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  • Fact check: Biden makes false and misleading claims in economic speech | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Biden makes false and misleading claims in economic speech | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden delivered a Thursday speech to hail economic progress during his administration and to attack congressional Republicans for their proposals on the economy and the social safety net.

    Some of Biden’s claims in the speech were false, misleading or lacking critical context, though others were correct. Here’s a breakdown of the 14 claims CNN fact-checked.

    Touting the bipartisan infrastructure law he signed in 2021, Biden said, “Last year, we funded 700,000 major construction projects – 700,000 all across America. From highways to airports to bridges to tunnels to broadband.”

    Facts First: Biden’s “700,000” figure is wildly inaccurate; it adds an extra two zeros to the correct figure Biden used in a speech last week and the White House has also used before: 7,000 projects. The White House acknowledged his misstatement later on Thursday by correcting the official transcript to say 7,000 rather than 700,000.

    Biden said, “Well, here’s the deal: I put a – we put a cap, and it’s now in effect – now in effect, as of January 1 – of $2,000 a year on prescription drug costs for seniors.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claims that this cap is now in effect and that it came into effect on January 1 are false. The $2,000 annual cap contained in the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden signed last year – on Medicare Part D enrollees’ out-of-pocket spending on covered prescription drugs – takes effect in 2025. The maximum may be higher than $2,000 in subsequent years, since it is tied to Medicare Part D’s per capita costs.

    Asked for comment, a White House official noted that other Inflation Reduction Act health care provisions that will save Americans money did indeed come into effect on January 1, 2023.

    – CNN’s Tami Luhby contributed to this item.

    Criticizing former President Donald Trump over his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, Biden said, “Back then, only 3.5 million people had been – even had their first vaccination, because the other guy and the other team didn’t think it mattered a whole lot.”

    Facts First: Biden is free to criticize Trump’s vaccine rollout, but his “only 3.5 million” figure is misleading at best. As of the day Trump left office in January 2021, about 19 million people had received a first shot of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to figures published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The “3.5 million” figure Biden cited is, in reality, the number of people at the time who had received two shots to complete their primary vaccination series.

    Someone could perhaps try to argue that completing a primary series is what Biden meant by “had their first vaccination” – but he used a different term, “fully vaccinated,” to refer to the roughly 230 million people in that very same group today. His contrasting language made it sound like there are 230 million people with at least two shots today versus 3.5 million people with just one shot when he took office. That isn’t true.

    Biden said Republicans want to cut taxes for billionaires, “who pay virtually only 3% of their income now – 3%, they pay.”

    Facts First: Biden’s “3%” claim is incorrect. For the second time in less than a week, Biden inaccurately described a 2021 finding from economists in his administration that the wealthiest 400 billionaire families paid an average of 8.2% of their income in federal individual income taxes between 2010 and 2018; after CNN inquired about Biden’s “3%” claim on Thursday, the White House published a corrected official transcript that uses “8%” instead. Also, it’s important to note that even that 8% number is contested, since it is an alternative calculation that includes unrealized capital gains that are not treated as taxable income under federal law.

    “Biden’s numbers are way too low,” said Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute think tank, though Gleckman also said we don’t know precisely what tax rates billionaires do pay. Gleckman wrote in an email: “In 2019, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabe Zucman estimated the top 400 households paid an average effective tax rate of about 23 percent in 2018. They got a lot of attention at the time because that rate was lower than the average rate of 24 percent for the bottom half of the income distribution. But it still was way more than 2 or 3, or even 8 percent.”

    Biden has cited the 8% statistic in various other speeches, but unlike the administration economists who came up with it, he tends not to explain that it doesn’t describe tax rates in a conventional way. And regardless, he said “3%” in this speech and “2%” in a speech last week.

    Biden cited a 2021 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy think tank that found that 55 of the country’s largest corporations had made $40 billion in profit in their previous fiscal year but not paid any federal corporate income taxes. Before touting the 15% alternative corporate minimum tax he signed into law in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, Biden said, “The days are over when corporations are paying zero in federal taxes.”

    Facts First: Biden exaggerated. The new minimum tax will reduce the number of companies that don’t pay any federal taxes, but it’s not true that the days of companies paying zero are “over.” That’s because the minimum tax, on the “book income” companies report to investors, only applies to companies with at least $1 billion in average annual income. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, only 14 of the companies on its 2021 list of 55 non-payers reported having US pre-tax income of at least $1 billion.

    In other words, there will clearly still be some large and profitable corporations paying no federal income tax even after the minimum tax takes effect this year. The exact number is not yet known.

    Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, told CNN in the fall that the new tax is “an important step forward from the status quo” and that it will raise substantial revenue, but he also said: “I wouldn’t want to assert that the minimum tax will end the phenomenon of zero-tax profitable corporations. A more accurate phrasing would be to say that the minimum tax will *help* ensure that *the most profitable* corporations pay at least some federal income tax.”

    There are lots of nuances to the tax; you can read more specifics here. Asked for comment on Thursday, a White House official told CNN: “The Inflation Reduction Act ensures the wealthiest corporations pay a 15% minimum tax, precisely the corporations the President focused on during the campaign and in office. The President’s full Made in America tax plan would ensure all corporations pay a 15% minimum tax, and the President has called on Congress to pass that plan.”

    Noting the big increase in the federal debt under Trump, Biden said that his administration has taken a “different path” and boasted: “As a result, the last two years – my administration – we cut the deficit by $1.7 trillion, the largest reduction in debt in American history.”

    Facts First: Biden’s boast leaves out important context. It is true that the federal deficit fell by a total of $1.7 trillion under Biden in the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years, including a record $1.4 trillion drop in 2022 – but it is highly questionable how much credit Biden deserves for this reduction. Biden did not mention that the primary reason the deficit fell so substantially was that it had skyrocketed to a record high under Trump in 2020 because of bipartisan emergency pandemic relief spending, then fell as expected as the spending expired as planned. Independent analysts say Biden’s own actions, including his laws and executive orders, have had the overall effect of adding to current and projected future deficits, not reducing those deficits.

    Dan White, senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics – an economics firm whose assessments Biden has repeatedly cited during his presidency – told CNN’s Matt Egan in October: “On net, the policies of the administration have increased the deficit, not reduced it.” The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, wrote in September that Biden’s actions will add more than $4.8 trillion to deficits from 2021 through 2031, or $2.5 trillion if you don’t count the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill of 2021.

    National Economic Council director Brian Deese wrote on the White House website last week that the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill “facilitated a strong economic recovery and enabled the responsible wind-down of emergency spending programs,” thereby reducing the deficit; David Kelly, chief global strategist at J.P. Morgan Funds, told Egan in October that the Biden administration does deserve credit for the recovery that has pushed the deficit downward. And Deese correctly noted that Biden’s signature legislation, last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, is expected to bring down deficits by more than $200 billion over the next decade.

    Still, the deficit-reducing impact of that one bill is expected to be swamped by the deficit-increasing impact of various additional bills and policies Biden has approved.

    Biden said, “Wages are up, and they’re growing faster than inflation. Over the past six months, inflation has gone down every month and, God willing, will continue to do that.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claim that wages are up and growing faster than inflation is true if you start the calculation seven months ago; “real” wages, which take inflation into account, started rising in mid-2022 as inflation slowed. (Biden is right that inflation has declined, on an annual basis, every month for the last six months.) However, real wages are lower today than they were both a full year ago and at the beginning of Biden’s presidency in January 2021. That’s because inflation was so high in 2021 and the beginning of 2022.

    There are various ways to measure real wages. Real average hourly earnings declined 1.7% between December 2021 and December 2022, while real average weekly earnings (which factors in the number of hours people worked) declined 3.1% over that period.

    Biden said he was disappointed that the first bill passed by the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives “added $114 billion to the deficit.”

    Facts First: Biden is correct about how the bill would affect the deficit if it became law. He accurately cited an estimate from the government’s nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

    The bill would eliminate more than $71 billion of the $80 billion in additional funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that Biden signed into law in the Inflation Reduction Act. The Congressional Budget Office found that taking away this funding – some of which the Biden administration said will go toward increased audits of high-income individuals and large corporations – would result in a loss of nearly $186 billion in government revenue between 2023 and 2032, for a net increase to the deficit of about $114 billion.

    The Republican bill has no chance of becoming law under Biden, who has vowed to veto it in the highly unlikely event it got through the Democratic-controlled Senate.

    Biden said that “MAGA Republicans” in the House “want to impose a 30 percent national sales tax on everything from food, clothing, school supplies, housing, cars – a whole deal.” He said they want to do that because “they want to eliminate the income tax system.”

    Facts First: This is a fair description of the Republicans’ “FairTax” bill. The bill would eliminate federal income taxes, plus the payroll tax, capital gains tax and estate tax, and replace it with a national sales tax. The bill describes a rate of 23% on the “gross payments” on a product or service, but when the tax rate is described in the way consumers are used to sales taxes being described, it’s actually right around 30%, as a pro-FairTax website acknowledges.

    It is not clear how much support the bill currently has among the House Republican caucus. Notably, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told CNN’s Manu Raju this week that he opposes the bill – though, while seeking right-wing votes for his bid for speaker in early January, he promised its supporters that it would be considered in committee. Biden wryly said in his speech, “The Republican speaker says he’s not so sure he’s for it.”

    Biden claimed the unemployment rate “is the lowest it’s been in 50 years.”

    Facts First: This is true. The unemployment rate was just below 3.5% in December, the lowest figure since 1969.

    The headline monthly rate, which is rounded to a single decimal place, was reported as 3.5% in December and also reported as 3.5% in three months of President Donald Trump’s tenure, in late 2019 and in early 2020. But if you look at more precise figures, December was indeed the lowest since 1969 – 3.47% – just below the figures for February 2020, January 2020 and September 2019.

    Biden said that the unemployment rates for Black and Hispanic Americans are “near record lows” and that the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is “the lowest ever recorded” and the “lowest ever in history.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claims are accurate, though it’s worth noting that the unemployment rate for people with disabilities has only been released by the government since 2008.

    The Black or African American unemployment rate was 5.7% in December, not far from the record low of 5.3% that was set in August 2019. (This data series goes back to 1972.) The rate was 9.2% in January 2021, the month Biden became president. The Hispanic or Latino unemployment rate was 4.1% in December, just above the record low of 4.0% that was set in September 2019. (This data series goes back to 1973.) The rate was 8.5% in January 2021.

    The unemployment rate for people with disabilities was 5.0% in December, the lowest since the beginning of the data series in 2008. The rate was 12.0% in January 2021.

    Biden said that fewer families are facing foreclosure than before the pandemic.

    Facts First: Biden is correct. According to a report published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, about 28,500 people had new foreclosure notations on their credit reports in the third quarter of 2022, the most recent quarter for which data is available; that was down from about 71,420 people with new foreclosure notations in the fourth quarter of 2019 and 74,860 people in the first quarter of 2020.

    Foreclosures plummeted in the second quarter of 2020 because of government moratoriums put in place because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Foreclosures spiked in 2022, relative to 2020-2021 levels, after the expiry of these moratoriums, but they remained very low by historical standards.

    Biden said, “More American families have health insurance today than any time in American history.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claim is accurate. An analysis provided to CNN by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which studies US health care, found that about 295 million US residents had health insurance in 2021, the highest on record – and Jennifer Tolbert, the foundation’s director for state health reform, told CNN this week that “I expect the number of people with insurance continued to increase in 2022.”

    Tolbert noted that the number of insured residents generally rises over time because of population growth, but she added that “it is not a given” that there will be an increase in the number of insured residents every year – the number declined slightly under Trump from 2018 to 2019, for example – and that “policy changes as well as economic factors also affect these numbers.”

    As CNN’s Tami Luhby has reported, sign-ups on the federal insurance exchange created by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, have spiked nearly 50% under Biden. Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan pandemic relief law and then the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act temporarily boosted federal premium subsidies for exchange enrollees, and the Biden administration has also taken various other steps to get people to sign up on the exchanges. In addition, enrollment in Medicaid health insurance has increased significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic, in part because of a bipartisan 2020 law that temporarily prevented people from being disenrolled from the program.

    The percentage of residents without health insurance fell to an all-time low of 8.0% in the first quarter of 2022, according to an analysis published last summer by the federal government’s Department of Health and Human Services. That meant there were 26.4 million people without health insurance, down from 48.3 million in 2010, the year Obamacare was signed into law.

    Biden said, “And over the last two years, more than 10 million people have applied to start a small business. That’s more than any two years in all of recorded American history.”

    Facts First: This is true. There were about 5.4 million business applications in 2021, the highest since 2005 (the first year for which the federal government released this data for a full year), and about 5.1 million business applications in 2022. Not every application turns into a real business, but the number of “high-propensity” business applications – those deemed to have a high likelihood of turning into a business with a payroll – also hit a record in 2021 and saw its second-highest total in 2022.

    Trump’s last full year in office, 2020, also set a then-record for total and high-propensity applications. There are various reasons for the pandemic-era boom in entrepreneurship, which began after millions of Americans lost their jobs in early 2020. Among them: some newly unemployed workers seized the moment to start their own enterprises; Americans had extra money from stimulus bills signed by Trump and Biden; interest rates were particularly low until a series of rate hikes that began in the spring of 2022.

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  • Fact check: McCarthy’s false, misleading and evidence-free claims since becoming House speaker | CNN Politics

    Fact check: McCarthy’s false, misleading and evidence-free claims since becoming House speaker | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Since winning a difficult battle to become speaker of the House of Representatives, Republican Kevin McCarthy has made public claims that are misleading, lacking any evidence or plain wrong.

    Here is a fact check of recent McCarthy comments about the debt ceiling, funding for the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s resort and residence in Florida, President Joe Biden’s stance on stoves and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff.

    McCarthy’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

    McCarthy has cited the example of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, his Democratic predecessor as House speaker, while defending conservative Republicans’ insistence that any agreement to lift the federal debt ceiling must be paired with cuts to government spending – a trade-off McCarthy agreed to when he was trying to persuade conservatives to support his bid for speaker. Specifically, McCarthy has claimed that even Pelosi agreed to a spending cap as part of a deal to lift the debt ceiling under Trump.

    “When Nancy Pelosi was speaker, that’s what transpired. To get a debt ceiling, they also got a cap on spending for the next two years,” McCarthy told reporters at a press conference on January 12. When Fox host Maria Bartiromo told McCarthy in a January 15 interview that “they” would not agree to a spending cap, he responded, “Well Maria, I don’t believe that’s the case, because when Donald Trump was president and when Nancy Pelosi was speaker, that’s exactly what happened for them to get a debt ceiling lifted last time. They agreed to a spending cap.”

