[✔️] March 22, 2024 Global Warming News | Sue the bastards, Harvard suggests homicide, Suborning murder, Svalbard speed, Bye bye Anthropocene, 2017 early Trump

[Richard Pauli]

/*March*//*22, 2024*/

/[ imagine jury duty for this big one ]/
*Fossil fuel firms could be tried in US for homicide over 
climate-related deaths, experts say*
Public Citizen, a non-profit group, proposed the idea last year to 
prosecute companies for millions of deaths due to climate crisis
Dharna Noor
Thu 21 Mar 2024
Each year, extreme temperatures take 5 million lives, while 400,000 
people die from climate-related hunger and disease and scores perish in 
floods and wildfires.

Now, researchers are promoting a new legal theory that says fossil fuel 
companies – which, data show, are the leading contributors to 
planet-heating pollution – could be tried for homicide for 
climate-related deaths.

The radical idea, first proposed last year by consumer advocacy 
non-profit Public Citizen, may sound far-fetched, but it’s gaining 
interest from experts and public officials.
“We’ve been really excited to see the curiosity, interest and support 
these ideas have garnered from members of the legal community, including 
from both former and current federal, state and local prosecutors,” said 
Aaron Regunberg, senior policy counsel with Public Citizen’s climate 
program.

The Public Citizen researchers are currently holding events at top law 
schools including Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, 
University of Chicago and New York University to promote the idea.

“I strongly support the effort to go after these bastards,” Christopher 
Rabb, a Pennsylvania state representative said at a recent UPenn event. 
The researchers say other public officials have expressed interest 
behind the scenes as well.

The proposal, which will soon be published in the Harvard Law Review, 
stems in part from the growing body of evidence that the fossil fuel 
industry hid information about the dangers of fossil fuel use from the 
public. Those revelations have inspired 40 lawsuits alleging big oil has 
violated tort, product liability and consumer protection laws and 
engaged in racketeering.

In addition to those civil lawsuits, fossil fuel companies should also 
face criminal charges, the researchers say.

“Criminal law is how we say what is right and wrong in our society,” 
said David Arkush, who directs Public Citizen’s climate program and 
co-authored the paper on the proposal. “I think it’s important that some 
of the most damaging conduct in human history be squarely recognized and 
pursued as criminal.”

There are a range of statutes that could criminalize fossil fuel 
companies’ climate conduct, the researchers say. Many of the civil 
claims facing oil companies, such as conspiracy and racketeering, have 
criminal counterparts, and other laws could be used to criminalize 
conduct that could inflict future harms, such as reckless endangerment. 
But the claim that could capture the sector’s gravest harms, the 
researchers say, is homicide.
Because oil companies fought to delay climate action despite knowing 
about global warming, there is a case to be made that they committed 
reckless or negligent homicide, according to Public Citizen.

“It’s well within the four signposts of the law that you ought to be 
able to bring one of these cases,” said Arkush. “We’ve talked to dozens 
of criminal law professors across the country, we’ve talked to former 
prosecutors, former department of justice prosecutors, and no one really 
has anything to say about us being wrong on the law.”
Energy companies have been charged with homicide for environmental 
crimes before, Arkush noted. California prosecutors charged the utility 
PG&E with manslaughter after a tree fell onto an aging transmission line 
and sparked a deadly 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California. Federal 
prosecutors also charged oil company BP with manslaughter after the 2010 
Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 workers and resulted in the 
largest oil spill in the history of marine oil-drilling operations. Both 
companies pleaded guilty and paid billions of dollars in penalties and 
fines.

Cindy Cho, a former Department of Justice prosecutor, said she was 
initially skeptical about Public Citizen’s proposal, which is called 
Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil for Climate Death.

“But once I read it, I thought that it was more compelling than I had 
guessed it would be,” she said.

Though she now believes it could be a “viable avenue for prosecution”, 
the legal proposal is not a slam dunk, said Cho, now a professor at 
Indiana University’s Maurer school of law. Even if a district attorney 
or attorney general is willing to bring such charges against some of the 
world’s most powerful corporations, that prosecutor would need 
significant resources and a highly specialized team, she said.

