09 March 21
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RSN: William Boardman | Fukushima Meltdowns Turn Ten, Still Getting Worse
William Boardman, Reader Supported News
Boardman writes:
ukushima Daiichi’s multiple nuclear reactor meltdowns started ten years ago. They are not over. They are not even close to over. Nuclear disasters don’t ever end. The radioactive danger slowly decays over decades, during which it needs constant safety management until radiation measurements are below “acceptable levels.” That’s still not safe.
Fukushima continues to be a low-level nuclear disaster, as it has been for ten years. The initial explosive accident has been mitigated, but the danger has never been fully contained. Recent news from Fukushima is hardly reassuring.
On February 13, a major earthquake hit the region. Not as powerful as the 2001 earthquake that led to the Fukushima meltdowns, the 2021 earthquake nevertheless unsettled the unstable nuclear complex. This caused one or more leaks of radioactive water from the damaged reactors, according to public broadcaster NHK. The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) that owns and operates the Fukushima facility promptly denied that there were any new leaks. TEPCO acknowledge radioactive water spilled from the fuel rod storage pools but said that caused no danger to the public. Two days later, TEPCO was reporting: “Currently there are no abnormalities at TEPCO’s nuclear power stations that would have an impact off-site.”
More than a week after the earthquake, TEPCO acknowledged that seismometers at Unit 3 were not working. TEPCO admitted it has been aware of the outage since the previous July.
There is an unknown number of old leaks in the Fukushima containment buildings, dating to the original collapse and since. Clean groundwater infiltrates the reactor buildings, comes into contact with the melted cores, and is contaminated. Some of this contaminated water is collected in tanks above ground at the facility. The rest of the contaminated water filters out of the plant and into the Pacific Ocean. No one has a reliable measurement of the radioactive water draining continuously into the ocean.
Maintaining the coolant water level inside the reactors is critical to prevent further meltdown of the cores at the bottom of the containment structure. TEPCO pumps 3 tons of water per hour into the reactors to cool the fuel debris (a ton of water is about 240 gallons). A week after the earthquake of February 13, TEPCO acknowledged that the water levels in Unit 1 and Unit 3 had dropped by a foot or more and that water levels continue to drop every day. TEPCO does not know why the water level is dropping or where the water is going. TEPCO is responding to the water drop by pumping more water into the reactors to keep the water level up. While this will keep the melted nuclear fuel covered, it will also create more contaminated water for TEPCO to store in surface tanks that are running out of capacity (about 1.37 million tons, or 328 million gallons). Ten days after the earthquake, TEPCO reported that the quake had shifted 53 of them (out of 1,074), but that there were no leaks.
TEPCO did not know whether the water level in Unit 2 was dropping because Unit 2 instruments had been removed.
Another source of contaminated water is the numerous nuclear fuel pools on the site. The stored fuel rods also need to be covered in water to keep from melting down.
On February 28, TEPCO announced it had completed the two-year process of removing 566 fuel assemblies from the fuel pool at the top of the Unit 3 building. The fuel is now stored at ground level in another part of the facility, where it still needs to be cooled to be safe. While this is relatively good news, it is a miniscule part of the decommissioning of the Fukushima plant. Even with Unit 3, the hardest part is ahead: locating and removing the melted nuclear core under water at the bottom of the building.
Media coverage of Fukushima is generally scanty, and much of the mainstream coverage is little more than press-release-based happy talk, like the Washington Post story on March 6 with the headline:
A decade after Fukushima nuclear disaster, contaminated water symbolizes Japan’s struggles
Little about that headline is based in reality. It is not a decade “after” the nuclear disaster, it is a decade after it began. It is a decade into the disaster, with decades to go before it can be even close to over. Arguably, “contaminated water symbolizes Japan’s struggles,” depending on what that might mean. Contaminated water is hardly the biggest part of the Fukushima clean-up or the most dangerous or the most expensive. Contaminated symbolizes the “sorcerer’s apprentice” aspect of Fukushima in the way it self-multiplies without actually accomplishing anything more than making the situation worse. The Post doesn’t explain what its headline is supposed to mean.
The Japanese government and TEPCO have been trying to dump their radioactive water in the Pacific at least since 2019. They claim that the water will be treated, most but not all radionuclides removed, and that dumping it will be perfectly safe. The Post treats this claim as if it were reasonable, but the Post talks to no nuclear scientists (rather relying on non-nuclear environmentalists for “balance”). As far as this “perfectly safe” dumping goes, the Post quotes unnamed experts as saying, “The only thing holding them back appears to be the Olympics and the bad publicity it could generate before the Games begin in July.”