    Facts First: McCarthy’s claims are highly misleading. The deal Pelosi agreed to with the Trump administration in 2019 actually loosened spending caps that were already in place at the time because of a 2011 law. In other words, while congressional conservatives today want to use a debt ceiling deal to reduce government spending, the Pelosi deal allowed for billions in additional government spending above the pre-existing maximum. The two situations are nothing alike.

    Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank, said when asked about the accuracy of McCarthy’s claims: “I’m going to steer clear of characterizing the Speaker’s remarks, but as an objective matter, the deal reached in 2019 increased the spending caps set by the Budget Control Act of 2011.”

    The 2019 deal, which was criticized by many congressional conservatives, also ensured that Budget Control Act’s caps on discretionary spending – which were created as a result of a 2011 debt ceiling deal between a Democratic president and a Republican speaker of the House – would not be extended past 2021. Spending caps vanishing is the opposite of McCarthy’s suggestion that the deal “got” a spending cap.

    Pelosi spokesperson Aaron Bennett said in an email that McCarthy is “trying to rewrite history.” Bennett said, “As Republicans in Congress and in the Administration noted at the time, in 2019, Speaker Pelosi and Democrats were eager to reach bipartisan agreement to raise the debt limit and, as part of the agreement, avert damaging funding cuts for defense and domestic programs.”

    In various statements since becoming speaker, McCarthy has boasted of how the first bill passed by the new Republican majority in the House “repealed 87,000 IRS agents” or “repealed funding for 87,000 new IRS agents.”

    Facts First: McCarthy’s claims are false. House Republicans did pass a bill that seeks to eliminate about $71 billion of the approximately $80 billion in additional Internal Revenue Service funding that Biden signed into law in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act – but that funding is not going to hire 87,000 “agents.” In addition, Biden has already made clear he would veto this new Republican bill even if the bill somehow made it through the Democratic-controlled Senate, so no funding has actually been “repealed.” It would be accurate for McCarthy to say House Republicans “voted to repeal” the funding, but the boast that they actually “repealed” something is inaccurate.

    CNN’s Katie Lobosco explains in detail here why the claim about “87,000 new IRS agents” is an exaggeration. The claim, which has become a common Republican talking point, has been fact-checked by numerous media outlets over more than five months, including The Washington Post in response to McCarthy remarks earlier this January.

    Here’s a summary. While Inflation Reduction Act funding may well allow for the hiring of tens of thousands of IRS employees, far from all of these employees will be IRS agents conducting audits and investigations. Many other employees will be hired for the non-agent roles, from customer service to information technology, that make up the vast majority of the IRS workforce. And a significant number of the hires are expected to fill the vacant posts left by retirements and other attrition, not take newly created positions.

    The IRS has not yet released a detailed breakdown of how it plans to use the funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, so it’s impossible to say precisely how many new “agents” will be hired. But it is already clear that the total won’t approach 87,000.

    In his interview with Fox’s Bartiromo on January 15, McCarthy criticized federal law enforcement for executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and residence in Florida, which the FBI says resulted in the recovery of more than 100 government documents marked as classified and hundreds of other government documents. Echoing a claim Trump has made, McCarthy said of the documents: “They knew it was there. They could have come and taken it any time they wanted.”

    Facts First: It is clearly not true that the authorities could somehow have come to Mar-a-Lago at any time, without conducting a formal search, and taken all of the presidential records they were seeking from Trump. By the time of the search, the federal government – first the National Archives and Records Administration and then the Justice Department – had been asking Trump for more than a year to return government records. Even when the Justice Department went beyond asking in May and served Trump’s team with a subpoena for the return of all documents with classification markings, Trump’s team returned only some of these documents. In June, a Trump lawyer signed a document certifying on behalf of Trump’s office that all of the documents had been returned, though that was not true.

    When FBI agents and a Justice Department attorney visited Mar-a-Lago without a search warrant on that June day to accept documents the Trump team was returning in response to the subpoena, a Trump lawyer “explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes that remained in the storage room,” the department said in a court filing after the August search. In other words, according to the department, the government was not even allowed to poke around to see if there were government records still at Mar-a-Lago, let alone take those records.

    In the August court filing, the department pointedly called into question the extent to which the Trump team had cooperated: “That the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former President’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.”

    McCarthy wrote in a New York Post article published on January 12: “While President Joe Biden wants to control the kind of stove Americans can cook on, House Republicans are certainly cooking with gas.” He repeated the claim on Twitter the next morning.

    Facts First: There is no evidence for this claim; Biden has not expressed a desire to control the kind of stove Americans can cook on. McCarthy was baselessly attributing the comments of a single Biden appointee to Biden himself.

    It is true that a Biden appointee on the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, Richard Trumka Jr., told Bloomberg earlier this month that gas stoves pose a “hidden hazard,” as they emit air pollutants, and said, “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” But the day before McCarthy’s article was published by the New York Post, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a press briefing: “The president does not support banning gas stoves. And the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is independent, is not banning gas stoves.”

    To date, even the commission itself has not shown support for a ban on gas stoves or for any particular new regulations on gas stoves. Commission Chairman Alexander Hoehn-Saric said in a statement the day before McCarthy’s article was published: “I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so.” Rather, he said, the commission is researching gas emissions in stoves, “exploring new ways to address health risks,” and strengthening voluntary safety standards – and will this spring ask the public “to provide us with information about gas stove emissions and potential solutions for reducing any associated risks.”

    Trumka told CNN’s Matt Egan that while every option remains on the table, any ban would apply only to new gas stoves, not the gas stoves already in people’s homes. And he noted that the Inflation Reduction Act makes people eligible for a rebate of up to $840 to voluntarily switch to an electric stove.

    Defending his plan to bar Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff from sitting on the House Intelligence Committee, a committee Schiff chaired during the Democratic majority from early 2019 to the beginning of this year, McCarthy criticized Schiff on January 12 over his handling of the first impeachment of Trump. Among other things, McCarthy said: “Adam Schiff openly lied to the American public. He told you he had proof. He told you he didn’t know the whistleblower.”

    Facts First: There is no evidence for McCarthy’s insinuation that Schiff lied when he said he didn’t know the anonymous whistleblower who came forward in 2019 with allegations – which were subsequently corroborated – about how Trump had attempted to use the power of his office to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden, his looming rival in the 2020 election.

    Schiff said last week in a statement to CNN: “Kevin McCarthy continues to falsely assert I know the Ukraine whistleblower. Let me be clear – I have never met the whistleblower and the only thing I know about their identity is what I have read in press. McCarthy’s real objection is we proved the whistleblower’s claim to be true and impeached Donald Trump for withholding millions from Ukraine to extort its help with his campaign.” Schiff also made this comment to The Washington Post, which fact-checked the McCarthy claim last week, and has consistently said the same since late 2019.

    The New York Times reported in 2019 that, according to an unnamed official, a House Intelligence Committee aide who had been contacted by the whistleblower before the whistleblower filed a formal complaint did not inform Schiff of the person’s identity when conveying to Schiff “some” information about what the person had said. And Reuters reported in 2019 that a person familiar with the whistleblower’s contacts said the whistleblower hadn’t met or spoken with Schiff.

    McCarthy could have fairly repeated Republican criticism of a claim Schiff made in a 2019 television appearance about the committee’s communication with the whistleblower; Schiff said at the time “we have not spoken directly with the whistleblower” even though it soon emerged that the whistleblower had contacted the committee aide before filing the complaint. (A committee spokesperson said at the time that Schiff had been merely trying to say that the committee hadn’t heard actual testimony from the whistleblower, but that Schiff acknowledged his words “should have been more carefully phrased to make that distinction clear.”)

    Regardless, McCarthy didn’t argue here that Schiff had been misleading about the committee’s dealings with the whistleblower; he strongly suggested that Schiff lied in saying he didn’t know the whistleblower. That’s baseless. There has never been any indication that Schiff had a relationship with the whistleblower when he said he didn’t, nor that Schiff knew the whistleblower’s identity when he said he didn’t.

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  • Faucets in McCarthy’s district are running dry after years of drought. Constituents want him to do more | CNN Politics

    Faucets in McCarthy’s district are running dry after years of drought. Constituents want him to do more | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Shortly after Benjamin Cuevas and his family moved into their new home three years ago in Tooleville, California, he realized something was horribly wrong.

    In the middle of the day, the water pressure would drop completely. Cranking up both hot and cold could only coax a little drip out of the faucet.

    Then there was the water itself, contaminated with chemicals from agriculture runoff and treated with so much chlorine that it turned his family’s black clothing gray in the wash. His daughter and her baby live in the house, and Cuevas’s wife only bathes her granddaughter in the bottled water they receive from the county for drinking.

    Cuevas is not alone; the entire town of under 300 people faces the same water crisis. In many rural parts of the state, faucets and community wells are running dry after years of drought and heavy agriculture use pulls more water from the same groundwater residents use.

    One local nonprofit told CNN that about 8,000 people in the San Joaquin Valley need thousands of gallons of hauled water just to keep their taps flowing – and that number is growing.

    Benjamin Cuevas stands next to a town water tank in Tooleville.

    Newly elected House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has represented Tooleville for the past decade – though the small town is just outside his newly redrawn congressional district. The Republican lawmaker has long represented Kern and Tulare counties, and his redrawn seat adds portions of Fresno County.

    Throughout his tenure, this region of California has spent more time than any other part of the country in exceptional drought – the US Drought Monitor’s most severe category – a drought scientists say has been made more intense by human-caused climate change. Recent rainfall has put a dent in the region’s surface drought, though experts have told CNN it will do little to solve the ongoing groundwater shortage.

    Tulare, Kern and Fresno counties have endured more than 200 weeks in exceptional drought over the past decade, according to Drought Monitor data.

    Multiple people CNN spoke to for this story said McCarthy and his office don’t often engage on this issue in the district, especially compared with neighboring members of Congress. And they wish he would do more with his power in Washington – especially now that he holds the speaker’s gavel.

    McCarthy proposed an amendment this past summer to set up a grant program to help connect small towns like Tooleville with larger cities that have better water systems. The measure passed the House but died in the Senate. But as more and more wells go dry, McCarthy has made a point to vote against other bills addressing climate change and drought, including the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law.

    “In my experience, he has never engaged with us on any of these kinds of emergencies,” said Jessi Snyder, the director of community development at local nonprofit Self-Help Enterprises, who focuses on getting hauled water to entire communities that have gone dry.

    Cuevas moved to Tooleville three years ago.

    In a statement to CNN, McCarthy’s office said he has been “a staunch advocate on water issues in the Central Valley and California” since he was first elected to the House. McCarthy has joined his colleagues to “introduce broad legislative solutions every Congress related to this topic since our water situation continues to worsen,” his spokesperson Brittany Martinez said.

    But McCarthy does not mention climate change when talking about his district’s drought, and his office did not respond to questions from CNN about whether he believes climate change is playing a role. Instead, he often blames the drought on state mismanagement of water and has called for new and larger dams and reservoirs to be built to capture rainwater during wet years.

    Water experts in California say that’s missing the new reality.

    “Part of what’s happening now is the reality that there is no more new water,” said Peter Gleick, co-founder and senior fellow of California-based water nonprofit Pacific Institute. “The knee-jerk response of politicians has always been build another dam; find more water. There is no new reservoir that’s going to magically solve these problems. It’s now a question of managing demand.”

    When a call comes in from yet another community whose well has run dry, it’s a race against time for the staff at Self-Help Enterprises.

    The Visalia, California-based nonprofit has a self-imposed deadline of just 24 hours to drive out to the impacted community with emergency tanks to keep water flowing for showers, laundry and cleaning, as well as with five-gallon jugs of higher-quality water for drinking.

    “The team goes all hands-on deck,” Tami McVay, Self-Help’s director of emergency services, told CNN. “Everybody knows what their role is, and they just go get it done. And we move forward to the next one.”

    A tanker truck makes a water delivery in Tooleville.

    Rick Jackpot Fernandez of Kyle Koontz Water Hauling hooks up a hose to one of the town's water storage tanks.

    These days, there’s always a next one. Snyder said the summer of 2022 marked “a new level of crisis” as entire small communities of 80 to 100 homes started running out of water, in addition to individual homes.

    “It’s been a real struggle because it’s hard to provide a backup source of water to a whole community instead of one household,” she said.

    More than 1,400 wells were reported dry last year, according to the state of California, a 40% increase over the same period in 2021. Self-Help staff see this in person on the ground. New families are flowing into their hauled water program, but none are leaving. During the dry, warm-weather months, McVay estimates her nonprofit fields around 100 calls a day, dropping down to about 30 per week in the winter months.

    The punishing multi-year drought is what Brad Rippey, a meteorologist at the US Department of Agriculture, calls California’s “latest misery.” California has spent eight of the last 11 years in drought, with the last three years being the driest such period on record, state officials said in October. Human-caused climate change – which is raising global temperatures and making much-needed rain and snow less frequent in the West – is contributing to the severity, Rippey said.

    “The impacts are multiplying. You have these droughts piling on top of droughts with cumulative impacts,” including wildfires, he added.

    To supplement the dwindling groundwater supply in Tooleville, officials in Tulare County and nonprofits like Self-Help deliver five-gallon water jugs to the residents for drinking and 16,000 gallons of hauled water into tanks for washing their clothes, doing dishes and taking showers.

    Six five-gallon jugs of water are delivered to a resident's home in Tooleville.

    There’s so much demand in the warm months for the hauled water that a 16,000-gallon delivery lasted some communities just a few hours before needing to be refilled, Snyder said.

    “We literally cannot pump the water out of the tanker trucks fast enough to fill the storage tanks,” she added. “We can’t ever get ahead of it; physics is against us. It’s nuts and really stressful.”

    California’s extreme heat wave this summer pushed water usage even higher as residents watered grass and farms pumped more for crops. In Tooleville, Cuevas watched as the orange and lemon trees in his yard withered and died. Outdoor watering restrictions meant he couldn’t save his trees, even as some of his neighbors flouted the restrictions with noticeably green lawns.

    “Everything just perished,” Cuevas said. “It’s not a good feeling to see other people enjoying [the water], while you’re doing your part.”

    Seeing the nearby Friant-Kern Canal every day – which carries melted snowpack water from Northern California to Central Valley farms – is a nagging reminder of what his family doesn’t have.

