U.S. feels the heat as Donald Trump pulls out of global climate pact
President Donald Trump is aiming to make the annual U.N.-sponsored climate talks underway in Madrid the last ones for full participation by the United States, which is the world’s No. 1 economy and the second-biggest carbon emitter. Trump dismisses climate change and he thumbed his nose at previous climate talks by twice sending White House delegations to promote climate-degrading coal. He is due to complete the U.S. withdrawal from the landmark Paris global climate accord on Nov. 4, 2020, the day after next year’s U.S. presidential election. If Trump loses that election, the next president could put the brakes on the withdrawal. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat-California, and other political and business leaders, scientists and activists are traveling to Spain this week and next to drive home a counter message: U.S. cities, states and businesses representing a sizable chunk of the U.S. population and economy are committed to a global effort to slash emissions. “We’re still in it,” Pelosi told reporters at the talks, where she appeared with 14 other congressional Democrats on Monday to call climate change a growing threat to public health, economy and national security in the U.S.. Her comments were echoed by Mandela Barnes, Wisconsin’s lieutenant governor. “Regardless of whether or not we have the support of the nation’s highest office or not, this work is going to get done,” Barnes said. This year’s conference is expected to focus on fine-tuning the rules for reducing fossil fuel emissions by the roughly 200 signatories of the Paris agreement. It comes ahead of a big push at next year’s climate summit for more ambitious emissions-cutting targets. Experts say the United States’ repeated about-faces on the threat of climate change likely have done lasting damage. Even before Trump repudiated the deal backed by President Barack Obama, George W. Bush’s administration renounced the landmark Kyoto emissions protocol, negotiated in the late 1990s during Bill Clinton’s presidency, said Nigel Purvis, a State Department climate negotiator under Clinton and Bush. “The international community has concluded the United States is an unreliable partner,” Purvis said. Although the United States served formal notice last month that it intends to become the first country to withdraw from the Paris accord, it technically remains a participant until next Nov. 4. Marcia Bernicat, a senior State Department official, is leading the official U.S. delegation. The administration is taking part to ensure a level playing field that protects U.S. interests,” the State Department said in a statement. Advocates of the Paris accord say the U.S. withdrawal will leave American businesses to compete internationally under carbon-cutting rules set by other countries. Behind the scenes, U.S. diplomats have played a helpful role despite the planned U.S. withdrawal, pushing for transparency and solid rules as countries commit to specific targets for cutting emissions, delegates from other nations say privately. Publicly, Trump has catered to his base at the yearly talks. That includes dispatching a team to the 2017 and 2018 climate meetings to stage side events promoting coal-fired power production, one of the main sources of climate-wrecking emissions. His administration stood by fossil fuels “unapologetically,” White House energy envoy Wells Griffith said at the U.S. pro-fossil fuel event at last year’s talks in Poland. That drew chants from the audience of “Shame on you!” Griffith, who helped broker a coal deal in Ukraine, apparently refused a request by House impeachment investigators to discuss administration actions there. A woman who answered the phone at Griffith”s office Tuesday said no one there would say whether he planned to appear this year’s climate negotiations. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last month repeated Trump’s argument that the Paris accord was an economic burden for the United States. Pompeo said technological innovation and the free market have made for continued U.S. declines in climate-changing emissions. It’s true U.S. carbon emissions are still falling under Trump, according to a study by Global Carbon Project, a group of international scientists who track emissions. The United States saw emissions drop 1.7 percent from 2018 to 2019, the same decline as in the European Union, even as China led in a 0.6 percent rise in emissions globally over the last year, the study said. U.S. experts say the drop in U.S. fossil fuel emissions is due in part to the decline of coal-fired power plants, losers in marketplace competition against cheaper natural gas and renewable sources despite Trump’s 2016 campaign pledges to save coal. The 2018 midterm elections, which gave Democrats control of the House, showed that embracing top-down government action to cut fossil fuel emissions can be part of a winning platform, at least in some parts of the country. In August 2017, 46 percent of Americans opposed U.S. withdrawal from the international agreement, while 29 percent supported it, according to a poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. This August, another AP-NORC poll found nearly two-thirds of Americans said the federal government should bear a lot of responsibility for combating climate change. “We hope … this is only a temporary farewell” for the U.S., German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said last month at a diplomatic conference. Regardless, he said, other governments can’t count on Americans sorting out a lasting climate policy anytime soon. Ultimately, said Carla Frisch, a former energy policy expert at the Department of Energy under three U.S. administrations, U.S. climate action demands U.S. climate regulation, making cutting emissions the law and policy of the land. “We have to be all in,” Frisch said. “We also need the federal government, to get where we need to go.”” By Ellen Knickmeyer Associated Press Associated Press writers Frank Jordans in Berlin, and Seth Borenstein and Hannah Fingerhut in Washington contributed to this report. Republished with the Permission of the Associated Press.
