[✔️] August 11, 2022 - Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/*August 11, 2022*/

/[  WBUR, audio report  ] /
*Should air conditioning be a human right?*
August 10, 2022
Robin Young, Thomas Danielian, Jeannette Muhammad
Sweltering temperatures continue to sweep nearly every continent this 
summer, with millions of people experiencing temperatures above 100 
degrees Fahrenheit.

Billions of people need air conditioning to combat the deadly heat, 
which raises the question: Should access to it be a human right?

WBUR is a nonprofit news organization. Our coverage relies on your 
financial support. If you value articles like the one you're reading 
right now, give today.

One critique of supplying more air conditioning units is the 
environmental harm it would cause. Dr. Morgan Bazilian, director of the 
Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines, has 
been searching for cooling technology that’s both efficient and sustainable.

“If you look at an issue where you're going to want to increase the 
energy demand in developing countries, then we have to go back to the 
fundamentals of how we design energy systems and how we focus,” he says.

Bazilian says the technology already exists to provide more efficient AC 
units: Companies like Carrier have built units that are three times more 
energy efficient, so technology isn’t the obstacle, Bazilian says. 
Rather, it's a matter of policy.

National and local governments are key to supplying more air 
conditioning units. The issue of cooling has caught the attention of top 
decision-makers and organizations like the United Nations. To ensure the 
solution is enforceable and robust, Bazilian wants it to happen at the 
national or international level.

In the U.S., landlords are already required to provide heat for tenants, 
but laws regarding AC access vary from state to state. Bazilian says 
efforts by the Biden administration to provide energy services to those 
in need are promising.

“I think you're going to see a sort of strong movement under this 
administration to make sure that things like cooling become as mandatory 
as heating in some places,” he says.
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2022/08/10/air-conditioning-human-right



/[Part 1 of 3 -- excellent, politically current, clear message - a 
global calamity - a must-see ]/
*The fight for water | DW Documentary*
  Aug 10, 2022  Climate change is causing temperatures to rise. Extreme 
weather events and droughts are increasing. Springs and wells are drying 
up. And everyone needs more water. The battles for control over precious 
water reserves have begun.

In some countries, water has always been available in abundance - and is 
wasted carelessly every day. But the climate crisis is changing that. 
Because the climate is warming, everyone needs more water than ever: for 
drinking, agriculture and industry. Water is the new gold.

In many countries, the distribution battles for precious water reserves 
have already begun. In Mendocino, California, there is no longer enough 
water to flush the toilets. And in Germany, regional drinking water 
supplies collapse in hot weather. Groundwater levels have dropped to 
record lows in many places. Will we still have enough drinking water in 
the future? What happens when our water disappears?

This is a three-part documentary series. Episodes will be released 
weekly on the following dates:
Part 1: The fight for water - August 10
Part 2: What happens when our water dries up? - August 17
Part 3: Who owns water? - August 24
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MZFrJPPIQ8



/[ From Grist ]/
*How climate change spurs megadroughts*
The curious connection between the sky’s “thirstiness” and the dry spell 
devastating the western U.S.
Shannon Osaka
Aug 09, 2022...
Depending on how you look at it, California — and most of the American 
West — has either entered its third catastrophic drought of the past 10 
years, or has been in a constant, unyielding “megadrought” since 2000. 
Reservoirs are emptying; lawns are turning brown; swaths of farmland 
that have coaxed lettuce, almonds, and alfalfa out of the dry ground for 
decades are going fallow...
- -
Climate change is also undermining one of the American West’s most 
treasured tools for managing drought: snowpack. In the Sierra Nevadas of 
California and in the Colorado Rockies, snow falls during the winter and 
then acts as a natural reservoir, slowly releasing water as it thaws 
during the hot, dry summer season. But as temperatures rise, more 
precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow, and any remaining snow 
is melting more quickly and earlier in the season. By 2050, scientists 
estimate that the mountains of the Western U.S. will lose around 25 
percent of their snowpack. In 60 years, they warn, there may be no 
snowpack at all...
- -
Throughout the West, anxiety about drought is as palpable as the dryness 
of the air; talk of water fills newspapers and conversations alike. 
“Aridification kills civilizations. Is California next?” read one Los 
Angeles Times headline in June. In February, scientists confirmed that 
the current, decades-long “megadrought” is the worst in 1,200 years. 
They also confirmed that rising temperatures — driven by human 
consumption of fossil fuels — were partly to blame.

