Same Message, Bigger Audience: Sen. Whitehouse Flags Climate Costs
For more than a decade, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse gave daily warnings about the mounting threat of climate change. Now he has a powerful new perch.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island chaired his first meeting of the Senate Budget Committee on Feb. 15, hoping to inject climate change into the heart of the partisan fight over federal spending. Credit…Sophie Park for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, has given 287 speeches on the Senate floor raising alarms about climate change, often delivered mainly to the C-SPAN cameras in a nearly empty chamber.
But now Mr. Whitehouse has a much bigger megaphone for his zeal for saving the planet, and one with real power: earlier this year, Mr. Whitehouse became chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, which shapes federal spending and revenue. He is using his new authority to argue that a warming planet poses fiscal dangers, injecting climate change into the partisan fight over federal spending, just as economists warned that the nation is nearing a catastrophic default on its debt.
At his first committee hearing as chairman on Feb. 15, he focused on the risks of climate change to the federal budget and the global economy. He gave each of his colleagues a 615-page binder detailing the fiscal threats posed by droughts, storms, wildfires and rising seas.
At its second hearing on March 1, the Budget committee targeted rising sea levels and the climate risk to coastal communities. And on Wednesday, the committee will hear about the economic devastation brought by wildfires.
“I can make the case for the danger of unchecked climate change blowing the debt through the roof, in the same way that both the mortgage meltdown and the pandemic together added $10 trillion to the deficit,” he said in an interview.
“We have all these warnings,” Mr. Whitehouse said at the Feb. 15 hearing. “Warnings of crashes in coastal property values as rising seas and more powerful storms hit the 30-year mortgage horizon. Warnings of insurance collapse from more frequent, intense and unpredictable wildfires. A dangerous interplay between the insurance and mortgage markets hitting real estate markets across the country. Inflation from decreased agricultural yields. Massive infrastructure demand. Trouble in municipal bond markets.” 03-07-23
Read more
An Alabama clean water fund discriminated against Black communities, complaint alleges

USDA
The state is accused of making access to federal dollars so hard that the people who needed it most got nothing.
A civil rights complaint filed with the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday accuses the state of Alabama of mismanaging funds that should have gone to fix long-standing sewage issues for predominantly Black communities in both urban and rural pockets of the state.
The Center of Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Southern Poverty Law Center, accuse the Alabama government of withholding federal funds distributed though a state program intended to address clean water issues for Black residents.
The complaint alleges the Alabama Department of Environmental Management purposefully set up rules that stopped any applicant trying to get funds from Alabama’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund. Historically, Black Alabamans have comprised the majority of people who are forced to live with raw sewage and without proper plumbing. 03-07-23
Read more
Nations agree on ‘world-changing’ deal to protect ocean life

More than 190 countries agreed on a long-awaited pact to help safeguard the high seas and reverse biodiversity loss, at a United Nations conference on Mar. 4 (Reuters)
More than 190 countries have reached a landmark deal for protecting the biodiversity of the world’s oceans, agreeing for the first time on a common framework for establishing new protected areas in international waters.
The treaty, whose text was finalized Saturday night by diplomats at the U.N. headquarters after years of stalled talks, will help safeguard the high seas, which lie beyond national boundaries and make up two-thirds of Earth’s ocean surface. Member states have been trying to agree on the long-awaited treaty for almost 20 years.
Environmental advocacy groups heralded the finalized text — which still needs to be ratified by the United Nations — as a new chapter for Earth’s high seas. Just 1.2 percent of them are currently environmentally protected, exposing the vast array of marine species that teem beneath the surface — from tiny plankton to giant whales — to threats such as pollution, overfishing, shipping and deep-sea mining.
“Two-thirds of the ocean has just been exposed to the will and want of all,” said Rebecca Hubbard, the director of the High Seas Alliance consortium of nongovernmental organizations that participated in the negotiations, in a telephone interview Sunday. “We have never been able to protect and manage marine life in the ocean beyond countries’ jurisdictions,” she said. “This is absolutely world-changing.” 03-05-23
Read more
10 of the best climate change documentaries to see in 2023
These films screened at the recent Wild & Scenic Film Festival.
What happens when you watch 20 or so documentaries that grapple with climate change and its many impacts — all in a row? I set out to find out at the 21st annual Wild and Scenic Film Festival, held in February in Nevada County, California.
I braced myself for a heavy affair. After all, the climate crisis is exactly that: a crisis. Doom and gloom can be hard to avoid. But as a fest vet, I also knew I could count on the morale boost that comes with seeing great people, doing great things, everywhere, every day.
This year was especially galvanizing as the festival came to life in person again for the first time since COVID, with filmmakers, activists, and people who just like nature converging to watch a bunch of films about the environment and climate change.
“CommUnity” was the festival theme this year, a concept that came roaring to life throughout the nine film venues scattered across downtown Nevada City and Grass Valley, sister towns in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The film selections included a wide range of films focused on people with different backgrounds, and ASL interpreters stood alongside presenters on stage at several screenings.
The sense that we’re in this together reached far beyond the theater walls, infusing activist workshops, environmental vendor booths, and even shops and restaurants where people seemed ready, eager even, to talk about the films they’d seen. 03-02-23
Read more
Justice Department sues major polluter in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’
“EPA is finally treating this health crisis for what it is — an emergency.”