“You need people who understand the science on the prosecution team, in 
addition to people who understand a homicide prosecution, in addition to 
people who understand big, document-intensive white-collar 
prosecutions,” she said. “That’s not an easy team to assemble.”
Another challenge: though bringing charges of reckless or negligent 
homicide would not technically require plaintiffs to demonstrate oil 
companies killed with intent, in practice that’s something many 
prosecutors and jurors will look for, she said.

Demonstrating causality between an oil company and any single 
climate-related death would also likely prove difficult, she said. When 
a person dies in a hurricane, even if attribution science shows climate 
change was a factor in increasing the severity of the storm, a court 
would also have to consider other factors that exacerbated the risk they 
faced, such as the victim’s underlying health conditions or the strength 
of their home.
“You could probably sit here for an hour and think of all of the 
factors,” she said. “And that’s before you even get to the knotty … 
question of showing that climate change led to the hurricane, that 
nothing else besides the actions of the company that lead to climate 
change was a cause.”

The researchers note that some criminal charges can be brought even 
without a demonstration of causality. Pennsylvania, for instance, has a 
criminal statute against not only causing, but also risking, catastrophe.

Even so, there are political and cultural barriers to filing novel 
charges against such well-heeled companies, the researchers say. But if 
such criminal litigation were successful, it could have major 
consequences for fossil fuel companies, potentially forcing the sector 
to alter how it operates.
Researchers point to the case of Purdue Pharma, which in response to 
federal charges over its role in the opioid crisis, accepted a 2020 
settlement requiring it to restructure as a public benefit corporation 
focussed on delivering safe drugs and abating addiction. A similar 
settlement with oil companies could require them to focus on 
accelerating the clean energy transition and redressing past harms, the 
researchers say.

The proposal also represents a chance to “more accurately portray what a 
criminal looks like”, Cho said at the researchers’ UPenn event last 
week. While criminal law often targets individuals, many prosecutors are 
interested in going after “big defendants” who create structural harm, 
she said.

“I think that prosecutors should actively consider pursuing the theory, 
especially if they walk into the investigation with an understanding of 
the intense challenges,” she said.

Larry Krasner, the district attorney of Philadelphia, said in an email 
his office will “explore legal avenues by which we may seek 
accountability from polluters”.

Nikil Saval, a state senator from Pennsylvania, said the proposal 
captured his curiosity. “Fossil fuel companies and the executives that 
lead them … have committed crimes that have harmed the people of 
Pennsylvania and they should be held accountable for them,” he said.

Marian Ryan, the district attorney for Middlesex, Massachusetts, said it 
is “imperative that we acknowledge the profound impact of pollution and 
chemical exposure on individuals’ well-being.
“I look forward to learning more about this research as we continue our 
collective efforts to address the intersection of public health and 
safety,” she said of Public Citizen’s proposal.

Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, which has 
supported civil suits against big oil, said the new theory “makes clear 
that efforts to hold the oil majors accountable are only beginning, and 
that lawyers will continue to pursue innovative legal strategies until 
the oil majors are finally held accountable for the massive harms they 
have caused”.

Sharon Eubanks, who was lead counsel on behalf of the US in the 
successful 2005 legal action against big tobacco, said she is supportive 
of the new theory and noted that her plan to sue big tobacco faced 
similar skepticism.

“There were a lot of people who said we were crazy to charge big tobacco 
with racketeering and that we could never win,” she said. “But you know 
what? We did win. I think we need that same kind of thinking to deal 
with the climate crisis.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/21/fossil-fuel-companies-homicide-climate-deaths-lawsuit?utm_

- -

/[ Harvard considers the law ]/
*New climate paper calls for charging big US oil firms with homicide*
Brian Kahn
Wed 22 Mar 2023 06.00 ED
Authors of paper accepted for publication in Harvard Environmental Law 
Review argue firms are ‘killing members of the public at an accelerating 
rate’

Brian Kahn
Wed 22 Mar 2023

Oil companies have come under increasing legal scrutiny and face 
allegations of defrauding investors, racketeering, and a wave of other 
lawsuits. But a new paper argues there’s another way to hold big oil 
accountable for climate damage: trying companies for homicide.