In one sense, the climate change link seems obvious. Since 1850, global 
temperatures have climbed 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit); 
in areas of the U.S. hit hardest by drought, the increase is even 
higher. Temperatures in California have risen about 3 degrees F since 
1896; in Arizona, they have gone up by 2.5 degrees...
- -
Climate change is also undermining one of the American West’s most 
treasured tools for managing drought: snowpack. In the Sierra Nevadas of 
California and in the Colorado Rockies, snow falls during the winter and 
then acts as a natural reservoir, slowly releasing water as it thaws 
during the hot, dry summer season. But as temperatures rise, more 
precipitation is falling as rain instead of snow, and any remaining snow 
is melting more quickly and earlier in the season. By 2050, scientists 
estimate that the mountains of the Western U.S. will lose around 25 
percent of their snowpack. In 60 years, they warn, there may be no 
snowpack at all...
- -
The American West is built on a strange, hodgepodge system of water 
that, for the last century, has somehow sustained millions of residents 
in the most arid parts of the country. Reservoirs, dams, and aqueducts 
carry water from where it is plentiful — the peaks of the Sierra 
Nevadas, the banks of the Colorado River — and deliver it to where it is 
scarce: fast-growing metropolises like Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Los 
Angeles. In California, 75 percent of the state’s rain and snow falls 
north of Sacramento, but 80 percent of its water demand comes from the 
southern two-thirds of the state. This imbalance is corrected 
artificially: A long cement aqueduct carries water from the north of the 
state to the south, shuttling through the dry, crackling Central Valley. 
More comes from the Colorado River, which brings water from the east to 
Los Angeles and Southern California...
- -
But the sheer longevity of the current dry period has even the most 
experienced water managers worried. That complex system of dams, 
aqueducts, and reservoirs that funnels water to Western states for 
lawns, golf courses, and farms is cracking under the strain. “We built 
these amazing places based on the promise of water,” said John Fleck, a 
professor of water policy and governance at the University of New 
Mexico. “And they’re good things — I don’t want to demonize what we did. 
But they were based on the promise of water that wouldn’t be there.”

To be sure, the current drought and even the overlapping, decades-long 
“megadrought” will eventually end. “I don’t expect it to be as dry as it 
has been the past few years forever,” Williams said. But the slow-moving 
disaster has demonstrated just how shaky the West’s foundation is. And 
it is a warning that the water system of the present may not hold for 
the future...
- -
What will happen next? Nearly 40 million people live in California 
alone; another 12 million reside in New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. 
And, in the wake of the pandemic, southwestern states are growing fast, 
as people look for more affordable housing, strong job markets, and 
warmer weather. But that warmer weather has a darker side. Not far from 
Phoenix, Arizona — one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S. — one 
community is already running out of water. As the Colorado River and the 
snowcaps of the Sierra Nevadas continue to dry up, the water flowing to 
the West’s sprawling suburbs and millions of acres of farmland will slow 
to a crawl. When that happens, communities will need to adapt. 
Agricultural water use will have to decline — even if that means 
destroying livelihoods that have continued uninterrupted for decades. 
Lawns will dry up; lush golf courses will disappear. The very character 
of the West — and of many arid parts of the globe — will be transformed. 
“In some ways it’s really simple,” Fleck said, of the climate-changed 
drought future. “The West will be less green.”
https://grist.org/drought/how-climate-change-spurs-megadroughts/



/[The news archive - looking back at a very recent past ]/
/*August 11, 2017*/
August 11, 2017: The New York Times reports on the machinations and 
secrecy of EPA head Scott Pruitt.

    *Scott Pruitt Is Carrying Out His E.P.A. Agenda in Secret, Critics Say*
    The Environmental Protection Agency has become more secretive under
    the leadership of Scott Pruitt.
    By Coral Davenport and Eric Lipton
    Aug. 11, 2017
    WASHINGTON — When career employees of the Environmental Protection
    Agency are summoned to a meeting with the agency’s administrator,
    Scott Pruitt, at agency headquarters, they no longer can count on
    easy access to the floor where his office is, according to
    interviews with employees of the federal agency.

    Doors to the floor are now frequently locked, and employees have to
    have an escort to gain entrance.

    Some employees say they are also told to leave behind their
    cellphones when they meet with Mr. Pruitt, and are sometimes told
    not to take notes.

    Mr. Pruitt, according to the employees, who requested anonymity out
    of fear of losing their jobs, often makes important phone calls from
    other offices rather than use the phone in his office, and he is
    accompanied, even at E.P.A. headquarters, by armed guards, the first
    head of the agency to ever request round-the-clock security.

    A former Oklahoma attorney general who built his career suing the
    E.P.A., and whose LinkedIn profile still describes him as “a leading
    advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda,” Mr. Pruitt has made it
    clear that he sees his mission to be dismantling the agency’s
    policies — and even portions of the institution itself.

    But as he works to roll back regulations, close offices and
    eliminate staff at the agency charged with protecting the nation’s
    environment and public health, Mr. Pruitt is taking extraordinary
    measures to conceal his actions, according to interviews with more
    than 20 current and former agency employees.