William Perry Pendley picked to oversee public lands
An ardent critic of the federal government who has argued for selling off almost all public lands has been named the Trump administration’s top steward over nearly a quarter-million federally controlled acres, raising new questions about the administration’s intentions for vast Western ranges and other lands roamed by hunters, hikers and wildlife. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt on Monday signed an order making Wyoming native William Perry Pendley acting head of the Bureau of Land Management. The bureau’s holdings are sweeping, with nearly one out of every 10 acres nationally, and 30% of minerals, under its dominion, mostly across the U.S. West. Pendley, a former midlevel Interior appointee in the Reagan administration, for decades has championed ranchers and others in standoffs with the federal government over grazing and other uses of public lands. He has written books accusing federal authorities and environmental advocates of “tyranny” and “waging war on the West.” He argued in a 2016 National Review article that the “Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold.” In tweets this summer, Pendley welcomed Trump administration moves to open more federal land to mining and oil and gas development and other private business use, and he has called the oil and gas extraction technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, “an energy, economic, AND environmental miracle!” Conservation groups called the Pendley appointment an alarming choice, while Western ranchers called it a welcome move that shows the Trump administration is serious about opening public lands to all uses, including mining and ranching. The Trump administration already has moved to weaken some protections for public lands. It downsized two national monuments in Utah to scale back protections on sacred tribal lands and signed a land exchange deal to build a road through a national wildlife refuge home to migrating waterfowl near the tip of the Alaska Peninsula. And in what it called a money saving move, the administration moved BLM headquarters from Washington to Colorado and dispersed staff among Western states. Environmentalists feared that this was a first step in dismantling the agency. After appointing Pendley as the bureau’s policy chief in mid-July, the Interior Department confirmed late Monday it had newly elevated him to acting director. Pendley’s “ascending to the top of BLM just as it is being reorganized strongly suggests the administration is positioning itself to liquidate our shared public lands,” said Phil Hanceford, conservation director for the Wilderness Society. Western Values Project executive director Chris Saeger said in a statement that the appointment could lead public lands to being handed over to the Trump administration’s “special interest allies.” Interior spokeswoman Molly Block disputed that, saying in an email, “This administration has been clear that we are not interested in transferring public lands.” Block said agency management plans are developed to allow for a range of uses including energy development, cattle grazing, recreation and timber harvest while protecting scientific, historical, ecological, environmental, air and atmospheric, water resource, and archaeological values. An analysis of six new BLM proposed management plans by the Pew Charitable Trust, which calls itself a nonpartisan research center, for parts of six Western states found they significantly reduce protections that have been in place for decades and open up new land for mining and oil and gas. They include Alaskan lands known as nesting habitat for peregrine falcons and Montana rivers homes to the westslope cutthroat trout. The plans would peel back the label of “critical environmental concern” for nearly all of the 3,125 square miles (8,100 square kilometers) of lands that currently hold that distinction, said Ken Rait, the project director for U.S. public lands and rivers conservation at Pew Charitable Trusts. He called it “a total reversal for how the agency has operated in the past.” In a letter to the agency, Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources said the management plan for public lands in the southwest corner of the state don’t do enough to protect the Gunnison sage grouse , which is a threatened species, or migrating wildlife. But Utah cattle rancher and county commissioner Leland Pollock said the Pendley appointment is the latest indication that the Trump administration is returning BLM to its original mission of ensuring that public lands are open to multiple uses. That includes mining, ranching, cattle grazing, ATV riding, hunting mountain biking and hiking, he said. He said the administration has made clear to him and others who had pushed for state control of federal lands that it has no intention of going that route. The 55-year-old is a commissioner in Garfield County in southern Utah, which has 93% federally owned lands. “He’s going to manage this thing just simply the way it was supposed to be managed,” Pollock said about Pendley. Utah was among several Western states that explored suing to compel the federal government to hand over control of federal lands, arguing the state would manage them better. The state hired an outside consulting firm in 2014 to prepare a lawsuit, but it has never been filed. Idaho rancher and county commissioner Kirk Chandler still thinks states should manage the lands but knows that’s unlikely to ever happen. In the meantime, he’s just happy the Trump administration is choosing leaders who will listen to his concerns. He wants to see more logging and forest thinning to prevent fires. “I think it will be a good thing, a real good thing,” said Chandler about Pendley. By Ellen Knickmeyer and Brady McCombs Associated Press. McCombs reported from Salt Lake City. Associated Press writer Dan Elliott contributed to this report from Denver. Republished with permission of the Associated Press.