The striking and seemingly radical legal theory is laid out in a paper 
accepted for publication in the Harvard Environmental Law Review. In it, 
the authors argue fossil fuel companies “have not simply been lying to 
the public, they have been killing members of the public at an 
accelerating rate, and prosecutors should bring that crime to the 
public’s attention”.
“What’s on their ledger in terms of harm, there’s nothing like it in 
human history,” said David Arkush, the director of the climate program 
at consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and one of the paper’s authors.
The paper is rooted in part in the growing body of evidence fossil fuel 
companies knew of the harm their products caused and misled the public 
about them.

Attorneys general and cities have used that information to sue oil 
companies for financial damages caused by rising seas, wildfires and 
heat. But the new paper argues that oil companies’ climate research and 
continued fight to delay climate regulations amount to a “culpable 
mental state” that has inflicted harm on people, including death.

“Once you start using those terms, you come to realize that’s criminal 
law,” said Donald Braman, a law professor at George Washington 
University and Arkush’s co-author. “Culpable mental state causing harm 
is criminal conduct, and if they kill anybody, that’s homicide.”

Braman argued that pursuing homicide charges would have a greater impact 
on fossil fuel companies than the cases currently wending their way 
through court in part because the penalties would be steeper. Rather 
than paying a fine, homicide charges could open up an array of other 
outcomes that could materially alter how companies operate.

Homicide is a catchall term that includes charges ranging from 
manslaughter to murder. The former is a lesser charge where death was 
caused without intent, while murder is reserved for cases where the 
defendant either had knowledge that taking a specific action could kill 
someone or engaged in a premeditated killing. Arkush said the fact that 
fossil fuel companies knew that their products worsened the climate 
crisis and yet continued to extract oil, gas and coal “comes extremely 
close” to meeting the definition of murder, though the paper lays out 
the case for multiple types of homicide charges.
The paper also argues that the case for climate homicide has been 
bolstered by attribution science, which seeks to ascertain how much the 
climate crisis has worsened individual extreme weather events. Some 
studies have even been able to attribute a specific number of extreme 
weather deaths to the climate crisis. The duo argue that this growing 
body of science is among the most powerful tools to prove that oil 
companies’ actions have more than met the standard for a prosecutor to 
bring a homicide case.

Bringing homicide charges against oil companies for deaths caused by the 
climate crisis would be unprecedented, but corporations have been tried 
for homicide before. California prosecutors charged the utility PG&E 
with manslaughter for its role in the deadly Camp Fire that leveled the 
town of Paradise in 2018. And federal prosecutors charged BP with 
manslaughter following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster. In both 
cases, the companies pleaded guilty and paid billions in fines and 
penalties.
While there may be a theoretical case for climate homicide, the 
realities are daunting. First, a district attorney or attorney general 
office that has jurisdiction in a place where climate change has caused 
deaths would have to be willing to bring charges. And that office would 
need significant resources to confront influential billion-dollar 
corporations.

“The morality of what fossil fuel companies have been doing over a few 
decades has become clearer and clearer,” said Christopher Kutz, a 
distinguished professor and director of the Kadish Center for Morality, 
Law and Public Affairs at the University of California, Berkeley. “They 
are complicit in the deaths that occur and the article is very 
persuasive about that. But whether you could make an actual criminal 
charge stick is tricky because their complicity is mixed with the 
complicity of everybody else.”...
- -
Kutz said another challenge facing any would-be prosecutions is the 
central role fossil fuels have played in shaping the modern world.

“The central act for which the homicide charges being applied were 
embraced, subsidized, and a central part of the world economy for the 
last 150 years,” he said. “This is a different kind of case where the 
use of fossil fuels is the baseline of normal behavior. That would make 
it a very unusual kind of homicide case,” he added, likening it to “a 
black hole of liability”.

Guyora Binder, a distinguished professor of law at the University at 
Buffalo, said the paper was “exciting, imaginative and insightful in a 
number of important ways”, but also advised caution.

