| Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate change, energy and the environment. If you enjoyed a cup of coffee morning - or, you know, ever - former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz wants you to know climate change is making it harder and more expensive to grow coffee beans, as USA TODAY's Brett Molina reports. So add that to the list of reasons why you should maybe care about climate change. |
| My name is Sammy Roth, and I'm a reporter based in Southern California. Now that I've gotten this newsletter off to such a pleasant start, here are some other things you might want to know: |
MUST-READ STORIES: |
| Natural gas may not be the climate savior you're looking for: There's been a lot of debate about whether the ongoing switch from coal to natural gas as an electricity source is a great thing for the climate. On the one hand, gas burns a lot more cleanly than coal; on the other hand, lots of natural gas leaks into the air from pipelines and stuff before it's burned, polluting the atmosphere with methane, a relatively short-lived but powerful heat-trapping gas. Now a big new study led by the Environmental Defense Fund estimates that methane emissions from the oil and gas industry are 60 percent higher than currently estimated by the EPA, as Doyle Rice reports for USA TODAY. If accurate, those numbers would undermine much of the climate benefit of natural gas. |
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| Supreme Court finally rules in 'water wars' case: In Supreme Court news that understandably flew under the radar this week, the court ruled in favor of Florida in the state's decades-long dispute with Georgia over water rights. Georgia may now have to cap water use by Atlanta and agricultural areas so that more water flows into Florida's Apalachicola Bay , where insufficient water has harmed a productive oyster fishery, as Ledyard King reports for USA TODAY. In other water news, Circle of Blue's Brett Walton reports that U.S. water consumption continues to drop even as population grows. |
MORE WATER WARS: |
| Public resource, private profit: Lots of water news this week, so let's keep the party going. Here in Southern California, the U.S. Forest Service granted Nestle a three-year permit to keep piping water out of a national forest and bottling it for profit, as my Desert Sun colleague Ian James reports. Nestle had been taking the water under a permit that was supposed to expire in 1988. Meanwhile, in other Southern California water news... |
| Pumping groundwater outside a national park: I wrote about a bill in Congress that could rescue a proposed hydropower plant on the doorstep of Joshua Tree National Park. The developer wants to pump billions of gallons of groundwater from a desert aquifer to supply the hydropower facility. And now let's take a trip to Arizona... |
| Arizona delivers water to wildlife to help them survive drought: This is sad and beautiful and thought-provoking: Arizona wildlife officials, nonprofits and individuals have been filling artificial catchments with water, sometimes by helicopter, to help animals like horses and bighorn sheep make it through a severe drought , as Alex Devoid reports for the Arizona Republic. It's sad that it has to happen, but it's also not a long-term solution, since climate change is expected to contribute to ever-more-extreme droughts. |
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CLIMATE POLITICS: |
| Trump administration may weaken smog standard: The Environmental Protection Agency is now taking public comments on whether to change the legal limit on ground-level ozone, per the Associated Press. Ozone is the main ingredient in smog. While the existing limit is based on what's necessary to protect public health, EPA chief Scott Pruitt wants a new standard that takes into account the "economic or energy effects" of the regulation. Here's the view from New Jersey, which has some of the country's smoggiest air due in part to out-of-state coal plants, as Scott Fallon reports for NorthJersey.com. |
| Scott Pruitt asked the oil industry to send him job candidates: I remember learning in school about "regulatory capture," the idea that regulatory agencies can fall under the sway of the industries they're supposed to regulate. But what do you call it when the agency wants to be captured? BuzzFeed's Zahra Hirji reports that EPA chief Scott Pruitt made a "plea" to the American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas industry trade group, to send him candidates for top jobs at the EPA. Resumes for two oil industry people were submitted to the agency, although ultimately neither of them was hired. |
AND ANOTHER THING: |
| Beneath the noise of the daily news churn, the Trump administration keeps taking steps to limit scientific information in the public sphere. |
| This week, the Los Angeles Times' Rong-Gong Lin II reported that scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey must now ask permission from Interior Department officials before speaking to reporters in most circumstances . Meanwhile, the acting administrator of NOAA - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - proposed a new mission statement for the agency that drops all mention of climate research, even though NOAA is one of the country's leading sources of information on climate change. |
| NOAA backed away from the proposal to drop "climate" from its mission statement, as USA TODAY's Doyle Rice reports. Still, I wonder what will happen next. NOAA is the source of the numbers in the "carbon count" graphic that appears at the bottom of this newsletter every week. Who would be better off if we didn't have that information? |
| That's all for this week. For more climate, energy and environment news, follow me on Twitter @Sammy_Roth. You can sign up to get Climate Point in your inbox here. |
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