
The Republican tax bill, which is likely headed to President Donald Trump's desk in the next few days, has major repercussions for our precious environment.
While the electric vehicle industry and the wind and solar sector can breathe a little easier that the sweeping legislation preserves their tax credits, fossil fuel producers are likely cheering the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil and gas drilling.
The controversial provision, a proposal from Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), would auction off an area known as the “biological heart" of the Arctic Refuge that's home to crucial wildlife habitats, including one-third of all polar bear denning habitat in the U.S. and one-third of the migratory birds that come to the Arctic Refuge. It is also considered sacred to the indigenous Gwich'in people, who sustain themselves from the caribou that migrate there.
Oil drilling in the refuge has been sought by conservative lawmakers for decades despite opposition from 70 percent of Americans.
"Congress has committed the ultimate sellout of America's public lands with such a devious and shortsighted action in one of the wildest places left in the world," said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife. "Shame on those who supported this abhorrent assault on our natural legacy."
Proponents of arctic drilling say the plan would help pay for the massive tax cuts, with Murkowski insisting that her rider would raise “more than $1 billion within 10 years and it will likely raise over $100 billion for the federal Treasury" over time.
But critics contend that with oil prices below $60 a barrel, it's not even certain that oil companies would want to open up one of Earth's most remote and harshest areas, nor would drilling raise enough revenue to offset the massive deficit forecasts created by the tax bill.
Notably, the renewable energy sector did not escape the widely unpopular bill's effects scot-free, as it includes the Base Erosion Anti-Abuse Tax (BEAT) program that would "undermine our capacity to use renewable energy tax credits, which have value only if they can be monetized," according to a letter addressed to the Senate from clean energy trade groups.
Greentech Media delved further:
That problem is the Base Erosion Anti-Abuse Tax (BEAT) provision, which targets "earnings strippings," where large companies with foreign operations reduce their tax bills through cross-border payments they can then deduct in the U.S. The BEAT provision aims to circumvent that stripping with a minimum tax of 10 percent of taxable income.
BEAT would require every company to do two calculations: one quantifying 10 percent of a company's taxable income, including cross-border payments, and another quantifying the corporation's tax liability, excluding any tax credits the company received from tax equity investments.
The BEAT provision applies to all but R&D; credits. If a company has invested in renewables, the second number could be lower than the first. If that's the case, the company would have to pay the difference in taxes.
“The environment is the clear loser, with calamitous consequences for all Americans," Anna Aurilio, Environment America's D.C. Office Director said about the tax bill.
Environment America noted that the bill continues massive incentives for fossil fuel production amounting to tens of billions of dollars over the next decade.
Aurilio continued, “After months of global warming-fueled extreme weather and wildfires, and decades of air and water pollution from burning coal, oil and gas, it has never been more important to shift our country—wholesale and quickly—toward renewable energy. This bill takes us in the wrong direction."
Kirin Kennedy, associate legislative director for lands and wildlife at the Sierra Club, told Public News Service that eliminating $1 trillion or more of revenue over ten years will have a huge impact on government agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department.
"They're going to be basically facing massive cuts in their budgets to help pay for the tax cuts that will go toward the richest one percent and the top one percent corporations in the country," Kennedy said.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) issued a strong condemnation after passage of the bill, especially blasting billionaire fossil fuel barons and major GOP donors Charles and David Koch, who have long pushed for tax reform.
"House Republicans just passed their disastrous tax bill," Sanders said in a video posted to social media. "Congratulations to the Koch brothers, massive corporations and billionaire campaign contributors on looting the Treasury and working families."
The deep-pocketed Koch network has spent more than $88 million in traceable funding to groups attacking climate change science, policy and regulation.
Sanders continued about how the tax bill will be bad for public health.
"I hope every American is listening," he said, "about what [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan and other Republicans are saying about how they're going to offset the $1.5 trillion in deficits they have created. And that is, they're going to come back in the very near future for 'entitlement reform'—which, in real language, means massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. That's what Speaker Ryan is saying and we should take him at his word because, as we all know, the Republican budget that passed a few months ago included a trillion-dollar cut in Medicaid and a nearly $500 billion cut to Medicare over the next decade."
Another loser in the health bill? The whole of Puerto Rico.
Under the new legislation, the hurricane-ravaged U.S. territory would be considered a foreign jurisdiction for tax purposes, even though its 3.4 million residents are American citizens, Reuters reported.
Puerto Rico was already $72 billion in debt, even before the Sept. 20 Category 4 storm devastated the island. The bill would make the already-painstaking recovery process even harder.
"There is an opportunity to set things straight, to give Puerto Rico an opportunity and to eliminate this just weird application of the base-erosion provision to a jurisdiction of the United States," Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello said.