    “It’s terrible,” Cuevas told CNN. “Just joking, I’d say I’ll go out there and put a hose [in it] running right back to my house.”

    Tooleville resident Maria Olivera has lived in town since 1974.

    Olivera cooks with bottled water.

    As Cuevas’s own trees died, commercial farms in the area were still producing – although their future is also uncertain. Farms are also having to drill deeper wells to irrigate orange groves and acres of thirsty pecan and pistachio trees.

    With this rush on groundwater, shallow residential wells don’t stand a chance. In West Goshen, a small town that sits outside McCarthy’s district in Tulare County, resident Jesus Benitez told CNN he burned through three well pumps – costing $1,200 a piece – during the warmer months when his neighbor, a farmer who grows alfalfa and corn, started irrigating his crops.

    “They’ve got the money to go every time deeper and deeper in the ground; we don’t have that luxury,” Benitez said.

    Two town wells in nearby Seville nearly ran dry this summer, said Linda Gutierrez, a lifelong resident who sits on the town’s water board. Across the street from the town’s wells is a pistachio farm, and when they start irrigating, the groundwater level plummets, she said.

    But she doesn’t blame the farmers. Like many who live in the area, her husband is a farm worker. There’s a lot of pride in the region’s far-reaching agriculture, and many feel it should be sustained.

    “You can’t not have farmers because you need food, but we have to have water in order to survive,” Gutierrez said. “There’s a very tricky balance to establish. Right now, if they don’t irrigate, we have water, but also a year from now we have no food.”

    A water usage notice is posted on a fence surrounding the Yettem-Seville water storage tanks.

    As big of a societal problem as drought and water shortages are, they are also intensely personal. Self-Help’s McVay gets emotional when talking about school children in the area getting beat up because they don’t have clean clothes or ready access to a shower.

    “They don’t have water in their homes to take baths, or brush their teeth, or have clean laundry, and they’re getting bullied,” she said. “Being made fun of because they’re taking baths at the local gas station bathroom. It’s not fair – the stress that it causes the parents because [they] start to feel like they’re failing as a parent.”

    Multiple local and state elected officials and leaders of nonprofits focusing on water delivery in the San Joaquin Valley said McCarthy isn’t engaged enough on what they consider one of his district’s most dire crises.

    McVay said outreach from McCarthy’s office on dry residential wells is “slim to none, and I am not saying that to discredit them at all.”

    “I have had more conversations, more engagement and just more wanting to know how they can assist from Congressman Valadao and his office than probably any other on the federal side,” McVay added.

    Snyder said Rep. David Valadao, a Republican representing neighboring Kings County as well as portions of Tulare and Kern, and his staff “will show up in a community at the time of a crisis” and are actively engaged on how they can support efforts to get people water.

    Other members of Congress, including Democratic Rep. Jim Costa and Republican Connie Conway, who left office earlier this month, have also been more accessible and engaged on the issue, Snyder said.

    “Kevin McCarthy, no,” Snyder added.

    A sign reading

    Oranges grown on trees in a grove in Tulare County.

    While McCarthy is popular in his district and influential among California and Central Valley Republicans, California state Sen. Melissa Hurtado, a Democrat who represents parts of the San Joaquin Valley plagued by drought, told CNN there are concerns that McCarthy’s ambition for House speaker has superseded his district’s needs.

    “He’s focused on that leadership position instead of actually working on issues to address the impacts of his district,” Hurtado told CNN. “Quietly, the word out there is it’s been a while that he’s actually delivered something for the region, given his focus on the leadership position. Maybe that’s part of his greater vision for helping this region out.”

    McCarthy’s office did not respond to questions about how he’ll use his position as House speaker to address climate change-fueled droughts in California and around the nation. Nor did it respond to the critiques about his lack of engagement.

    “The Leader has consistently worked in a bipartisan, bicameral fashion to deliver this life-giving resource for the families, agriculture producers and workers, and communities in the Central Valley and throughout California, and our Republican congressional delegation heavily relies on his steadfast leadership and decades of expertise when crafting their own pieces of water legislation,” McCarthy’s spokesperson Martinez told CNN in a statement. “When Democrats have held the majority, they time and time again blocked the progress and innovation of their House GOP colleagues.”

    McCarthy delivers remarks to supporters alongside Ronna Romney McDaniel, Republican National Committee chair, and Rep. Tom Emmer on November 9.

    In July, McCarthy spoke on the House floor about Tooleville’s plight, seeking to set up a federal grant program to help connect it and other small towns to larger cities’ water supply.

    “In our district, the community of Tooleville has run out of water as the groundwater table drops and aging infrastructure fails or becomes obsolete,” McCarthy said at the time. “Tulare County advises me that if California’s droughts continue, more small and rural communities in our district with older infrastructure could meet the exact same fate.”

    McCarthy’s measure authorized a grant program but didn’t contain any funding. And even though the bill passed the House, it died in the Senate, and it’s unclear whether it will come up again in the new Congress.

    Connecting Tooleville’s water infrastructure with that of nearby Exeter has been a decadeslong pursuit that is finally close to happening thanks to a state mandate and funding. The project will mean more reliable and cleaner water for residents like Cuevas. But it’s expected to take eight years for the two systems to fully merge.

    The Friant-Kern Canal carries melted snowpack water from Northern California to Central Valley farms.

    McCarthy is also co-sponsoring a bill with Valadao that would enlarge certain reservoirs and kickstart construction on a new reservoir in the Sacramento Valley. But some nonprofit leaders and local officials say these solutions would prioritize agriculture over residents.

    “We need more solutions beyond storage and dams,” said Susana De Anda, executive director of the San Joaquin Valley-based environmental justice nonprofit Community Water Center. “[McCarthy] lacks understanding of the real critical problems we’re experiencing around the drought and our communities.”

    Seeking to attract younger voters concerned about climate change to the Republican Party, McCarthy last year convened a Climate, Energy and Conservation Task Force to develop the party’s messaging and policies around the issue. And House Republican delegations have attended the last two United Nations climate summits.

    Cars drive past a sign on the outskirts of Tooleville.

    But all indications suggest that addressing human-caused climate change is not going to be a focal point of McCarthy’s now that he has the speaker’s gavel. McCarthy and House Republicans have shown they don’t want to move away from planet-warming fossil fuels, and few in the party are willing to connect global temperature rise to worsening droughts and extreme weather.

    McCarthy dissolved Democrats’ Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, and he has vowed to investigate Department of Energy grants for electric vehicle components, as well as alleged “collusion” between environmental groups and China and Russia to “hurt American Energy,” according to a recent statement.

    “Our representatives don’t talk about climate change; it’s a real problem,” De Anda said. “Climate change is real. Our communities are the canaries in the coal mine. We get hit first.”

    It’s part of the reason Cuevas is hoping to move away in a couple years. He’s hopeful the water situation will improve by connecting Tooleville to a larger town’s water system; otherwise, he’s afraid he won’t be able to entice another buyer due to the water issues.

    “I’m happy I had a chance to buy it, but we are planning to move,” Cuevas told CNN. “Right now, if I try, I ain’t going to get nothing, not even what I paid for the home.”

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  • The Federal Reserve is testing how climate change could hurt big banks | CNN Business

    The Federal Reserve is testing how climate change could hurt big banks | CNN Business

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    A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The largest six banks in the United States have been given until July to show the Federal Reserve what effects disastrous climate change scenarios could have on their bottom lines.

    Noting the risks could be “material,” the Fed said the banks will have to show how their finances fare under a number of climate stress tests, including heat waves, wildfires, floods and droughts, according to details of a new Fed pilot program released on Tuesday.

    “The pilot exercise includes physical risk scenarios with different levels of severity affecting residential and commercial real estate portfolios in the Northeastern United States and directs each bank to consider the impact of additional physical risk shocks for their real estate portfolios in another region of the country,” wrote the Fed.

    The Federal Reserve first announced the pilot program in September, noting that Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo would participate.

    Climate activists said that the project was long overdue (Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has been questioned about it multiple times over the last year), and that other central banks are far ahead of the Fed on climate risk assessments. The Bank of England ran a similar exercise in 2021.

    They also said the proposal lacked any real teeth. In its announcement the Federal Reserve stressed that the exercise “is exploratory in nature and does not have capital consequences.” It also said that it would not publish individual banks’ results.

    San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly told CNN in October Thursday that this was a learning and exploratory exercise for the Federal Reserve. It would be “incredibly premature to jump to the conclusion that any new policies or programs would come out of it,” she said.

    The other side: Critics of the pilot program have argued that the Federal Reserve was overstepping its boundaries and that they might soon begin to enforce financial penalties.

    “The Fed’s new ‘pilot’ program is the first step toward pressuring banks into limiting loans to and investments in traditional energy companies and other disfavored carbon-emitting sectors,” wrote former Republican Senator Pat Toomey, then a ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee. “The real purpose of this program is to ultimately produce new regulatory requirements.”

    Powell said last week that the central bank would not become a “climate policymaker.”

    “Today, some analysts ask whether incorporating into bank supervision the perceived risks associated with climate change is appropriate, wise, and consistent with our existing mandates,” Powell said last Tuesday. “In my view, the Fed does have narrow, but important, responsibilities regarding climate-related financial risks. These responsibilities are tightly linked to our responsibilities for bank supervision. The public reasonably expects supervisors to require that banks understand, and appropriately manage, their material risks, including the financial risks of climate change.”

    The discovery, movement and use of oil has played an outsized role in shaping geopolitics over the past century and a half. But over the next 50 years, global interaction and wealth are more likely to be influenced by microchips, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger told CNN Tuesday.

    “Where the technology supply chains are, and where semiconductors are built, is more important for the next five decades,” Gelsinger said in an interview with CNN’s Julia Chatterley at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

    Intel (INTC) is betting those predictions prove true. The company announced in 2021 it would invest $20 billion to build two new US chipmaking facilities, as well as up to $90 billion in new European factories, aimed at reasserting its position as the leader of the semiconductor industry, reports my colleague Clare Duffy.

    Gelsinger said the company’s investment in new manufacturing facilities in the United States, Europe and elsewhere is important not only for the company’s future, but for the “globalization of the most critical resource to the future of the world.”

    “We need this geographically balanced, resilient supply chain,” he said.

    The announcements also came amid concerns about the concentration of manufacturing for chips, in Asia, particularly China and Taiwan, during the Covid-19 pandemic and as geopolitical tensions grew. Issues in the chip supply chain in recent years have caused shortages and shipping delays of everything from desktop computers and iPhones to cars.

    “If we’ve learned one thing from the Covid crisis and this multi-year journey that we’ve been on it’s we need resilience in our supply chains,” Gelsinger said, adding that Intel’s manufacturing investments are aimed at “leveling that playing field so that good investment decisions can be made.”

    The years following the peak of the Covid pandemic have not been good for wealth equality.

    The world’s wealthiest residents have been getting far richer, far faster than everyone else over the past two years, reports my colleague Tami Luhby.

    The fortune of the 1% soared by $26 trillion during that period, while the bottom 99% only saw their net worth rise by $16 trillion, according to Oxfam’s annual inequality report released Sunday.

    And the wealth accumulation of the super-rich accelerated during the pandemic. Looking over the past decade, they netted just half of all the new wealth created, compared to two-thirds during the last few years.

    Meanwhile, many of the less fortunate are struggling. Some 1.7 billion workers live in countries where inflation is outpacing wages. And poverty reduction likely stalled last year after the number of global poor skyrocketed in 2020.

    “While ordinary people are making daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have outdone even their wildest dreams,” said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International.

    “Just two years in, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires — a roaring ’20s boom for the world’s richest,” she said.

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  • Climate activist Greta Thunberg released after being detained by German police at coal mine protest | CNN

    Climate activist Greta Thunberg released after being detained by German police at coal mine protest | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was released by German police on Tuesday evening after being detained earlier in the day at a protest over the expansion of a coal mine in the western village of Lützerath, police confirmed to CNN on Wednesday.

    ”Thunberg was only briefly detained. Once (Thunberg’s) identity was established, she was free to go,” Max Wilmes, police spokesman in the city of Aachen, told CNN.

    ”Due to the recognition of her name, police sped up the identification process,” Wilmes said. He said she then waited for other protesters to be released.

    Thunberg swiftly resumed campaigning on Wednesday, tweeting: “Climate protection is not a crime.”

    “Yesterday I was part of a group that peacefully protested the expansion of a coal mine in Germany”, the activist said, adding: ”We were kettled by police and then detained but were let go later that evening.”

    Thunberg was part of a large group of protesters that broke through a police barrier and encroached on a coal pit, which authorities have not been able to secure entirely, police spokesman Christof Hüls told CNN Tuesday. This is the second time Thunberg has been detained at the site, he said.

    Since last Wednesday, German police have removed hundreds of activists from Lützerath. Some have been at the site for more than two years, CNN has previously reported, occupying the homes abandoned by former residents after they were evicted, mostly by 2017, to make way for the lignite coal mine.

    The German government reached a deal with energy company RWE, the owner of the mine, in 2022, allowing it to expand into Lützerath in return for ending coal use by 2030 – rather than 2038.

    Once the eviction is complete, RWE plans to build a 1.5-kilometer (0.93-mile) perimeter fence around the village, sealing off its buildings, streets and sewers before they are demolished.

    Thunberg tweeted on Friday that she was in Lützerath to protest the expansion. On Saturday, she joined thousands of people demonstrating against the razing of the village.

    Addressing the activists at the protest, Thunberg said, “The carbon is still in the ground. And as long as the carbon is in the ground, this struggle is not over.”

    Hüls said Thunberg had “surprisingly” returned to protest on Sunday, when she was detained for the first time, and then again on Tuesday.

    The expansion of the coal mine is significant for climate activists. They argue that continuing to burn coal for energy will increase planet-warming emissions and violate the Paris Climate Agreement’s ambition to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Lignite is the most polluting type of coal, which itself is the most polluting fossil fuel.

    “We need to stop the current destruction of our planet and sacrificing people to benefit the short-term economic growth and corporate greed,” Thunberg said.

    Clashes between activists and police have been ongoing this month, and photos from the protests have shown police wearing riot gear to remove the demonstrators.

    More than 1,000 police officers have been involved in the eviction operation. Most of the village’s buildings have now been cleared and replaced with excavating machines.

    RWE and Germany’s Green party – a member of the country’s governing coalition – both reject the claim the mine expansion will increase overall emissions, saying European caps mean extra carbon emissions can be offset. But several climate reports have made clear the need to accelerate clean energy and transition away from fossil fuels. Recent studies also suggest that Germany may not even need the extra coal. An August report by international research platform Coal Transitions found that even if coal plants operate at very high capacity until the end of this decade, they already have more coal available than needed from existing supplies.

