Trump EPA official William Wehrum announced his resignation as the EPA's top air policy official on 26 June 2019, after the Energy and Commerce Committee launched an ethics inquiry. Wehrum served as one of the chief architects of the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the ambition and reach of the EPA, and to retreat from President Obama’s push to slash emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. He oversaw efforts to ease regulation of the coal industry, slow requirements that cars and trucks become more fuel efficient and overhaul how the agency calculates costs and benefits to favor industry. Photo: Eric Vance / USEPA

Trump EPA official resigns amid scrutiny over possible ethics violations – “William Wehrum was emblematic of the administration’s struggles to remain ethical”

By Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis 26 June 2019 (The Washington Post) – Bill Wehrum spent only a year and a half as the Environmental Protection Agency’s top air official before announcing plans to resign Wednesday amid scrutiny over possible violations of federal ethics rules. But during that time, Wehrum served as one of the […]

Map of the 105,000 square miles of coal-rich outback land known as the Galilee Basin in Queensland, Australia. Graphic: The Times

Australia approves vast coal mine near Great Barrier Reef – “An act of climate vandalism that represents everything that has gone wrong with politics in Australia”

By Andrew Beatty 13 June 2019 (AFP) – Australia approved Thursday the construction of a controversial coal mine near the Great Barrier Reef, paving the way for a dramatic and unfashionable increase in coal exports. Queensland’s government said it had accepted a groundwater management plan for the Indian-owned Adani Carmichael mine—the last major legal hurdle […]

Donald Trump, Scott Pruitt, James Hackett, Larry Kudlow. President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting on 11 May 2018 with automotive executives in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, a few months before the administration rolled back Obama-era fuel-efficiency standards, one of a number of giveaways to the fossil-fuel industry. From left, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt, Ford CEO James Hackett, Trump, and White House chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow. Photo: Evan Vucci / AP / REX / Shutterstock (9668793i)

The shadow cabinet: How a group of powerful business leaders drove Trump’s agenda – “Just about any safeguard to protect the country’s air, water and climate is up for sale”

By Andy Krol 19 June 2019 (Rolling Stone) – It could have been an episode of The Apprentice. On a summer day in 2016, a group of businessmen and women descended on Trump Tower in Manhattan. They exited their black SUVs and rode the golden elevators to the 26th floor, where they assembled in a […]

New York State Attorney General Letitia James holds a press conference at the Office of the Attorney General in New York, 28 March 2019. The New York attorney general's office did not engage in prosecutorial misconduct in investigating Exxon for climate fraud, a judge ruled on Wednesday 12 June 2019. Photo: Timothy A. Clary / Getty Images

Judge rejects Exxon challenges to New York’s climate fraud suit – No prosecutorial misconduct in Exxon climate fraud investigation

By Karen Savage 12 June 2019 (Climate Liability News) – A judge dismissed several claims by Exxon to stop New York State’s lawsuit against the oil giant for alleged climate fraud, including charges of prosecutorial misconduct and conflict of interest. New York Supreme Court Judge Barry Ostrager on Wednesday rejected claims by Exxon that the New York attorney general’s […]

List environmental regulations rolled back by the Trump administration, updated on 7 June 2019. Graphic: The New York Times

83 environmental rules being rolled back under Trump

By Nadja Popovich, Livia Albeck-ripka, and Kendra Pierre-Louis 7 June 2019 (The New York Times) – President Trump has made eliminating federal regulations a priority. His administration, with help from Republicans in Congress, has often targeted environmental rules it sees as burdensome to the fossil fuel industry and other big businesses. [cf. Trump regulation rollbacks will […]

Carbon emissions from the power sector 2018. Graphic: BP

BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2019: “A growing mismatch between hopes and reality”

By Spencer Dale 11 June 2019 (BP) – The Statistical Review of World Energy has been providing timely and objective energy data for the past 68 years. In addition to the raw data, the Statistical Review also provides a record of key energy developments and events through time. My guess is that when our successors […]

Industrial methane emissions are 100 times higher than reported, researchers say

By Amanda Garris 6 June 2019 (Cornell Chronicle) – Emissions of methane from the industrial sector have been vastly underestimated, researchers from Cornell and Environmental Defense Fund have found. Using a Google Street View car equipped with a high-precision methane sensor, the researchers discovered that methane emissions from ammonia fertilizer plants were 100 times higher […]

Leading scientists set out resource challenge of meeting net zero emissions in the UK by 2050: Twice the total annual world cobalt production and at least half of the world’s copper production

5 June 2019 (NHM) – A letter authored by Natural History Museum Head of Earth Sciences Prof Richard Herrington and fellow expert members of SoS MinErals (an interdisciplinary programme of NERC-EPSRC-Newton-FAPESP funded research) has today been delivered to the Committee on Climate Change. The letter explains that to meet UK electric car targets for 2050 […]

Graph of the Day: Carbon emissions and human population, 1751-2018

Graph of the Day: Carbon emissions and human population, 1751-2018

9 June 2019 (Desdemona Despair) – It’s time to update one of Desdemona’s favorite graphs: human carbon emissions per capita. In the last update, four years ago, we had carbon emissions data through the year 2013, and it was clear that per-person emissions growth followed a nearly perfect exponential curve. The curve passed through one ton […]

Reductio ad absurdum: “The big deception is that we have weaned ourselves off coal, when in reality we have just exported our coal burning to someone else’s country”

4 June 2019 (The Consciousness of Sheep) — One of the advantages of being a rocky island in the northeast Atlantic, right underneath the Gulf Stream is that you get to deploy record amounts of offshore wind turbines to delay the day when your economy grinds to a halt. This is the reality of modern […]

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