A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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An aerial view of the Belridge oil field in McKittrick, California Mario Tama/Getty |
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Last week’s newsletter talked about the clash between Biden’s climate goals and the fact that his administration has so far been outpacing Trump’s in approving oil and gas drilling permits. Let’s return to that, because a Guardian report published Monday has shed new light on the matter—and the Biden administration’s actions are looking increasingly odd. To recap: Biden pledged to pause new drilling leases—and did, in January. Republican-led states sued, and a judge issued a preliminary injunction against the order. The Biden administration appealed and, in the meantime, proceeded to hold a massive oil and gas lease auction in November, saying its hands were tied. Environmental groups pointed out that the administration could have sought a stay on the Trump-appointed judge’s injunction and didn’t actually have to hold a sale—let alone one of that size. As it turns out, the Biden administration had already made that exact same argument. On Monday, The Guardian published a piece analyzing a Justice Department memo that the administration sent in August in response to the Republican states’ request that the court “compel compliance with the preliminary injunction.” In other words, they wanted the administration to produce drilling permits immediately, please. In the memo, the DOJ countered that the order didn’t actually require the administration to hold an immediate lease sale: “While the order enjoins and restrains (the department of) interior from implementing the pause, it does not compel interior to take the actions specified by plaintiffs, let alone on the urgent timeline specified in plaintiffs’ contempt motion,” The Guardian’s Oliver Milman quoted from the memo. Strangely, despite this argument, the Interior Department announced only days later that it would be resuming lease sales, even though the states, according to the Columbia Sabin Center’s climate case–tracking database, withdrew their request to “compel compliance” shortly afterward. |
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{{#if }} Our writers and editors are bringing you vital reporting, explanation, and analysis to understand the current climate crisis—but they need your help. Here’s a special offer to subscribe to The New Republic. |
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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{{/if}} Milman contacted the Department of the Interior (which held the auction) for comment about this confusing chain of events: |
A spokesperson for the department of interior said that it was “complying with a US district court’s decision” in going ahead with the leases. He did not answer questions over why the government said in August that this court decision does not compel the auction. |
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This doesn’t look great. The Interior Department has had a lot of time to figure out what it would say when asked about the DOJ’s August memo and why it held this auction at a time when any new fossil fuel infrastructure is known to be a terrible idea. As environmental groups and numerous climate writers argued in November, it’s hard to square the auction itself with the administration’s claim to be taking climate change seriously. But the fact that the administration still doesn’t even have an explanation for why it held the auction—or, if it does, doesn’t think the public deserves to hear it—is even harder to square with this claim. As we head into the final stretch of 2021, crammed with holidays both religious and secular, I’m going to try to keep these newsletters short. But I want to give you a heads up about The New Republic’s “What Now?” end-of-year series. The point is to look at where we are at the end of the Biden administration’s first year (and the second year of this pandemic), with a strong expectation that we’ve seen about as much legislative action as we’re likely to get from this Congress. TNR’s politics team will be looking at a variety of policy proposals, as well as 2022 predictions. Apocalypse Soon writers will weigh in with some novel ideas for fighting climate change and Covid-19 and reforming agriculture, among other things. And Kate Aronoff has a piece in the series examining the gap between the Biden administration’s climate goals and the action it has taken so far. This may sound awfully depressing—not the stuff you want to think about over eggnog. But as you’ll read in Kate’s forthcoming piece, there are a number of tools the administration could still deploy even without Congress—if it’s serious about fighting climate change. Stay tuned. —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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That’s the record-breaking temperature the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk reached this past summer, as officially verified by the World Meteorological Organization on Tuesday. That makes it the highest temperature ever recorded in the Arctic. |
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By the time you read this, the New York City Council will likely have passed a measure banning new buildings from using natural gas. This would be a huge deal, given the city’s size and cultural prominence. The ban would start taking effect in 2023. |
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Oil and gas operations in America’s Permian Basin continue to pour methane into the atmosphere. According to a recent survey conducted by the Environmental Defense Fund via helicopter, 40 percent of the 900 sites surveyed are leaking “major methane plumes.” Fourteen percent of those plumes are coming from bad flaring techniques. Read Reuters’s write-up here. |
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Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
Tornado climatologist James B. Elsner has a good explanation in The New York Times this week of what we know about tornadoes in climate change: |
Although tornadoes across the years do not appear to have become more common, an increasing percentage of them are occurring in outbreaks. The tornadoes that included Friday night’s so-called quad-state tornado—which crossed four states and devastated the town of Mayfield, Ky.—are an example of an outbreak. These are on the rise.… Here’s what we’ve also been seeing: A below average number of tornadoes this year; outbreaks becoming more common during cooler months in recent years; and tornadoes occurring more often across the Southeast compared with the Great Plains. Cities with the largest decreases in the number of strong tornadoes since 1984 include Dallas, Oklahoma City and Houston. Cities with the largest increases in the number of strong tornadoes since 1984 are Atlanta, Nashville and Augusta. There is also evidence that tornadoes are getting stronger. |
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