The Fifth Ward Elementary School and residential neighborhoods sit near the Denka Performance Elastomer Plant, back, in Reserve, La. AP Photo / Gerald Herbert
The Biden administration sued a chemical company operating in southeast Louisiana on Tuesday, compelling it to face up to the cancer risk generated by its toxic emissions, a move that activists have been demanding for years. Denka Performance Elastomer, a synthetic rubber manufacturing plant owned by a Japanese company of the same name, is located half a mile from an elementary school in St. John the Baptist Parish, where the air is laced with toxic chemicals emitted by dozens of different industrial facilities and more than 60 percent of residents are Black. The parish sits along the Mississippi River just north of New Orleans in the state’s main industrial corridor, a region commonly known as “Cancer Alley.”
“This brings us hope,” said Mary Hampton, president of the local advocacy group Concerned Citizens of St. John, which was founded in 2016. “It’s been a long time coming. We need action now for our children and want this to be put in place immediately.”
Denka’s facility is the only one in the country that makes neoprene, a type of synthetic rubber used for wetsuits and mousepads, a process which releases the carcinogen chloroprene. The material was invented by scientists at Dupont, the American chemical giant that owns the complex where Denka operates, and that sold it the neoprene plant in 2015. In its complaint filed on Tuesday, the Justice Department also named Dupont as a party responsible for ensuring that the plant reduces its emissions of chloroprene, which has been linked to numerous cancers and diseases of the nervous, immune, and respiratory systems. 03-01-23
Read more
In a growing petrochemical hub, the East Palestine derailment triggers ‘an uneasy feeling’
The Upper Ohio River Valley has been layered in industrial pollution for centuries, and residents are fed up.

A plume of smoke hovers over a line of trucks near the East Palestine train derailment. Jason Blinkiewicz
Chris Laderer was 34 days into his tenure as chief of the volunteer fire department in Darlington, Pennsylvania, when the station received a call that a train had caught fire in the neighboring town of East Palestine, just over the state border in Ohio. Laderer assumed that an engine had overheated, but as the crew pulled out of the station he saw signs of something far more disastrous.
“We could see the glow and plume of smoke from our station, and we’re 4 miles from the scene,” he recalled. “We realized we’re getting something much bigger than what we anticipated.”
When Laderer’s team arrived, alongside the fire departments from roughly 80 other towns across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, they found 38 cars of a 150-car train splayed along the tracks, with some emitting flames that smelled, as Laderer described it, of burning plastic. They would learn in the days that followed that 11 cars contained hazardous chemicals, including the highly toxic compounds vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate, which are used in the manufacturing of common plastics.
By Monday, three days after the February 3 derailment, the Norfolk Southern railroad company had sent in their own officials and contractors to perform a controlled burn-off of the vinyl chloride. The tactic was meant to prevent, as much as possible, more than 100,000 gallons of vinyl chloride from evaporating into the air and seeping into the soil and creek beds surrounding the train, although an as-yet-unknown quantity of it already had. (“Either we were going to blow it up, or it blows up itself,” Trent Conaway, the mayor of East Palestine, explained at a town hall the next week by way of illustrating a frustrating lack of options.)
But the burn didn’t go quite as planned. A towering, bulbous cloud of black smoke erupted from the train in the explosion and then spread over the surrounding area like a pool of oil, where it hung in the low atmosphere for hours and hours. Experts have attributed the smoke’s stubborn refusal to dissipate to a weather phenomenon called an inversion, where warm air that rises into the atmosphere after a sunny day traps the cold air coming off the ground as night falls. “The smoke that was supposed to stay up started banking down a bit on the area,” Laderer explained. 03-01-23
Georgians plead with state officials to protect the Okefenokee from mining
Even if the Supreme Court rules to protect certain wetlands, the fate of certain watersheds will be up to the states.
“Please don’t let them mine what God has put for us here to enjoy, and generations beyond us,” said Sheila Carter, a former Okefenokee guide, to representatives from the Environmental Protection Division of Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources during a Thursday Zoom hearing. She was one of more than 70 people ranging from state representatives to high school students, who spoke out against the mine, which scientists warn could change the water level in the Okefenokee watershed.
The hours-long meetings were part of the 60-day public comment period on the Mining Land Use Plan drafted by the Twin Pines Minerals company. The vast majority of participants spoke in defense of the swamp, citing reasons such as the Okefenokee’s importance as a habitat and a carbon sink. Many shared impassioned messages about their own experiences there, such as being inspired as children by the refuge’s beauty.
Atlanta high school junior Zain Khemani recently visited the Okefenokee for the first time on a school field trip. He told the meeting he learned more there about wildlife and biology than he has in a classroom.
“I’ve never been in a wilderness like that before,” Khemani said. “As someone who’s lived my entire life in the city, it was genuinely magical to learn from the wilderness.”
The proceedings are more than just a place for people to vent their feelings. While the wildlife refuge is technically protected by the federal government, a short-lived Trump-era rule has left the decision surrounding the current mining proposal up to the state. In national news, the Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on a case that could settle decades of legal ambiguity about which wetlands should receive federal protection under the Clean Water Act. But legal experts say that any protections from the court’s decision might not apply to projects like the Twin Pine mine, which has already passed certain milestones in the permitting process. 02-28-23
Read more
Once Scorned, Birds Are Returning to Farms

