Sustainable Arlington

More than 300 Local Officials from 40 States Call for Green New Deal, End of Fossil Fuels

The open letter includes a signature from a former high-level Mobil Oil executive. In a little over a month, the so-called Green New Deal has won endorsements from more than three dozen sitting or incoming federal lawmakers as Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) makes a high-profile bid to shift debate over climate change toward policy on the scale of the crisis.  On Friday, the effort got a boost from 311 state and local officials. Forty-four mayors, 63 county and state legislators and 116 city council members were among the officials from 40 states ― including some top oil and gas producers ― who signed an open letter issuing a sweeping, full-throated call for the phaseout of fossil fuels and adoption of Green New Deal-style climate policies. One signatory, L.W. Allstadt, a trustee of the Upstate New York village of Cooperstown, is a former executive vice president of Mobil Oil, the giant that merged with Exxon in 1998 to form the world’s largest publicly traded oil company. “The existence of climate change and its potential disastrous impacts have been known for decades,” Allstadt said in a statement.  “The solutions, primary among which is elimination of the use of fossil fuels, have also been known.”  The letter ― published Friday online and shared in advance with HuffPost ― was organized by Elected Officials to Protect America, a nonprofit formed in 2015 to rally support for local climate action.  It lays out three demands.  It calls for 100 percent renewable energy, though does not[…]

California’s Bus Fleet Will Be 100 Percent Electric by 2040

Any new public transit bus purchased in California by 2029 must be a 100 percent electric vehicle, according to a new unanimous vote by the California Air Resources Board, the state’s clean air agency.  It is the first statewide policy in the United States to require an entire vehicle class go electric, the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote. Within five years, 25 percent of transit agencies’ new bus purchases must be electric vehicles.  That jumps to 50 percent by 2026, and 100 percent by 2029.  This equates to about 14,000 zero-emissions buses on California roads by 2040 — up from 132 today —and will reduce the state’s carbon emissions by 1 million metric tons per year in just two decades.  School buses and privately owned buses are not covered under the policy. In addition to the policy’s climate benefits, another major motivator was that the shift to electric vehicles will help further combat California’s air pollution; the state is home to eight of the top 10 most polluted cities in the U.S., including Los Angeles and Bakersfield. “This is the biggest public transportation breakthrough since we switched from trolleys to diesel buses a century ago,” Jimmy O’Dea, a senior vehicles analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement.  “Bus riders, bus drivers, and anyone who has gulped the exhaust from a passing truck or bus knows we must do something about these vehicles.  Electrifying them is a one-two punch:  we reduce carbon emissions that worsen climate change[…]

We Have 12 Years to Stop Climate Catastrophe.  These Young Activists Have a Plan.

In the wake of the stark U.N. report, direct-action groups like Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion are out to disrupt the fossil fuel economy. On a clear and sunny morning in San Francisco’s downtown SoMa district, 40 people stand side by side with interlinked arms blocking the entrance to the San Francisco Federal Building.  Just a couple of weeks ago this city was shrouded in a suffocating blanket of wildfire smoke that had traveled down from giant blazes in the north.  But the haze has since cleared, and its absence has revealed a clarity of vision which stretches far beyond a healthier air quality index. “I’m here today because we have a 12-year deadline,” Lydia Macy, 18, told HuffPost from behind a 40-foot banner that she was helping to hold up.  “Climate change is the No. 1 issue that we’re facing in the 21st century, and if we don’t fight we won’t have a world to live in.” A student at Berkeley High School, Macy was joined by hundreds of others in this action organized by the Bay Area chapter of Sunrise Movement — a youth-led organization with the mission to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process.  Sunrise Movement’s most recent campaign has been focused on putting pressure on members of Congress to support Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in pushing for a Green New Deal, a policy proposal aiming to ensure a just and rapid transition to a decarbonized economy. Following a day of[…]

‘Climate Passport’ for People Driven Away by Global Warming Proposed

A climate researcher proposed on Thursday the establishment of a kind of ‘climate passport’, allowing people who have been driven away from their homes due to the impact of the global warming to move freely around the world.   On the sidelines of the UN climate talks in Poland, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), said that a future ‘climate passport’ could be modeled on the League of Nations Passport, the so-called Nansen Passport, that was first issued to refugees of the Russian civil war in the 1920s to move freely across borders. However, rich developed countries are likely to object to such proposal because of the ‘climate refugees’ that could head their way, the Associated Press points out.    The UN talks on climate in the Polish city of Katowice are taking place two months after the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a special report on the climate situation on the planet, saying the world needs to spend US$2.4 trillion every year until 2035 to slow down the effects of climate change. At the start of the Katowice summit last week, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said that carbon emissions in the world’s developed economies are set to increase this year for the first time in five years, as higher oil and gas use has more than offset dwindling coal consumption. According to the latest available energy data, energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in North America, the European Union (EU),[…]

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