By David Shiffman
As we enter what's hopefully the home stretch of the COVID-19 pandemic, it's time to take stock of how it affected every aspect of our world, to consider what happened, what could be done different to avoid those problems in the future, and what's next.
NOAA
NOAA OKEANOS Explorer Program, 2013 Northeast U.S. Canyons Expedition
A young monk seal underwater in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. NOAA/PIFSC/HMSRP
A recently emerged sea turtle hatchling. Becky Skiba/USFWS
<p>So what does the pandemic mean for ocean conservation? Experts caution that it's probably too early to tell. However, it's not all stories of dolphins frolicking in suddenly quiet rivers. Environmental planning meetings, funding schemes for protected areas, and monitoring of fisheries and endangered species populations were all disrupted, giving us good reasons to fear that the story is far more complicated, and far less happy, than many of us have been led to believe.</p>Scientists Warn 4°C World Would Unleash 'Unimaginable Amounts of Water' as Ice Shelves Collapse
By Jessica Corbett
A new study is shedding light on just how much ice could be lost around Antarctica if the international community fails to urgently rein in planet-heating emissions, bolstering arguments for bolder climate policies.
The study, published Thursday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that over a third of the area of all Antarctic ice shelves — including 67% of area on the Antarctic Peninsula — could be at risk of collapsing if global temperatures soar to 4°C above pre-industrial levels.
- Antarctica's 'Doomsday Glacier' Is Starting to Crack - EcoWatch ›
- Scientists Make Unexpected Find Beneath Antarctic Ice - EcoWatch ›
By Sharon Buccino
This week, Secretary Haaland chose a visit to Bears Ears National Monument as her first trip as Interior Secretary. She is spending three days in Bluff, Utah, a small town just outside the monument, listening to representatives of the five tribes who first proposed its designation to President Obama in 2015. This is the same town where former Secretary Sally Jewell spent several hours at a public hearing in July 2016 before recommending the monument's designation to President Obama.
Marine Life Is Fleeing the Equator to Cooler Waters – This Could Trigger a Mass Extinction Event
By Anthony Richardson, Chhaya Chaudhary, David Schoeman, and Mark John Costello
The tropical water at the equator is renowned for having the richest diversity of marine life on Earth, with vibrant coral reefs and large aggregations of tunas, sea turtles, manta rays and whale sharks. The number of marine species naturally tapers off as you head towards the poles.
The Bell Curve is Warping Dangerously
<img class="rm-lazyloadable-image rm-shortcode" lazy-loadable="true" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNjAzODUwNi9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY3NzE1OTU4N30.qQL3P1IvA7Cwj_UbsrAL6MVZvafXGZc7hlAFieLPvso/img.png?width=980" id="9bbfd" width="1580" height="872" data-rm-shortcode-id="16ca57badee20ad55037706875f813f4" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" />If you look at each line in this chart, you can see a slight dip in total species richness between 1955 and 1974. This deepens substantially in the following decades. Anthony Richardson, Author provided
<p>This global pattern — where the number of species starts lower at the poles and peaks at the equator — results in a bell-shaped gradient of species richness. We looked at distribution records for nearly 50,000 marine species collected since 1955 and found a growing dip over time in this bell shape.</p>This Has Happened Before
<p>We shouldn't be surprised global biodiversity has responded so rapidly to global warming. This has happened before, and with dramatic consequences.</p><p><strong>252 million years ago…</strong></p><p>At the end of the Permian geological period about 252 million years ago, global temperatures warmed by 10℃ over 30,000-60,000 years as a result of greenhouse gas emissions from volcano eruptions in Siberia.</p><p><a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/117/30/17578" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">A 2020 study</a> of the fossils from that time shows the pronounced peak in biodiversity at the equator flattened and spread. During this mammoth rearranging of global biodiversity, 90% of all marine species were killed.</p><p><strong>125,000 years ago…</strong></p><p><a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/109/52/21378" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">A 2012 study showed</a> that more recently, during the rapid warming around 125,000 years ago, there was a similar swift movement of reef corals away from the tropics, as documented in the fossil record. The result was a pattern similar to the one we describe, although there was no associated mass extinction.</p><p>Authors of the study suggested their results might foreshadow the effects of our current global warming, ominously warning there could be mass extinctions in the near future as species move into the subtropics, where they might struggle to compete and adapt.</p><p><strong>Today…</strong></p><p><a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/117/23/12891" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">During the last ice age</a>, which ended around 15,000 years ago, the richness of forams (a type of hard-shelled, single-celled plankton) peaked at the equator and has been dropping there ever since. This is significant as plankton is a keystone species in the foodweb.</p><p>Our study shows that decline has accelerated in recent decades due to human-driven climate change.</p>The Profound Implications
