[✔️] January 24, 2023- Global Warming News Digest - Yale traumas, mind, understanding the EPA, Grid and the FBI
Richard Pauli
Richard at CredoandScreed.com
Tue Jan 24 07:38:02 EST 2023
/*January 24, 2023*/
/[ Yale Climate Change Communications //Dec 15, 2022//] /
*Younger Americans are growing more worried about global warming*
By Jennifer Marlon, Seth Rosenthal, Matthew Goldberg, Matthew Ballew,
Edward Maibach, John Kotcher and Anthony Leiserowitz
Filed under: Policy & Politics, Audiences and Beliefs & Attitudes/.../
/- -
/Here are just a few highlights from the updated tool:
While public acceptance and worry about global warming have increased
over the last decade, acceptance and worry have increased faster among
younger Americans aged 18-34 compared to older Americans. For example,
since 2012, more young adults today accept that global warming is
happening (+13% points from 68% in 2012 to 81% in 2022) and already
harming the U.S. (+24% from 40% in 2012 to 64% in 2022). Younger
Americans have also surpassed older Americans on some measures of policy
support, including funding more research into renewables (+19% points
from 69% in 2012 to 88% in 2022) and regulating carbon dioxide as a
pollutant (+14% points from 66% in 2012 to 82% in 2022). Younger
Americans are also much more likely to discuss global warming today than
they were a decade ago (+15% points from 19% in 2012 to 34% in 2022).
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/FN_Fig1_CCAMEx_Youth-1024x704.png
- -
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/FN_Fig2_CCAMEx_RepGap.png/
/
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/younger-americans-are-growing-more-worried-about-global-warming//
/
Please explore the data for yourself using our online interactive tool.
The underlying data are downloadable from the Open Science Framework./
/
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/younger-americans-are-growing-more-worried-about-global-warming/
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/
/[ Yale makes new Tool for desk top computer -- displays study results ]
/*Explore Climate Change in the American Mind*/
/About the Tool
Public opinion parameters are based on national survey data collected
between 2008 and 2022 as part of the Climate Change in the American Mind
(CCAM) project led by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
and the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication.
Percentages refer to positive responses to questions (e.g., “Agree” or
“Support”)./
/https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/americans-climate-views//
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/[ google search reports indicate growing interest in a topic ]/
*Google searches for climate refugee up 33% in past week*
Worldwide-Friday, January 13, 2023 - Thursday, January 19, 2023
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=climate%20refugee
/
/
/[ From the NYTimes ]
/*Depleted Under Trump, a ‘Traumatized’ E.P.A. Struggles With Its Mission*
Despite an injection of funding, the agency still has not recovered from
an exodus of scientists and policy experts, both insiders and critics say.
By Lisa Friedman
Jan. 23, 2023
WASHINGTON — The nation’s top environmental agency is still reeling from
the exodus of more than 1,200 scientists and policy experts during the
Trump administration. The chemicals chief said her staff can’t keep up
with a mounting workload. The enforcement unit is prosecuting fewer
polluters than at any time in the past two decades...
-The agency’s administrator, Michael S. Regan, has promised that new
regulations being written by his staff now will be made public by
spring. Agency officials said that the E.P.A. has stepped up its
recruitment efforts and has purchased software that has helped it
identify more potential job candidates, particularly from universities.
“The agency is moving further and faster than ever before,” Dan Utech,
Mr. Regan’s chief of staff, said in a statement. He added that
accomplishments had come “despite depleted staffing levels, persistent
funding challenges and a previous administration that left the agency
neglected and scientifically compromised.”..
- -
The E.P.A. is at an unusual juncture. The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure
law and the climate law enacted last year have begun to pump $90 billion
into the agency over the next 10 years for climate projects like $1.5
billion for new technologies to monitor and reduce methane emissions
from oil and gas wells, $5 billion for states to purchase low-emission
school buses and $3 billion to cut pollution at ports. For the first
time, the E.P.A. has “a little bit of walking-around money,” Mr. Regan
joked to staff at a recent meeting.
