Lisa Friedman

Climate scientists and energy economists say the plan is technically impractical, politically unfeasible and possibly ineffective.

Yet the criticism does not appear to bother many of the young voters who will have an important role in selecting a Democratic presidential candidate, and who overwhelmingly place climate change at the top of their priority lists, according to polls.

“He has some really great ideas that may not be passed, but it’s definitely stuff that needs to be brought up,” said Chandler Condon, a 25-year-old supporter who traveled from Denver to Des Moines, Iowa, last week for a climate rally with Sanders.

“People saying that it’s too radical, it’s like, well, we need that radical change,” she said.

David Victor, a professor of international relations at the University of California San Diego and a climate adviser to Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, called that “the big challenge for serious policy in the Democratic Party.”

“The progressive wing wants radical change, and climate change is one of those areas where this has really been the most palpable,” he said. “The Sanders plan claims to deliver radical change, but it can’t work in the real world.”

Sanders is not a newcomer to the climate issue; he has spent decades fighting, largely unsuccessfully, for ambitious legislation to increase clean energy, reduce carbon emissions, and end fossil fuel subsidies. He distinguished himself in the 2016 Democratic primaries by calling for a tax on carbon emissions and declaring global warming a national emergency.

This time, he faces a crowded field of candidates vying to outdo one another on global warming. But Sanders seems to have cemented his status as the climate candidate with the most expensive plan, an early embrace of the Green New Deal and a rally last weekend with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Green New Deal’s most prominent champion.

On Thursday Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez introduced a $180 billion Green New Deal for public housing, the first major effort to bring the vision of grappling with both climate change and income inequality into legislation. The bill would provide for retrofitting 1 million units of federally owned housing.

To most climate change experts, Sanders’ promise to reduce U.S. emissions by 71% in a decade and to fully convert to renewable energy by 2050 may win high marks for ambition, but major elements of his plan to get there are implausible.

The heart of Sanders’ plan, a government-run effort to build, manage and distribute renewable energy on a vast scale, would cost more than $2 trillion if it could pass muster in Congress and, several economists said, it might not even curb emissions.

His rejection of nuclear energy as well as technology to capture carbon emissions would make his carbon-reduction targets much harder. His notion of paying for renewable energy by “making the fossil fuel industry pay for their pollution” is vague. And, economists said, his climate plan fails to consider his larger agenda, such as the new infrastructure projects in his economic plan that would create a burst of new emissions. High-speed rail, wind turbines and mass transit need steel and concrete, the production of which requires energy.

“He’s trying to set a marker in terms of the pace and scale of spending that he’s proposing,” said Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems engineer and assistant professor at Princeton University. But, he added, “I don’t think that represents a very nuanced understanding of the set of challenges that we face.”

Paul Hawken, author of Project Drawdown, which analyzes solutions to global warming, said, “His sense of urgency in here is correct, in my opinion. But you can take that sense of urgency and make it more effective.”

Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist, said Sanders was more focused on signaling his ambitions to the party’s liberal wing than sweating policy details.

“People who care about these issues want a warrior,” Payne said. “Whether or not the battle plans they draw up exactly check out is kind of beside the point.”

The foundation of Sanders’ climate change plan is using the federal government to build and generate renewable energy, and sell it to publicly owned distribution systems, with preferential prices for utilities that pledge to break themselves of fossil fuels. The “greed” of profit-driven electric utilities, he has argued, has made them underinvest in the electric grid while clinging to dirty energy.

Sanders’ plan envisions expanding the four existing federal agencies that market electric power, known as federal Power Marketing Administrations, as well as the Tennessee Valley Authority, a government-owned corporation. He would create a fifth such agency that would spend $1.52 trillion on developing renewable energy and another $852 billion on technology like advanced batteries to store energy for days when the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow.

Energy experts say the problems are multifold. Congress would have to create and fund these new entities, a heavy lift even with a Congress in Democratic control.

Moreover, pressure from Washington would not necessarily affect utilities’ likelihood of adopting clean energy. Municipal power boards reflect their communities, so while liberal towns might demand greater levels of renewable energy, rural cooperatives in conservative states quite likely would not.

“I just don’t see that getting off the ground,” said Severin Borenstein, a professor at the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley.

Not everyone sees doom in Sanders’ nationalization of the power sector. Daniel Kammen, an energy expert at the University of California, Berkeley, called it “audacious but doable.”

Noah Kaufman, a researcher at Columbia University who worked on climate change in the Obama administration’s White House Council on Environmental Quality, said Sanders’ plan recognized that the planet could not afford to wait for market forces to find solutions.