While outlining the government position in sympathetic details, the Post is more dismissive of the opposition, which is led by the regional fishing industry, which is only halfway recovered from 2011. “Also angry is South Korea, even though it is more than 600 miles away across the sea,” snidely reports the Post without mentioning that South Korea has banned Fukushima seafood. The Post also omits Japanese resistance from the Coastal Science and Societies and other environmental organizations, as well as the Catholic bishops of Japan and South Korea.
As for the routine sampling of fish caught off Fukushima, the Post writes rather dismissively: “Tests routinely come back clear, although last month a solitary black rockfish was found to have cesium levels five times the national standard, the first fish to fail the test in 16 months.” Cesium at five times the “safe level?” Not important? Perhaps it’s an anomaly, but the understanding of Fukushima’s radioactive particle is still rudimentary. In 2011 it became well known that Cesium particles spread as far as Tokyo. In 2021, a team of international scientists has announced the discovery of a previously unknown, larger and more radioactive Cesium particle. This Cesium particle was apparently formed in the Fukushima Unit 1 hydrogen explosion and spread to the northwest of the reactor. Ten years later and they’re still discovering what needs to be cleaned up. That’s on land. So how much more is unknown about radioactivity in the ocean?
On March 3, Yonhap News Agency summed up the status of Fukushima radioactive water dumping this way:
A Japanese government official said Wednesday that Tokyo cannot continue to delay the disposal of contaminated water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant due to tank storage limits, though it has yet to decide when and how to release it.
There is no plan in place but the government and TEPCO argue that they have to carry it out because they will run out of storage space for contaminated water by the summer of 2022. At the same time, the radiation level at the perimeter of the Fukushima facility is already eight times the “safe level” set by the government.
TEPCO told press that the predominant reason behind the sharp increase in radiation at the plant was X-rays coming from storage tanks holding radioactive water that has been leaking from the Fukushima facility. The water in the tanks contains traces of radioactive strontium along with other substances that react with the materials the tank is composed of, producing X-rays, said officials.
Apparently they didn’t know how the tanks would interact with radioactive materials before they set about filling more than a thousand of them. Or if they did know, they went ahead anyway. That would be consistent with the government’s allowing TEPCO to build the Fukushima plant in 1967 at sea level rather than on a bluff less vulnerable to tsunamis or groundwater flow. And it would be consistent with the government allowing TEPCO to ignore safeguards in the government’s 2002 long-term earthquake assessment.
Nuclear power has always been a corrupt enterprise, but in Japan now that corruption is coming back to hold its perpetrators accountable. On February 19, the Tokyo High Court ordered the government and TEPCO to pay damages of $2.63 million to 43 people who were forced to evacuate from their homes by the Fukushima disaster. The presiding judge called the government’s regulatory inaction “extremely unreasonable.” There are as many as 30 more such suits pending in Japanese courts.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
A Democratic Socialists of America rally in Nevada. (photo: Steve Eberhardt/The Nation)
Entire Staff of Nevada Democratic Party Quits After Democratic Socialist Slate Won Every Seat
Akela Lacy and Ryan Grim, The Intercept
The battle between insurgent progressives in Nevada and the Harry Reid machine began building in 2016.
ot long after Judith Whitmer won her election on Saturday to become chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, she got an email from the party’s executive director, Alana Mounce. The message from Mounce began with a note of congratulations, before getting to her main point.
She was quitting. So was every other employee. And so were all the consultants. And the staff would be taking severance checks with them, thank you very much.
On March 6, a coalition of progressive candidates backed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America took over the leadership of the Nevada Democratic Party, sweeping all five party leadership positions in a contested election that evening. Whitmer, who had been chair of the Clark County Democratic Party, was elected chair. The establishment had prepared for the loss, having recently moved $450,000 out of the party’s coffers and into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s account. The DSCC will put the money toward the 2022 reelection bid of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a vulnerable first-term Democrat.
While Whitmer’s opponents say she was planning to fire them anyway, Whitmer denies that claim. “I’ve been putting in the work,” Whitmer told The Intercept for the latest episode of Deconstructed. “What they just didn’t expect is that we got better and better at organizing and out-organizing them at every turn.”