    Together with a small group of political appointees, many with
    backgrounds, like his, in Oklahoma politics, and with advice from
    industry lobbyists, Mr. Pruitt has taken aim at an agency whose
    policies have been developed and enforced by thousands of the
    E.P.A.’s career scientists and policy experts, many of whom work in
    the same building.

    “There’s a feeling of paranoia in the agency — employees feel like
    there’s been a hostile takeover and the guy in charge is treating
    them like enemies,” said Christopher Sellers, an expert in
    environmental history at Stony Brook University, who this spring
    conducted an interview survey with about 40 E.P.A. employees.

    Climate Change Report vs. E.P.A. Chief
    A draft report by scientists from 13 federal agencies directly
    contradicts statements by Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator,
    that human contribution to climate change is
    uncertain.CreditCredit...Al Drago for The New York Times
    Such tensions are not unusual in federal agencies when an election
    leads to a change in the party in control of the White House. But
    they seem particularly bitter at the E.P.A.

    Allies of Mr. Pruitt say he is justified in his measures to ramp up
    his secrecy and physical protection, given that his agenda and
    politics clash so fiercely with those of so many of the 15,000
    employees at the agency he heads.

    “E.P.A. is legendary for being stocked with leftists,” said Steven
    J. Milloy, a member of Mr. Trump’s E.P.A. transition team and author
    of the book “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the E.P.A.” “If you
    work in a hostile environment, you’re not the one that’s paranoid.”

    Mr. Pruitt’s penchant for secrecy is reflected not just in his
    inaccessibility and concern for security. He has terminated a
    decades-long practice of publicly posting his appointments calendar
    and that of all the top agency aides, and he has evaded oversight
    questions from lawmakers on Capitol Hill, according to the
    Democratic senators who posed the questions.

    His aides recently asked career employees to make major changes in a
    rule regulating water quality in the United States — without any
    records of the changes they were being ordered to make. And the
    E.P.A. under Mr. Pruitt has moved to curb certain public
    information, shutting down data collection of emissions from oil and
    gas companies, and taking down more than 1,900 agency webpages on
    topics like climate change, according to a tally by the
    Environmental Defense Fund, which did a Freedom of Information
    request on these terminated pages.

    William D. Ruckelshaus, who served as E.P.A. director under two
    Republican presidents and once wrote a memo directing agency
    employees to operate “in a fishbowl,” said such secrecy is
    antithetical to the mission of the agency.

    “Reforming the regulatory system would be a good thing if there were
    an honest, open process,” he said. “But it appears that what is
    happening now is taking a meat ax to the protections of public
    health and environment and then hiding it.”

    Mr. Ruckelshaus said such secrecy could pave the way toward, or
    exacerbate, another disaster like the contamination of public
    drinking water in Flint, Mich., or the 2014 chemical spill into the
    public water supply in Charleston, W.Va. — while leading to a dearth
    of information when such events happen.

    “Something will happen, like Flint, and the public will realize they
    can’t get any information about what happened or why,” he said.

    But Liz Bowman, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., categorically denied
    the accounts employees interviewed for this article gave of the
    secrecy surrounding Mr. Pruitt.

    “None of this is true,” she said. “It’s all rumors.”

    She added, in an emailed statement, “It’s very disappointing, yet
    not surprising, to learn that you would solicit leaks, and collude
    with union officials in an effort to distract from the work we are
    doing to implement the president’s agenda.”

    Mr. Pruitt’s efforts to undo a major water protection rule are one
    example of his moves to quickly and stealthily dismantle regulations.

    The rule, known as Waters of the United States, and enacted by the
    Obama administration, was designed to take existing federal
    protections on large water bodies such as the Chesapeake Bay and
    Mississippi River and expand them to include the wetlands and small
    tributaries that flow into those larger waters.

    It was fiercely opposed by farmers, rural landowners and real estate
    developers.

    The original estimate concluded that the water protections would
    indeed come at an economic cost to those groups — between $236
    million and $465 million annually.

    But it also concluded, in an 87-page analysis, that the economic
    benefits of preventing water pollution would be greater: between
    $555 million and $572 million.

    E.P.A. employees say that in mid-June, as Mr. Pruitt prepared a
    proposal to reverse the rule, they were told by his deputies to
    produce a new analysis of the rule — one that stripped away the
    half-billion-dollar economic benefits associated with protecting
    wetlands.

    “On June 13, my economists were verbally told to produce a new study
    that changed the wetlands benefit,” said Elizabeth Southerland, who
    retired last month from a 30-year career at the E.P.A., most
    recently as a senior official in the agency’s water office.

