5.2 million people, including those at these nine events. But there were 1,300 events at smaller cities and towns and villages across the country, and that’s what makes this whole day really impressive. Regardless of where we lived, or what we do in our daily lives, we got together for a couple of hours to affirm and reaffirm that we are a good people caring for each other.
I’m a day late. Instead of “yesterday,” let’s say April 5.
Excerpt from this Washington Post story:
A Canada goose won the hearts of Chicago Cubs fans over the weekend after building a nest at Wrigley Field, causing a section of bleachers to be closed. But the bird may no longer call the iconic ivy-covered stadium home.
The unnamed goose was sitting on her nest in a planter in the center field bleachers Friday afternoon when more than 40,000 fans showed up for the Cubs’ home opener against the San Diego Padres. The goose and her apparent mate stayed through the weekend, aided by ballpark attendants who blocked off the section to protect them.
But they were gone Monday, said Cubs spokeswoman Jennifer Martinez.
Cubs staffers had seen some geese near the ballpark Monday but couldn’t tell if they were the ones who’d made the center field bleachers their home, Martinez said.
She had said Sunday that the team welcomed its new around-the-clock fans and was working with a wildlife organization “to manage the situation safely and responsibly.”
Excerpt from this Washington Post story:
As California continues to recover from devastating January wildfires and extreme dryness that reached deep into winter, there are early signs that the state and surrounding region could face a troubling fire season in the months ahead.
The rainy season in the West is winding down, but much of the region remains well behind on rainfall. The Southwest is in deep drought after largely missing out on storms this winter. Much of the broader West is forecast to have unusually hot and dry weather in the coming weeks and months. And that heat — along with the recent proliferation of additional fire-fueling vegetation — could accelerate the turnaround into yet another wildfire season, with high risks of concerning conflagrations even for areas that had adequate rain and snow this winter.
California’s fire season typically starts up in May as grasses dry out, and this year could see heightened wildfire risk by June that becomes widespread in July, according to outlooks released at the beginning of this month.
“I expect it to be a big fire season,” said Matt Shameson, a meteorologist with the U.S. Forest Service in Riverside. “We have a lot of fuels out there in every category.”
And conditions are already emerging that could speed up that process. A heat wave is building this week, with record-breaking temperatures possible in parts of California and the Southwest.
Recent seasonal outlooks show abnormally warm and dry conditions centered over the Southwest this spring and expanding over much of the West into the summer.
There are several ingredients at play, including lingering impacts from a weakening La Niña, which typically promotes dry conditions for Southern California and the Southwest. When drought conditions are prominent, they can also supercharge heat waves — a result of positive feedback with the dry land surface. Long-term warming trends have also made scorching heat more likely.
The warmth could trigger rapid snowmelt along with earlier or more intense wildfires.
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
Over the last few months, Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has made explosive accusations against the Biden administration, accusing it of “insane” malfeasance in its handling of $20 billion in climate grants.
Now, as a legal battle ensues over those funds, many of Mr. Zeldin’s claims remain unsupported, and some are flat-out false.
Mr. Zeldin has said that the program, which Congress approved as part of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, was vulnerable to “waste, fraud, and abuse.” If that claim was substantiated, it would allow the E.P.A. to take back the $20 billion, which was awarded to eight nonprofit groups. The money was to be used to finance projects across the country such as solar panels on community centers and geothermal systems to heat and cool subsidized housing.
But so far, the Trump administration has failed to provide evidence of wrongdoing. The E.P.A., which has worked to block the nonprofits from accessing the money, is now being sued by several of the organizations for breach of contract.
On Wednesday, Judge Tanya Chutkan of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia noted that the E.P.A. has offered “different positions” to justify its actions but not presented evidence of waste, fraud or abuse.
“Here we are, weeks in, and you’re still unable to proffer me any evidence with regard to malfeasance,” she told Justice Department lawyers during a hearing on the case.
Legal experts said the agency’s arguments increasingly appear thin.
“It’s just nonsense,” said Richard Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard University.
He said when he first heard about Mr. Zeldin’s accusations about the $20 billion grant program, he was shocked. Then he read the Trump administration’s recent filings in federal court, which were supposed to provide evidence for its claims of fraud and abuse.
“They come in with huge press releases claiming all kinds of things, criminal misconduct, corruption, and then the documents that are filed in court don’t match that rhetoric,” Mr. Lazarus said. “It’s completely and utterly irresponsible.”
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
Republicans in Congress cannot use an obscure legislative maneuver to stop California’s ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035, the Senate parliamentarian ruled on Friday.
The decision dealt a blow to efforts by the Trump administration to quickly kill policies that promote electric vehicles.
California had received a federal waiver under the 1970 Clean Air Act from the Biden administration to impose a stricter automobile emissions standard than the one set by the federal government. Under that waiver, it enacted a plan to require all new cars sold in the state by 2035 be free of emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, the primary contributor to climate change.
It’s one of the most ambitious climate policies in the United States, designed to shift the auto industry toward electric cars. That has made it a top target for elimination by the Trump administration.
According to three Senate Democrats, however, the parliamentarian on Friday said the waiver granted to California was not subject to the Congressional Review Act, which permits lawmakers to reverse recently-adopted regulations with a simple majority vote.
California’s two Democratic senators, Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, announced the decision but declined to release the text of the ruling.
All three described it as a victory for climate policies.
“In passing the Clean Air Act on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, Congress explicitly granted California the ability to set more stringent vehicle emissions standards to protect public health from California’s unique air quality challenges,” Mr. Padilla said.
