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Trump at Big Sandy Superstore Arena in Huntington, West Virginia on Aug. 3, 2017. SAUL LOEB / AFP / Getty Images

Trump Team Plans 'Sideshow on Coal' at UN Climate Talks

No one really expects the coal-friendly Trump administration to take significant action on climate change, but this is just trolling.

A new exclusive from Reuters claims that the president's team will "set up a side-event promoting fossil fuels" at the global climate summit this December, aka COP 24, in Katowice, Poland.

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This Thursday the Senate will hold a hearing to confirm attorney Bernard McNamee to fill a vacancy at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Sen. Martin Heinrich

Senate Should Reject Trump’s Coal-Friendly Energy Commission Nominee

By Elliott Negin

The steady parade of unqualified, ideologically driven appointees for key Trump administration positions has resumed now that things in Washington have settled down after the mid-term elections. Last week, Trump tapped Matthew G. Whitaker to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions. This Thursday, the Senate will hold a hearing to confirm attorney Bernard McNamee to fill a vacancy at the five-member, presidentially appointed Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), a relatively obscure—but critically important—independent agency that oversees interstate power lines and pipelines.

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Energy
International Energy Agency

The IEA Comes up Short on Climate (Again)

By Greg Muttitt

The release of the World Energy Outlook (WEO) 2018 on Monday marked another missed opportunity for the International Energy Agency (IEA) to provide a roadmap to Paris success.

Governments and investors alike have been calling on the IEA to help guide them towards achievement of the Paris goals. Two years ago, the IEA itself proposed updating its climate scenario to match the ambition of the Paris goals, and also gave its updated scenarios a cameo in the WEO 2017.

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Climate
NurPhoto / Getty Images

The EPA Has Disappeared Its Climate Page

The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) climate change page might be gone, permanently.

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Energy
Nitrogen dioxide pollution around the world. Greenpeace

World's Biggest NO2 Emissions Hotspots Revealed

Greenpeace has revealed the world's largest nitrogen dioxide (NO2) air pollution hotspots across six continents, and identified Mpumalanga, South Africa as the biggest NO2 hotspot, even outranking areas in China, India and the U.S.

The lush, green province is home to the southern half of Kruger National Park and the iconic Blyde River Canyon. At the same time, it's home to a dozen coal fired power plants owned and operated by the power utility Eskom.

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Bleached staghorn coral in the Great Barrier Reef. Matt Kieffer / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0

NOAA Forecast: Great Barrier Reef Could Face Third Mass Bleaching Event in 4 Years

For any nature lover, one of the most sobering pieces of information from this month's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was that global warming of just two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels could kill off 99 percent of tropical coral reefs. And even if we act quickly and successfully limit warming to 1.5 degrees, 70 to 90 percent of these invaluable ecosystems will still be lost.

Now, an alarming forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that process could begin as early as this Australian summer in one of the most iconic reefs of all: the Great Barrier Reef.

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Climate
Air pollution in Beijing. DuKai photographer / Getty Images

Beijing Air Pollution Mystery Could Be Solved, Scientists Say

More than one million people die each year in China from particulate matter air pollution, but despite 15 years and billions of dollars of efforts to clean up the country's air, dangerous winter smog persists.

Now, an international team of scientists think they have discovered the reason why: The instruments used to measure Beijing's particulate matter pollution were misinterpreting their readings.

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Water and sediment sampling operations during the EPA's response to the Enbridge oil spill on Morrow Lake, MI in 2010. USEPA

EPA Delays 'Agenda to Sideline Science' After Receiving Nearly 600,000 Comments

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is delaying the roll out of a controversial science proposal after receiving nearly 600,000 comments on the plan, The Hill reported Wednesday.

The proposal would have limited the kinds of studies the EPA could use to make regulations to only studies that relied on data that was publicly available and therefore reproducible. But scientists and environmentalists warned that would exclude many important public health studies that relied on confidential patient medical records, ABC News reported.

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Climate
Fossil fuel use is the primary source of CO2. eflon / Flickr / CC BY 2.0

Trump EPA Takes Credit For Obama-Era CO2 Reductions

Total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions decreased by 2.7 percent between 2016 and 2017, according to a report released by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released on Wednesday.

Andrew Wheeler, the acting administrator of the EPA, touted that the report shows that regulations are unnecessary to slash carbon emissions.

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