<p>Losing species in tropical ecosystems means ecological resilience to environmental changes is reduced, potentially compromising ecosystem persistence.</p><p>In subtropical ecosystems, species richness is increasing. This means there'll be species invaders, novel predator-prey interactions, and new competitive relationships. For example, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-13/sydney-growing-own-coral-reef-with-help-from-tropical-fish/11466192" target="_blank">tropical fish</a> moving into Sydney Harbour compete with temperate species for food and habitat.</p><p>This could result in ecosystem collapse — as was seen at the boundary between the Permian and Triassic periods — in which species go extinct and ecosystem services (such as food supplies) are permanently altered.</p><p>The changes we describe will also have profound implications for human livelihoods. For example, many tropical island nations depend on the revenue from tuna fishing fleets through the selling of licenses in their territorial waters. Highly mobile tuna species are likely to move rapidly toward the subtropics, potentially beyond sovereign waters of island nations.</p><p><span></span>Similarly, many reef species important for artisanal fishers — and highly mobile megafauna such as whale sharks, manta rays and sea turtles that support tourism — are also likely to move toward the subtropics.</p><p>The movement of commercial and artisanal fish and marine megafauna could compromise the ability of tropical nations to meet the <a href="https://sdgs.un.org/goals" target="_blank">Sustainable Development Goals</a> concerning zero hunger and marine life.</p>Is There Anything We Can Do?
<p>One pathway is laid out in the Paris Climate Accords and involves aggressively reducing our emissions. Other opportunities are also emerging that could help safeguard biodiversity and hopefully minimise the worst impacts of it shifting away from the equator.</p><p>Currently 2.7% of the ocean is conserved in <a href="https://mpatlas.org/" target="_blank">fully or highly protected reserves</a>. This is well short of the 10% target by 2020 under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.</p><p>But <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/topical-events/global-ocean-alliance-30by30-initiative/about#global-ocean-alliance-members" target="_blank">a group of 41 nations</a> is pushing to set a new target of protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030.</p><p>This "30 by 30" target could ban seafloor mining and remove fishing in reserves that can destroy habitats and release as much carbon dioxide as <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03371-z" target="_blank">global aviation</a>. These measures would remove pressures on biodiversity and promote ecological resilience.</p><p>Designing climate-smart reserves could further protect biodiversity from future changes. For example, reserves for marine life could be placed in refugia where the climate will be stable over the foreseeable future.</p><p>We now have evidence that climate change is impacting the best-known and strongest global pattern in ecology. We should not delay actions to try to mitigate this.</p><p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/anthony-richardson-100303" target="_blank">Anthony Richardson</a>: Professor, The University of Queensland. <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/chhaya-chaudhary-1223419" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Chhaya Chaudhary</a>: University of Auckland, <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/david-schoeman-111544" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">David Schoeman</a>: Professor of Global-Change Ecology, University of the Sunshine Coast, <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/mark-john-costello-1223418" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Mark John Costello</a>: Professor, University of Auckland</em></p><p><em>Disclosure statement: Anthony Richardson receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</em></p><p><em>Chhaya Chaudhary works for Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. During her PhD studies (2014- 2019), she received part- funding from the European Marine Observation Data Network (EMODnet) Biology project funded by the European Commission's Directorate—General for Maritime Affairs and Fisheries (DG MARE), and received U21 Doctoral Mobility Scholarship from the University of Auckland in 2016.</em></p><p><em>David Schoeman receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</em></p><p><em>Mark John Costello does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</em></p><p><em>Reposted with permission from <a href="https://theconversation.com/marine-life-is-fleeing-the-equator-to-cooler-waters-history-tells-us-this-could-trigger-a-mass-extinction-event-158424" target="_blank" style="">The Conversation</a>. </em></p>- Netflix's 'Seaspiracy': Viewers React to Fishing Documentary ... ›
- Mysterious Circling Behavior Observed in Large Marine Animals ... ›
In celebration of Earth Day, a star-studded cast is giving fans a rare glimpse into the secret lives of some of the planet's most majestic animals: whales. In "Secrets of the Whales," a four-part documentary series by renowned National Geographic Photographer and Explorer Brian Skerry and Executive Producer James Cameron, viewers plunge deep into the lives and worlds of five different whale species.
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Herring are a primary food source for Norway's orcas. Luis Lamar / National Geographic for Disney+
Belugas are extremely social creatures with a varied vocal range. Peter Kragh / National Geographic for Disney+
A Southern Right whales is pictured in the accompanying book, "Secrets of the Whales." Brian Skerry / National Geographic