“This latest stunt from Trump’s E.P.A. was a clearly bogus attempt to undercut California’s climate leadership, and it failed,” he said.
The Trump administration submitted the automobile waiver to Congress along with two other California waivers approved by the Environmental Protection Agency last year. One requires that half of all new heavy-duty vehicles sold in the state be electric by 2035 and the other places limits on nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter emissions from cars and trucks.
The parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, is a civil servant who acts as the arbiter and enforcer of the Senate’s rules. She decided that the rules would not allow Republicans to fast-track the repeal of the waiver.
Mr. Schiff noted that the parliamentarian is “nonpartisan and independent,” and added that California “has been the gold standard for fighting harmful air pollution, and today’s ruling allows that fight to continue.”
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
A jury in Louisiana has ruled that Chevron must pay a parish government about $745 million to help restore wetlands that the jury said the energy company had harmed for decades.
The verdict, which was reached on Friday, is likely to influence similar lawsuits filed by other parishes, or counties, in the state against other energy giants and their possible settlement negotiations.
The lawsuit, filed by Plaquemines Parish, is one of at least 40 that coastal parishes have filed against fossil fuel companies since 2013.
The lawsuit contended that Texaco — which Chevron bought in 2000 — violated state law for decades by failing to apply for coastal permits, and by not removing oil and gas equipment when it stopped using an oil field in Breton Sound, which is southeast of New Orleans.
A state regulation in 1980 required companies operating in wetlands to restore “as near as practicable to their original condition” any canals that they dredged, wells that they drilled or wastewater that they dumped into marshes.
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
President Trump has promised to usher in an era of “energy dominance” and cut energy costs in half for consumers in his first 18 months in office. But his latest round of tariffs, announced Wednesday, have rattled energy markets and threatened to scramble global supply chains.
The upshot: neither fossil fuel companies nor renewable energy companies are thrilled about the announcement. Higher costs for U.S. energy producers, including more expensive materials, could throw cold water on the “drill, baby, drill” philosophy Trump has championed. And the effect of the new levies could stymie efforts to expand renewables domestically.
“It’s always tempting to say these tariffs are good for fossil fuels, bad for clean energy,” Antoine Vagneur-Jones, a researcher for BloombergNEF, told Brad Plumer. “But I think it’s just bad for everyone.”
President Trump announced a series of new tariffs on Wednesday that were far higher than many economists had expected, and U.S. stocks plunged significantly on Thursday. The changes, as Patricia Cohen wrote, cut directly against the “global economic system that the United States has shaped and steered for more than three-quarters of a century. “
Trump announced a 10 percent tariff on all imports to the U.S., with higher rates for certain nations. Imports from the European Union, a key trading partner and importer of U.S. energy, will face a new 20 percent tariff, and Chinese goods will be subjected to a new 34 percent tariff on top of existing charges.
It’s possible these numbers will change. In the first months of his term, Trump delayed some tariffs and reduced rates following negotiations with trading partners.
The tariffs’ precise impacts on the global transition away from fossil fuels have not yet come into focus. They may encourage new alliances that intentionally exclude the U.S. — say, by accelerating sales of Chinese renewables in Pakistan and Brazil, for example.
But they could just as easily snarl global supply chains and push up prices across many sectors.
President Trump’s tariff announcement excluded certain energy products including oil and natural gas.
Trump’s tariff plans had drawn the ire of oil and gas companies ahead of Wednesday’s announcement. In a recent industry survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, respondents from Texas, Louisiana and the Southwest complained that 25 percent levies on steel imports were already pushing up the costs of necessary piping equipment.
Just as worrisome to survey respondents was the feeling of whiplash.
Without clarity about long-term trade policies, operators said, it’s difficult to invest in facilities that may not be operational for years to come. “The administration’s chaos is a disaster for the commodity markets. ‘Drill, baby, drill’ is nothing short of a myth and populist rallying cry,” wrote one respondent from an exploration and production firm. “Tariff policy is impossible for us to predict and doesn’t have a clear goal. We want more stability.”
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
The insurance crisis spreading across the United States arrived at Richard D. Zimmel’s door last week in the form of a letter.
Mr. Zimmel, who lives in the increasingly fire-prone hills outside Silver City, N.M., had done everything right. He trimmed the trees away from his house, and covered his yard in gravel to stop flames rushing in from the forest near his property. In case that buffer zone failed, he sheathed his house in fire-resistant stucco, and topped it with a noncombustible steel roof.
None of it mattered. His insurance company, Homesite Insurance, dumped him. “Property is located in a brushfire or wildfire area that no longer meets Homesite’s minimum standard for wildfire risk,” the letter read. (Homesite did not respond to a request for comment.)
Mr. Zimmel has company. Since 2018, more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts nationwide have been dropped — “nonrenewed,” in the parlance of the industry. In more than 200 counties, the nonrenewal rate has tripled or more, according to the findings of a congressional investigation released Wednesday.
As a warming planet delivers more wildfires, hurricanes and other threats, America’s once reliably boring home insurance market has become the place where climate shocks collide with everyday life.
The consequences could be profound. Without insurance, you can’t get a mortgage; without a mortgage, most Americans can’t buy a home. Communities that are deemed too dangerous to insure face the risk of falling property values, which means less tax revenue for schools, police and other basic services. As insurers pull back, they can destabilize the communities left behind, making their decisions a predictor of the disruption to come.
Now, for the first time, the scale of that pullback is becoming public. Last fall, the Senate Budget Committee demanded the country’s largest insurance companies provide the number of nonrenewals by county and year. The result is a map that tracks the climate crisis in a new way.
