Today's Top Posts

EPA Chief Doubts Consensus View On Climate Change

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said on Thursday that carbon dioxide was not a primary contributor to global warming, a statement at odds with the established scientific consensus on climate change. - New York Times

EPA Environmental Justice Official Resigns, Implores Pruitt To Protect Vulnerable Communities

Mustafa Ali, a senior adviser and assistant associate administrator at the agency, worked to alleviate the impact of air, water and industrial pollution on poverty-stricken towns and neighborhoods during nearly a quarter century with the EPA. He helped found the environmental justice office, then the environmental equity office, in 1992, during the presidency of President George H.W. Bush. Ali leaves the EPA as Pruitt, who took office Feb. 17, prepares to implement deep cuts in the agency's budget and staff. An internal memo obtained by multiple news outlets on March 1 called for a complete dismantling of the office of environmental justice and elimination of a number of grant programs that address low-income and minority communities. A story in the Oregonian reported that funding for the office would decrease 78 percent, from $6.7 million to $1.5 million. - InsideClimate News

Great Barrier Reef Bleached For Unprecedented Second Year Running

A repeat of mass bleaching compounds fears for the survival of already-stressed coral, whose recovery since 2016 has been challenged by stubbornly high sea surface temperatures, including through winter. - The Guardian

Six Years After Fukushima, Woman and Children Still Suffer Most

The Japanese government is trying to get back to normality after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, but the crisis is far from over for women and children, says Greenpeace. Thousands of mothers have sued the authorities. - Deutsche Welle

Thousands Forced To Move As Drought Hits Somali Pastoralists Hard

Puntland is on the edge of famine, according to aid agencies working in this semi-autonomous state in Somalia's arid north. Between 20,000 and 27,000 nomadic pastoralists have been forced to travel hundreds of miles to reach coastal regions of Puntland where there was a flash of rain in December last year. There has been no rain since. The displacement has forced families to separate, leaving women, children and the elderly to find help in makeshift displacement camps on the edges of towns where water-borne diseases are spreading and living conditions are dire. The Horn of Africa is in the midst of the harshest and most prolonged drought in decades. - Al Jazeera

Today's Top 5

Pruitt Treads Softly, But Signals Big Changes At EPA

New EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt offered a conciliatory greeting Tuesday to employees of the agency he frequently sued in his old job as Oklahoma's attorney general — while making it clear he plans a sharp departure from the Obama administration's strategy and will emphasize cooperation with industry. Pruitt is among the most controversial Cabinet members brought on by President Donald Trump, who promised during the campaign gut the agency and leave only "little tidbits left," but the new administrator struck a genial tone with the staff he will rely upon to carry out his changes. - Politico

Coal Plants Keep Closing On Trump's Watch

While Trump and his congressional allies pursue a rollback of Obama-era environmental regulations in Washington, coal plants continue to close at a rapid clip across the country. In the next four years, utilities have plans to close 40 coal units, federal figures show. Six closures have been announced since Trump's victory in November. The spate of closures underlines the challenges facing President Trump, who ran on a promise of revitalizing the coal industry. Utilities, beset by stagnant power demand and presented with cheaper alternatives like natural gas and wind, have shown little appetite for returning to the fuel that long powered the American economy. - E&E News

Divesting In DAPL In Favor of American Indian-Owned Banks

Tribes and individuals that want to move their money away from financial institutions that have funded the Dakota Access Pipeline might want to take a look at American Indian-owned banks as an alternative. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has designated 18 commercial banks as American Indian-owned banks. As a group they have $2.7 billion in assets and all have their deposits insured by the FDIC. The group tends to be community banks, some quite small, others with more than a quarter billion dollars of assets. A majority of them are based in Oklahoma, but there are also institutions in North Carolina, Colorado, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Montana and North Dakota. - Indian Country Today

South Sudan Promises Safe Access To Starving Civilians Facing Famine

South Sudan's President Salva Kiir on Tuesday promised aid agencies safe access to hunger-stricken civilians, a day after his government declared a famine in parts of the war-ravaged, drought-stricken country. South Sudan has been mired in civil war since 2013 and the United Nations said on Monday it was unable to reach some of the worst hit areas because of the insecurity. - Reuters

Trump's Potential Science Advisor Happer: Hanging Around With Conspiracy Theorists

Happer is not, by any stretch, an expert on climate change science. Happer’s record of getting scientific papers published in leading journals on climate change science is at, or very close to, zero. Simply, he knows a lot about some stuff, but he is not a climate scientist. While he has a distinguished career as an atomic physicist, previously serving the administration of George HW Bush as a science director, the 77-year-old’s views on climate science are outnumbered by all the credible evidence, all the credible science agencies and are also being laughed at by the Earth’s thermometers and its melting ice sheets and glaciers. - The Guardian