“An obstacle to finding causal responsibility is when death results from 
diffuse actions of multiple actors,” said Binder, who has written 
extensively on homicide and criminal law. “It’s a little reminiscent of 
the issues with tobacco and opioids where you have multiple 
manufacturers and you can’t trace which one contributed to which death … 
It’s not clear that if you remove any one of [the fossil fuel 
companies], that the deaths resulting from global warming don’t occur.”...
- -
Binder hypothesized that multiple companies could be charged 
collectively, though it would still be a very challenging case to bring 
about. As an analog, he noted that there have been cases in which 
multiple street drag racers have been charged with homicide, though only 
of them was physically responsible for killing someone, because they all 
competed in a race that resulted in a death.

“If it turns out [fossil fuel companies] were all colluding in 
suppressing research about climate change and all trying to help each 
other continue this enterprise, then we may be [able to] hold them 
responsible for one another’s actions,” he said.

Asked for a response to the study, a spokesperson for the American 
Petroleum Institute said in an email: “The record of the past two 
decades demonstrates that the industry has achieved its goal of 
providing affordable, reliable American energy to US consumers while 
substantially reducing emissions and our environmental footprint. Any 
suggestion to the contrary is false.”...
- -
It’s possible that the broader social shift taking place, including 
criticism over fossil fuel companies’ role in causing the climate 
crisis, could make climate homicide a feasible option for the right 
prosecutor. The growing wave of lawsuits being brought against them is 
proof, Braman said, that those companies are no longer untouchable.

The authors go so far as to recommend a particular sentence should 
fossil fuel firms be found guilty of homicide: restructuring them as 
public benefit corporations, similar to what happened to Purdue Pharma 
as part of its settlement for contributing to the opioid crisis. Doing 
so, they argue, would allow for rapidly winding down fossil fuel 
production to reduce further climate harm while ramping up investments 
in clean energy and protecting workers and communities tied to fossil 
fuel companies.

Climate advocates have taken note of the paper’s argument. The Center 
for Biological Diversity is a US non-profit that focuses on protecting 
endangered species. It has sued over oil companies’ drilling rights, but 
isn’t directly involved with any of the big oil cases.

“The case is compelling that fossil fuel companies’ actions meet the 
legal definition of homicide. The paper lays that out clearly,” said 
Kassie Siegal, the director of the center’s climate law institute.

“I think it’s absolutely brilliant,” she said.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/22/big-oil-companies-homicide-harvard-environmental-law-review

- -

/[Opinion from Yours Truly still applies ]/
*Suborning Murder, Encouraging Mass Suicide*
By Richard Pauli on July 9, 2009
Suborn 1. To induce (a person) to commit an unlawful or evil act.

Hey EnergyTomorrow, API and the entire fossil fuel industry - we have to 
speak out.   You suborn murder by heavily promoting carbon fuel usage.  
You actively encourage species suicide.

You have known for decades that CO2 causes global warming.  And you know 
that fossil fuels are the major human source of CO2 greenhouse gasses 
that cause catastrophic heating.

You hide it from consumers, you deny the science and you secretly fund 
skeptics, and now you seek political support for your carbon fueled 
campaign of mass suicide.

Science pretty much knows now that we are a doomed species.   It will be 
a tough life for all our grandchildren, and we cannot expect many humans 
after that.

And you continue lying when you could have been educating and 
researching and deploying non-polluting energy.   Now your momentum 
traps us all.

Your most evil act is to discount the danger and continue promoting 
ignorance and doubt.   You have pushed the world into total adoption of 
carbon based fuels, and like big tobacco you covered up science and 
distracted your market, and now you are groveling for political support 
to keep your industry going through the chaos ahead.

More than any other industrial segment, yours - oil, gas, coal, all the 
CO2 carbon fuels - are the most directly responsible for the end of our 
species.  You continue to worsen the struggle and cause an early death 
for our progeny.

It is no comfort that your grandchildren are just as doomed as mine.   
Eventually we will all be dying for your sins.   But now we know, and we 
will neither forgive nor forget this mass murder for money.

