#Climate Change Legislation

[spooky-spextre-arts]

Hi, if you're interested in helping create effective climate action, one of the first and easiest ways to do so is through signing petitions and writing to Congress.

Citizens' Climate Lobby is one such service which automatically writes and sends messages to your state Representatives, urging them to take further action on creating/supporting climate action.

[pebblegalaxy]

The Inflation Reduction Act: A Green Facade Masking Protectionism and Global Inequality

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed into law by President Biden on August 16, 2022, has been lauded by its proponents as a monumental step in addressing economic and environmental issues in the United States. But let’s peel back the polished rhetoric, and what do we find? A web of contradictions, protectionism disguised as progress, and a policy framework that, despite its lofty…

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Changes to the Canadian Environmental Protection Act enshrining the right to a healthy environment have passed into law. The federal government has been working on the legislation for several years, and introduced the latest version in the Senate in February. It also adds a sentence to the act guaranteeing that every Canadian has the right to a healthy environment and makes it a duty of the government to protect that right. The government now has up to two more years to define how that right will be implemented when it comes to enforcing the act. Critics have said the law would be stronger if that right were enshrined in the Constitution, but the government is not interested in that change. [...]

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

[harriswalz4usabybr]

Speech Kamala Harris gave at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa!

~BR~

[regulationlistener]

its really so absurd to me that even among people that believe climate change is real the popular belief seems to be "and anyone that tries to do anything to mitigate it is annoying and an idiot" like what are you talking about

[ivygorgon]

AN OPEN LETTER to THE PRESIDENT & U.S. CONGRESS; STATE GOVERNORS & LEGISLATURES

Act Now: Save Public Transit from Extinction!

2 so far! Help us get to 5 signers!

I am writing to highlight the critical state of public transit in the United States and urge your support increased investment in this essential service. The challenges facing public transit—under-investment, over-reliance on car ownership, and racial disparities—have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is imperative that we take bold action to address these issues for the benefit of our communities and our future.

Investing in public transit is not merely a matter of convenience; it is a necessity for tackling climate change, advancing equity, supporting essential workers, and fostering economic recovery. The largest source of carbon emissions in the U.S. stems from transportation, and increased investment in public transit can significantly reduce this impact. Furthermore, public transit plays a crucial role in providing equitable access to jobs, schools, and services, especially for those who cannot afford or do not have access to private vehicles.

With over 2.8 million essential workers relying on public transit, our pandemic response and economic recovery hinge on the strength and viability of our transit systems. According to studies, sustained investment in public transportation yields substantial economic returns, with every $1 billion invested annually resulting in approximately $5 billion in additional GDP.

I commend initiatives like the Green New Deal for Transportation and efforts by organizations such as the CHARGE coalition to electrify and expand public transportation. These initiatives are pivotal in shaping a more sustainable and equitable transportation system for all Americans.

Therefore, I urge you to support emergency relief funding for public transit and join the movement to rebuild and improve our public transit system. This is not just an investment in infrastructure; it is an investment in our collective future.

Thank you for your attention to this urgent matter. I look forward to your support in advancing policies that will ensure a robust and accessible public transit system for all.

📱 Text SIGN PZHBAF to 50409

🤯 Liked it? Text FOLLOW IVYPETITIONS to 50409

💘 Q'u lach' shughu deshni da. 🏹 "What I say is true" in Dena'ina Qenaga

[ttpd-chair]

Kinda crazy that young people are asking for laws and policies that ensure that we won’t die in a horrific or violent way and the response of the Republican party is to essentially give us the middle finger and say we shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

Jeremy Jones, an extreme snowboarder, filmmaker and owner of his own clothing brand, never dreamed of becoming a lobbyist.

More comfortable in snowboarding bibs and puffy jackets than a suit and tie, the laid-back Jones has quietly become a force in Washington’s power corridors — and this year, his coalition achieved its biggest victory yet.

Protect Our Winters, a group Jones founded in 2007 to bring together winter athletes for advocacy on climate issues, has grown steadily in influence over the past decade. Made up of climbers, skiers and other outdoor athletes, P.O.W. played a small but crucial role in helping pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains $370 billion in climate and clean-energy programs.

The group’s origins, though, were pretty humble.