But experts said they worry the E.P.A.’s regulatory and enforcement work
is taking a back seat to issuing grants.
“E.P.A. is a regulatory agency, and I worry the huge piles of money they
now have to administer and manage could end up obscuring the regulatory
work the statutes say they have to do,” said Eric Schaeffer, executive
director of the Environmental Integrity Project, a watchdog group.
And time is running out.
Mr. Biden wants to cut United States greenhouse gas emissions roughly in
half this decade in order to avoid the most severe climate disruptions.
Analysts say that even with the new climate law, the president can’t
achieve his goal without new regulations designed to cut carbon dioxide
and other pollutants from power plants, cars and trucks.
The process from proposing a regulation to enacting it can take months,
and the current delays may mean that some rules are not completed until
next year. Under the Congressional Review Act, lawmakers can repeal any
regulation within 60 legislative days of being finalized with a simple
majority vote. So any final rule issued in late 2024 could be repealed
by Republicans if they maintain control of the House and pick up seats
in the Senate in the November 2024 elections.
The process from proposing a regulation to enacting it can take months,
and the current delays may mean that some rules are not completed until
next year. Under the Congressional Review Act, lawmakers can repeal any
regulation within 60 legislative days of being finalized with a simple
majority vote. So any final rule issued in late 2024 could be repealed
by Republicans if they maintain control of the House and pick up seats
in the Senate in the November 2024 elections...
- -
Moreover, Biden administration climate rules are also likely to face
legal challenges. If a new administration is elected in 2024, it might
opt not to defend the rules in court.
A recent report card from Evergreen, an environmental group, found the
E.P.A. was behind its own deadlines on nine key environmental
regulations, including limits on power plant emissions of mercury and
other toxic substances, ozone standards, and curtailing the storage of
coal ash to avoid spills and contamination. Most worrisome, climate
advocates said, is that the agency has yet to propose rules to limit
greenhouse gas emissions from new gas-fired power plants and existing
coal and gas plants — measures that energy analysts say will be
necessary to eliminate fossil fuels from the electricity sector by 2035
as Mr. Biden has pledged to do.
In a recent interview, Mr. Regan said his agency has recently been
reassessing its regulatory plans. The millions of dollars now available
through the climate law to make it cheaper and easier for utilities and
automobile manufacturers to move away from fossil fuels has led the
agency to consider whether it could impose more stringent emissions
goals than initially conceived, he said. That would move the power and
transportation sectors of the economy even faster away from fossil
fuels. He said developing the legal and economic justification for such
regulations would take time but was nearing completion.
“This spring, you’re going to see a number of actions taken by E.P.A.”
Mr. Regan said.
Despite the billions earmarked for climate programs, E.P.A. remains
underfunded and understaffed when it comes to its other obligations,
including enforcing environmental laws and evaluating chemicals to
ensure they don’t pose an unreasonable risk to human health or the
environment.
The nonpartisan Environmental Integrity Project recently found that
federal environmental enforcement was slipping under Mr. Biden. E.P.A.’s
civil cases against polluters hit a two-decade low in 2022, with 72 such
enforcement cases closed in court. That’s fewer than during the Trump
administration, which bristled against restrictions on industry yet
closed an average of 94 enforcement cases per year. The Obama
administration averaged 210 per year, the report found. E.P.A. officials
said they were focused on protecting heavily polluted communities by
increasing inspections and targeting the most serious violations...
- -
Industries regulated by the E.P.A. are also frustrated, saying the
agency is taking too long to determine whether new and existing
chemicals pose an unreasonable risk to the environment or human health.
The American Chemistry Council, which represents companies like Dow,
DuPont and ExxonMobil Chemical, is frustrated by “constant delays and
lack of transparency in how resources are being deployed,” according to
a statement from Kimberly Wise White, vice president of regulatory and
scientific affairs at the trade group.
Michal Freedhoff, who leads the E.P.A.’s chemical unit, told Congress
recently that the office of chemical safety would fall short of its
obligations and miss many “significant statutory deadlines.” She blamed
the fact that after a 2016 law significantly increased the agency’s
duties, the E.P.A. under the Trump administration never sought the
resources from Congress that were required to perform the work.