The battle between the insurgent progressive wing of the party and what’s known in Nevada as the Reid machine — a tightly run operation still guided by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — began five years ago, when Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders organized support for his 2016 presidential primary run, while Reid was working behind the scenes to help his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Over the next four years, outside organizations like DSA exploded in size and strength. The Sanders campaign focused on organizing tens of thousands of young Latino voters in the state, with the goal of activating people whom the party hadn’t bothered with before. And it worked: In the 2020 cycle, after investing heavily in Nevada, Sanders won a commanding victory in the Nevada caucuses.
When the Sanders campaign ended, the organizers behind it were ready to take their project to the next level. Progressive groups like the Clark County Left Caucus, of which Whitmer was chair, and local DSA chapters had been organizing for Sanders across Nevada since 2016. They used their momentum, and the state-level delegates they picked up during the caucuses, to continue activating progressive pockets in the state with a focus on local office. Progressives led by the Left Caucus won a majority on the state Democratic board this summer, a sign that their momentum was growing even without a candidate at the top of the Democratic ticket to get behind.
“This was certainly kind of immediately made possible by the caucus outcome,” Keenan Korth, a member of the state party’s central committee who is supporting Whitmer, told The Intercept. “But it really started before then, in that the caucus results were in and of themselves the result of a sustained organizing effort, and the slow accumulation of organizing infrastructure here post-2016, in large part through the campaign in 2018 for Amy Vilela.” Vilela ran for Congress in Nevada in 2018 and later became Sanders’s Nevada campaign co-chair.
During the presidential race, the conflict between the Sanders element and the Reid machine had been kept below a boil partly as a result of the personal relationships at play. Sanders’s 2020 brain trust was significantly made up of former aides to Reid who remain on good terms with the former majority leader, including campaign manager Faiz Shakir; deputy Ari Rabin-Havt, who has since returned to Sanders’s Senate office; and national policy director Josh Orton.
But when the Sanders campaign ended, the establishment was ready to maneuver against them.
The Left Caucus and DSA organizers ran a slate of candidates for state party leadership under the name “The NV Dems Progressive Slate.” All but one candidate on the slate was a dues-paying member of a local DSA chapter. The Democratic Party ran candidates on a slate titled “The Progressive Unity Slate,” playing on a theme they’d been pushing the entire cycle: The groups angling for change from the left were trying to divide the party, they said, while they were trying to save it.
Whitmer faced pressure to drop out of the race, and allies of Reid were working their connections to try to keep the party structure intact. A letter circulated accusing Whitmer of blocking the creation of diversity caucuses, though Whitmer told The Intercept it was a disagreement over process. The fight also drew the attention of Cortez Masto, who asked Whitmer to drop out and approached her opponent, Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom, about running. Segerblom had chaired the party in the 1990s and wasn’t considering running for the seat.
Segerblom, who supported Sanders in both 2016 and 2020 and chaired his state campaign, confirmed that Cortez Masto approached him about running. He sees the current fallout as an unfortunate culmination of a back-and-forth that’s been happening since 2016. “There’s been a lot of disagreement within the party since 2016,” Segerblom told The Intercept. “This is just a situation where the Bernie team won, and the old guard so to speak were not gonna stick around.” Cortez Masto’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Despite the pushback, Whitmer ultimately won the election, in which the state party’s governing members voted. In the certified election results, she received 244 to Segerblom’s 214; Jacob Allen won first vice chair by 101 votes; Dr. Zaffar Iqbal, on Whitmer’s progressive slate, was reelected second vice chair by 127 votes; Ahmad Adé won secretary by 39 votes; and Howard Beckerman won treasurer by three votes.
After the results, Mounce sent the email making clear that everyone on the small staff had resigned, including the party operations director, communications director, research director, and finance director.
The mass exodus of party staff, despite the rhetoric around unity, wasn’t a shock, Whitmer told The Intercept. “We weren’t really surprised, in that we were prepared for it,” she said. “But what hit us by surprise and was sort of shocking is that for a slate that claimed that they were all about unity, and kept this false narrative of division going on throughout the entire campaign — in fact they kept intensifying that — that’s what was surprising about it, was the willingness to just walk away, instead of working with us.”
Mounce, the Nevada Democrats director who notified Whitmer of the staff resignations, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Korth told The Intercept Mounce is now providing access to logins and other information to Whitmer and her team. But the ruthlessness on display in her email to Whitmer is part of what has made the Reid machine so effective against Republicans in the state, but it’s unclear how it’ll work against the party’s progressive wing. The Democratic National Committee hired Mounce as their new political director last month.