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  • Jay Inslee Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    Jay Inslee Fast Facts | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Here is a look at the life of Jay Inslee, governor of Washington and former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.

    Birth date: February 9, 1951

    Birth place: Seattle, Washington

    Birth name: Jay Robert Inslee

    Father: Frank Inslee, biology teacher, coach and athletic director

    Mother: Adele (Brown) Inslee, store clerk

    Marriage: Trudi (Tindall) Inslee (August 27, 1972-present)

    Children: Jack, Connor and Joe

    Education: Stanford University, 1969-1970; University of Washington, B.A., 1973, economics; Willamette University College of Law, J.D., 1976, graduated magna cum laude

    Religion: Protestant

    Inslee is dedicated to addressing climate change and other environmental issues.

    While in the US House of Representatives, he served on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

    He was the first governor to enter the 2020 presidential race.

    At Seattle’s Ingraham High School, Inslee was the starting quarterback.

    Worked his way through college doing odd jobs.

    Has praised the “Green New Deal,” saying it is “raising people’s ambitions” and “making what might seem impossible within the realm of the possible,” but has not outright said he would support the entire package. Nor has he endorsed Medicare-for-all.

    Established Washington’s Marijuana Justice Initiative. It allows for gubernatorial pardons for those previously convicted of a single misdemeanor marijuana crime “between January 1, 1998, and December 5, 2012, when I-502 legalized marijuana possession.”

    After law school, works as an attorney with Peters, Schmalz, Leadon & Fowler (later Peters, Fowler and Inslee), and serves as a city prosecutor for over a decade.

    November 1988 – Wins an open seat in the Washington House of Representatives for the 14th District against Lynn Carmichael (R) with 51.64% of the vote. Is reelected in 1990 with 61.82% of the vote.

    1989-1993 – Washington House of Representatives.

    November 1992 – Wins US House of Representatives seat for Washington’s 4th District against Richard “Doc” Hastings (R) with 50.84% of the vote.

    January 3, 1993-January 3, 1995 – US House of Representatives.

    November 1994 – Loses his reelection bid to the US House of Representatives to Hastings with 46.6% of the vote.

    1995-1996 – Attorney at Gordon, Thomas, Honeywell, Malanca, Peterson & Daheim L.L.P.

    September 1996 – Unsuccessful gubernatorial bid, only coming in third with 10% of the vote in the primary.

    1997-1998 – Region 10 Director for the US Department of Health and Human Services under US President Bill Clinton, serving Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington.

    November 1998 – Wins US House of Representatives seat for Washington’s 1st District, after four years out of office, against incumbent Rick White (R) with 49.77% of the vote.

    January 3, 1999-March 20, 2012 – US House of Representatives. Reelected six times.

    2007 – His book, “Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy,” written with Bracken Hendricks, is published.

    March 10, 2012 – Announces he will resign from the US House of Representatives in order to focus on his run for governor of the state.

    November 2012 – Wins the election for governor of Washington, defeating Rob McKenna (R) with 51.54% of the vote. Is reelected in 2016 with 54.39% of the vote.

    January 16, 2013-present – Governor of Washington.

    February 11, 2014 – Announces that he is suspending executions while he is in office, meaning he will issue reprieves when any capital cases come to his desk for action.

    2015-2016, 2017-2018 – Education and Workforce Committee Chair, National Governors Association (NGA).

    2016-2017, 2018-2019 – Education and Workforce Committee Vice Chair, NGA.

    2016 – Endorses Hillary Clinton for president of the United States.

    2017-present – Co-chair of the US Climate Alliance, a group he co-founded with California Governor Jerry Brown and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. The Alliance pledges to uphold the Paris Climate Accord following the United States’ withdrawal from the agreement.

    2017-2018 – Chairman of the Democratic Governors Association.

    July 5, 2017 – Inslee signs Washington’s paid family and medical leave act into law. It is considered one of the most generous such laws in the nation.

    November 6, 2018 – Loses a bid to enact a statewide carbon emissions tax, for the second time in two years.

    March 1, 2019 – Releases a video announcing his presidential candidacy.

    March 14, 2019 – Signs a bump stock buy-back program into law a week before a nationwide ban takes effect. The devices, which replace the standard stock and grip of a semi-automatic firearm, make it easier to fire rounds from such a weapon by harnessing the gun’s recoil to “bump” the trigger faster.

    August 21, 2019 – Suspends his 2020 presidential campaign.

    August 22, 2019 – Announces that he is running for a third term as governor.

    November 3, 2020 – Wins reelection to a third term as governor.

    June 30, 2022 – Inslee issues a directive that bars state police from cooperating with out-of-state investigatory requests related to abortion in his efforts to make the state a “sanctuary” for those seeking abortion services. The decision comes after the US Supreme Court ruled to strike down Roe v Wade, the 1973 legal precedent which guaranteed people’s federal constitutional right to abortion. The historic ruling essentially leaves abortion laws in states’ hands.

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  • The rich should pay higher fares to clean up aviation, says Heathrow boss | CNN Business

    The rich should pay higher fares to clean up aviation, says Heathrow boss | CNN Business

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    Rich travelers will have to pay more to fly if the aviation industry is to transition to greener fuels, the boss of one of the world’s biggest airports said Tuesday.

    Speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos hosted by CNN’s Richard Quest, Heathrow CEO John Holland-Kaye said that wealthy individuals and companies should pay extra to fly with sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) in order to bring the costs down for everyone else, particularly people in developing countries.

    He said that financiers and energy suppliers should invest in SAF production, including in emerging markets.

    “But as individuals and companies we need to be paying the premium for sustainable aviation fuels so that we can get the cost of it down so that the mass market and developing countries don’t have to pay for the energy transition. The wealthy people in this room and wealthy nations should be funding the energy transition in aviation to help support developing countries,” he added.

    Holland-Kaye said the solution to sustainable aviation was not to fly less, which was not necessarily an option outside Northern Europe, but to use cleaner sources of energy to travel.

    SAF is viewed as critical to reducing aviation’s carbon emissions but its green credentials come at a hefty price. Some airlines allow passengers to offset their CO2 emissions by paying more for their tickets to cover the extra cost of using SAF, but very few travelers currently make use of this option.

    Holland-Kaye said that companies can play a major role accelerating the adoption of SAF because business travel accounts for about 30% of fuel used in aviation. He cited the example of Microsoft

    (MSFT)    , which has an internal carbon tax for travel that requires each business unit to pay a fee based on its carbon emissions.

    Produced mainly from recycled food and agricultural waste, such as used cooking oil, SAF is a type of biofuel that cuts greenhouse gas emissions by 80% compared to conventional jet fuel.

    It also costs between two and eight times more than its fossil-fuel based alternative, which is why in 2019 it accounted for just 0.1% of jet fuel used in commercial aviation, according to a report by the World Economic Forum and McKinsey.

    In 2021, the industry pledged to replaced 10% of global jet fuel supply with SAF by 2030. This year, Virgin Atlantic plans to fly a Boeing 787 from London to New York powered solely by SAF in what has been billed as the world’s first net-zero transatlantic flight.

    Clean energy investments need a major boost if the world is to meet its climate goals, according to Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted a surge in investment in renewables as countries race to secure alternative energy supplies, but much more needs to be done, he said.

    Speaking on another Davos panel hosted by CNN’s Julia Chatterley earlier on Tuesday, Birol said that for every dollar invested in fossil fuels, the world is now investing $1.50 in clean energy. That needs to increase to $9 to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, he added.

    — Anna Cooban contributed reporting.

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  • Locally caught freshwater fish contain PFAS toxins, study finds | CNN

    Locally caught freshwater fish contain PFAS toxins, study finds | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Life, But Greener newsletter. Our limited newsletter series guides you on how to minimize your personal role in the climate crisis — and reduce your eco-anxiety.



    CNN
     — 

    Fish caught in the fresh waters of the nation’s streams and rivers and the Great Lakes contain dangerously high levels of PFOS, short for perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, a known synthetic toxin phased out by the federal government, according to a study of data from the US Environmental Protection Agency.

    The chemical PFOS is part of a family of manufactured additives known as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, widely used since the 1950s to make consumer products nonstick and resistant to stains, water and grease damage.

    Called “forever chemicals” because they fail to break down easily in the environment, PFAS has leached into the nation’s drinking water via public water systems and private wells. The chemicals then accumulate in the bodies of fish, shellfish, livestock, dairy and game animals that people eat, experts say.

    “The levels of PFOS found in freshwater fish often exceeded an astounding 8,000 parts per trillion,” said study coauthor David Andrews, a senior scientist at Environmental Working Group, the nonprofit environmental health organization that analyzed the data.

    In comparison, the EPA has allowed only 70 parts per trillion of PFOS in the nation’s drinking water. Due to growing health concerns, in 2022 the EPA recommended the allowable level of PFOS in drinking water be lowered from 70 to 0.02 parts per trillion.

    “You’d have to drink an incredible amount of water — we estimate a month of contaminated water — to get the same exposure as you would from a single serving of freshwater fish,” Andrews said.

    “Consuming even a single (locally caught freshwater) fish per year can measurably and significantly change the levels of PFOS in your blood,” Andrews said.

    Chemicals in the PFAS family are linked to high cholesterol, cancer and various chronic diseases, as well as a limited antibody response to vaccines in both adults and children, according to a report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

    “This is an important paper,” said toxicologist Linda Birnbaum, former director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences and the National Toxicology Program.

    “To find this level of contamination in fish across the country, even in areas not close to industry where you might expect heavy contamination, is very concerning. These chemicals are everywhere,” she said.

    Read more: Doctors should test levels of PFAS in people at high risk, report says

    It’s nearly impossible to avoid PFAS, experts say. Manufacturers add the chemicals to thousands of products, including nonstick cookware, mobile phones, carpeting, clothing, makeup, furniture and food packaging.

    A 2020 investigation found PFAS in the wrapping of many fast foods and “environmentally friendly” molded fiber bowls and containers.

    A 2021 study found PFAS in 52% of tested cosmetics, with the highest levels in waterproof mascara (82%), foundations (63%) and long-lasting lipstick (62%). Polytetrafluoroethylene, the coating on nonstick pans, was the most common additive.

    Read more: Makeup may contain potentially toxic chemicals called PFAS, study finds

    In fact, PFAS chemicals have been found in the blood serum of 98% of Americans, according to a 2019 report using data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

    “These chemicals are ubiquitous in the American environment. More than 2,800 communities in the US, including all 50 states and two territories, have documented PFAS contamination,” Dr. Ned Calonge, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health and chair of the Academies committee that wrote the report, told CNN previously.

    Read more: Dangerous chemicals found in food wrappers at major fast-food restaurants and grocery chains, report says

    Scientists at the Environmental Working Group used data from the EPA’s own monitoring programs — the National Rivers and Streams Assessment, which has been periodically testing stream conditions since 2008, and the Great Lakes Human Health Fish Fillet Tissue Study, which tests lake water every five years.

    “The analysis focused on EPA wild-caught fish in rivers, streams and throughout the Great Lakes from 2013 to 2015 as that was the latest data available,” Andrews said.

    The contamination was widespread, impacting “nearly every fish across the country,” he said. “I believe there was one sample without detected levels of PFOS.”

    The EWG created an interactive map of the results with details for each state. Fish caught near urban areas contained nearly three times more PFOS and overall PFAS than those caught in nonurban locations, the study found. The highest levels were found in fish from the Great Lakes.

    The analysis showed PFOS accounted for an average 74% of the contamination in the fish. The remaining 25% was a mixture of other PFAS known to be equally damaging to human health, Andrews said.

    CNN reached out to the EPA for comment but did not hear back before this story published.

    Based on the study’s findings, people who fish for sport might “strongly” consider releasing their catch instead of taking the fish home for a meal, Andrews said.

    Yet many people in lower socioeconomic groups, indigenous peoples and immigrants in the US rely eating freshly caught fish.

    “They need it for food or because it’s their culture,” Birnbaum said. “There are Native American tribes and Burmese immigrants and others who fish because this is who they are. This is key to their culture. And you can’t just tell them not to fish.”

    Read more: Water- and stain-resistant products contain toxic plastics, study says. Here’s what to do

    The predominant chemical in the fish, PFOS, and its sister perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, are known as “long-chain” PFAS, made from an 8-carbon chain.

    Read more: Plastics and pesticides: Health impacts of synthetic chemicals in US products doubled in last 5 years, study finds

    Manufacturers agreed in the early 2000s to voluntarily stop using long-chain PFAS in US consumer products, although they can still be found in some imported items. Due to growing health concerns, the use of PFOS and PFOA in food packaging was phased out in 2016 by the US Food and Drug Administration.

    However, industry reworked the chemicals by making them into 4- and 6-carbon chains — today over 9,000 different PFAS exist, according to the CDC. Experts say these newer versions appear to have many of the same dangerous health effects as the 8-chain PFAS, leaving consumers and the environment still at risk.

    Many of these longer-chain PFAS can be stored for years in different organs in the human body, according to the National Academies report. Scientists are examining the impact of newer versions.

    “Some of these chemicals have half-lives in the range of five years,” National Academies report committee member Jane Hoppin, an environmental epidemiologist and director of the Center for Human Health and the Environment at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, told CNN previously.

    Read more: FDA must do more to regulate thousands of chemicals added to your food, petitioners say

    “Let’s say you have 10 nanograms of PFAS in your body right now. Even with no additional exposure, five years from now you would still have 5 nanograms,” she said. “Five years later, you would have 2.5 and then five years after that, you’d have one 1.25 nanograms. It would be about 25 years before all the PFAS leave your body.”

    That’s why it’s “no surprise” to find such high levels of PFOA in freshwater fish, said the director of environmental pediatrics at NYU Langone Health, Dr. Leonardo Trasande, who was not involved in the new study.

    “These truly are ‘forever chemicals,’” Trasande said. “This reinforces the reality that we need to get all PFAS out of consumer products and people’s lives.”

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  • Opinion: Miami is one step closer to the implosion of its crypto dreams | CNN

    Opinion: Miami is one step closer to the implosion of its crypto dreams | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Jake Cline is a writer and editor in Miami whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic and other national outlets. He was a member of the team that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s coverage of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The opinions expressed here are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    Thanks in large part to bitcoin evangelism by top officials in Miami, the city has spent the past couple of years in full-blown cryptomania.

