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May 10, 2017, 9:39 a.m.

Some Republican lawmakers balked at fully embracing the Trump administrations climate skepticism Wednesday, as the Senate failed to kill an Obama-era plan for containing methane emissions that had deep support among environmental activists and many landowners in the West.

Three Republican senators joined Democrats in blocking the effort to kill the methane restrictions that the GOP congressional leadership had been confident it could scuttle. The push to scrap the methane rules faltered amid an uprising of protest in Western states,where tens of thousands of residents near drilling operations risk exposure to the toxic compounds that leak in tandem with the methane.

At issue is 41 billion cubic feet of a greenhouse gas leaking from many of the nearly 100,000 oil and gas wells on federally owned land. Methane is among the most potent accelerators of global warming, 25 times more harmful than carbon dioxide.

A House vote in March to eliminate an Obama-era Bureau of Land Management rule requiring energy firms to trap the escaping gas and convert it to electricity was followed by a swift public backlash. Several Republican senators wavered on the measure in recent weeks.

The vote, said Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, shows that President Trumps plans to unravel hard-won environmental protections are not a foregone conclusion. The Republican senators who joined Democrats in voting against the rule were Susan Collins of Maine, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

After the vote, the American Petroleum Institute warned the methane rule will prove costly to consumers and ineffective at limiting emissions. The rule could impede U.S. energy production while reducing local and federal government revenues, said a statement from Erik Milito, who directs upstream and industry operations at API.

The fight over the restrictions does not end with the Senate vote. Trump administration officials have expressed their own misgivings with the methane restrictions, and they will likely work through their agencies to try to roll them back. But such efforts involve a laborious bureaucratic process that is ultimately vulnerable to legal action from environmental groups and states supportive of the methane rule.

The Obama administration had concluded the amount of methane escaping each year from drilling operations is enough to provide electricity for nearly 740,000 homes. The Government Accountability Office alerted Congress in July that capturing it would boost royalties owed to taxpayers by $23 million.

Read more:
Senate fails to kill Obama-era methane rule - Los Angeles Times

The Paris Agreement was in part brokered by Obama and was seen as a major breakthrough after the previous accord, the Kyoto protocol, failed to include the US and China, the world's two biggest polluters.

US President Donald Trump vowed during his campaign to "cancel" US participation in the accord, which obliges countries to slash their greenhouse gas emissions to keep global temperatures from rising to catastrophic levels.

At a summit in Milan, Italy, focused on climate change and food availability, Obama defended the Paris Agreement and said that the US must show leadership and not "sit on the sidelines."

"We have been able to bring our emissions down even as we grow our economy. The same is true in many parts of Europe," he said.

In a question-and-answer session, Obama said his policies had helped the United States improve its wind power production and increase solar power production 10-fold, explaining that the costs for renewable energy were now comparable to oil and gas.

He did not, however, make any direct criticisms of the Trump administration's policies.

"The current administration has differences with my administration in terms of energy policy, and that's part of what happens in democracy. So there will be useful debate that takes place in America," he said.

He defended the Paris Agreement as a deal that would not reverse climate change but that had "put together the architecture" for a meaningful response.

The speech is Obama's first abroad since leaving office in January, and the former president appeared relaxed, ditching his usual tie for an unbuttoned collar.

Climate change and nutrition are issues close to the Obamas' hearts and were centerpiece policies of the eight-year Obama period.

Meanwhile, Trump aides are openly airing their differences on the issue and a final decision on the US stance is expected soon. A planned meeting on Tuesday of Trump's advisers on whether to pull out of the agreement, however, was postponed, a White House official said, citing a scheduling conflict.

Trump has maintained he is committed to taking the US out of the accord, which would severely weaken the agreement as the United States is the world's second-largest polluter.

Trump Chief Strategist Steve Bannon has pressed the President to uphold his campaign promises to withdraw from the plan, and thereby signal a commitment to American energy producers, including coal miners.

Trump, who once remarked that climate change was a Chinese hoax, has since backed off those claims.

The debate between Trump's aides has turned from whether climate change is real to discussions on how the administration plans to position itself at the international negotiating table on global warming.

Trump has resolved to announce his intentions by this month's Group of 7 meeting in Sicily, meaning a decision to withdraw could isolate him at his first gathering of world leaders.

Each country must commit to a voluntary plan to reduce emissions, with the goal of keeping the global rise in temperatures to below 2C above pre-industrial levels.