“Someone should be doing something about this,” Jones recalled thinking around 2005. He began seeing rain in the middle of winter “in places where it doesn’t rain,” he said, or signs of glacial retreat in the German Alps.

So Jones decided that “someone” was him. Before long, he was cold-calling climate scientists, who told him he needed to use his celebrity to call for federal legislation, which they said would be the only way to achieve meaningful reductions in emissions.

Jones has done so, largely, by building a coalition he calls “the outdoor state”: skiers and snowboarders, backpackers and cyclists — and soon, he hopes, the even larger community of anglers and hunters.

These advocates talk up the economic importance of recreation in ways that resonate with politicians who tend to care more about jobs than endangered species. As Jones put it, “We don’t go to Capitol Hill with pictures of polar bears.”

[aldieb]

but you guys i was balling [sic] so hard. after she opened with “augustine” she said people could yell out songs they wanted to hear and the first one was “city hall” and everyone went bananas at the lines “they can take it away again some day/ this beautiful thing won’t change.” i could see the person who yelled it first and the whole song they were doing a thing i do with my hands (but can’t bring myself to do in public [yet?]) where you’re just like wiggling your fingers furiously to the music like you’re conducting and playing a piano at the same time and i could see what looked like their wedding ring flashing in the stage lights. perfection

[shreygoyal]

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Been reading more and more takes that climate bill failed because of shifting public opinion: e.g. the NYT "reported" this week (without empirical evidence!) that the public has soured on climate as the economy weakened. Nonsense.

(Source)

[harriswalz4usabybr]

Speech Vice President Harris gave in Buffalo, NY!

[sapphia]

USA please listen to me: the price of “teaching them a lesson” is too high. take it from New Zealand, who voted our Labour government out in the last election because they weren’t doing exactly what we wanted and got facism instead.

Trans rights are being attacked, public transport has been defunded, tax cuts issued for the wealthy, they've mass-defunded public services, cut and attacked the disability funding model, cut benefits, diverted transport funding to roads, cut all recent public transport subsidies, cancelled massive important infrastructure projects like damns and ferries (we are three ISLANDS), fast tracked mining, oil, and other massive environmentally detrimental projects and gave the power the to approve these projects singularly to three ministers who have been wined and dined by lobbyists of the companies that have put the bids in to approve them while one of the main minister infers he will not prioritise the protection of endangered species like the archeys frog over mining projects that do massive environmental harm. They have attacked indigenous rights in an attempt to negate the Treaty of Waitangi by “redefining it”; as a backup, they are also trying to remove all mentions of the treaty from legislation starting with our Child Protection laws no longer requiring social workers to consider the importance of Maori children’s culture when placing those children; when the Waitangi Tribunal who oversees indigenous matters sought to enquire about this, the Minister for Children blocked their enquiry in a breach of comity that was condemned in a ruling — too late to do anything — by our Supreme Court. They have repealed labour protections around pay and 90 day trials, reversed our smoking ban, cancelled our EV subsidy, cancelled our water infrastructure scheme that would have given Maori iwi a say in water asset management, cancelled our biggest city’s fuel tax, made our treasury and inland revenue departments less accountable, dispensed of our Productivity Commission, begun work on charter schools and military boot camps in an obvious push towards privatisation, cancelled grants for first home buyers, reduced access to emergency housing, allowed no cause evictions, cancelled our Maori health system that would have given Maori control over their own public medical care and funding, cut funding of services like budgeting advice and food banks, cancelled the consumer advocacy council, cancelled our medicine regulations, repealed free prescriptions, deferred multiple hospital builds, failed to deliver on pre-election medical promises, reversed a gun ban created in response to the mosque shootings, brought back three strikes = life sentence policy, increased minimum wage by half the recommended amount, cancelled fair pay for disabled workers, reduced wheelchair services, reversed our oil and gas exploration ban, cancelled our climate emergency fund, cut science research funding including climate research, removed limits on killing sea lions, cut funding for the climate change commission, weakened our methane targets, cancelled Significant National Areas protections, have begun reversing our ban on live exports. Much of this was passed under urgency.

It’s been six months.

[reasonsforhope]

No paywall version here.

"Two and a half years ago, when I was asked to help write the most authoritative report on climate change in the United States, I hesitated...