    In the vision of Mayor Francis Suarez – the city’s chief cheerleader for digital currency – Miami will one day become the national capital for cryptocurrency.

    Two years ago, Miami published its “Bitcoin White Paper” – a blueprint for its transformation into a 21st century city. Around the same time, prominent crypto figures began relocating to the city, and Miami began hawking its own digital currency, MiamiCoin.

    As the fever quickened, cryptocurrency exchanges began advertising on Miami billboards. Bitcoin ATMs were installed at neighborhood gas stations and convenience stores.

    And perhaps the most visible symbol allowing Miami to flex its crypto bragging rights was the announcement in March of 2021 by Miami-Dade County that it had sold naming rights for its main sports arena – home of the beloved Miami Heat NBA franchise – to FTX, the now bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange founded by disgraced crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried.

    That partnership, which is not even two years old, came to an unhappy end last week. On Wednesday, the beleaguered company and Miami’s local government finalized an agreement to terminate the deal and remove the now tarnished FTX logo from the sports venue.

    Over the past few months, as the scale of Bankman-Fried’s alleged fraud became clear, some city elders and the business community scrambled to unwind what many of us had suspected from the start was a simply terrible business deal. Bankman-Fried, who has maintained his innocence, pleaded not guilty to federal fraud charges during a court appearance in New York earlier this month.

    We now know just what a fiasco Miami’s love affair with crypto has been. The financial costs of last year’s crypto crash have been enormous for the many thousands of investors who invested – and then lost funds they could ill afford to forgo.

    But my own reservations were not rooted in certain knowledge that crypto would crumble, although its collapse was far swifter and more spectacular than even most skeptics anticipated.

    My opposition to crypto is based on its deleterious effects on the environment. The fact that Miami, considered “the most vulnerable major coastal city in the world,” would go all in for a currency created by a climate-wrecking technology always seemed to me to be a particular kind of madness.

    Many people don’t understand how a currency that exists largely in the digital space can have real-life destructive impacts on our environment. Bitcoin mining uses vast amounts of resources. As the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in an April 2021 article, “bitcoin-mining operations worldwide now use … about the annual electricity consumption of the entire nation of Sweden.”

    Citing data scientist Alex de Vries’ Digiconomist website, Kolbert reported that “a single bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of power that the average American household consumes in a month.” Similar reporting could be found at The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN.

    Bitcoin mining hardware has ramped up as the cryptocurrency’s popularity has increased. Between January 1, 2016, and June 30, 2018, the mining operations for four major cryptocurrencies released an estimated three to 15 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to a study in the research journal Nature Sustainability.

    Even China, the world’s largest polluter, banned bitcoin mining in 2021, citing its high carbon emissions. Now we are in what has been called “crypto winter” after enthusiasm has plummeted for cryptocurrencies worldwide. Nevertheless, the carbon footprint of bitcoin, still the world’s most valuable digital currency, continues to be enormous.

    This past September, a report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy found that crypto mining in the United States emits as much greenhouse gas as the nation’s railroads and cautioned that “depending on the energy intensity of the technology used, crypto-assets could hinder broader efforts to achieve net-zero carbon pollution consistent with U.S. climate commitments and goals.”

    But despite all that data, Suarez remains convinced that it’s possible to produce bitcoin in an environmentally friendly way.

    “I’d love to sort of dispel some of the, I think, myths — I call them myths — of [crypto] mining as a not-environmentally-friendly activity,” the mayor said during his Crypto Conference, a live-streamed event held in June 2021.

    And because there are renewable-energy sources in South Florida, his argument goes, crypto miners could eventually be incentivized to stop contributing to the destruction of our planet. He has argued, in effect, that because renewable energy sources exist, miners might just in the future opt to use them. It’s an extraordinarily weak argument. It would be a wonderful outcome, if only we could interest bitcoin miners in abandoning their pursuit of cheap and dirty energy sources.

    But he’s not wrong – it is entirely possible to mine bitcoin responsibly, as bitcoin’s leading competitor, ethereum, proved last year. A decentralized global network used for verifying billions of dollars of cryptocurrency transactions, ethereum in September completed a system-wide transformation known as the Merge.

    Essentially, ethereum moved to a mining process, known as proof of stake, that requires significantly less computing power than bitcoiners’ preferred process, proof of work. In doing so, ethereum appears to have reduced its worldwide energy consumption by more than 99%.

    While some bitcoin miners say they want their industry to go green, the majority resist calls to adopt the proof of stake system over fears it would eat into their profits. Meanwhile, residents of Miami seem torn on environmental matters. According to a survey conducted by Yale University, as well as George Mason University, they believe that local officials, and state officials, including the governor “should do more to address global warming.”

    But Miami voters helped to propel a “red wave” that installed Republican supermajorities in both chambers of the Florida legislature — a body that under GOP control allows fossil-fuel companies to write its bills.

    Residents of Miami-Dade County this past November also voted to reelect Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has said that while he doesn’t consider himself a “climate change denier” he hopes never to be mistaken for a “climate change believer.”

    And despite everything that has happened with the digital currency’s plummeting value, Suarez, who is also president of the United States Conference of Mayors, remains a bitcoin believer.

    Miami-Dade County will once again play host later this year to Bitcoin 2023, the next installment of the annual conference. And Suarez told a Miami TV station that he continues to receive his government salary in bitcoin, as he has since November 2021.

    Some dreams, it would seem, die hard.

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  • Chester Zoo announces birth of critically endangered Western chimpanzee | CNN

    Chester Zoo announces birth of critically endangered Western chimpanzee | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Extremely rare – and extremely adorable.

    The Chester Zoo in Cheshire, England, has welcomed the birth of a Western chimpanzee, the most endangered subspecies of chimpanzees.

    The zoo announced the baby boy’s birth in a Thursday news release. The little one, born to mother ZeeZee, will join a troop of 22 Western chimpanzees at the British zoo.

    “We’re incredibly proud to see a precious new baby in the chimpanzee troop,” said Andrew Lenihan, team manager at the zoo’s primate section, in the release. “Mum ZeeZee and her new arrival instantly bonded and she’s been doing a great job of cradling him closely and caring for him.”

    Lenihan said that the baby is already quickly becoming accepted by his extended family.

    “A birth always creates a lot of excitement in the group and raising a youngster soon becomes a real extended family affair,” Lenihan went on. “You’ll often see the new baby being passed between other females who want to lend a helping hand and give ZeeZee some well-deserved rest, and that’s exactly what her daughter, Stevie, is doing with her new brother. It looks as though she’s taken a real shine to him, which is great to see.”

    Additionally, the tiny baby is an essential asset to the critically endangered population.

    “He may not know it, but ZeeZee’s new baby is a small but vital boost to the global population of Western chimpanzees, at a time when it’s most needed for this critically endangered species,” Lenihan added.

    Following a decades-old tradition, Chester Zoo’s newborn will be named after a famous rock star, according to the news release.

    The Western chimpanzee is the only chimpanzee subspecies categorized as “critically endangered” by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which indicates they are facing “an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild.” The species has gone extinct in Benin, Burkina Faso and Togo, but still lives in some parts of West Africa, with the largest population remaining in Guinea.

    The subspecies has faced an 80% population decline over the last 25 years, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The ape’s numbers have plummeted due to habitat destruction, poaching, and disease.

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  • Lightning in the ‘cataclysmic’ Tonga volcano eruption shattered ‘all records’ | CNN

    Lightning in the ‘cataclysmic’ Tonga volcano eruption shattered ‘all records’ | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted in January 2022, it sent shockwaves around the world. Not only did it trigger widespread tsunami waves, but it also belched an enormous amount of climate-warming water vapor into the Earth’s stratosphere.

    Now researchers in a new report have unveiled something else: the eruption set off more than 25,500 lightning events in just five minutes. Over the course of just six hours, the volcano triggered nearly 400,000 lightning events. Half of all the lightning in the world was concentrated around this volcano at the eruption’s peak.

    The “cataclysmic eruption” shattered “all records,” according to the report from Vaisala, an environmental monitoring company that tracks lightning around the world.

    “It’s the most extreme concentration of lightning that we’ve ever detected,” Chris Vagasky, meteorologist and lightning expert at Vaisala, told CNN. “We’ve been detecting lightning for 40 years now, and this is really an extreme event.”

    The annual report by Vaisala found that 2022 was a year of extremes for lightning. Lightning increased in the US in 2022, with more than 198 million lightning strokes — 4 million more than what was observed in 2021, and 28 million more than 2020.

    “We are continuing an upward trend in lightning,” Vagasky said.

    The World-Wide Lightning Location Network, another lightning monitoring network led by the University of Washington, which is not involved with the report, said Vaisala’s findings about global lightning as well as the Hunga volcano are consistent with their own observations.

    “We can do this because the stronger eruptions generate lightning, and lightning sends detectable radio signals around the world,” Robert Holzworth, the director of the network, told CNN. “The Hunga eruption was absolutely impressive in its lightning activity.”

    Researchers have used lightning as a key indicator of the climate crisis, since the phenomenon typically signals warming temperatures. Lightning occurs in energetic storms associated with an unstable atmosphere, requiring relatively warm and moist air, which is why they primarily occur in tropical latitudes and elsewhere during the summer months.

    But in 2022, Vaisala’s National Lightning Detection Network found more than 1,100 lightning strokes in Buffalo, New York, during a devastating lake-effect snowstorm that dumped more than 30 inches of snow in the city, but piled historic totals in excess of 6 feet in the surrounding suburbs along Lake Erie. Lake-effect snow occurs when cold air blows over warm lake water, in this case from the Great Lakes. The large difference in temperature can cause extreme instability in the atmosphere and lead to thunderstorm-like lightning even in a snow storm.

    More than 1,100 lightning strokes were detected in Buffalo, New York, during a devastating lake-effect snowstorm that dumped more than 30 inches of snow in the city, but piled historic totals in excess of 6 feet in the surrounding suburbs along Lake Erie.

    The report noted that many of these lightning events happened near wind turbines south of Buffalo, which Vagasky said was significant. He explained that the ice crystal-filled clouds were lower to the ground than usual, scraping just above the blades of the turbines.

    “That can cause what is known as self-initiated upward lightning,” Vagasky said. “So the lightning occurs because you have charged at the tip of this wind turbine blade that is really close to the base of the cloud, and it’s really easy to get a connection of the electric charge.”

    This is an area of ongoing research, he said, as the country turns to more clean energy alternatives.

    “We’re seeing bigger and bigger wind turbines, and certainly as we’re putting in more and more wind energy and renewable energy, lightning is going to play a role in that,” he said.

    The report comes after an unusual year in 2021, when they found lightning strokes increased significantly in the typically frozen Arctic region, which scientists say is a clear sign of how the climate crisis is altering global weather.

    “Lightning in polar regions wasn’t mentioned [in this year’s Vaisala report], but our global lightning network shows a trend for much more lightning in the northern polar regions,” Michael McCarthy, research associate professor and associate director of the World Wide Lightning Location Network, told CNN. “That trend closely tracks the observed average temperature changes over the northern hemisphere.

    “This close tracking suggests, but does not prove, a climate change effect,” McCarthy added.

    Vagasky said lightning in colder areas will only amplify as the planet warms, noting that meteorologists and climatologists have been collecting more data to not only make the climate connections clear but also keep people safe.

    “That’s why they’ve named lightning as an essential climate variable,” he said, “because it’s important to know where it’s occurring, how much is occurring, and so you can see how thunderstorms are trending as a result of changing climates.”

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  • Lula da Silva sworn in as Brazil’s president, amid fears of violence from Bolsonaro supporters | CNN

    Lula da Silva sworn in as Brazil’s president, amid fears of violence from Bolsonaro supporters | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva was sworn in as Brazil’s president for the third time on Sunday, as threats of violence loomed from supporters of his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.

    “I promise to maintain, defend and fulfill the constitution, observe the laws, promote the general good of the Brazilian people, support the unity, integrity and independence of Brazil,” Lula said.

    The 76-year-old politician, returning to the presidency after a 12 year hiatus, arrived with his wife, Rosângela da Silva, at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Brasília at 12:20 p.m. local time before heading to congress where a formal congressional session took place.

    Parliamentarians applauded Lula before breaking into a chant of “ole, ole ola, Lula, Lula.”

    The Senate president opened the ceremony by paying respects to Pelé and Pope Benedict with a minute of silence.

    During the ceremony, Lula broke with traditional protocol to tell a short story about the pen he used to sign congressional documents.

    “In 1989 was in a rally in Piaui, then we walked until the San Benedict church, and a citizen gave me this pen and asked me to use this to sign in if I win the election in ’89. I didn’t win the election in ‘89, didn’t win in ‘94, didn’t win ‘98. In 2002 I won, but when I arrived here I had forgotten the pen and signed with a senator pen. In 2006, I signed with the Senate pen, and now I found the pen, and I do in honor of the people of Piaui state,” he said.

    The newly inaugurated president and the first lady then traveled in an open car parade to attend a military honors ceremony outside the presidential palace.

    Looming over the ceremony was the notable absence of Bolsonaro, who left Brazil for Florida on Friday and did not specify his return date.

    His trip to the United States breaks with Brazilian convention of outgoing leaders being present at their successors’ inauguration ceremony. It came as Brazil’s government issued an ordinance on Friday authorizing five civil servants to accompany “future ex-president” Bolsonaro to Miami, Florida, between January 1 and 30, 2023.

    Lula supporters gather to attend his inauguration as new president, in Brasilia, Brazil, Sunday, Jan. 1, 2023.

    Lula won a tight run-off race on October 30, in a stunning comeback that marked the return of the left in power in Brazil following four years of Bolsonaro’s far-right administration.

    Lula accomplished a remarkable return to power after a series of corruption allegations that led to his imprisonment for 580 days. The Supreme Court later ruled it a mistrial, clearing his path to run for reelection.

    After previously governing Brazil for two consecutive terms between 2003 and 2010, Lula will inherit a country with crippling debt and much higher levels of poverty than when he left office.

    Bolsonaro’s former vice president, Hamilton Mourao, addressed the nation in a speech on national television this Saturday on the last day of his government and criticized leaders whose silence created “an atmosphere of chaos.”

    “Leaders that should reassure and unite the nation around a project for the country allowed that silence to create an atmosphere of chaos and social division,” said Mourao, who added that the armed forces had to pay the bill. Since the election results, Bolsonaro had addressed the public only three times. He did not accept election results in those addresses, fomenting his radical base into believing the result could be reversed.