In fact, Mr. Trump tried each year to slash the E.P.A. budget by at
least 30 percent. Highly skilled scientists and other experts left the
agency as the Trump administration dismantled science advisory panels,
disregarded scientific evidence and weakened protections against pollution.
“They beat down the E.P.A. work force, a lot of people left dispirited,”
said Senator Tom Carper, Democrat of Delaware and chairman of the
Committee on Environment and Public Works, which oversees the E.P.A.
The result is that the E.P.A.’s chemical safety office is way behind,
Ms. Freedhoff told Congress. Attracting and retaining staff has been
difficult because of the heavy workload, she said.
Mr. Carper said he was “impatient,” particularly with the regulatory
delays, and had expressed that to Mr. Regan personally.
The E.P.A. is hiring and, in the past two years, has increased its
payroll by 3 percent, up to 14,844 employees. But that has brought total
staffing levels to slightly more than when Ronald Reagan was president.
Staffing at the E.P.A. peaked in 2004 during the George W. Bush
administration, when there were 17,611 employees, according to the
agency. Those levels ebbed and flowed slightly, but began to take a
sharp dip during the Obama administration amid Republican control of the
House and Senate.
When Mr. Trump entered the White House, the E.P.A. had 15,408 employees.
The following year it dropped to 14,172 employees, a level that stood
more or less steady until the Biden administration.
It was only last month that the agency received its first significant
budget increase in years, an additional $576 million, for enforcement
and compliance, as well as clean air, water and toxic chemical programs.
Max Stier, the head of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan
organization that seeks to make government more effective, said the
E.P.A. faced a “consequential hurdle” to both accomplishing the long
list of rules that Mr. Biden has promised and to expanding further to
make sure money from the new climate law gets spent effectively.
“You have an organization that was at some level traumatized to begin
with, that was facing difficulties created over many, many years of
divestment and now you have a new set of requirements that are going to
call for new capabilities,” he said. “They’re going to have to build up
their strength, and that does not happen overnight.”/
/
Lisa Friedman reports on federal climate and environmental policy from
Washington. She has broken multiple stories about the Trump
administration’s efforts to repeal climate change regulations and limit
the use of science in policymaking. @LFFriedman
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/climate/environmental-protection-agency-epa-funding.html?unlocked_article_code=s3Hu0dUNk8I2Q-dL4vsCuu74JlhnBQA-jH7RFhw2S-8XKLpjOzj8Ngp9uDLil3N9q9Z_37IAofDdzqvpQlkeDTJ-ovhtDtwgXD-cmpY1o148ZJiuqP1uPaFfe8W5AV1YX93H6uIa9Vk2aqrEC47RL0XZ-WFd25hS8V-TkVg1xNjr7Zc9IvKrwm-BYHkPhS1FWgHVp9nh1FNF-hCkjRFnzHldAqqkmBJjENxgxqQTqdpRwCPs-SkvGjTxYMFLzFoBhMadsve_nXQl_alKrLz1Gw4lCfoCRAZ14kB8F8tjhK0HEOOb628QV8GVRmpFqEn9-g5kq8vkNu6WDrab9hIHMR_EioSl2jKyDZ6I6irYPduhB8RjUQ&smid=share-url
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/climate/environmental-protection-agency-epa-funding.html/
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/[ Tweeted //-- Climate Psychology Alliance of North America // ]
/@ClimateNa
*IDEAS WANTED: We are soon launching a new podcast in which we interview
authors (fiction or non-fiction) who write about climate change and
whose writing provides a good basis for talking about climate and mental
health. * We’d love suggested books!/
/https://twitter.com/ClimateNa/status/1617285524846252032/
/
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/[ Where weather forecasters come from. "curiosity and passion to
communicate" ]/
*Climate Central
*Climate Central communicates climate change science, effects, and
solutions to the public and decision-makers.