“Climate change presents risks that are big and that are scary, and for that reason it’s being talked about like a crisis,” he said. “He’s proposing policies that match that rhetoric.”

Other analysts criticized Sanders’ rejection of nuclear energy and of technology to capture and store carbon emissions. His plan calls both of those “false solutions” to climate change and calls for a moratorium on the renewal of nuclear power plant licenses.

Yet nuclear power currently accounts for 20% of the nation’s energy mix and more than half its carbon-free power. Allowing aging plants to close would likely mean that natural gas, a fossil fuel, would fill the void and emissions would rise.

“The last thing you want to do is be righteous about how you feel about nuclear,” Hawken said.

Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geoscience and international affairs at Princeton University, said Sanders’ plan did not appear to take political realities into account. He also said he was disappointed that Sanders no longer supported a carbon tax, a position he embraced in 2016. Economists say a fee on the burning of fossil fuels is the most efficient way to drive down global warming, but Sanders says that would not work quickly enough.

Still, Oppenheimer said, Sanders wins points on vision.

“When I talk about these issues I have to be realistic, but that’s why I don’t run for president,” he said. “You need more than that in the political arena. You can’t drain these issues of their lifeblood and turn them into numbers and realistic deadlines and expect people to get engaged about it.”

Zina Precht-Rodriguez, 23, an activist with the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate change group, traveled from Philadelphia to speak at the Des Moines rally last week. She said it’s important to have faith.

“It’s not necessarily proved that it’s impossible because it’s never been tried,” she said.

This article originally appeared in

Sanders' Climate Goals Thrill Young Voters, but Experts Have Doubts

WASHINGTON — Sen. Bernie Sanders’ $16 trillion vision for arresting global warming would nationalize the power sector and promise that, by 2030, the country’s electricity and transportation systems would run entirely on wind, solar, hydropower or geothermal energy, with the fossil fuel industry footing much of the bill much as Mexico was to pay for the border wall.

The lawsuit is the latest salvo in a long-running battle over the future of coal and how to regulate the nation’s heavily polluting power plants, which are major producers of greenhouse gases that warm the planet. It also is the most significant test to date of the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate or weaken former President Barack Obama’s regulations to reduce the United States’ contribution to global warming.

It is a case that could go all the way to the Supreme Court. If justices there were to ultimately decide in favor of the Trump administration, it could weaken the ability of future presidents to regulate carbon dioxide pollution from power plants, experts said, and make it harder for the United States to tackle climate change.

“It would have a devastating effect on the ability of future administrations to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act,” said Richard L. Revesz, a professor at New York University who specializes in environmental law, referring to a 1970 law that requires the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate hazardous air pollutants.

The court challenge, , led by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, argued that the Trump administration’s EPA had no basis for weakening an Obama-era regulation that set the first-ever national limits on carbon dioxide pollution from power plants.

The Obama-era rule, the Clean Power Plan, required states to implement plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 2022, and encouraged that to happen by closing heavily polluting plants and instead generating electricity using natural gas or renewable energy. Carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is a major contributor to global warming because it traps the sun’s heat.

“The science is indisputable. Our climate is changing. Ice caps are melting,” James said in a statement. She called the Trump administration plan a “do-nothing rule.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/climate/states-lawsuit-clean-power-ace.html" id="104b3eaa-e499-35ce-a394-85cbccc07ba1">The New York Times</a>.

States and Cities Sue Trump Administration Over Rollback of Climate Rule

WASHINGTON — A coalition of 29 states and cities on Tuesday sued to block the Trump administration from easing restrictions on coal-burning power plants, setting up a case that could determine how much leverage the federal government has to fight climate change in the future.

The changes will make it harder to consider the effects of climate change on wildlife when deciding whether a given species warrants protection. They would most likely shrink critical habitats and, for the first time, would allow economic assessments to be conducted when making determinations.

The rules also make it easier to remove a species from the endangered species list and weaken protections for threatened species, a designation that means they are at risk of becoming endangered.

Overall, the new rules would very likely clear the way for new mining, oil and gas drilling, and development in areas where protected species live.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said the changes would modernize the Endangered Species Act and increase transparency in its application. “The Act’s effectiveness rests on clear, consistent and efficient implementation,” he said in a statement Monday.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement the revisions “fit squarely within the president’s mandate of easing the regulatory burden on the American public, without sacrificing our species’ protection and recovery goals.”

The new rules are expected to appear in the Federal Register this week and will go into effect 30 days after that.

