As expected, Trump’s EPA has proposed to rescind the endangerment finding. This is the EPA’s formal, evidence-based assessment that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and welfare. Rather than try to argue that there is no threat, the EPA has decided (18 years later) that it actually doesn’t have the power to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Concomitant with this action, the EPA is also proposing to relax requirements for reducing greenhouse gases from vehicles and power plants.

As I noted in A Supreme Ignorance of History, the record is unambiguous that Congress understood the threat of greenhouse-gas pollution to public health and welfare when adopting the Clean Air Act (CAA) in 1970. Naomi Oreskes and colleagues found “more than 100 examples of Congressional hearings that examined CO2 and the greenhouse effect prior to the adoption of the CAA.” President Nixon’s Air Pollution Task Force concluded that “the greatest consequences of air pollution for man’s continued life on earth are its effects on the earth’s climate” and, when introducing the CAA on the floor of the Senate, Edmund Muskie (D-ME) warned that unchecked air pollution will “threaten irreversible atmospheric and climatic changes.”

An op-ed in The New York Times summarizes the myriad ways that climate change endangers the health and well-being of Americans. In Scientific American, my colleagues from the Union of Concerned Scientists make clear the implications of the EPA’s proposal, noting that this “is a blatant attempt to evade that responsibility and pander to fossil fuel interests.” The EPA issued a report to support its proposal, which as expected is “riddled with climate denial tropes, cherry-picked evidence, and distortions of the indisputably well-established facts on climate change. For example, the report claims that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are good for agriculture without acknowledging the significant negative impacts of climate-driven heat, drought and floods on crops.”

Phys.org describes the outrage of multiple scientists who claim their work is being misused and misrepresented, and Carbon Brief provides explicit fact-checking by many of these individuals. The Union of Concerned Scientists and the Environmental Defense Fund have sued the EPA for violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act for conducting this important review in secret. RealClimate notes that the National Academy of Sciences will be challenging the EPA as well.

It is hard to imagine a greater abdication of public trust, as the agency that is supposed to fight for public and environmental health is actually leading the effort to damage both. The U.S. government is now adopting climate-denier talking points as official policy, and we all must fight back. Please submit comments to the EPA and the DOE to push back against their destructive actions. This does not take long, and you can use information from the Scientific American article (or other sources) to support your comment.

The Guardian notes a recent report concluding that “rampant climate misinformation is turning the crisis into a catastrophe.” As has been the case for years, climate action is being obstructed and delayed by false and misleading information supplied by fossil-fuel companies, rightwing politicians and some nation states. The more action is delayed, the more dangerous the misinformation campaigns become. And now, of course, these misinformers have the ear of the President of the United States. The report documented how climate denialism has “evolved into campaigns focused on discrediting solutions, such as the false claims that renewable energy caused the recent massive blackout in Spain.” A scientist who led the review states: “Alliances of industry and conservative think-tanks actually target misinformation at the key people who will be making decisions. Those links are particularly worrisome because it’s something approaching a conspiracy.”

The New York Times examines the problem of beach erosion as sea level rises. The article focuses on the legal principal of public trust, with many states in the U.S. designating lands below the high-tide line as a protected public-trust resource. But as coastal private property is threatened, owners want to armor their land with sea walls or other hard structures, and this hastens erosion of nearby beach areas (a phenomenon geologists call “coastal squeeze,” as the beach gets squeezed between the rising ocean and the hardened landscape). Beaches and other intertidal landscapes will naturally migrate inland (and up) if given the opportunity.

The San Francisco Chronicle describes the results of a recent report about the impact of sea level rise on Stinson Beach. The costs for protecting the homes in this area, along with roads, septic systems and other infrastructure is enormous ($2.4M for each of the 500 residents). It is unclear where the money would come from, nor how long these upgrades would last as sea level rise accelerates over the course of this century and beyond.

The New York Times reports on a recent study highlighting how coastal flooding will exacerbate the housing shortage in the New York City area. In a region that is already short of housing, sea level rise and coastal flooding will be eliminating 80,000 homes in the next 15 years. The article reviews how many localities are attempting to make their communities more resilient to this threat. The Washington Post describes the results of a study in North Carolina that determined coastal flooding was actually an order of magnitude more common than previously estimated. The new study placed remote cameras inside storm drains and other structures to directly observe flooding, rather than relying on tide gauges. “The reason tide gauges are poor indicators of flooding,” the authors write, is not any fault with the instruments, which have long measured water levels in the ocean and serve various purposes. Rather, the existing tools often underestimate the true extent of flooding on land because they “do not measure rainfall runoff, groundwater contributions to flooding, or the effects of local drainage infrastructure.”

The New York Times takes a look at ocean acidification, a well-understood but less-publicized impact of carbon emissions. This is a particular concern for animals that produce shells, and the oyster industry is struggling with the effects. The article examines how the industry is trying to cope, and the extreme challenges it faces as the ocean continues to acidify. “Aside from shellfish, acidification is taking its toll on other sea life, including tiny pteropods (sea slugs and snails) and krill. That is causing a decline in food sources and critical nutrients for salmon and other fish.”

The Washington Post describes how wildfires in Canada, where more than 80 are presently burning out of control, are changing the country’s appearance as existing forests are unlikely to grow back in a similar configuration. Fire is part of the Canadian landscape, but “drier conditions and warmer weather due to climate change are making these fires more frequent and hotter, and the trees just kind of can’t keep up.” This implies that Canadian forests will be transitioning to grasslands or savannah in some parts of the country. In some ways, this would be a return to the past, as decades of fire suppression have allowed dense forests to proliferate. The New York Times reports on a new study that concludes: “climate change is making severe fire weather more common around the world, raising the chances of worsened forest fire seasons.”

The International Court of Justice has issued an opinion “that states have binding legal obligations to act to protect the climate system, and failure to do so — by continuing to produce, consume, and subsidize fossil fuels — may constitute an internationally wrongful act.” In other words, “curbing greenhouse-gas emissions is not merely voluntary in the eyes of the court; failure to do so is illegal.” While not legally binding, the opinion sets an important standard for understanding what must be done. An article in The Atlantic describes the opinion and its importance, quoting from it as a summation: “A complete solution to this daunting, and self-inflicted, problem requires the contribution of all fields of human knowledge, whether law, science, economics or any other. Above all, a lasting and satisfactory solution requires human will and wisdom — at the individual, social and political levels — to change our habits, comforts and current way of life in order to secure a future for ourselves and those who are yet to come.”

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