Climate activists want to turn anti-Trump rage into votes

A big march in Washington this month will get headlines, but the real action, green groups believe, needs to make waves on election days.

The first People’s Climate March in 2014 in New York was hailed as the largest climate march in history. The second such march will be held in Washington D.C. on April 29, 2017, and the rallying cry is anti-Trump sentiment. Credit: TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images

Marianne Lavelle reports for Inside Climate News:

Activists planning the People’s Climate March in Washington, D.C. on April 29 are mapping out a far more ambitious trek than that day’s walk from the Capitol to the White House. They are trying to turn rage over the Trump administration’s rollback of climate change policy and budget cuts targeting science into actual political clout.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators organized by 50 groups that represent millions of members plan to demand that political leaders preserve protections for the environment and public health and invest in a clean energy economy. The march will culminate a week of activism that begins with the March for Science on April 22, followed by lobbying visits on Capitol Hill, rallies outside federal agencies and national and local candidate training workshops. There will be more than 250 People’s Climate Marches held across the country and overseas.
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NJ chemical lobby calls Argentina cleanup dodge ‘fraud’

Three months after the EPA announced the price tag for cleaning up a Superfund site in Newark, the company that bought polluter Diamond Alkali went into bankruptcy and backed away from the cleanup, leaving public outrage in its wake.

State legislators, at a hearing in the New Jersey Meadowlands today, heard testimony from numerous environmental organizations–and from the state’s chemical industry–all who decried the actions by Maxus Energy and its owner, YPF, Argentina’s state-owned oil company. 


Dennis Hart, executive director of the Chemistry Council of New Jersey, called the attempts by the corporations to avoid responsibility for the Superfund cleanup through bankruptcy a “blatant fraud.”


NJTV News‘ Brenda Flanagan has the story above.

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Interesting story: Climate change reroutes a Yukon River

Ice canyon carries melt water from Kaskawulsh Glacier away from the Slims river (Dan Shuar photo)




John Schwartz reports for The New York Times:

In the blink of a geological eye, climate change has helped reverse the flow of water melting from a glacier in Canada’s Yukon, a hijacking that scientists call “river piracy.”

This engaging term refers to one river capturing and diverting the flow of another. It occurred last spring at the Kaskawulsh Glacier, one of Canada’s largest, with a suddenness that startled scientists.

A process that would ordinarily take thousands of years — or more — happened in just a few months in 2016.

Much of the meltwater from the glacier normally flows to the north into the Bering Sea via the Slims and Yukon Rivers. A rapidly retreating and thinning glacier — accelerated by global warming — caused the water to redirect to the south, and into the Pacific Ocean.

Last year’s unusually warm spring produced melting waters that cut a canyon through the ice, diverting more water into the Alsek River, which flows to the south and on into Pacific, robbing the headwaters to the north. The scientists concluded that the river theft “is likely to be permanent.” Read the full story, with additional photos, here

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Argentine oil company trying to duck $1.38B NJ cleanup?

Scott Fallon reports for The Record:

Argentina’s state-run oil company is trying to avoid paying a substantial portion of the $1.38 billion Passaic River cleanup by declaring one of its key subsidiaries bankrupt, state lawmakers said Thursday.

The move by the company, YPF SA, has prompted a rare joint hearing by the Senate and Assembly environmental committees tomorrow in Lyndhurst to discuss ways to ensure the company pays its fair share of one of the largest toxic cleanups in U.S. history.

“They’re simply trying to duck their responsibilities,” said state Sen. Christopher “Kip” Bateman, R-Somerville, who co-sponsored a resolution with Democrats condemning the bankruptcy filing.

Michael Turner, a spokesman for YPF SA’s subsidiary, declined to comment Thursday.



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B. L. England to pump out power for another two years


Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight:


PJM Interconnection says generating facility essential to reliability of power grid

b.l. england

Credit: Kirk Moore
B.L. England power plant in Cape May County
B.L. England is not shutting down anytime soon — again.
The power plant in Beesleys Point, scheduled to close next month, will continue to operate under a directive from PJM Interconnection, the operator of the nation’s largest power grid.
The decision is largely unrelated to a continuing controversy over the past few years about converting the coal-fired generating facility to natural gas by building a 22-mile gas pipeline to the facility, partly through the Pinelands. That project is tied up in litigation.
PJM wants the remaining units at the plant to keep running for another two years while transmission upgrades now underway are completed to maintain the reliability of the power grid. That work is not expected to be finished until 2019, according to PJM.
“If the transmission work is done, they could be retired sooner,’’ said Ray Dotter, a spokesman for PJM.
The owner of the plant agreed to shut down the facility — at the time one of the most polluting units in the state — according to an administrative consent order with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection in 2014. The order included a provision that the shutdown would not take effect if PJM deemed the units needed to keep the lights on in the region, which it has.

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Some of these kids have never seen strawberries



From the environmental blog, Grist:

Courtesy of Karmani

Immigrant developed app for food waste

 

Raj Karmani was a graduate student in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when his frequent trips to the neighborhood bagel store opened his eyes to food waste. Most of the unsold bagels usually went into the trash. Karmani’s obsession with efficiency got him thinking: What if there were an app that would sync up businesses with fresh, excess food and organizations in need of it? In 2013, he started Zero Percent, an online platform for food donation.
Here’s how it works: First, a food producer at a commercial kitchen, say a restaurant or bagel shop, opens an Uber-style app and drops in detailed data about the excess food: the amount, where to pick it up, when to pick it up, etc. Then, a delivery person, hired by Zero Percent, scoops up the food and drops it off at any number of youth groups, community centers, or nonprofits that have also signed up for the app and signaled a need.
Right now, Zero Percent operates in the Chicago area and in Urbana-Champaign (but plans to expand), and its biggest clients include the University of Illinois and the local Salvation Army. Karmani says Zero Percent has delivered more than 1,000 meals. As a well-educated and relatively well-off immigrant, the experience has been eye-opening for him. “Some of these kids have never seen strawberries.”
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