Environmental organizations denounced the changes as a disaster for imperiled wildlife.

David J. Hayes, who served as a deputy interior secretary in the Obama administration and is now executive director of the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center at the New York University School of Law, said the changes would “straitjacket the scientists to take climate change out of consideration” when determining how to best protect wildlife. “We all know that climate change is now the greatest threat ever to hundreds of species,” Hayes said.

A recent United Nations assessment, some environmentalists noted, has warned that human pressures are poised to drive 1 million species into extinction and that protecting land and biodiversity is critical to keep greenhouse gas emissions in check.

Climate change, a lack of environmental stewardship and mass industrialization have all contributed to the enormous expected global nature loss, the United Nations report said.

Ever since President Richard M. Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into law in 1973, it has been the main U.S. legislation for protecting fish, plants and wildlife and has acted as a safety net for species on the brink of extinction. The peregrine falcon, the humpback whale, the Tennessee purple coneflower and the Florida manatee all would very likely have disappeared without it, scientists say.

Republicans have long sought to narrow the scope of the law, saying it burdens landowners, hampers industry and hinders economic growth. Bernhardt wrote in an op-ed last summer that the act places an “unnecessary regulatory burden” on companies.

They also make the case that the law is not reasonable because species are rarely removed from the list. Since the law was passed, more than 1,650 have been listed as threatened or endangered, while just 47 have been delisted because their populations rebounded.

Over the past two years Republicans made a major legislative push to overhaul the law. Despite holding a majority in both houses of Congress, though, the proposals were never taken up in the Senate. With Democrats now in control of the House, there is little chance of those bills passing.

The Trump administration’s revisions to the regulations that guide the implementation of the law, however, mean opponents of the Endangered Species Act are still poised to claim their biggest victory in decades.

One of the most controversial changes removes long-standing language that prohibits the consideration of economic factors when deciding whether a species should be protected.

Under the current law, such determinations must be made solely based on science, “without reference to possible economic or other impacts of determination.”

Gary Frazer, the assistant director for endangered species with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said that phrase had been removed for reasons of “transparency.” He said the change leaves open the possibility of conducting economic analyses for informational purposes, but that decisions about listing species would still be based exclusively on science.

Environmental groups saw a danger in that.

“There can be economic costs to protecting endangered species,” said Drew Caputo, vice president of litigation for lands, wildlife and oceans at Earthjustice, an environmental law organization. But, he said, “If we make decisions based on short-term economic costs, we’re going to have a whole lot more extinct species.”

The new rules also give the government significant discretion in deciding what is meant by the term “foreseeable future.” That’s a semantic change with far-reaching implications because it enables regulators to disregard the effects of extreme heat, drought, rising sea levels and other consequences of climate change that may occur several decades from now.

When questioned about that change and its implications in the era of climate change, Frazer said the agency wanted to avoid making “speculative” decisions far into the future.

Among the animals at risk from this change, Caputo listed a few: Polar bears and seals that are losing crucial sea ice; whooping cranes whose migration patterns are shifting because of temperature changes; and beluga whales that will have to dive deeper and longer to find food in a warmer Arctic.

Jonathan Wood, a lawyer at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative group that has represented landowners in opposing endangered species designations, said he believed the changes would improve the law by simplifying the regulatory process and making the law less punitive.

“It’s a shift away from conflict in favor of more collaboration and cooperation,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/climate/endangered-species-act-changes.html" id="53001fc6-712e-3d33-a033-177190df66fa">The New York Times</a>.

U.S. Significantly Weakens Endangered Species Act

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration Monday announced it would change the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, significantly weakening the nation’s bedrock conservation law credited with rescuing the bald eagle, the grizzly bear and the American alligator from extinction.

But there is another issue high on his list of urgent concerns that is not on his party’s agenda: climate change.

“Climate change isn’t going to discriminate between red states and blue states, so red-state actors have to start engaging on these issues,” said Galloway, 19, who is heading into his sophomore year and is chairman of the South Carolina Federation of College Republicans. “But we haven’t been. We’ve completely ceded them to the left.”

While President Donald Trump has led the Republican Party far down the road of denying the scientific consensus of human-caused climate change, Galloway represents a concern among younger Republicans that has caught the attention of Republican strategists.

In conversations with 10 GOP analysts, consultants and activists, all said they were acutely aware of the rising influence of young voters like Galloway, who have never lived through a colder-than-average month and identify climate change as a top priority. Those strategists said lawmakers were aware, too, but few were taking action.

