledges by rich nations to enhance financial support and "revisit" targets for curbing greenhouse gas emissions before 2020. "And how can...

When a damaging heat wave occurs, how much responsibility do the major greenhouse gas-emitting countries bear? It's a question scientists say they're getting closer to answering at a country-by-country level. As international climate negotiators meet in Germany this week, a team of scientists has published a method for estimating how individual countries' shares of global greenhouse gas emissions over time contributed to the risk of specific extreme climate events, like heat waves, occurring in other countries. The new techniques "make it possible to assign extreme events to human-induced climate change and historical emissions," and "allow losses and damage associated with...

The International Monetary Fund has told rich countries they must do more to help poor nations cope with climate change or suffer from the weaker global growth and higher migration flows that will inevitably result. In a chapter released ahead of the publication of next month’s World Economic Outlook, the Washington-based IMF said low-income countries had contributed little to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and could not afford to tackle the problem from their own meagre resources. “Rising temperatures would have vastly unequal effects across the world, with the brunt of adverse consequences borne by those who can least...

During the online “Overtime” segment of Friday’s edition of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that Obamacare did redistribute income and President Obama should have said so. Maher said, “Obamacare is not putting us into the red. No. It’s actually making a little money. Because, you know, it was a redistribution of income. When they accused him that, he should have said, ‘Yeah. F*ck yeah. Exactly. That’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re taking money from people who will never miss it, and giving it to poor people who desperately need it. Sue me.'”

All of this raises critical questions for climate change law and policy. Here, the team of lawyers at the Sabin Center offers a brief primer on eleven key climate law issues highlighted by and likely to arise due to Hurricane Harvey: 1. Disaster Recovery Legislation... 2. Flood Insurance Reform... 3. Flood Maps 4. Flood Protection for Federal Projects 5. Controlling Air Emissions from Damaged Facilities 6. Handling Toxic Pollutants and Discharges of Toxic Water Pollution 7. Chemical Safety 8. Damage to Superfund Sites 9. Zoning and Building Codes 10. Public utilities 11. Climate Change Attribution and Hurricanes: Numerous scientists have...

Harvey is precisely the kind of weather event that scientists have been predicting climate change would give us, a monster hurricane with severe downpours and devastating flooding. Yet some are still resisting reality, by noting that we can't connect this specific storm to climate change. The same is true of cancer and tobacco, as climate scientist Heidi Cullen points out. We still can't say for sure that someone who smokes two packs a day and dies from lung cancer died because of smoking. The pace and severity of global storms today is unnatural, as are the melting glaciers and rising...

A customer dining at D.C.’s Oceanaire restaurant noticed an unusual line at the bottom of his receipt: “Due to the rising costs of doing business in this location, including costs associated with higher minimum wage rates, a 3% surcharge has been added to your total bill.” Brian, who asked The Washington Post to use only his first name to avoid conflicts with his employer, was surprised to see the additional charge. He snapped a picture and sent it to local blog Popville, which posted a picture of his receipt. The outraged comments started rolling in. “Just raise prices if you...

I first heard the term “basic income” in the socialist magazine Dissent in 2005. I was a 15-year-old leftist with a taste for weird, radical plans to restructure society: say, having the government buy up majority stakes in every company and then distribute them equally to every American; converting all companies into worker cooperatives; trying a planned economy where the planning is done by decentralized worker and consumer councils rather than a government bureaucracy. Basic income, wherein the government gives everyone enough cash to live on with no strings attached, struck me as an idea in that mold: another never-going-to-happen...

The U.S. decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement means Turkey is less inclined to ratify the deal because the U.S. move jeopardizes compensation promised to developing countries, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday. Erdogan was speaking at the G20 summit in Germany where leaders from the world's leading economies broke with U.S. President Donald Trump over climate policy, following his announcement last month that he was withdrawing from the accord.

Britain is pulling out of an agreement that permits fishermen from five other countries to operate in U.K. waters, the first step in reasserting control over its fishing industry as it prepares to leave the European Union. The government announced Sunday it will trigger the two-year process of leaving the London Fisheries Convention, which allows vessels from France, Belgium, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands to fish between six and 12 nautical miles off the U.K. coastline. Britain signed the convention before it joined the EU and would be bound by its terms after leaving the bloc unless it starts to...

Amazon will now offer discount memberships to its Prime subscription service at a rate of $5.99 each month. Prime is best known for getting subscribers unlimited free two-day shipping on most items, as well as allowing access to Prime Music, Prime Video, Prime Reading and Prime Photos. For now, the discount is available to people with a valid Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards, but Amazon said it plans to expand the lower rate to people on other government assistance programs. Amazon said a Prime membership helps customers “save time and money.” “We designed this membership option for customers receiving government...

Thomas Edsall, the longtime Washington Post reporter now writing on his New York Times blog, laments the increasing tendency of high-income Americans to vote Democratic. That leaves the Democrats with an increasingly affluent constituency, presumably unwilling (or less willing than others) to support redistributive policies like Bernie Sanders's proposal for higher tax rates on the affluent. "In the past," Edsall writes, "Democrats could support progressive, redistributive policies knowing that the costs would fall largely on Republicans. That is no longer the case. Now supporting these policies requires the party to depend on the altruistic idealism of millions of supporters who,...