    Lula, his wife Rosangela Silva, Vice President-elect Geraldo Alckmin, right, and his wife, Maria Lucia Ribeiro, ride to Congress for their swearing-in ceremony, in Brasilia, Brazil, Sunday, Jan. 1, 2023.

    Lula vowed to rebuild the country, after thanking the “vow of trust given by the Brazilian people” during a speech addressing Congress.

    “Today our message to Brazil is of hope and reconstruction,” Lula said. “If we are here today, it is thanks to the political conscience of Brazilian society, and the democratic coalition that we built during the campaign.”

    Lula said that democracy was the biggest winner of the Brazilian election after his campaign was able to overcome a series of obstacles.

    “Despite everything, the decision in the ballots prevails, thanks to an electoral system internationally recognized for its efficacy. It was fundamental the courageous attitude of the Judiciary, mostly from the Supreme Electoral Court,” Lula continued.

    Lula proceeded his speech by criticizing the government of Bolsonaro, accusing the former president of using Brazil’s resources to further increase his power.

    “The diagnosis we received from the transition cabinet is appalling. They emptied the resources for health, dismantled education, culture, science, they destroyed the environmental protections, haven’t left resources to school meals, vaccines, public security, forest protection and social assistance,” Lula said.

    Protests led by Bolsonaro supporters have rocked Brazil, following the incumbent's election defeat in October.

    Violence has taken grip of the country with Bolsonaro yet to explicitly concede his election loss, despite his administration saying it is cooperating with the transition of power.

    Security presence at Lula’s inauguration was high, as approximately 8,000 security agents from several security forces were mobilized Sunday, according to the Federal District’s security department.

    Earlier on Sunday, a man was arrested in Brasilia after he was caught trying to get into the inauguration party carrying a knife and fireworks, the State Police of the Federal District said in a statement. The suspect traveled from Rio de Janeiro.

    A Brazilian Supreme Court judge on Wednesday ordered a four-day ban on carrying firearms in the capital that will run through the end of Sunday, as a precautionary measure ahead of the ceremony.

    It will not apply to active members of the armed forces, policemen and private security guards, Judge Alexandre de Moraes wrote.

    Lula da Silva’s team had requested the ban on firearms at the inauguration days after police arrested a man on suspicion of planting and possessing explosive devices at Brasilia International Airport.

    The suspect, identified as 54-year-old gas station manager George Washington de Oliveira Sousa, is a Bolsonaro supporter and told police in a statement, seen by CNN, that he intended to “create chaos” so as to prevent Lula from taking office again in January.

    Moraes’ ban came into force as thousands of Bolsonaro supporters have gathered at military barracks across the country in protest of the election result, asking the army to step in as they claim, with no evidence, that the election was stolen.

    Bolsonaro condemned Sousa’s bombing attempt on Friday, saying “there is no justification” for a “terrorist act.”

    “Brazil will not end on January 1, you can be sure about that,” the outgoing president said in reference to Lula’s inauguration date.

    “Today we have a mass of people who know more about politics,” he added. “They understand they are at risk. Good will win. We have leaders all over Brazil. New politicians or reelected politicians, they will make a difference.”

    Lula praised Brazil’s natural resources and promised a U-turn to his predecessor’s deforestation policy in the Amazon while aiming to maximize the country’s potential.

    “No other country has the conditions Brazil has to become an environmental power. Having creativity, the bioeconomy and socio biodiversity enterprises as starting points, we will start the energy and ecology transition towards sustainable agriculture and mining activities, family agriculture and green industry. Our goal is zero deforestation in the Amazon, zero greenhouse gasses emissions,” Lula said during his address to Congress.

    “We will not tolerate (…) the environmental degradation and deforestation that harmed the country so greatly. This is one of the reasons, albeit not the only one, for the creation of the indigenous people’s ministry,” Lula continued.

    The new Brazilian president promised to address the inequality inflicted on minorities in the country by creating “the ministry of racial equality promotion to expand the affirmative action policy in universities and public service, as well as resuming policies for Black and brown people in the health, education and culture areas.”

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  • Devastating disasters and flickers of hope: These are the top climate and weather stories of 2022 | CNN

    Devastating disasters and flickers of hope: These are the top climate and weather stories of 2022 | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    From a small island in Polynesia to the white-sand beaches of Florida, the planet experienced a dizzying number of climate and extreme weather disasters in 2022.

    Blistering summer heat broke records in drought-stricken China, threatening lives and food production. In the United States, drought and sea level rise clashed at the mouth of the historically low Mississippi River. And in South Africa, climate change made rainfall that triggered deadly floods heavier and twice as likely to occur.

    Yet against the backdrop of these catastrophic events, this year also sparked some glimmers of hope:

    Scientists in the US successfully produced a nuclear fusion reaction that generated more energy than it used – a huge step in the decades-long quest to replace fossil fuels with an infinite source of clean energy.

    And at the United Nations’ COP27 climate summit in Egypt, nearly 200 countries agreed to set up a fund to help poor, vulnerable countries cope with climate disasters they had little hand in causing.

    “There was some encouraging climate action in 2022, but we remain far off track to meet our goals of reducing global heat-trapping emissions and limiting future planetary warming,” Kristina Dahl, principal climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told CNN. “There must be a stronger collective commitment and progress toward slashing emissions in 2023 if we are to keep climate extremes from becoming even more devastating.”

    Here are the top 10 climate and extreme weather stories of 2022.

    When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted in January, it sent tsunami waves around the world. The blast itself was so loud it was heard in Alaska – roughly 6,000 miles away. The afternoon sky turned pitch black as heavy ash clouded Tonga’s capital and caused “significant damage” along the western coast of the main island of Tongatapu.

    The underwater volcanic eruption also injected a huge cloud of ash and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, more than 30 kilometers (around 19 miles) above sea level, according to data from NASA satellites.

    At the time, experts said the event was likely not large enough to impact global climate.

    But months later, scientists found that the eruption actually belched an enormous amount of water vapor into the Earth’s stratosphere – enough to fill more than 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. The massive plume of water vapor will likely contribute to more global warming at ground-level for the next several years, NASA scientists reported.

    Mississippi River shipwreck jc

    Severe drought reveals incredible discovery at bottom of Mississippi river


    00:45

    – Source:
    CNN

    Searing temperatures, lack of rainfall and low snowpack pushed some of the world’s most vital rivers to new lows this year.

    Northern Italy saw its worst drought in more than 70 years. The 400-mile River Po hit a record low due to an unusually dry winter and limited snowpack in the Alps, which feeds the river. The drought impacted millions of people who rely on the Po for their livelihood, and roughly 30% of the country’s food, which is produced along the river.

    Also fed by winter snowpack in the Alps along with spring rains, Germany’s Rhine River dropped to “exceptionally low” levels in some areas, disrupting shipping in the country’s most important inland water way. Months of little rainfall meant cargo ships began carrying lighter loads and transport costs soared.

    Meanwhile in the US, extreme drought spread into the central states and gauges along the Mississippi River and its tributaries plummeted. Barge traffic moved in fits and starts as officials dredged the river. The Mississippi River dropped so low that the Army Corps of Engineers was forced to build a 1,500-foot-wide levee to prevent Gulf-of-Mexico saltwater from pushing upstream.

    President Joe Biden signs

    After more than a year of negotiations, Democrats in late July reached an agreement on President Joe Biden’s long-stalled climate, energy and tax agenda – capping a year of agonizing negotiations that failed multiple times.

    Biden signed the bill into law in August and signaled to the world that the US is delivering on its climate promises.

    Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin was influential in delaying the bill’s passage. Multiple White House and Biden administration officials for months had tried to convince the senator to support the bill over dinners in Paris and ziplining in West Virginia.

    An analysis suggests the measures in the bill will reduce US carbon emissions by roughly 40% by 2030 and would put Biden well on his way to achieving his goal of slashing emissions in half by 2030.

    01 Nicole Damage

    ‘We are in trouble here in Daytona’: Coastal homes collapse into the ocean


    01:00

    – Source:
    CNN

    Hurricane Nicole was the first hurricane to hit anywhere in the US during the month of November in nearly 40 years. The rare, late-season storm also marked the first time that a hurricane made landfall on Florida’s east coast in November.

    Although Nicole was only a category 1, it had a massive wind field that stretched more than 500 miles, coupled with astronomically high tides that led to catastrophic storm surge. Homes and buildings collapsed into the ocean in Volusia County, with authorities scrambling to issue evacuation warnings.

    Hurricane Nicole flooded streets, destroyed power lines and killed at least five people. The storm came just 42 days after deadly category 4 Hurricane Ian wreaked havoc on the west coast of Florida.

    Protesters demonstrate during the UN's COP27 climate conference in November in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

    Negotiators from nearly 200 countries agreed at the UN climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to set up a new fund for “loss and damage,” meant to help vulnerable countries cope with climate disasters. It was the first time wealthy, industrialized countries and groups, including longtime holdouts like the US and the EU, agreed to establish such a fund.

    “We can’t solve the climate crisis unless we rapidly and equitably transition to clean energy and away from fossil fuels, as well as hold wealthy nations and the fossil fuel industry accountable for the damage they have done,” Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told CNN.

    Submerged vehicles in Jackson, Kentucky, in July. Between 8 and 10 inches of rain fell within 48 hours from July 27 to 28 across Eastern Kentucky. The month was Jackson's wettest July on record.

    The summer’s series of floods started off in Yellowstone National Park in June, when extreme rainfall and rapidly melting snow washed out roads and bridges in the park, causing significant damage to the nearby town of Gardiner, Montana, at the park’s entrance. Authorities had to rescue more than 100 people from the floods.

    The year also brought several 1,000-year rainfall events. A 1,000-year rainfall event is one that is so intense it’s only seen on average once every 1,000 years – under normal circumstances. But extreme rainfall is becoming more common as the climate crisis pushes temperatures higher. Warmer air can hold more moisture, which loads the dice in favor of historic rainfall.

    Deadly flooding swept through Eastern Kentucky and around St. Louis in July after damaging, record-breaking rainfall in a short period of time.

    California’s Death Valley, after a yearslong dry spell, saw its rainiest day in recorded history.

    Meanwhile, down south, parts of Dallas, Texas, got an entire summer’s worth of rain in just 24 hours in August, prompting more than 350 high-water rescues.

    UK Wildfires Record Heat

    Wildfires threaten London during record-breaking heat wave


    01:20

    – Source:
    CNN

    Europe experienced its hottest summer on record in 2022 by a wide margin. While the heat kicked off early in France, Portugal and Spain, with the countries reaching record-warmth in May, the most significant heat came in mid-July, spreading across the UK and central Europe.

    The UK, in particular, topped 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for the first time on record. Stephen Belcher, the UK Met Office’s chief scientist, said this would have been “virtually impossible” in an “undisrupted climate.”

    Throughout western Europe, the heatwaves gravely increased wildfire risk, with one London fire official noting that the 40-degree day led to an “unprecedented day in the history of the London Fire Brigade.”

    A bird flys above the beach at Lake Mead in Boulder City, Nevada on Sept. 11, 2022.

    As water levels drop at this major lake, bodies begin to appear


    03:19

    – Source:
    CNN

    The past few years have been a reality check for western states that heavily rely on the Colorado River for water and electricity. Plagued by decades of overuse and a climate change-fueled drought, the river that serves 40 million people in seven western states and Mexico is draining at an alarming rate.

    The water levels in its two main reservoirs – Lake Mead and Lake Powell – have plunged rapidly, threatening drinking water supply and power generation. In late July, Lake Mead – the country’s largest reservoir – bottomed out and has only rebounded a few feet off record lows. Its rapidly plunging levels revealed human remains from the 1970s and a sunken vessel from World War II.

    The federal government implemented its first-ever mandatory water cuts this year for states that draw from the Colorado River, and those cuts will be even deeper starting in January 2023.

    Flood-affected people carry belongings out from their flooded home in Shikarpur, Sindh province, in Pakistan in August.

    Floods caused by record monsoon rain and melting glaciers in Pakistan’s northern mountain regions claimed the lives of more than 1,400 people this summer, with millions more affected by clean water and food shortages. More than a third of Pakistan was underwater, satellite images showed, and authorities warned it would take months for the flood waters to recede in the country’s hardest-hit areas.

    UN Secretary General António Guterres said the Pakistani people are facing “a monsoon on steroids,” referring to the role that the climate crisis had in supercharging the extreme rainfall. The hard-hit provinces Sindh and Balochistan saw rainfall more than 500% of average during the monsoon season.

    Pakistan is responsible for less than 1% of the world’s planet-warming emissions, yet it is the eighth most vulnerable nation to the climate crisis, according to the Global Climate Risk Index.

    Destruction in the wake of Hurricane Ian on October 4 in Fort Myers Beach, Florida.

    Hurricane Ian was a Category 4 storm when it made landfall in southwest Florida in late September and left a trail of destruction from the Caribbean to the Carolinas. Insured losses from Ian are expected to reach up to $65 billion, according to recent data from reinsurance company Swiss Re.

    The storm first struck Cuba before undergoing rapid intensification from a tropical storm to a category 3 hurricane in just 24 hours – something scientists told CNN is part of a trend for the most dangerous storms. That same week, Super Typhoon Noru in the Philippines grew from the equivalent of a category 1 hurricane to a category 5 overnight as residents around Manila slept, catching officials and residents unaware and unable to prepare.

    Hurricane Ian’s size and intensity allowed it to build up a storm surge higher than any ever observed in Southwest Florida, devastating Fort Myers and Cape Coral. Ian killed more than 100 people, most by drowning. It will likely be one of the costliest hurricanes on record not only in Florida, but in the US.

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  • 3M will stop making hazardous ‘forever chemicals’ starting in 2025 | CNN Business

    3M will stop making hazardous ‘forever chemicals’ starting in 2025 | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    3M, the conglomerate behind Post-It notes and Scotch tape, will stop making controversial per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) by the end of 2025.

    The chemicals, commonly known as “forever chemicals,” are found in hundreds of household items and used to make coatings and products that can repel water, grease, heat and oil. The most recent science suggests that these chemicals are much more hazardous to human health than scientists had initially thought and probably more dangerous at levels thousands of times lower than previously believed.

    In a statement Tuesday, 3M said its decision is “based on careful consideration and a thorough evaluation of the evolving external landscape,” acknowledging that regulations are cracking down on the chemicals.

    For example, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposal earlier this year to label “forever chemicals” as hazardous substances. California also announced a lawsuit recently to recoup the clean-up costs from PFAS.