    “On June 16, they did what they were told,” Ms. Southerland said.
    “They produced a new cost-benefit analysis that showed no
    quantifiable benefit to preserving wetlands.”

    Ms. Southerland and other experts in federal rule-making said such a
    sudden shift was highly unusual — particularly since studies that
    estimate the economic impact of regulations can take months or even
    years to produce, and are often accompanied by reams of paperwork
    documenting the process.

    “Typically there are huge written records, weighing in on the
    scientific facts, the technology facts and the economic facts,” she
    said. “Everything’s in writing. This repeal process is political
    staff giving verbal directions to get the outcome they want,
    essentially overnight.”

    Jeffrey Ruch, the executive director of Public Employees for
    Environmental Responsibility, an organization representing
    government employees in environmental fields, said the E.P.A. could
    not allow changes like this to take place, or expect its employees
    to follow such directives.

    “This is a huge change, and they made it over a few days, with
    almost no record, no documentation,” Mr. Ruchs said, adding, “It
    wasn’t so much cooking the books, it was throwing out the books.”

    Experts in administrative law say such practices skate up to the
    edge of legality.

    While federal records laws prohibit senior officials from destroying
    records, they could evade public scrutiny of their decision-making
    by simply not creating them in the first place.

    “The mere fact they are telling people not to write things down
    shows they are trying to keep things hidden,” said Jeffrey Lubbers,
    a professor of administrative law at American University.

    Mr. Pruitt had a reputation for being secretive before he ever came
    to the E.P.A.

    While serving as Oklahoma’s attorney general, he came under
    criticism for maintaining at least three separate email accounts,
    including one private account that he at times used for state
    government business.

    During his Senate confirmation, he was asked about these multiple
    accounts, providing what some senators considered a misleading answer.

    A subsequent lawsuit resulted in the release of some of these other
    emails, which Mr. Pruitt had asserted did not exist.

    E.P.A.’s Scott Pruitt and Secrecy
    The E.P.A.'s Scott Pruitt has created a culture of secrecy, longtime
    agency employees say, as he has moved to undo Obama-era rules.

    “He’s got a serious problem because of his emails down in Oklahoma —
    he’s burned himself,” said David Schnare, who worked at the agency
    from 1978 to 2011 and then on the Trump administration’s E.P.A.
    transition team. “He doesn’t want to take any risks.”

    Mr. Schnare, a conservative Republican who has backed President
    Trump’s broader agenda, had taken on what was expected to be a more
    permanent role at the E.P.A.

    But he resigned last month in protest of what he said is Mr.
    Pruitt’s mismanagement of the agency.

    Mr. Schnare noted that some previous E.P.A. administrators had been
    secretive — during the Obama administration, for example, Lisa
    Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator, came under criticism for using an
    email alias, “Richard Windsor,” to conduct official business.

    But Mr. Schnare said that Mr. Pruitt’s methods stood out from all of
    his predecessors.

    “My view was that under this administration we would be good at
    transparency, particularly in the regulatory area,” he said. “But
    these guys aren’t doing that.”

    Senator Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the
    committee overseeing federal government operations, has criticized
    Mr. Pruitt for embracing what he calls “a culture of secrecy around
    everything from his schedule to the way the agency makes scientific
    determinations.”

    Mr. Carper and other Senate Democrats have a dozen outstanding
    requests awaiting a response from Mr. Pruitt, and when responses do
    come, Mr. Carper said, they referred lawmakers to printouts of news
    releases instead of answering questions.

    An E.P.A. spokesman disputed Mr. Carper’s criticisms.

    “Administrator Pruitt has responded to 14 of the 27 oversight
    letters, which often contain numerous in-depth questions and it
    takes time to provide an extensive and through response,” he said,
    adding that he “has been incredibly responsive to Congress.”

    Mr. Pruitt and his staff are also subject to intense scrutiny from
    the public and the news media: The E.P.A., just in the last two
    months, has received more than 2,000 Freedom of Information
    requests, many of them focused on Mr. Pruitt, asking for every
    possible record related to his tenure, including text messages,
    telephone records and even his web browsing history.

    Yet for E.P.A. employees, information about Mr. Pruitt’s activities
    can be hard to obtain.

    In April, for example, he traveled to Chicago to visit an
    E.P.A.-designated hazardous waste site.

    But E.P.A. employees at the agency’s Chicago office said they had no
    idea he was there — nor did he visit the Chicago branch of the
    agency, or meet with staff members.

    “He won’t meet with us or talk to us to make decisions about policy,
    and we don’t even know when he’s in town,” said Nicole Cantello, a
    lawyer in the E.P.A.’s Chicago office and a leader of the employee
    union.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/us/politics/scott-pruitt-epa.html?mwrsm=Email 



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