If the United States does decide to pull out of the agreement, it won't be a quick process. UN rules mandate a one-year notice period, starting three years after the accord has entered into force. That would mean November 2019, plus one year to complete the withdrawal in late 2020.

CNN's Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.

See original here:
Obama defends Paris climate accord as Trump mulls ditching it - CNN

Former President Barack Obama is starting to define his new role in the age of Donald Trump.

After dropping out of sight for a pair of glamorous island getaways, Obama is emerging for a series of paid and unpaid speeches, drawing sharp contrasts with Trump even as he avoids saying the new president's name. He's wielding his influence overseas, offering his support for some of the international political candidates who are clamoring for his endorsement. His aides are engaging in real-time political combat with Trump, including revealing Monday that Obama personally warned his successor against tapping embattled Michael Flynn as his national security adviser.

Obama's swift return to the spotlight has been cheered by some Democrats, who are still sifting through the wreckage of the party's crushing defeats in the November election. But the attention surrounding Obama has also magnified the vacuum for new Democratic leadership, a reality that aides say is not lost on the former president.

"He's acutely aware that when the former president speaks, he consumes a lot of the oxygen," said Eric Schultz, Obama's senior adviser. "He wants to make sure we make room for the next generation of leaders."

With that in mind, Obama is picking his spots carefully.

During a speech Sunday night in Boston, he urged members of Congress to have "courage" as Trump presses for the repeal of his signature health care law, recalling the Democrats who were swept into office with him in 2009, but lost their seats after casting votes in favor of the "Obamacare" measure. But he avoided a lengthy defense of the law Democrats muscled through in 2010 and did not critique the bill House Republicans passed last week.

In an unusual move for a former president particularly one who just handed the White House to the opposing party Obama taped a video endorsing Emmanuel Macron, the eventual winner of the French presidential election. He backed Macron after Trump appeared to side with nationalist candidate Marine Le Pen , calling her the strongest candidate on terrorism and borders.

Obama advisers say the former president is still navigating his role in international politics, but he is willing to consider requests for support from overseas candidates. Later this month, he'll appear alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who faces elections later this year, for a panel on democracy.

Obama's stop in Germany will coincide with Trump's first visit to Europe as president, likely setting up a stark contrast between the 44th and 45th presidents on the world stage.

The former president is said to be reluctant to get into a tit-for-tat with Trump over every tweet or critique from the White House briefing room. But he has plenty of proxies willing to jump in for him, including on Monday, when three former Obama administration officials said Obama had personally warned Trump against hiring Michael Flynn as national security adviser.

Flynn, who is at the center of the controversy surrounding Trump's campaign and Russia, was fired after less than a month. The revelation from Obama advisers appeared to be sparked by Trump's attempts to shift some of the blame for Flynn's troubles to Obama by noting that the previous administration renewed the former military intelligence director's clearance even after he was fired in 2014.

Obama and Trump haven't spoken since the inauguration, though an aide said Obama would take Trump's call if the Republican reached out. The two spoke frequently during the transition, and Trump spoke about his surprise at their good relationship.

But Trump stunned Obama advisers with his March 4 tweets accusing Obama of wiretapping his New York skyscraper during the election , an explosive allegation that has been denied by FBI Director James Comey and other national security officials.

"I wouldn't say I've been exactly great to him, either," Trump acknowledged in a recent interview with The Washington Times.

Obama's re-entry in public life hasn't been all smooth sailing. He was sharply criticized by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, his party's most prominent liberals, for his plans to receive $400,000 to speak at a September health care conference put on by the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald.

The former president is said to have been unbothered by the criticism. Still, he and wife Michelle Obama moved swiftly to announce a $2 million donation for a summer jobs program in their home town of Chicago.

Warren and Sanders represent one flank of the Democratic Party that's trying to take control as the party tries to rebuild ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. Obama is expected to campaign and fundraise for candidates as those contests draw near, but his supporters are clear-eyed about his own role as the party tries to recalibrate.

"The onus is on the next generation to lead the party in the Trump era," said Dan Pfeiffer, a longtime Obama White House and campaign adviser.

Link:
Obama Is Back and He's Carving Out His Role in the Age of Trump - Fortune

Former president Barack Obama said today that the U.S. is progressing on clean energy policy, despite some rollbacks from the Trump administration .

Although because of the current debates taking place in Washington, it may be some of the steps we put in place move more slowly than they otherwise would have, Obama said, Im confident that the U.S. will continue to move in the right direction.

Obama was speaking at Seeds&Chips, a global food and innovation summit in Milan, Italy, where he discussed the intersection of climate change and the global food system.