“We’re definitely sending a message to younger voters that we don’t care about things that are very important to them,” said Douglas Heye, a former communications director at the Republican National Committee. “This spells certain doom in the long term if there isn’t a plan to admit reality and have legislative prescriptions for it.”

Trump has set the tone for Republicans by deriding climate change, using White House resources to undermine science and avoiding even uttering the phrase. Outside of a handful of states such as Florida, where addressing climate change has become more bipartisan, analysts said Republican politicians were unlikely to buck Trump or even to talk about climate change on the campaign trail at all, except perhaps to criticize Democrats for supporting the Green New Deal.

That, several strategists warned, means the party stands to lose voters to Democrats in 2020 and beyond — a prospect they said was particularly worrisome in swing districts that Republicans must win to recapture a majority in the House of Representatives.

The polling bears out Heye’s prediction of a backlash. Nearly 60% of Republicans between the ages of 23 and 38 say that climate change is having an effect on the United States, and 36% believe humans are the cause. That is about double the numbers of Republicans older than 52.

But younger generations are also now outvoting their elders. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, voters younger than 53 cast 62.5 million votes in the 2018 midterm elections. Those 53 and older, by contrast, were responsible for 60.1 million votes.

“Americans believe climate change is real, and that number goes up every single month,” Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican strategist, told a congressional panel recently.

He also circulated a memo to congressional Republicans in June warning that climate change was “a G.O.P. vulnerability and a G.O.P. opportunity.”

A new Harvard University survey of voters younger than 30 found that 73% of respondents disapproved of Trump’s approach to climate change (about the same proportion as those who object to his handling of race relations). Half the respondents identified as Republican or independent.

“Here’s another gap between our party and younger voters,” said a recent report by a Republican polling firm, Public Opinion Strategies. Speaking of younger Republicans, the firm concluded that “climate change is their most important issue” and called the numbers “concerning” for the party’s future.

The full effect quite likely will not be felt until after the 2020 election cycle. Trump’s campaign appears to have identified a strategy for winning reelection that relies on polarizing the electorate on issues like race, immigration and, it seems, climate change. But conservatives said the long-term implications of that gambit were worrisome for the future of the party and the planet.

“He gets to set the national platform,” Joseph Majkut, director of climate policy at the Niskanen Center, a center-right research organization, said of Trump. But, he noted, “Every year that goes by, where people are going about their lives as if greenhouse gas emissions are a matter of very small concern, we make the problem worse for ourselves.”

Galloway and 45 other young Republicans with the American Conservation Coalition, a group that advocates for conservative environmental policies, brought that message to Washington last month when they lobbied Congress to address greenhouse gas emissions with free-market solutions.

“You can be skeptical of climate change all you want, but young people aren’t, and there’s no way conservatives are going to win elections if we don’t deal with climate change,” said Benjamin Backer, 21, the coalition’s founder and president.

Backer said he was encouraged by Trump’s environmental speech July 8 as well as recent moves among some Republicans in Congress to advance climate policies. But he also said changes were not occurring fast enough to lure his generation of environmentally conscious conservatives.

“There’s a lot of people out there who would probably vote Republican if they knew there was a conservative agenda on climate change,” Backer said. Instead, he said, “They’re going to go to the Democratic Party, because that’s the only party that’s talking about the environment.”

Trump’s core supporters say they are not worried. Standing in the sweltering heat outside East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, last month as he waited for entry into a rally led by the president, Trey Bagley, 25, readily acknowledged climate science. But Bagley, a sergeant in the Marine Corps Reserves wearing a “Trump 2020, Make Liberals Cry Again” shirt, said that did not make him a Democrat.

“I completely agree that we’re offending the climate,” Bagley said. “But the solutions that are being introduced to fix it are going to drive us back into the Dark Ages.”

He is not alone in that belief. To illustrate that, Alex Flint, executive director of the Alliance for Market Solutions, a conservative nonprofit group that advocates for a carbon tax, hit play on a video of 11 Trump voters around a hotel conference table in Florida discussing climate change. Government cannot be trusted to solve climate change, the focus group agreed. But like Bagley, they also all agreed that climate change is real.

“Republican orthodoxy is changing,” Flint said. “You’re safe saying you acknowledge climate change.”

He said climate change is hardly a top-tier topic among even moderate Republicans. But he noted it is a key differential issue in swing districts that can either help a candidate win young, college-educated and female voters, or lose them.

“It’s a matter of honesty,” he said. “Voters believe it is happening; at the very least, they want their politicians to acknowledge reality.”

