weekend mix
The quiet dismantling of Obama's environmental legacy.
We talk with The Hill’s Timothy Cama, who bushwhacks his way through the unruly thicket of legislation on Capitol Hill and tracks the steady stream executive orders coming out of the White House.
Ep. 22: The Quiet Dismantling of Obama's Environmental Legacy
President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump shake hands following their meeting in the Oval Office on Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Back in February, Steve Bannon, then a high-ranking advisor to Donald Trump, said the administration is in a battle for the deconstruction of the administrative state. Since then, Trump's Cabinet members have, by all accounts, gotten down to this task with laser-like focus. Since President Trump’s inauguration, the EPA has rolled back or delayed at least 30 rules and regulations. The common theme? Anything that Obama touched.
In this episode of Trump on Earth, we talk with The Hill’s Timothy Cama, who bushwhacks his way through the unruly thicket of legislation on Capitol Hill and tracks the steady stream executive orders coming out of the White House.
“You know, it seems that if it has President Obama's name on it, then President Trump wants to undo it, almost no matter what the substance of the policy is,” says Cama. “We saw that for example, a few weeks ago with President Trump signing or rolling back the flood protection standards that President Obama had written. These were widely seen as commonsense standards to sort of require that future infrastructure, future federally-funded projects would be built to withstand future floods...that wasn't safe from President Trump's big deregulatory push. That shows the extent to which the administration is going to undo Obama.”
So what has the reaction been from Congress to this administration's moves on the environment?
“You have to see it in the context of all the other things that the lawmakers are worrying about with the Trump administration," says Cama. "There are a lot of very controversial things that the president is doing on defense, on international relations, on multiple fronts. And so it feels, sometimes, like lawmakers are distracted. But at the same time, the lawmakers who do have to worry about this on a daily basis -- for example Senator Tom Carper, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee in the Senate, or Representative Raul Grijalva, the top Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee in the House -- are very, very alarmed."
With all the regulatory rollbacks, there’s no shortage of work for Cama. With the amount of stories Cama has written over the summer, his e-mail inbox might be the hottest part of the universe right now. So what's it been like covering this pivotal moment in U.S. environmental policies?
“It's definitely a big shift," he says. "It’s surreal sometimes to see the speed and efficiency with which all of this is happening...it's definitely busy, but it helps to sort of keep in mind the big picture of what the Trump administration's goals here are, and how this fits in with the overall ideas of increasing the use of the development, the use of fossil fuels and of domestic energy.”
Mentioned in This Episode:
Clean Power Plan & Clean Water Rule
Clean Air Act
Methane regulations
Flood protection standards
Timothy Cama’s reporting for The Hill
Follow Timothy Cama on twitter.
This episode was hosted by Reid Frazier. Follow him on twitter. Trump on Earth is produced by The Allegheny Front, a Pittsburgh-based environmental reporting project, and Point Park University's Environmental Journalism program.
Our podcast is free to download, follow and listen, so if you find these episodes informative in a chaotic political environment, please consider donating or leaving a review on iTunes. We are actively listening to our reviewers, and each review helps our podcast reach more ears. Questions? Tweet at us on Twitter or send us a message via trumponearth@gmail.com or Facebook.
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Chad Horwedel
Illinois' vanishing bugs and why it matters to Earth.
Endangered insects, a little-known part of the Endangered Species Act, prepare for life under Trump.
Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune
A beast with black wings buzzed close and darted past us into the trees: What was that? Was that it? That had to be it. Mallory Sbelgio, citizen scientist, entomologist in training, defender of rare insects, did not quite roll her eyes, though it was remarkable her eyes remained in her head: No, she said, no, that wasn’t the bug we were looking for. She continued walking. Our insect was rarer — in decline throughout the country, but especially Illinois. We were hunting the Hine’s emerald dragonfly, one of relatively few insects to receive a special status: It’s protected by the Endangered Species Act.
A long sliver of a thing alighted on a curling blade of grass, its body sky blue, its wings slim windowpanes. It clung to its green, then zipped off.
There!
“Nope,” Sbelgio said. “Damselfly.”
It was a bright Saturday morning, and we were walking along the Des Plaines River in Will County, stepping around the spongy marshes and flooded banks left by a downpour a few hours before. Dragonflies darted inches above the waterline. But not our dragonfly. Sbelgio was too polite to state the obvious: This was a waste of time, we would never stumble onto a Hine’s by wandering around a forest preserve. Success was statistically unrealistic: According to Andres Ortega, an ecologist who specializes in insects for DuPage County, where the Hine’s is slightly more prevalent, its population in Illinois is “close to extinction — like maybe just 200 to 300 a year. So, incredibly low for an insect.”
Think finding an endangered elephant is hard?
Try finding an endangered insect.
Sbelgio crouched and peered into the forest. She wasn’t always a bug person. As a child, she was scared of everything, until one day her father brought home a tarantula, as a happy-birthday joke. To her shock, she has been hooked on insects ever since. The 27-year-old Lombard native has studied entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and zoology at Miami University in Ohio; lately, she has been trying to start a nonprofit to raise awareness of endangered insects in Illinois.
“All the energy goes into endangered fish and mammals,” she said. “So there are not a lot of us out here, but someone has to advocate for bugs. Most of the time I mention I stand up for endangered insects, I’m met with dead silence. People think ‘endangered’ and ‘insects’ don’t go together. But lose insects, and we are dismantling our ecosystem.”
