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As reported in the Los Angeles Times, the Trump administration has lifted a major hurdle for development of the Pebble Mine, a massive gold and copper mine in the wilds of Alaska despite fears that it will poison the world’s largest sockeye salmon run.
Even after the world’s largest economies adopted the landmark Paris Agreement to tackle the climate crisis in late 2015, governments continued to pour $77 billion a year in public finance into propping up the fossil fuel industry, according to a report released recently.
Together, Representative Ilhan Omar (D – Minnesota) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I – Vermont) introduced a bill that would end corporate handouts to the fossil fuel industry. The End Polluter Welfare Act would close tax loopholes and eliminate other federal subsidies for the oil, gas and coal industries, a press release stated.
The Zurich Insurance Company has announced that it won’t renew its policy insuring the expansion of Canada’s Trans Mountain Pipeline when the policy expires on August 31. Zurich has been Trans Mountain’s lead insurer for years, and without insurance the pipeline can’t legally transport any oil. Now opponents of the pipeline will push other insurance companies, including Liberty Mutual and Munich Re, to follow suit.
President Trump is nominating the ultra-conservative anti-conservationist William Perry Pendley to head the federal Bureau of Land Management, the agency responsible for managing public lands. Pendley has been acting director of the bureau for the last year. Pendley has an abysmal record on the environment.
Since 2015, 94 of 115 countries have improved their combined score on the Energy Translation Index, which analyzes each country’s readiness to adopt clean energy using three criteria: energy access and security, environmental sustainability, and economic development and growth.
If world governments don’t act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, most polar bear populations will not survive the century, a new study has found.
