300 and Counting: State AGs Lead the Fight for Health and the Environment

Attorneys general reach 300 legal and regulatory actions, blunting many severe consequences of the Trump administration’s worst rollbacks, but more actions lie ahead.

The report examines the AGs’ response to some of the administration’s most serious assaults on the environment in six key areas:

The Failure to Confront Climate Change The Reversion to Dirtier, Unhealthy Air Quality The Weakening of Clean Water Protections The Exploitation of Our Public Lands & Wildlife The Undermining of Clean Energy & Energy Efficiency The Failure to Keep Americans Safe from Chemical Accidents and Dangerous Toxics

Oil, Gas and Climate: An Analysis of Oil and Gas Industry Plans for Expansion and Compatibility with Global Emission Limits

This data briefing analyzes the expansion plans of the oil and gas industry and assesses the compatibility with Paris climate goals. We primarily focus on the global expansion threat over the next five years (2020 to 2024). This short-term focus illustrates the urgent need for government, investor, business, and civil society action to chart a different course – to stop licensing and permitting new production and infrastructure and instead manage a swift and just phase-out of oil and gas extraction.

In terms of the global threat, three different metrics are summarized:

1. The investment the oil and gas industry intends …

Persistent Fossil Fuel Growth Threatens the Paris Agreement and Planetary Health

Amidst declarations of planetary emergency and reports that the window for limiting climate change to 1.5 °C is rapidly closing, global average temperatures and fossil fuel emissions continue to rise. Global fossil CO2 emissions have grown three years consecutively: +1.5% in 2017, +2.1% in 2018, and our slower central projection of +0.6% in 2019 (range of –0.32% to 1.5%) to 37 ± 2 Gt CO2 (Friedlingstein et al 2019 Earth Syst. Sci. Data accepted), after a temporary growth hiatus from 2014 to 2016. Economic indicators and trends in global natural gas and oil use suggest a further rise in emissions …

An Assessment of the GREEN Act: Implications for Emissions and Clean Energy Deployment

The Growing Renewable Energy and Efficiency Now (GREEN) Act, a discussion draft distributed to Congress on November 19th, proposes to extend several tax credits for clean energy deployment and expand several others. Given the current political climate and numerous competing priorities facing Congress, a tax credit extension package may possibly be the best chance in this Congress to enact measures that can accelerate clean energy deployment and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This independent analysis quantifies the combined impact of most major provisions of the proposal on both technology deployment and GHG emissions, through 2030.…

Global Carbon Budget 2019

Accurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and their redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere – the “global carbon budget” – is important to better understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of climate policies, and project future climate change. Here we describe data sets and methodology to quantify the five major components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties. Fossil CO2 emissions (EFF) are based on energy statistics and cement production data, while emissions from land use change (ELUC), mainly deforestation, are based on land use and land use change data and bookkeeping models. …

2019 National Preparedness Report

The National Preparedness Report evaluates annual preparedness progress and challenges facing the whole community. The 2019 National Preparedness Report highlights the diverse range of preparedness challenges the Nation faces—from terrorism and active shooter incidents, to cyber attacks, to natural disasters, as well as how stakeholders across the Nation are using preparedness grant funding to invest in preparedness improvements. The 2019 Report also presents cross-cutting trends from the Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (THIRA) and Stakeholder Preparedness Review (SPR), which provide insights into preparedness progress and gaps. Read the 2019 National Preparedness Report.…

People’s Summary of Roadmap to Nowhere: The Myth of Powering the Nation with Renewable Energy

People’s Summary of “Roadmap to Nowhere: The Myth of Powering the Nation with Renewable Energy”

by Timothy Maloney and Mike Conley
Prepared by Leonard Rodberg, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Urban Studies,
Queens College/CUNY…

The Adverse Impact of Section 201 Tariffs: Lost Jobs, Lost Deployment and Lost Investments

Lost Jobs, Lost Deployment and Lost Investments
This report explores the impact of Section 201 tariffs on the U.S. solar industry. As a result of the tariffs:

62,000 fewer jobs from 2017 through 2021
10.5 gigawatts (GW) of lost solar deployment (enough to power 1.8 million homes and avoid 26 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions
$19 billion in lost investment…

Pathways for Climate-Ready Fisheries

With climate change increasingly threatening key life support systems of our planet, including the ocean, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) today released a new report identifying key priorities for the world’s fisheries to achieve sustainability in the face of rapidly-warming seas.

The report, Pathways for Climate-Ready Fisheries, identifies five key elements necessary to prepare the world’s fisheries to thrive in a climate-impacted future. It details the necessary social, political and economic transitions required in order to avoid, or even reverse, the worst impacts from climate change on the world’s seafood and fishing communities. The report is being released as a discussion …

Reducing EV Charging Infrastructure Costs

RMI’s groundbreaking report Reducing EV Charging Infrastructure Costs finds that the electric vehicle (EV) charging industry needs to do what the solar industry did about a decade ago: streamline and de-bottleneck installation.

The report draws on numerous sources, including literature, publicly available information on utility procurements, and two dozen original interviews conducted under nondisclosure agreements with utilities, hardware providers, software providers, operators of charging networks, transit agencies, states, laboratories, contractors, and consultancies.

The authors find that while the cost of hardware components is already falling as manufacturers gradually find ways to squeeze costs out of their processes, there are significant …