https://youtu.be/TaLsnnFMFZY
Climate Central is an independent group of scientists and communicators
who research and report the facts about our changing climate and how it
affects people’s lives. We are a policy-neutral 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Climate Central uses science, big data, and technology to generate
thousands of local storylines and compelling visuals that make climate
change personal and show what can be done about it. We address climate
science, sea level rise, extreme weather, energy, and related topics. We
collaborate widely with TV meteorologists, journalists, and other
respected voices to reach audiences across diverse geographies and beliefs.
https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters
- -
/[ recent peer-reviewed research Online Publication: 15 Oct 2020 ] /
*Impact of the Climate Matters Program on Public Understanding of
Climate Change*
*Abstract*
Climate Matters is a localized climate change reporting resources
program developed to support television (TV) weathercasters across
the United States. Developed as a pilot test in one media market in
2010, it launched nationwide in 2013; in the autumn of 2019 more
than 797 weathercasters were participating in the program. In this
paper we present evidence of the impact of the Climate Matters
program on Americans’ science-based understanding of climate change.
We analyzed three sets of data in a multilevel model: 20 nationally
representative surveys of American adults conducted biannually since
2010 (n = 23 635), data on when and how frequently Climate Matters
stories were aired in each U.S. media market, and data describing
the demographic, economic, and climatic conditions in each media
market. We hypothesized that 1) reporting about climate change by TV
weathercasters will increase science-based public understanding of
climate change and 2) this effect will be stronger for people who
pay more attention to local weather forecasts. Our results partially
support the first hypothesis: controlling for market-level factors
(population size, temperature, political ideology, and economic
prosperity) and individual-level factors (age, education, income,
gender, and political ideology), there is a significant positive
association between the amount of Climate Matters reporting and some
key indicators of science-based understanding (including that
climate change is occurring, is primarily human caused, and causes
harm). However, there was no evidence for the second hypothesis.
These findings suggest that climate reporting by TV weathercasters,
as enabled by the Climate Matters program, may be increasing the
climate literacy of the American people.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/wcas/12/4/WCAS-D-20-0026.1.xml?rskey=mXRY58&result=1
///[ Yikes - not during heat waves please. ]/
*FBI warns of neo-Nazi plots as attacks on Northwest power grid spike*
By Conrad Wilson (OPB) and John Ryan (KUOW)
Jan. 19, 2023 5 a.m.
As a string of attacks on electrical substations unfolded in Oregon and
Washington in 2022, the FBI was warning utilities of white supremacists’
plots to take down the nation’s power grid...
- -
The order by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission directs officials
to study the effectiveness of existing reliability standards for the
physical security of the nation's power grid and determine whether they
need to be improved.
“The security and reliability of the nation’s electric grid is one of
FERC’s top priorities,” FERC Chairman Richard Glick said at a commission
meeting Thursday.
- -
Electrical substations transform high-voltage electricity to the lower
voltages that keep America’s lights on, its food cold, its medical
devices operating and its phones charged. Far-flung substations can be
difficult to secure. Damaging even a single one can shut off critical
services to thousands of people.
Attacks like the one in Morton are on the rise in the Northwest – there
have been 15 since June, more than in the previous six years combined.
The recent attacks make this region a hotspot for such activity,
according to a joint investigation by Oregon Public Broadcasting and
KUOW. In most cases, the motives aren’t known. But as the FBI and
extremism researchers have noted, neo-Nazis have been calling for just
such attacks.
https://www.opb.org/article/2022/12/15/feds-order-review-of-power-grid-security-after-attacks/
https://www.opb.org/article/2023/01/19/surge-in-oregon-washington-substation-attacks-as-fbi-warns-neo-nazi-plots/
/[The news archive - looking back]/
/*January 24, 2007*/
January 24, 2007: "CBS Evening News" provides a sneak preview of the 4th
IPCC report.
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/climate-change-cause-effect/
https://web.archive.org/web/20140622143051/cbsnews.com/videos/climate-change-cause-effect/
=======================================
*Mass media is lacking, many daily summariesdeliver global warming news
- a few are email delivered*
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