A bird box at Ridge Vineyards. (Photo credit: Jerry James)
The Wild Farm Alliance is working with farmers across California and beyond to help farmers take advantage of birds as natural pest control.
For more than two decades, Wild Farm Alliance (WFA) has provided just that—an alliance—between farmers and wildlife advocates. Based in California, the group is focused on finding common ground between two groups that have often been at odds in an effort to address the biodiversity crisis while helping farms benefit from adding more wildlife to their operations.
Executive director Jo Ann Baumgartner has been with WFA since 2001, and she’s a passionate advocate for what she and WFA call “bringing nature back to the farm.” Baumgartner spoke with us about the one of the group’s core efforts in recent years: building awareness about the value of birds on farms.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why focus on birds?
We have a goal of [adding] a million nest boxes and perches on 10 percent of farmland in the U.S. Our audience is mainly growers, and so we want to show them where they can see the benefits, but we also want to educate them about the need for nature to be supported. There are so many species in decline and so many ways that farmers can help, because agriculture comprises almost 60 percent of the landscape [in the U.S.] when you count all the grazing lands, and it’s a huge footprint. With farmers’ help, we can do a lot to reduce the biodiversity crisis, and they can benefit from it. 02-27-23
Read more

Africatown’s Old Plateau Cemetery in Mobile, Alabama. Google Maps
Africatown, the only U.S. community established by West Africans who survived the Middle Passage, demonstrates the long roots of environmental injustice.
Four years ago, an announcement from the Alabama Gulf Coast shocked the world: The wreckage of the Clotilda, the last slave ship ever brought to the U.S., had been identified in the muddy depths of the Mobile Delta. The slavers had burned the ship after its 1860 voyage to erase evidence of their crimes, but those they took captive kept their memories alive in Africatown, a neighborhood at the edge of Mobile that they established after their emancipation. Those survivors included Cudjo Lewis, who lived to be nearly 100 — long enough to share his experiences with Zora Neale Hurston, who interviewed him for what became her book Barracoon.
Africatown is the only American community established by West Africans who survived the brutality of the Middle Passage, a distinction recognized by its inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places. Descendants of the voyage still live in the neighborhood today, though its population is a fraction of what it once was.
Throughout its history, Mobile’s white power brokers have treated Africatown as an industrial dumping ground. For years it was hedged in by two paper factories that released vast amounts of pollution into the air and waterways. It’s now surrounded by other industrial businesses, including a chemical refinery and an asphalt plant. Many residents believe there is a cancer epidemic. With help from activists, some are trying to transform the neighborhood into a destination for heritage tourism, which they see as the only hope for preserving it. Despite the national attention Africatown has received since the Clotilda’s discovery — which culminated in the release of the recent Netflix documentary Descendant — the community’s very existence remains in peril. 02-24-23
Read more
As Louisiana’s coast disappears, its historic communities are disappearing too
New levees are too late to stop the exodus for bayou villages like Pointe-aux-Chenes.