Whitmer’s predecessor, former Clark County Democratic Chair Donna West, said Whitmer did not try to bridge gaps within the party. She “does not listen to others’ opinions and really take those on board,” West said. “I found that working with her could be really difficult, that she doesn’t really collaborate well, and doesn’t work to build consensus.” West resigned last summer.
A former Nevada Democratic Party staffer, who requested anonymity to speak freely, told The Intercept they quit out of a belief that Whitmer hadn’t built relationships across the party as Clark County chair and was at times unfairly critical of the state Democratic Party. “I knew I couldn’t work with her and watch her destroy the years of hard work so many operatives put into making our state party the best state party in the country.”
In a twist of history, Reid himself actually produced the conditions that led to his own lieutenants getting tossed from office. It was Reid who successfully maneuvered in 2008 to make Nevada the first presidential caucus in the West. His reasoning was simple: He wanted presidential candidates to have to take a position on whether nuclear waste should be stored at Yucca Mountain. More precisely, he wanted that position to be no. In exchange for Barack Obama’s promise to scuttle the Yucca Mountain project, Reid endorsed him, after encouraging him to run. It worked: Obama appointed a former aide of Reid’s to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with instructions to halt the project.
Reid also wanted the caucus to help build the party’s infrastructure, and that worked too. After years of Republican control, Democrats now hold the governor’s mansion, the state Senate, and the state House, as well as both U.S. Senate seats. Without those two senators, there’d be no Democratic majority in the Senate today. But the caucuses also created an opening for Sanders, and his supporters have run through it to swamp the party. Instead of finding a way to work with the newcomers, the Reid machine is setting up an independent shop. Reid declined to comment.
Jessica Watkins, second from left, and Donovan Ray Crowl, center, both from Ohio, march down the East Front steps of the U.S. Capitol with the Oath Keepers on Jan. 6. (photo: Jim Bourg/Reuters)
Oath Keepers Founder Stewart Rhodes Was in Direct Contact With Rioters Before and During Capitol Breach, US Alleges
Spencer S. Hsu, The Washington Post
Hsu writes:
.S. prosecutors alleged Monday that Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was in direct contact before, during and immediately after the Jan. 6 Capitol breach with members since charged with plotting to prevent Congress from confirming the results of the 2020 presidential election.
In a late-night court filing, prosecutors alleged that Rhodes directed the right-wing, anti-government group to rally during the riot to the southeast steps of the Capitol, after which several members forcibly entered the east side of the building.
Prosecutors said they had recovered a chat called “DC OP: Jan 6 21” on the encrypted Signal messaging app that “shows that individuals, including those alleged to have conspired with [others], were actively planning to use force and violence.”
Prosecutors said chat participants included Rhodes — identified only as “Person One” in the filing but whom prosecutors named in earlier court papers — and two charged Oath Keepers members: Jessica Watkins, 38, an Ohio leader; and Kelly Meggs, 52, of Florida.
U.S. authorities have charged Watkins, Meggs and seven other people who appear to be members or associates of the Oath Keepers, alleging a wider conspiracy to obstruct Congress amid rioting that led to five deaths and assaults on about 140 police officers. Charges have been brought against more than 300 defendants, but prosecutors led by the U.S. attorney’s office for Washington have not publicly charged anyone other than alleged rioters.
In the court filing, prosecutors said Rhodes, Watkins, Meggs and “regional Oath Keeper leaders from multiple states across the country” discussed plans in the chat for members and affiliates to come to Washington for events on Jan. 5 and 6 to “provide security to speakers and VIPs.”
Prosecutors said they found “no discussion of forcibly entering the Capitol until January 6.”
But they said the chat messages, combined with Rhodes’s previous statements, “all show that the co-conspirators joined together to stop Congress’s certification of the Electoral College vote, and they were prepared to use violence, if necessary, to effect this purpose. . . . They were plotting to use violence to support the unlawful obstruction of a Congressional proceeding.”
Rhodes — who has not been charged and whom prosecutors did not name as a conspirator — could not immediately be reached for comment late Monday. In previous interviews, he has said that he gave no direction or signals to members to storm the Capitol.
In Monday’s court filing, prosecutors quoted Rhodes messaging the group in advance about preparations for “worst-case scenarios,” writing, “We will have several well equipped QRFs [quick reaction forces] outside DC.”
Rhodes also recommended helmets, hard gloves, eye protection and weapons, according to prosecutors, writing: “Collapsible Batons are a grey area in the law. I bring one. But I’m willing to take that risk because I love em.”