    “While PFAS can be safely made and used, we also see an opportunity to lead in a rapidly evolving external regulatory and business landscape to make the greatest impact for those we serve,” said 3M CEO Mike Roman in a statement. “This action is another example of how we are positioning 3M for continued sustainable growth by optimizing our portfolio, innovating for our customers, and delivering long-term value for our shareholders.”

    The company expects to take a financial hit of about $1.3 billion to $2.3 billion over the next few years because of the PFAS discontinuation. Yet 3M

    (MMM)     said PFAS represents a “small portion” of its revenue.

    Over the past decade, chemical manufacturers have voluntarily stopped producing two of the most commonly used forever chemicals, including PFOS and PFOA.

    At the federal level, the US Food and Drug Administration phased out the use of certain PFAS chemicals in 2016. The FDA and manufacturers agreed in 2020 to phase out some PFAS chemicals from food packaging and other items that came into contact with food. However, FDA monitoring of the environment showed that the chemicals tend to linger.

    – CNN’s Jen Christensen contributed to this report.

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  • First on CNN: Biden administration moves to phase out compact fluorescent light bulbs and push market toward LEDs | CNN Politics

    First on CNN: Biden administration moves to phase out compact fluorescent light bulbs and push market toward LEDs | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Biden administration is unveiling a new proposed rule that, if enacted, would effectively phase out compact fluorescent light bulbs and move the US light bulb markets decisively to more energy-efficient LEDs.

    The Department of Energy is proposing the rule on Monday with the aim to finalize it by the end of President Joe Biden’s first term. The rule would more than double the current minimum light bulb efficiency level, from its current standard of 45 lumens per watt to over 120 lumens per watt for the most common bulbs. The details of the proposed rule were shared first with CNN.

    This change will accelerate what White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi said is an “increasing shift in the marketplace toward LED lighting” over the last decade. Zaidi said moving away from compact fluorescents and even less efficient incandescent bulbs will ultimately lead to savings for consumers.

    “The mandate to the Department of Energy from Congress is to find ways to save money for American consumers,” Zaidi told CNN in an interview. “LEDs are now an order of magnitude cheaper than just a decade ago.”

    The proposed rule comes on top of the Biden administration’s move to get inefficient incandescent bulbs off the shelves by the summer of 2023. The Department of Energy finalized a rule to phase out the old-fashioned bulbs in the spring, capping off a decades-long bipartisan effort started in the Bush administration to get them off the shelves.

    That was complicated by former President Donald Trump in 2019, whose administration undid a previous Obama-era light bulb rule. Trump once famously complained about the quality of the light coming from LED bulbs, telling House Republicans “I always look orange” in the energy-efficient lighting.

    Zaidi said that LED lighting technology has improved tremendously since the early days of LEDs, providing better light for a fraction of the cost.

    LED bulbs can last three to five times longer than a compact fluorescent bulb, and up to 30 times longer than an incandescent bulb, according to the Department of Energy. Unlike both incandescent and compact fluorescent bulbs, LEDs release very little heat, and thus waste less energy.

    “If a particular light fixture was costing someone $10 in a year, then it’s going to be costing much, much less,” Zaidi said.

    Even before the latest proposed rule, LED use in the US has grown significantly in recent years. Nearly 50% of US households said they used LED bulbs for most or all their indoor lighting, according to the 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey. It was a huge increase from the 2015 survey, where just 4% of households reported using LEDs for most or all indoor light use.

    That same survey showed just 12% of US households said they used compact fluorescents as their predominant source of lighting, down from 32% in 2015.

    DOE also estimates the proposed changes will help put a dent in planet-warming emissions, cutting 131 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and 903 thousand tons of methane over the next 30 years – roughly equal to the electricity that 29 million homes use in one year.

    Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a statement the changes would “help lower energy costs and keep money in the pockets of American families while reducing our nation’s carbon footprint.”

    The rulemaking is also part of an administration goal to take 100 actions in the past year to make energy efficiency standards stronger. The White House announced Monday it had surpassed its goal with stronger standards on gas furnaces, air conditioners and clothes dryers.

    Zaidi told CNN it is part of a broader effort by the Biden administration to move Americans’ appliances to more energy efficient and cost-effective ones that also release far less heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions into the air. For instance, Zaidi said DOE is also at work on a rule to make residential cooking products like stoves and ovens more efficient.

    Zaidi added the administration is trying to use a combination of federal standards and incentives to push consumers toward energy-efficient and cleaner products for their homes, whether it be a light bulb, an HVAC unit or a stove.

    “We’re laying the foundation for people in every year of this administration being able to lock in more ways to save money on energy bills,” Zaidi said. “One of the things we’ve heard loud and clear is how focused consumers are on not only recognizing that energy costs are front of mind now, but that there are these products that help them avoid impacts to their bottom line as energy costs fluctuate in the future.”

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  • California regulators approve plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045 | CNN

    California regulators approve plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045 | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    California’s air regulators approved an aggressive plan Thursday for the state to reach carbon neutrality by 2045 – in line with legislation signed by Governor Gavin Newsom earlier this year.

    The plan, approved by the California Air Resources Board, looks to move one of the largest economies in the world to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels.

    Known as the Scoping Plan, the actions and policies aim to slash fossil fuel usage to less than a tenth of current consumption by decreasing demand for liquid petroleum by 94% by 2045, mainly driven by a move away from gas-powered vehicles.

    The board also says the plan will cut air pollution by 71% and gas emissions by 85% to below 1990 levels. Both goals are consistent with targets laid out in Governor Gavin Newsom’s $54.1 billion climate commitment intended to protect residents from wildfires, extreme heat and drought while moving away from big oil.

    The plan will create four million jobs and save Californians some $200 billion in health costs for pollution-related illnesses by 2045, the board said, providing a path for California to meet its climate targets.

    “California is leading the world’s most significant economic transformation since the Industrial Revolution – we’re cutting pollution, turning the page on fossil fuels and creating millions of new jobs,” said Newsom in a press release after the plan was approved.

    After a public comment session, board members acknowledged that this plan is a roadmap to cutting greenhouse gases, and that not all of what is laid out may come to fruition.

    One focus of the plan is a move to zero-emission transportation, including both personal vehicles and mass transit. While fossil fuels used in homes are also targeted, the state said gas-powered vehicles and other transportation are currently the largest source of carbon emissions.

    In August, the board approved a rule requiring all passenger vehicles sold in the state to be zero-emission by 2035.

    Beginning in 2026, all new residential buildings will be required to install electric appliances and in 2029, the requirements will begin extending to commercial buildings, according to the plan. For existing residential buildings, all appliance sales are required to be electric by 2035. Ten years later, all commercial buildings in the state will have to follow suit, the plan said.

    While the board called the plan “achievable” some critics say the plan relies too much on what some of the board members acknowledged is an unproven method of carbon capture and sequestration instead of relying on natural and working lands to also house some of that carbon.

    “This plan is failing the people of California and our planet – first by endorsing carbon capture, a faulty climate scheme promoted by the fossil fuel industry,” said Chirag Bhakta, the California state director for Food & Water Watch, in a statement to CNN.

    “Carbon capture is a completely unproven and unworkable technology that only serves to provide cover for oil and gas drillers to continue business as usual,” Bhakta said.

    The scoping plan also targets wildfires which are not only responsible for the destruction of forests, buildings and property, but also emit copious amounts of carbon dioxide.

    In recent years, human-driven climate change has spurred massive blazes. The board pointing out that of the 20 largest wildfires in California, nine happened in 2020 and 2021.

    The plan sets a goal of treating one million acres a year by 2025 through actions like prescribed burns and increased forest management. Currently, about 100,000 acres are treated a year.

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  • ‘This is a war’: Californians seek affordable housing alternatives | CNN Business

    ‘This is a war’: Californians seek affordable housing alternatives | CNN Business

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    Los Angeles
    CNN
     — 

    At 26, Ixchel Hernandez has become the defender and protector of her family’s modest apartment. In the two decades they’ve lived in their Los Angeles home, the family of four has successfully fought against multiple attempts aimed at pricing and, ultimately, forcing them out.

    “We are human beings with the right to live in our home, and that’s just frankly what every person… in every home and [in] every building should know … they have the right to have their own space, to have their home,” Hernandez said.

    But, across the country, affordable housing is becoming increasingly rare to find. The lack of housing inventory coupled with inflation and zoning inequalities have priced out most families, especially those who start with little-to-no capital of their own.

    Ixchel’s parents moved to the United States from Mexico in hopes of giving her and her brother opportunities and a safe environment. Her father, Jose Hernandez, never wanted to give the family’s various landlords a reason to evict them over the years, and he dreamed of owning his own home one day.

    “Thank God we never failed to pay our rent,” he said. But in order to keep up with rising rents, both parents worked and even opened up their home to another family for a brief time. Ixchel remembers six people crammed into their one-bedroom apartment.

    “It shouldn’t have to be that way where you’re kind of fighting for space or you’re going to have to move so far out of LA to be able to have a home,” she said.

    To purchase a house in more than 75% of the nation’s most populous cities, an average family needs to spend at least 30% of their annual income on housing. In cities like Miami, New York and Los Angeles, that number surges to more than 80% of an average family’s annual income.

    Home ownership for the Hernandez family, and so many others, has felt like a fading American dream. That is until they discovered a Civil Rights era approach that helps promote home ownership, particularly among minority groups, who are disproportionately impacted by the affordable housing crisis. It’s called a Community Land Trust, or CLT.

    The Hernandez family at their home.

    “We’re operated by residents who actually live in our building… [as well as] folks from the communities that we’re serving,” said Kasey Ventura of the Beverly-Vermont Community Land Trust. “My interest in this work, outside of just preserving housing and affordable housing, is preserving culture in a community.”

    A CLT is essentially a nonprofit organization that buys the land on which a building sits, thereby allowing a community’s residents to collectively manage it. Some residents eventually choose to form a co-op with their neighbors and take ownership of their buildings, renting the land.

    The Hernandez family and their neighbors embraced the concept. This year they joined the Beverly-Vermont CLT, one of at least five in Los Angeles and more than 200 nationwide. The process requires neighbors to meet regularly over several months before ultimately unanimously agreeing on various terms so as to finalize the trust. Ixchel now sits on the board of her building’s management; it’s in the final stages of ownership transfer to the co-op.

    “What’s important is that we’re now owners!” said Ixchel’s mother, Guadalupe Santiago. “But it’s also important to remember it was not easy,” her father cautioned.

    “It may not seem like a lot to a lot of folks that have money or come from money,” Ixchel said. “[But] we are just as much trying to build that generational wealth.”

    According to 2019 figures, the United States was roughly 3.8 million homes short of what was needed to house families. That is more than double the number from a decade earlier. California has the largest housing deficit of any other state, requiring an estimated million more homes to meet housing demands.

    “We don’t necessarily view housing as a need that everybody should have. And that’s key… in this work,” said Kasey Ventura, who helps run the Beverly-Vermont Community Land Trust in Los Angeles.

    While CLTs are a solution, Ventura admits there are — and should be — other affordable housing options to adequately address the crisis.

    In Southern California, there is growing demand for construction and rental of ADUs, or Accessory Dwelling Units. Also called “carriage homes,” the converted garages or newly built smaller structures sit adjacent to existing homes and are on the same property. The mostly studio or one-bedroom apartments provide a more affordable option to many who prefer to live or work in areas that might otherwise be too expensive.

    Others have advocated for utilizing unoccupied homes. There are dozens of vacant houses, in some cases, sitting just a few blocks from several homeless encampments lining many Los Angeles sidewalks. However, efforts to transform them into affordable housing in some neighborhoods have proven controversial among existing homeowners.

    Another route undertaken by some companies is Employer-Assisted Housing. Although they have only finished a portion of what they initially pledged, in recent years corporations like Google, Meta and Apple have promised to spend billions of dollars on some 40,000 new homes in California. The initiative began in order to combat soaring home prices in the Bay Area, while also recruiting and retaining talent who needed more affordable housing options, along with a shorter commute to the office.

    “Just to be able to be like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna wake up, take a walk down the street and come to work.’ I mean that’s awesome!” said Matthew Johnson, an employee of Factory_OS in Vallejo, California, which already plans to provide workforce housing options to its workers in the coming years. However, unlike other companies, Factory_OS employees will build their own homes.

    In a space once used to build US Navy submarines during World War II, Larry Pace now operates Factory_OS outside San Francisco. He co-founded the company with Rick Holliday to address the worsening housing shortage.

    Matthew Johnson working at Factory_OS.

    “That we’ve repurposed a building that was once for instruments of war, [so as] to [now] create affordable and supportive housing…. I don’t know how much cooler that can be,” said Pace.

    Factory_OS puts homebuilding onto an assembly line and produces fully finished modular units within two weeks. From insulation and drywall to flooring, fixtures and paint, all of it is prefabricated within the confines of the factory before it’s trucked to a site for assembly.

    “We’ve created an IKEA for the manufacturing of homes,” said Pace. “Then we put the pieces together.”

    When hoisted by a crane and stacked like sophisticated Legos, the modular units combine to make entire apartment buildings. Pace maintains there are massive cost-savings and huge efficiencies in moving homebuilding into a factory setting compared with on-site construction.

    “We’re building houses for the people who need them, for the people who have been struggling to be able to support their families or pay rent or pay bills,” said Johnson, as he placed support beams for a roof of one of the units.

    The 38-year-old Factory_OS employee and father of five was once homeless, and he said he often thinks about the families who will one day live under the roof he’s assembling. w

    “Every morning I wake up, I’m grateful… that I come home from work and there are my kids waiting for me,” said Johnson.

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  • Mark, Albania’s last ‘restaurant bear,’ arrives at sanctuary after over 20 years of captivity | CNN

    Mark, Albania’s last ‘restaurant bear,’ arrives at sanctuary after over 20 years of captivity | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    After over twenty years in captivity, Mark, the last of Albania’s “restaurant bears,” has safely arrived at his new home, an animal sanctuary in Austria, according to the animal rescue group Four Paws International.

    So-called “restaurant bears” have historically been kept in tiny cages near restaurants or hotels, where they served as an attraction for tourists, according to Four Paws. In 2016, the nonprofit launched the “Saddest Bears” campaign in an effort to relocate the more than 30 bears being used as entertainment in the country.

    Mark, a 24-year old brown bear, is the last known “restaurant bear” in Albania, according to a news release from Four Paws, although there are other bears in captivity in poor circumstances in the country. He was rescued on December 7 and arrived at his new home, “BEAR SANCTUARY Arbesbach” in Austria on Friday.