The good news? As summer ends, there are fewer insects, fewer swats.
The bad news? That insect you just swatted might be the last of its kind.
Scientist after scientist, and research study after research study, has agreed our ecosystem is indeed being dismantled, partly because extinction rates for thousands of wildlife species have accelerated in the past decade. The really bad news: Insects constitute a majority of those species. Tarantulas, for instance. Some biologists believe most tarantulas could be extinct within our lifetime. The suspects are not hard to guess: climate change, development, the human-made decline of natural habitats.
One hope, entomologists say, is the Endangered Species Act.
Invertebrates have been on it since 1976, when the Fish and Wildlife Service granted protections to seven species of butterflies. Yet, the trouble with insects is, well, most are not a “charismatic species,” scientists’ term for superstars of the endangered animal kingdom. We coo for pandas and whales. Ants, not so much. “Honestly, endangered insects have been a (public relations) nightmare,” said May Berenbaum, the head of UIUC’s department of entomology. She received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama; “The X-Files” named a character after her. But ask about protecting insects and even she acknowledges “insects are a hard case (for protection). Try arguing for a pygmy hog-sucking louse. Not a great name for something we might want to save.”
You can make eye contact with a rare river otter.
Try that with a beetle that buries roadkill for lunch.
And now, insects face a more existential hurdle — the Trump administration, which has signaled it intends to gut the Endangered Species Act. Never mind melting glaciers — explain to a politician why the extinction of the rattlesnake-master borer moth is a crisis. As the Entomological Society of America noted in a recent statement of support for the Endangered Species Act: Insects are 75 percent of species, and insects are necessary for a healthy environment, but only 84 species of invertebrates have government protection, compared to 439 vertebrates.
So the battle for bugs is lonely.
Sbelgio stared into the forest and shook her head: “People don’t get it. They don’t think insects impact their world at all — something moved!” She trudged off into the thicket, ever careful of where she stepped.
Specimens in the Insects, Arachnids and Myriapods collection of the Field Museum.
Fifty years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued its first list of endangered and threatened species to be federally protected, an outcome of 1966’s Endangered Species Preservation Act. Some of the initial 76 protected animals included manatees, bald eagles, Columbian white-tailed deer and the American alligator. You know, relatable.
By 1970, protections were extended to invertebrates, and in 1973, at the urging of the Nixon administration, the Endangered Species Act, a significantly beefed-up version of the 1966 law, was passed to include protections for the habitats of endangered species. It wasn’t the federal government’s first rodeo with animal conservation: The Lacey Act of 1900, a response to the decline of passenger pigeons (which eventually went extinct), addressed the illegal trade of animals. Later legislation tried to slow whale hunting and the shooting of migratory birds. Today, the federal Endangered Species List isn’t even the only list: Many states keep their own lists, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which has published a broader “Red List” since 1964, classifies 195 insect species (worldwide) as “critically endangered.”
Still, the Endangered Species Act remains a regulatory outlier compared with conservation laws in many countries, said Andy Suarez, an entomologist at UIUC. “Never mind it gives value to a species, which many people find abstract. The language is pretty blanket — it preserves entire habitats. That’s why a lot of people are terrified of losing it under Trump — conservationists will never get anything like it again.”
Despite strong laws, however, insect protection is awkward.
Insects are small and everywhere. Their lives are short. More butterflies receive protection than, say, flies because they’re outgoing, they pollinate — if you can see a bug, you have a better chance of compiling data on it. Said Michael Jeffords, an entomologist with the Illinois Natural History Survey: “Illinois is an insect Venn diagram. We’re on the edge of a lot of (insect) ranges, so accuracy gets rough. On the other hand, we’ve been collecting data since the 1850s. If you don’t see an insect that once lived here, you know they’re done — or their habitat is.”
Bugs die quietly every day.
Since millions of insects remain unidentified, entire species have vanished before we knew they existed. As California condors were captured in the 1980s and brought into breeding programs to prevent their extinction, scientists washed them. However, doing this killed a louse that lived only on California condors. Now that louse is extinct.
The federal Endangered Species Act lists 85 endangered or threatened insects. Illinois’ list is 15 species long and includes Karner blue butterflies, springtails, stoneflies and a scorpion. Crystal Maier, collections manager for invertebrates at the Field Museum, has most of them. She has 4 million bugs stuck on boards, 12 million more floating in alcohol. She walks the cold hallways of the museum’s insect storage room, locates the scientific name of a species, then slides out a series of wooden trays with dead specimens stuck with pins. It’s a combination library/morgue. “And there you ... go,” she says cheerfully.
Behold, the striped bark scorpion.
Found rarely in Illinois on the eastern banks of the Mississippi River, outside St. Louis; grows no more than 3 inches; black stripe on its back; resembles a crustacean; stings. Maier puts it back and reaches for rare springtails, so tiny the specimens float in vials placed inside jars.
Ask an entomologist why it matters to protect bugs like this, and they rattle off reasons, economic, environmental, moral: Bugs provide billions of dollars of pollinated crops, according to agricultural studies. In the Chicago area, said John Legge, Chicago conservation director of the Nature Conservancy, a lack of biodiversity in natural spaces “can be an illustration of the threat of climate change.” (A few years ago, after an uncommonly cool spring in the Indiana Dunes caused the Karner blue to emerge too soon, the population crashed and never recovered.) Maier, whose own specialty is aquatic beetles, said the biodiversity of the insects along a river or stream is often a warning light of water quality.