During the Jan. 6 event, the chat showed that the group “was activating a plan to use force,” prosecutors said.
As President Donald Trump was finishing his speech near the White House, Rhodes, according to prosecutors, wrote to the group at 1:38 p.m.: “All I see Trump doing is complaining. I see no intent by him to do anything. So the patriots are taking it into their own hands. They’ve had enough.”
At 2:14 p.m., an unnamed person who prosecutors said was leading the coordination of the security details run by the Oath Keepers stated, “The have taken ground at the capital[.] We need to regroup any members who are not on mission.”
Rhodes reposted that message, prosecutors said, with instructions to gather on the southeast side of the Capitol, followed at 2:41 p.m. by a photograph captioned: “South side of US Capitol. Patriots pounding on doors.”
Two minutes later, Meggs and Watkins led a line of Oath Keepers who “forcibly entered the Capitol through the Rotunda door in the center of the east side of the building,” prosecutors alleged.
“We are surging forward. Doors breached,” Thomas Edward Caldwell, who also has been charged, wrote to his Facebook contacts at 2:48 p.m. from the other side of the Capitol, the government said.
Meggs has denied that anyone in particular made the decision or gave the command to enter, prosecutors said, and another charged defendant denied knowing that Rhodes was on Capitol grounds.
Nevertheless, prosecutors wrote, about 4 p.m., Meggs and three other charged defendants who had exited the building gathered around Rhodes, where they were photographed and recorded.
Prosecutors submitted the filing to argue for the continued detention of Caldwell, 66, of Berryville, Va. Prosecutors said Caldwell, a career Navy intelligence officer, was not on the chat but responded after Rhodes called on members to “get to DC to stand tall in support of President Trump,” against what Rhodes called an attempted coup.
Caldwell attorney David Fischer did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Monday. Prosecutors said they planned to disclose the communications to Fischer this week, before a detention hearing on Friday.
Fischer has asked a court to release Caldwell pending trial, arguing that prosecutors have provided incomplete and inaccurate information and that the Capitol breach was not a “preplanned, premeditated scheme” to obstruct Congress but an “unplanned, spontaneous event fueled by a variety of factors on the ground.”
Prosecutors in Monday’s filing included what they said was a lengthy Signal message sent by Caldwell to “select friends” on Jan. 8 in which he allegedly said, “I have been on the Oathkeepers intel net for months now,” and explained that rallygoers were peaceful until provoked by police. “We tore our way through and had to climb through the maze of scaffolding,” Caldwell allegedly wrote, before adding, “I went over to the steps which people were using to get inside but it was so packed I couldn’t get on the steps.” The note concluded: “I am glad I was there and that I did what I did. I did not hurt anyone, I did not break anything and I did not know anyone who did or see anyone who did. did see cops hurting unarmed peaceful protestors just like the brown shirts and the gestapo used to do. It was a hell of a day in d.c. God help us all as they tear down our country.”
In interviews, Rhodes has said that he did not know Caldwell to be taking any action Jan. 6 on behalf of the Oath Keepers, and denied that Caldwell was a dues-paying member.
Rhodes said in January that Caldwell “helped” host Oath Keepers members before a November pro-Trump rally in Washington because “he’s a local,” but is “not a leader of any kind.”
Separately Monday, prosecutors arrested Roberto Minuta, 36, who prosecutors alleged was an Oath Keepers associate who illegally entered the Capitol after appearing to provide security for Republican strategist Roger Stone outside a Washington hotel on the morning of Jan. 6.
President Joe Biden. (photo: Tom Brenner/Reuters)
Biden Directs Dismantling of Trump-Era Title IX Rule on Campus Sexual Assault
Laura Meckler, The Washington Post
Meckler writes: "President Biden on Monday directed the Education Department to review a controversial regulation governing how colleges and universities handle allegations of sexual assault, with an eye toward unraveling a new system put into place by former education secretary Betsy DeVos."
READ MORE
A COVID-19 vaccine. (photo: AP)
CDC Says It's Safe for Vaccinated People to Do These Activities
Allison Aubrey and Rachel Treisman, NPR
Excerpt: "The new guidance says, people who are fully vaccinated can visit indoors with other fully vaccinated people without wearing masks or social distancing."
READ MORE
Displaced indigenous children in Colombia. (photo: Federico Rios/Christian Aid)
Colombia: Violence Displaces Over 280 Indigenous People
teleSUR
Illegal groups threaten the life of at least 4,000 members of Indigenous communities.
he Ombudsman's Office reported the forced displacement of over 280 Indigenous people who are victims of the increasing violence in the Choco department in Colombia.