Obama said that the private sector, having made the determination that clean energy is the future , would lead the way. He pointed to fuel efficiency in the auto industry as an example, saying that his administration had set aggressive standardssome of which are subject to change by the current White House. But California, the largest car market in the U.S., sets its own fuel emission standards, he noted. Even if the rules change in Washington, theres no U.S. automaker that can afford to produce a car that is not fuel efficient to be sold in California, he said.

Obama spoke with urgency about climate change, saying that he had made the issue "a top priority because I believe of all the challenges we face, this is the one that will define the contours of this century" more than any other.

"I do not believe this planet is condemned to ever rising temperatures. I believe these are problems that were caused by man and can be solved by man," he said, stressing the need for action. Quoting Martin Luther King Jr., he said there is such a thing as being too late, and "when it comes to climate change, the hour is almost upon us."

Although Obama only mentioned the Trump administration once in the 90-minute session that included prepared remarks and a Q&A with his one-time senior food policy advisor Sam Kass, the current tenor in Washington clearly informed his comments. During his campaign, President Donald Trump said that he would cancel the U.S.s involvement in the Paris climate accord, which Obama brokered. Trump once Tweeted that the concept of global was created by and for the Chinese.

Obama said that the Paris agreement "did not set high enough standards to completely solve the problem of climate change, but what it did was put together the architecture, the mechanism, where each year, each country could progressively do more to reduce carbon emission. He said that its important big countries that are major emitters like the U.S. and China lead the way. Its going to require continuing leadership on all our parts, he said. No one can sit on the sidelines.

Obama said that 99% of scientists who study climate change carefully will tell you that the planet is getting warmer and the only real controversy is how much warmer it will get. If the planet warms at the upper end of current projections, it would be catastrophic," he said. "At the low end, it will still be very disruptive." A three-foot rise in sea level could lead to mass migration, he said. "The number of refugees that could be resulting from something like that could be unprecedented in human history, he said. If we don't, address these issue, we can anticipate "not only real threats to food security but increases in conflict as a consequence of scarcity.

Obama highlighted the work that still needs to done in the food system to both ease its impact on the environment and feed a growing planet. Although weve made real progress in becoming more efficient in the energy side, we are actually seeing a continuing increase in the emissions coming out of the agricultural sector, he said.

In Obama's view, one of the reasons why pressure on the food system has lagged the energy sector is that food is an emotional issue and its impact on greenhouse gas emissions has not been publicized. People arent as familiar with the impact of cows and methane, he notedan issue that will only increase as developing nations demand more protein. (Obama noted that he is a meat eater"I respect vegetarians, but I am not one of them," he said.)

Key to making progress is taking into account the interests of food producers, Obama said. If you prioritize environmental concerns over their economic interests, theyll resist, he added.

Obama said he saw major potential in personalized medicine. He pointed to allergies as an example, using one of his daughters who has a peanut allergy to illustrate the point. He said she's now going through a process at Stanford University, where shes being evaluated for each nut to determine the type of allergy and severity. He said her doctors can now determine protocols where if she take a little nut protein in a pill each day, slowly her allergy will be eliminated.

Since his presidency has ended, Obama said that most of his time has been spent writing his third book and building the next phase of his workthe Obama Presidential Center, which is designed to help the next generation of leadership for activism.

See more here:
Obama: The Private Sector Will Lead the Way on Climate Change - Fortune

Pete Souza, former President Barack Obamas staff photographer, is well-known for his low-key trolling of President Donald Trump.

In March, GOOD first reported on Souzas totally transparent jabs at the new commander in chief and his administration via his wildly popular Instagram account. Souzas thinly veiled Insta-jokes included a doctored photo he posted to his account with the caption, Someone has been photoshopping one of my photos. For the record, it wasn't me. In the photo, President Obama is situatedbehind a camera insidea microwave, which clearly is a poke at Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway following her bizarre theory that Obama spied on Trump via microwaves.

In another, Souza posted a photo of Obama looking at his phone with the caption, Glad he only tweeted out facts with his device.

And on Wednesday, following the abrupt firing of FBI Director James Comey, Souza posted a photo of the now out-of-work Comey, alongside the former president and his chief Homeland Security and Counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper, and Obama's former White House chief of staff Denis McDonough. The caption simply read, Every person in this photograph is a patriot.

As of Wednesday morning, the photo has garnered more than 50,000 likes and hundreds of comments.

Originally posted here:
Former Obama Photographer Blasts Trump Over Comey's Firing With One Simple Photo - GOOD Magazine