There are times, though, where she is hesitant to identify a rare species: “Because you’re not just naming a species anymore, you’re pointing out habitat for protection — which gets politicized.” Indeed, the Reagan administration sought to remove all insects from protection. Instead, “pests” — mosquitoes, ticks, certain beetles, anything regarded as having a negative impact on health or economic concerns like crops — were prohibited. “Yet people assume all bugs are pests,” Berenbaum said. “During the W. Bush years, a recommendation was made to set aside 9,200 acres in Hawaii for flies found nowhere else that had bacterial qualities useful, some said, in developing drugs. The White House said ‘OK,’ and then it set aside 18 acres — a giant middle finger to bugs.”
Consider the journey of the rusty patched bumblebee.
Once common throughout the Midwest and Northeast, it’s found in only 13 states now (including Illinois). It pollinates cranberries, tomatoes. Even dead and stuck with a pin, it’s adorable: fuzzy, colored like an autumn forest. Last fall, the Obama administration announced it would be added to the Endangered Species List. Hours before Rusty was officially listed, the Trump administration delayed inclusion, explaining more study was needed. A coalition of farm and real estate interests had petitioned against Rusty. After the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a lawsuit, the White House backed down and included Rusty.
This bee’s story isn’t over.
In the spring, work on the Longmeadow Parkway Corridor Project in Kane County, which cut through the bee’s habitat, was halted, then restarted; that battle is ongoing. Yet Rusty’s inclusion has been pivotal, said Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Portland, Ore.-based Xerces Society, which led the decadelong petition process for protection. He sees the bee as a “charismatic” gateway to bringing attention to endangered insects in general. “But the endgame is never the listing. Insects get less money than endangered animals, and almost nothing if they’re not listed, so now the struggle for conservation action begins.”
Xerces, founded in 1971, a pioneer in insect conservation, is not alone. The Nature Conservancy in Chicago buys land that protects local insect habitats; museums launch butterfly counter iPhone apps; the St. Louis Zoo established a Center for American Burying Beetle Conservation.
Just off the lobby of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum — some distance from the live-butterfly exhibit, to prevent contagion — Allen Lawrence, associate curator of entomology, and Doug Taron, chief curator of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, breed Baltimore checkerspot butterflies, a vulnerable species. The lab is humid, small. A graduate student is hunched over a table, using a thin paintbrush to delicately sift caterpillar poop from paper cups. That’s nearly the entire arrangement: cups, student, a humidifier, a few leaf greens of food.
“With insects, it doesn’t cost a lot to make a difference,” Lawrence said.
Next summer, after three years, the project will release its Baltimores in Elgin. “Habitat conditions have to be ideal,” Taron said. “The problem is that nature, no matter what you do, throws so much at you.” As with many things in life, it’s the spineless that take the roughest hits.
Grass poked through the fast-moving current on the Des Plaines River. Geese honk-honked overhead. Mallory Sbelgio watched a harvestman (aka daddy longlegs) step carefully around her hand.
It was no Hine’s emerald dragonfly.
Dead specimens alone are hard to find. Andres Ortega, in DuPage, is eager to change this. His Hine’s breeding project in Warrenville is a year old. On waterways, he’s carving the kind of shallow channels that Hine’s look for. And though he wasn’t involved, when the Illinois Tollway built Interstate 355 across the Des Plaines, the state made the road higher than planned, so motorists didn’t accidentally speed up the Hine’s extinction.
“Why spend so much money on a dragonfly?” he asked. “Extinction is normal and happens, but when that removal is unnatural, as we are seeing all over the world, we have a cascading crisis in our backyards.”
The prognosis is grim.
Sbelgio pictures herself on the front lines by staying small. The state rejected her proposal for a nonprofit organization centered on endangered insects. But she’s not going away. Endangered insects make the Endangered Species Act accessible in a way that an endangered polar bear does not, she said — it’s a niche waiting for a leader.
A small quick oblong alien crawled past.
Oh! There!
“That’s an ant,” Sbelgio said. “Don’t worry. There’s a lot of ants.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @borrelli
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Administration officials meet to develop climate strategy.
Trump administration officials huddled at the White House on Wednesday in a bid to chart a more cohesive energy and environmental policy strategy, including a game plan for communicating its position on climate change, according to three people familiar with the meeting.
By ANDREW RESTUCCIA and EMILY HOLDEN 09/21/2017 02:32 PM EDT
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Trump administration officials huddled at the White House on Wednesday in a bid to chart a more cohesive energy and environmental policy strategy, including a game plan for communicating its position on climate change, according to three people familiar with the meeting.
The meeting included more than a dozen deputy-level officials from the White House’s various policy councils, as well as representatives from federal agencies such as the EPA and the Energy Department.
The goal of the meeting was to develop a forward-looking strategy that goes beyond early efforts by the administration to overturn former President Barack Obama’s regulations. Participants emphasized the importance of coming up with a way to frame President Donald Trump's energy and environmental objectives. Several officials at the meeting proposed highlighting the potential for new energy technology innovation and job creation, according to the people familiar with the meeting.
Officials also discussed how to combat the public perception that the administration is out of touch with climate science, sources said. The White House declined to comment.
One administration official said the meeting focused on “big picture climate strategy,” and had less to do with the nitty-gritty policy details of the Paris climate change agreement or Obama’s climate regulations for power plants.