Today's Top 5

Scott Pruitt Doesn't Know Power of the EPA

The President-elect’s pick to head the E.P.A., the Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, has argued before Congress that the agency “was never intended to be our nation’s frontline environmental regulator,” and that the states should have primary authority. That argument is now a favorite among conservatives. But according to Philip Angell, who became an E.P.A. special assistant in 1970, Pruitt’s interpretation ignores the history and intent of the laws that define the agency’s mission. The statutes give the E.P.A. “the primary authority to set standards and enforce them if the states won’t do it,” he told me. “The whole point was to set a federal baseline.”  - The New Yorker

Civil Rights Panel: Flint Water Crisis Linked to 'Systemic Racism'

The Flint drinking water crisis has its root causes in historical and systemic racism, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission said Friday in a hard-hitting report that calls the public health catastrophe " a complete failure of government" and recommends a rewrite of the state's emergency manager law and bias training for state officials. The report, unanimously adopted at a meeting of the commission at the Northbank Center in downtown Flint, also calls for the creation of a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" — a model that was used in South Africa after apartheid — as a way of rebuilding government trust and credibility by listening to and addressing specific concerns raised by Flint residents. - Detroit Free Press

Climate Change Is Transforming The World's Food Supply

Climate change is poised to affect the world's food supply in three key ways, experts say. "There will be impacts on the quantity, quality and location of the food we produce," said Dr. Sam Myers, a medical doctor and senior research scientist studying environmental health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. "We've never needed to increase food production more rapidly than we do today to keep up with global demand." - Live Science.

Murray Energy CEO Claims Global Warming Is A Hoax

Murray Energy is the country's largest coal miner. Many of its mines are in Appalachia, a region that would suffer some of the biggest impacts of the rule. Murray also successfully sued to delay implementation of the Clean Power Plan, which would regulate planet-warming carbon emissions from power plants. Asked about the economic analysis behind President Barack Obama's energy regulations, Murray said, "There's no scientific analysis either. I have 4,000 scientists that tell me global warming is a hoax. The Earth has cooled for 20 years." It was not immediately clear who the 4,000 scientists Murray referenced are. - CNBC

Majority of Science Teachers Are Teaching Climate Change, But Not Always Correctly

Most public middle and high school science teachers in the United States are devoting two hours or less per course to the topic of climate change —and they are often getting the facts wrong, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal Science. While three out of four teachers are teaching the issue, only half of those instructors are correctly explaining that humans are driving climate change. An even smaller number of teachers are aware of how overwhelming the scientific consensus on the issue is. - InsideClimate News

Today's Top 5 Trending: Latin American Environmentalists, Schools and Lead, Climate Politics, Scotland Closes Last Coal-Fired Power Plant

For Latin American Environmentalists, Death is a Constant Companion

Two-thirds of environmentalists who died violently around the world since 2002 lost their lives in that region. For the five years ending in 2014, more than 450 were killed, according to an international network of conservationist groups. Over half were in Honduras and Brazil. - Washington post

Schools Nationwide Still Grapple With Lead in Water 

This winter’s crisis in Flint, Mich., has cast new attention on lead in water supplies. But problems with lead in school water supplies have dragged on for years — aggravated by ancient buildings and plumbing, prolonged by official neglect and tight budgets, and enabled by a gaping loophole in federal rules that largely exempts schools from responsibility for the purity of their water. - New York Times

Where Do The Remaining Presidential Candidates Stand On Climate Change?

We are now officially through half of the United States Presidential election primary and caucus season, and there are currently 5 contenders left in the Republican and Democratic parties vying for their party’s respective nomination. Delegate math shows that Governor John Kasich has no chance to become the Republican nominee, so we’re left with four real candidates to examine. - De Smog Blog

Climate Change May Be a Burning Issue, But Election Campaign Tells a Different Story

While Alaska is clearly on the melting edge of climate change, this fundamental shift barely registered in the Republican caucus held earlier in March and won by Ted Cruz. Even though Democratic candidates have been more willing to discuss climate change, the topic wasn't front and centre ahead of Saturday’s caucus. - The Guardian

Scotland Closes Last Coal-Fired Power Plant

Scotland may be home to golf, haggis, and Sean Connery — but it’s no longer hospitable to coal. On March 24, Scottish Power shut down Longanett power station, its last standing coal-fired power plant. - Grist