Richard Pauli   July 4th 2009
http://www.noenergytomorrow.org/2009/07/suborning-murder-encouraging-mass-suicide.html



/[meterologist's impressive documentary of Svalbard ice melt  22 min 
video ]/
*Melting Point: The Fastest Warming Place on the Planet*
The Weather Network
  Mar 17, 2024  #theweathernetwork #svalbard #climatechange
The Earth has been in a warming trend for decades due to the effects of 
human-caused climate change, but there's one place that is feeling these 
effects at an accelerated rate.

Svalbard is a group of Norwegian islands north of the Arctic Circle 
where glaciers, polar bears, and people are all reeling as the higher 
temperatures promised by global warming have already arrived.

Join The Weather Network's Jaclyn Whittal, meteorologist and Fellow of 
the Explorer's Club, as she journeys through Svalbard to experience 
first-hand this incredible and changing land at the forefront of climate 
change.
#climatechange #svalbard #theweathernetwork

Chapters:
02:24 The Town of Longyearbyen
07:09 Voyage To See Calving Glaciers
14:53 A Challenge for Polar Bears
21:04 Preview of Episode 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEI8c_n9Vdk



/[ Cynically -- study geology, then find gold and oil, then do nothing 
else ]/
*Geologists Make It Official: We’re Not in an ‘Anthropocene’ Epoch*
The field’s governing body ratified a vote by scientists on the 
contentious issue, ending a long effort to update the timeline of 
Earth’s history.
By Raymond Zhong
March 20, 2024
The highest governing body in geology has upheld a contested vote by 
scientists against adding the Anthropocene, or human age, to the 
official timeline of Earth’s history.

The vote, which a committee of around two dozen scholars held in 
February, brought an end to nearly 15 years of debate about whether to 
declare that our species had transformed the natural world so thoroughly 
since the 1950s as to have sent the planet into a new epoch of geologic 
time.

Shortly after voting ended this month, however, the committee’s chair, 
Jan A. Zalasiewicz, and vice chair, Martin J. Head, called for the 
results to be annulled. They said the members had voted prematurely, 
before evaluating all the evidence.
Dr. Zalasiewicz and Dr. Head also asserted that many members shouldn’t 
have been allowed to vote in the first place because they had exceeded 
their term limits.
After considering the matter, the committee’s parent body, the 
International Union of Geological Sciences, has decided the results will 
stand, the union’s executive committee said in a statement on Wednesday.
That means it’s official. Our planet, at least for the time being, is 
still in the Holocene epoch, which began 11,700 years ago with the most 
recent melting of the ice sheets.

Even if the Anthropocene does not yet have an official place on the 
geologic time scale, the term will “continue to be used not only by 
earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, 
politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large,” the 
statement from the geological union said. “It will remain an invaluable 
descriptor of human impact on the earth system.”

The statement did not directly address Dr. Zalasiewicz’s and Dr. Head’s 
concerns about the voting process. It said only that the committee 
members had acted with integrity and had wide expertise as geologists. 
“The scientific decision is clear, and the specialists do not see any 
value in adding a new epoch in the geological record,” the union’s 
president, John Ludden, said by email.

Even though the voting results have been declared valid, Dr. Head, an 
earth scientist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, said he 
expected the Anthropocene episode to prompt geologists to change their 
procedures for deciding on future updates to the time scale.

“I feel this has been a missed opportunity to recognize and endorse a 
simple reality, that our planet left its natural functioning state in 
the mid-20th century,” Dr. Head said by email. “A myriad of geological 
signals reflect this fact.”

The Anthropocene issue has polarized scientists in a way that few issues 
in the history of the geological time scale ever have.

The scale divides Earth’s past into chapters, many of which encapsulate 
planet-spanning changes. There’s no question our time is full of such 
changes. Pollution, urbanization, rapid greenhouse warming and other 
disruptions to ecosystems and natural processes have left traces that 
will linger in the rocks for long to come.