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Wednesday’s meeting marks the latest effort by chief of staff John Kelly to formalize the policymaking process in the West Wing. Kelly has called for more deputy-level strategy sessions on a range of policy issues. Administration officials said there were no final decisions at Wednesday’s meeting, and they expect additional meetings in the coming weeks.
Trump and his team have often struggled to put forward a unified environmental vision. Trump has said he values clean air and water. But he has sought to undo a series of Obama-era environmental regulations and he announced in June that he intended to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement, arguing it is a bad deal for the United States.
Though the Paris climate deal wasn’t a major topic at Wednesday’s meeting, Trump’s stance on the pact has caused confusion among the United States’ foreign allies. Trump has held out the possibility of remaining in the agreement if he can secure a better deal for the U.S., but he’s offered few clues about what that might look like. For now, administration officials have stressed that they still intend to withdraw.
The administration has also not yet honed a clear stance on climate change science. Before becoming president, Trump called climate change a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese. Since then, various administration officials have said they believe climate change is occurring, but raised questions about the degree to which human beings are responsible. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has called for a public review of climate change science.
PLAYBOOK PLUS
Graham-Cassidy not a done deal in the Senate
By JAKE SHERMAN, ANNA PALMER and DANIEL LIPPMAN
A series of record-breaking hurricanes have put added pressure on the White House to weigh in on the effect that climate change is having on extreme weather.
"We continue to take seriously the climate change — not the cause of it, but the things that we observe,” White House national security adviser Tom Bossert said earlier this month, pointing to rising sea levels and other climate effects that “would require prudent mitigation measures.”
Trump later appeared to dismiss the link between hurricanes and climate change. “We’ve had bigger storms than this,” Trump said when asked if Hurricanes Harvey and Irma were changing his views of climate change.
The vast majority of climate scientists say the planet is warming in large part due to human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels.
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This story tagged under:
White House Climate Change Barack Obama Environmental Protection Agency Scott Pruitt Paris Climate Agreement Hurricane Harvey Hurricane Irma
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Leonardo DiCaprio speaks at Yale Climate Conference, urges change.
Leonardo DiCaprio closed out a climate change conference at Yale University Tuesday with a talk in which the actor criticized political hand-wringing and stressed the urgency of combating man-made changes to the environment.
MATT ORMSETH
Leonardo DiCaprio closed out a climate change conference at Yale University Tuesday with a talk in which the actor criticized political hand-wringing and stressed the urgency of combating man-made changes to the environment.
DiCaprio's visit capped a two-day conference put on by the Kerry Initiative, a program founded earlier this year by former Secretary of State and 1966 Yale graduate John Kerry, that also featured California Gov. Jerry Brown, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, former Secretary of State James Baker and General Electric chairman Jeffrey Immelt as speakers.
DiCaprio's talk, which took the form of a back-and-forth dialogue with Kerry, was peppered with moments of levity. Kerry introduced the "Titanic" star with a quip: "Who better to talk about climate change," he asked, "than a man who has witnessed an iceberg breaking apart in the middle of the ocean?"
At one point, Kerry held up a vial of air from the South Pole — "the cleanest air on earth," he called it — at which DiCaprio joked, "Let me get a hit of that," drawing laughter from the 2,500 in attendance.
But those moments were rare in an evening otherwise colored with grim prognoses and clear frustration on the part of DiCaprio.
He admitted that climate change has become "somewhat of an obsession" after traveling around the world last year to film "Before the Flood," a documentary on the effects of climate change.
"When you start talking about chemically changing our planet in an irreversible fashion, that will threaten all life on earth, that was like the most surreal science fiction movie I could ever imagine," he said.
DiCaprio referenced last year's Academy Awards, in which he won the Oscar that had long eluded him, and brought up climate change in his acceptance speech. "I said this might be my one opportunity in my life — it was an essential question: Do I bring up something so sensitive and so polarizing?"
Tuesday's conference came at a time when catastrophic storms in the Gulf of Mexico have people wondering if climate change was to blame, and the devastating hurricanes were mentioned early and often in DiCaprio's visit.
"We just broke three records in the last couple weeks: Irma, the most high-velocity cyclonic effect in a hurricane, winds over 185 miles per hour for over 24 hours; Harvey, the greatest amount of rainfall in history in one storm; and then the fires that are decimating the western part of the country," Kerry said. "The evidence is overwhelming."
DiCaprio said that while climate change was not the sole cause of this year's cataclysmic storms, the scientific community believes "it's making them more extreme and more destructive."
On Sept. 11, a few days before Hurricane Irma clobbered the Caribbean and parts of Florida, Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said discussing climate change's role in the proliferation of such storms was "very, very insensitive."
Even before President Donald Trump took office, DiCaprio has tried to sway a leader hesitant to acknowledge humankind's role in environmental changes, and who has sought to extricate the United States from Obama-era commitments to fighting climate change.
In December, DiCaprio visited then-President-elect Trump in his eponymous Manhattan tower and touted the job-creating potential of clean energy.
"We presented him with a comprehensive plan to tackle climate change, while also simultaneously harnessing the economic potential of green jobs," he said. "We talked about how the United States has the potential to lead the world in clean energy manufacturing and research and development."
That meeting was to no avail, DiCaprio said, before blasting the president's choice of Pruitt to lead the EPA, and his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accords.
In June, the president announced the United States would pull out of the Paris agreement — which Kerry himself helped broker in 2015 — in which 195 nations pledged to curb greenhouse gas emissions and help developing countries do the same.