A fallen pole lies near Point-Au-Chenes Elementary School. Jake Bittle
It was March 2021, and Sheri Neil was throwing together po’boys for the lunch crowd at her namesake Sheri’s Snack Shack, the only restaurant in the small bayou village of Pointe-aux-Chenes, Louisiana. The counter-service sandwich joint stands elevated about 12 feet off the ground, with a big red deck where people can sit as they enjoy one of Sheri’s renowned milkshakes.
At the height of the lunch hour, a woman drove into the parking lot and came running up the stairs. She was a teacher at Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary School, which served about 80 children from the village of Pointe-aux-Chenes and nearby Ile de Jean Charles, both Indigenous communities that had been eroding for decades. Earlier that morning a representative from the parish school board had shown up unannounced and informed the staff that the parish was closing the school, effective that summer. People had been leaving Pointe-aux-Chenes for decades, driven out by frequent floods and the decline of the local shrimping industry, and enrollment at Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary had fallen well below the district’s target. The village no longer merited its own school, officials said.
There were about a dozen people at the restaurant when the teacher drove up, and each of them ran at once to tell their families and friends. By nightfall everyone in town had heard the news, and by the next morning the residents of Pointe-aux-Chenes leapt into action as only the residents of a small town could. They started a Facebook group on behalf of the school and alerted the new cub reporter for the daily newspaper in the nearby city of Houma. The leader of the local tribal organization called the tribe’s attorney and asked her to help them file a lawsuit against the parish. The town staged a small picket outside the school, with students and parents holding up handwritten signs. 02-22-23
Read more
An activist group is spreading misinformation to stop solar projects in rural America

Roger Houser’s family has worked the land in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley for three generations. But it has been getting harder to make a living raising cattle there. So Houser was excited when a solar company showed up offering to lease his property. It would have been good money heading into retirement. But his hopes were dashed by a four-year battle against solar development in Page County.
Ryan Kellman/NPR
Roger Houser’s ranching business was getting squeezed. The calves he raises in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley were selling for about the same price they had a few years earlier, while costs for essentials like fuel and fertilizer kept going up. But Houser found another use for his 500 acres.
An energy company offered to lease Houser’s property in rural Page County to build a solar plant that could power about 25,000 homes. It was a good offer, Houser says. More money than he could make growing hay and selling cattle.
“The idea of being able to keep the land as one parcel and not have it split up was very attractive,” Houser says. “To have some passive income for retirement was good. And then the main thing was the electricity it would generate and the good it would do made it feel good all the way around.”
But soon after he got the offer, organized opposition began a four-year battle against solar development in the county. A group of locals eventually joined forces with a nonprofit called Citizens for Responsible Solar to stop the project on Houser’s land and pass restrictions effectively banning big solar plants from being built in the area.
Citizens for Responsible Solar is part of a growing backlash against renewable energy in rural communities across the United States. The group, which was started in 2019 and appears to use strategies honed by other activists in campaigns against the wind industry, has helped local groups fighting solar projects in at least 10 states including Ohio, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, according to its website.
“I think for years, there has been this sense that this is not all coincidence. That local groups are popping up in different places, saying the same things, using the same online campaign materials,” says Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
Citizens for Responsible Solar seems to be a well-mobilized “national effort to foment local opposition to renewable energy,” Burger adds. “What that reflects is the unfortunate politicization of climate change, the politicization of energy, and, unfortunately, the political nature of the energy transition, which is really just a necessary response to an environmental reality.” 02-18-23
Read more
Biden administration restores Obama-era mercury rules for power plants, eyes more regulations in coming months

Plant Bowen, a coal-fired Georgia Power plant, in October 2022. Kendrick Brinson/The New York Times
The Biden administration on Friday finalized a decision to reestablish Obama-era rules that require coal and oil-fired power plants to reduce toxic pollutants, including mercury and acid gas, that come out of their smokestacks.
Mercury is a neurotoxin with several health impacts, including harmful effects on children’s brain development. And while the updated rule significantly benefits public health for communities around these kinds of power plants, it also has the effect of requiring plants to cut down on planet-warming pollution that comes from burning coal to generate electricity.
President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency announced early last year that it intended to undo a Trump-era rollback of the 2012 mercury pollution rules, one of many Trump-era environmental decisions it has reversed.
“This is a really good day for public health in this country,” EPA Deputy Administrator Janet McCabe told CNN. “We’re talking about mercury, arsenic, acid gases; these are dangerous pollutants that impact people’s health.” 02-17-23
Read more
Sen. Whitehouse wants the budget panel to be a climate committee