But to merit inclusion on the geological scale, any time interval needs 
to meet certain criteria, such as having a clear, objective starting 
point in the mineral record.
Last month, the first of three scientific committees began voting on 
whether the decades since World War II fit the bill. The results, which 
were first reported by The New York Times, showed that most committee 
members weren’t ready to ratify an epoch that is still so young, at 
least by the standards of Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history. The 
rejection means the Anthropocene question will not advance to the next 
round of voting.
The results are “a sign that the system is not equipped to deal with 
looking at the present, nor with the rate of change currently occurring 
on our planet,” said Brad E. Rosenheim, chair of the Geological Society 
of America’s Geochronology Division, in a statement.

“Although it is unclear whether the Anthropocene will ever become a 
geological division, it is an important question for every one of us to 
ponder: What exactly are we doing to this planet that supports our 
civilization?” said Dr. Rosenheim, a geological oceanographer at the 
University of South Florida.

With the Anthropocene issue behind them, the keepers of the geologic 
timeline can now turn to other matters. Next on their agenda, among 
other things, is deciding precisely when the late Pleistocene epoch began.

That would be the time, something like 130,000 years ago, when the 
planet was warmer than it is today. As time went on, the world grew cold 
again. The ice sheets returned. Neanderthals and other prehistoric 
ancestors were either wiped out or assimilated, leaving only modern humans.

Geologists say this period deserves an official start date, but they 
still need to figure out how and where to define it. The question has 
been on their minds for a long time, longer than the Anthropocene has 
been. Much longer, in fact. The first time scientists officially put 
forth a potential starting point for the late Pleistocene was in 1932.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/climate/anthropocene-vote-upheld.html


/[The news archive - undoing  ]/
/*March 22, 2017 */
March 22, 2017:
The New York Times reports:

    *Trump Lays Plans to Reverse Obama’s Climate Change Legacy*
    By Coral Davenport
    March 21, 2017
    WASHINGTON — President Trump is poised in the coming days to
    announce his plans to dismantle the centerpiece of President Barack
    Obama’s climate change legacy, while also gutting several smaller
    but significant policies aimed at curbing global warming.

    The moves are intended to send an unmistakable signal to the nation
    and the world that Mr. Trump intends to follow through on his
    campaign vows to rip apart every element of what the president has
    called Mr. Obama’s “stupid” policies to address climate change. The
    timing and exact form of the announcement remain unsettled, however.

    The executive actions will follow the White House’s release last
    week of a proposed budget that would eliminate climate change
    research and prevention programs across the federal government and
    slash the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 31 percent,
    more than any other agency. Mr. Trump also announced last week that
    he had ordered Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, to revise the
    agency’s stringent standards on planet-warming tailpipe pollution
    from vehicles, another of Mr. Obama’s key climate change policies.

    While the White House is not expected to explicitly say the United
    States is withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate
    change, and people familiar with the White House deliberations say
    Mr. Trump has not decided whether to do so, the policy reversals
    would make it virtually impossible to meet the emissions reduction
    goals set by the Obama administration under the international agreement.
    In an announcement that could come as soon as Thursday or as late as
    next month, according to people familiar with the White House’s
    planning, Mr. Trump will order Mr. Pruitt to withdraw and rewrite a
    set of Obama-era regulations known as the Clean Power Plan,
    according to a draft document obtained by The New York Times. The
    Obama rule was devised to shut down hundreds of heavily polluting
    coal-fired power plants and freeze construction of new coal plants,
    while replacing them with vast wind and solar farms.

    The draft also lays out options for legally blocking or weakening
    about a half-dozen additional Obama-era executive orders and
    policies on climate change.
    At a campaign-style rally on Monday in the coal-mining state of
    Kentucky, Mr. Trump told a cheering audience that he is preparing an
    executive action that would “save our wonderful coal miners from
    continuing to be put out of work.
    Experts in environmental law say it will not be possible for Mr.
    Trump to quickly or simply roll back the most substantive elements
    of Mr. Obama’s climate change regulations, noting that the process
    presents a steep legal challenge that could take many years and is
    likely to end up before the Supreme Court. Economists are skeptical
    that a rollback of the rules would restore lost coal jobs because
    the demand for coal has been steadily shrinking for years.