Yale students said DiCaprio's name was enough to provoke campuswide interest in the conference, and keep climate change in the conversation.
"They're bringing a celebrity here because a lot of people are here to see him," said Alex Briasco-Stewart, a freshman from Wayland, Mass. "And through attracting that audience, they can push that message out."
"I think it's an important issue," he said of climate change. "And I think seeing Leonardo DiCaprio's cool."
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Canada deploys 'multi-pronged' lobbying to counter Trump's EPA cuts.
Elimination, laceration or privatization: inside the Trudeau government's full-court press to save ENERGY STAR from Trump's budget knives.
Canada deploys 'multi-pronged' lobbying to counter Trump's EPA cuts
By Carl Meyer in News, Energy, Politics | September 21st 2017
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United States President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt in the Rose Garden of the White House on June 1, 2017. Photo by The Associated Press /Susan Walsh
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Canada has deployed a "multi-pronged" lobbying strategy against the Trump administration's budget over concerns that proposed U.S. cuts will put a “fundamental” component of the Trudeau government's climate change plan in jeopardy, newly-released federal briefing documents show.
The records from the director of the Office of Energy Efficiency at Natural Resources Canada warn that Trump's proposed cuts would spell trouble not only for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's climate change policies, but also for numerous provincial government energy efficiency programs and tens of thousands of Canadian jobs.
ENERGY STAR, a popular initiative that identifies the most energy-efficient products on the market, creating jobs and helping people lower their energy use and save money, was put on the chopping block earlier this year by the White House, as part of its proposal to reduce funding to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The U.S.-run program and its well-known sticker showing a stylized white star on a blue background is familiar to many Canadians and Americans. It was launched in 2001 and designed to help consumers identify energy efficient products to lower their utility bills.
President Donald Trump's White House said the plan to eliminate the program would save taxpayer dollars. His critics, however, say his budget needlessly slashes and burns the EPA, among other key departments and services.
The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from National Observer.
An example of the ENERGY STAR logo. Image from government website
Senior Canadian government officials were among those alarmed by Trump's proposal, according to the briefing documents obtained by National Observer through access to information legislation.
The Canadian officials responded to the Trump budget by crafting an aggressive, “multi-pronged” lobbying campaign to push back, joining the efforts of dozens of organizations and companies such as 3M, Intel and others, the documents indicated. From the Canadian side, the lobbying was to be spearheaded by Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr and Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna.
Canada is heavily invested in the program, according to the documents:
Natural Resources Canada considers it to be a “fundamental element” of the Trudeau government’s climate change plan, and says 2017 budget programs "could not be implemented as proposed if ENERGY STAR is eliminated."
Losing the program, it said, would mean "ceding ground to European and Asian standards in the fastest-growing job segment of the energy sector — energy efficiency," a sector supporting 100,000 Canadian jobs.
ENERGY STAR is the "foundation for almost all provincially-funded energy efficiency programs," and cost-savings for Canadians would be “at risk” if the program was killed. The program saves North American households about $500 on average per year.
Natural Resources says the program is “highly embedded in the Canadian marketplace" with support from a “broad cross-section of the economy," and has about 90 per cent brand recognition.
ENERGY STAR gets one of the best rates of return for any U.S. government program, according to the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council, shaving $34 billion USD off utility bills in 2015 while only costing around $50 million a year to operate.
North of the border, Amin Asadollahi, co-chair of the Green Budget Coalition and North American lead for climate mitigation at the International Institute for Sustainable Development, said ENERGY STAR has helped businesses and Canadians reduce their energy costs and carbon pollution.
Asadollahi said it helps consumers make more informed decisions on most energy efficient equipment — everything from appliances to windows and doors, kitchen items, electronics, heating and cooling, lighting and other devices.
National Observer reporter Carl Meyer chats with managing editor Mike De Souza about the new documents released by the Canadian government regarding the EPA cuts. Video by National Observer
"Defunding of ENERGY STAR by the Trump administration will have an impact beyond U.S. borders, and will undermine Canada's energy efficiency and climate efforts," he said.
The department was preparing for ENERGY STAR funding to be cut off as early as two weeks from now. There are signs it continues to be threatened: a U.S. House of Representatives budget proposal cuts the program almost in half.
Now the Senate needs to weigh in. Meanwhile, ENERGY STAR lives on as part of a "continuing resolution" signed by U.S. President Donald Trump this month that, in theory, will keep the government funded at last year's levels until Congress agrees on a plan for 2018.
"It’s not clear how this is going to play out," said Ben Evans, vice president of government affairs and communications at the Alliance to Save Energy, one of several U.S.-based groups identified in the documents as having expressed concern to Congress. The alliance has called the U.S. House proposal a "debilitating cut."
“We’re hopeful the Senate will propose a good bill, and we’re going to be working over the next few months very aggressively to defend the program."
Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr speaks to reporters on Parliament Hill on May 15, 2017. Carr reiterated to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt in an April 24 letter about the importance of ENERGY STAR. Photo by Alex Tétreault
ENERGY STAR cut would 'jeopardize' a third of carbon pollution reductions
The documents show the program’s elimination would “jeopardize” a third of all greenhouse gas emissions reductions projected in the Trudeau government’s climate action plan — the portion that represents energy efficiency interventions.
The alarm within the government pushed bureaucrats to recruit Trudeau's cabinet ministers in the lobbying efforts, the documents show.
