The Energy 202: Many California Republicans side with Trump in dismissing climate change as wildfire cause

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), a staunch Trump ally, blasted “the geniuses in the Democrat Socialist Party” for “saying global warming is causing these forest fires.”

“Kids are being indoctrinated,” he said during an interview on Fresno’s KMJ radio station this month, according to Politico.

Rep. Tom McClintock, whose Central Valley district is the site of a fire that has burned more than 246,000 acres, told Newsmax TV this week that California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is “delusional” if he thinks “these wildfires will go away” if more people ride bicycles and lower their thermostats. 

“We passed laws in the 1970s that made the management of our forests and our wild lands all but impossible, and nature is taking over,” McClintock said. “Look, these environmental laws that we pass apply only to public lands. Today, you can easily tell the boundaries between the private and public lands simply by the conditions of the forests. Now how clever of the climate to know exactly the boundary line between the public lands and private lands, and only to decimate the public lands.”

He added: “The fact is, the climate has changed much over the centuries, but the problem has not.”

Rep. Doug LaMalfa, whose Northern California district is also ablaze, similarly accused Newsom of espousing a “radical” position on climate change after the governor visited the fire-scarred region and promised to redouble the state’s efforts to address climate change. 

“Today, the Governor had the audacity to come tour the North Complex and peddle his climate change agenda while offering zero solutions to alleviate the pain of our people or get these fires under control,” LaMalfa responded in a news release on Sept. 11. 

Savannah Glasgow, a LaMalfa spokeswoman, added that the congressman supports legislation that would make it easier to reduce the amount of combustible material in forests.

“To break the cycle of continued catastrophic fires, it’s imperative that we get back into the forests and reduce the fuel load,” she said. “Decades of mismanagement in our federal forests are the largest contributing factor to the destruction in recent years.”

None other than House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is leading the charge to change his party’s tune on climate.

His proposal, unveiled at the beginning of the year, is to plant a trillion trees and expand a tax break for companies capable of capturing their emissions — all in an effort to keep carbon dioxide out of the air. But experts say planting more trees, an idea that even has Trump’s backing, is not enough: What’s required, according to U.N. scientists, is an unprecedented economic transition to sharply reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

The plan is, in part, a response to shifting attitudes among Republicans on global warming. Polls show that a majority GOP voters under 45 acknowledge that human activity is causing the climate to change. 

But not every Republican is on board with the plan. During a hearing in February, McClintock wondered whether public land, already “densely overcrowded and dying because of it,” could handle more trees.

Regarding California’s wildfires, McCarthy said in a statement Friday he believes “forest mismanagement plays a significant factor” and lamented that Democrats will not work with Republicans to make it harder for environmental groups to sue to stop the clearing of underbrush.

“In order to address the high wildfire hazards which have cost hundreds of millions of dollars in damage and have more importantly taken the lives of Californians, we should start by removing the tinderbox of dead and dying trees fueling many of these fires from our forests,” the Republican leader said.

In fact, there is only one GOP representative from the Golden State at real risk of losing his seat in November. The Cook Political Report projects Rep. Mike Garcia’s race against Democratic challenger Christy Smith as a toss-up. 

Compare 2020 with 2018: Two years ago, Democrats ousted six GOP incumbents from office on their way to taking back control of the House. 

Although experts say clearing underbrush and other practices can prevent some fires, the buildup of heat-trapping gases from industrial and agricultural activity is dialing up temperatures, drying out vegetation and fueling the fires.

Weathering fiercer fires and more intense storms, Americans overall are increasingly concerned about rising temperatures and their effects. A majority of Americans — about 8 in 10 — said that human activity is behind climate change, according to a 2019 poll conducted by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation. 

Trump’s tweet Wednesday about the fate of a contested gold and copper mine in Alaska appears to show that he’s paying attention to the project, which has sparked a fierce lobbying campaign pitting a Canadian mining company against a coalition of Alaska Natives, environmentalists and Republican anglers.