    Scientists and climate policy advocates around the world say they
    are watching the administration’s global warming actions and
    statements with deep worry. Many reacted with deep concern to Mr.
    Pruitt’s remarks  this month that he did not believe carbon dioxide
    was a primary driver of climate change, a statement at odds with the
    global scientific consensus. They also noted the remarks last week
    by Mick Mulvaney, the director of the White House Office of
    Management and Budget, in justifying Mr. Trump’s proposed cuts to
    climate change research programs.

    “As to climate change, I think the president was fairly
    straightforward: We’re not spending money on that anymore,” Mr.
    Mulvaney said at a White House briefing.

    “The message they are sending to the rest of the world is that they
    don’t believe climate change is serious. It’s shocking to see such a
    degree of ignorance from the United States,” said Mario J. Molina, a
    Nobel Prize-winning scientist from Mexico who advises nations on
    climate change policy.

    The policy reversals also signal that Mr. Trump has no intention of
    following through on Mr. Obama’s formal pledges under the Paris
    accord, under which nearly every country in the world submitted
    plans detailing actions to limit global warming over the coming decade.

    Under the accord as it stands, the United States has pledged to
    reduce its greenhouse pollution about 26 percent from 2005 levels by
    2025. That can be achieved only if the United States not only
    implements the Clean Power Plan and tailpipe-pollution rules, but
    also tightens them or adds more policies in future years.
    “The message clearly is, ‘We won’t do what the United States has
    promised to do,’” Mr. Molina said.

    In addition to directing Mr. Pruitt to withdraw the Clean Power
    Plan, the draft order instructs Attorney General Jeff Sessions to
    request that a federal court halt consideration of a 28-state
    lawsuit against the regulation. The case was argued before the
    United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
    in September, and the court is expected to release a decision in the
    coming months on whether to uphold or strike down the rule.

    According to the draft, Mr. Trump is also expected to announce that
    he will lift a moratorium on new coal mining leases on public lands
    that had been announced last year by the Obama administration.
    He is also expected to order White House economists to revisit an
    Obama-era budgeting metric known as the social cost of carbon.
    Economists and policy makers used the metric to place a dollar cost
    on the economic impact of planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution:
    about $36 per ton. That measure formed the Obama administration’s
    economic justification for issuing climate change regulations that
    would harm some industries, such as coal mining, noting that those
    costs would be outweighed by the economic benefits of preventing
    billions of tons of planet-warming pollution.

    Eliminating or lowering the social cost of carbon could provide the
    Trump administration the economic justification for putting forth
    less-stringent regulations.
    The draft order would also rescind an executive order by Mr. Obama
    that all federal agencies take climate change into account when
    considering any form of environmental permitting.

    Unlike the rollback of the power plant and vehicle regulations,
    which could take years and will be subject to legal challenges, Mr.
    Trump can make the changes to the coal mining ban and undo Mr.
    Obama’s executive orders with the stroke of a pen.

    White House staff members and energy lobbyists who work closely with
    them say they have been expecting Mr. Trump to make the climate
    change announcements for weeks, ever since Mr. Pruitt was confirmed
    to head the E.P.A. on Feb. 17, but the announcement has been
    repeatedly rescheduled. The delays of the one-page announcement have
    largely been a result of disorganization and a chaotic policy and
    planning process, said people familiar with that process who asked
    to speak anonymously to avoid angering Mr. Trump.

    One reason for the confusion, these people said, is internal
    disputes about the challenging legal process required to dismantle
    the Clean Power Plan. While Mr. Trump may announce with great
    fanfare his intent to roll back the regulations, the legal steps
    required to fulfill that announcement are lengthy and the outcome
    uncertain.

    “Trump’s announcements have zero impact,” said Richard J. Lazarus, a
    professor of environmental law at Harvard. “They don’t change
    existing law at all.”

    Much of that task will now fall to Mr. Pruitt.

    “To undo the rule, the E.P.A. will now have to follow the same
    procedure that was followed to put the regulations in place,” said
    Mr. Lazarus, pointing to a multiyear process of proposing draft
    rules, gathering public comment and forming a legal defense against
    an expected barrage of lawsuits almost certain to end up before the
    Supreme Court.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/climate/trump-climate-change.html


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