Carr, Trudeau's natural resources minister, sent a letter to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt on April 24, reiterating the importance of Canada-U.S. collaboration on energy, "including energy programs such as the EPA-run ENERGY STAR program," said Tania Carreira Pereira, communications officer for media relations at Natural Resources Canada, in response to questions.
Documents released by Natural Resources Canada reveal key messages from the Canadian government, warning of the severe consequences resulting from the elimination of the ENERGY STAR program. Screenshot of documents released through access to information legislation
Several pages within the documents released by Natural Resources Canada were censored under sections of federal access to information legislation that allow the government to withhold details that could harm Canada's international relations, involving ongoing advice and deliberations, as well as solicitor-client privileged information.
Carr's press secretary Alexandre Deslongchamps said that the minister's letter to Pruitt is "not in the public domain."
"Natural Resources Canada will continue to work closely with the U.S. EPA to uphold its commitments as an international ENERGY STAR partner and to deliver ENERGY STAR programs for products, homes, buildings and industry in Canada," Pereira said. Carr had also met earlier with Pruitt on March 29, the documents show.
The federal records demonstrate how the department saw an opening early on to lobby congressional members and others for the program to be saved, during the time between the White House’s budget blueprint and congressional budget approval.
“During this timeframe, prior to the final budget decision, a multi-pronged engagement approach...is recommended,” the documents read. “Advocacy and engagement to underscore Canada’s support for ENERGY STAR, profiling its benefits to the U.S. economy and consumers, and the risks that privatization could bring, would serve to minimize risks to Canadian provinces.”
The "ENERGY STAR Engagement Strategy” described in the documents lays out a campaign involving ministers, the embassy in Washington and key industry players. It is reminiscent of the Harper government's deployment of Canadian diplomats to lobby companies in the U.S. to counter an environmental advocacy campaign targeting the oilsands industry.
Environment Minister Catherine McKenna speaks to schoolchildren on Aug. 31, 2017 in Gatineau, Que. The Natural Resources department said it expected McKenna and her parliamentary secretary to be “well briefed” on the issue of ENERGY STAR. Photo by Alex Tétreault
The newly-released documents also noted “engagement opportunities” with members of Congress, including the appropriations committee, the House and Senate energy committees and the appropriations subcommittees for environment. It suggested the embassy in DC “host events and participate in third-party events to convey Canadian messages.”
Both McKenna and Carr have met with Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chair, Senator Lisa Murkowski, the documents show. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran and Vice Chairman Patrick Leahy are also singled out as receiving a letter from 36 Senators “expressing concern” with cuts to the EPA, in particular ENERGY STAR.
Pruitt and his office have been a main target. The documents suggest “broad engagement of Pruitt staff” and names over a dozen staffers as potential contacts.
Ministers have been drafted to include energy efficiency messages in their outreach in Washington and across the U.S. The document makes it clear to ensure that McKenna and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Jonathan Wilkinson were “well briefed” on the issue and could “raise the issue in their U.S.-focused meetings and stakeholder work.”
McKenna's office was contacted but did not respond to questions by publication.
But earlier this week, Prime Minister Trudeau said at a news conference in Ottawa that he expects municipal, state and congressional politicians to lead the U.S. in efforts to fight climate change, even if there is "a little less participation" on the file by the Trump administration.
“In the conversations I’ve had with Americans — whether they be congressional leaders, governors, or mayors across the United States, or businesses who get the opportunities that come with the challenge of climate change — I’m confident that the United States is still going to be moving forward in the fight against climate change,” Trudeau said.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt in the White House. Pruitt met with Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr on March 29, according to Natural Resources departmental documents. File photo by The Associated Press
Firms, groups state support for energy efficiency program
ENERGY STAR is used in Canada and the United States, as well as six other jurisdictions: Japan, New Zealand, Taiwan, the European Union, the European Free Trade Association and Switzerland. Natural Resources Canada is the sole Canadian administrator. It is currently operating under an agreement between the department and the EPA, which the documents say expire on March 14, 2019.
A screenshot of federal documents released under access to information legislation by Natural Resources Canada list the Canadian government's speaking points about the consequences of U.S. President Donald Trump's cuts to the ENERGY STAR program.
In addition to the congressional campaign, the departmental documents suggest identifying and working with “third party influencers that could advance the message,” such as “industry leaders and associations, labour organizations, building organizations as well as sub-national leaders on energy efficiency.”
It notes how stakeholders have “expressed concern about this proposed cut to Congress,” and specifically names 3M, Johnson Controls, Philips Lighting, Intel, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Alliance to Save Energy.
“As a founding partner of the program, Johnson Controls supports continued funding of ENERGY STAR," said the firm's global media relations director Fraser Engerman, when reached for comment.
He said the program saved $430 billion USD on utility bills for U.S. consumers since 1992, and avoided 2.7 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas.
"Elimination or reduction in funding for ENERGY STAR will only hurt consumers and increase energy costs," Engerman said.
In a statement, 3M said they were supportive of ENERGY STAR, noting they were among dozens of groups and companies that signed a March 21 letter in support of the program to congressional committee leaders.
Patricia Remick, senior energy communications strategist at Natural Resources Defense Council, said the organization and others, as well as manufacturers and businesses "have been very vocal in their opposition to the proposed cuts."
"We have posted numerous blogs about this and they have been shared with members of Congress," said Remick. She pointed to a letter to congressional representatives signed by over 1,000 organizations and businesses supporting ENERGY STAR.