Within a matter of weeks, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will issue a decision on whether to grant a federal permit for the Pebble Mine, which would be North America’s largest and operate near the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery. While the agency found in late July that the project would have “no measurable effect” on the area’s fish populations, last month it informed its sponsor, Pebble Limited Partnership, that it had to do more to show how it would offset the damage caused by the mine.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson has run two separate segments criticizing the project, and other Trump allies, including the president’s oldest son and Vice President Pence’s former chief of staff, Nick Ayers, have also lobbied the White House to block it.

The company has responded by running an ad repeatedly on Fox, which ends with the line, “President Trump — continue to stand tall and don’t let politics enter the Pebble review process.”

On Wednesday, Trump tweeted, “Don’t worry, wonderful & beautiful Alaska, there will be NO POLITICS in the Pebble Mine Review Process. I will do what is right for Alaska and our great Country!!!”

It is unclear what this means for the company, which is one to two weeks away from submitting a plan to the Corps that will outline how it will make up for the streams and wetlands that it will destroy in the process of constructing the mine. But Pebble Limited Partnership’s chief executive, Tom Collier, said in an interview Thursday that he views the president’s comments as a good sign.

“It looks to us that it’s directly responsive to the ad,” he said, adding that he thinks it shows Trump doesn’t plan to intervene in the Corps’ final decision.

“We don’t believe there’s been any political interference in this process,” and we don’t think there will be in the future,” he added.

But Collier and his colleagues aren’t leaving anything to chance. The company plans to continue running ads on the president’s favorite network “for the next few weeks,” he said.

“Fracking has to continue because we need a transition,” the Democratic presidential candidate said during a CNN town hall on Thursday, pushing back against calls from the party’s left flank. “We’re going to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, and we’ll get to net-zero power emissions by 2035. But there’s no rationale to eliminate, right now, fracking.”

Unlike some of his rivals in the Democratic primary, Biden has not called for phasing out the controversial drilling practice linked to tainted water. The position is meant to endear him to voters in Pennsylvania, where fracking is a source of jobs, but puts him at odds with younger Democratic voters who want to end fossil fuel use altogether to tackle climate change.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit “halted implementation of the Trump administration’s methane rollback while it considers pleas to permanently strike down the EPA rule,” E&E News reports.

The order comes after environmental groups sued over Environmental Protection Agency efforts to limit oversight of emissions and leaks of the potent greenhouse gas. 

“The purpose of this administrative stay is to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the emergency motion for stay, and should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion,” the court said.

“Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney (R) wants the Justice Department to investigate a host of environmental organizations to determine whether the groups are in league with Chinese and Russian government interests,” E&E News reports.

The letter to Attorney General William P. Barr alleges that efforts to stop hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, could align with Russia’s own interest in expanding natural gas exports.

“Environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, whose anti-fracking agendas align with the Kremlin’s are low-hanging fruit for Russian influence or support efforts in the United States,” Cheney writes.

It is the latest move in “a yearslong effort by GOP lawmakers to link environmental activists to foreign governments,” E&E News writes. In 2018, the House Natural Resources Committee, under the leadership of then-Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah), alleged that foreign governments could work with environmental groups to undermine national security.

“The haze along the West Coast has created the most polluted air in the world over the past week, forcing millions of residents indoors,” our colleagues Heather Kelly and Samantha Schmidt report. “Going outdoors is dangerous for even healthy lungs, and exercising has largely been out of the question.”

Some businesses have closed because the poor air quality makes it too risky for their employees to come to work.

But health experts say that even people who take all of the precautions may still face risks, as small smoke particles from wildfire find their way deep into people’s lungs and bloodstream. While the risk is highest for those who have asthma or lung disease, at the current levels of smoke, even healthy people are likely to start feeling symptoms. Long-term exposure can increase the risk of heart disease or stroke. 

Coronavirus-related restrictions on indoor activities have also made the situation harder, and N95 masks, which offer the best protection against the smoke, are in short supply because they are needed by health-care workers.

On Wednesday, smoke started to lift a little in some cities. San Francisco residents could again go running outdoors, and the Air Quality Index rated Portland, Ore., and Seattle as “very unhealthy” rather than “hazardous.” Smoke may clear even further over the next week, but with wildfire season only halfway over, any “fresh air might be temporary,” Kelly and Schmidt write.

