| Climate Red Flags Fly in Trumpland: Incoming White House chief of staff Reince Priebus pushed back on the suggestion that Trump is “softening” his stance on climate, saying in an interview with Fox News Sunday that the president-elect’s default position on climate change is that “most of it is a bunch of bunk.” Meanwhile, Kathleen Hartnett White, senior fellow with Koch-connected Texas Public Policy Foundation and a rumored pick for an EPA or Interior Department cabinet position, met with the president-elect on Monday. White strongly opposes climate regulations, was once called “an apologist for polluters” during her stint as Chair and Commissioner of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and has claimed the coal industry abolished slavery in the British empire. Military experts also told ClimateWire they worry that the president-elect will downplay climate change as a national security threat. The appointment of Fox News analyst K.T. McFarland as deputy national security adviser probably won’t assuage these fears: McFarland denies the climate-security link and claimed Obama’s attendance at the Paris Agreement talks last year gave “encouragement” to terrorists. (News: Houston Chronicle, Morning Consult, ThinkProgress, Greenwire $, Politico Pro $ Commentary: ThinkProgress, Joe Romm column; The Conversation, Travis N. Rieder op-ed)
Largest Die-Off on Record: A new map released by the Australian Research Council shows unprecedented coral bleaching in the last nine months in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, resulting in the largest coral die-off ever recorded. About two-thirds of reefs have died in the most-impacted northern region stretching 435 miles and researchers estimate the damage could take up to 15 years to recover. Global warming, combined with a strong El Niño, caused disastrous coral bleaching across the world this year. (New York Times $, Washington Post $, US News & World Report, Guardian, Mashable, USA Today, Foreign Policy, AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, Financial Times $, Buzzfeed)
Pope Says Keep the Climate Pact: In an address to a group of scientists at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope Francis called on world leaders to fully implement the Paris Agreement. Without directly mentioning Trump, the pope also criticized climate deniers for “the ease with which well-founded scientific opinion about the state of our planet is disregarded.” Francis’s comments come two weeks before the one-year anniversary of the Paris Agreement and more than a year since he penned an encyclical on the issue. (Reuters, Crux, Catholic Philly, VOA News, Deutsche Welle) |