"In addition, numerous organizations and manufacturers have talked to members of Congress about their concerns. It is no secret that we think this voluntary program, arguably one of America's most effective public-private partnerships, should be fully funded."
United States President Donald Trump on August 22. Congress is currently hammering out a 2018 budget, so the fate of ENERGY STAR and other programs still hangs in the balance. File photo by The Associated Press
Elimination, laceration or privatization?
Ben Evans at the Alliance to Save Energy said his organization didn't know how the U.S. House's proposed cut, or the White House's proposal to scrap the program, would be implemented and how that might affect Canada.
“Obviously, you can safely assume that a 40 per cent cut like that, which is roughly what that is, would have debilitating impacts on the program across the board," said Evans. But, he said, “no one has spelled out exactly how such a cut would be implemented at the sub-program level."
The program is split into three sub-programs, the Canadian government records state. ENERGY STAR for Products, which certifies consumer and commercial products, costs $2.8 million (CDN) to administer in 2017-18, and there were 50 million certified products sold in Canada in 2015-16.
Another sub program is ENERGY STAR for New Homes, which cost $1.3 million in 2017-18, and has achieved 70,000 labelled homes in 2016-17. A third is ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, an “energy benchmarking” tool for commercial and institutional buildings. That cost $2.2 million in 2017-18, and has certified 17,400 Canadian buildings as of March 2017.
Pereira, the communications officer at Natural Resources Canada, said the government launched another program in August, ENERGY STAR for Industry, at the Energy and Mines Ministers’ Conference in New Brunswick. The program is aimed at "helping facilities track, analyze and reduce their energy consumption," said Pereira.
The government remains committed to energy efficient products, equipment, homes, buildings and industrial processes as a way to reduce emissions and meet Canada’s climate change obligations, Pereira added.
Asadollahi, of the Green Budget Coalition and the International Institute for Sustainable Development, said Canada can put ENERGY STAR on "life support," and "work with other countries, who also depend on the program, to further strengthen it.'"
"It will be a win-win by helping Canadian businesses and homes use energy more efficiently and save money while contributing to climate objectives," he said.
The Green Budget Coalition, which represents 19 Canadian environmental and conservation organizations, said in its annual budgetary recommendation released Sept. 20 that Canada itself should manage ENERGY STAR for the next five years, at a “minimum funding” of $25 million per year..
Another possible outcome, however, is that ENERGY STAR is privatized.
The departmental documents refer multiple times to privatization, although it’s addressed indirectly. At one point, they discuss mitigating the risk of program “elimination /privatization.” At another point it refers to U.S. lobbying to understate “the risks that privatization could bring.”
As well, a March 21, 2017 memo obtained by InsideClimate News that was written by David Bloom, acting chief financial officer at the EPA, directs top staff to “begin developing legislative options and associated groundwork for transferring ownership and implementation of Energy Star to a non-governmental entity.”
He signed off by saying, "thank you again in advance for all your efforts as we begin to plan for this new direction."
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September 21st 2017
Carl Meyer
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Gilles | Thu, 09/21/2017 - 09:12
It's another regressive step by this administration but what stands out for me is foreign reliance on an American program. This should be an international initiative not dependent on one country's budgetary whims. The United Nations comes to mind but then the Americans pretty much fund that also. With the EU and Japan as users along with Canada and New Zealand, surely we can find a way to hire the people bound to be fired from cuts and form an international organization co-funded that could then withstand future right wing government cuts in any one jurisdiction. We cannot on the one hand complain about the regressive American administrations and not be willing to take the lead on progressive governance ideas with our own cash. I don't hold back in my criticisms of the States but one has to also know that they fund one helluva lot of things around the world. If they are leaving the international community to their own devices then we owe it to ourselves to pick up the slack.
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United Nations
Trump increasingly isolated as Nicaragua to sign Paris Agreement.
President Daniel Ortega has announced Nicaragua will sign the Paris climate agreement, leaving Donald Trump and Syria's Bashar Assad heads of the only two countries not taking part in the global accord.
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega has announced that his country will sign the Paris Agreement, leaving only two countries out of the global effort to tackle climate change - the United States and Syria.
"When the only country left in the world that hasn't signed the Paris Agreement is Syria, President Trump's decision to withdraw from the accord stands out like a sore thumb," said David Waskow, international climate director at the World Resources Institute (WRI). "The Trump Administration's reputation as a climate loner deepens even farther."
Unlike the US, Nicaragua had refused to sign the agreement on grounds that it didn't go far enough to tackle climate change. The small Central American country wanted to see bigger emissions cuts from the wealthy, industrialized nations responsible for the bulk of the carbon in our atmosphere.
But earlier this week, Ortega told Nicaraguan state media that his country would soon sign the Paris Agreement, in solidarity with vulnerable countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean that had already done so.
"We have to be in solidarity with this large number of countries that are the first victims, who are already the victims, and are the ones who will continue to suffer the impact of these disasters," Ortega said, according to Nicaraguan media.
Could the US renegotiate terms?
During his election campaign, Trump pledged to pull the US out of the international agreement. He formally announced that the country would withdraw in June, citing the "draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country."
During a climate change meeting between environment ministers in Montreal earlier this week, US officials reportedly said the US would consider rejoining the agreement, but the Trump administration denied any shift in stance.