    When Four Paws first encountered Mark, the animal was suffering from severe health problems. He was overweight, had broken teeth and displayed “abnormal” behaviors like pacing due to the lack of stimulation in his cramped cage, Four Paws said in a previous news release.

    The bear embarked on a 44-hour journey to his new home, according to the organization. He traveled through North Macedonia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary before finally reaching the sanctuary.

    But he was “calm and relaxed” during the trek, according to Four Paws.

    “We made regular stops for our accompanying vet to check on him and fed him with fruits and vegetables,” Magdalena Scherk-Trettin, who coordinates Four Paws’ wild animal rescue and advocacy projects, said in the release. “After receiving an inappropriate diet of restaurant leftovers and mainly bread for two decades, he was a little reluctant about the vegetables, but munched happily on the grapes we gave him.”

    Mark was slow to explore his snowy new habitat, according to Four Paws. He hadn’t stepped outside a cage in over twenty years. He’ll stay in a smaller outdoor enclosure for the time being until he adjusts to his new environment and moves to a larger enclosure.

    The sanctuary in Arbesbach has operated since 1988, according to its website. Mark will join three other rescued grizzly bears who live on 14,000 square meters of “natural surroundings.”

    “With Mark’s rescue we ended the cruel practice of keeping him next to a restaurant to attract and entertain visitors,” Four Paws’ president Josef Pfabigan said in the release. “We are now one step closer to a world where people treat animals with respect, empathy and understanding.”

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  • A trash heap 62 meters high shows the scale of India’s climate challenge | CNN

    A trash heap 62 meters high shows the scale of India’s climate challenge | CNN

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    New Delhi
    CNN
     — 

    At the Bhalswa landfill in northwest Delhi, a steady flow of jeeps zigzag up the trash heap to dump more garbage on a pile now over 62 meters (203 feet) high.

    Fires caused by heat and methane gas sporadically break out – the Delhi Fire Service Department has responded to 14 fires so far this year – and some deep beneath the pile can smolder for weeks or months, while men, women and children work nearby, sifting through the rubbish to find items to sell.

    Some of the 200,000 residents who live in Bhalswa say the area is uninhabitable, but they can’t afford to move and have no choice but to breathe the toxic air and bathe in its contaminated water.

    Bhalswa is not Delhi’s largest landfill. It’s about three meters lower than the biggest, Ghazipur, and both contribute to the country’s total output of methane gas.

    Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, but a more potent contributor to the climate crisis because methane traps more heat. India creates more methane from landfill sites than any other country, according to GHGSat, which monitors methane via satellites.

    And India comes second only to China for total methane emissions, according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Global Methane Tracker.

    As part of his “Clean India” initiative, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said efforts are being made to remove these mountains of garbage and convert them into green zones. That goal, if achieved, could relieve some of the suffering of those residents living in the shadows of these dump sites – and help the world lower its greenhouse gas emissions.

    India wants to lower its methane output, but it hasn’t joined the 130 countries who have signed up to the Global Methane Pledge, a pact to collectively cut global methane emissions by at least 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. Scientists estimate the reduction could cut global temperature rise by 0.2% – and help the world reach its target of keeping global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius.

    India says it won’t join because most of its methane emissions come from farming – some 74% from farm animals and paddy fields versus less than 15% from landfill.

    In a statement last year, Minister of State for Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate change Ashwini Choubey said pledging to reduce India’s total methane output could threaten the livelihood of farmers and affect India’s trade and economic prospects.

    But it’s also facing challenges in reducing methane from its steaming mounds of trash.

    A young boy in the narrow lanes of slums in Bhalswa Dairy Village.

    When Narayan Choudhary, 72, moved to Bhalswa in 1982, he said it was a “beautiful place,” but that all changed 12 years later when the first rubbish began arriving at the local landfill.

    In the years since, the Bhalswa dump has grown nearly as tall as the historic Taj Mahal, becoming a landmark in its own right and an eyesore that towers over surrounding homes, affecting the health of people who live there.

    Choudhary suffers from chronic asthma. He said he nearly died when a large fire broke out at Bhalswa in April that burned for days. “I was in terrible shape. My face and nose were swollen. I was on my death bed,” he said.

    “Two years ago we protested … a lot of residents from this area protested (to get rid of the waste),” Choudhary said. “But the municipality didn’t cooperate with us. They assured us that things will get better in two years but here we are, with no relief.”

    The dump site exhausted its capacity in 2002, according to a 2020 report on India’s landfills from the Center for Science and Environment (CSE), a nonprofit research agency in New Delhi, but without government standardization in recycling systems and greater industry efforts to reduce plastic consumption and production, tonnes of garbage continue to arrive at the site daily.

    Narrow lanes of the slum in Bhalswa Dairy Village.

    Bhalswa isn’t the only dump causing distress to residents nearby – it is one of three landfills in Delhi, overflowing with decaying waste and emitting toxic gases into the air.

    Across the country, there are more than 3,100 landfills. Ghazipur is the biggest in Delhi, standing at 65 meters (213 feet), and like Bhalswa, it surpassed its waste capacity in 2002 and currently produces huge amounts of methane.

    According to GHGSat, on a single day in March, more than two metric tons of methane gas leaked from the site every hour.

    “If sustained for a year, the methane leak from this landfill would have the same climate impact as annual emissions from 350,000 US cars,” said GHGSat CEO Stephane Germain.

    Methane emissions aren’t the only hazard that stem from landfills like Bhalswa and Ghazipur. Over decades, dangerous toxins have seeped into the ground, polluting the water supply for thousands of residents living nearby.

    In May, CNN commissioned two accredited labs to test the ground water around the Bhalswa landfill. And according to the results, ground water within at least a 500-meter (1,600-foot) radius around the waste site is contaminated.

    A ground water sample from the Bhalswa landfill in northwest Delhi.

    In the first lab report, levels of ammonia and sulphate were significantly higher than acceptable limits mandated by the Indian government.

    Results from the second lab report showed levels of total dissolved solids (TDS) – the amount of inorganic salts and organic matter dissolved in the water – detected in one of the samples was almost 19 times the acceptable limit, making it unsafe for human drinking.

    The Bureau of Indian Standards sets the acceptable limit of TDS at 500 milligrams/liter, a figure roughly seen as “good” by the World Health Organization (WHO). Anything over 900 mg/l is considered “poor” by the WHO, and over 1,200 mg/l is “unacceptable.”

    According to Richa Singh from the Center for Science and Environment (CSE), the TDS of water taken near the Bhalswa site was between 3,000 and 4,000 mg/l. “This water is not only unfit for drinking but also unfit for skin contact,” she said. “So it can’t be used for purposes like bathing or cleaning of the utensils or cleaning of the clothes.”

    Dr. Nitesh Rohatgi, the senior director of medical oncology at Fortis Memorial Research Institute, Gurugram, urged the government to study the health of the local population and compare it to other areas of the city, “so that in 15 to 20 years’ time, we are not looking back and regretting that we had a higher cancer incidence, higher health hazards, higher health issues and we didn’t look back and correct them in time.”

    Most people in Bhalswa rely on bottled water for drinking, but they use local water for other purposes – many say they have no choice.

    “The water we get is contaminated, but we have to helplessly store it and use it for washing utensils, bathing and at times drinking too,” said resident Sonia Bibi, whose legs are covered in a thick, red rash.

    Jwala Prashad, 87, who lives in a small hut in an alleyway near the landfill, said the pile of putrid trash had made his life “a living hell.”

    “The water we use is pale red in color. My skin burns after bathing,” he said, as he tried to soothe red gashes on his face and neck.

    “But I can’t afford to ever leave this place,” he added.

    Jwala Prashad, 87, at the handpump in front of his house in Bhalswa Dairy Village.

    More than 2,300 tonnes of Municipal Solid Waste arrive at Delhi’s largest dump in Ghazipur every day, according to a report released in July by a joint committee formed to find a way to reduce the number of fires at the site.

    That’s the bulk of the waste from the surrounding area – only 300 tonnes is processed and disposed of by other means, the report said. And less than 7% of legacy waste had been bio-mined, which involves excavating, treating and potentially reusing old rubbish.

    The Municipal Corporation of Delhi deploys drones every three months to monitor the size of the trash heap and is experimenting with ways to extract methane from the trash mountain, the report said.

    But too much rubbish is arriving every day to keep up. The committee said bio-mining had been “slow and tardy” and it was “highly unlikely” the East Delhi Municipal Corporation (which has now merged with North and South Delhi Municipal Corporations) would achieve its target of “flattening the garbage mountain” by 2024.

    “No effective plans to reduce the height of the garbage mountain have been made,” the report said. Furthermore, “it should have proposed a long time ago that future dumping of garbage in them would pollute the groundwater systems,” the report added.

    CNN sent a series of questions along with the data from the water testing questionnaire to India’s Environment and Health Ministries. There has been no response from the ministries.

    In a 2019 report, the Indian government recommended ways to improve the country’s solid waste management, including formalizing the recycling sector and installing more compost plants in the country.

    While some improvements have been made, such as better door-to-door garbage collection and processing of waste, Delhi’s landfills continue to accumulate waste.

    In October, the National Green Tribunal fined the state government more than $100 million for failing to dispose of more than 30 million metric tonnes of waste across its three landfill sites.

    “The problem is Delhi doesn’t have a concrete solid waste action plan in place,” said Singh from the CSE. “So we are talking here about dump site remediation and the treatment of legacy waste, but imagine the fresh waste which is generated on a regular basis. All of that is getting dumped everyday into these landfills.”

    “(So) let’s say you are treating 1,000 tons of legacy (waste) and then you are dumping 2,000 tons of fresh waste every day it will become a vicious cycle. It will be a never ending process,” Singh said.

    “Management of legacy waste, of course, is mandated by the government and is very, very important. But you just can’t start the process without having an alternative facility of fresh waste. So that’s the biggest challenge.”

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  • Big Oil has engaged in a long-running climate disinformation campaign while raking in record profits, lawmakers find | CNN Politics

    Big Oil has engaged in a long-running climate disinformation campaign while raking in record profits, lawmakers find | CNN Politics

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    CNN
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    Big Oil companies have engaged in a “long-running greenwashing campaign” while raking in “record profits at the expense of American consumers,” the Democratic-led House Oversight Committee has found after a year-long investigation into climate disinformation from the fossil fuel industry.

    The committee found the fossil fuel industry is “posturing on climate issues while avoiding real commitments” to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Lawmakers said it has sought to portray itself as part of the climate solution, even as internal industry documents reveal how companies have avoided making real commitments.

    “Today’s documents reveal that the industry has no real plans to clean up its act and is barreling ahead with plans to pump more dirty fuels for decades to come,” House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney told CNN in a statement.

    For example, lawmakers reported, BP has stated it strives to “be a net zero company by 2050 or sooner,” but the committee found internal BP documents that show the company’s recent plans do not align with the company’s public comments.

    In a July 2017 email between several of the company’s high-level officials about whether to invest in curbing emissions from one of its gas projects off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago, BP’s vice president of engineering stated that BP had “no obligation to minimize GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions” and that the company should only “minimize GHG emissions where it makes commercial sense,” as required by code or if it fits into a regional strategy.

    The committee said documents uncovered also showed the fossil fuel industry has presented natural gas as a so-called “bridge fuel” to transition to cleaner sources of energy, all while doubling down on its long-term reliance on fossil fuels with no clear plan of action to full transition to clean energy.

    A strategy slide presented to the Chevron Board of Directors from CEO Mike Wirth and obtained by the committee states that while Chevron sees “traditional energy business competitors retreating” from oil and gas, “Chevron’s strategy” is to “continue to invest” in fossil fuels to take advantage of consolidation in the industry.

    In a 2016 email from a BP executive to John Mingé, then-Chairman and President of BP America, and others, about climate and emissions, an employee assessed that the company often adopted an obstructionist strategy with regulators, noting, “we wait for the rules to come out, we don’t like what we see, and then try to resist and block.”

    “The fossil fuel industry has of late been involved in extensive “greenwashing”—misleading claims in advertisements, particularly on social media, claiming or suggesting that they are “Paris aligned,” and that they are committed to meaningful solutions,” Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard professor who has studied the fossil fuel industry’s rebuke of climate science, told CNN. “Numerous analyses shows that these claims are untrue.”

    BP, Chevron, Exxon, Shell, the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce were the focus of Democratic lawmakers’ investigation. The companies have denied engaging in a disinformation campaign surrounding climate change and the role the industry has played in fueling it for decades. CNN has reached out to the companies and organizations for comment on the committee’s findings.

    Todd Spitler, a spokesperson for Exxon, said in a statement the committee took internal company communications out of context.

    “The House Oversight Committee report has sought to misrepresent ExxonMobil’s position on climate science, and its support for effective policy solutions, by recasting well intended, internal policy debates as an attempted company disinformation campaign,” Spitler said. “If specific members of the committee are so certain they’re right, why did they have to take so many things out of context to prove their point?”

    Democratic lawmakers had hoped the committee’s hearings would be the fossil fuel industry’s “Big Tobacco” moment — a nod to the famous 1994 hearings when tobacco CEOs insisted that cigarettes were not addictive, triggering accusations of perjury and federal investigations.

    The impact of House Oversight’s investigation into Big Oil will not be as immediate, but Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat and the chair of Oversight’s environmental subcommittee, said the findings have added to the historical record for the industry and its role in global warming.

    “These hearings and reports have been historic because we succeeded in bringing in the heads of Exxon, Chevron, Shell, BP, API, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to testify under oath for the first time ever about efforts to mislead the public on climate and forced them to provide explosive internal documents” Khanna told CNN in a statement. “I have no doubt that this work will be analyzed for years to come and help deepen our understanding about the entire industry’s role in funding and facilitating climate disinformation.”

    Democratic lawmakers said the oil and gas industry obstructed their investigation throughout the more than year-long process. Many of their requests for internal documents were heavily redacted by the companies, which did not specify reasons for withholding the information.

    In other cases, documents were heavily redacted because companies like Exxon said the information was “proprietary and confidential,” though the lawmakers noted that is not a valid reason to withhold information in a committee subpoena.

    “These companies know their climate pledges are inadequate but are prioritizing Big Oil’s record profits over the human costs of climate change,” Maloney said. “It’s time for the fossil fuel industry to stop lying to the American people and finally take serious steps to reduce emissions and address the global climate crisis they helped create.”

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