What's new

The Climate Change Thread

Trump is also trying to end the offshore wind industry. It’s green, renewable, would provide electricity to one million southern New England homes, and Trump hates renewable energy sources. Using a suit by a group claiming the wind turbines endanger Right Whales, in order to reconsider the application, and in order to kill it.


The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has asked a federal court to remand the federal approval of the New England Wind offshore wind project to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which issued it last year and now wants to conduct further review, according to a filing submitted on 2 December in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

In the filing, the DOJ, on behalf of the Federal Defendants in a lawsuit launched earlier this year by the organisation Ack for Whales, states that BOEM is now reconsidering its July 2024 approval of the project’s Construction and Operations Plan (COP).

BOEM says the previous decision “may have failed to account for all the impacts”required under subsection 8(p)(4) of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act and that the record materials “may have understated impacts” that were weighed in the approval. The agency says it intends to issue a new COP decision after its re-evaluation.

The motion cites the January 2025 Presidential Memorandum directing a federal review of offshore wind leasing and permitting, the May 2025 withdrawal of the Anderson legal opinion and reinstatement of the Jorjani opinion on OCSLA 8(p)(4), and a July 2025 Secretary of the Interior order directing reconsideration of approvals associated with wind projects.
—————————————————————————-

Both the local fishing industry, and environmentalists, oppose the wind project. Personally, I am not as up on these issues as I should be.

 

I didn’t make up the problems,” Butler wrote in an essay for Essence in 2000. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.” That same year, she said in an interview that she dearly hoped she was not prophesying anything at all; that among other social ills, climate change would become a disaster only if it was allowed to fester. “I hope, of course, that we will be smarter than that,” Butler said six years before her death, in 2006.

What will our “full-fledged disasters” be in three decades, as the planet continues to warm? The year 2024 was the hottest on record. Yet 2025 has been perhaps the single most devastating year in the fight for a livable planet. An authoritarian American president has pressed what can only be described as a policy of climate-change acceleration—destroying commitments to clean energy and pushing for more oil production. It doesn’t require an oracle to see where this trajectory might lead.

Taking our cue from Butler, we would do well today to study the ways that climate change has already reshaped the American landscape, and how disasters are hollowing out neighborhoods like the one where Butler is buried. We should understand how catastrophe works in a landscape of inequality.

Over the next 30 years or so, the changes to American life might be short of apocalyptic. But miles of heartbreak lie between here and the apocalypse, and the future toward which we are heading will mean heartbreak for millions. Many people will go in search of new homes in cooler, more predictable places. Those travelers will leave behind growing portions of America where services and comforts will be in short supply—let’s call them “dead zones.” Should the demolition of America’s rule of law continue, authoritarianism and climate change will reinforce each other, a vicious spiral from which it will be difficult to exit.

How do we know this? As ever, all it takes is looking around.


(Sounds like I’m on a front line):

The US region called New England is widely known for its colonial history, maple syrup and frigid, snow-bound winters. Many of these norms are in the process of being upended, however, by a rapidly altering climate, with new research finding the area is heating up faster than almost anywhere else on Earth.

The breakneck speed of New England’s transformation makes it the fastest-heating area of the US, bar the Alaskan Arctic, and the pace of its temperature rise has apparently increased in the past five years, according to the study.

“The temperature is not only increasing, it’s accelerating,” said Stephen Young, a climate researcher at Salem State University, who conducted the study, published in the Climate journal, with his son Joshua Young.

“It’s really sped up in recent years, which surprised me. Our climate is moving in a new direction, after being relatively stable in the past 10,000 years”.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top