In the end, I said yes, but reluctantly. Frankly, I was sick of admonishing people about how bad things could get. Scientists have raised the alarm over and over again, and still the temperature rises. Extreme events like heat waves, floods and droughts are becoming more severe and frequent, exactly as we predicted they would. We were proved right. It didn’t seem to matter.

Our report, which was released on Tuesday, contains more dire warnings. There are plenty of new reasons for despair. Thanks to recent scientific advances, we can now link climate change to specific extreme weather disasters, and we have a better understanding of how the feedback loops in the climate system can make warming even worse. We can also now more confidently forecast catastrophic outcomes if global emissions continue on their current trajectory.

But to me, the most surprising new finding in the Fifth National Climate Assessment is this: There has been genuine progress, too.

I’m used to mind-boggling numbers, and there are many of them in this report. Human beings have put about 1.6 trillion tons of carbon in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution — more than the weight of every living thing on Earth combined. But as we wrote the report, I learned other, even more mind-boggling numbers. In the last decade, the cost of wind energy has declined by 70 percent and solar has declined 90 percent. Renewables now make up 80 percent of new electricity generation capacity. Our country’s greenhouse gas emissions are falling, even as our G.D.P. and population grow.

In the report, we were tasked with projecting future climate change. We showed what the United States would look like if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius. It wasn’t a pretty picture: more heat waves, more uncomfortably hot nights, more downpours, more droughts. If greenhouse emissions continue to rise, we could reach that point in the next couple of decades. If they fall a little, maybe we can stave it off until the middle of the century. But our findings also offered a glimmer of hope: If emissions fall dramatically, as the report suggested they could, we may never reach 2 degrees Celsius at all.

For the first time in my career, I felt something strange: optimism.

And that simple realization was enough to convince me that releasing yet another climate report was worthwhile.

Something has changed in the United States, and not just the climate. State, local and tribal governments all around the country have begun to take action. Some politicians now actually campaign on climate change, instead of ignoring or lying about it. Congress passed federal climate legislation — something I’d long regarded as impossible — in 2022 as we turned in the first draft.

[Note: She's talking about the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Act, which despite the names were the two biggest climate packages passed in US history. And their passage in mid 2022 was a big turning point: that's when, for the first time in decades, a lot of scientists started looking at the numbers - esp the ones that would come from the IRA's funding - and said "Wait, holy shit, we have an actual chance."]

And while the report stresses the urgency of limiting warming to prevent terrible risks, it has a new message, too: We can do this. We now know how to make the dramatic emissions cuts we’d need to limit warming, and it’s very possible to do this in a way that’s sustainable, healthy and fair.

The conversation has moved on, and the role of scientists has changed. We’re not just warning of danger anymore. We’re showing the way to safety.

I was wrong about those previous reports: They did matter, after all. While climate scientists were warning the world of disaster, a small army of scientists, engineers, policymakers and others were getting to work. These first responders have helped move us toward our climate goals. Our warnings did their job.

To limit global warming, we need many more people to get on board... We need to reach those who haven’t yet been moved by our warnings. I’m not talking about the fossil fuel industry here; nor do I particularly care about winning over the small but noisy group of committed climate deniers. But I believe we can reach the many people whose eyes glaze over when they hear yet another dire warning or see another report like the one we just published.

The reason is that now, we have a better story to tell. The evidence is clear: Responding to climate change will not only create a better world for our children and grandchildren, but it will also make the world better for us right now.

Eliminating the sources of greenhouse gas emissions will make our air and water cleaner, our economy stronger and our quality of life better. It could save hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives across the country through air quality benefits alone. Using land more wisely can both limit climate change and protect biodiversity. Climate change most strongly affects communities that get a raw deal in our society: people with low incomes, people of color, children and the elderly. And climate action can be an opportunity to redress legacies of racism, neglect and injustice.

I could still tell you scary stories about a future ravaged by climate change, and they’d be true, at least on the trajectory we’re currently on. But it’s also true that we have a once-in-human-history chance not only to prevent the worst effects but also to make the world better right now. It would be a shame to squander this opportunity. So I don’t just want to talk about the problems anymore. I want to talk about the solutions. Consider this your last warning from me."

-via New York Times. Opinion essay by leading climate scientist Kate Marvel. November 18, 2023.