Scott Jennings, a Republican consultant and a former campaign adviser to Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said 2020 candidates in different states would take various approaches to climate change, but he predicted that most would focus on simply attacking Democrats and the Green New Deal.

Still, he said, “Someday Republicans are going to have to come up with some proposals that are responsive to these issues and, frankly, be more reasonable and more thoughtful.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/climate/climate-change-republicans.html" id="8ac61c43-35da-33e9-a48e-39d7816a63a0">The New York Times</a>.

Climate Could Be an Electoral Time Bomb, Republican Strategists Fear

WASHINGTON — When election time comes next year, Will Galloway, a student and Republican youth leader at Clemson University, will look for candidates who are strong on the mainstream conservative causes he cares about most, including gun rights and opposing abortion.

The effort comes as Harris, who is running for president, and other Democratic candidates prepare for a set of debates in Detroit this week. Racial and economic disparities on issues ranging from housing to education are expected to take center stage.

Harris, who has yet to release a comprehensive climate change plan of her own, has focused much of her economic agenda on providing tax credits and other assistance to low- and middle-income Americans. This month, she and Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill designed to help people with criminal records obtain housing.

The new proposal, titled the Climate Equity Act, provides a view of Harris’ environmental priorities. Under the plan, any environmental regulation or legislation would be rated based on its effect on low-income communities, which are disproportionately affected by climate change because they are often in flood zones, near highways or power plants, or adjacent to polluted lands known as brownfields.

The rating system would be modeled after the Congressional Budget Office score, which measures the costs of every major piece of legislation.

“We can’t do anything without a CBO score, but we never actually consider if it’s disastrous to communities as long as it’s revenue-neutral,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview.

The bill would also establish an independent Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability to represent vulnerable communities and create a position of senior adviser on climate justice at “all relevant agencies.”

Ocasio-Cortez was the primary House sponsor of the Green New Deal, a nonbinding resolution that set out a broad vision for significantly reducing planet-warming pollution by 2030 while also guaranteeing millions of new jobs. She said low-income workers were often ignored in the climate discussion.

“One of the tenets of the Green New Deal is prioritizing vulnerable communities,” she said. “We have to talk about Flint. We have to talk about West Virginia. We have to talk about the Bronx, and we have to talk about the ways climate change manifests in our lives.”

Ocasio-Cortez said that she had not endorsed anyone in the presidential race and noted that she had worked with various candidates on different aspects of the climate challenge.

Climate change analysts said they were encouraged by the bill and by the fact that several presidential candidates had recently made issues of equity more central to their discussions of the environment. Many of the candidates’ early plans for tackling global warming focused almost entirely on methods of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, including by establishing a price on carbon dioxide, eliminating coal-fired power plants and investing billions of dollars in clean energy technologies.

But in another example of the growing focus on economic and racial disparities, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington released the final plank of a five-part global warming plan Monday, aimed at new federal policies to prioritize low-income areas and communities of color. Inslee, who has made climate change the top issue of his presidential campaign, also called for a way to score, or screen, federal environmental decisions and proposed a new office dedicated to environmental justice.

Tom Steyer, the billionaire former hedge fund investor who also is running for president, last week released his own “justice-centered” five-pillar plan for tackling climate change focused on protecting low-income communities.

The new plans “send an important signal,” said Mustafa Ali, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice office under the Obama administration.

“They are timely, and they are needed,” he said, “and they help us to begin to think critically about the steps that are going to be necessary to protect people’s lives in the moment, and in these challenges that are rushing at us at a very quick pace.”

The candidates are making equity a top issue in other arenas. This month Harris has introduced a $100 billion housing plan to help black families and individuals buy homes in historically redlined communities and a $75 billion initiative to invest in minority-owned businesses and historically black colleges. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has called for an executive order requiring recipients of federal contracts to diversify their workforces. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey has proposed creating savings accounts for every child born in the United States.

Harris also released her health care plan Monday, proposing a system that would provide Medicare for all Americans but allow people to choose private plans modeled on Medicare Advantage.

Harris’ campaign said her full climate plan was forthcoming. But in a statement, Harris said she believed it was important to address equity even before nailing down the specifics of how to curb carbon emissions.

“We cannot accept a status quo where children of color are drinking toxic water in Flint or breathing toxic air in Louisiana’s cancer alley,” she said. “This systemic environmental injustice will only get worse and become more ingrained if climate and environmental policies like the Green New Deal do not specifically focus on lifting up these communities.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/us/politics/kamala-harris-aoc-climate-change.html" id="ab4abe0c-cdbb-3a52-af8f-e17f008f657c">The New York Times</a>.