"There has been no change in the United States' position on the Paris agreement," the White House said in a statement. "As the President has made abundantly clear, the United States is withdrawing unless we can re-enter on terms that are more favorable to our country."
Andrew Light, senior fellow at the WRI Global Climate Program, told DW there was some confusion over the US position over the weekend, but the Trump administration had been fairly consistent since July that it would be willing to "re-engage" in the Paris Agreement - meaning to revise its pledge.
The US lowering its commitment to cut carbon emissions might not be popular with other signatories, but Light says legal assessments suggest it would be permitted under the terms of the agreement.
"I don't think that any country would welcome any other party revising downward their target, but given that the targets themselves are not legally binding I don't believe there would be any legal recourse that they could make in response to that," Light told DW.
Trump against the world
Speaking at the Montreal event on the sidelines of the general assembly, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the Paris Agreement's current pledges would not be enough to reach its goal of keeping the global temperature rise well below 2 degrees.
By 2020, he said, "we need to make sure that we have substantially raised the bar of ambition."
World leaders including the UK's Theresa May, Chile's Michelle Bachelet, and South Africa's Jacob Zuma, underlined the importance of climate action and the Paris Agreement in speeches at the UN General Assembly this week.
Light says the US position is of concern to some countries, not only for its impact on emissions but also because of implications for climate security and development aid.
"We're doing so much climate-related development assistance around the world, if the administration were to apply some sort of climate litmus test to that assistance... countries are worried," Light said.
"I think this will impact their relationship with the United States because they do see climate change as a threat, regardless of what the US administration thinks, and they are relying on that assistance."
He added that Nicaragua may have decided to sign up to the agreement to avoid being placed in the same camp as Trump.
"I expect that they were weary of being called out as a hold-out on this along side the Trump administration and they didn't want to stand on that side of the line on the issue," Light said.
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Trump’s HUD keeps climate-smart rebuilding guide under wraps.
Just a few months before a pair of blockbuster hurricanes hit Florida and Texas, the Trump administration received detailed guidelines from consultants for factoring climate change into how federal aid is spent.
Just a few months before a pair of blockbuster hurricanes hit Florida and Texas, the Trump administration received detailed guidelines from consultants for factoring climate change into how federal aid is spent.
Yet the recommendations, developed to help local officials consider climate risk when they use Department of Housing and Urban Development grants, have stayed under wraps even as the government prepares to disburse billions of dollars to storm victims.
The "Community Resilience Toolkit" was commissioned last year by the Obama administration and delivered to HUD leadership in April. Former officials say the Trump administration’s delay in releasing the report may lie with its skepticism of global warming.
HUD is looking for a way "to tone it down," said Harriet Tregoning, who oversaw the project as head of HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development for President Barack Obama. She said she believes current officials "didn’t want to directly contradict some of the other messages coming out of the administration."
Brian Sullivan, a department spokesman, said the toolkit is still "under review" and gave no timeline for releasing it.
The 50-page document is part of an initiative under Obama to spend federal money in a way that reflects the likely effects of climate change. Trump has reversed other elements of that initiative, including a requirement restricting federal infrastructure investments in flood plains.
The stakes for rebuilding decisions are enormous. Congress has already approved $7.4 billion in grants after Harvey; Texas Governor Greg Abbott has said his state alone could require $120 billion in federal aid.
HUD Secretary Ben Carson, when asked during a press conference Wednesday how his department would ensure that local officials account for future risks when spending disaster aid, said that his staff was "taking into consideration, you know, the flood plains."
Carson declined to say how climate change would factor into his department’s policies on rebuilding.
"We’re all concerned about the environment," Carson said. "In terms of long-term assessment of climate change, I think that’s something we should leave to the climatologists."
Last year, the housing department issued a regulation requiring cities that receive Community Development Block Grants to consider climate risks as a condition of those grants. To help officials meet that requirement, the department paid Abt Associates, a consulting firm in Boston, to develop the toolkit.
The Office of Economic Development, the division inside HUD that was chiefly responsible for the toolkit, sent a version to senior HUD officials for their approval in April, according to a person familiar with the process.
Joel Smith, the Abt researcher in charge of the project, declined to comment, beyond confirming that Abt had done the work and that it had been sent to HUD earlier this year. He declined to provide a copy, or to discuss in detail what it contained.
However, a draft obtained by Bloomberg addresses six types of natural hazards: rising temperatures and extreme heat, sea-level rise and coastal storms, inland flooding, wildfires, drought, and erosion and landslides. Those hazards, according to the draft, were included "because they already pose risks to communities and there is strong scientific consensus that these risks will change in the future."
The document explains how local officials can estimate future exposure to those risks, and provides "possible actions your community can undertake to reduce the potential effects from natural hazards and become more resilient," including planning decisions, building codes and zoning laws.
Sea-Level Rise
For places threatened by sea-level rise, for example, the document suggests that officials create an inventory of their most vulnerable buildings and infrastructure; focus new development away from the riskiest areas; acquire and preserve open spaces as buffers against the water; elevate utilities; and invest in both natural and man-made barriers to blunt the force of storm surges.
Kristin Baja, a former climate resilience planner for the city of Baltimore who worked with Abt Associates and HUD staff on the tool, said its value was in challenging local officials to incorporate future risks into their current decisions.
"Priorities have shifted," Baja said. When asked why she thought the document hasn’t been released, she said "It’s become much more of a political game, rather than looking at the realities of the situation we’re in and thinking about what’s best for people."
— With assistance by Joe Light
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