“Hurricane Sally blasted into the southeastern United States on Wednesday, unleashing massive floodwaters and powerful winds along the coast from the Florida Panhandle to Mobile, Ala., that swallowed up roadways and left hundreds of thousands without electricity,” T.S. Strickland, Ashley Cusick and Maria Sacchetti report for The Post.

The National Hurricane Center said “historic and catastrophic flooding” occurred along the Florida and Alabama coastline. Pensacola, Fla., saw more than two feet of rain and six feet of storm surge — the third-highest storm surge ever recorded. At least 500,000 customers in Alabama and Florida lost power.

Weather Channel meteorologist Jim Cantore tweeted:

“Sally is part of a new trend of hurricanes that strengthen just before landfall, a time when they would traditionally lose power, a dangerous effect that scientists are attributing to climate change,” Strickland, Cusick and Sacchetti write. “These rapidly intensifying storms are likely to inflict greater damage and catch residents and rescuers off guard, experts warn.”

The remnants of Sally are still dumping rain through the Southeast, but “reflecting the breakneck pace of the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, forecasters are already turning their attention to two more threatening tropical weather systems: Hurricane Teddy and a disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico that could soon earn the name Wilfred,” our colleague Jason Samenow reports.

Teddy could hit Bermuda and then northern New England mid-next week, while the gulf system could threaten coastal Texas and the northern Gulf Coast.

“The threat of new storms comes during the busiest Atlantic hurricane season on record. Twenty named storms have formed and, after the likely Wilfred, forecasters will be forced to draw from the Greek alphabet for naming additional storms. That’s happened only once before, in 2005, the busiest season on record,” Samenow writes.

The rollback of several major environmental regulations could result in an additional 1.8 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 2035, according to a new analysis from the Rhodium Group, an independent research organization.

“That’s more than the combined energy emissions of Germany, Britain and Canada in one year,” the New York Times reports.

The analysis looked at the impact of the Trump administration’s rollback of regulations governing emissions from hydrofluorocarbons, vehicles and methane. These changes are just some of the 100 environmental regulations the Trump administration has acted to rescind or weaken.

The Rhodium Group’s analysis compares national emissions projections with the rollbacks in place to projections with the original Obama-era regulations, based on what the group judged to be the most likely scenario for post-coronavirus recovery in the economy and energy sector.

Amid an international travel drought, some airlines are experimenting with ‘flights to nowhere.’

Passengers made desperate for travel by coronavirus shutdowns are willing to shell out for tickets. 

“A seven-hour Qantas flight will depart Sydney on Oct. 10 and return on the same day, with no stops along the way, to comply with restrictions on interstate travel,” our colleagues Antonia Noori Farzan and Adam Taylor write. “Passengers have been promised views of the Great Barrier Reef, the Uluru monolith and the Australian Outback as the plane flies over the country at low altitudes.”

Tickets cost $575 and $2,765, according to Reuters. Airlines in Taiwan and Japan have already run similar flights. 

“Environmental groups have raised concerns about the trend, pointing out that carbon emissions from air travel are a major contributing factor to the worsening climate crisis,” Farzan and Taylor write. Qantas has promised to pay for carbon offsets, Reuters reported. 

American eels are “having a good year — a good decade, in fact — continuing their unlikely comeback in the largest river on the East Coast, with help from daily truck rides,” Clare Fieseler writes for The Post.

Dams along the Susquehanna River, which flows from New York to Maryland, interrupt the natural journey of American eels from their birthplace in the Chesapeake Bay to fresh waters upriver. Biologists have been trapping juvenile eels and driving them 200 miles north in trucks.

“The idea of trapping and physically relocating a species — in this case, moving eels around physical obstacles — is gaining new interest as the planet warms and causes some plant and animal species to struggle in their native habitats,” Fieseler writes. “Moving them to a more hospitable home, also known as assisted migration, may be one way to save some species as the climate changes.”