Harris and Ocasio-Cortez Release Climate 'Equity' Plan

WASHINGTON — Sen. Kamala Harris of California and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York on Monday unveiled legislation aimed at ensuring that climate change plans benefit low-income communities. They described the measure as a key element of the Democrats’ Green New Deal.

The rating system would be modeled after the Congressional Budget Office score, which measures benefits against costs for every major piece of legislation.

But Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, who has made climate change his top issue, released the final plank of a five-part global warming plan Monday. It is aimed at new federal policies to prioritize low-income areas and communities of color. Like the legislation introduced by Harris and Ocasio-Cortez, it calls for a way to score, or screen, federal environmental decisions and also proposes a new office dedicated to environmental justice.

Mustafa Ali, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice office under the Obama administration, said the plans “send an important signal.”

“They are timely, and they are needed, and they help us to begin to think critically about the steps that are going to be necessary to protect people’s lives in the moment, and in these challenges that are rushing at us at a very quick pace,” he said.

Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Release Climate 'Equity' Plan

WASHINGTON — Sen. Kamala Harris of California and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York on Monday will introduce legislation aimed at ensuring that climate change plans benefit low-income communities. The congresswomen described the measure as a key element of the Democrats’ Green New Deal.

WASHINGTON — Sen. Kamala Harris of California and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York on Monday will unveil legislation aimed at ensuring that climate change plans benefit low-income communities. The congresswomen described the measure as a key element of the Democrats’ Green New Deal.

The decision by Andrew Wheeler, the EPA administrator, represents a victory for the chemical industry and for farmers who have lobbied to continue using the substance, chlorpyrifos, arguing it is necessary to protect crops.

It was the administration’s second major move this year to roll back or eliminate chemical safety rules. In April, the agency disregarded the advice of its own experts when officials issued a rule that restricted but did not ban asbestos, a known carcinogen. Agency scientists and lawyers had urged the agency to ban asbestos outright, as do most other industrialized nations.

In making its chlorpyrifos ruling, the EPA said in a statement that the data supporting objections to the use of chlorpyrifos was “not sufficiently valid, complete or reliable.” The agency added that it would continue to monitor the safety of chlorpyrifos through 2022.

The substance, sold under the commercial name Lorsban, has already been banned for household use but remains in widespread use by farmers for more than 50 fruit, nut, cereal and vegetable crops. In 2016, more than 640,000 acres were treated with chlorpyrifos in California alone.

Representatives of Corteva Agriscience, the maker of chlorpyrifos, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the decision.

The Obama administration announced in 2015 that it would ban chlorpyrifos after scientific studies produced by the EPA showed the pesticide had the potential to damage brain development in children. That ban had not yet come into force when, in 2017, Scott Pruitt, then the administrator of the EPA, reversed that decision, setting off a wave of legal challenges.

Those lawsuits culminated in April when a federal appeals court ordered the EPA to issue a final ruling on whether to ban chlorpyrifos by this month.

Patti Goldman, an attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental group that brought a legal challenge against the EPA’s 2017 decision on behalf of farmworker organizations and others, criticized the decision. She said groups would sue again and ask the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to expedite the case.

“By allowing chlorpyrifos to stay in our fruits and vegetables, Trump’s EPA is breaking the law and neglecting the overwhelming scientific evidence that this pesticide harms children’s brains,” Goldman said in a statement.

Representatives of the chemical industry expressed satisfaction with the decision. “The availability of pesticides, like chlorpyrifos, is relied upon by farmers to control a variety of insect pests and by public health officials who work to control deadly and debilitating pests like mosquitoes,” Chris Novak, chief executive of CropLife America, said in a statement.

Hawaii banned chlorpyrifos in 2018. California and New York are considering similar actions. The European Commission is under pressure from consumers and environmental groups to ban the pesticide.

The Trump administration has issued several other decisions in recent months relaxing environmental regulations. This week the agency acknowledged a new policy doing away with surprise inspections of chemical and power plants. The “no surprises” policy is aimed at fostering better working relationship between the agency and states, EPA officials wrote.

Last week the EPA approved broad use of the pesticide sulfoxaflor, which is known to harm bees. And earlier this year the agency announced curbs on a lethal chemical found in paint stripping products that represented a weakening of a ban that the Obama administration proposed.

Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., who introduced legislation to ban chlorpyrifos nationwide said there is “no excuse” for keeping chlorpyrifos in use.

“The science on chlorpyrifos is clear and unambiguous,” he said. “It damages the developing brains of children and causes serious health problems in those who have been exposed to it.”