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) at a news conference Wednesday. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has a new platform for urging Americans to wake up to the threat of climate change.
Whitehouse, who has given nearly 300 “Time to Wake Up” speeches on the Senate floor to call for greater action on global warming, recently became chair of the Senate Budget Committee, which is responsible for drafting Congress’s annual budget plan.
The Democrat plans to use the committee gavel to probe ways climate change could threaten the overall economy — and how the fossil fuel industry has allegedly misled the public about global warming. But he faces a couple of big obstacles.
For one thing, the Budget Committee doesn’t wield a great deal of power: While the panel produces budget resolutions, which serve as a blueprint for appropriators, policy decisions are left up to other committees. For another, House Democrats have not sent a trove of internal industry documents to the Senate, complicating Whitehouse’s plans to continue investigating the fossil fuel industry’s downplaying of climate concerns.
Still, a defiant Whitehouse pledged in a recent interview to use the full powers of his new perch — however limited they may be — to push for continued climate action and accountability.
“There are plenty of sector-specific areas for the committee to dive into where there is profound budget impact from climate change, the obvious ones being coastal flooding and the flood insurance program,” Whitehouse said Wednesday after holding the panel’s first hearing of the 118th Congress on climate issues. 02-17-23
Any Way the Wind Blows
A Koch-owned chemical plant in Texas spent years running from the Clean Air Act. New evidence suggests it bent the law until it broke.
Michael Holtham, Oxbow’s plant manager, had been preparing for this moment. He had been on the job for nearly a decade. His three brothers had worked at the Port Arthur plant, as had his dad. He loved coordinating his 60-person team and had enjoyed watching many of them grow in their jobs. But they were now facing a new challenge.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, had installed an air monitor near the plant a few months earlier and was allowing Oxbow to capture nearly real-time data. The data was technically available to the public on request, but Oxbow was the only company in the state to have sought it — and it used the information to its advantage. Every time the wind blew in the direction of the monitor and the readings ticked upward, Holtham and other Oxbow employees were alerted. Then they improvised ways to decrease the brownish-yellow sulfurous plume spilling out of the smokestacks, stopping the company from running afoul of the law.
The Port Arthur plant was built in the 1930s and has been grandfathered in as an exception to the landmark federal environmental laws of the 1970s. The facility has four cavernous, cylindrical kilns that are constantly rotating, each about half the length of a football field. Raw petcoke, the bottom-of-the-barrel remainder from refining crude oil, is fed into the kilns and heated to temperatures as high as 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit — a fourth of the temperature of the surface of the sun. The intense heat helps burn off heavy metals, sulfur, and other impurities into the air. It emits more than double the amount of sulfur dioxide, which can cause wheezing and asthma attacks, than the average U.S. coal-fired power plant. 02-16-23
Read more
Big Oil’s trade group allies way outspend clean energy groups
You’ve probably seen ads promoting gas and oil companies as the solutions to climate change. They’re meant to be inspiring and hopeful, with scenes of a green, clean future.
But shiny ads are not all these companies do to protect their commercial interests in the face of a rapidly heating world. Most also provide financial support to industry groups that are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on political activities, often to thwart policies designed to slow climate change.
For example, The New York Times recently reported on the Propane Education and Research Council’s attempts to derail efforts to electrify homes and buildings in New York, in part by committing nearly $900,000 to the New York Propane Gas Association, which flooded social media with misleading information about energy-efficient heat pumps.
The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, which represents oil refiners and petrochemical firms, has spent millions on public relations campaigns, such as promoting a rollback of federal fuel efficiency standards. 02-14-23
Read more
Tesla co-founder’s startup gets $2 billion to boost EV battery production
The DOE loan is part of a Biden Administration push to create a domestic EV supply chain.

Redwood Materials
The Department of Energy has agreed to loan a Nevada startup $2 billion to support its production of critical battery materials, a staggering sum that illustrates the Biden Administration’s determination to domesticate the electric vehicle supply chain.
Redwood Materials will use the money for construction of the first factory in the nation to produce anode copper foil and cathode active materials, two essential components in EV batteries. The company, founded by former Tesla executive JB Straubel, says it will manufacture enough of them to support the production of 1 million electric vehicles per year by 2025. That would reduce the country’s gasoline consumption by more than 395 million gallons annually and cut carbon dioxide emissions by more than 3.5 million tons. It also would ease automakers’ reliance on battery components made overseas.
“It accomplishes the goals of less reliance on critical minerals from Asia, brings manufacturing and the supply chain to the US, and produces components for electric vehicles, which ultimately reduces greenhouse gas emissions,” Bob Marcum, chief operating officer of the DOE Loan Programs Office, told Grist on Friday. “It’s a very important project and something that we’re very excited about.”
The loan, which the Energy Department agreed to in a conditional commitment announced Thursday, will come from the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program, which supports manufacturing projects that improve vehicle fuel efficiency. 02-13-23
Read more