The murder of an Indigenous guard on Feb. 17 by an illegal armed group triggered the displacement of 73 families to the urban area in the Pueblo Rico municipality.
These latest displacements are not the only ones that have affected the region. At least 178 indigenous people from Murindo, in the Antioquia department, abandoned their territory.
The Ombudsman's Office also indicated that massive COVID-19 tests will be carried out to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus while warning about the risk of overcrowding as displaced Indigenous communities continue to arrive.
Antioquia's Governor Luis Suarez noted that illegal armed groups threaten the lives of at least 4,000 Indigenous citizens due to their fight to control the Uraba corridor, a strategic route for drug trafficking and illegal gold mining activities.
Last week, Catholic Church representatives called on Colombia's President Ivan Duque to address the areas affected by violence in the Pacific region, urging for a humanitarian agreement to mitigate the pressing situation.
A recent report registered 29 events connected to forced displacement in the country where over 3,000 families were affected, and 10,850 people massively abandoned their homes.
Pollution from a factory. (photo: Science Focus)
US Urged to Cut 50% of Emissions by 2030 to Spur Other Countries to Action
Oliver Milman, Guardian UK
Milman writes:
he US needs to commit to slashing its planet-heating emissions by at least half by the end of the decade to address the climate crisis and spur other countries to greater action, a coalition of American environmental groups has urged.
Joe Biden’s administration is set to unveil a new national emissions reduction target at a climate meeting it has convened with other major economic powers on Earth Day, 22 April, which it hopes will galvanize countries that are currently dangerously lagging in efforts to stave off disastrous climate change.
A motley selection of environmental groups and leaders have said the US goal must be no lower than a 50% cut in its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, based on 2005 levels. This will, the groups argue, put America on track to meet Biden’s aspiration of net zero emissions by 2050, as well as provide a major push to countries and businesses that were bereft of American climate leadership during Donald Trump’s presidency.
“The target has to be ambitious enough to show US leadership, but also credible, it can’t just be plucked from thin air,” said Nat Keohane, vice-president for international climate at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). “This is ambitious but also feasible. We need to show the US is bringing everything it can to this fight.”
A new EDF report calls for a “whole of government effort” to combat the climate crisis, with all cars sold in the US to be zero emissions from 2035, a clean electricity standard to shift the grid to renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, and new regulations to restrict methane emissions from oil and gas drilling.
Other environmental groups, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, World Resources Institute and National Resources Defense Council, have also rallied to the idea of a 50% cut, along with figures such as Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington, and Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City, as crucial to curb ever-worsening wildfires, floods and heatwaves that are suffered disproportionately by underserved Americans of color.
“We see this important opportunity to bolster equity and fairness,” said Starla Yeh, a clean energy policy specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The goal is not only achievable but cost effective. The more progress we make this decade, the better off we will be.”
The US first set an emissions reduction target, known in diplomatic jargon as a nationally determined contribution (or NDC), in 2014 during Barack Obama’s administration, vowing to cut emissions by up to 28% by 2025, on 2005 levels. The target by itself does not lower emissions but helps set federal government policy and provides a framework for businesses, cities and states to work towards.
A 50% reduction by 2030 would “be a challenge”, according to Nathan Hultman, who helped design the Obama-era goal, but would be achievable with a “whole of society approach”.
The international credibility of the world’s second largest carbon polluter was severely damaged during the Trump administration, when the US pulled out of the Paris climate agreement and dismantled various rules aimed to reduce emissions. The US’s return to the international fold has come with added expectations, with Laurence Tubiana, a French diplomat and key architect of the Paris agreement, saying the American target should be “at least” a 50% reduction.
“There are broad expectations from America’s allies that the NDC needs to start with a ‘5’,” said Keohane. “There is a level of urgency you hear from folks in the White House that is a sea change from even the Obama administration. I think they are serious in putting out an ambitious marker.”
John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, is currently on a trip to Europe to meet leaders in the lead-up to crucial UN climate talks in Glasgow later this year. Kerry met with the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, on Monday and will this week hold talks with officials from the European commission and the French government.
Kerry said the UK was a “strong partner” in facing the climate crisis but that the world’s largest emitters needed to do far more. Before his trip, Kerry had said the world was “marching forward to what is almost tantamount to a mutual suicide pact” by failing to cut emissions quickly enough. China, the world’s largest emitter, recently released a five-year plan that severely disappointed environmentalists.
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