The EPA decision is also one of the first concrete results of a separate Trump administration effort to restrict the use of scientific studies involving human subjects.

Under Pruitt the agency proposed a rule saying it could not consider scientific research unless the raw data behind it was made public, saying the issue was a matter of transparency. Scientists argued that studies measuring human exposure to pesticides and other chemicals often rely on confidential health information and argued the EPA’s real motivation was to restrict the ability to develop regulations.

In opting not to ban chlorpyrifos, the EPA rejected a major study conducted by Columbia University on its effects on children in New York City. The EPA said because it was unable to obtain the raw data and replicate that study, which linked the insecticide to developmental delays, it couldn’t independently verify the conclusions.

Angela Logomasini, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank that rejects the established science of climate change, expressed strong support for the decision. She called the EPA’s Science Advisory Panel decision on which the original ban was based “junk science.”

Kevin Minoli, a former senior EPA lawyer who is now a partner at the Washington law firm Alston &amp; Bird, predicted the courts would ultimately ban chlorpyrifos. He called Thursday “the beginning of the end” for the chemical.

The EPA may argue that the science showing chlorpyrifos is unsafe is unclear. But Minoli said under the Food Quality Protection Act, the EPA must prove that there is a reasonable certainty that the pesticide will not cause harm.

“Whatever you think about the science, there’s at least a question about that,” Minoli said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/climate/epa-chlorpyrifos-pesticide-ban.html" id="ec6ceca2-ec64-350d-aee8-f7eb33c446ea">The New York Times</a>.

EPA Won't Ban Chlorpyrifos, Pesticide Tied to Children's Health Problems

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration took a major step to weaken the regulation of toxic chemicals on Thursday when the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would not ban a widely used pesticide that its own experts have linked to serious health problems in children.

It was the administration’s second major move this year to roll back or eliminate chemical safety rules. In April, the agency disregarded the advice of its own experts when officials issued a rule that restricted but did not ban asbestos, a known carcinogen. Agency scientists and lawyers had urged the agency to ban asbestos outright.

Patti Goldman, an attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental group that brought a legal challenge against the EPA’s 2017 decision, criticized the decision. She said groups would sue again.

The decision not to prohibit the use of the pesticide, chlorpyrifos, comes after years of legal wrangling. It represents a victory for the chemical industry and farmers who have lobbied to continue using the substance, arguing it is necessary to protect crops.

In making its ruling, the EPA rejected claims that the amount of pesticide residue allowed to remain in or on treated foods was unsafe, and said that the science was unsettled.

“EPA has determined that their objections must be denied because the data available are not sufficiently valid, complete or reliable to meet petitioners’ burden to present evidence demonstrating that the tolerances are not safe,” the agency said in a statement.

The agency added that it would continue to review the safety of chlorpyrifos through 2022.

The product, sold under the commercial name Lorsban, has already been banned for household use but remains in widespread use by farmers for more than 50 fruit, nut, cereal and vegetable crops.

The Obama administration decided to ban chlorpyrifos in 2015 after scientific studies produced by the EPA showed the pesticide had the potential to damage brain development in children. But in 2017 Scott Pruitt, then the administrator of the EPA, reversed that prohibition, setting off a new round of legal challenges.

Patti Goldman, an attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental group that brought a legal challenge against the EPA’s 2017 decision on behalf of farmworker organizations and others, criticized the decision.

A federal appeals court in April ordered the EPA to make a final ruling on whether to ban chlorpyrifos by this month. Since then a number of states, including California and New York, have moved to prohibit its use.

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday announced it would not ban a widely used pesticide associated with developmental disabilities and other health problems in children.

The criticisms are based on a yet-to-be-released plan outlined in a Reuters report in which one person advising Biden characterized the Democratic front-runner as seeking a “middle ground” on policies to reduce planet-warming emissions.

Additional details in the report described Biden’s forthcoming policy as likely to include reinstating Obama-era regulations on automobiles and coal-fired power plants, while leaving a role for nuclear energy and natural gas in the U.S. energy mix. The emerging policy has sparked criticism among Biden’s political rivals and has left supporters worried that he is underestimating the passion on climate change, particularly among Millennials who have embraced the Green New Deal, an ambitious resolution calling for an end to fossil fuels.

“There is no ‘middle ground’ when it comes to climate policy,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., tweeted.

Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, who has centered his campaign on climate change, praised Biden and former President Barack Obama for making “historic progress” on climate change but added: “We cannot simply go back to the past. We need a bold climate plan for our future.”

Biden on Friday sought to remind voters that he was an early supporter of tackling climate change and promised a detailed plan soon.

“I’m proud to have been one of the first to introduce climate change legislation,’’ he said on Twitter. “What I fought for in 1986 is more important than ever — climate change is an existential threat. Now. Today.”

Julian Brave NoiseCat, director of Green New Deal strategy at Data for Progress, a left-leaning think tank, said he hoped Biden’s plan is ultimately a robust one.

“We do have a policy out there designed to build a new climate coalition. It’s called the Green New Deal, and he needs to jump aboard it,” NoiseCat said.

But Paul Bledsoe, a strategic adviser at Progressive Policy Institute and a former Clinton White House climate staff member, praised Biden for seeking a climate plan that would appeal to working-class Americans.

“Indulging in ideological purity is great until you actually want to solve the problem,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/us/politics/joe-biden-climate-change.html" id="f9627e1e-9e1c-3a94-a632-a7d464479499">The New York Times</a>.

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2020 rivals and a group of progressive environmental organizations are attacking him as being weak on climate change, a sign of the central role global warming is shaping up to play as an issue in the Democratic primary.

Biden's 2020 Rivals Attack Him From the Left on Climate Change

In a video posted by the Sunrise Movement, which encourages young people to combat climate change, an exchange quickly became tense once Feinstein started to explain her opposition to the Green New Deal, an ambitious Democratic-led proposal that calls for a radical transformation of the U.S. energy sector.

“There’s no way to pay for it,” Feinstein told the group of about 15 children at her San Francisco office.

“We have tons of money going to the military,” a young girl responded, only to receive a lecture about the realpolitik of passing bills in a Republican-led Senate.

“That resolution will not pass the Senate, and you can take that back to whoever sent you here and tell them,” said Feinstein, D-Calif. She added, “I’ve been in the Senate for over a quarter of a century and I know what can pass and I know what can’t pass.”

Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, plans to bring the Green New Deal to a vote as early as next week, a move that could split Democrats. Republicans hope to put Democrats, particularly those running for president in 2020, on the record regarding a plan that the right has ridiculed as a “socialist fantasy.”

The Green New Deal calls for a “10-year mobilization” to make the United States carbon neutral, meaning as much carbon would have to be absorbed as emitted into the atmosphere. It also requires shifting away from fossil fuels and supplying 100 percent of the country’s electricity from carbon-free energy sources.

Twelve Democratic senators have embraced the proposal, which was introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Sen. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts. Members of the Sunrise Movement have held rallies and protests this week urging Democrats who have not co-sponsored the measure to vote for it when it comes to the floor.

In a statement late Friday, Feinstein called the interaction with the Sunrise Movement “a spirited discussion” and said she wanted the children to know that “they were heard loud and clear.”

“I have been and remain committed to doing everything I can to enact real, meaningful climate change legislation,” she said.

Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, in a statement called Feinstein “out of touch” and said the interaction shows that the Democratic Party needs “fundamental change.”

The exchange between Feinstein and the children became more testy when a young woman accompanying them told the senator that “if this doesn’t get turned around in 10 years, you’re looking at the faces of the people who are going to be living with the consequences.”

Feinstein chafed at the lecture, replying that she has seven grandchildren and is mindful of the threat of climate change. A decade ago, she championed ambitious legislation that would have put a cap on emissions that cause climate-warming pollution.

“You know what’s interesting about this group?” she asked. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’m doing. You come in here and you say it has to be my way or the highway. I don’t respond to that.”

Feinstein then tried to explain an alternate measure she has endorsed, which calls for a slightly later timeline in reducing carbon emissions. That solution, the young woman replied, is not good enough.

“You know better than I do, so I think one day you should run for the Senate and then you do it your way,” Feinstein told the young woman.

“Great,” she replied. “I will.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/climate/feinstein-sunrise-green-new-deal.html" id="377faa47-b4b1-3704-a6f5-7c19ddf877bf">The New York Times</a>.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein found herself in a standoff Friday with a group of schoolchildren who confronted her about her refusal to support the Green New Deal.

Feinstein Lectures Children Who Want Green New Deal, Portraying It as Untenable

The exchange between Feinstein and the children became more testy when an adult accompanying them told the senator that “if this doesn’t get turned around in 10 years, you’re looking at the faces of the people who are going to be living with the consequences.”

Feinstein then tried to explain an alternate measure she has endorsed, which calls for a slightly later timeline in reducing carbon emissions. That solution, a young woman replied, is not good enough.

Lisa Friedman

Articles written by the author

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